Where The Bird Sings Best

Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was an magical realism retelling of the history of the authors geneology. I am a sucker for magical realism and I thought it was an interesting way to recall your history. So much of the stories that get passed down are fraught with a tinge of myth anyway, and this just goes over the top. Who will ever forget two lovers preserved in honey or a ghost that gets passed down through the generations? Still Jodorowsky comes from some disturbing lineages and there were times I almost stopped reading (and probably should have) because of some of the cruder passages. The ending also felt sort of anti climatic to me, like it was rushed at the end. Some of the imagery and stories were so magical I wish the whole thing could have been more readable.

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In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out from loneliness receive compassionate teachers who are really the children themselves, sent back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding light to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.


For a month now, you’ve been lying here pretending to be dead. You don’t rot because you are alive but overcome by indifference.

If a wise man is one who knows that he doesn’t know, then at this moment I’m a wise man.

A silver coin, half a shekel, half a kopek, the same symbol, rich and poor giving a half, the mortal half, while receiving the sum of eternal life.

God hides so we will search for Him. By learning to see Him in everything, we are born.

There is a precise instant when the world is marvelous: now.”

my work, which was to lead all beings to Awareness, progressively eliminating God by absorbing Him in existence so that we would all become an exclusively human Universe. All of that was achieved with the consent of the Father, who, out of absolute love, creates us to be his tomb. From the putrefaction of the divine, our eternity will be born.

“A man sees a frog. The frog says to him, ‘Kiss me, please.’ “The man thinks, ‘A frog that speaks must be an enchanted princess. I’ll kiss her, she’ll turn back into what she was, she will marry me, and I’ll be a millionaire.’ The man kisses the frog, feels an explosion, and finds he’s been turned into a frog. “The first frog says, ‘How wonderful. You were enchanted for ever so long, and, finally, I was able to save you!’”

around an illusion, may elect him president. “But the capitalist regime, aside from some superficial reforms, will go on exactly as it is. It will go right on selling the country, and hunger will only be pacified with bullets. There is a third candidate that few see, who has no possibility of being elected because he preaches outside the circus, that is, from jail. He’s proposing an impossible truth, this Luis Emilio Recabarren. Instead of asking for small victories, like a monkey in the zoo who demands to be well treated by his keepers—a few extra nuts—but doesn’t consider destroying the cage, Recabarren wants everything; he wants to abolish borders, 

Why don’t they show a luminous, triumphant Christ in churches? It would be a bad example to the workers. If I, instead of lugging around these hundred pounds, were shooting light all over the place, I wouldn’t get money, food, and sex—rather, I’d get whippings and a sore backside for being a political agitator.”

As it is, no feline will dare come close. So I understand that sometimes it isn’t good to seek security, because it leads to death. Sometimes it’s better to live in uncertainty. But you know these things because you’re a saint. What work it has cost you to purify you soul. I saw it on your body. You’ve been beaten, had ribs broken. You’ve had to fight against many wills. You feel your parents didn’t love you as they should. All that weighs more than the Christ on His cross. If you like, I’ll lighten you. Memory is like a corset. Your memories stick to your chest, your back, all over your skin, and they form an invisible shell that separates you from the world.”

Each apple is different, because during their growth each receives the sun in a different way.