Sorcerer’s Rendezvous with Carlos Castaneda Translated from the French Véronique Skawinska Contents 1. Manhattan 3 2. Aimel Helle 7 3. Simon and Schuster 15 4. The Stolen Car 26 5. You Have No Right 34 6. The Dinner Party 48 7. Los Angeles 58 8. The Bodi Tree 70 9. The Meeting 80 10. Cyclone Gloria 95 11. Tannins 103 ii CONTENTS One day he succeeds in performing something ordinarily quite impossible to accomplish. He may not even notice his extraordinary deed. — Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality 1 CONTENTS [Chapter titles have been supplied by the translator based on chapter content; the original has num- bered chapters only.] 2 1. Manhattan Manhattan sparkled like a cluster of quartz crystals. The glass needles of the buildings opened wide to swallow the sky. Across the bay, the Statue of Liberty stretched her shadow over a few tiny tugboats. I had to succeed. But how? Everyone I’d consulted had warned me: impossible! It was totally impossible to meet Carlos Castaneda unless the initiative came from him. And he had in no way decided to receive me. Not the slightest reply to my letters. I had asked the stewardess for a window seat. It was the first time I was coming to New York. Opportunities to make the trip had not been lacking, though. A journalist at Paris- Match , I had been assigned to conduct an interview there with a university figure. My celebrity was abruptly forced to leave the city. At the last minute, the meeting was post- poned to a later date. A date that was never set. During the ten years I lived in London with the composer Vangelis Papathanassiou, there was frequent talk of our embarking for the New World. Any musical career must sooner or later win the approval and sympathy of Americans. To the great despair of his manager and the heads of his record label, Van- gelis never consented to cross the Ocean. Even his Oscar nomination in 1982 for the music of Hugh Hudson’s superb film *Chariots of Fire* could not pry this genius of synthesizers from his European rootedness. After our separation, I settled back in Paris. The voyage to the Americas appeared on the horizon again. I had been invited to go to Canada for a publishing matter. At the last mo- ment, the operation was postponed. This succession of obstacles was decidedly irritating. But this time, nothing, nobody could stop me from making the trip, as though it were a matter of realizing my old dream. In fact, I was coming on assignment. And to carry off what was really nothing more than a tourist adventure. After a wide circle above the city, the TWA jumbo landed heavily on the runway at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport. My baggage cleared customs without a hitch. I found a taxi right away; it was yellow, oversized, scaled to the dimensions of the country. It slid in silence along the ribbon of highway. I let myself be carried without thinking, given over entirely to the strangeness of being elsewhere, lost in the immensity of a continent that drew its mobile lines of force: the rapid curves of interchanges, dual carriageways, electrical cables sawing the sky. Suddenly, a great bridge. A surge of enthusiasm swelled my chest. These were good signs. All at once the space plunged between two concrete ramparts. We were in the city. The car stopped at the corner of Second Avenue and 47th Street. It was 3 1. MANHATTAN almost too fast, this arrival. Aimel had told me: “Watch the smallest details.” Was that what it was, the details to watch? She sorted them out so well, that woman! From that, I had transformed her name. I secretly called her “She sorts them out” — with as much amusement as envy... 1 The doorman of the building — desk, uniform — solemnly announced that I was expected on the twelfth floor. Was that something she would have counted as a sign? Gunilla welcomed me in an affectionate burst of effusiveness. For years I had not seen my explosive Swedish friend. We had worked together in Paris, under Marie-Thérèse de Brosses, whose experience and friendship had guided my first steps as a journalist. At Paris- Match , it was astonishing to find, among the senior editors, a person like her, sensitized to all the problems of Knowledge, to the point that she would later become the legatee of the work of Raymond Abellio. It was somewhat under his aegis that Gunilla and I had become close friends. It seemed to me that our reunion thus fell under the high hand of Knowledge. 2 Having emigrated to the United States, Gunilla had married both a title of nobility and a French businessman at the same time. An art collector specializing in primitive art, the Comte de Montaigu had assembled in his small apartment an impressive populace of masked powers. One practically had to share dinner with them. Roland and Gunilla retired early to their bedroom, leaving me at the mercy of this somber grimacing horde. I arranged the cushions from the couch right on the living room carpet to fashion a makeshift mattress in the little space this savage decoration afforded me. I had barely turned off the lamp when the sorcerous horde began to grow in the half- darkness. The glow of the city, filtered through the blinds, lit up in ghostly fashion the masks and pre-Columbian statues that populated the living room. Above my head, a face hovered like a black moon whose absent gaze was trained on me. A weathered old man spied on me from behind the mocking folds of his eyelids. A feathered fury in an empanada headdress hurled threats that I thought I could hear creaking. Men and women, panthers and jackals, lions, eagles, and falcons locked me in the whirlwind of their war dance. A car horn tore through the night. In the heart of New York? Sorcerers? What delirium was this? What madness? It was nothing but a collection of art objects. My friends lived with them every day. Did I have to be foolish enough to believe I was falling prey to the manipulation of fetishes! These museum objects had nothing to say to me. It was me talking to myself. So then, what adventure had I gotten myself into? If there was any madness in this, it was right there: in the initiative that had made me take the plane and land here. Who was I to compel Carlos Castaneda to receive me? Him, an illustrious writer, known in seventy countries around the world, a veritable idol in the United States. Given that he systematically fled all contact with the press. And I wasn’t even coming on behalf of a major French newspaper. I didn’t have 1 Wordplay on “Aimel Helle” — “Elle démêle” means “she untangles/sorts out.” The name is likely a pseudonym or anagram. 2 “la haute main de la Connaissance” — Knowledge here operates in the Castanedan sense but also evokes a quasi-providential agency, a design of power arranging events. 4 so much as the least calling card to announce me. Did he even exist, after all? Perhaps he was nothing but a myth... Certain people doubted his reality, as one might doubt that of Homer or Shakespeare. And here I was, setting out in search of him... The one I had to meet — it was the Carlos Castaneda known culturally for having been a student of anthropology at the University of California in Los Angeles, in 1960. He had chosen as a doctoral subject the traditional use of hallucinogenic plants in Central America and had published his thesis under the title The Teachings of Don Juan 3 . What a success! An entire generation of young people had learned the Teachings of don Juan by heart. Strange celebrity! Instead of making the face of the idol familiar, it had practically spirited him away. No photograph has ever shown the writer Carlos Castaneda as seen by some great specialist of the sensitive plate. Neither Avedon, nor Cartier-Bresson, nor Penn — not the slightest image. No concession to fame, to the pressure of the fantastic curiosity of the masses. The writer preserved his incognito on the advice of the old Indian who had initiated him into sorcery. I knew it. I could well imagine what this flight signified. You only had to read his books to get the idea. It was perfectly simple: this man had at his disposal magical means to escape all gazes and save his freedom. There was cause for concern. So many young people, after devouring his books, had thrown themselves in pursuit of him, without success. By whole charter flights, they had descended on Mexico, searching for don Juan or his disciple, finding neither the one nor the other. I was thinking all this, trying to calm in myself the disquiet that had fallen from the totems that dominated the room. I had to interpret their presence as a favorable omen. To see meaning in this nocturnal encounter. I come to New York for the sole purpose of tracking down a mysterious individual who spends his time hiding in the heart of the Mexican desert, and I arrive right inside an Aztec sanctuary. After all, those statues were not Roman. Venerable Buddhas, Egyptian sphinxes, would not have had that air of com- plicity that kept me awake. I was afraid. Castaneda is a dangerous man. As a scholar, he has pulverized the ramparts of scientific objectivity by accepting the well-foundedness of magical thought. His scan- dalous approach has provoked contradictory commentary. For some, he is the greatest anthropologist since Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss. For others, he is merely a weak mind who let himself be taken in. Most of his colleagues consider him a trickster of ge- nius, a novelist overflowing with imagination and fantasy. Don Juan would be a character invented from whole cloth. Carlos Castaneda protested vehemently against this interpre- tation. He stated it in an interview given in 1972 to Psychology Today magazine: “The idea that I concocted a character like don Juan is inconceivable. There is no aspect, no element of my European intellectual tradition that would have led me to invent him. The truth is far stranger. I created nothing. I’m just a reporter.” 4 This reporter had so thoroughly taken up the cause of the Knowledge advocated by don 3 Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan , 1971. Le soleil noir, Paris. 4 The demarcation problem in full — Castaneda’s work sits precisely at the boundary where Popper’s fal- sifiability criterion breaks down against first-person phenomenological report. His defense here (“I’m just a reporter”) is also the classic move of the ethnographer claiming mere transcription. 5 1. MANHATTAN Juan that he had transformed himself into a sorcerer. For twenty-five years already, he had gone over bag and baggage to the camp of fearsome Mexican sorcery. He had now replaced don Juan at the side of the clan that keeps alive the warrior traditions of the Toltecs. He had become their Nagual. Their spiritual leader. Their master! Aimel had told me he was not as powerful as he believed. She did not fear him. That was easy to say, from Paris. Credulous as I am, I had let myself be bamboozled by her reasoning. She seemed so sure of herself. How could one think, from a distance, that she was capable of foiling the ruses of a Mexican sorcerer she knew neither from Eve nor from Adam? And me, I had let myself be convinced that the thing was possible, normal, willed by I knew not what apparatus of international sorcery! Six months ago, I didn’t even know this woman. And here I was, behaving as if I had always been her disciple. I could no longer believe that the lessons received in Paris were up to the challenge posed by the extraordinary powers with which don Juan’s teachings had endowed Carlos Castaneda. I really wasn’t up to the task of cornering such a man over the preposterous desire to meet him. I had let myself be trapped by the conviction of Aimel Helle. She was sure I would succeed. The books of Carlos Castaneda — I had read them all. And even several times, for a long time and again recently, to prepare for this expedition. From the outset, I had felt great sympathy for the author. This man had had the courage to submit to a fierce apprentice- ship. He had held firm throughout an adventure during which he confessed he understood nothing. Although he had obtained his doctorate, he had renounced his university chair to lead a life consistent with the principles he had adopted. He had no fixed address, never met journalists, cancelled his appointments at the last moment. No one ever knew where he was going or coming from. And it had to be me, because Aimel had said so, who managed to flush him out. Spending a small fortune in money, time, and energy to deliver the invisible message of a woman I barely knew! What absurdity! I could no longer understand how I had been able to accept belief in the logic of such a wager. Me, if I don’t understand, I’m afraid. I am paralyzed. How could I have taken seriously an impossible mission in the name of certain necessities pertaining to Knowledge, necessities I was incapable of saying whether they existed or not? Either these initiatory demands were as real as the buildings of Manhattan and I was headed for catastrophe. For it was clear: I would not recover from this plunge into utopia. All the forces of intuition of which I am capable had warned me. My life depended on it. 6 2. Aimel Helle I could not sleep. Despite myself, memories were assailing me. They paraded of their own accord, mingling with the phantoms of the Toltec, Peruvian, and Incan statues. This pantheon of primitive art poured its troubling millennial disquiet over me. “You should consult a rabbi,” the doctor had told me. This advice had surprised me, coming from the mouth of a Catholic practitioner. A rare blood disease had, the previous year, brought me to him. Condemned by hospital medicine, able to choose only between mutilating treatments and destruction by hemor- rhage, I had opted for flight. A powerful survival instinct had propelled me out of the hospital one autumn evening of impatience. Stuck, punctured, sliced open, pupils dilated, I had made a run for it. Alone at the wheel of my car, I ran the risk of being taken for a drug addict, arrested, thrown in prison. But I knew it, I knew I was going to pull through. Where? How? I hadn’t the slightest idea. The homeopath-acupuncturist who was follow- ing me had, for his part, thrown in the towel. Now I was in New York. In Paris, I live on avenue de New York. Is this a coincidence that means something? Did I have to come to New York? I’m afraid of anything that might have a meaning. I turn over and fall back on my ground-level bed. I had called my friend Maria. An hour later, she informed me that I had an appointment the following day at the office of the doctor to whom she referred the leukemia patients she treated. Her powers of persuasion had worked miracles — the appointment book of Dr. C. was full for six months. She would confess to me, later, that she had been inspired by a dream in which she saw me dying. To say that everything had started from there! Four months later, the risk of hemorrhage under control, I was writing a book on clay 5 My experience ought to be able to help other people. The words sickness, care, healing had acquired for me the meaning of ordeal, combat, victory, and transformation. A natural medicine was in the process of restructuring my ground. I liked that the subject, commis- sioned by Michel Lafon, a friendly publisher, dealt with clay. Founding earth — it contains in potency everything that exists and lives on the planet. Why, how is clay healing? What 5 Véronique Skawinska, Le Livre de l’argile , 1986, Michel Lafon-Carrère, Paris. 7 2. AIMEL HELLE does the Bible say about it? On that March evening in 1985, without scruple, stealing his time, I was peppering my doctor with a thousand questions. “No, not a rabbi,” he went on. “Rather a cabalist. Listen! There’s someone you might want to contact. Aimel Helle...” “Aimel what?” “That’s her name. Aimel Helle.” “What a funny name.” “She’s also a funny kind of woman.” “Where can I find her?” “I don’t know.” “Does she write?” “I can tell you this much...” He gave me a name I had never heard, anywhere. That of an unknown writer. So many people know things that nobody notices. This would set me apart from the academics and specialists whose wisdom I had gathered with method and obstinacy over weeks. A biblical deep dive would refresh my mind. So it was that one Monday morning I called a bookstore where I sometimes stocked up on esoteric reading. “Do you have any works by...?” “Of course,” replied a feminine voice with sympathy. “Can you give me the name of her publisher?” “What for?” The question caught me off guard, suddenly suspicious. “I’m doing research on clay and I’d like to meet this person.” “Have you read her books?” “No. Not at all.” “Perhaps you should start there.” “Fine. I’m coming.” “Normally, the shop is closed. I don’t usually let anyone in. But if you come right away...” I hurtled down my eight floors, started my Samba — brand new — and sped to Montpar- nasse. At the bookshop Le Fil d’Ariane , I was greeted by Christiane Bainaud, sharp blue gaze in a face of pietà. She was waiting for me with an attention that had nothing commer- cial about it. She recommended two books. Then, to my great surprise, she informed me that she had just been speaking to Mme Helle. 8 “Read these first. I’ll try to get you an appointment. I promise nothing. It’s not even certain she’ll receive you, even if I ask her. It’s very difficult.” This pretension to isolation astonished me greatly. What interest is there in cutting yourself off from others when you have no audience? No newspaper, and I read many, had brought her name to my attention. I frequent so-called spiritual places, I move in circles where people dabble in esotericism, and I had never caught wind of her existence. Yet I was curious, struck by the ease with which I had found from the start the path that could lead me to her. A doctor prescribes that I meet an esotericist; I ring the bell at the door of the first bookshop that comes to mind. Normally the shop should have been closed — it was a Monday, in Paris. But it was open. I call while the owner happens to be making an unusual jump. And it all seemed to fall just right — the right moment and the right place. I felt drawn toward this unknown woman. Why would she refuse to receive me? Back at home, I settled onto the cushions that constituted the essential furnishing in the corner of one of the two glazed bays overlooking the southern half of the capital. The view from there is magnificent. Barges and fly-boats mark the rhythm of the Seine’s flow. Gulls wheel and dive in the immensity of the sky; the less plump pigeons sometimes reach my balcony, while the Eiffel Tower never stops pushing its neck out. Of the two volumes brought home as pasture, the thicker one excited my appetite. Its scientific bearing meshed a priori with the style of my quest. From the first page, the com- plexity of the language surprised me. The words, which the author hardly ever kept under three syllables, possessed an almost knife-edge density of reasoning that demanded every sentence be reread and chewed over. For three days I labored over a discourse of a hermeti- cism you could cut with a knife. It dealt with mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, evolution, anatomy, genetics, linguistics, and other disciplines. The author was attempting to demonstrate that all phenomena obey universal laws expressed through Hebrew. If it was dazzling, I hardly noticed. Blinding, rather. Fascinating, too. An original concept had piqued the curiosity of the dietician that I am. The evolution of species was decoded in an unexpected way. The author saw extraordinary significance in the fact that two kinds of animality are distinguished based on the relative position of the digestive and nervous systems. Man appears on the side that gives priority to the head over the stomach. Of this monumental brick that had become my nocturnal bedside torment, three days later I had still extracted nothing that bore on my work on clay. As a journalist, I tend to ask the interview for conveniences that reading does not provide. Best to go straight to the cabalist, rather than displease the bookshop owner, who I thought was inflating her own importance by placing obstacles in the way. She had, however, placed a quick call to me. It was to ask for the exact spelling of my name. I did not expect anything at all when I called her back on the telephone, only for her to announce at the very first word a meeting for the following day at eight in the evening. We were to go there together. The wisest course was to meet at the shop. 9 2. AIMEL HELLE That day, Friday April 5, 1985, I had planned to go to the beauty salon for a full treatment. When I came out, I no longer had time to go home and change. Hair greasy with massage creams, Japanese trousers crumpled, worn out by my workday — my health was still shaky — I was in a sorry state. This appearance in no way matched my usual presentation. In my profession, femininity is an asset. Seduction plays its part in the art of getting people to talk. Christiane gave me the address where I was to go, specifying that Mme Aimel Helle would receive us at her son’s home. I arrived on time, in front of a handsome recently built apart- ment block overlooking a quiet, tree-lined avenue in a chic neighborhood. On the second floor, the door opened on a warm “Good evening!” A stout woman in an aubergine dress, strict chignon, impeccable makeup, welcomed us. She was smiling, projecting a radiance at once rough and gay around her. I had been expecting a monastic personality, not at all an elegant bourgeoise with bejeweled ears. “Come in,” she insisted, ushering us toward a vast room that could have been the refectory of a convent. Large waxed furnishings of authentic antiquity contrasted harmoniously with imposing modern canvases whose abstraction pushed austerity to the point of doing without color altogether. The table was set for three on an enormous, heavy table. Near curtainless windows, three leather sofas in a square formation surrounded a notable ab- sence of rugs on the parquet floor. Each of us claimed her own. I was getting ready to switch on my tape recorder the moment we broached the subject. I was trying to steer the conversation toward my theme, surprised to find that no one was helping me along. I had to take the plunge on my own. — Clay? I know absolutely nothing about it, came the superb reply. So why had she received me? I had made clear the reason that had inspired me to seek her out. She cared little about it. She was inviting us to sit down to dinner. A dinner! That had not been part of the plan! Grapefruits, lamb tagine with honey and almonds, walnut cake, excellent Bordeaux. Improvised, she assured us, with a peasant heartiness. An invitation in this style, with such a menu, could only alarm me. At the time, I was sub- jecting myself to a fierce diet: no meat, no sugar, no alcohol, the fewest possible mixtures. How could I refuse the hospitality of this woman? I had come to see her on tiptoe, her sheer stature impressed me. I had the audacity to push away the meat, the wine, and the cake. She didn’t flinch. I felt like a little girl on the day of her first school when she discovers her new teacher. I studied her face. Her Indian features — as fitting for the Indies as for the Americas — would have supported a sari just as well as the feathered harness of a plumed headdress. The glow of her amber skin had a youthfulness that contrasted with the thick- ness of her waist and the silvered halo of her hair. Her eyes, the corners of her mouth, her nostrils, her ears all stretched into a smile that served as a facelift. When she stood up, I no- ticed she was limping. Throughout the evening, we chatted about this and that — at least that was my impression. But she was telling me, as she would a girlfriend, about intimate episodes of her life. Around two in the morning, on the sidewalk, after exchanging phone numbers at her request, we parted. It was Good Friday. My father, had he lived, would have celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday on the occasion of this full moon. The night over 10 Paris shone beneath the varnish of a perfectly round moon. The next day, I spent the whole day ruminating over the unpleasant feeling of having par- ticipated in a meeting quite different from what I had believed. Something had escaped me. I understood nothing. I had come driven by professional interest, I had spent a very pleasant and relaxed evening with a most amiable woman, and I had come away with a certainty that was ripening hour by hour: that all this was not normal, that the sympathy she had shown me proved nothing, had no reason for being. Curiously, I felt an enormous and comfortable attraction toward her. All things that turned out to be misplaced, excessive, given the difference in age, in cultural level, and, apparently, in lifestyle. I have neither the air nor the manners of a bourgeoise of the VIIth arrondissement. The whole thing was gnawing at me to the point of being unable to work. That evening, unable to hold back any longer, I dared to call despite the late hour. I stumbled through an excuse, confessing both my embarrassment and my unease. — I have looked into your clay, he declared. She had probed the word in Hebrew and the material in physics. But it was me that no longer interested her. She wanted to know something else. I didn’t know what, but I had the impression she knew it, that she knew. She proposed that I visit her the following day. As luck would have it, she had just been invited to lunch on a barge moored on the quays, right across from my building. She would come at five o’clock. Right on time, the doorbell rang. Straight away, the conversation took off on an unexpected register. She began by telling me that she had received me because of my name. SKAW- INSKA had provided her with a piece of information. Deaf to where she was heading, I pointed out that on my passport I called myself SKAWINSKI. This Polish name has accus- tomed me to providing spelling explanations every time I introduce myself. Nobody gets it on the first try. I have to spell it out. And spend several dreary minutes establishing that I am French, Catholic and not Jewish, that I speak no Slavic language, and that for the most part I have played the role of the Polish woman, substituting a feminine “a” for the paternal “i” according to a custom that is not recognized by the French state, so that where my official papers announce “ski,” I proclaim myself “ska” — which leaves the police perplexed when they compare my gray card to my insurance certificate and sometimes obliges me to plead at length to collect a registered letter at the post office window... A brusque wave of the hand cut me off. — For me, it works both ways. — In what way does it work? — You cannot understand. — I can always understand what my name means. — That’s the case, yes, it is the case. — Which case? 11 2. AIMEL HELLE — Yours. I was truly disoriented. — And the “ski,” then? — I am content that it is the case, yes, it is the case. — What for? — To decide to give you my full attention. It was about my name. I was intrigued. I specified that win , in English, means to win, to conquer, and that Véronique comes from the Greek fero niki , I bring victory. — I hope that will indeed be the case, she said, with a humor that eluded me. Then, all at once, as if she judged me capable of bearing the clarification, she told me about an ancient biblical technique consisting in exploring proper names. The names of people one meets for the first time are always bearers of a message that must be deciphered. She had received me because my name gave her information that matched her expectation. She was awaiting an answer, regarding a certain problem. My patronymic had furnished it. She gave me a few indications about the way an initiate thinks, complaining about having to use that word. — It irritates me, she said, with a grinding of teeth that tried to pass for comic. So antiquated! And yet, the word is apt. It suits anyone who uses it, for thinking about what stands at the initial of the real. 6 She explained to me all sorts of things about the universe, about life, about history. And when she had talked a great deal, since she had to go home, she invited me to accompany her. At midnight, she let me into her home. So she wasn’t sleepy, at her age? I found her very much awake, far too much so for me. A small room, half sitting room, half study, half office, reflected an attention to elegance and delicacy that was surprising, bearing no relation to her person, who from the very first struck one as larger than life. Too narrow, too remote, in that popular and touristy quarter of old Paris. She did not belong in that gnawed building where the garbage bins lingered in the entryway. Forty hours nonstop. For forty hours, without eating or sleeping, seated side by side, bun- dled up in a large mohair blanket, we talked. Or rather, she explained. Little by little, before my eyes, the events were fitting together into the puzzle of my life. Then, in a flash, I saw, I understood. The foreign ancestries, the death of my father by hemorrhage when I was two, the remarriage of my mother to a surgeon, the revolt at twenty, the break with the family, the illness, the operations, the transfusions — leading to the question of why, in the middle of life. And there I was, gingerly, beginning to see my destiny. The red thread was unspooling fast. Each episode of my fate was becoming an indispensable stage in my progression. I was dazzled by the metamorphosis she made each sequence of my lived 6 “l’initiale du réel” — a striking formulation. The “initial” of the Real (Lacan) suggests the letter as that which insists at the threshold of the Symbolic order; cf. also Derrida on the proper name as trace. 12 experience undergo. I recognized myself in it. It was indeed my story, my history that she was magically summoning from its shadows, through the sheer clarity of her gaze. A story whose meaning was that of the blood. I was suddenly flooded with a profound serenity. I had been on the point of dying several times. I had the certainty that on this Easter Sunday the time of my rebirth had come. 7 How is it that we do not know how to go about it? That there is not, for living, a man- ual known to all? Why do men wander in suffering and heartbreak? Why these pointless injustices? Why is it so difficult to accept that life has a meaning? Why, incapable of fore- seeing the worst that always comes, must one inevitably just take it? The materialist option, whether of the right or the left, raises more problems than it solves. For many long years, I had been searching for a doctrine capable of answering these ques- tions. I belong to that tormented generation which, for lack of finding conventional solu- tions, turned toward the East. I was, as they say, on the path. I confessed it in a previous book: I spared myself nothing. Neither psychedelic explorations, nor voyages to Tibet. Nor, for that matter, the serious disciplines. I took care to rub up close against the wisdom of the great masters. Yoga, zen, shiatsu, Tibetan Buddhism, white tantrism. I did not forget, either, to stretch out on the psychoanalyst’s couch. I went from one to the other of these teachings in the hope of improving my access to each of them. Every time, one had to as- similate a language. Why? But from sacred lexicon to secret glossary, I never heard the clear, simple expression that would have dissolved my doubts beneath itself. All traditional wisdoms show that the answer exists, that it is there, somewhere, but they do not deliver it. All of them promise an “awakening” whose exact content remains unclear even as you are told it is the goal. That this state of Buddha, which nature had had the kindness to place within me without my realizing it and which slipped from my gaze even as I greeted it with a hundred thousand prostrations? A clever thing to have said. 8 I was told that one had to insist, practice, that personal experience would eventually pro- duce the spark. That the barrier of the mind was the obstacle. That one had to tear it down, reduce one’s ego. Stop thinking. Be silent. Too many words, too many ailments! Wait, always wait! I could be as patient as I liked, legs knotted in lotus, knees aching, head in the cloud I called meditation, telling off malas and mantras, I never saw the illumination coming. There had been a few flashes, fugitive gleams surging at the end of a long ascesis. I had been unable to fix them or recall them. These experiences had all the same managed to forge in me one certainty: something existed, that remained to be found! I am no fool. A solid rationalism has often earned me the reproaches of friends more given to artistry. A square head, in short. I suffer from an incurable need to understand. I work in Paris, I earn my living dis- pensing to the general public precepts of fitness and hygiene, I pay my taxes, I love sports, 7 Nachträglichkeit — the entire biographical recasting here, where past events acquire meaning only retroac- tively through Aimel’s interpretive framework, is a textbook instance of Freudian deferred action. 8 The critique here anticipates TLP-style analysis — the spiritual seeker’s investment in the search itself as identity, the wanting-to-want awakening rather than awakening. 13 2. AIMEL HELLE travel, and beautiful things. Why should I, a Christian by birth, need to call upon distant cultures? Eastern techniques had brought me a physical balance and a moral strength that gave advantages for daily life. But that was not enough. What I needed was a Knowledge that was of here and now. Here! In the West, for a woman who works at her computer. Now! Between two articles, two planes or two television broadcasts. And here, in just a few hours, in the heart of Paris, the explanation I had been searching for all along was emerging. Aimel Helle’s manner of speaking was unusual to me, but in what she said, I was rediscovering and recognizing what I had learned without understanding. It was the same lesson, yet different: different in that I was grasping it. In all those sacred places where Wisdom is taught, the ritual demanded that one kiss the hem of the master’s robe. I had never resigned myself to it. My prostrations at the temple were really just gym- nastics. For the first time, the doctrine — as it is customary to say — struck me as exciting, luminous, livable. The more my interest strained to follow Aimel Helle’s reasoning, in that long night of talk, the more my mind relaxed into a comfort that was for it like the return to the hearth. I was reassured by the oiled side of the Knowledge she had mastered. Words were enough to make it accessible! I had finally found the key. My first reaction was to talk about my discovery to my friends. Naturally, everyone wanted to know the rare bird. Curiously, Aimel Helle did not object. For a full month, every evening after my work, I would bring to Montmartre, in great pomp, an interested person. Over some thirty days, a constant and privileged spectator of these encounters with all these different beings, I was witnessing an unprecedented exposition of the classic princi- ples of Knowledge. Unprecedented because its principles accorded with those I had always been taught about existence. The conversa- tion changed color depending on the personality introduced. Mme Helle adapted so swiftly to each visitor’s psychological and cultural particularities that it was a pleasure to see her give the Tradition the form suited to the circumstance. Each audience was the occasion for a great lesson. These people I had brought in because of their open-mindedness were authorities in their sphere of activity. Nearly all of them began to put up resistance. Were they afraid of being challenged? Yet the majority among them were sensitive to Aimel Helle’s understanding of the things of life, for they requested a second audience. Who among them advised me not to take this woman seriously? Who among them urged me to distrust her talk? Who? Nobody. When I look around the circle that formed at the start of this affair, I see, curiously, only people in agreement. Those who followed Aimel’s advice reaped the fruits so swiftly that they could not help but recognize the value of her teachings. A single person took flight, preferring to preserve his love for beribboned initi- ations. It was equally remarkable: none of the friends to whom I confided my enthusiasm uttered the slightest criticism that might have made me reflect. Not a voice rose up to stop me before I threw myself into this outlandish adventure. And if I turn this same interroga- tion back upon myself, I see in it nothing but acquiescence and good will, a good will that was almost excessive, so limpid and simple was it. 14 3. Simon and Schuster I arrived in New York on Monday September 16, 1985, in the evening. My calendar noted Rosh Hashanah. The fact that my expedition fell under the auspices of a Jewish holiday had not escaped me. I had asked Aimel what the Jews would be celebrating that evening. — They light lights, came the reply. Then, with an enigmatic smile: — Lights that will not fail to enlighten you. Words! Words that had hypnotized me in Paris, when I had heard them. But recalled in New York, in the night peopled with Mayan phantasms, they no longer had the same reso- nance at all. I could hardly see how the signal fires of the Hebrew religion might illuminate the path I had to discover. That any help might come from that quarter seemed unlikely, and the idea that nothing else could help me was keeping me from sleeping above all else. I had calmed myself through a long meditation in lotus posture. At first light, I had finally managed to fall asleep. When I awoke, my hosts had already left the apartment, having had the delicacy not to enter the living room. Finding Castaneda — it was still not the end of the world! More than once, in the course of my professional life, I had taken on far more difficult challenges. I had started out in jour- nalism as an investigative reporter. The production of a practical guide — I produce them continuously — begins with exploration in the field. You have to get front-rank personal- ities to grant you interviews. Good heavens! I know how to go about securing a meeting. What was I afraid of? The first step was to find out who Castaneda’s New York publisher was in order to make contact with him. I went out with the intention of finding out at a bookshop. Gunilla had explained to me how to get around Manhattan. Cross streets cut the avenues at right angles. Some are named, others numbered. Street sections are designated east or west depending on their position relative to Fifth Avenue. Americans are brilliant geometers! Designing a city so easy to navigate, as long as you can read numbers! And read a compass! I, who after twenty years of walking in Paris still can’t do without a map! Though it is true that the streets there have names, often poetic ones. So I headed back up 47th Street toward Fifth Avenue. From the very first steps, I had to take off the tweed jacket of my beige herringbone suit. It 15 3. SIMON AND SCHUSTER was hot. The dry heat had surprised me on leaving the building. I hadn’t realized that the air conditioning maintained in the apartments a coolness that was not that of the natural climate. I looked up. The sun had climbed to the tops of the buildings and, through a gap, was flooding the street with light. How far away it seemed. Farther still than in Paris, pushed back by the height of the constructions. The cars, rare compared to the Parisian glut, moved with a majestic slowness that was also surprising for eyes accustomed to the nervousness of the Champs-Elysees. I walked along three blocks of gray facades, crossed two absurdly wide avenues,