But it's her perpetual war against creative drought that provides the most surprises. Following the advice of Celia, Isabel and her mother smoke marijuana all night in an attempt to awaken the spirits of creation.
After nine spliffs and no discernible effect other than a lot of giggling, she decides soft drugs are not for her. Looking for something a little more inspirational she and her husband ingest a draught of ayahuasca - a shamanic potion used by Amazon Indians to induce visions.
After a horrifying two days spent shivering in a corner of a room and vomiting a strange white liquid, Isabel emerges convinced that 'the material world is an illusion' and armed with more than enough material for a trilogy of children's books.
If some of her tales seem fanciful, Allende warns us, that's because they probably are; her fictional inventions and autobiography blend into each other. For Allende the hidden realm of emotions always distorts the physical world, even without the help of hallucinogens.
When her granddaughter bumps her head, her weeping 'peels the paint off the walls', and when Allende mourns Paula's death with her son Nico their grief is 'unleashed in the form of a hailstorm'. The innocent logic of unusual and poignant associations is central to Allende's vision that has survived intact since her first and still best-loved novel, The House of the Spirits.
'Mystery', she tells us, 'is not a literary device; it's part of life itself.'
From: Isabel Allende: kith and tell
The novelist Isabel Allende once took a potent hallucinogen to overcome writer's block. But no such stimulants were needed to fuel her most gripping work yet - a devastatingly candid portrait of life in her soap-opera-like family. She talks to Catherine Elsworth
'It was the most intense, out-of-my-mind experience that I have ever had. It was very revealing and very important and opened up a lot of spaces inside me. But I don't ever want to do it again.'
Isabel Allende is describing the time she experimented with a powerful hallucinogen in an attempt to punch through the writer's block that was preventing her from completing a trilogy of adventure books she had promised her three grandchildren. It was a few years ago, and the Chilean novelist, now 65, decided to travel to South America with her second husband to 'subject myself to the shamanic experience of ayahuasca', a potent vision-inducing potion made from jungle vines by Amazon Indians.
But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had 'lost his wife to the world of spirits'. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.
'I think I went through an experience of death at a certain point, when I was no longer a body or a soul or a spirit or anything,' Allende says matter-of-factly. 'There was just a total, absolute void that you cannot even describe because you are not. And I think that's death.'
Nevertheless, the process proved transformative. Allende emerged aching but lucid and was able to complete the trilogy, now being adapted for film by the co-producers of The Chronicles of Narnia.
She relates this experience in her latest book, The Sum of Our Days, a memoir and intimate portrait of her own and her family's lives since the death of her daughter, Paula, in 1992. In the book, which is addressed throughout to Paula, Allende writes that the only event that can match the profundity of the experience was her daughter's death. 'I was never the same after your last night in this world or after I drank that powerful potion,' she writes. 'I lost my fear of death and experienced the eternity of the spirit.'
No comments:
Post a Comment