Up to standing half-lotus forward bend today, in the backyard, after richly deserved late morning sleep (up at 9 am). The gluteus medius and iliopsoas were too loaded with what Jason otherwhere called "sweet fatigue pain" and it just was NOT going to work to do a sun salutation to Utkatasana from there. That's fine, I'm used to that for home practice.
Yesterday afternoon I did a specifically backbend oriented practice; a little warm up, some baby backbends, six wheels, about eight wall-dropbacks, and I got the dropbacks good and deep again (under knee-high) but the psoas got REALLY cranky about an hour after that. This puzzle remains: the more deeply I backbend, the crankier the psoas seems to get. Wha????
This coming week should be the final one of temp work at 8:30, after which I will immediately have to find ANOTHER temp job so that I can afford July's debt. The 5:30 am wakeup has become routine, but the practice at dawn has been as minimal as anything Stella ever painted. It's HARD to practice that early.
(0v0) had a brilliant post some few back (a lot of her stuff is brilliant) about "precarite" (it's French, so pronounce the "e" like "ay" in both cases), which is, in one sense, prolonged, what you might call chronic, economic instability, a definitional economic instability. I consider myself to live in a state of precarite right now, at least until my full-time-yet-visiting gig begins in January. For the record, living in economic precarite is essentially a mix of middle-class accoutrements, mixed with downright poverty-line income. It's very bizarre. It's even weirder when you're totally overeducated and live on the poor side of town. Because American culture generally associates great education with higher social class, this not-infrequent combination of great education with poverty-line income is a real head-bender. The dialogue is something like this:
"Hey, where's the ivory tower I just paid for?"
"Oh, you paid for loan debt, not an ivory tower."
"But I want my membership card! No, no wait, I don't! That's pretentious!"
"Well do you want to be brilliant-but-poor or brilliant-but-pretentious?"
"Uh..I want the best of both worlds! I want to be 'with the people' but I also want to be brilliant! I want the ivory tower to pay my way as I make art in the streets!"
That's some tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the dialogue really is something like that.
Membership in the ivory tower might reduce the terror of looking over the cliff face of student loan debt, but it comes with the price of MEMBERSHIP in the ivory tower. Essentially, my complaint here is that I feel pinned between two not-totally-appetizing incarnations of the social contract. In the one, I am nought but my loan debt. In the other, I am, as Jean-Luc Godard once put it in a different context, "trapped within the fortress." Safety comes with a lack of proximity. Harun Farocki made a famous film about this, called "Images of the World and the Inscription of War."
My home practice happens in the midst of this. Because of that, the stress of indebtedness shows MOST strongly in my outer hips, when I'm at home. My practice is "more advanced" (noting the fact that this doesn't technically matter) if I drive even EIGHT MINUTES from here to a studio, because I don't have my computer, I don't have my phone, I can't "do" anything with my indebtedness or work or need to publish or job letters or whatever, the stress drops off because I break the contact.
Taken the other way, this means that my home practice is my most psychologically and emotionally stout practice, because I have to rely on breath, bandhas and dristi to MOVE me FROM "home" (and all it connotes) to "practice" (which happens in the midst of "home" but is not permeable to it).
As soon as I'm not home, and practicing, ease comes, because I don't need to step away from the horrorshow of precarite. The step is taken via travel. In a way, this is cheating, but even I like to get in a full Primary once in a while.
Avant-garde: recently, in discussions with my partner, I've discovered that my take on avant-garde art is about historicizing the series of practices and the discourse of avant-garde. I called it "the family tree." This means that my personal taste in art isn't high in the mix of my appreciation; if it is or has been considered or can be taken to be "avant-garde," I'm inherently interested in it. This doesn't mean that I buy everything which anyone calls "avant-garde" but I'm always at least interested in something which is anti- or counter- or neo- or somesuch. The history, the politics, the manifestoes, of this creature "the avant-garde" fascinate me. Who has rebelled, or objected, or critiqued, or deviated from? I'll bring my curiosity.
Rambling over!
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