Because you see, they used to know a lot of magic ‘round these parts, –and I do mean a lot; once you start being able to tell, it’s pretty much everywhere.
So let’s go into a little bit of detail, shall we? And try and give ourselves a picture that is a bit more clear about a few things.
Ok so it’s the 1500’s and all the high initiates of magic this side of the blue ball are faced with the biter realization that their superior understanding of the subtle realms of being (read: mind) was still no match for the brute force of that oh so wonderful combination of stirrup and cannon. The bearded, smelly, and drunken people that had gotten off the floating hill (give you an idea how hard it was for native people to understand a ship) were plain destroying everything, so the magic had to be hidden, and hidden it was, in the farthest mountains where the spanish-speakers never came, along with amaranto (is that called amaranth in english?), the plant that the smellies had to forbid because it freed the Indians from the obligation to come down work as semi-slaves in the haciendas, and along with the politeness of the land, a way of treating each other so incredibly careful and loving (once you’ve done the mushroom you can tell) that the motherfucker (it’s what they are) mentality mistakes it, to this day, for some pathological shyness, sort of the way people who are not happy enough find happy music silly.
So everything had to be like double-accounting.
Everyone started growing accustomed to the following situation: No matter where you are, no matter whatcha doin’ YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO PRETEND IT’S SOMETHING ELSE.
This duplicity (schizophrenia?) of the collective psyche is especially easy to perceive in language. To this day nobody dares speak to strangers like they speak at home. Nobody wants to be found out as the son of brown-skinned people, even though they might be brown-skinned themselves.
Ok, then 400 years later, the Revolution hands power over to your typical adult-male gang (only here they’re not Caucasian, but still just as castrated and life-hating as your modern-day immigrant shooting “minutemen”, for example) and all the practice the collective psyche had developed at living Indian under the nose of the pseudo-european was diverted into robbing the people under their own nose. (think of some ghoulish inbreeding hillbilly tying his daughters to the plow, or think of the guy in
So it was pretty much Orwell’s 1984 down here, from the 30’s on to the year 2000. Doublethik levels kept rising as the foam on top of a pulque barrel, except...
There came the sixties. Avandaro music fest, the Mexican Woodstock. Number of naked people: one (it’s really catholic out here). A few guys and girls actually did acid and mushrooms, but they did not coalesce into anything visible, maybe because they were too used to living in hiding and fear (-This is beautiful, honey, but they’ll never get it, so let’s not tell anyone), maybe because the mushroom itself cautioned them against surfacing too soon. In any case the forces of Promethea (if we may so call them) were slowly gaining ground on another flank.
In 1967, just in time for some of the participants in the 1968 student revolts to read it, Gabriel García Márquez’s (GGM)“One Hundred Years of Solitude”(OHYS) came out. It did not come out of nowhere, for sure, and it would be arguable to trace at least some of his interest in magic back to Jorge Luis Borges, maybe 30 or 40 years older than GGM. But the thing is, OHYS is not about magic, in the sense Borges’s stories are. It is about human relationships, but it ever so casually mentions things like Narciso Babilonia (Narcissus Babylon for those of you not fluent) being followed around everywhere by a cloud of butterflies (Promethea variety, perhaps? Hmmm…) and stuff tantamount to coming out on a family dinner and saying: c’mon granma, we all know magic has always existed, whyncha tell us all ‘bout the talking deer you meet with everyday?
So one conjecture that imposes itself on the mind is that the book caught on because there were literally thousands of middle class housewives picking up (with their albeit muffled goddess sensibility) everyday perceptions of the immaterial realm on the clairvoyance-inertia left over in the collective mind-continuum by the ancients, imagine if you will the crumbling moment of a guilty-secret based domination scheme, the floggers (or their current version) have everyone intimidated into submission, but then the slaves start gaining an understanding of their power, and in the end it’s just a matter of looking at each other an finding the courage to stand up against it. Every oppressed-into-housewivery moon-priestess read the book and thought: “Maybe I’m not insane like my (impotent, alcoholic) husband says, maybe magic’s true, and maybe I’m not the only one living it despite herself”.
Ok fast-forward 30 years, and it’s the sons and daughters of the ’68 protesters (the ones that grew up with mommies that did believe in magic, and were allowed to say so) that are closing down (public, tuition-free, university’s) campus for 11 months and doing lotsa ‘shrooms in it, and yours truly with them. Please bear in mind that it’s tuition free, because that’s what allows for the grandsons and granddaughters of the not-yet-spanish-speaking shamans to attend the most important college of the Spanish speaking world only 2 generations away form magic. (I mean 2 generations ago their grannies were still cooking’it up with spirit and just 2 generations later they’re in college, with granny still alive and stirring the brew, in some cases).
Now here, if my kind readers will bear with such a display of narcissism, I will recount some of the events in the 1999-2000 student strike in a tone more autobiographical than “big picture-esque” (if I may take such preposterous liberties with no-longer-shakespeare’s tongue).
What I expound in the following paragraph serves to illustrate a metaphysical conjecture about the nature of novelty (more or less as defined by whitehead-mckenna).
Before 1999 the maximum number of days any school facility had been occupied by students was (I don’t remember) around 40. So a month an a half into the strike we broke the record.
We were living in a situation that nobody thought could occur.
And yet there we were.
My contention is that
· to begin with, reality is woven by the sum of minds (duh!)
· When minds perceive an improbability (something ordinarily unthinkable, like college shut down 11 months) effectively taking place, they sort of “relax” their reality-creation mechanisms and allow themselves to create/manifest/discover things that are more novel than the ones they’d allow themselves if there weren’t an elephant levitating over the kiosk (or any other effectively obtaining improbability).
So, people did large amounts of psychedelics in that strike, maybe substantially more than ever before, and they also lost the faith in their parents (as everyone with slave parents must, eventually), pretty much at the same time.
NOTE TO DANIEL: it’s what I have so far, around 1300 words. I think it’ll grow to maybe 5000 words, from here I recount some anecdotes from the strike and then start describing the actual mindscape and the systemic relations I spoke of in the e-mail in another 1500 words and finally the mushroom eaters-party and interviews in the last 1500. I’ll be happy to get your feedback and can send you the next draft in a week.
