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.