Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whether Carlos Castaneda is, as some leading scholars think, a major figure in an evolution of anthropology or only a brilliant novelist with unique knowledge of the desert and Indian lore, his work is to be reckoned with. And it goes on. At present, he is finishing the fourth and last volume of the Don Juan series, Tales of Power, scheduled for publication next year...
...separate realities and returned, he seems to have reentry problems. According to the books, Don Juan taught him to abandon regular hours ? for work or play ? and even in his apartment in Los Angeles he apparently eats and sleeps as whim occurs, or slips off to the desert. But he often works at his writing as many as 18 hours a day. He has great skill at avoiding the public. No one can be sure where he will be at any given time of day, or year. "Carlos will call you from a phone booth," says Michael Korda...
Indeed, though the man is an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid. Castaneda's story unfolds with a narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies. Its terrain?studded with organ-pipe cacti, from the glittering lava massifs of the Mexican desert to the ramshackle interior of Don Juan's shack?becomes perfectly real. In detail, it is as thoroughly articulated a world as, say, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. In all the books, but especially in Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of leaves...
...Robert Aldrich's excellent The Flight of the Phoenix (1966), an ill-assorted group of renegades, soldiers, businessmen and misfits were marooned in the middle of a desert, their sole hope of survival being to somehow piece together their crashed plane. Steelyard Blues more or less rips off the same plot, but dispenses with suspense in favor of fey comedy and ragtag radicalism...
According to the poet, then, we are all behind bars -locked inside the jail of mortality. No matter how bitter his past, the prisoner must find a way to leave the personal desert for the world of common humanity. But how can one enter that world when there are no doors? How can one "praise" what one cannot understand...