I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all.

Following my pact with the mountain – once I could move easily in the most forbidding places – I proposed to myself an agreement with the animals: horses, goats, birds. This was accomplished through the skin, by means of a sort of “touch” language. I could draw near animals where other human beings put them to precipitate flight.

I was transforming my blood into comprehensive energy – masculine and feminine, microcosmic and macrocosmic – and into a wine that was drunk by the moon and the sun.

I end up believing that I was in another world, another epoch, another civilization, perhaps on another planet containing the past and future, simultaneously, the present.

I believed that I was being put through purifying tortures so that I might attain Absolute Knowledge, at which point I could live Down Below.

I knew that by closing my eyes I could avoid the advent of the most unbearable pain: the stare of others.

Leonora Carrington, Down Below.