California, 1976

Set free from exams, and free from school forever, and with money in a bank account, and with enough rope to hang myself, I went to California.

I had been reading books by Carlos Castaneda. These were works of popular philosophy, written in the form of a dialogue between the author and a Mexican Indian called Juan Matus, or don Juan, a name whose equivalent in English might be John Smith. They were very popular at the time, and are still in print.

Don Juan -- whose name confusingly invokes unrelated and very different fictional characters created by Mozart and Byron -- describes himself as a sorcerer, and initiates Carlos into his metaphysical universe. The initiation begins with an introduction to the psychotropic plants of the deserts of Mexico and the southwestern United States.

Don Juan leads Carlos into an alternative reality that one can enter with the help of the hallucinogenic flora and fungi that don Juan finds in the desert. Carlos flies like a bird over the desert, has marvelous, terrifying visions, gets sick, has a conversation with a bilingual coyote. He meets the shape-shifting spirit called Mescalito, the personification of the peyote mushroom, who leads Carlos into the secret, higher reality that lies hidden behind the mundane reality of ordinary life.

I loved these books. They are written in the form of a dialogue between Carlos, the student, and don Juan, the teacher. Carlos plays the roles of author, narrator and character in his own story. As one of the two main characters in the story Castaneda is telling, Carlos is earnest, clumsy and prone to misunderstanding: a naïve disciple. Sometimes he begs don Juan to explain things, at other times he tells his teacher he is talking nonsense. Sometimes he loves don Juan; sometimes he hates him. Carlos is a stranger from Los Angeles who has a car and a job, while his teacher is a dirt poor Indian who is always shown sitting on a wooden crate, or on the ground, or lying on the ground.

Don Juan is the archetype of the spiritual teacher, the guru, the pandit, the master. In his poverty and zest for the sharp epigram he is like Diogenes. In his use of dialogue as a method for teaching the student to teach himself he is like Socrates. Like the hermit at the top of a Himalayan mountain he teaches through the example of his ascetic way of life, and through silence and laconic statements.

Don Juan is a great literary creation. In the thousands of pages Castaneda wrote about this character – he wrote about twelve books, though I only read the first three or four -- his personality comes across entirely through the magic of inventive story telling. We are given no reliable information about him. Don Juan makes a point of saying that he has no social co-ordinates or identifying personal data.

“The bureaucratic facts of one’s identity – your name, your place and date of birth, for instance – are trifling encumbrances on who you really are. Reject everything that isn’t true for you in the moment,” don Juan says.

“The ultimate freedom lies in being unknown.”

Don Juan is described as a Yaqui Indian, but nothing about him identifies him as a Yaqui Indian. Maybe Castaneda searched for the most obscure indigenous Mexican group he could find and chose that one because it was the one that people knew the least about.

He never describes don Juan’s appearance. Our sense of what he looks like is entirely in our imagination. Only flashes of personality are shown, as needed to advance the story.

“It was not the shape of his eyes nor the shape of his head, but some cold fierceness in his gaze that had reminded me of the look in the eyes of a falcon,” Carlos writes.

When a person is playing a trick on you, he lays out before you exactly what he is doing. The trick works because you consent to be tricked. You pay the fare and you take the ride. That’s how the best story telling works. Castaneda tells us that Don Juan is telling us that he doesn’t exist. Yet we keep reading.

Castaneda’s books made a great splash when they were first published, starting with the first in the series The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in about 1970. It presents itself as an anthropological study. The author is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles. His account of his fieldwork -- his adventures with the sorcerer don Juan, whom he first meets in a bus station somewhere – is told in a narrative voice that has just the right amount of academic clunkiness about it to create convincingly the characters of Carlos the earnest graduate student and don Juan, his mysterious informant. This first book contains about fifty pages of pseudo-scholarly “structural analysis.”

It is a fact that Carlos Castaneda was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA in the early 1960s, and he did complete and submit a doctoral dissertation. His dissertation was signed off by a committee of UCLA professors of anthropology.

The text of his dissertation is the text of his third and best book, Journey to Ixtlan. Like the best-selling book, this text has none of the scholarly apparatus you might expect in a doctoral dissertation: no footnotes, no references, nothing: just the story of cosmic adventures in the desert.

We know this because of the work of an independently wealthy scholar named Richard de Mille, who was the adopted son of the famous cineast Cecil B. De Mille (“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr De Mille.”) De Mille didn’t have an academic job, and didn’t depend on an academic salary, or on academic relationships, and so was free to investigate the case of Castaneda’s doctorate and to publish the results of his investigation as his curiosity took him. He did this in two books, written in a jaunty narrative tone of erudite sarcasm.

De Mille concluded that the UCLA professors nodded the submission through, despite its inadequacy as a work of scholarship, because it was more entertaining to read than most doctoral dissertations in anthropology.

It’s important to note that as an undergraduate at a community college in Los Angeles Castaneda took courses in creative writing. His ambition was to be a writer.

He succeeded in this ambition.

How many great works of fiction claim to be telling a true story?

The dialogues of Carlos and Juan, and the stories of their encounters with supernatural forces, told using the frame narrative of an anthropologist’s fieldwork, fit into an American tradition of popular works of self-improvement that are well enough written to endure. This is not the same as self-help books: works of popular psychology or supernatural quackery. It’s a line that begins, maybe, with the preachers of colonial New England, then includes the plain good advice of Benjamin Franklin, and goes on to include Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later works like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Their common theme is how the American man should make his way in American experience: where, most of the time, he is a stranger in a strange land. They tell us that life, how to live it and how to understand it is a matter for the party of the first part. Morally, spiritually, philosophically a man is on his own. The individual is the atom of meaning. In the majority of these works this philosophy is formed in the encounter with the vastness of the American landscape. Castaneda – shivering at night in an unspecified desert, trying to digest his dinner of rattlesnake meat (it’s delicious, and despite what you may have heard does not taste like chicken) -- fits into this part of the tradition.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” That’s what the Wizard of Oz says when the American philosophers Dorothy, the Straw Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man uncover the trick that he has been playing on them. The all-knowing Wizard that was the goal of their pilgrimage turns out to be a carnival salesman with a talent for publicity. By the end of the movie, they achieve knowledge either because of the Wizard or despite him.

Don Juan teaches by means of significant stares, long silences, answering questions with more questions, talking in riddles, and moments of coarse slapstick: he rarely puts exactly what he wants to say in plain language. He sets up tests of endurance which Carlos either passes or fails. The overall philosophy, which seems indebted to Mircea Eliade’s 1951 book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, could be summarized like this:

The world is weird, don Juan says. It is “stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable.” To make his way in it, to live in it, a man must assume the heroic archetypal role of a hunter or a warrior, or both combined. That means being alert at all times, aware of everything around you, in control.

He teaches an ethical code very like Stoicism: a regimen of instructions for how to live well and uprightly. Don’t blame others for your misfortunes. You are responsible for your own life; no one else is. Live with the bare minimum.

It’s an ideal philosophy for a teenage boy.

A teenage boy feels that he is the only person in the world who knows what is true and good, and can witheringly spot hypocrisy, weakness and inconsistency. At the same time, he knows that he is learning and growing in knowledge and ability.

“Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you," he said.

"That's correct," I said.

"And they have been doing something to you against your will."

"True.”

“Look at yourself. Everything offends and upsets you. You whine and complain and feel that everyone is making you dance to their tune. You are a leaf at the mercy of the wind. There is no power in your life. What an ugly feeling that must be!

"A warrior, on the other hand, is a hunter. He calculates everything. That's control. But once his calculations are over, he acts. He lets go. That's abandon. A warrior is not a leaf at the mercy of the wind. No one can push him. No one can make him do things against himself or against his better judgement. A warrior is tuned to survive, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions.”

Every teenage boy despises the tyranny of routine. Don Juan advises that you should abandon any kind of routine, because routines shackle you to a world of ignorance. You should eat whenever you want to eat, and disregard regular meal times. The man of knowledge “is free, fluid, unpredictable.”

Carlos asks, “Can anyone be a man of knowledge?”

“No, not anyone. You have to be a strong man, and your life has to be truthful.”

“What is a truthful life?”

“A life lived with deliberateness, a good, strong life.”

In my diary I wrote, “Don Juan talks about the gait of power. He told Carlos Castenada to go onto the desert at night when it was pitch dark and run as fast as he could in a straight line without looking where you were going, without looking out for obstacles or worrying about avoiding them. You just run blindly into the darkness as fast as you can. He only tripped over a few times. That’s how to live,” I wrote. “The way to enjoy life is to experience it like you are walking a tightrope: always in danger of falling off.”

I nearly missed the plane to Los Angeles because I couldn’t find the departure gate in time. I spotted what I rightly guessed was my plane out on the tarmac and ran towards it. I dodged the security screening by running down a flight of concrete stairs and had to run across the tarmac and up the steps to the plane door. The flight attendants were shocked by what I had done, and gave me a perfunctory body search before I could sit down. I got the last seat. I only made it because the plane was late.

Eleven hours later we landed at LAX. They said they hoped we had had a good flight, and thanked us for flying TWA.

A sign said, Welcome to California. Please be patient. A drug free America comes first. I bought a magazine at a newsstand to get some coins to make a telephone call. I found a payphone and called the number I had been given. It was someone I didn’t know. I put in 75 cents, and when it ran out, the person I was told to call called me back. They were coming to get me, she said. It was going to be a long wait.

I sat on a leatherette couch and read my National Lampoon magazine under the buzzing white light. There were rows of fiberglass chairs with small black and white televisions attached to them. Beside the TV set was a coin slot. You could pass the time waiting for whatever it was you were waiting for by sitting in one of these chairs and watch TV. You got fifteen minutes for 25 cents. This was a common sight in airports and bus terminals in America at this time.

After a while I went outside to wait.

It was divine to be breathing the heavy Los Angeles air, in the twinkling lights of early evening. There were palm trees and cars; there were flashy customized vans painted purple and day-glow green with wide tires, jacked up rear axles and surfboards on top. They streamed past as I waited and shivered in my t-shirt. As I waited with my luggage the light changed from a blue smoggy glow to a darkness filled with the hissing of red and white car lights, pouring down the freeway, like a mechanical form of weather.

Eventually a car appeared, a big white American car. Someone inside noticed me, and the car slowed down and veered over. I ran up to the car and the door opened. My friends got out, we put my bags in the trunk, and then we got back in and settled into the darkness, lit by the dials on the dashboard. We injected ourselves onto the freeway and drove 100 miles south to San Diego county.

By now it was 0400 British Summer Time. I was feeling tired and grimy.

I awoke the next morning in an apartment in Oceanside, California. I had been invited by two friends, brothers Eli and Callum. The apartment had been rented by their mother and stepfather. I was a last minute addition.

The apartment was one of eight in a building called Ocean View, one block away from the beach. There was a strip of bright green lawn between the building and the sidewalk. There were pots of plastic flowers and a bright green plastic frog on the lawn. The neighbouring houses were painted colors like pink and purple; some had plastic sunflowers in their front gardens that spun like pinwheels in the breeze.

The television was on all day, with commercials every five minutes, appealing to the stomachs, bowels and armpits of the nation. I sat at the table in the kitchen and held my head. I loved America but the noise was too much.

It was sunny, and there was a balcony, and we went swimming in the Pacific Ocean, and drank beer. My friends’ stepfather made hamburgers and jokes.

I loved being in southern California.