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From THE RADIANT QUESTION (La cuestión radiante)
Persecuted, the mushroom has remained hidden. It has vanished from the garden. You look for it and it’s not there. When you pass by it, you don’t see it. In the rain-sodden meadow, it is not. In the forest of hermetic songs, it is not. When you don’t look for it, it appears. Then, if you need it and can’t find it, it calls you from among the grass.
...
You take the mushroom. Golden and silver. The sacred hat. Irradiated and radiant. Solar flesh. You touch it. You smell it. You eat it. Chew. The bitter mushroom. Tasting of earth. Smelling of earth. The earth-mushroom born from lightning. The lightning-mushroom. The mushroom that appears and disappears like man and the world. You eat the (whole) earth contained in the mushroom. You eat what is above the earth and eat the underworld. Eat heaven and hell, which are the mushroom’s flesh. You eat the measure of purification. But you don’t know what you’re eating. You don’t know what you’re drinking. Like uncertainty you wait, not knowing what will come. You take the mushroom. You watch it. You feel it. You smell it. You bite into it. You chew the bitter mushroom that tastes of earth, that smells of earth, chew the earth, the earth-mushroom born of lightning, you chew lightning.
...
You drink the mushroom, inhale it, suck it up, make it essence of you, juice of you, flesh of you, blood of you, make it your dream and your existence, slowly. And the mushroom drinks you, inhales you, sucks you up, makes you its essence, its juice, its flesh, its blood, its existence. Is the mushroom an animal? The toadstool: a messenger? Is a being arisen from a secret, parallel world coursing through you?
...
The earth’s movement begins again. Everything moves and is. You’re not ready. Everything surrounds you and rocks you as if you were a little child. Danger lavishes its care on you. Miserly prudence whips you. You are jolted by the tide. You get dizzy. The strength gushes out of your body. Suddenly, everything is toxic. The world is toxic. Air and blood are toxic. Blood sweeps stones away in its flow. Our thoughts are toxic. The great architecture of your knowledge of reality, zealously built, crumbles down with a roar. You know nothing. You can prevent nothing. The underworld drinks you, inhales you, sucks you up, makes you its essence, its juice, its blood, in a dream. Death chews on you. The kingdom of shadows digests you. You are its hallucinatory substance. You are tied to the post of your end. You have to fight. But you must die until you empty yourself of your death.
...
Do you know how much a dead man weighs? In order to die speech is forgotten, the words are the first to die. Suddenly you know a lot about heaviness. You’re heavy, like a dead man, like a ravine, like the world. Your body lies motionless under the grave sky, crushed by an anomalous gravity. Temperature goes up and down without control. Climate is internal. We must die in order to inhale the morning of rebirth – empty the old wineskin to fill it with new wine. Know ourselves to be a thought of not being earth without awareness. Experience the certainty of being the dead who haven’t wanted to learn to live, dead without words, without word. Or the perception of being the earth that dies and lives ceaselessly. It is the spirit that sets the limits.
...
Willingly you dry, are emptied of the wine that kills. You watch the underside of life and see death in your dry, hollow body, from which energy begins its prolonged escape.
Where do you go, you fleeting creature? Stay here where the brave lie, so you can watch your hollow body, your dry boughs, because only he who has come from the world can love it, make an effort and drink the juice of immortality which your dry body needs. The strength which your own thoughts prevent from blossoming.
...
We are a body woven by light, which oblivion and bad love unknit. We lose Ariadne’s threads in the labyrinth. To die is to abandon the threads, not to renounce our centuries’ resistance to life, not to permit its juices to flow freely in ours, not to choose between the death and life that fill us, not to separate life from death in us, for they both dispute our face between them.
...
When we die, the universe’s axis yields. The sky closes over us like a tombstone. Plants wilt. Energy flees your hands, which remain open like dry boughs. You are tied to the colts of hallucination, who gallop towards the cardinal points. Energy absents itself from your body, dry as a felled trunk, as desert clay. Fruit’s color rots.
...
It is imperative to recover, to reconnect with the sea of solar threads. You close your eyes and rest. Strength slowly takes over you. One wave after another fills your body. Strength washes death off you. Eternity begins at twelve. The clock doesn’t run. All the world’s dead die in your body. All battles are fought in your body. All resurrections comfort your body. The transmission of life is the only and true love. Eternity begins at twelve. Time doesn’t run. A Mayan or Egyptian priest, a Siberian Shaman, or the warrior that still hasn’t trod the earth of time are by your side. They uphold the framework of your dream.
Trembling at the sacred earthquake, your body exhausted, your soul exhausted, you again see the immortal color on the surface of fruit.
...
We traverse death, with or without fear, to look at its underside. On the other side of death: life. Death is a no-place traversed by life in all directions. From the other side of life, death is a shaman who doesn’t tread the earth of time, his presence is armor. So that your body shall not falter, he upholds your dream. It is twelve o’clock. Time doesn’t run. You are born outside of time. Someone outside of time dives at this time into existence.
...
The sky looks at you, takes you, feels you, bites you and bites you again, you’re the sky’s fodder. The one gobbled down by the sky. The beloved of splendor’s laughing shadows. You are the grass’s beloved, the laughing one, the shadow of grass and splendor. The body swarms with sun. Being unfolds from the inside. We burn with electricity. The outline of beings is stronger. Earth recognizes us, knows we are hers, her very ancient lovers, the children who will return to her womb.
...
The sentinel is a giant, standing before the age of the earth. This shoreless meadow is not in time, time doesn’t run in the meadow, this forest is unhistorical. We have been in this place since before history. Eternity sings limitless transformation. Energy swirls in the arteries. Skies intensify. The juices of the earth boil and multiply in the overwhelming manifestation of light. This is the feast in which we most celebrate life. Being blossoms through the mushrooms. Being develops like a leaf whose veins are the writing of mystery. This is the place in which we come to understand our path as humans. The shapes of foliage whisper and change. The wind’s oceanic voice comes and goes among the tree leaves. The wind brings the voices from other times, memory of the invisible world. It is still twelve. Time doesn’t run. The one who speaks is the mushroom. Soul, remember.
...
You travel towards the ancestors too. You are their assembly. They make up you. They lean out from all sides of your tower. They await the outcome of your battle. Their faces take over from each other, revealing themselves in yours. You are them. And the extension of their journey. The ones who will come.
...
Since the olden times we have gazed at the sky numberless times. We see it, again, for the first time. We are joined to it, like earth to us, by sun ligaments. The planets are interwoven, like leaves to their tree. Dew governs us as it does birds and flowers, through new senses. Swallows rule the summer. We have seen the tissue of paths in the air: current-slides ridden by birds of prophecy. So much dreaming of opening the gates of the sea. There was a threshold there. The door’s golden panes are engraved with the characters of spring. The sky closes and opens. Beings come and go between the worlds. Our eyes are not ready to look at them. They are there, poised on the void, objects of sacred, inevitable love. They wait for us.
...
We are not alone. But we are not on the outside of the others. They do not live outside of us. We are all inside. Of the great body whose substance we are. Man is body, earth is body, the universe is body, the visible and the invisible a single body. As inside is outside. Hölderlin wrote: “Rhythm is the soul of the spirit. All is no more than rhythm: man’s destiny is one single celestial rhythm”.
...
I remembered this Greek prayer: “Enter my spirit and my thought for the rest of my life, for you are I and I am you; I keep your name in my heart like a charm”.
...
The pine grove shivers in the world’s drunkenness. A sun brook flows in the forest of roots intermingling on the black earth. A motionless tree returns to its winged dance, in ecstatic balance, outside of time. Butterflies alighted on my body, as on a motionless tree, stay –like the sky and the earth– outside of time. The only truth is the splendor of all things.
…
At nightfall a vigorous-winged being moves away from the forest. Against its will, which yearns for permanence in dream, the sea slowly returns the boat to rough reality.
Blood and the senses washed, the body purified, wave after wave returns to us voices and limits. The dream recedes, leaving us alone with the world.
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