Thursday, December 22
Don Juan was sitting on the floor, by the door of his house, with his back against the wall. He turned over a wooden milk crate and asked me to sit down and make myself at home. I offered him some cigarettes I had brought a carton of them. He said he did not smoke but he accepted the gift. We talked about the coldness of the desert nights and other ordinary topics of conversation.
I asked him if I was interfering with his normal routine. He looked at me with a sort of frown and said he had no routines, and that I could stay with him all afternoon if I wanted to.
I had prepared some genealogy and kinship charts that I wanted to fill out with his help. I had also compiled, from the ethnographic literature, a long list of culture traits that were purported to belong to the Indians of the area. I wanted to go through the list with him and mark all the items that were familiar to him.
I began with the kinship charts.
“What did you call your father?” I asked.
“I called him Dad,” he said with a very serious face.
I felt a little bit annoyed, but I proceeded on the assumption that he had not understood.
I showed him the chart and explained that one space was for the father and another space was for the mother. I gave as an example the different words used in English and in Spanish for father and mother.
I thought that perhaps I should have taken mother first.
“What did you call your mother?” I asked.
“I called her Mom,” he replied in a naive tone.
“I mean what other words did you use to call your father and mother? How did you call them?” I said, trying to be patient and polite.
He scratched his head and looked at me with a stupid expression.
“Golly!” he said. “You got me there. Let me think.”
After a moment’s hesitation he seemed to remember something and I got ready to write.
“Well,” he said, as if he were involved in serious thought, “how else did I call them? I called them Hey, hey, Dad! Hey, hey, Mom!”
I laughed against my desire. His expression was truly comical and at that moment I did not know whether he was a preposterous old man pulling my leg or whether he was really a simpleton. Using all the patience I had, I explained to him that these were very serious questions and that it was very important for my work to fill out the forms. I tried to make him understand the idea of a genealogy and personal history.
“What were the names of your father and mother?” I asked.
He looked at me with clear, kind eyes. “Don’t waste your time with that crap,” he said softly but with unsuspected force. I did not know what to say; it was as if someone else had uttered those words. A moment before, he had been a fumbling, stupid Indian scratching his head, and then, in an instant he had reversed the roles; I was the stupid one, and he was staring at me with an indescribable look that was not a look of arrogance, or defiance, or hatred, or contempt. His eyes were kind and clear and penetrating.
“I don’t have any personal history,” he said after a long pause. “One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped it.”
I did not quite understand what he meant by that. I suddenly felt ill at ease, threatened. I reminded him that he had assured me that it was all right to ask him questions. He reiterated that he did not mind at all.
“I don’t have personal history any more,” he said and looked at me probingly. “I dropped it one day when I felt it was no longer necessary.”
I stared at him, trying to detect the hidden meanings of his words.
“How can one drop one’s personal history?” I asked in an argumentative mood.
“One must first have the desire to drop it,” he said. “And then one must proceed harmoniously to chop it off, little by little.”
“Why should anyone have such a desire?” I exclaimed.
I had a terribly strong attachment to my personal history. My family roots were deep. I honestly felt that without them my life had no continuity or purpose.
“Perhaps you should tell me what you mean by dropping one’s personal history,” I said.
“To do away with it, that’s what I mean,” he replied cuttingly.
I insisted that I must not have understood the proposition.
“Take you for instance,” I said. “You are a Yaqui. You can’t change that.”
“Am I?” he asked, smiling. “How do you know that?”
“True!” I said. “I can’t know that with certainty, at this point, but you know it and that is what counts. That’s what makes it personal history.”
I felt I had driven a hard nail in.
“The fact that I know whether I am a Yaqui or not does not make it personal history,” he replied. “Only when someone else knows that does it become personal history. And I assure you that no one will ever know that for sure.”
I had written down what he had said in a clumsy way. I stopped writing and looked at him. I could not figure him out. I mentally ran through my impressions of him; the mysterious and unprecedented way he had looked at me during our first meeting, the charm with which he had claimed that he received agreement from everything around him, his annoying humor and his alertness, his look of bona fide stupidity when I asked about his father and mother, and then the unsuspected force of his statements which had snapped me apart.
“You don’t know what I am, do you?” he said as if he were reading my thoughts. “You will never know who or what I am, because I don’t have a personal history.”
He asked me if I had a father. I told him I did. He said that my father was an example of what he had in mind. He urged me to remember what my father thought of me.
“Your father knows everything about you,” he said. “So he has you all figured out. He knows who you are and what you do, and there is no power on earth that can make him change his mind about you.”
Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and that I kept feeding that idea with everything I did. “Don’t you see?” he asked dramatically. “You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.”
Suddenly the idea became clear in my mind. I had almost known it myself, but I had never examined it. Not having personal history was indeed an appealing concept, at least on the intellectual level; it gave me, however, a sense of loneliness which I found threatening and distasteful. I wanted to discuss my feelings with him, but I kept myself in check; something was terribly incongruous in the situation at hand. I felt ridiculous trying to get into a philosophical argument with an old Indian who obviously did not have the “sophistication” of a university student. Somehow he had led me away from my original intention of asking him about his genealogy.
“I don’t know how we ended up talking about this when all I wanted was some names for my charts,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back to the topic I wanted.
“It’s terribly simple,” he said. “The way we ended up talking about it was because I said that to ask questions about one’s past is a bunch of crap.”
His tone was firm. I felt there was no way to make him budge, so I changed my tactics.
“Is this idea of not having personal history something that the Yaquis do?” I asked.
“It’s something that I do.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“I learned it during the course of my life.”
“Did your father teach you that?”
“No. Let’s say that I learned it by myself and now I am going to give you its secret, so you won’t go away empty-handed today.”
He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper. I laughed at his histrionics. I had to admit that he was stupendous at that. The thought crossed my mind that I was in the presence of a born actor.
“Write it down,” he said patronizingly. “Why not? You seem to be more comfortable writing.”
I looked at him and my eyes must have betrayed my confusion. He slapped his thighs and laughed with great delight.
“It is best to erase all personal history,” he said slowly, as if giving me time to write it down in my clumsy way, “because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people.”
I could not believe that he was actually saying that. I had a very confusing moment. He must have read in my face my inner turmoil and used it immediately.
“Take yourself, for instance,” he went on saying. “Right now you don’t know whether you are coming or going. And that is so, because I have erased my personal history. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do.”
“But, you yourself know who you are, don’t you?” I interjected.
“You bet I… don’t,” he exclaimed and rolled on the floor, laughing at my surprised look.
He had paused long enough to make me believe that he was going to say that he did know, as I was anticipating it. His subterfuge was very threatening to me. I actually became afraid.
“That is the little secret I am going to give you today,” he said in a low voice. “Nobody knows my personal history. Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I.”
He squinted his eyes. He was not looking at me but beyond me over my right shoulder. He was sitting cross-legged, his back was straight and yet he seemed to be so relaxed. At that moment he was the very picture of fierceness. I fancied him to be an Indian chief, a “red-skinned warrior” in the romantic frontier sagas of my childhood. My romanticism carried me away and the most insidious feeling of ambivalence enveloped me. I could sincerely say that I liked him a great deal and in the same breath I could say that I was deadly afraid of him.
He maintained that strange stare for a long moment.
“How can I know who I am, when I am all this?” he said, sweeping the surroundings with a gesture of his head. Then he glanced at me and smiled.
“Little by little you must create a fog around yourself; you must erase everything around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real. Your problem now is that you’re too real. Your endeavors are too real; your moods are too real. Don’t take things so for granted. You must begin to erase yourself.”
“What for?” I asked belligerently.
It became clear to me then that he was prescribing behavior for me. All my life I had reached a breaking point when someone attempted to tell me what to do; the mere thought of being told what to do put me immediately on the defensive.
“You said that you wanted to learn about plants,” he said calmly. “Do you want to get something for nothing? What do you think this is? We agreed that you would ask me questions and I’d tell you what I know. If you don’t like it, there is nothing else we can say to each other.”
His terrible directness made me feel peeved, and begrudgingly I conceded that he was right.
“Let’s put it this way then,” he went on. “If you want to learn about plants, since there is really nothing to say about them, you must, among other things, erase your personal history.”
“How?” I asked.
“Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do. Then you must leave everyone who knows you well. This way you’ll build up a fog around yourself.”
“But that’s absurd,” I protested. “Why shouldn’t people know me? What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won’t be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance.”
“But that would be lying.”
“I’m not concerned with lies or truths,” he said severely. “Lies are lies only if you have personal history.” I argued that I did not like to deliberately mystify people or mislead them. His reply was that I misled everybody anyway.
The old man had touched a sore spot in my life. I did not pause to ask him what he meant by that or how he knew that I mystified people all the time. I simply reacted to his statement, defending myself by means of an explanation. I said that I was painfully aware that my family and my friends believed I was unreliable, when in reality I had never told a lie in my life.
“You always knew how to lie,” he said. “The only thing that was missing was that you didn’t know why to do it. Now you do.”
I protested. “Don’t you see that I’m really sick and tired of people thinking that I’m unreliable?” I said.
“But you are unreliable,” he replied with conviction.
“Damn it to hell, man, I am not!” I exclaimed.
My mood, instead of forcing him into seriousness, made him laugh hysterically. I really despised the old man for all his cockiness. Unfortunately he was right about me.
After a while I calmed down and he continued talking.
“When one does not have personal history,” he explained, “nothing that one says can be taken for a lie. Your trouble is that you have to explain everything to everybody, compulsively, and at the same time you want to keep the freshness, the newness of what you do. Well, since you can’t be excited after explaining everything you’ve done, you lie in order to keep on going.”
I was truly bewildered by the scope of our conversation. I wrote down all the details of our exchange in the best way I could, concentrating on what he was saying rather than pausing to deliberate on my prejudices or on his meanings.
“From now on,” he said, “you must simply show people whatever you care to show them, but without ever telling exactly how you’ve done it.”
“I can’t keep secrets!” I exclaimed. “What you are saying is useless to me.”
“Then change!” he said cuttingly and with a fierce glint in his eyes.
He looked like a strange wild animal. And yet he was so coherent in his thoughts and so verbal. My annoyance gave way to a state of irritating confusion.
“You see,” he went on, “we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don’t. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.”
I contended that erasing personal history would only increase our sensation of insecurity.
“When nothing is for sure we remain alert, perennially on our toes,” he said. “It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we know everything.”
He did not say another word for a very long time; perhaps an hour went by in complete silence. I did not know what to ask. Finally he got up and asked me to drive him to the nearby town.
I did not know why but our conversation had drained me. I felt like going to sleep. He asked me to stop on the way and told me that if I wanted to relax, I had to climb to the flat top of a small hill on the side of the road and lie down on my stomach with my head towards the east.
He seemed to have a feeling of urgency. I did not want to argue or perhaps I was too tired to even speak. I climbed the hill and did as he had prescribed.
I slept only two or three minutes, but it was sufficient to have my energy renewed. We drove to the center of town, where he told me to let him off.
“Come back,” he said as he stepped out of the car. “Be sure to come back.”
I had the opportunity of discussing my two previous visits to Don Juan with the friend who had put us in contact. It was his opinion that I was wasting my time. I related to him, in every detail, the scope of our conversations. He thought I was exaggerating and romanticizing a silly old fogy.
There was very little room in me for romanticizing such a preposterous old man. I sincerely felt that his criticisms about my personality had seriously undermined my liking him. Yet I had to admit that they had always been apropos, sharply delineated, and true to the letter.
The crux of my dilemma at that point was my unwillingness to accept that don Juan was very capable of disrupting all my preconceptions about the world, and my unwillingness to agree with my friend who believed that “the old Indian was just nuts.” I felt compelled to pay him another visit before I made up my mind.
Wednesday, December 28, 1960
Immediately after I arrived at his house he took me for a walk in the desert chaparral. He did not even look at the bag of groceries that I had brought him. He seemed to have been waiting for me.
We walked for hours. He did not collect or show me any plants. He did, however, teach me an “appropriate form of walking.” He said that I had to curl my fingers gently as I walked so I would keep my attention on the trail and the surroundings. He claimed that my ordinary way of walking was debilitating and that one should never carry anything in the hands. If things had to be carried one should use a knapsack or any sort of carrying net or shoulder bag. His idea was that by forcing the hands into a specific position one was capable of greater stamina and greater awareness.
I saw no point in arguing and curled my fingers as he had prescribed and kept on walking. My awareness was in no way different, nor was my stamina.
We started our hike in the morning and we stopped to rest around noon. I was perspiring and tried to drink from my canteen, but he stopped me by saying that it was better to have only a sip of water. He cut some leaves from a small yellowish bush and chewed them. He gave me some and remarked that they were excellent, and if I chewed them slowly my thirst would vanish. It did not, but I was not uncomfortable either.
He seemed to have read my thoughts and explained that I had not felt the benefits of the “right way of walking” or the benefits of chewing the leaves because I was young and strong and my body did not notice anything because it was a bit stupid.
He laughed. I was not in a laughing mood and that seemed to amuse him even more. He corrected his previous statement, saying that my body was not really stupid but somehow dormant.
At that moment an enormous crow flew right over us cawing. That startled me and I began to laugh. I thought that the occasion called for laughter, but to my utter amazement he shook my arm vigorously and hushed me up. He had a most serious expression.
“That was not a joke,” he said severely, as if I knew what he was talking about.
I asked for an explanation. I told him that it was incongruous that my laughing at the crow had made him angry when we had laughed at the coffee percolator.
“What you saw was not just a crow!” he exclaimed.
“But I saw it and it was a crow,” I insisted.
“You saw nothing, you fool,” he said in a gruff voice.
His rudeness was uncalled for. I told him that I did not like to make people angry and that perhaps it would be better if I left, since he did not seem to be in a mood to have company. He laughed uproariously, as if I were a clown performing for him. My annoyance and embarrassment grew in proportion. “You’re very violent,” he commented casually. “You’re taking yourself too seriously.”
“But weren’t you doing the same?” I interjected. “Taking yourself seriously when you got angry at me?”
He said that to get angry at me was the farthest thing from his mind. He looked at me piercingly.
“What you saw was not an agreement from the world,” he said. “Crows flying or cawing are never an agreement. That was an omen!”
“An omen of what?”
“A very important indication about you,” he replied cryptically.
At that very instant the wind blew the dry branch of a bush right to our feet.
“That was an agreement!” he exclaimed and looked at me with shiny eyes and broke into a belly laugh.
I had the feeling that he was teasing me by making up the rules of his strange game as we went along, thus it was all right for him to laugh, but not for me. My annoyance mushroomed again and I told him what I thought of him.
He was not cross or offended at all. He laughed and his laughter caused me even more anguish and frustration. I thought that he was deliberately humiliating me. I decided right then that I had had my fill of “field work.”
I stood up and said that I wanted to start walking back to his house because I had to leave for Los Angeles.
“Sit down!” he said imperatively. “You get peeved like an old lady. You cannot leave now, because we’re not through yet.”
I hated him. I thought he was a contemptuous man.
He began to sing an idiotic Mexican folk song. He was obviously imitating some popular singer. He elongated certain syllables and contracted others and made the song into a most farcical affair. It was so comical that I ended up laughing.
“You see, you laugh at the stupid song,” he said. “But the man who sings it that way and those who pay to listen to him are not laughing; they think it is serious.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I thought he had deliberately concocted the example to tell me that I had laughed at the crow because I had not taken it seriously, the same way I had not taken the song seriously. But he baffled me again. He said I was like the singer and the people who liked his songs, conceited and deadly serious about some nonsense that no one in his right mind should give a damn about.
He then recapitulated, as if to refresh my memory, all he had said before on the topic of “learning about plants.” He stressed emphatically that if I really wanted to learn, I had to remodel most of my behavior.
My sense of annoyance grew, until I had to make a supreme effort to even take notes.
“You take yourself too seriously,” he said slowly. “You are too damn important in your own mind. That must be changed! You are so goddamn important that you feel justified to be annoyed with everything. You’re so damn important that you can afford to leave if things don’t go your way. I suppose you think that shows you have character. That’s nonsense! You’re weak, and conceited!”
I tried to stage a protest but he did not budge. He pointed out that in the course of my life I had not ever finished anything because of that sense of disproportionate importance that I attached to myself.
I was flabbergasted at the certainty with which he made his statements. They were true, of course, and that made me feel not only angry but also threatened.
“Self-importance is another thing that must be dropped, just like personal history,” he said in a dramatic tone.
I certainly did not want to argue with him. It was obvious that I was at a terrible disadvantage; he was not going to walk back to his house until he was ready and I did not know the way. I had to stay with him.
He made a strange and sudden movement, he sort of sniffed the air around him, his head shook slightly and rhythmically.
He seemed to be in a state of unusual alertness. He turned and stared at me with a look of bewilderment and curiosity. His eyes swept up and down my body as if he were looking for something specific; then he stood up abruptly and began to walk fast. He was almost running. I followed him. He kept a very accelerated pace for nearly an hour. Finally he stopped by a rocky hill and we sat in the shade of a bush. The trotting had exhausted me completely although my mood was better. It was strange the way I had changed.
I felt almost elated, but when we had started to trot, after our argument, I was furious with him.
“This is very weird,” I said, “but I feel really good.”
I heard the cawing of a crow in the distance. He lifted his finger to his right ear and smiled.
“That was an omen,” he said.
A small rock tumbled downhill and made a crashing sound when it landed in the chaparral.
He laughed out loud and pointed his finger in the direction of the sound.
“And that was an agreement,” he said.
He then asked me if I was ready to talk about my self-importance. I laughed; my feeling of anger seemed so far away that I could not even conceive how I had become so cross with him.
“I can’t understand what’s happening to me,” I said. “I got angry and now I don’t know why I am not angry any more.”
“The world around us is very mysterious,” he said. “It doesn’t yield its secrets easily.”
I liked his cryptic statements. They were challenging and mysterious. I could not determine whether they were filled with hidden meanings or whether they were just plain nonsense.
“If you ever come back to the desert here,” he said, “stay away from that rocky hill where we stopped today. Avoid it like the plague.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“This is not the time to explain it,” he said. “Now we are concerned with losing self-importance. As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you. You are like a horse with blinders, all you see is yourself apart from everything else.”
He examined me for a moment.
“I am going to talk to my little friend here,” he said, pointing to a small plant. He kneeled in front of it and began to caress it and to talk to it. I did not understand what he was saying at first, but then he switched languages and talked to the plant in Spanish. He babbled inanities for a while. Then he stood up.
“It doesn’t matter what you say to a plant,” he said. “You can just as well make up words; what’s important is the feeling of liking it, and treating it as an equal.” He explained that a man who gathers plants must apologize every time for taking them and must assure them that someday his own body will serve as food for them. “So, all in all, the plants and ourselves are even,” he said. “Neither we nor they are more or less important.”
“Come on, talk to the little plant,” he urged me. “Tell it that you don’t feel important any more.”
I went as far as kneeling in front of the plant but I could not bring myself to speak to it. I felt ridiculous and laughed. I was not angry, however. Don Juan patted me on the back and said that it was all right, that at least I had contained my temper.
“From now on talk to the little plants,” he said. “Talk until you lose all sense of importance. Talk to them until you can do it in front of others. Go to those hills over there and practice by yourself.” I asked if it was all right to talk to the plants silently, in my mind. He laughed and tapped my head.
“No!” he said. “You must talk to them in a loud and clear voice if you want them to answer you.”
I walked to the area in question, laughing to myself about his eccentricities. I even tried to talk to the plants, but my feeling of being ludicrous was overpowering.
After what I thought was an appropriate wait I went back to where don Juan was. I had the certainty that he knew I had not talked to the plants. He did not look at me. He signaled me to sit down by him. “Watch me carefully,” he said. “I’m going to have a talk with my little friend.”
He kneeled down in front of a small plant and for a few minutes he moved and contorted his body, talking and laughing. I thought he was out of his mind.
“This little plant told me to tell you that she is good to eat,” he said as he got up from his kneeling position. “She said that a handful of them would keep a man healthy. She also said that there is a batch of them growing over there.” Don Juan pointed to an area on a hillside perhaps two hundred yards away.
“Let’s go and find out,” he said.
I laughed at his histrionics. I was sure we would find the plants, because he was an expert in the terrain and knew where the edible and medicinal plants were. As we walked towards the area in question he told me casually that I should take notice of the plant because it was both a food and a medicine. I asked him, half in jest, if the plant had just told him that. He stopped walking and examined me with an air of disbelief. He shook his head from side to side.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, laughing. “Your cleverness makes you more silly than I thought. How can the little plant tell me now what I’ve known all my life?”
He proceeded then to explain that he knew all along the different properties of that specific plant, and that the plant had just told him that there was a batch of them growing in the area he had pointed to, and that she did not mind if he told me that.
Upon arriving at the hillside I found a whole cluster of the same plants. I wanted to laugh but he did not give me time. He wanted me to thank the batch of plants. I felt excruciatingly self-conscious and could not bring myself to do it. He smiled benevolently and made another of his cryptic statements. He repeated it three or four times as if to give me time to figure out its meaning.
“The world around us is a mystery,” he said. “And men are no better than anything else. If a little plant is generous with us we must thank her, or perhaps she will not let us go.” The way he looked at me when he said that gave me a chill.
I hurriedly leaned over the plants and said, “Thank you,” in a loud voice.
He began to laugh in controlled and quiet spurts. We walked for another hour and then started on our way back to his house. At a certain time I dropped behind and he had to wait for me. He checked my fingers to see if I had curled them. I had not. He told me imperatively that whenever I walked with him I had to observe and copy his mannerisms or not come along at all.
“I can’t be waiting for you as though you’re a child,” he said in a scolding tone. That statement sunk me into the depths of embarrassment and bewilderment. How could it be possible that such an old man could walk so much better than I? I thought I was athletic and strong, and yet he had actually had to wait for me to catch up with him.
I curled my fingers and strangely enough I was able to keep his tremendous pace without any effort. In fact, at times I felt that my hands were pulling me forward. I felt elated. I was quite happy walking inanely with the strange old Indian. I began to talk and asked repeatedly if he would show me some peyote plants. He looked at me but did not say a word.
(Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan)