If Nirvana were a hotel, I would buy timeshare shares to travel two weeks out of every year, take a non-addictive psychotropic pill to love others, plants, and pelicans in thongs and waxing. If Nirvana were a hotel, we would confirm that Utopia is not a fumarole of the past, nor a fertilizer for phantasmagoric futurology... Utopia belongs to every Today that we live in, but if it were a hotel it could only exist in Mexico... on the Pacific coast, near Acapulco (because Acapulco is all of us).
At the end of the psychedelic decade of the last century, an enlightened man named Timothy Leary founded a creed on the axiom that God is the Brain of each soul and went about elevating the study, fervor and fever for LSD to academic ranks in the Harvard University with fantastic tours of mind-blowing experimentation at the Catalina Hotel in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Carlos Castaneda and other intellectuals attended the Catalina happenings in search of the eternal flame, copal fumes and laughter, freedom without any atavism and a lot of verbal fungus. There is a reason why Paradise at the end of Stephen King's story that gave rise to the film
The Shawshank Redemption
is located in
Zi-hua-ta-ne-jo
in the voice of Morgan Freeman (who has also played the role of God): the prisoners behind the bars and all slaves to the tedium of insipid routines we have dreamed of rising in orange clouds at the edge of the sea and so close to Acapulco.
Half a century ago, Harvard University abruptly ended Timothy Leary's polychrome project and I think they even took away his professorship, in addition to canceling the utopian vacation at the Catalina Hotel, and all that evaporated—like the decade itself—in a sad nostalgia. for our childhood where the bullets that killed Martin Luther King, Bobby, Tlatelolco and the entire geography of Vietnam murdered the flowers that for a few seconds choked the rifles... but the CIA and the Good Consciences, the Outstretched Hand and the hairdressers shaved the gentlemen on the flight of many dreams and half a century later, of course I do not advocate the debauchery of substances and the liberation of all delirium, but every minute that passes confirms that we have been delaying the serious discussion and considered alternative of legislating responsibly for more than half a century about the use of any substance that liberates the mind and soul against the grain of foolish apathy or open disdain for the nefarious empire that all drug trafficking, transit and smuggling has become... If there were a Hotel for Nirvana, At least we have the Theater in capital letters.
Juan Villoro has fulfilled Jorge Ibargüengoitia's dream and has established himself as one of the most influential and fun playwrights on stages here and there. It is not the first time that Tony Castro reads the speeches, dialogues, knots and theatrical situations of the Villoro ink as if in Braille to create a feast on stage as Director: with these lines I applaud the National Theater Company, each and every one from the artists who transform into characters, to the very original music, the precise lighting, the tropical scenery and every element that has made the appearance of Hotel Nirvana at the National Center of the Arts of Mexico possible.
For a couple of hours I have levitated with axioms where the colors are random words, danced to the rhythms of the age of Aquarius and among immense flowers under a sky of diamonds, hypnotized again by the planetary voice that reminds me that we are nothing more than
stardust
made flesh and bones. I fell in love with a muse that is rented to dream on the edge of the beach, because without touching her we kissed without anyone else in the seats noticing the enchantment and I have wandered laughing through the great actor Beristáin as a bureaucrat drugged with a kind of universal love and revolutionary from above and forward while a lady discovers herself freely in love with a nun who has escaped from the convent who gives a totally erotic meaning to the trinomial of Faith-Hope and Charity.
In several scenes a bearded man with dark glasses seems to be flapping his fan trying to pull the reins of the delirious alcoholic indigenous man who seems to speak in peyote when howling at the Moon and the boatman who is used as a waiter to clean the pool of the Hotel as Temple of Nirvana where the Great Guru meets, the Gringo with the spotless smile who hears voices and prescribes small doses of pure knowledge with a pill called Logos, never better said. They are sessions of free association at the edge of the sea in the seats of a theater where we are the sea and its waves are our reaction to the hallucinations and consciences of the characters who juggle with their revelations all the geometric shapes and all the manners and manias of the Be.
In the end, Nirvana is nothing more than the ephemeral epiphany of going to the theater. Sitting in amazement at the only reliable proof that a writer has about the existence and reaction of his readers and happy amazement at the professional work of the one who directs the score of several voices of characters that we all are in a moment frozen half a century ago... when of As children we dreamed that everything would become an endless field of strawberries.
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