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.

Snippet Overheard on Philly Streets of the Day

Gap-toothed white beard to his young and burdened protege:

"Because time keeps on movin, like a bird, flyin from one place, to another."

Hangover

Here is a movie that lives up to its name. I had a pretty good time, I think, and now I feel kind of sick.

The movie is a vomitous splurge of humor in its many variations, most notably funny and not funny, though the possibility does exist to break the jokes down further into categories like stupid, unsubtle, or artfully constructed. Vomitous and uncontrolled. The opening image left me with hope: a Kill Bill-esque desert landscape with a busted car and some effed up dudes who LOST THE GROOM during a bachelor party. It seemed edgy and sinister enough at the moment, but hindsight says maybe it was just the music. Anyway, after some dicks and asses and making fun of the fat guy who is also stupid, the movie finally gets around to the absurdity in which it thrives: the predictably ruined hotel room, complete with chicken, tiger, and lots of other stuff. The amnesiac detective narrative frame serves the movie well and keeps gags moving, stackin 'em up on top of each other as things start to get a little bit funny and Mike Tyson lays out the stupid fat guy with a wicked right hook. All of the men find the empowerment they really needed by the end of the film, so don't worry, just like we shouldn't worry that every other character in the 'adventure' narrative is a token: "hey guys if we make the black guy a drug dealer, the asian an evil sniveling queer, and the woman a whore who is also a really sweet girl, we're totally spinning this thing! also let's say retard an uncomfortable number of times."

I'm kind of shocked the Philly Inquirer reviewer was waxing lyrical about this film. The "Citizen Kane" of bender movies!??!?! Because it's well shot, in the desert, and has a pretty sweet arc beginning with alienation and ending with exhaustion? Yes, funny. Yes, rolicking. Yes, possessed of the bachelor party milieu. No, nothing distinguishing, besides it may leave you feeling a little bit filthier. Good show, Hangover, for truth in advertising.

CYBORGS ON NETWORK TV!

I like "Chuck." I like it a lot. To catch allo'y'all up as quickly as possible: chuck is a geek loser working very hard at the "buymore," an electronics superstore, to not live up to his genius-level potential until one day an experimental supercomputer called "The Intersect" is implanted in his brain granting him access to the ultimate intelligence database by way of "flashes" -- unwrapping of said intelligence into his conscious mind through a visual trigger -- which results in the government deploying two crack agents and a lot of fancy hardware to protect "The Asset" from an ambiguous axis-of-evil type secret group known as Fulcrum, priority 1, as well as to take advantage of his capabilities in saving the world, priority 2. One of the agents is a "perfect dime piece" as my brother might say, and she and Chuck fall in love but are separated by the official nature of their relationship and the endlessly unfolding hijinx as can be imagined per the show's premise. A delightfully entertaining mix of comic book high-geek secret agent shit with great bufoonery from the employees of the buymore with a heart-warming alternative family drama (Chuck and sister were abandoned by father at a young age and I'm pretty sure the mom died at some point. Chuck, sis, and sis's fiance all live together).

Now, the meat. Chuck is a modern cyborg. His brainspace has been invaded completely. He works through the machine; the machine works through him. This doesn't make him into a superman, it makes him into a commodity. He is referred to as "The Asset," he has "handlers," and, most importantly, Chuck's central struggle is not in saving the world--that comes secondarily--it is in asserting his person-ness in the face of the both fulcrum and the government's attempts to pack him up and pull the computer out of his head.

The show is borderline subversive in the way it handles this drama: Chuck's humanity is repeatedly threatened, and he wins every time without even trying, without exaggerated gestures of heroism and, mostly importantly, without violence. It's as if, at the moment the machine inhabited him to the extent that he was no longer Chuck, some protector's spirit rose up and out, ceding the flesh to unlock life in the machine and destroying the machine's rational, binary perfection. A real cyborg! This protector's spirit follows Chuck through all of his unlikely trials and smites all the clowns that would mistake a fellow man for an object to be treated as less than human.

Telling also that the setting for Nick Bottom and Peter Quince's descendents is an electronics superstore. The employees make a circus of corporate america, turning a warehouse of a shop on steroids into a village. The goods and geekeries transformed into symbols of status, as opposed to the more common reality of symbols stripped and sold, which is something we witness daily.

Watch chuck! It's awesome!

Susan, Susan, Susan

From cigarette lighter to iPod charger to iPod to radio input to speakers, a podcast sounds in the cavity of an automobile barreling down the highway at eighty miles per hour.

(paraphrase)
IRA GLASS: How did you react when you saw the clip of Susan Boyle in Britain's Got Talent?

SOME RADIO GUY: Oh, I totally got choked up, which, you know, just made me wonder about my own ethical outlook... that I should be surprised to such a reaction, when the only difference is how the woman looks.

Ok, so some effete, liberal intellectual on NPR has his values challenged in a kind of wake-up call about the actualities of cultural perception. "I know that all human beings are equally capable regardless of race and appearance, so I am wrong for reacting emotively to her performance. The television people are manipulating my sentiment for the sake of entertainment and thereby cheapening one of my dearly held democratic principles."

Hey! This isn't about you, NPR guy.

I've heard the sentiment elsewhere: why should people be so surprised that she can sing just because she isn't a pop star? What's the big deal?

Well, for starters, this isn't about the triumph of an ugly person getting on TV and SHOCKING everyone by being able to sing. The drama is a different one entirely: Susan Boyle broke all the rules of the game, and there's nothing we all love more than a very small dose of liberation.

What she did was tear down the dramatized definitions of success and achievement upon which shows like "Got Talent" and "Idol" prey. They are venues for humiliation of the have-nots and the glamorification of the haves, operating under the shoddy narrative pretext that reaching for the stars and attaining your dreams means winning over completely the hearts and minds of your audience--nay! the world!

Then along comes this woman who is solitary and well-adjusted at 47. Scooby says "ruhwhaaaa?" She has been singing since she was 12. She did not display an ounce of regret regarding anything, and, as her performance speaks for itself, she obviously has been active in her practice of voice. She didn't need "Got Talent," though it certainly must have been a large and exciting venue for her. She was not participating in some manufactured achievement narrative for the unrealized.

And herein lies the juice, the game-breaking elements. All of the tension and effort and pound-your-head-against-a-wall striving that the shows stoke for drama and ratings are stripped away and performance becomes more than a nice voice and a pretty song. In an environment of dull, sniping, and insecure drudgery, a simple, sincere thing sings liberation, and our hearts are warmed.

Am I so naive as to think some producers didn't have an inkling as to what they were doing when they let Ms. Boyle pass by wardrobe and makeup? No, not so naive. But what that does make this, as far as I'm concerned, is one fantastic piece of television in the last place you'd expect to find it.

Kinesthetic Learning

For some people yoga is an experience, for others an Experience. Some call it a workout, others "stretching," others a yuppy pile of horseshit. Regardless of your perspective, there are some nuts and bolts of repeated practice which, if you are savvy, you can connect to other aspects of your existence in the world, as anyone willing to learn does with any sustained practice.

I'm in headstand in class the other day, and I receive an adjustment from the teacher. With her index finger, she pushes my shins maybe two inches back in space, aligning the posture to its intended form in which the legs rise in a perpendicular line from the floor. Two inches help, and all of the hellishly difficult and unnecessary work my musculature and mind were exerting to maintain a shape not quite in accord with skeletal structure and gravity fell away. Being inverted is a tremendous joy. You hit the right spot on the top of your skull--engaging your locks, hugging your leg muscles to the bone, aligning mindfully--and there is an exhilarating sensation of lightness and effortlessness. As easy as standing, except upside down, and for those moments you are granted the liberated perspective of limitless potential, having shattered the incorrect perception that when we are standing, we are right-side up.

For some people, myself included, this is how they learn. The moral of the story is not the joy of headstand, it is the action of getting there: a situation in which tremendous, concerted effort and a touch of fear at tumbling over maintains a shape that is not quite right, when a bit more ease and attention is all that lacking to be where you want to be. This is a worthwhile lesson, taught through a physical practice, and it bleeds into everything else I do. Skittering about in a panic trying to organize all my junk for work then rehearsal then two hour break then class then rehearsal then... I remember floating into headstand, and it helps me get out of my own way.

Bodies are intelligent.