…..”You are on your own now”, he said.
…..I told him I needed his assistance to interpret what I had seen. He said I could do that by myself, that it was better for me to start thinking on my own. I argued that I was interested in hearing his opinions because it would take me too long to arrive at my own, and I did not know how to proceed.
…..I said, “Take the songs for instance. What do they mean?”
”Only you can decide that,” he said. “How could I know what they mean? The protector alone can tell you that, just as he alone can teach you his songs. If I were to tell you what they mean, it would be the same as if you learned someone else’s songs.”
“What do you mean by that, don Juan?”
“You can tell who are the phonies by listening to people singing the protector’s songs. Only the songs with soul are his and were taught by him. The others are copies of other men’s songs. People are sometimes as deceitful as that. They sing someone else’s songs without even knowing what the songs say.”
Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan
At first it was trying for me to understand Belle’s smoldering disregard for her teachers (Jan 2 post from The Blue Journal). I, on the backside of the mirror, worshiped all of my teachers, dumbstruck by their capacity to lasso such precise meaning from the existent art that surely proffered only mystery to me. I sought out and dwelled in the majestic makings of their studio practices. I stole their vocal patterns. I wore their clothes. I drank their labels of red wine, scotch and applejack. It was so that I built myself as a painter and came to be a sort of me.
Having lived so many years in this grand periphery, an equally grand and despotic yearning ground me into rubble.
Someone (later to be revealed as a Teacher) handed me a book to read, the same book quoted atop this tumble of words. In its revelation I remembered the forgotten angels, simple and discreet, who forged my long-time-coming understanding, not by demanding obedience to their well-rehearsed lives and methods, not by making me memorize their faithless scriptures, not by insisting on my treading the gamut of their possession, but rather by gently quarantining me to my own energies, however large or small they may have been; and having settled in there as I have, mostly unknowingly, I was able to grow my own education, capitulating the cosmos, learning the Gatekeeper’s Code (Belle’s term), and forming, forming at the holy speed that swung me into birth. Of this I am now happily and respectfully aware.
Those same Teachers discarded me on the day that I discarded them.
Belle Pontus once screamed on a journal page Just show me the ritual, damn it, and leave me be on the mountain.