Florinda Donner Grau's Talk at the Los Angeles Workshop 1997 - Morning

Notes by Vincent Sargenti and Randy Stark

Los Angeles Workshop, August 23 to 27, 1997

Saturday morning, August 23rd, the weather was picture postcard perfect in Los Angeles as roughly 850 workshop attendees and hardcore Tensegrity practitioners converged on the LA Convention Center from all over the world. The Los Angeles Convention Center loomed dissonantly against the southernmost area of the downtown skyline -- a gleaming white tubular steel and smoked-glass abstraction, a monument to the Calculus of man's technological madness as expressed in architecture. The workshop was held in this newer portion of the complex of enormous buildings. The old complex is a huge, mammoth rectangular building next to Interstate 110. Everyone who didn't already live in Los Angeles seemed to be staying in hotels on Figueroa street. The Hotel Figueroa and the Holiday Inn were both almost completely taken over by the Tensegrity Workshop crowd with their rolled up blue mats and black foam rubber Wheels of Time.

The crowd of mostly familiar faces were buzzing around the registration tables (as much as two hours before showtime) where the work-study people were seated by the dozen to have paperwork signed and hand out the transparent green ID badges that were the key to the magic kingdom. Before going through security (four large, dark-clothed men with black, metal-detecting paddles, a gauntlet of no less than 10 super-conscious guards, and 10 more inspectors at tables for searching bags.) On the other end of the gauntlet, were the most familiar and wonderful faces one can see, the two ladies who look at your badge and let you in. Once through their formidable doorway, one entered a huge rectangular room that seemed as large as a football field, and very possibly was. It had large honeycombed squares of recessed lights in the thick beamed ceiling and four gray and black-trimmed platforms, about a foot and a half high, spaced evenly down the center of a blue carpeted floor. Of the two central platforms, one, the southernmost, had a podium on it. People gathered in front of it, sitting on the floor.

Eventually, Grant walked up and welcomed everyone to Los Angeles. The room went wild with anticipation. He made a few announcements, and said that the schedule had basically been thrown out the window. He said that it was very difficult to plan months in advance for an event of this nature because the energetic configurations that the sorcerers operate within the context of make it impossible to say what's what from one day to the next. He stated emphatically that we should all try to bear with them and to make an attempt to be as patient and fluid as possible. He said that regardless of the scheduling, they had quite a treat in store for us.

Florinda Donner-Grau soon came out of a side door. She was dressed in a light blue shirt, dark blue slacks and thick-soled black rubber-looking sandals. She started by saying that 9am was way too early for her to read from the wall. It was the first time she had addressed us in the morning, and since she wasn't worth a damn in the morning she had written something to read to us.

There were translators for Italian, Russian, French, German and Spanish. (People using this service had portable earphones and were able to receive translations even while doing passes.) One benefit for the translators of her reading, she said, was that she didn't talk as fast.

The microphone kept feeding back periodically, but Florinda was in good spirits, tapping the toes of her sandals on the floor behind her as she talked. Before going to her notes she joked about something someone had said earlier as she walked into the convention center. "Oh Florinda, you look tired." But she didn't look tired in the least as she stood at the podium, short blonde hair impeccably brush cut around her flawless white skin and beaming face.

She told us the old nagual, don Juan, had given them his very best. He hit them with everything he had. When he realized that Carlos didn't have the energetic configuration or temperament for anything but ending the lineage, he put Big Florinda in charge of pulling them back together and recovering after he and the rest of his party left. They weren't worth a plugged nickel, Florinda said. You couldn't have made a whole person from the four of them put together.

She digressed into to speaking about Carlos and said that he has a particular fondness for several Hollywood filmmakers whose movies he watches over and over. She said that among them, one of his favorites is Woody Allen. She humorously said that he has poor taste in her opinion. (Florinda is quite a filmgoer herself, but she never mentioned that.) She told the story of a particular film and asked if we might remember it. It was the one where all these men are dressed in white with big white helmets and are preparing to jump out of the back of an airplane. They are supposed to be sperm and right as they are getting ready to rush out the back of the plane, the leader in front yells, "Go back, it's a blow job!"

What happened to them reminded her of that scene in the Woody Allen movie. "That's what happened to us," she said. They had been trained and were ready to jump when suddenly they were told, "Go back, it's a blowjob!" Regrouping afterwards was not easy, especially with Carol Tiggs having disappeared to god knows where.

Not long after this, Florinda talked about the sheen of awareness that has been eaten down by the Flyers, and how don Juan described it as El Condoncito, the little condom. The vulgarity of this description annoyed Florinda and she asked him if he couldn't just as well describe it more like a pillow and a pillow case. He said no, it was much tighter than that.

Florinda joked that Carlos has made a lot of mistakes in his life and that, over the years, she has been witness to most of them. One of the more recent, and according to her 'imbecilic', things he did was create what came to be known as the Sunday Group, a local LA practice group that Carlos worked with intensively over a period of more than a year. Carlos' temperament is not like don Juan's. She humorously described Carlos Castaneda as the 'ultimate hit-and-run artist'. She said that over a year ago he decided he would try to influence this small group of people and attempt to mold them into serious warrior-practitioners with the force of his charismatic personality, his ability to talk about anything, and his superior energy.

Florinda told the Los Angeles crowd that Carlos had made a monumental error in judgment because all he succeeded in doing was to make himself into their 'Guru'. So the Sunday Group was immediately abolished according to Florinda. Her statement signaled the end of the group, much to the surprise of some workshop attendees who were members of it. Later in the week, Florinda's tale of the demise of the group would spark speculation as to whether or not Carlos would be showing up for the workshop at all.

Florinda went on to talk about some of the favorite songs of Juan Tuma and Silvio Manuel. She described Silvio Manuel at length as an incredible dancer of tremendous flair and physical prowess. The other sorcerers often preferred not to look at his antics, which were in response to the Dark Sea of Awareness, because they were so outrageous -- like his ability to squeeze himself through a knothole. She said that the songs they were going to play for us were particular favorites of Silvio Manuel and Juan Tuma. She told everyone that when they were apprentices they had heard these songs over and over and over again while in the company of Silvio Manuel. Florinda stated that these same songs were going to be played for us again and again throughout the course of the workshop until we were, "Steeped in the mood of Silvio Manuel and don Juan's generation of sorcerers."

The three musical themes of the workshop were available on a CD at the Tensegrity Bookstore during breaks. All of the songs are sung in Spanish by Daniel Santos who, according to Florinda, has a unique vibration in his voice. All three are poignant and moving songs of love and longing. Florinda described how all human beings sense this immense longing for something they cannot completely define. She said that sorcerers maintain that this sense of longing for something indefinable is something that human beings mistakenly project onto other people as a longing for love and companionship, when in fact it is a longing for the boundless affection we would feel in the presence of our energy body. She said candidly that, "It is really a longing for the energy body we feel."

Florinda ended her lecture by translating the lyrics to the song she was about to play for us. She said it was one that Juan Tuma especially liked. She admiringly described him for us, her eyes filling with light as she did so. She became charged with a strange energy and awe as she described him as a handsome giant Indian man who sang and danced like thunder!

As the song began to play, she walked out of the room to a standing ovation, gesturing for us to be quiet so we could absorb the mood of the music.

NOCTURNAL

by Jose Sabre Marroquin

Through the palm trees
That sleep peacefully
The silvery moon
Cuddles with the tropical sea

And my arms
Hungrily stretch out
Searching for you

In the night
A flowery perfume
Evokes your enrapturing breath
And the sweet kisses
Of your mouth,
And my lips thirstily wait
For a kiss from you

I feel that you are next to me
But it is a lie, an illusion
Oh! I spend hours like this
And nights like this
Asking life
For the miracle of being next to you
And perhaps not even in your dreams
Do you remember me

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