480
VINCENT CRAPANZANO
reality to replace the unidimensional one which he, vain and foolish in
his acceptance, takes to be real. In
their
reality, a second one, in constant
play, I suppose, with everyday reality, mystery and contradiction pre–
vail under the devilish smile of the clown. Their humor - the occasion
for their laughter - is oriented differently from Castaneda's, from our
own.
It
is in consequence forceful, manipulative, disconcerting and
suggestive, illusionistic. It is the humor that derives from the loneli–
est vision, and it is when Castaneda finally grasps this loneliness –
the loneliness of his teacher and now, despite his writings, despite
the game he is playing with his personal history, his own inevitable
loneliness - that he sees. "I
saw
the loneliness of man," he writes at
the end of
Journey to Ixtlan,
"as a gigantic wave which had been
frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of metaphor."
One is tempted to write off Castaneda as a sort of ethnomasochist.
He is certainly dependent on don Juan. He does not have the distance
to appreciate, or even acknowlege, the element of joke in his predica–
ment, and this is particularly apparent in
A Separate Reality
and in the
Journey to Ixtlan.
The apprenticeship has had effect, though: he admits
to
presunci6n
and seems more at ease with his vulnerability. His de–
pendency in any event is typical of all initiations, and the end of initia–
tion is often, though not always, the regaining - or the developing–
of independence. It is this independence, I suppose, that don Juan calls
being a warrior.
"One needs the mood of a warrior for every single act," he said.
"Otherwise one becomes distorted and ugly. There is no power in
a life that lacks this mood. Look at yourself. Everything offends and
upsets you. You whine and complain and feel that everyone is
making you dance to their tune. You are a leaf at the mercy of the
wind. There is no power in your life. What an ugly feeling that
must be!"
Castaneda has in fact formed such a strong attachment to don
Juan that we have no idea how don Juan experienced his relationship
with Castaneda. Indeed Castaneda seems afraid of learning too much
about
his
teacher. "I did not want don Juan to tell me about himself. He
paused as if he had read my mind." Don Juan was about to tell him
where he had left his "passion." Was don Juan's role as a guide suf–
ficient to insulate him from the emotions of a friendship of twelve
years? We know don Juan only as Castaneda does - not in fact, of
course, but in the retrospective consciousness of the storyteller. He seems
