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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
The origins of homophobia
Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness
What is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
My three messages
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
What is Enlightenment?
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
Priestly Sexuality
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
Next
Step in Evolution
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement
About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
|
 Janet Planet
By Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press, 200 pages, 978-1936419067
Available from mayapplepress.com
Also available from amazon.com
Reviewed by Toby Johnson, author of The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell
Janet Planet is a wonderfully engaging and beautifully written roman à clef-style
novel. The story is told in two time periods: the present of the age of
the internet, email and cell phones and the past of the age of
psychedelic drugs, exotic gurus and hippie counterculture. The first is
written in ongoing present tense—an interesting reading experience in
itself; the latter, in italics, in a nostalgic, lyrical past tense. A
major theme of the novel is that events of a person’s past are never
entirely forgotten or left behind, for understanding the present brings
the past back into awareness. That is how this story is told.
In the present, Janet of the
eponymous title is a late middle-aged woman, living in Woodstock NY, a
former 60s hippie now residing in this town of counterculture legend,
doing harpsichord repair and refurbishing. Soon a mysterious character
from her 60s/70s past appears in Woodstock and Janet is forced to
remember her earlier life with him, when he’d nicknamed her “Janet
Planet,” in order to understand how to respond to him as who he is now
and to who she believes he should have become based on who he was then.
The he
is Jorge Castelan, “Georgie” to his intimates, a UCLA grad student in
anthropology who’d gone to Mexico to study indigenous uses of medicinal
plants and discovered—or was discovered by—the Mexican Indian
wiseman/sorceror Yamon who taught him the secrets of peyote mysticism
and transworldly sorcery; these secrets and his adventures finding them
he wrote about in a series of bestselling books. Jorge Castelan, of
course, is Carlos Castenada and Yamon is Don Juan.
Eleanor Lerman’s account of Janet
Planet and Jorge Castelan pretty closely jibes with the wikipedia entry
on Castenada, though there are clear differences. Castenada died of
cancer in L.A. in 1998. The fictional character, Jorge Castelan, is told
to have gone off for an exotic, high-end alternative cancer cure, so he
is alive in the 2000s and, as “the last nagual,” is still raring
to transcend space, time and eternity. Interestingly, death would not
have been that transcendence; the nagual (which means “leader of a band
of seers”) doesn’t expect to die to get to the other side; while he is
still alive, he is going directly over.
In reality, Carlos Castenada became a sort of cult figure in 1968 with the release of The Teachings of Don Juan.
Three more books followed in quick succession, all claiming to be
accounts of Castenada’s adventures in Mexico with a group Yaqui Indian
sorcerers who possessed magical powers, like invisibility, bi-location
and the ability to jump off cliffs unharmed—the jump was the big event
that “proved” to Castenada and to his readers that Yaqui magic was real.
Critics complained these books
weren’t factually consistent and one researcher even found evidence that
Castenada was in the UCLA library reading books about peyote on the
very date he reported taking the psychedelic cactus with the Indians in
the Sonoran desert. Even if the books were fictional, many enthusiastic
readers agreed, they still conveyed valid mystical wisdom from a
legitimate seeker and student of Native American shamanism. Castenada
had always presented himself as mysterious and other worldly (and
explained away temporal inconsistencies in his accounts as part of the
inexplicable, mysterious quality of higher reality). In 1973, he
withdrew from the public eye, moving into a large house with three women
companions who under his and Don Juan’s tutelage became witches. In the
1990s he reappeared briefly to tout a series of yoga/Gurdjieff
movements/tai chi-like exercises called tensegrity supposed based in
Toltec spiritual practice. Following his death in 1998, the witches and a
tensegrity teacher all disconnected their cell phones and disappeared,
never to be seen again. No one knows what happened to them. Did they all
to the other side to be with the nagual?
A body found in Death Valley in 2003,
not far from an abandoned car, was identified in 2006 as that of one of
Castenada’s companions.
Janet Planet
adds another character to the story: Janet, who is not taken as another
wife, but adopted as a daughter for the countercultural family of one
man and three women. She’d become disillusioned and fled the family, and
so was not involved in their subsequent disappearance. A little
rearranged in time, the basic outline of Castenada’s life is cast as
that of Georgie Castelan. In the novel, Castelan’s touting the exercise
program does not happen till the present, and that’s the crisis of the
story. The Georgie Janet had known as a true teacher, she believes,
would never have participated in such a blatant scheme to cash in on the
popularity of videotape exercise fads, if only because he wouldn’t have
wanted himself recorded. (In actual fact, Carlos Castenada did not
appear in the tensegrity tapes.) The novel’s climax comes when Janet
takes it on herself to stop Georgie from ruining his reputation by
putting out the tapes.
Well, of course, one reason this book
is intriguing is because it seems to be revealing material about a
popular figure of the 1970s and a truly formative teacher of hippie and
new age mysticism whose life was always shrouded in mystery. But the
reason I want to recommend Janet Planet to readers is not just to get
the dish about a celebrity from my youth, but because the novel so
gracefully blends the modern American present with its demand for
factuality and true history with that more mysterious and elusive side
of life which psychedelics revealed to a segment of a certain generation
in which strange and unexplainable things do happen. Lerman’s novel
rekindles the magical quality of hippie thinking and hopeful ideology.
I’m not sure she really gives the
dish on Carlos Castenada anyway. What she has done is to have woven a
story about a middle-aged woman recapturing the wonder and hopeful
expectation of youth and giving herself a reason—and an omen—to start on
a new adventure. This is the message of the two time frames of the
story: to keep alive and happy and moving forward in life entails tying
up unresolved fragments of the past and rediscovering what inspired you
as a youth, so you can reclaim it as an adult with wisdom and
perspective.
Janet Planet
is a lovely, haunting, wistful, poetic piece of writing and
mythopoesis. It stirred up wonderful memories for me—and, as you see,
sent me running to Wikipedia to get the facts behind this inspired and
inspiring roman à clef. It’s a good story and an easy and satisfying read.
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