A_L_T: переводы

→In my teens, transfixed by Henry Miller’s Big Sur, I threw away my wallet and hitched a ride north, winding up in a halfway house. In that place, I became obsessed with stowing away on a freighter to Peru. After this phase ended, I watched Kwaidan and read the ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn, cultivating a sudden, powerful desire to move to Honshu, where it seemed that both the living and the dead were startled to discover they had somehow changed places. I sobbed over Tobias Schneebaum’s flamboyant attempts to obliterate his identity in Keep the River on Your Right. Even though this gorgeous memoir contained a well-known epigram from The Teachings of Don Juan, I had not yet read Carlos Castaneda. I was seventeen. The quote Schneebaum chose was this:

→I’ve always liked the employment of that word, attention. He told me that his teacher, the Nagual don Juan Matus, had literally saved his life. Carlos Castaneda asked what he could do to repay him. Don Juan Matus answered, “Give me your full attention.”

→I should briefly explain: nagual can denote many things. In my teacher’s case, the word was associated with the leaders of a distinct ancient lineage of Mexican sorcerers. For me, it is an honorific of great respect and affection as well, equivalent to rinpoche or roshi. He also used nagual in his books, to denote the realm of dreaming—“the second attention”—as opposed to “the first attention” of everyday life, or tonal.

→The Nagual Carlos Castaneda was not an easy man to find, especially if one went looking. It is curious that our first encounter was at a brunch in Santa Monica.

→Only now am I beginning to understand the potent elegance of the phrase’s impossible simplicity: to the border.

→Sometimes it is a great teaching to be so wrong.

→Egotistically, I thought, “I have entered one of his Tales of Power. I might even rate a chapter in a new book.”

→One day my teacher said that he was compelled to bring me “to the border.” He said he had failed to do that very thing, long ago, with another, and his debt must be paid.

→How harshly I have judged those who were privileged to write of their teachers, some in these very pages! I viewed such essays as pretentious exercises in false humility—anecdotal rose petals of self-importance flung at the sangha. Now here I am, writing of my “root guru,” the Nagual Carlos Castaneda, with whom I studied, so to speak, for ten years. He always told me I was arrogant, and back then I wondered: But how? In what possible way? How could he even think this?

→Of awareness—

→The Nagual used to begin lectures with this simple entreaty: “Please suspend judgment.”

→The unbearable clear light-ness of being.

→The wind is haunting and brings its own effulgence:

→There is a chant that begins with the Tibetan word kyema. Sadness, weariness, wariness. A certain sorrow.

→Perhaps it was this too: I once heard a rinpoche talk about the mixture of joy and sadness befalling those who take responsibility for the wellness, pain and ignorance of sentient beings. How to lead the blind?

→He used to speak of ontological sadness, what he called “the sadness of the microbe,” lost in the nebulae.

→He assuredly did not believe in goodbyes.

→Their respirations conjure a major melancholy: my teacher. He is ten years gone—or something like that—I’m incapable of taking measurement. Of crunching the numbers. The space they whistle through isn’t really about my teacher anyhow, though I do miss him at this precise moment, terribly, which is unusual, because most times I feel like he was never here, and also that he never left.

→From “the border” . . .

→They blow in from the ocean of awareness.