Ephemeral Panics and Exquisite Corpses

When Alejandro Jodorowsky introduced me to the oldest tree in Paris

Ripples of interconnected thoughts and memories…

Recently I have been spending a few weeks in Paris. I am overwhelmed with love for this amazing city — I don’t want to leave!

I revisited Shakespeare & Co, the English language bookstore on the Left Bank where the Beat Generation poets used to hang out. I remember going there when I was 19, 20… meeting the owner, grey-bearded George Whitman. Spending many hours there. That was 1985, ’86. The establishment is now under the direction of his daughter Sylvia. It has expanded, overtaken neighboring buildings, colonizing a cafe. It feels fantastic inside of the shop, with its little nooks and upstairs crannies for invisible authors of the past and future to linger over manual typewriters.

The oldest tree in Paris

Next to Shakespeare & Co is a little park that holds the oldest tree in Paris, an acacia tree transplanted from the Southern part of the United States in 1601, next to the city’s oldest church. The director and avant-garde provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky originally showed me this tree when we met to film a documentary for the German television show, ‘Into the Night’, back in 2010. The producers approached me and asked me who, of anybody in the world, I would like to spend a day and night with? I proposed Jodorowsky.

The Chilean director read my books and, to my delight, accepted. I was flown to Paris to meet him a few weeks later. We met in front of Notre Dame (not yet a burnt-out husk), followed by cameras and microphones. Then he took me to this little park where we sat beneath the ancient acacia tree. We talked about our life stories, psycho-magic, shamanism, crop circles, cinema, the Mayan Calendar, Surrealism, and other topics.

At Jodorowsky’s home

Later we went to other spots: Jodorowsky read my tarot cards in the hotel suite where Oscar Wilde lived his last years. Based on his reading, he told me I needed to dress up my girlfriend in my mother’s clothes and make love to her as my mother. Although I had gone to Gabon to eat iboga and Mexico to smoke DMT, the idea of dressing my girlfriend up as my mother was too transgressive for me. I passed on this suggestion.

At the time Holy Mountain was my favorite movie. It remains an astonishing historical / cultural achievement. The first part of Holy Mountain follows a bearded protagonist, resembling an emaciated Christ, and his handicapped dwarf companion. The hero escapes crucifixion in the Mexican desert, where children throw stones at him. He travels to Mexico City, where he encounters a reenactment of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec civilization performed by costumed frogs and iguanas. He discovers a Gurdjieff-like guru in a tall, forboding tower, played by Jodorowsky himself. He reaches the pinnacle of the tower to undergo an alchemical process of self-transmutation.