DON JUAN & THE SURREALIST JOURNEY TO IXTLAN

A kind of late romanticism that reflected the disenchantment with futurism and other forms of modern art that celebrated technology and progress. The surrealists rejected the notion of cure, healing and the implicit standards of normalcy, or at minimum, the absence of harmful dysfunction inherent in the raison d’etre of psychoanalysis.In the Surrealist Manifesto of Breton, Desire, and to some degree,ambition, was viewed as a creative force founded on the notion of absence, want, emptiness, and generalized lack thereof. Alienation and isolation within a paradigm of belonging and the need for voyage and renewal. An identity between the extreme poles of tribalism and the perpetual accidental tourist.Nonetheless, the two principal images used within Freudian psychoanalysis to conjure desire and its effects – ‘unbound’ energy within the unconscious, on the one hand, and a compulsive, fetishistic process, on the other – find strong echoes in the surrealists’ explorations of desire.

Andre Breton, urged artists to develop a grasp of the wider event through ”automatism”, ”encompasses the whole psychophysical field in which the field of consciousness constitutes only a very small segment. Freud has demonstrated that at these unfathomable depths there reigns the absence of contradiction, the relaxation of emotional tensions due to repression,  lack of the sense of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure principle alone. Automatism leads us in a straight line to this region” ( Ronald E. Martin )

The fetishistic model of desire corresponded to the surrealists’ trompe d’oeil visual images remembered from dreams and fantasies, and to their specifically constructed ‘objects with a symbolic function’. In these works the image or object stood in the place of veiled or sublimated impulses and desires, as a recompense for, or an intervention in, what the surrealists saw as the inadequacies of reality. The issue was the fork in the road: between a fulfilling exploration of self and ambling down unmapped areas of psychosis:

”Salvador Dali eagerly anticipated being able to ‘systemize confusion’, thanks to a paranoiac and active process of thought, ‘and so assist in discrediting completely the world of reality’. He strove to develop, ‘ a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical-interpretive association of delirious phenomena’ ”. This is somewhat similar to the psychic theology of Carlos Castaneda in his series of books on the Teachings of Don Juan, a shaman able to teach the connection  between that part of perception which is in the realm of the unknown yet still reachable by man.A medium to the unknown.

This implies that, for his party of chosen seers, Don Juan was in some way a connection to that unknown or what Dali called delirious phenomena, in this case enhanced bya not negligible consumption of peyote and mescaline. Castaneda  categorized this unknown realm as  ,” non-ordinary reality” which bears semblance Freudian dream interpretation.Castaneda implied that this realm was indeed a reality , but radically different from the ordinary reality experienced by human beings who suffer from a deeply ingrained social conditioning which limits perception and their human potential.

Ordinary reality as experienced by humans was simply a “description” that had been derived and created through repetition and reinforcement, a a dominating feature of their awareness since early childhood. On his way to shamanic enlightenment, Castaneda learned how to fly, interacted with a bilingual coyote, and encountered amazing columns of singing light. Was it the hallucinatory fantasy of another American, Latino in this case, confidence trickster selling Don Juan as a one potion fits all remedy to herbal-psycho-philo-metaphysical ills.Among the spiritual techniques taught in expensive workshop  sessions were “magical passes,” an esoteric series of body movements supposedly passed down through Don Juan and 27 earlier generations of secret masters.

In order to arrive at seeing  one first has to stop the world  . Stopping the world  is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to ou

rmal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world. The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned. ( Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan )

Castaneda was plastic guru for many emotionally damaged and adrift spiritual seekers. Troubled sons and daughters; typical upper-middle class California hippies. Breton, in a sense was also a Sorceror’s apprentice who was equally manipulative and deceptive at times in his recycling, juxtaposition and subversion of existing and emerging thought. Both men represent a cautionary tale about the dangers of new age charisma passing as a form of true love and ultimate truth. Both Castaneda and Breton, were able to damage, even ruin lives, yet exalt others. They appropriated the role of ”Don Juan ” and painted stripes on a pony,and sold it as a zebra. Breton’s mixing of Freud with philosophies and popular writings of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is a marketing savvy, yet shameless case in point of pseudo- intellectual hucksterism.

The surrealists had no intention of  healing or confronting sexual obsessions but instead tended to fertilize and ferment them as a leavening agent  in order to make recognizable artwork out of them.  It should come as no surprise that some of their most famous paintings objectify and degrade women as part of an inward voyage in the good name of the darker recesses of consciousness ;which could,in terms of content, resemble shrink wrapped erotica at the newsstand.

René Magritte’s The Rape superimposes the midsection of a naked woman’s body on her face. Her eyes are the breasts and the vagina is the mouth. André Masson’s ”Gradiva”  depicts a woman whose stomach and pelvis has been transformed into a raw steak, and her vagina into a  threatening clam equipped with  a set of fangs. Her half-rotting body has attracted a swarm of bees. Behind the supine woman is an erupting volcano as phallic symbol of male power and perhaps projected fantasy and inferiority.

In German  sculptor Hans Bellmer, there are graphic images of cruelty toward women that are eons beyond any conception of politically incorrect. During the 1930s, Bellmer constructed life sized dolls  out of wood, metal, plaster and ball joints that were then twisted, dimembered and distorted out of form, shape and function. These were subsequently published in surrealist journals under the thematic of joy, exaltation and fear . The knotted-up sex dolls were, in theory, supposed to help the viewer recover the enchanted garden of childhood as well as a critique and protest against Nazism, since they ostensibly disavowed the ideal form of the aryan body.

At some point, there is the question of whether the perversions being attacked are only being grotesquely reproduced and labelled as ”key surrealist images”  of expressions of male longings and desires. they may have been following, unconsciously, Carlos Castaneda’s  mythic Juan Matus, whom he called Don Juan. However, concerning  Matus’s teachings of the Yaqui Way of Knowledge, these warriors of surrealism, once in bed, likely proved to be no Don Juan.