The Next Thing

I've been looking through old journals, poetry, posturing, rambling and whatnot, and I understand better why I made particular decisions I made. Stepping away from engineering was a choice made out of contempt for security. My young mind wondered what adventure, what truth in precarious existence there was to be found in making sure things function, in developing models or materials to provide definitive answers for questions poised within clearly defined parameters (my somewhat older mind understands that these bids for security, in actuality, embody a great many clever and novel compromises, including those on a philosophical level which will never enable us to step away from the implacable enormity of our material existence). How could anyone be so sure of anything, as engineers pretend to be? My rush to the opposite was dramatic... what is less sure than dance, an art that falls apart the very instant after its execution, the art that aspires most directly to the irrecoverable innocence of any given moment and that pretends no grasp on posterity? An art that looks no further than the very site of our being for its medium? This commitment to things that fall apart was a shock: stunning, life-instilling, mind-altering, unsustainable. I wanted to live in this space of perpetually falling, and I fell perpetually, sometimes with a joy that was larger than my mind and body and radiated out of me into allness, ecstasy, divine arrest; sometimes into a depressed stillness that saw only blackness, without a single fingerhold to seize in effort to pull myself towards some positive potentiality; sometimes, and perhaps most perplexing of all, into normality, this place where things refused to move with momentous intent, where I was unhappy and confused with a world that could be utterly enchanted in one moment and so indifferent the next.

Many other things and feelings happened which do not serve this narrative, which moves next to the subject of yoga. Here, a practice which would bring you to the same site of art as dance, and yet ask that you do not understand that site as separate from normality. A practice to slow and, at times, remove perception, to bump up against the wild and ecstatic and allow it to be subsumed by the quotidian which, upon closer examination, is not quotidian but perpetually miraculous, and yet... perching upon the tension between the two and chuckling. Locating the self within in the self, instead of relative to art or your society. This is not how the practice appealed to me at first (it appealed first through the promise of exercise, improved physical prowess, discipline, repetition, quietness of mind), though I am able to say now that this is what was happening all along. It was the natural next step if I was to avoid annihilating myself, "deranging all my senses," as some radical artists and poets (it was arthur rimbaud who said that) may do.

And so the practice of yoga continues, at times tripping into solipsism but, I hope, for the most part integrating itself into existence, making it possible for me to remain solid instead of living as one disappearing, or one who moves through the world a raw wound to its meaningless bumps and changes of direction. Teaching is nice, it helps me define what for me is at the center of asana practice. Interesting that I write so little these days, I wonder if there is something in acting that does not an essay, a blurb, a journal entry love.

The relief of sitting in meditation

The work I do in yoga asana is not limited to the physical envelope. It reveals, very gradually, the layers beneath; perhaps I am like an onion. I sit, and the mind itself sets the body’s channels to unclogging, the joints to listen, loosen and the prana to MOVE. I sat and practiced alternate nostril breathing, nadi shodhana. It was frustrating. Maddening. It did not work. Until afterwards, when I sit here and my nostrils are mighty and the breath scampers joyfully. An element of this breath practice I’d overlooked is that of resistance. Like swinging with a donut in the on-deck circle, restricting airflow to one nostril gives the full breath the benefit of relative freedom: wild, unharnessed, speedy and effortless.

Seated, I imagined my spine a tree. This is not so long a stretch, if you consider the spine a house for the body’s delicate, juice-filled neurons. As I sat in meditation, the left side of my tree flourished, steeped in verdant green energy and branching, growing, very happily. Particular to my body is a very drastic difficulty in breathing through the right nostril, perhaps the result of a broken nose or simply years of habitual left-nostril breathing (these things happen). The right side of my spinal tree was blown over, stripped as by hurricane, leaving a complete picture of a tree traumatized, recovering splendidly on one half but bearing still the dead marks of some powerful event. Imagery arose unbidden. I pictured my right body enlivened by the energy of the left, sprouting and growing its own sap-filled branches, recovering, reassuming the fullness promised by the original seed.

In the meantime, the body pulsed with joy at the sensation of living. Layers of restraint fell from those joints and muscles upon which the mind had clamped. The body pulsed with the heart, and this had its own effect on the vision which, despite the stillness and relaxedness of the eyeballs, saw flux in the boundaries and depths of things, punching forward and receding, as though the chair and the tiled floor were humming some peculiar tune of their own devising. The result of this feeling, present to immediacy and quiet in the mind, was like sitting at the base of a waterfall. What at first is joy and delight continues on unceasing, pummeling, and it instills fear at the largeness of the thing, the continuity and timelessness of it, and you sitting there are nothing besides a speck en route to annihilation. The mind would like to step out; the sensations of the body—fullness, aliveness, fleshiness, full of demands—continue to clamor as they grow in both joy and terror such that any distraction would be welcome, but you are confronted regardless that this thing, this movement, is the only thing, and you can make arabesques and sleep-over fort towers with the mind but never escape the truth that you are being worked on, worn away, eroded. And so you stay with that person, the one sitting beneath the waterfall, for as long as you can stand it because you imagine it makes you close to something that you will never know but that—unquestionably, it vibrates through all of time and appears as the 10^-10 percentage of error in whatever it is we try to measure—is larger than our selves, thereby instilling faith, at the very least, in our ignorance.

It stops when you stop. You stand up and brush off your thighs and stretch out your knees and feel the body change back to day-to-day mode, and you’re exhausted, like you just had a fantastic workout. The mind picks up and everything picks up and you’re back off to the races, perhaps affirmed in the fact of your solidness, your participation in the abstract constant of movement and the perpetuity of the world you perceive in realms outside your perception.