THE TWILIGHT ZONE

I'm doing the translation from spanish. Should be done within a few more weeks. Ask nance74, if you want more.
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I know, maybe I should wait, but I have found lots of interesting passages. It must be the most extensive series of interviews that Castaneda ever granted. It appears that the interview and writing is pretty clear and straightforward, although there IS one page where I feel that she is whining about her feelings that Castaneda's view of the world is not "equal", like, that God does not create us all equal. "Not Fair!" Otherwise it all seems pretty straight-from-the-hip and intellegent.
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“In what way were you in touch with him?”
“Don Juan came to Los Angeles as well.”
“Did he speak English?”
“He spoke perfect English. He was an American Indian, an Indian from Yuma!” he clarified indignantly for the doubt. “He was fluent in various native tongues,” he added, “besides Spanish.”

(Don Juan was a born US citizen, and a naturalized Mexican, in other words. But then it seems a little incongruous with the description of his early life as told in The Power of Silence)

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“Don Juan accused you of disguising pleasing yourself as independence, and felt that self-importance hid self-pity.”
“A state of extraordinary laziness, that appears to be the reference point of all of us, we transform into ideas of personal liberty so that nobody will bother us, and we argue a total integrity, which is a lie, and represents a barrier that does not permit us liberty,” he concluded in a decisive tone.

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“Do other philosophies or oriental disciplines interest you?” I was curious.
“I do kung-fu,” he responded.
“Ah, that is how you maintain yourself so well.”
“Sure it maintains me in good form, but only because I practice it every day!” he exclaimed.
Through Florinda I would know that Castaneda not only does kung-fu, but that he is a master of kung-fu.
A few months later, I note in the dedication of his second to last book, El Fuego Interior (The Fire from Within), “I want to express my admiration and gratitude to a masterful teacher, H.Y. Lee, for helping me to restore my energy, and for teaching me an alternate way to plenitude and well-being.”

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“One should not hug their children face to face, because we are weakened in our unconscious desire to recuperate that energy, in order to become complete.”

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“Why did don Juan say that one must teach mankind, now more than ever, to connect inward? Is it because mankind has attained a major level of intellectual development?”
“What are you saying!” he exclaims. “It is because now we are indeed bankrupt. We are,” he continues irately, “in the middle of a battle between the two superpowers, that is going to destroy humanity. They have already opened up a hole in the ozone. And do you believe that they are going to patch it up? Are they going to set aside their enormous expenditures on defense in order to repair the Earth? More than anything,” he concludes in a firm tone, “mankind needs the help of magic.”

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“Yes. In 1985, doña Florinda left so suddenly, we decided to leave for a season. We did not know very well where we wanted to go. We just craved to get away.”

He explained that the group, that up until that point was drawn together around doña Florinda, disintegrated. Those that accepted the leadership of Castaneda, headed with him to the airport.

“And you didn’t have any fixed itinerary or destiny?”

“No! In the airport we asked which was the first flight out of the country. The lady at the information desk said, ‘To where?’ We answered that it did not matter,” continued Castaneda. “The girl was very surprised and informed us that there was one to South Korea, but we no longer had time to take it. I asked here what was the following, and she answered, ‘The next flight is to Helsinki.’ So we bought the tickets and boarded the plane.”

“And you went to Helsinki?”

“Yes. When we arrived it was frighteningly cold,” he remembers with a smile.

“Did you stay there very long?”

“We traveled throughout Scandinavia, until we got tired of the cold and decided to look for climates more temperate. Finally we arrived at Barcelona.”

In that city, Castaneda explains that he began to feel sharp pains originating from a hernia that he believed he had caused a few weeks earlier upon making a sudden movement during the “disappearance” of doña Florinda. His health became worse and he decided to submit himself to an urgent treatment.

“The surgeon,” he remembers amusedly, “told me that it was quite likely that I would not survive the operation. He asked me to go for a comprehensive diagnosis before the uncomfortable situation that I could create for him if I insisted that he operate on me, being that in the case of my death he would be obliged to fill out a whole series of forms. In sextuplet!” Between laughs, he says with a touch of irony that he took stock of the complications that he was going to provoke and returned rapidly to the United States where he checked into a clinic. “The nurse, a young black man, was shaving my pubic hair,” he continues, “and asks me, ‘What is it?’ I respond to him, ‘A hernia.’ ‘Well, it looks to me like cancer,’ he replied.” Now, Castaneda was laughing so hard that it was making him cry. He dried his tears and continued the story of his misadventure. Now in the surgery room, the surgeons aide, a gay kid, grabs me from behind to lift me up to the operating table and says calmly, “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit.”

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To that liberty of movement, that he vindicates and puts into practice without feeling the need of giving explanations, is added his refusal to acquire any commitment in time, as was already proven in his meeting with Barbara Robinson, upon refusing to give a conference if he had to fix the date more than one day in advance. That is why his comment does not seem strange to me, about what he had heard a traveling scientist say in the United States.

“That man assured that he had noted in his calendar that visit since October. Imagine, how important!” He pronounces the last word sarcastically, dragging the eRRe, and pauses, almost for himself. “Planning something almost one year in advance, when we don’t even know if we are going to be alive then. What stupidity!” appearing aghast in light of this binding willfulness.

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“For several years,” he remembers, “I lived legally as Joe Cortes. I had that name on my drivers license, my social security card… all of my documents.”.........................

“I am going to tell you a story,” he announced. “Apparently I had to pass some test. Florinda told me that the spirit demanded it. So I decided to work as a cook in Arizona, a very racist state,” he notes. “I showed up in a cafeteria, and they asked me if I knew ‘egg cooking‘. Imagine! Cooking eggs!” He laughs at the translated term. “As I did not know ‘egg cooking’, I passed three months learning it and finally obtained employment in a cafeteria in charge of the kitchen and of the restaurant. A girl worked there as a waitress that was obsessed with meeting Castaneda. I told her, “And you, why do you want to meet that idiot?” The girl lamented me and answered me with great patience, ‘You don’t understand Joe. You are illiterate.” Joe breaks into laughter, he still to this day enjoys that mistake.

“One very hot day,” he remembers, “a white luxury car parks near the cafeteria, a limousine or something like that. Inside, a man was taking notes. Then the girl thought, ‘who could be here on a day like today, taking notes, but Castaneda?” So she approaches the car and attempts to speak with him. And do you know what that man did?” he asks me scandalized. “He throws her out yelling ‘Fuck You!’ and adds his own version in Spanish, ‘Go to Hell!” Like other times he laughs until tears are running down his face. He cleans them and continues with the story. “The girl as well had tears when she returned to the establishment. She began crying,” he remembers, between sadistic-ness and tenderness. “I assured here that he had refused her only because she was fat. She hugged me, lamenting about her physical condition, while I tried to consul her saying, “You’re stupid! You should think nothing of it.”

“Did you tell her who you were?” I asked.

“I couldn’t,” he responded.

“How did all that end?”

“After a short time, Florinda considered that the spirit had liberated me from the test. I thought that I should stay a few days until they found another person to take my place, but Florinda said that nobody was waiting for me when I arrived and so for that nothing would come of me leaving without notice. I left without notice. As to that girl,” he concluded, “she was finally and without knowing it, in the arms of Castaneda.”

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“One day, upon entering the building where my attorney has his office, I crossed paths with a young woman that was leaving with an angry disposition. When I arrived to the office, my attorney asked me, ‘Did you see a girl leave just now?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered him, ‘I just crossed paths with her and she appeared upset.’ ’Because she has come to sue you,’ he continued, ‘because she says that you have been sleeping with her with the hoax of initiating her into sorcery and that you have not fulfilled your end of the promise.” Castaneda is serious while he remembers the situation. “I assured my attorney,” he proceeded, “that that was the first time that I had seen her and that I in no way knew her. All of a sudden the girl returned to the office and my attorney asked her, pointing to me, ‘Do you know this man?’ The girl responded that she had never seen me before, and then he enlightened her, ‘Because this is Carlos Castaneda.’ Somebody had been passing himself off as me,” he concluded.

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“We recorded in a notebook,” he relates, “what bothered us the most about some of the people that we knew. One night, we went to visit a psychiatrist that hated for people to show up unannounced. In spite of the fact that it was about eleven, we did not manage to bother him because he was having a party and the house was full of people. When he saw me he said, ‘Come on in. I am going to introduce you to someone.’ It was a person,” Castaneda remembers, “who was tall and serious, dressed in white clothes, signing my books as if he were the author. The psychiatrist introduced us, me with a different name and at once left us alone. Then that man,” he continues, “began to ask me, ‘Have you read my books?’ ‘Yes, all of them.” Castaneda speaks in an arrogant tone for the questions, and humble for the answers. “And do you understand them?” continues the person. “Yes, I believe so,” responds Castaneda, painting the scene by pointing in my direction. “He pointed to me, with his finger,” he clarifies irritated. Perhaps with the intention to capture the intensity of that moment, Castaneda repeats the questions, and after each on of them he smacks his tongue, imitating a gun shot, while he moves his index finger from vertical to horizontal, like an improvised pistol. Never the less, he even had the courtesy to tell him, “Well I have been very pleased to have met you, Mr. Castaneda.”

And that role-player corrected him, “Doctor Castaneda.” The real doctor Castaneda did not finish the story, but I suppose that he allowed the impostor finish his night of glory.


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“I had been invited to a party,” he remembers. “Before arriving somebody had been praising me. He said that I had dignified the age old culture of the Indians and their spiritual practices. He placed me on the level of a hero, the defender of the despised Indians,” he solemnly emphasizes. “But when I arrive that person was so disillusioned by my physical condition that he ignored me. He did not speak a word to me all night.”

“Don’t make a deal of it,” Florinda cuts him off. “It’s not so.”

I suppose that she was present and her interpretation of the facts were different.

“Yes, yes,” insists Castaneda. “He suffered a let-down and he did not speak to me all that night. Perhaps he was expecting someone tall and majestic.”

Florinda continues disagreeing and shaking her head ‘no’.

To back up his point of view, Castaneda sews the thread of another anecdote.

“One day, I was walking by a fence near UCLA, when a young man that knew me yelled at a girl that he had parted from just a minute before. ‘Hey! That is Carlos Castaneda!’ The girl looked at me, and turned to her friend and said, ‘It must be a joke!” Castaneda concludes with a laugh.

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Joe Cortes must have provided a respite for Carlos Castaneda, who was enjoying all of the acquired privileges, and at the same time avoiding the inconveniences of popularity. He did not have to make up pretexts in order to deftly avoid undesired commitments, nor worry about the effect that it could cause on others, nor defend himself in front of the indiscreet or the obsessive. At the root of it, he enjoyed his secret life, which placed him in an advantageous position in respect to almost everyone.

“One day I was visiting a friend in his home,” he remembers, “in south Arizona, almost on the boarder. A man and a woman arrived to speak with him. They passed inside the home and I stayed in the garden working the earth. When they came out, my friend yelled at me in Spanish, ‘I told you not to do it like that!’ I answered, as well in Spanish,” and he imitates the voice of an illiterate Chicano, ‘Well I am only dooooing it like you told me tooooo.’ ‘I warned you that you should not place that dirt there!’ he continued scolding me, while I, on my knees, with my hands dirty and my head hung down, insisted on defending my work in front of the supposed boss. The scene started to look ugly to the visitors, who saw themselves off in a hurry. And do you know who they were?” he asked with a naughty look.

“No,” I responded with much curiosity.

“They represented a television chain,” clarifies Castaneda in a triumphal voice, “and they had gone to speak with my friend because they were… searching for Castaneda.”

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Disguising his identity while under the very noses of those who would want to find him was at the root of the game. I suppose that he no longer practices those pranks. In his quality of being the nagual he has less time and more responsibilities. He maintains a sense of humor, but not for giving himself into “pranks” invented by others, but for those that set an example.

“A few days ago,” he tells, “an organization sent to the office of my attorney, a letter in which they were asking authorization to include my name on a list of foreigners that had triumphed in the United States. And what should you do about that?” he asks, serious and disparaging, while I waited for him to tell me. “You can tear it up,” he concludes.

In spite of arriving in the country as a child, of being a citizen and writing in english, he continues to be considered as a foreigner. He does not like that.

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Henry (and Nance!), thank you for the translation. I recall reading bits and pieces of this elsewhere, but not sure where.

Carlos appears true to form, a master raconteur.

Here are a few more fragments from the last chapter that I want to share, but it is full of so much and some great observations on the part of the author, Carmina Fort, it is worth reading it all.

The next chapter, that I am working on now, Carmina states some wonderfully insightful knowledge and well founded inferences, about how DJ suggested writing the first book in order to break him of his writing habit, like he had broken his smoking habit. How DJ suggested that the book be written in the sorcerers tradition, of quoting experiences from dreaming and from under drug influence, as direct first-hand knowledge, and how DJ disapproved of Castaneda writing further books.

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“One day,” he commented on the afternoon in which we first had met, “don Juan asked me to write that which I did not like about myself. After thinking about it, I wrote down a series of aspects like, ‘I give the form and tone of pretended transcendence.’ ‘I am inconsiderate of others.’ ‘I am too unreliable.’ When he saw what I wrote, don Juan laughed at me saying, “How stupid this all is! What you don’t like about yourself is that you are ugly! That you are short and ugly!”

It could be that he is still fighting against the little pieces of ego that his teacher did not destroy, surely for lack of time.”
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“Florinda and I go frequently, above all to Italy,” he says with a smile. As if one of his grandparents were Italian.

“To some city in particular?”

“We like Rome a lot. Whenever we are there we meet with Fellini, who is our friend. I tell him,” confides Castaneda, ‘At your age you should leave behind the passion. Don’t waste your energy on that. Interest yourself in other things.’ But he pays no mind. He says that he can’t live if he is not in love.”

“And you always see him in Rome?”

“As well we meet in Los Angeles,” says Castaneda. “Once he showed up with a young roman boy, because, he told us, the journey was very long and meanwhile he wanted to enjoy the beauty.”

“Do you understand Italian?” I asked, remembering his rebuttal that he indeed studied in Milan.

“My Italian is very colloquial,” he assured, “I don’t know enough to get down to the nitty gritty. We speak with Fellini in english.”

Federico Fellini declared towards the end of 1989, that in 1985 he went to Los Angeles with the project of making a film based on the saga of don Juan. Castaneda had agreed to accompany him to Mexico, but later changed his mind. Fellini went to Mexico with his equipment, and from that experience suggested the script for a comedy titled “Viaje a Tulum”, with drawings by Manara.


(This one really bothers me, because I would have loved to have seen Journey to Ixtlan through Federico Fellini's surrealist cinematography. "Damn It Castaneda, why couldn't you have just loosened up a notch or two? Fellini would have done it so vaguely that you wouldn't need to worry about erasing the trail")

As Castaneda told Carmina Fort there were many differient imposters running around claiming to be Castaneda. So with so many, I am curious where they are at these days. They will probibly never admit to it. No doubt some of them post on these sorts of forums.

I just finished the whole translation. Check with Nance for a copy. Post your favorite passages on this thread if you like.

An opinion that I have formed concerning the writings of Carlos Castaneda, is that he had some basic truths, some experiences,with a group of Mexican (and North American) sorcerers, and that he elaborated upon those truths. Some might say that he exaggerated, or lied. However his method to exaggerate was in accordance with shamanic traditions. Dreaming and direct perception of energy. Therefore I personally grant him a little more license in this aspect, and still maintain a good degree of respect for the knowledge that he presents. He alludes to this in The Power of Silence where he says DJ is relating to him how one should relate to the story of Calexti Muni (spelling?). He also states this out-right in the wheel of time, and in fact alludes to it in the introductions of all of his later books.

Carmina Fort, in her several day interview with CC, catches him red-handed several times, changing the truth a little, in order to better suit a purpose, and puts more trust of the facts in the things said by Florinda Donner.

I cannot, and do not think that the works of CC can be disregarded as a pure fabrication, but I think that the accounts of those around him, like Carmina Fort, Florinda Donner, and doña Solidad Ruiz, are illuminating, and could be very likely more factual in the details, than what CC had presented

http://ttzlibrary.yuku.com/topic/629


In case those in command of Yuku get nasty again, I also created a Google Page:

http://ttz.library.googlepages.com/home

Blackbeard,

I was just about to send you a PM, but I will post it here publically so that Traveler, Nance and others will take note.

Towards the end of the Prologue, you need to substitute this paragraph for what is there presently -

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To the experts in the works of Castaneda it will be obvious that I am not it. I confess that I am just another author that because of her profession, has the opportunity to offer, from her own perspective, the daily dimension of that generally inaccessible man.

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Note that I used the word "him" instead of "her", the gender not being defined within the original spanish word "su", and at that point early on, I mistakenly thought that I saw clues that the author was male.

I KNOW that there are other typos, as I wanted to get the work out, and proofing takes a long time as well. Also, someone like Traveler might chose to reword things to seem a little more natural, maybe at times necessary. I am not saying that he shouldn't. Translation is an artform, much more than a science. One thing to keep in mind is that even within the context of the spanish language, Carmina Fort often had a complex or convoluted way of saying things, and I wanted to convey the style of the author as best as possible as well.