CARLOS CASTANEDA DESCRIBED BY HIS FRIEND JOSÉ AGUSTÍN

 

José Agustín Ramírez Gómez (1944-2024) was a Mexican writer who met Carlos Castaneda in 1972 through the playwright and translator Juan Tovar, who translated Castaneda's first four books into Spanish.

Castaneda and José Agustín became friends.

José Agustín, in addition to reviewing Castaneda's work, also translated some of his books into Spanish, such as "The Eagle's Gift".

In 2004, host José Gordon interviewed José Agustín, who recounted his experiences with Castaneda.

You can see this interview in those two videos:

Part One

(minutes 3:10 to 10:30)

 

Second

(minutes 1:10 to 9:20)

 

I also transcribed them and added images to illustrate the conversation:

Gordon: We are in Chalcatzingo, in the State of Morelos, in a place that could practically look like a cover of Carlos Castaneda's books.

José Agustín, we would like to talk to you about the encounters you had with Carlos Castaneda right here on this site.

Agustín: Well, yes, look, he knew Mexico remarkably well, although in his books his favorite areas are: first Sonora and Arizona, and then Oaxaca. But in reality, it's clear that he knew the entire country very well, and the area around Mexico City, specifically the state of Morelos, was very dear to him. So he loved Tepoztlán, he loved the Xochicalco area, the Cuautla area, but very specifically Chalcatzingo here. 

So, on occasions when he was in Mexico and wanted to see me, he would call me and say, "Hey, I'll be around your area." Sometimes he would come to my house, but other times we would arrange to meet right here.

Gordon: You meet Carlos Castaneda and have the opportunity to directly explore certain knowledge that is perhaps hinted at in his books. Tell us a little about that world you were exploring in your conversation. 

Agustín: Precisely because of Don Juan's ideas, Castaneda specialized in being conspicuous, so he said that he had to wear a little suit like any executive with his briefcase, not even very elegant. 

But you would sit down to eat with him and then, for example, you would see that he ate fruit in a particular way; he would take certain parts out of the papaya, place them as if with a certain ritual, and eat some parts.

I asked him several times, "Why are you doing that?" and he always dismissed me as crazy and acted as if he couldn't hear me and didn't want to answer those things.

Then another day he was staying at a hotel in the Zona Rosa, so Jorge Ponce and I went to pick him up, and he greeted us in a t-shirt. I had always seen him fully dressed, but that time he was wearing a t-shirt like the one Marlon Brando wore in the movie "A Streetcar Named Desire."

And I was very surprised because Carlos Castaneda was incredibly strong, he looked like he lifted weights, he had truly tremendous musculature. I told him: "Hey Carlos, it's unbelievable, but you look like a bodybuilder, you're incredibly strong."

He replies: "Well, yes, Don Juan forces you to develop your physical condition; if you had known me 20 years ago, back then I was an intellectual hippie like any other, but with Don Juan's training my body became like this."

And then he said to me, "Look, I'm going to show you something else." Then he lifted his pants and in that area here [below the knee] he had like another muscle that had appeared, a lump, and he said to me, "Touch it."

And I touched it and it was rock hard. And then he tells me, "This muscle only develops when you practice the famous power step," which consists of trusting in Don Juan's powers and running at night, almost raising your legs as high as possible to your chest. Then the warriors run at full speed in absolute darkness, and something guides them so they don't fall into any gaps, they don't hit any rocks, they don't get caught on branches, etc.

Gordon: We're talking about those walks potentially having taken place at this site. 

Agustín: It's very feasible, of course, perfectly fine. 

Gordon: What distance did you find between what you assume a character is, when you're reading it, what you assume the creator is, and when you finally meet the real man, the person who created those books? 

Agustín: It was more of a character sketch I had of him. I never imagined what he looked like physically, and then when I saw him in person, I thought, "Well, yes, this is Carlos Castaneda; he corresponds very well to what I assumed he would never be." 

He was relatively short in stature, he liked to wear suits that made him look like an ordinary person, he had brown skin, a light brown, and his hair was completely curly and very short.

Years later, I ran into him once in the United States and he said to me: "You won't recognize me because  the nagual  gave me a beating."

I said to him, "So, how are you?"

He tells me: "Well, you'll see," and in reality he was the same as always, the only difference was that his hair had turned completely gray, it had become a little stranger because it was all white, like pure dullness because since he was dark-skinned, the white hair made him look like that; and then his face was rather square with features that tended towards the square, his eyes were small, very lively, with an intelligence and a sparkling quality that I have only seen in Juan José Arreola, like a mix of mischief and hidden intelligence that doesn't want to show itself, but is there behind it and cannot avoid manifesting itself.

His nose is straight, neither too big nor too small; his mouth is also of average size. He had no fat, no marks, no wrinkles, at least not when we met him, and even later, when he was older and his hair was gray, he still didn't have many wrinkles.

Gordon: One controversial point we must address is: who was Carlos Castaneda? Some, such as Juan Tovar, considered Castaneda to be more of a creator of fantastic literature than an anthropologist. 

Agustín: Well, it's understandable, he was such a good writer that I myself have said that reading Carlos Castaneda's books is a bit like reading Mexican or shamanic " One Thousand and One Nights ". 

But I do believe he was an anthropologist, a very good anthropologist indeed, with his doctorate, with all the recognition due and yet to come, and that's why he initially gained academic prestige.

Initially, all the great minds interested in the subject of hallucinogens, such as Richard Evans Schultes, Roger Ham from Paris, Roger Wasson the great mycologist and his wife Valentina, or Peter Furts, the author of the book "Hallucinogens and Culture," all gave him their full support and were fascinated by Castaneda's work.

Because if you recall, in his first book, very cleverly after the narrative part that he called a sui generis autobiography , he ends it with a structural anthropological study that is the most arid in the field of anthropological expression.

The academic world liked him a lot and greatly boosted his popularity among that public, but afterwards, as a result of some letters that Roger Watson sent him and which Charles did not answer, his prestige among the intellectual elite gradually declined.

Octavio Paz withdrew his support,  Evans Schultes  also withdrew his support, and then some relegated him to the realm of charlatanism, in the style of Lobsang Rampa, or of people who are profiting from the spirit.

But many more people saw him as a writer because he had an incredible narrative talent, a gift for storytelling, and literary skill. Translating his work reveals how his books are constructed, and they are masterfully crafted.

But I've always said that it can't be merely made up, because if it is, then we're dealing with one of the most incredibly imaginative minds in the world, who also has the discipline to physically support all the fantasies he's inventing. Having particularly well-developed muscles, being incredibly strong—evidently, the man was working with his body to support a supposedly shamanic fallacy or a mere fiction.

So I've always said that what terrifies me most is the idea that he's a writer who invented all that, because it seems to me a work of monumental scope in the field of literature, one of the finest and most ingenious literary games ever written, and so as a writer he has an incredible stature.

That's why I prefer him to be an anthropologist, I prefer that Don Juan existed, because it seems more normal and more accessible to me.

So I believe that in what he says, there is at least 60 to 70% reality with 30% personal embellishment.

Gordon: Augustine, tell us about the paradox of the public man who is also an unknown person. 

Agustín: Castaneda specialized in appearing when you least expected him, like when Juan Tovar suddenly stood up to greet Castaneda, even though Tovar was still eating with his spoon in one hand and his beer in the other. 

Suddenly someone would knock on the door, and it would be Castaneda, when you least expected it. He would arrive unexpectedly, we would chat, or go somewhere, anything at all. Then everything was subject to him. That was part of his fundamental strategy: to be completely free.

He was what he called "a rider of absolute freedom," and to ride well towards freedom you need to protect yourself in a thousand ways, and one of them was that nobody knew anything about you, that they didn't know your story, that they had no expectations of you.

And Castaneda achieved that wonderfully; he managed to get people to respect his privacy because he was in countless places with so many people. I could have taken out my camera without him noticing and taken pictures of him, but it never crossed my mind to do that; he was respected.

And that allowed him to do wonderful things, for example, I had the opportunity to present his book "The Gift of the Eagle" at the University Club. The place was packed with people from the esoteric world; his new followers were from the Ferrier group, who had split off because of The Teachings of Don Juan, and everyone was gathered there.

I was speaking after other presenters had spoken, and suddenly I see Carlos Castaneda in the doorway making faces at me and greeting me.

Only someone like Castaneda can be in a place where people are talking about him, where everyone would like to meet him, and he is there and nobody knows he is there, nobody knows it is him.

Then I got down from the table to hug him and chat with him for a while, and perhaps with that someone realized that the real Castaneda was there.

Gordon: We're talking about that need or desire we all sometimes have to disappear, to vanish into anonymity. How do you relate that to the whole life of this project, which involves being so publicly visible, as you are through your books, while at the same time trying to go unnoticed? 

Agustín: That is his great achievement, because if we talk about celebrities, Carlos Castaneda's has been one of the most extraordinary of the end of the millennium since he was a man who sold millions of books. 

Personally, people from Europe and Asia have come to me just to see if I could put them in touch with him. Now imagine how many people on their own set out to meet him personally; there must have been thousands.

But nobody knew where he was, nobody knew what he looked like, nobody could locate him if he didn't want to be located; and at the same time he could afford to go to Mexico, Europe or the United States and give great lectures to hundreds or even thousands of people.

He liked to spread ideas, he had a prodigious ability to communicate, a great facility with words, great wit, and he was very funny, he had you laughing your head off all the time.

So that was something he liked to cultivate; he couldn't live in complete anonymity. But at the same time that he was in the world's brightest spotlight, he was also shrouded in absolute mystery.

Nobody could reach him for half an hour; he'd disappear, and there was no way to find him. So that was a wonderful achievement in his life, and if you don't know how important it is at times to manage to stay out of people's expectations, because people think they know you and have a false idea of ​​you, and based on that false idea, they demand things, they expect things from you.

And if you don't comply with them, or if you comply with them in any way, you're not doing what you're supposed to do, you're doing what others think you're supposed to do.

So the only way to do what is truly your responsibility, he said, is by creating a fog around your identity.

Gordon: José Agustín, we thank you very much for this spoken portrait of that fog called Carlos Castaneda. 

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