Karen, at one of my early posts about seventh series, said that nothing was vanishing, being taken from me, at all, despite how it felt.
Last night I got a reminder of this in the Intermediate series sampler class.
Fairly easily, I dropped over into Kapo, spidered the hands forward, and with the lightest teacher adjustment, found the toes, in a full grab. Both hands.
As you know (or could easily extrapolate), I expected this night's practice to be a train wreck, and it wasn't. My level of practice remains fairly consistent with where it once was (on Monday nights, anyway).
Try as I might to do a "no practice exists" meditation, I can't figure out how this quite positive and affirmative practice fits with my "omg I'm being killed" panic about seventh series.
I think I'm going to be simplistic about the lesson and simply learn from this that
1. Yes, things are NOT vanishing and I'm not losing identity/flexibility/younameit.
2. Distracted or not, reprioritizing or not, against what I'd prefer or not, I am NOT solely becoming a seventh series householder.
Life does, in fact, as the pithy aphorism says (!!!), go on.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
A month of seventh series.
Alright, so yesterday made four weeks of seventh series, which for those of you not in on the lingo, means four weeks of official newborn care. This is my new series.
Yes, I wrote, posted and deleted the post which was prior to this one, and no, I don't feel in the least bad about it. Blogger had lost (through a miskey) the post I'd written BEFORE that, and then I wrote a bitter followup which will now be replaced by this. Such drama, and all I have is a keyboard! Shucks!
Week four sees more squiggling, less crying (yes, seriously), more looking around, even shades of what MIGHT be a smile (Jennifer sees many more of these instances than I do).
There had been what I call "colick-ish" behavior for a couple nights--real live "I'm dying" howling, inconsolable screaming-type crying, for FOUR HOURS, and so we figured we had a colicky baby, which is just pure hell for six weeks to three months, and so we steeled for it, but there hasn't been a "colickish" episode since then (thank the freakin' STARS).
Right now baby is about four feet to my left, in a crib, hanging out and wiggling around without howling. If he can get used to being peacefully alive without crying for human contact (and I mean ON YOUR LAP kinda contact), then this will be a MAJOR development for us all. Man, it is HARD to do things like grade, prep your class, cook food, etc, with a baby that needs CONSTANTLY to be in hand.
My asana practice these days is a Saturday morning and Tuesday evening vinyasa class. Power yoga, basically. My home practice has upgraded (hahaha!) from first and a smattering of second, to seventh series all the time. I did a most of Primary yesterday that cracked SO MUCH tension out of my hips that I was in "walk like an old person" agony for SEVEN HOURS.
I have no nostalgia whatsoever---NONE--for the first week or three of seventh series. My memories of that period are that there was PURE and UNADULTERATED hellfire, but with cuteness and affection. VERY complicated emotional affect. Even now it hurts me to REMEMBER the pain I was in during those weeks--a cold, deadly sleeplessness, incoherence, constant child screaming so that J and I couldn't hear each other speak, pacing back and forth with armload of screaming demon, randomness of child behavior, colickish screaming we couldn't solve, 4 am diaper changes (that hasn't changed yet; we've just gotten used to it), on and on and on.
NO FUCKING WAY is that going to get some kind of "it was great" nostalgia. I will be fucking DEAD before I will sell out to that bullshit sentimentality.
I mean, yes, the emotional affect is complicated and multiple, and therefore chewy and interesting, but what I really object to is the way that those rough days get frosted over with pink fluffy "awwww" sentimentality. They were HELLISH AGONY, people, let's not forget that EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE SUPER CUTE. It's like GREMLINS or something. It wasn't a horror movie, but it wasn't kiddy animation either. It was like Friday the 13th, done IN kiddy animation. Jason meets the Teletubbies, or something like that.
**************************
"I'm tryin', Ringo, I'm tryin' REAL..HARD...to be the shepherd!" This citation LIVES in this experience. What does the shepherd do, as Jules has put it? Let us have a look:
"Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children."
Yeah, of course a videostore clerk named Quentin has rewritten the original text (better look out for that last sentence of Revelations, motherfucker!), but there is telling accuracy here: it very much DOES NOT SAY "he who feels the goodwill" or "he who has the goodwill to spare." It says, "IN THE NAME OF CHARITY AND GOODWILL," which I think aptly describes the way that, against my will in some cases, I summon charity and do the child care.
Now, in the film's mythology, the tyranny of evil men turns (perhaps! we'll need a sequel!) into the shepherd, guiding the weak. We NEVER know who the righteous man is, nor do we (perhaps) see this path of his, of which it is spoken.
I, of course, have a "righteous man" mythology, and I have on numerous occasions named a climbing route, "Path of the Righteous Man." Indeed.
The question was raised: isn't that fundamentalist? Let us investigate.
**************************
Now I know what you're thinking...fundamentalist? WTF are you talking about?
Two posts ago, I set up what is "true" against what is "false" or "less true." My demands for truth value, unrepressedness and intelligence and insight, were set up against repression, euphemism and what in the Nietzschean sense one could call "Christianity." Those are my regular foes, and I miss no opportunity to give them a firm face-stomp.
Fundamentalism relies essentially on the philosophical basis of all human conflict, which is the establishment of an "us" and a "them." "WE," whoever we are, are the chosen people, or the enlightened few, or whatever it is. "WE" are the people who are right, and "THEY" are the infidels, or the masses, or the idiots, or whatever. That's the fundy formula and you can even see it in debates over "which school of yoga is the best one?" and such. This kind of thinking is EVERYWHERE, no matter how tongue in cheek it is.
Now, Nietzsche was NOT a fascist, even though his "superman" (which actually in German says "overman," to say nothing of the fact that Nietzsche says that the overman must UNDER GO) is often read by pop culture idiots as a type of proto-fascist who is "better" than other people.
Nonetheless, my face-stomp on my (rhetorical) enemies is full of Nietzschean rhetoric, as you saw two posts ago. What I want is the empowerment to ACTUALLY CHANGE thinking, to swerve culture toward greater (what I call) ACCURACY, greater alignment with what is ACTUALLY true (this usually ends up in a quasi-FIGHT CLUB imagining of nomadic tribes, and we all know how FIGHT CLUB ends, yeah?).
But the world cannot be changed; as Jules puts it in the same conversation with Ringo, "Now, maybe it's the WORLD that's evil...and I like that, but that shit ain't the truth!" No, the world isn't evil--it's full of half-thought, inherited traditions that don't change with time, and so our daily practice is full of ridiculous inherited inaccuracies we don't think about, which makes our lives full of other people's stupidities--but it is, if you will, "stupid." We want timeless truths, but time IS reality, and its passage ruins ALL metaphysical systems.
In short, we want truth without mortality, and we can't find it. It's impossible.
But instead of accepting this, we establish more and more intricate systems of ignoring what is true, and then we get irritated that our systems fail, that there is a gaping hole of scary darkness at the center of everything. YOU are that darkness, mortal human; own it and the world changes. Demons to angels, like they say in JACOB'S LADDER.
Anyway, I was talking about fascism and/or fundamentalism, right?
I have fascist tendencies. This isn't shocking. I'm sure you do, too. My fascist tendencies come down to this: in the name of "greater reality," I'm sure that, if I were made Lord of the Universe, I would do in repression, stupidity, and Christianity (again, in the Nietzschean definition of that word). See? US and THEM. Do them in. In the name of "greater reality." You choose a goal and then you move the obstacles, forgetting, as all rhetoricians do, that those obstacles have HUMAN CONTENTS.
And suddenly we're Stalin. It's that easy and it's that spooky.
If the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was NOT as the conspiracy theorists say, an inside job, then we also saw this in that case. Attack economic domination, cultural imperialism, right? Well, apparently three thousand lives were worth it, right? And in return, we stormed a whole lot of civilians into the sand.
Us and Them.
*************************
Che famously said that, "Every revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love." This, I'm certain, is true. Sure. One has to love one's ideal, one's great idea. But forgetting that the obstacles to that idea are human, results in tragic consequences. I would add that every (revolutionary) is also motivated by great feelings of (one's own) pain.
The more distance I was able to get from Catholicism, the mellower I got. The more distance I was able to get from repression and from American television, the more mellow I became. When those exposures kicked back up, the seeds burst into full bloom and we got a mix of interesting things: anger, keen analysis, revolutionary idealism. All at once. In 2002 I taught a course on radical gender politics which was really my own inner life, transformed into academic course material. I did that sort of thing for YEARS, and now much of my teaching CV looks like the history of someone else.
The invention of the warrior costume, as I called it in the now-vanquished blog post, was an act of self-possession. 2003-2007 is its heyday. Now, when I retreat to it in the name of comfort from seventh series, it is an overt costume, but like the old jean jacket you love and can't give away, it still feels good to wear it. It doesn't keep the changes of seventh series from happening, but it makes me feel "protected" from the intensity of those changes. There is still panic and the feeling of dying associated with seventh series.
There is substantial jealousy of people who get to practice a lot, and who get teachers guiding them through asana practice. There is substantial jealousy of the guy who returned to rock climbing, an hour south of here. How come these people get to do what the warrior soul in me CRAVES, the activities that it associates itself with, which it CALLS ITS OWN?
And as part of that, who in their right fucking mind would envy what I HAVE NOW?
Always with me (as Yoda would put it; is it any accident that he's called that?) it is the case: I do not want what I have, and I want what I do not. Dude, I have an ADVANCED PRACTICE right now. Its major characteristic is that I have to practice when I don't want to and that I have to do practices that I don't want to. Compared to seventh series, Kapotasana is about as difficult as putting pants on.
I have acquired new climbing gear (after losing mine to a stupidity incident in February) and it lives in the closet with the rest of my gear. What was $200 originally, four years ago, is now $130 from Ebay. When I see a crack of permission and capability, I shall return.
The big book of Vinyasa Yoga (with its BOW sequence) is on the way, twelve bucks from an Amazon seller. Must see what Grimmly is taking big doses of these days.
In 90 minutes I'll give a lecture on the early avant-gardes of the 20th century, as part of my beloved course on Dada, the coolest art movement in the history of TIME. Yes, I'm biased; sue me. This course always provides comfort and fun.
Seventh series remains very stout; I'm getting used to it, and at least now I can CONCEIVE of returning to past activities, of being someone ON TOP OF a seventh series practitioner. At the start, seventh series is ALL YOU DO; you don't even FEED yourself.
It's still bigger than I am; I'm still underwater with it; I have not broken the surface all month.
Yes, I wrote, posted and deleted the post which was prior to this one, and no, I don't feel in the least bad about it. Blogger had lost (through a miskey) the post I'd written BEFORE that, and then I wrote a bitter followup which will now be replaced by this. Such drama, and all I have is a keyboard! Shucks!
Week four sees more squiggling, less crying (yes, seriously), more looking around, even shades of what MIGHT be a smile (Jennifer sees many more of these instances than I do).
There had been what I call "colick-ish" behavior for a couple nights--real live "I'm dying" howling, inconsolable screaming-type crying, for FOUR HOURS, and so we figured we had a colicky baby, which is just pure hell for six weeks to three months, and so we steeled for it, but there hasn't been a "colickish" episode since then (thank the freakin' STARS).
Right now baby is about four feet to my left, in a crib, hanging out and wiggling around without howling. If he can get used to being peacefully alive without crying for human contact (and I mean ON YOUR LAP kinda contact), then this will be a MAJOR development for us all. Man, it is HARD to do things like grade, prep your class, cook food, etc, with a baby that needs CONSTANTLY to be in hand.
My asana practice these days is a Saturday morning and Tuesday evening vinyasa class. Power yoga, basically. My home practice has upgraded (hahaha!) from first and a smattering of second, to seventh series all the time. I did a most of Primary yesterday that cracked SO MUCH tension out of my hips that I was in "walk like an old person" agony for SEVEN HOURS.
I have no nostalgia whatsoever---NONE--for the first week or three of seventh series. My memories of that period are that there was PURE and UNADULTERATED hellfire, but with cuteness and affection. VERY complicated emotional affect. Even now it hurts me to REMEMBER the pain I was in during those weeks--a cold, deadly sleeplessness, incoherence, constant child screaming so that J and I couldn't hear each other speak, pacing back and forth with armload of screaming demon, randomness of child behavior, colickish screaming we couldn't solve, 4 am diaper changes (that hasn't changed yet; we've just gotten used to it), on and on and on.
NO FUCKING WAY is that going to get some kind of "it was great" nostalgia. I will be fucking DEAD before I will sell out to that bullshit sentimentality.
I mean, yes, the emotional affect is complicated and multiple, and therefore chewy and interesting, but what I really object to is the way that those rough days get frosted over with pink fluffy "awwww" sentimentality. They were HELLISH AGONY, people, let's not forget that EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE SUPER CUTE. It's like GREMLINS or something. It wasn't a horror movie, but it wasn't kiddy animation either. It was like Friday the 13th, done IN kiddy animation. Jason meets the Teletubbies, or something like that.
**************************
"I'm tryin', Ringo, I'm tryin' REAL..HARD...to be the shepherd!" This citation LIVES in this experience. What does the shepherd do, as Jules has put it? Let us have a look:
"Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children."
Yeah, of course a videostore clerk named Quentin has rewritten the original text (better look out for that last sentence of Revelations, motherfucker!), but there is telling accuracy here: it very much DOES NOT SAY "he who feels the goodwill" or "he who has the goodwill to spare." It says, "IN THE NAME OF CHARITY AND GOODWILL," which I think aptly describes the way that, against my will in some cases, I summon charity and do the child care.
Now, in the film's mythology, the tyranny of evil men turns (perhaps! we'll need a sequel!) into the shepherd, guiding the weak. We NEVER know who the righteous man is, nor do we (perhaps) see this path of his, of which it is spoken.
I, of course, have a "righteous man" mythology, and I have on numerous occasions named a climbing route, "Path of the Righteous Man." Indeed.
The question was raised: isn't that fundamentalist? Let us investigate.
**************************
Now I know what you're thinking...fundamentalist? WTF are you talking about?
Two posts ago, I set up what is "true" against what is "false" or "less true." My demands for truth value, unrepressedness and intelligence and insight, were set up against repression, euphemism and what in the Nietzschean sense one could call "Christianity." Those are my regular foes, and I miss no opportunity to give them a firm face-stomp.
Fundamentalism relies essentially on the philosophical basis of all human conflict, which is the establishment of an "us" and a "them." "WE," whoever we are, are the chosen people, or the enlightened few, or whatever it is. "WE" are the people who are right, and "THEY" are the infidels, or the masses, or the idiots, or whatever. That's the fundy formula and you can even see it in debates over "which school of yoga is the best one?" and such. This kind of thinking is EVERYWHERE, no matter how tongue in cheek it is.
Now, Nietzsche was NOT a fascist, even though his "superman" (which actually in German says "overman," to say nothing of the fact that Nietzsche says that the overman must UNDER GO) is often read by pop culture idiots as a type of proto-fascist who is "better" than other people.
Nonetheless, my face-stomp on my (rhetorical) enemies is full of Nietzschean rhetoric, as you saw two posts ago. What I want is the empowerment to ACTUALLY CHANGE thinking, to swerve culture toward greater (what I call) ACCURACY, greater alignment with what is ACTUALLY true (this usually ends up in a quasi-FIGHT CLUB imagining of nomadic tribes, and we all know how FIGHT CLUB ends, yeah?).
But the world cannot be changed; as Jules puts it in the same conversation with Ringo, "Now, maybe it's the WORLD that's evil...and I like that, but that shit ain't the truth!" No, the world isn't evil--it's full of half-thought, inherited traditions that don't change with time, and so our daily practice is full of ridiculous inherited inaccuracies we don't think about, which makes our lives full of other people's stupidities--but it is, if you will, "stupid." We want timeless truths, but time IS reality, and its passage ruins ALL metaphysical systems.
In short, we want truth without mortality, and we can't find it. It's impossible.
But instead of accepting this, we establish more and more intricate systems of ignoring what is true, and then we get irritated that our systems fail, that there is a gaping hole of scary darkness at the center of everything. YOU are that darkness, mortal human; own it and the world changes. Demons to angels, like they say in JACOB'S LADDER.
Anyway, I was talking about fascism and/or fundamentalism, right?
I have fascist tendencies. This isn't shocking. I'm sure you do, too. My fascist tendencies come down to this: in the name of "greater reality," I'm sure that, if I were made Lord of the Universe, I would do in repression, stupidity, and Christianity (again, in the Nietzschean definition of that word). See? US and THEM. Do them in. In the name of "greater reality." You choose a goal and then you move the obstacles, forgetting, as all rhetoricians do, that those obstacles have HUMAN CONTENTS.
And suddenly we're Stalin. It's that easy and it's that spooky.
If the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was NOT as the conspiracy theorists say, an inside job, then we also saw this in that case. Attack economic domination, cultural imperialism, right? Well, apparently three thousand lives were worth it, right? And in return, we stormed a whole lot of civilians into the sand.
Us and Them.
*************************
Che famously said that, "Every revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love." This, I'm certain, is true. Sure. One has to love one's ideal, one's great idea. But forgetting that the obstacles to that idea are human, results in tragic consequences. I would add that every (revolutionary) is also motivated by great feelings of (one's own) pain.
The more distance I was able to get from Catholicism, the mellower I got. The more distance I was able to get from repression and from American television, the more mellow I became. When those exposures kicked back up, the seeds burst into full bloom and we got a mix of interesting things: anger, keen analysis, revolutionary idealism. All at once. In 2002 I taught a course on radical gender politics which was really my own inner life, transformed into academic course material. I did that sort of thing for YEARS, and now much of my teaching CV looks like the history of someone else.
The invention of the warrior costume, as I called it in the now-vanquished blog post, was an act of self-possession. 2003-2007 is its heyday. Now, when I retreat to it in the name of comfort from seventh series, it is an overt costume, but like the old jean jacket you love and can't give away, it still feels good to wear it. It doesn't keep the changes of seventh series from happening, but it makes me feel "protected" from the intensity of those changes. There is still panic and the feeling of dying associated with seventh series.
There is substantial jealousy of people who get to practice a lot, and who get teachers guiding them through asana practice. There is substantial jealousy of the guy who returned to rock climbing, an hour south of here. How come these people get to do what the warrior soul in me CRAVES, the activities that it associates itself with, which it CALLS ITS OWN?
And as part of that, who in their right fucking mind would envy what I HAVE NOW?
Always with me (as Yoda would put it; is it any accident that he's called that?) it is the case: I do not want what I have, and I want what I do not. Dude, I have an ADVANCED PRACTICE right now. Its major characteristic is that I have to practice when I don't want to and that I have to do practices that I don't want to. Compared to seventh series, Kapotasana is about as difficult as putting pants on.
I have acquired new climbing gear (after losing mine to a stupidity incident in February) and it lives in the closet with the rest of my gear. What was $200 originally, four years ago, is now $130 from Ebay. When I see a crack of permission and capability, I shall return.
The big book of Vinyasa Yoga (with its BOW sequence) is on the way, twelve bucks from an Amazon seller. Must see what Grimmly is taking big doses of these days.
In 90 minutes I'll give a lecture on the early avant-gardes of the 20th century, as part of my beloved course on Dada, the coolest art movement in the history of TIME. Yes, I'm biased; sue me. This course always provides comfort and fun.
Seventh series remains very stout; I'm getting used to it, and at least now I can CONCEIVE of returning to past activities, of being someone ON TOP OF a seventh series practitioner. At the start, seventh series is ALL YOU DO; you don't even FEED yourself.
It's still bigger than I am; I'm still underwater with it; I have not broken the surface all month.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
An ANSWER even if it's wrong: it works!
Why thank you readership! That was downright kind of all of you, ahhh. Like a cool shower on a hot sweaty summer day.
In any case:
I don't have much time to write (didn't stop me from penning a book last time, but hey, that's the advantage of working in the academy, you type fast), but basically here is the story.
I got a big, fat, chunky baby book from two yoga friends online, and they deserve big fat thank you's which will be done more formally later.
In part, this book says, "You might be raising a fussy or colicky child. Here's how you tell."
And it has ELEVEN SYMPTOMS, phrased in things that actual parents have said, as to how you know you have a what is now (politically correctly, you see) called a "high needs" child.
There are things like "hyperactive, hypertonic" energy levels and phyical movement, and non-stop nursing, and unschedulability, and totally erratic sleep patterns.
Connor CLEARLY, and with NO DEBATE, fit EIGHT of those eleven categories as if they were the little cookie cutters from which he was made. AHA!!
**************
I felt intellectual fire ROAR to life behind my eyes. TURN YOUR MIND BACK ON.
Comprehension! Understanding! Handholds in this sheer, dark cliff!
Lion power lit me up EVERYWHERE, all systems on, sleep no more, fucking Godzilla emerging from the sea, from sleep, from letting the bad guys win.
Darkness and unthinking emotional stillness fell off like diaphanous illusion.
In a mirror's reflection and topless as usual in the summer, there was the flexing muscle of arms raised overhead, the roar announcing this arrival, the mane hanging, fluffy with humidity.
I HAVE RETURNED.
My intellectual capacity touches EVERYTHING I do and am; my identity does not exist without it. Yes, maybe that's narrow minded or not Zen enough, but I'd rather be myself than be comfortable and accepting. Life is challenge. I can climb this fucker. I am fury and determination and I will put creative parenting through its paces in mastering this child's "high needs." BRING IT.
For I have concepts now, ideas, thinking, processing, through which and alongside which I can put emotional releases and pressures; I am WHOLE again.
Bring the endorphins, also, on which this bodymind runs. Bring me obstacles and I will clear them. You, long deferred joy over there, yes, you.
I AM COMING FOR YOU AND YOU ARE MINE.
'NO' IS NOT AN ANSWER ANYMORE, NOT TO LIFE, NOT TO JOY, NOT TO ANYTHING. NOT EVER AGAIN.
My love is the dancer's grace of the warrior's charge. It is martial in character and it increases with challenge. It is dialectical and it struggles. Bring facepaint and armor! Drums! And let us take the world. This love puts its face in the viscera of the world and glories in it. Oh yes it does. And it will.
In any case:
I don't have much time to write (didn't stop me from penning a book last time, but hey, that's the advantage of working in the academy, you type fast), but basically here is the story.
I got a big, fat, chunky baby book from two yoga friends online, and they deserve big fat thank you's which will be done more formally later.
In part, this book says, "You might be raising a fussy or colicky child. Here's how you tell."
And it has ELEVEN SYMPTOMS, phrased in things that actual parents have said, as to how you know you have a what is now (politically correctly, you see) called a "high needs" child.
There are things like "hyperactive, hypertonic" energy levels and phyical movement, and non-stop nursing, and unschedulability, and totally erratic sleep patterns.
Connor CLEARLY, and with NO DEBATE, fit EIGHT of those eleven categories as if they were the little cookie cutters from which he was made. AHA!!
**************
I felt intellectual fire ROAR to life behind my eyes. TURN YOUR MIND BACK ON.
Comprehension! Understanding! Handholds in this sheer, dark cliff!
Lion power lit me up EVERYWHERE, all systems on, sleep no more, fucking Godzilla emerging from the sea, from sleep, from letting the bad guys win.
Darkness and unthinking emotional stillness fell off like diaphanous illusion.
In a mirror's reflection and topless as usual in the summer, there was the flexing muscle of arms raised overhead, the roar announcing this arrival, the mane hanging, fluffy with humidity.
I HAVE RETURNED.
My intellectual capacity touches EVERYTHING I do and am; my identity does not exist without it. Yes, maybe that's narrow minded or not Zen enough, but I'd rather be myself than be comfortable and accepting. Life is challenge. I can climb this fucker. I am fury and determination and I will put creative parenting through its paces in mastering this child's "high needs." BRING IT.
For I have concepts now, ideas, thinking, processing, through which and alongside which I can put emotional releases and pressures; I am WHOLE again.
Bring the endorphins, also, on which this bodymind runs. Bring me obstacles and I will clear them. You, long deferred joy over there, yes, you.
I AM COMING FOR YOU AND YOU ARE MINE.
'NO' IS NOT AN ANSWER ANYMORE, NOT TO LIFE, NOT TO JOY, NOT TO ANYTHING. NOT EVER AGAIN.
My love is the dancer's grace of the warrior's charge. It is martial in character and it increases with challenge. It is dialectical and it struggles. Bring facepaint and armor! Drums! And let us take the world. This love puts its face in the viscera of the world and glories in it. Oh yes it does. And it will.
Monday, June 22, 2009
The Law of Averages, on Baby Talk
Quickly, before I scare off all my readership ;-)
1. Why all the darkness?
All the darkness first because it's actually true, and second, because it is woefully understated in all the pregnancy/birth/kids literature I have ever scanned and it is TOTALLY understated in American media rhetoric. This discourse could USE some fucking darkness, to keep it accurate, and so I have obliged. Have you ever seen what ideologically mystifying NONSENSE "A Baby Story" is? The way they fucking censor EXACTLY what's miraculous and then kick in with the fucking piano music when they SHOULD be fixating on the stitches of the perineal tear and the fucking REALITY? FUCK THAT SHOW TO HOT DEATH.
2. But aren't you worried about spooking your readership or coming off like a psycho?
Sure, some, but not enough to fake the truth. Read my entries again; they will seem even-handed. I always try to include at least one entry of "sweet and adorable" amidst the holocaust. I'm not going to harm my kid or my partner; people who would think so are idiots. It is with DISCOURSE that I have a serious axe to grind; anyone who knows anything about my body politics and my experience with American Catholicism knows this (and I've written PLENTY and AT LENGTH about that, and so I think it should all be obvious).
3. But isn't it, just, you know, IMPOLITE to complain about newborns?
There are no sacred cows if you're going to tell the truth.
4. Don't you guys have cute, soft, squishy moments? Why can't we hear about those?
Sure, you can hear about those. What, the eye contact wasn't enough? The beginnings of cognition weren't enough? The fact that the kid slept all over my lap and shoulder while I watched THIEF OF BAGDAD three days ago? That's not enough? Are you sure you're not just looking for your own emotional reinforcement in my writing (and hint, that's a bad place to look for it; anyone who has to seek emotional security in someone else's writing...well, I'll let you call the therapist, ok)?
5. Can't you just say that your love is going to carry you through it?
Sure, I can say that, if I want to reduce my experience to a cute little aphorism that doesn't have anything to do with life daily lived. I have faith that this is true, but I love daily experience, I love REALITY, and that means I love the pain of being real and being daily. I'm not going to surrender what's real for some imaginary eye-in-the-sky nonsense about "I am being tested" or some post-lapsarian Christian bullshit.
6. Why don't you confess to us that really, it's your own weakness that results in the pain and anger?
Ah, FINALLY someone asks me a smart question. Yeah, about time, me interviewing myself, right? Yes, absolutely: I wasn't ready for pregnancy and a new kid; I wasn't. Not in that stupid emotional gender-stereotype American-TV generalization where "for men, intimacy means intercourse," fuck that. I'm not THAT fucking stupid and reptilian, so go fuck yourself sideways for even thinking that for a nanosecond.
What I mean by not ready is that I wasn't prepared to really dedicate my quest to service. I'm an extroverted seeker and warrior. It is HARD for me to sit down and dedicate myself to service. What my partner and I did, in negotiating this, was to imagine ourselves intentionally exercising our weak links, our uncertainty, taking a big gamble and seeing if it would pay off. Sort of a test of the limits. We very much did NOT play it the "slave morality" way, where bullshit artists tell themselves, "Oh you need to give yourself to something bigger than you!" My exwife used to say that all the time, in her ego-defeating self-effacing life-hating Catholic rape-victim surrender of all intent.
FUCK SURRENDER. Life is warrior testing, even testing of weakness and fear. Jedi Knights, motherfucker, not Catholic fear. Sure, there's failure. "Remember your failure at the tree." Even Zarathustra gets mocked by a donkey. Sure, we're idiots sometimes, we fuck up, we overstate, we act too brashly, describe something too darkly, emphasize our pain, get ressentiment, feel the past again, ignite the seeds, live out past pain, waste our time. Sure, we do all of this. But we do NOT become fucking slaves who hate the life energy and power of the vivacious.
And YES, I have Nietzsche in my bone marrow. YES, I think his short "Homer's Contest" is some of the most accurate diagnosing of human nature EVER.
What was I talking about, now?
Yes, being ready, yes, right. No, I wasn't, I didn't realize how completely this would require me to sit still, to live with controlled denial of the powerful life urges, the desire to EXERCISE JOY. Who would fucking CONTROL AND LIMIT JOY? What fucking maniac does that? So yes, that was my test. DEFER JOY. It was hard, it was so, so hard. It still is, but I'm getting much better at it.
Do not struggle, do not wage the war for greater (Castanedan) power. Huh? Don't do what I feel I am MADE FOR? What denial is this? It was a sort of sage test, a Yoda test, a man-on-the-mountaintop test. To learn something powerful by precisely NOT exercising my strength, my power. Oh how that lion stormed the gates. I pounded the shore like a fucking tidal wave. Frustration-driven rage towered in me like a strike of flame from a mythological god.
Maybe, as Facebook tells me, I really AM Anakin Skywalker.
But I held it; I didn't act out, didn't fuck up my relationship, didn't hurt anyone, I held it, the uncontrollable force, the storm, the fire, the natural disaster force that is me, that lives in me, the Lion roar.
I realize (I've known this for years) that I can hurt people with language, and I try not to do that, but I know that I can wield words with some intensity. It can be a rush or it can be a stick in the eye.
There is no manifestation, no specific one, for this power. It's not like there will be a climactic battle (as I used to dream) or a certain outlet (climbing a 14,000 foot mountain taught me that). What you do, is what you do. The power remains, tapped but unending, undrainable, eternal. Or frustrated, and raging, but unerupting. The way the sun is always in storm but always pleasant on the skin when you first walk out into it. This is the nature of my power. It will be present in everything I do, and so I can't tell how it will manifest is raising this kid, but there's no question that it'll be there.
1. Why all the darkness?
All the darkness first because it's actually true, and second, because it is woefully understated in all the pregnancy/birth/kids literature I have ever scanned and it is TOTALLY understated in American media rhetoric. This discourse could USE some fucking darkness, to keep it accurate, and so I have obliged. Have you ever seen what ideologically mystifying NONSENSE "A Baby Story" is? The way they fucking censor EXACTLY what's miraculous and then kick in with the fucking piano music when they SHOULD be fixating on the stitches of the perineal tear and the fucking REALITY? FUCK THAT SHOW TO HOT DEATH.
2. But aren't you worried about spooking your readership or coming off like a psycho?
Sure, some, but not enough to fake the truth. Read my entries again; they will seem even-handed. I always try to include at least one entry of "sweet and adorable" amidst the holocaust. I'm not going to harm my kid or my partner; people who would think so are idiots. It is with DISCOURSE that I have a serious axe to grind; anyone who knows anything about my body politics and my experience with American Catholicism knows this (and I've written PLENTY and AT LENGTH about that, and so I think it should all be obvious).
3. But isn't it, just, you know, IMPOLITE to complain about newborns?
There are no sacred cows if you're going to tell the truth.
4. Don't you guys have cute, soft, squishy moments? Why can't we hear about those?
Sure, you can hear about those. What, the eye contact wasn't enough? The beginnings of cognition weren't enough? The fact that the kid slept all over my lap and shoulder while I watched THIEF OF BAGDAD three days ago? That's not enough? Are you sure you're not just looking for your own emotional reinforcement in my writing (and hint, that's a bad place to look for it; anyone who has to seek emotional security in someone else's writing...well, I'll let you call the therapist, ok)?
5. Can't you just say that your love is going to carry you through it?
Sure, I can say that, if I want to reduce my experience to a cute little aphorism that doesn't have anything to do with life daily lived. I have faith that this is true, but I love daily experience, I love REALITY, and that means I love the pain of being real and being daily. I'm not going to surrender what's real for some imaginary eye-in-the-sky nonsense about "I am being tested" or some post-lapsarian Christian bullshit.
6. Why don't you confess to us that really, it's your own weakness that results in the pain and anger?
Ah, FINALLY someone asks me a smart question. Yeah, about time, me interviewing myself, right? Yes, absolutely: I wasn't ready for pregnancy and a new kid; I wasn't. Not in that stupid emotional gender-stereotype American-TV generalization where "for men, intimacy means intercourse," fuck that. I'm not THAT fucking stupid and reptilian, so go fuck yourself sideways for even thinking that for a nanosecond.
What I mean by not ready is that I wasn't prepared to really dedicate my quest to service. I'm an extroverted seeker and warrior. It is HARD for me to sit down and dedicate myself to service. What my partner and I did, in negotiating this, was to imagine ourselves intentionally exercising our weak links, our uncertainty, taking a big gamble and seeing if it would pay off. Sort of a test of the limits. We very much did NOT play it the "slave morality" way, where bullshit artists tell themselves, "Oh you need to give yourself to something bigger than you!" My exwife used to say that all the time, in her ego-defeating self-effacing life-hating Catholic rape-victim surrender of all intent.
FUCK SURRENDER. Life is warrior testing, even testing of weakness and fear. Jedi Knights, motherfucker, not Catholic fear. Sure, there's failure. "Remember your failure at the tree." Even Zarathustra gets mocked by a donkey. Sure, we're idiots sometimes, we fuck up, we overstate, we act too brashly, describe something too darkly, emphasize our pain, get ressentiment, feel the past again, ignite the seeds, live out past pain, waste our time. Sure, we do all of this. But we do NOT become fucking slaves who hate the life energy and power of the vivacious.
And YES, I have Nietzsche in my bone marrow. YES, I think his short "Homer's Contest" is some of the most accurate diagnosing of human nature EVER.
What was I talking about, now?
Yes, being ready, yes, right. No, I wasn't, I didn't realize how completely this would require me to sit still, to live with controlled denial of the powerful life urges, the desire to EXERCISE JOY. Who would fucking CONTROL AND LIMIT JOY? What fucking maniac does that? So yes, that was my test. DEFER JOY. It was hard, it was so, so hard. It still is, but I'm getting much better at it.
Do not struggle, do not wage the war for greater (Castanedan) power. Huh? Don't do what I feel I am MADE FOR? What denial is this? It was a sort of sage test, a Yoda test, a man-on-the-mountaintop test. To learn something powerful by precisely NOT exercising my strength, my power. Oh how that lion stormed the gates. I pounded the shore like a fucking tidal wave. Frustration-driven rage towered in me like a strike of flame from a mythological god.
Maybe, as Facebook tells me, I really AM Anakin Skywalker.
But I held it; I didn't act out, didn't fuck up my relationship, didn't hurt anyone, I held it, the uncontrollable force, the storm, the fire, the natural disaster force that is me, that lives in me, the Lion roar.
I realize (I've known this for years) that I can hurt people with language, and I try not to do that, but I know that I can wield words with some intensity. It can be a rush or it can be a stick in the eye.
There is no manifestation, no specific one, for this power. It's not like there will be a climactic battle (as I used to dream) or a certain outlet (climbing a 14,000 foot mountain taught me that). What you do, is what you do. The power remains, tapped but unending, undrainable, eternal. Or frustrated, and raging, but unerupting. The way the sun is always in storm but always pleasant on the skin when you first walk out into it. This is the nature of my power. It will be present in everything I do, and so I can't tell how it will manifest is raising this kid, but there's no question that it'll be there.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Baby Talk, part 4
Yesterday saw daylight crying (pretty much all day) but then late night sleeping (say from 2 am ALL THE WAY TO 9! with of course feeding breaks). There is still no set schedule; there might be daytime screaming, there might be nighttime screaming. We might be up at 4 am, we might be asleep at 10 pm. The night might be a broken-up insomniac screamfest or it might be peaceful three-across-in-the-bed until dawn. No way to tell, no way to estimate.
************************
Essentially, I do not practice asana anymore. This morning at 6, with pinkish sunrise, longest day of the year, I thought, "Hey, the house is asleep, surely I can pull ninety minutes." But that kind of thinking is always possibly deception. That sleeping kid could wake up howling in 4 minutes, or 21 minutes, or 59 minutes, or 163 minutes. And no one can tell. So I went back to sleep for over two hours of quiet. It was great. I don't feel that I am clearing emotional peace and patience with the household, well enough yet to ask Jennifer to handle the kid and the household duties for 90 minutes. It feels overtly selfish and full of avoidance, and so I don't do it. But this is changing its character from self-sacrifice to something else. About which:
*************************
This whole pregnancy-newborn scenario is changing character from its early incarnation, "assault by Mongol hordes," toward becoming "the soil in which one grows." We got pregnant at the crack of September, on less than two weeks' effort. Let's see if we can do this. SHAZAM, said the gods and BAM, just like that, here's your kid at the end of May. A little over two weeks later, in September, the thirteen solid weeks of morning sickness began and all of our fun summer intimacy turned into pain management and that has not yet let up. Effort, change and surrender, unbroken, sustained, for ten months straight now. What joy? What intimacy? Hahahahahaha, any book that says this is less than pure hell is full of fucking lies. Anyway:
So my early experiences, all the way back to September, were all of the flavor that my life had been overtaken by burning, murdering Mongol hordes, who killed everything that I ever enjoyed, and turned my existence into a scorched-earth Anselm Kiefer painting. I'm not exaggerating my emotional pain IN THE LEAST.
But about three days ago (note: three days ago is HALFWAY THROUGH JUNE) I started to feel that this newborn care insomniac service, STILL with no joy, is more like the soil of my actual existence; it is TRUE in a way that I appreciate. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting against the couch, on the floor, watching sunlight and cloud-shadows pass over the front oak tree and the neighbors' roof, just sort of sitting and watching. I think there was the sound of crying, but I'm well used to that now. It occurred to me that this, to an outsider, would resemble relaxation. In a way, it was relaxation. Sure, my mind was turned off (I turn my mind off numerous times a day because waking intellectual consciousness is nothing but existential angst), and I was just hanging out pointlessly, but still, it actually served as relaxation.
It has begun to feel less like attack and death and murder and more like daily life, and it only took about ten months of sheer, non-stop agony for it to turn over.
****************************
We both hold the child through screaming fits, trying some position changes in order to change the character of the screaming. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can feed the child via pumped-milk-in-a-bottle or nighttime formula supplements (he gets inconsolably hungry, often about 1 am, and the pain of breastfeeding is TOO INTENSE to continue, so we supplement).
*****************************
This still can't be thought about, can't be intellectualized. I use my brain to plan lessons for school and to fill in the electronic gradebook, but in screaming fits and feeding and dealing with the kid, I turn it off. I actually say to myself, "Turn off" and then I do. Then it's all action and observation from that strange-but-now-familiar consciousness that is not mine, that has no voice inside me. Action and care with nothing else, no presence. No thinking, no reflection.
They say there is the active life and the contemplative life. Not so. That binary doesn't hold. Baby care is not active, and it is not contemplative. I do not act, because I often sit still, or pace the same pattern. I have dreams about climbing the three peaks of Colorado's Mount Massive, at 14,000 feet. I have dreams about setting routes on climbing walls. I do NOT, notably, have dreams about asana practice (what's an asana practice?). Activity only happens when I am asleep.
And I do not contemplate baby care. I never think about it. When I think, I get existential interrogations of the gods, all the gods in all the pantheons that have ever existed. And no answers. So fuck that. Turn off. Click. And then the thinking ends and peace returns.
There is some kind of consciousness, and it works for what it is needed. So be it. I don't think about it either, and I don't understand it and I don't need to. Sometimes I wonder if I could write an article under its influence, or practice asana under its influence, but I bet that even if I could, I wouldn't be aware of it.
The "seventh series," as some have called newborn care, is harder than any of Ashtanga's six sequences. I don't care what you practice or how often or under what conditions. Seventh series dwarfs it all. But this doesn't make its practitioners harder or more enlightened. There are no practitioners, when you get to seventh series. There aren't individuals any more. There isn't patience AND one who is patient, there isn't effort AND one who exerts.
************************
Essentially, I do not practice asana anymore. This morning at 6, with pinkish sunrise, longest day of the year, I thought, "Hey, the house is asleep, surely I can pull ninety minutes." But that kind of thinking is always possibly deception. That sleeping kid could wake up howling in 4 minutes, or 21 minutes, or 59 minutes, or 163 minutes. And no one can tell. So I went back to sleep for over two hours of quiet. It was great. I don't feel that I am clearing emotional peace and patience with the household, well enough yet to ask Jennifer to handle the kid and the household duties for 90 minutes. It feels overtly selfish and full of avoidance, and so I don't do it. But this is changing its character from self-sacrifice to something else. About which:
*************************
This whole pregnancy-newborn scenario is changing character from its early incarnation, "assault by Mongol hordes," toward becoming "the soil in which one grows." We got pregnant at the crack of September, on less than two weeks' effort. Let's see if we can do this. SHAZAM, said the gods and BAM, just like that, here's your kid at the end of May. A little over two weeks later, in September, the thirteen solid weeks of morning sickness began and all of our fun summer intimacy turned into pain management and that has not yet let up. Effort, change and surrender, unbroken, sustained, for ten months straight now. What joy? What intimacy? Hahahahahaha, any book that says this is less than pure hell is full of fucking lies. Anyway:
So my early experiences, all the way back to September, were all of the flavor that my life had been overtaken by burning, murdering Mongol hordes, who killed everything that I ever enjoyed, and turned my existence into a scorched-earth Anselm Kiefer painting. I'm not exaggerating my emotional pain IN THE LEAST.
But about three days ago (note: three days ago is HALFWAY THROUGH JUNE) I started to feel that this newborn care insomniac service, STILL with no joy, is more like the soil of my actual existence; it is TRUE in a way that I appreciate. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting against the couch, on the floor, watching sunlight and cloud-shadows pass over the front oak tree and the neighbors' roof, just sort of sitting and watching. I think there was the sound of crying, but I'm well used to that now. It occurred to me that this, to an outsider, would resemble relaxation. In a way, it was relaxation. Sure, my mind was turned off (I turn my mind off numerous times a day because waking intellectual consciousness is nothing but existential angst), and I was just hanging out pointlessly, but still, it actually served as relaxation.
It has begun to feel less like attack and death and murder and more like daily life, and it only took about ten months of sheer, non-stop agony for it to turn over.
****************************
We both hold the child through screaming fits, trying some position changes in order to change the character of the screaming. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can feed the child via pumped-milk-in-a-bottle or nighttime formula supplements (he gets inconsolably hungry, often about 1 am, and the pain of breastfeeding is TOO INTENSE to continue, so we supplement).
*****************************
This still can't be thought about, can't be intellectualized. I use my brain to plan lessons for school and to fill in the electronic gradebook, but in screaming fits and feeding and dealing with the kid, I turn it off. I actually say to myself, "Turn off" and then I do. Then it's all action and observation from that strange-but-now-familiar consciousness that is not mine, that has no voice inside me. Action and care with nothing else, no presence. No thinking, no reflection.
They say there is the active life and the contemplative life. Not so. That binary doesn't hold. Baby care is not active, and it is not contemplative. I do not act, because I often sit still, or pace the same pattern. I have dreams about climbing the three peaks of Colorado's Mount Massive, at 14,000 feet. I have dreams about setting routes on climbing walls. I do NOT, notably, have dreams about asana practice (what's an asana practice?). Activity only happens when I am asleep.
And I do not contemplate baby care. I never think about it. When I think, I get existential interrogations of the gods, all the gods in all the pantheons that have ever existed. And no answers. So fuck that. Turn off. Click. And then the thinking ends and peace returns.
There is some kind of consciousness, and it works for what it is needed. So be it. I don't think about it either, and I don't understand it and I don't need to. Sometimes I wonder if I could write an article under its influence, or practice asana under its influence, but I bet that even if I could, I wouldn't be aware of it.
The "seventh series," as some have called newborn care, is harder than any of Ashtanga's six sequences. I don't care what you practice or how often or under what conditions. Seventh series dwarfs it all. But this doesn't make its practitioners harder or more enlightened. There are no practitioners, when you get to seventh series. There aren't individuals any more. There isn't patience AND one who is patient, there isn't effort AND one who exerts.
Friday, June 19, 2009
"There is no practice" meditation
I've practiced some form of ashtanga yoga asana maybe 6 times in the past three weeks. Two partial Intermediates that I remember, one full Primary, two partial Primaries (today included). Basically, I think the asana guideline for having a kid is this: you won't practice for a few weeks, not regularly. Maybe not for a few months. Know this going in and you won't have to deal with some hard non-attachment later.
*********************************
Sore in the trapezius on the right side this morning: one of those random "I slept on it wrong" sensations. Electricity and touchiness. Sun salutations, and standing to Parsvottanasana, with electric OW in every updog. Soreness in twists, soreness in Prasaritas. No good. 3 bridges and a short 10-5 closing.
But then longish rest after, repeating to self, "There is no practice, there is no sequence of poses, there is no series."
Not quite of the "life is an illusion" variety; more of the "this is for the repetition and does not elsewise matter" variety. Same meditation I've been doing since the kid was born.
To make the practice of asana quite the same as vacuuming the rug. Wake up, do it, check it off the list, go to the next thing. I find that I do NOT want to say, "It's the best part of my day," I VERY MUCH do not wish to say that.
But Patrick, really, isn't this just because you had an off morning? Surely if you'd gotten some backbending development you wouldn't be saying this, eh? Yes, probably, in truth, but this meditation comes to nothing if I can't ALSO say it for THOSE days, and particularly for those.
*****************************
The kid slept like a real live textbook baby last night: wake every 2 hours, feed, go back to sleep. It was probably the most authentic night's sleep the three of us have had since May 30. This, of course, could be as random as any of the other behaviors, but we shall hope that it is not.
*****************************
I'm not giving up on the campus visit gig that I had in May, but I've heard nothing and so am setting the fall's intention on still being here: 2 big lecture classes, one grad theory class, two yoga classes to teach per week. Saturday morning vinyasa, daycare, and low but steady full-time paycheck through December. Currently the plan is that I will do a few days daycare in the spring (Jan to May) and teach two classes adjunct, and I've been doing that for five years now and make twice as much money as when I started, which is actually getting into "enough to live on" territory.
For all of the stress I have this late spring, I do NOT have money stress. The double classes over the summer, combined with the final "full time" paycheck in May, have gotten me out of knife-edge loan repayment territory for at least June and July, and supplemental summer pay should carry me into September, when full-time pay returns.
The place where I teach as an adjunct has an OK to run a full-time assistant prof search in art history next year. I would be inside candidate for such a position.
So life is ok. If I can grok "there is no practice," it will always be fine, even if I never pass Kapotasana as long as I live.
*********************************
Sore in the trapezius on the right side this morning: one of those random "I slept on it wrong" sensations. Electricity and touchiness. Sun salutations, and standing to Parsvottanasana, with electric OW in every updog. Soreness in twists, soreness in Prasaritas. No good. 3 bridges and a short 10-5 closing.
But then longish rest after, repeating to self, "There is no practice, there is no sequence of poses, there is no series."
Not quite of the "life is an illusion" variety; more of the "this is for the repetition and does not elsewise matter" variety. Same meditation I've been doing since the kid was born.
To make the practice of asana quite the same as vacuuming the rug. Wake up, do it, check it off the list, go to the next thing. I find that I do NOT want to say, "It's the best part of my day," I VERY MUCH do not wish to say that.
But Patrick, really, isn't this just because you had an off morning? Surely if you'd gotten some backbending development you wouldn't be saying this, eh? Yes, probably, in truth, but this meditation comes to nothing if I can't ALSO say it for THOSE days, and particularly for those.
*****************************
The kid slept like a real live textbook baby last night: wake every 2 hours, feed, go back to sleep. It was probably the most authentic night's sleep the three of us have had since May 30. This, of course, could be as random as any of the other behaviors, but we shall hope that it is not.
*****************************
I'm not giving up on the campus visit gig that I had in May, but I've heard nothing and so am setting the fall's intention on still being here: 2 big lecture classes, one grad theory class, two yoga classes to teach per week. Saturday morning vinyasa, daycare, and low but steady full-time paycheck through December. Currently the plan is that I will do a few days daycare in the spring (Jan to May) and teach two classes adjunct, and I've been doing that for five years now and make twice as much money as when I started, which is actually getting into "enough to live on" territory.
For all of the stress I have this late spring, I do NOT have money stress. The double classes over the summer, combined with the final "full time" paycheck in May, have gotten me out of knife-edge loan repayment territory for at least June and July, and supplemental summer pay should carry me into September, when full-time pay returns.
The place where I teach as an adjunct has an OK to run a full-time assistant prof search in art history next year. I would be inside candidate for such a position.
So life is ok. If I can grok "there is no practice," it will always be fine, even if I never pass Kapotasana as long as I live.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Brief Baby Talk part 3
Last night from 1:30 to 3 am the boy and I were pacing up and down the house trying to earn sleep for everyone else who's here, and I was talking about an exhibit of human hair that I'd seen at the Contemporary Art museum in Chicago, and how one always needs historical context to understand a piece--so said hair piece (ha!) could be about ethnicity or even global capitalism, really. It could even be a formalist exercise in minimalist seriality. This is the sort of thing I have on tap at 2 am.
**************************
An official depressing practice yesterday: a Kapo and hangbacks that belong more to January than to this weather, and while I did finally get a full feet-flat bind on both sides of Pasasana, my backbending acts as if I've not done four months of work on it. Le sigh, as they say. Householding or backbends? Which do you want? Both, of course. So back to the blackboard.
*****************************
Sometimes the boy will stop the regular crying-or-asleep show and open his eyes in dim light and just hang out and look around. I swear that last night he was moving his head to follow the movements of mine (that's advanced behavior for a 2-week old, if it's true). The silent beginnings of cognition. MMmmmmmHHmmmmmm.
******************************
Later today I give the third of four tests for my night class in Contemporary Art. That class ends on Wednesday the 24. Then I get Monday nights free for the Intermediate ashtanga show again.
******************************
Yesterday I had a complicated realization, which I'm sure I will phrase badly here, in talking to Jennifer (who is marvelous, who is always marvelous). Since about mid-pregnancy, there's been a feeling of "threat" in all of this, very much as if I'm losing some serious part of my identity and it's not being replaced with anything. Like falling into the void, or getting aphasia, an effacing, a vanishing, a non-consensual surrender. It's had me pretty antsy for a few months.
I said yesterday that what worries me about newborn care is that I can't THINK about it, it has no process, no philosophy, no MIND in it. She said, well yes, that's how it is, that's what it is. And as this conversation went on, I realized that there is mind in it, but a mind that is also assaulted by it in a way. For example: sleep is never regular. Not even the child's sleep is regular. And so the idea of "schedules" is completely impossible. I have breakfast, for example, anywhere between 3 and 11 am. No more specific scheduling can possibly be imagined.
But I can't let it all just go to anarchic hell, because the child needs changing, and I need to remember how to do that. I need to speak English because my voice seems soothing. So I can't just "jump into the imaginary," as French theory would have it, I can't just disappear into the full opacity of the "thermal sequence" in Grandrieux's film LA VIE NOUVELLE, for example. Ok, so there is some left-brain scheduling, task-mastering, tending, ordering.
But at the same time, and much louder, much more the heart of the experience, there is inchoate, swirling chaos, everywhere. There are body fluids and eye goo and emotions and heavily affective crying and screaming, and PRIOR to any "dealing" with that is the pure, thick, REALITY of it all. And this happens alongside a stability-challenging long-term insomnia; it is an INTENSE derangement of the rational mind.
Now I've always valorized bodies and affect and all that, and particularly in my avant-garde film class, because from Surrealist desublimation to the new intense work coming from France in the first half of this decade, the SENSORIUM has become important again, just like in "primitivist" film theory. But that sensorium happens in a movie theater (or at home in front of the monitor), and so it is able to interact DIALECTICALLY with "waking consciousness," and from there, the trip is on.
THIS experience does NOT interact dialectically, like that. It disables, upturns, possesses, takes over, waking daily life SO MASSIVELY that one struggles to throw rationality at it. It's like falling down stairs: for a second or two, you are pure disorientation, struggling for homeostatic balance! Then it's over and you're in a pile or you're standing, and it's over. Newborn care is like falling downstairs FOR TWO WEEKS. It is HUGELY disorienting, demanding, and it completely subverts the very rationality which provides any structure for it.
Sometimes I act without my head, and it's not a trance, I'm not sure what it is. I'm "not there" to process it. This might sound good, it might sound like a kind of samadhi, but it feels like a kind of death, complete with terror. What I do is to provide loving kindness (that's what we do all day long now), but I don't do it with my mind, which gives me anxiety. I mean, I guess I should trust it, since the vibes are good, but who is acting? You know? I feel myself rising, acting, I feel emotions (frustration, appreciation of cuteness, etc) but I don't have "my voice" in my head. The body acts and there's a selfhood, a subjectivity, but I DON'T KNOW WHOSE IT IS.
**************************
An official depressing practice yesterday: a Kapo and hangbacks that belong more to January than to this weather, and while I did finally get a full feet-flat bind on both sides of Pasasana, my backbending acts as if I've not done four months of work on it. Le sigh, as they say. Householding or backbends? Which do you want? Both, of course. So back to the blackboard.
*****************************
Sometimes the boy will stop the regular crying-or-asleep show and open his eyes in dim light and just hang out and look around. I swear that last night he was moving his head to follow the movements of mine (that's advanced behavior for a 2-week old, if it's true). The silent beginnings of cognition. MMmmmmmHHmmmmmm.
******************************
Later today I give the third of four tests for my night class in Contemporary Art. That class ends on Wednesday the 24. Then I get Monday nights free for the Intermediate ashtanga show again.
******************************
Yesterday I had a complicated realization, which I'm sure I will phrase badly here, in talking to Jennifer (who is marvelous, who is always marvelous). Since about mid-pregnancy, there's been a feeling of "threat" in all of this, very much as if I'm losing some serious part of my identity and it's not being replaced with anything. Like falling into the void, or getting aphasia, an effacing, a vanishing, a non-consensual surrender. It's had me pretty antsy for a few months.
I said yesterday that what worries me about newborn care is that I can't THINK about it, it has no process, no philosophy, no MIND in it. She said, well yes, that's how it is, that's what it is. And as this conversation went on, I realized that there is mind in it, but a mind that is also assaulted by it in a way. For example: sleep is never regular. Not even the child's sleep is regular. And so the idea of "schedules" is completely impossible. I have breakfast, for example, anywhere between 3 and 11 am. No more specific scheduling can possibly be imagined.
But I can't let it all just go to anarchic hell, because the child needs changing, and I need to remember how to do that. I need to speak English because my voice seems soothing. So I can't just "jump into the imaginary," as French theory would have it, I can't just disappear into the full opacity of the "thermal sequence" in Grandrieux's film LA VIE NOUVELLE, for example. Ok, so there is some left-brain scheduling, task-mastering, tending, ordering.
But at the same time, and much louder, much more the heart of the experience, there is inchoate, swirling chaos, everywhere. There are body fluids and eye goo and emotions and heavily affective crying and screaming, and PRIOR to any "dealing" with that is the pure, thick, REALITY of it all. And this happens alongside a stability-challenging long-term insomnia; it is an INTENSE derangement of the rational mind.
Now I've always valorized bodies and affect and all that, and particularly in my avant-garde film class, because from Surrealist desublimation to the new intense work coming from France in the first half of this decade, the SENSORIUM has become important again, just like in "primitivist" film theory. But that sensorium happens in a movie theater (or at home in front of the monitor), and so it is able to interact DIALECTICALLY with "waking consciousness," and from there, the trip is on.
THIS experience does NOT interact dialectically, like that. It disables, upturns, possesses, takes over, waking daily life SO MASSIVELY that one struggles to throw rationality at it. It's like falling down stairs: for a second or two, you are pure disorientation, struggling for homeostatic balance! Then it's over and you're in a pile or you're standing, and it's over. Newborn care is like falling downstairs FOR TWO WEEKS. It is HUGELY disorienting, demanding, and it completely subverts the very rationality which provides any structure for it.
Sometimes I act without my head, and it's not a trance, I'm not sure what it is. I'm "not there" to process it. This might sound good, it might sound like a kind of samadhi, but it feels like a kind of death, complete with terror. What I do is to provide loving kindness (that's what we do all day long now), but I don't do it with my mind, which gives me anxiety. I mean, I guess I should trust it, since the vibes are good, but who is acting? You know? I feel myself rising, acting, I feel emotions (frustration, appreciation of cuteness, etc) but I don't have "my voice" in my head. The body acts and there's a selfhood, a subjectivity, but I DON'T KNOW WHOSE IT IS.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Ok ok ok, two cents on putting your foot behind your head.
Not that people have been asking me, specifically, but I think every ashtangi has to put down at least one full post about this, as we wrestle with this pose.
Now, the only pose where I am *supposed* to, perhaps, do foot-behind-head is Supta Kurmasana, because my last classically "given" pose is Kapotasana. So right off, we are in experimentation territory, let that be said.
The first time I put a foot behind my head was the fall of 2006, I think. I'd gone to a morning intro Ashtanga class and then a 2-hour intro-to-all-of-Primary workshop, back to back, led by the same teacher. When we did Supta Kurmasana, I decided to try sitting up and puttin' the left foot back, and I got it back there, hands off. Whoohoo. I was pretty cranked.
Immediately the neck pressure and low back pressures were HUGE. This is the first thing that I think generally happens to all FBH yogis.
The weight of the foot, which is ACTUALLY the unwillingness of hip fascia to let you have a forward bend this deep, will crank you over toward your leg, rounding the back, and perhaps even injuring the spinal flexors all the way from the sacrum to the cervical.
What I found is that I had to engage the spinal flexors in the low back VERY powerfully to maintain the foot behind my head, and also that I had to as powerfully look up and back, to keep the "socket" of the neck round so that the leg would fit "in" it, because otherwise it would floop out and spring over my head.
So my gifts, early on in FBH, were external rotation of the hip, and the ability to get the knee well back of the armpit. Also, I had the flexibility of hamstrings to take the foot UP and OVER my head and then to guide the shin into the cervical crook (so no, I don't generally do the foot-to-ear answer-the-telephone game, although I do consider the ABILITY to do that a good indicator of whether I can FBH at all on a given day).
My liabilities early on in FBH were that my spinal flexors and cervical spine in particular were not STRONG enough to hold the "weight" which both the leg itself (legs are heavy) and the hip's resistance to the pose, exerted on my back. Often I'd be sore the next day, and sometimes, for three days, from cranking back and trying to sit upright. More precisely the liability is that I was trying to force myself to make this position that way. The cervical spine doesn't like to do hip pushups.
I used to enter FBH by doing compass pose, taking the leg behind the arm, and then lifting the foot in the opposite hand, to stretch the hamstrings. A few months ago I realized that was just a crutch; if I have a limit in FBH, it's hip flexibility, not hamstrings.
My entry to FBH in the old days was something like this: bring the knee up to knee squeeze, take the foot out about 90 degrees in the opposite hand, swing the leg over the same-side arm. Lift the foot up, duck the head under, lower the calf to the cervical curve, crank back HARD with the same-side arm, shoulder, cervical spine, lower spinal flexors, and everything else that helps one sit up under weight. I realize now that this was pretty unsafe for the cervicals. If this is your FBH, STOP DOING THE POSE or at least put a hand or two up there to ease the pressure.
I almost always now enter FBH by taking the foot up and back, and getting the back of my knee as high up the arm as it'll go, and then sweeping the foot over my head (sometimes I duck a bit, because I know I have the strength now to undo it) and parking the meat of the calf on my back. A sweep of my head one way then the other, and it's there (somehow this still seems necessary; maybe it's a ritualistic Lion thing). If I'm really warm or flexible or both, I can take the foot up, swing the knee out, way out in external rotation, and then just swing the whole calf in onto my back/neck and take the pose.
The main difference between "early" and "current" FBH's is that in my current FBH's I rely on hip flexiblity that in my early FBH's I had to build by cranking back against the calf.
The leg doesn't stick on my shoulder as it passes, ever. That's never been a problem for me, which I think is because my legs are sick long. If I'm warm nowadays, I can put the back of the knee on top of my shoulder (practically touching my earlobe with my shinbone) without much trouble, with the foot out in front of me. It is also not uncommon for me to have a triangular slice of daylight between the back of my leg and the side of my body, when I'm taking the foot back for FBH.
Progress, as I measure it, in FBH, is that the shinbone moves from it's early position, which was tucked up into the notch at the base of my skull, and pressing there with weight, gradually DOWN the back. I still feel contact in my cervical spine, but the WEIGHT there has dramatically reduced with practice. The leg sits more still, doesn't want to "jump my head" and spring over, as much.
Eventually--not consistently yet, but coming--I can feel my same-side shoulder press against the calf of the leg as I do FBH. Also, the weight of the leg moves down from the cervical crook to the very start of the thoracic, and that means rib cage. The weight of the FBH is MUCH easier to support with the power of the intercostals and the abs, than it is with the meager musculature of the cords of the back of the neck. Once you feel this progression begin, you'll never want to go cervical again.
A final note: as that progression begins, sometimes it'll actually increase the cervical weight, which I have experienced as the FBH wanting to turn my head. Like this: let's say I have right FBH. The heel moves slightly toward the front of the room and the toes angle a bit back toward the back of the room. The shin twists a little, so that even as I have the shoulder parked in front of the top of the shin, the foot and bottom of the calf are pressing hard on the cords of the neck on the left side. This is the foot TRYING to slip over my head (boing!) but me not letting it. A slight, slight version of this is happening in my "upright" photo that I'll attach below.
Much of what I've written here is indebted to posters over at Karen's Place. I'll talk about Dwi Pada and Yoganidrasana in comments if anyone's interested. Happy FBH'ing!
P. S.: I've not said anything about sacroiliac issues, which are an important part of this discussion, because I've not had any, and so can't speak to them with any accuracy.
Now, the only pose where I am *supposed* to, perhaps, do foot-behind-head is Supta Kurmasana, because my last classically "given" pose is Kapotasana. So right off, we are in experimentation territory, let that be said.
The first time I put a foot behind my head was the fall of 2006, I think. I'd gone to a morning intro Ashtanga class and then a 2-hour intro-to-all-of-Primary workshop, back to back, led by the same teacher. When we did Supta Kurmasana, I decided to try sitting up and puttin' the left foot back, and I got it back there, hands off. Whoohoo. I was pretty cranked.
Immediately the neck pressure and low back pressures were HUGE. This is the first thing that I think generally happens to all FBH yogis.
The weight of the foot, which is ACTUALLY the unwillingness of hip fascia to let you have a forward bend this deep, will crank you over toward your leg, rounding the back, and perhaps even injuring the spinal flexors all the way from the sacrum to the cervical.
What I found is that I had to engage the spinal flexors in the low back VERY powerfully to maintain the foot behind my head, and also that I had to as powerfully look up and back, to keep the "socket" of the neck round so that the leg would fit "in" it, because otherwise it would floop out and spring over my head.
So my gifts, early on in FBH, were external rotation of the hip, and the ability to get the knee well back of the armpit. Also, I had the flexibility of hamstrings to take the foot UP and OVER my head and then to guide the shin into the cervical crook (so no, I don't generally do the foot-to-ear answer-the-telephone game, although I do consider the ABILITY to do that a good indicator of whether I can FBH at all on a given day).
My liabilities early on in FBH were that my spinal flexors and cervical spine in particular were not STRONG enough to hold the "weight" which both the leg itself (legs are heavy) and the hip's resistance to the pose, exerted on my back. Often I'd be sore the next day, and sometimes, for three days, from cranking back and trying to sit upright. More precisely the liability is that I was trying to force myself to make this position that way. The cervical spine doesn't like to do hip pushups.
I used to enter FBH by doing compass pose, taking the leg behind the arm, and then lifting the foot in the opposite hand, to stretch the hamstrings. A few months ago I realized that was just a crutch; if I have a limit in FBH, it's hip flexibility, not hamstrings.
My entry to FBH in the old days was something like this: bring the knee up to knee squeeze, take the foot out about 90 degrees in the opposite hand, swing the leg over the same-side arm. Lift the foot up, duck the head under, lower the calf to the cervical curve, crank back HARD with the same-side arm, shoulder, cervical spine, lower spinal flexors, and everything else that helps one sit up under weight. I realize now that this was pretty unsafe for the cervicals. If this is your FBH, STOP DOING THE POSE or at least put a hand or two up there to ease the pressure.
I almost always now enter FBH by taking the foot up and back, and getting the back of my knee as high up the arm as it'll go, and then sweeping the foot over my head (sometimes I duck a bit, because I know I have the strength now to undo it) and parking the meat of the calf on my back. A sweep of my head one way then the other, and it's there (somehow this still seems necessary; maybe it's a ritualistic Lion thing). If I'm really warm or flexible or both, I can take the foot up, swing the knee out, way out in external rotation, and then just swing the whole calf in onto my back/neck and take the pose.
The main difference between "early" and "current" FBH's is that in my current FBH's I rely on hip flexiblity that in my early FBH's I had to build by cranking back against the calf.
The leg doesn't stick on my shoulder as it passes, ever. That's never been a problem for me, which I think is because my legs are sick long. If I'm warm nowadays, I can put the back of the knee on top of my shoulder (practically touching my earlobe with my shinbone) without much trouble, with the foot out in front of me. It is also not uncommon for me to have a triangular slice of daylight between the back of my leg and the side of my body, when I'm taking the foot back for FBH.
Progress, as I measure it, in FBH, is that the shinbone moves from it's early position, which was tucked up into the notch at the base of my skull, and pressing there with weight, gradually DOWN the back. I still feel contact in my cervical spine, but the WEIGHT there has dramatically reduced with practice. The leg sits more still, doesn't want to "jump my head" and spring over, as much.
Eventually--not consistently yet, but coming--I can feel my same-side shoulder press against the calf of the leg as I do FBH. Also, the weight of the leg moves down from the cervical crook to the very start of the thoracic, and that means rib cage. The weight of the FBH is MUCH easier to support with the power of the intercostals and the abs, than it is with the meager musculature of the cords of the back of the neck. Once you feel this progression begin, you'll never want to go cervical again.
A final note: as that progression begins, sometimes it'll actually increase the cervical weight, which I have experienced as the FBH wanting to turn my head. Like this: let's say I have right FBH. The heel moves slightly toward the front of the room and the toes angle a bit back toward the back of the room. The shin twists a little, so that even as I have the shoulder parked in front of the top of the shin, the foot and bottom of the calf are pressing hard on the cords of the neck on the left side. This is the foot TRYING to slip over my head (boing!) but me not letting it. A slight, slight version of this is happening in my "upright" photo that I'll attach below.
Much of what I've written here is indebted to posters over at Karen's Place. I'll talk about Dwi Pada and Yoganidrasana in comments if anyone's interested. Happy FBH'ing!
P. S.: I've not said anything about sacroiliac issues, which are an important part of this discussion, because I've not had any, and so can't speak to them with any accuracy.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Wherein Patrick and son become late-night DJs explaining cultural theory.
Last night at 3:37 am I was recruited to pacify the boy (we take shifts). My strategies vary, and my throat's been getting sore, so at 3:37 I decided to keep my voice in the back of my throat, not as far down as turning it into gravel, but lower, significantly, than speaking volume day-to-day. Immediately, I thought I sounded like one of those 1970s late-night DJ characters (or else that I was doing my best Barry White impression), so I started playing it up.
Connor and I were the late-night radio voice for benzedrine-filled Beatniks and characters from Joan Didion novels. We saw the highways, we imagined the adventures, and we narrated the mellowness that we were to bring to these people as dawn came around. The characters' own fates, we left to them (how Pirandello!).
Then we went for a pacing walk around the house, to and fro over exactly the same steps, for about 20 minutes. Seeing that Connor's eyes were open, I began (in the same 1970s tone) telling him that vision was the privileged sense of Western culture, and then I explained oculocentrism, and from there, we got into the deployment of other senses, and we surfed over Menninghaus' book on DISGUST (which is linked largely to senses at proximity, like taste and smell), and then to Bakhtin and ideas on carnival (which can also, and intentionally, summon disgust, even celebrate it). Then Connor's mother arrived, and we explained to her where we'd been, and she said, I'm sure he's getting it.
I know fuck-all about lullabies, you see, and since I know that babies respond to tone rather than content, I figured we'd go for it with the benny beatniks and the Bakhtin.
Connor and I were the late-night radio voice for benzedrine-filled Beatniks and characters from Joan Didion novels. We saw the highways, we imagined the adventures, and we narrated the mellowness that we were to bring to these people as dawn came around. The characters' own fates, we left to them (how Pirandello!).
Then we went for a pacing walk around the house, to and fro over exactly the same steps, for about 20 minutes. Seeing that Connor's eyes were open, I began (in the same 1970s tone) telling him that vision was the privileged sense of Western culture, and then I explained oculocentrism, and from there, we got into the deployment of other senses, and we surfed over Menninghaus' book on DISGUST (which is linked largely to senses at proximity, like taste and smell), and then to Bakhtin and ideas on carnival (which can also, and intentionally, summon disgust, even celebrate it). Then Connor's mother arrived, and we explained to her where we'd been, and she said, I'm sure he's getting it.
I know fuck-all about lullabies, you see, and since I know that babies respond to tone rather than content, I figured we'd go for it with the benny beatniks and the Bakhtin.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Wherein Patrick becomes Salvador Dali and Hears Voices from the Past.
Wouldn't it be fun to chapter a blog like some old novel, maybe Tristram Shandy or even Richard Farina's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up To Me?
Yesterday I became Salvador Dali. Let me explain: long, long intense sleep deprivation, of the type Jennifer and I have been doing this past week, results in hallucinations. I was trying to sleep, and it wasn't working. Essentially, my mind remained awake and conscious while the brain raced hither and yon, dreaming-style, and I watched it all happen. Wild changes of content: trains, yoga, sexy dreams, flashbacks to elementary school chorus performances. I looked at a fold in the sheets and it turned into a baby face, and then blinked back into a fold of fabric. I asked myself, did that just turn into a baby face? And as I did so, it morphed again, and I think it winked at me or something; the mode was "YES SUCKA, I'M A FREAKIN BABY FACE! MUUUAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" It was pretty freakin' weird, so I came out to the main room and told Jennifer about it, and she said, yes, there are actually six baby faces in that room, glad to see you're having the same hallucinations that I am.
It's like a really light hit of acid, this newborn care gig. Anyway, to link this to Dali, you know about his "paranoia-critical method," yes? He tried to make himself willfully paranoid, to become suspect of surface appearances, and thus to generate aesthetic imagery. I, therefore, by sleep deprivation (another Surrealist technique for deregulating consciousness), have become Salvador Dali. Someone in the sixties once asked SD, "Mr. Dali, have you ever done DRUGS?" and Dali replied, in his classic third person presentation, "Salvador Dali IS DRUGS!"
********************************
I practiced today; Intermediate to Eka Pada Sirsasana, which didn't go (I can tell immediately, from the jump in, whether or not the foot will go back). I also did Intermediate to Karandavasana last Thursday and did get in a Friday Primary. This newborn care gig isn't TOTALLY stealing my practice. Today it was all about hip flexors, which from about Parsva Dhanurasana on, were SO INTENSE. Kapo A for five, no feet, Kapo B for five, and up. So be it. Thursday I bumped toes with middle fingers. It's more important to me now that I take ten breaths than that I get the heels. They are coming, or they're not. One thing I like about Connor is that he makes me care less about it.
*********************************
There are voices of past neurosis in my head, now that I have "family." It's the same dichotomy we see in culture these days: there are actual, real, various families, then there is the "nuclear family," a construction of discourse, and then there is the conservative construction "family values." Which and how many "families" do I have? Do I have "families" that I don't want?
I have two significant exposures to conservative Catholicism: one is that I was raised by "Easter-Christmas Catholics," who inherited all of Catholicism's body fear but none of its aggressive repression. The other is that I got married to the daughter of a hardcore, aggro Catholic in the nineties. Said daughter was a rape victim, and wasn't over those events at all, and so a six year no-sex "rut" in our seven years together would work like this: with one hand, she'd invite to "break the rut however I can" and with the other hand, she'd call me a rapist, for trying to break that rut. I'm not kidding, nor am I exaggerating.
What do these experiences have to do with family?
1. Being raised by people who are terrified of the body (its sickness, its lust, and all other aspects of its physicality) means that family is never sexualized, never empowered in that way. One grows up with the idea that it's only in dark corners, covered with secrecy and transgression, that one can experiment with one's newfound powers at puberty. One grows up thinking that only behind the most closed of doors can those secrets be accessed. There is no overt expression, and no love in it; it's middle-of-the-night super spy business, taken on the sly, never admitted to, never in daylight.
2. My ex-wife used to talk a lot about "when we have kids" and "when you're older you'll be more mature," in that inclusive way that seeks not to speak actually to me, but to a "me" that she wished that I were. It is, of course, virtually impossible to have kids when you don't have sex, ever. I tried pointing that out one day and got vicious rhetoric about how I "blame her" and so forth, in payment. Logic failed. Consistently. In any case, I learned that her family experiences regarding sexual experience had functioned as sort of a "come true" case for what I'd learned from my own parents. She had, true to life, taken it on the sly. And that sly taking it took the form of "get drunk and naked and I'll come over." That's what she got used to. How was she to know that that was negativity and trauma? No one told her any different. No one told her anything. She would fight ghosts, in arguing with me, which meant that really, she was never arguing with me. She was just talking to herself and making me the target of barbs that made no sense and didn't belong to me but which stuck anyway.
3. So "family," where bodies and specifically sexualized bodies, are concerned, is almost antithetical. In those two major experiences, anyway. So now that I have "family," which family and what kind, do I have? Do you see from where the neurosis of the past pokes its head up here?
4. Jennifer's family told her all about sexual machinery when she was 6. She's always been used to it, and totally lacks the "ssssshhhhhhh" mode of my upbringing. Totally lacks that fear and negativity. She respects the fact that I was brought up with that stuff and that I got soaked in it for years in the followup relationship, but doesn't see it as an issue for our own family. "You're over it and don't want to live it in our family, right? Then it's not a problem." True. She's brilliant. Pure affirmation; she's always been.
5. Our pregnancy was savage frustration for us, but pure service and provision for Connor. He has no genetic bad guys, wasn't breach, didn't have the cord wrapped around his neck, didn't have any complications. For him, the pregnancy was auto-pilot, smooth sailing. For us, solid morning sickness, late sciatica, a cold in the middle, pain of every kind, every month, all the time. Non-stop agony and frustration. But to have a healthy kid (for which all parents wish) we said, right on. So be it. Naturally, these conditions were not suitable for a whole lot of intimate moments of ease and comfort.
6. It takes, so the rhetoric says, six weeks for a birthing mother to recover (on multiple levels) from a vaginal birth. Bleeding ceases, swelling reduces. Uterus contracts down to close to "normal" size. Breastfeeding is biochemically related to that. There's sort of an "unpregnancy" period, a sort of "undoing." We are already straight-out with sleeplessness and care. There is crying and feeding and a few hours of inconsolability every night. Yesterday I was so overworked with kid and school prep that my body kicked into a 100 degree fever for about 30 hours, which put me down completely. Then it broke, the lesson being, DO LESS. SLEEP.
7. The "seeds" (to use the Yoga Sutras language for it) of my past experiences--all of that body negativity, that secrecy, that repression--are kicking around, as the long, long sexual frustration of pregnancy and newborn care continues. I can actually feel them wiggle, psycho-emotionally, inside me as the "six weeks" marker looms in the future. It's not simple lust. It's past experience, past neurosis, an anxiety that MY "family" is actually one of "THOSE" families and that I've accidentally stumbled into a horrorshow of repression, AGAIN.
So I put it down; I try witness consciousness, I try realizing that it's simply the "seeds" of the past and not ACTUAL present anxiety, I try to practice asana each day, I try focusing on breathing while seated, I try to get quiet, however, whenever.
We have positivity, not darkness. We have information and desire, not willed ignorance. We are both interested, not just me the male "agent" and she the female "object." We are wise. We are not pure theory from some feminist book. These two women, my two great long relationships, have virtually nothing in common. There is no reason to believe there will be any carryover. Hush. Or, as Gurdjieff put it, "STOP!" Simply command the motion to cease, and do something else.
Jennifer said, today, that when Connor is crying inexplicably and being intolerable that "he's the yoga." True! Hold your inner peace, stay stable, don't be reactive, take witness consciousness, spread calm. He is TOTALLY the yoga. Master swimmers we must be!
I had to put this down, somewhere, just to have it out, to commit it to langugage.
Yesterday I became Salvador Dali. Let me explain: long, long intense sleep deprivation, of the type Jennifer and I have been doing this past week, results in hallucinations. I was trying to sleep, and it wasn't working. Essentially, my mind remained awake and conscious while the brain raced hither and yon, dreaming-style, and I watched it all happen. Wild changes of content: trains, yoga, sexy dreams, flashbacks to elementary school chorus performances. I looked at a fold in the sheets and it turned into a baby face, and then blinked back into a fold of fabric. I asked myself, did that just turn into a baby face? And as I did so, it morphed again, and I think it winked at me or something; the mode was "YES SUCKA, I'M A FREAKIN BABY FACE! MUUUAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!" It was pretty freakin' weird, so I came out to the main room and told Jennifer about it, and she said, yes, there are actually six baby faces in that room, glad to see you're having the same hallucinations that I am.
It's like a really light hit of acid, this newborn care gig. Anyway, to link this to Dali, you know about his "paranoia-critical method," yes? He tried to make himself willfully paranoid, to become suspect of surface appearances, and thus to generate aesthetic imagery. I, therefore, by sleep deprivation (another Surrealist technique for deregulating consciousness), have become Salvador Dali. Someone in the sixties once asked SD, "Mr. Dali, have you ever done DRUGS?" and Dali replied, in his classic third person presentation, "Salvador Dali IS DRUGS!"
********************************
I practiced today; Intermediate to Eka Pada Sirsasana, which didn't go (I can tell immediately, from the jump in, whether or not the foot will go back). I also did Intermediate to Karandavasana last Thursday and did get in a Friday Primary. This newborn care gig isn't TOTALLY stealing my practice. Today it was all about hip flexors, which from about Parsva Dhanurasana on, were SO INTENSE. Kapo A for five, no feet, Kapo B for five, and up. So be it. Thursday I bumped toes with middle fingers. It's more important to me now that I take ten breaths than that I get the heels. They are coming, or they're not. One thing I like about Connor is that he makes me care less about it.
*********************************
There are voices of past neurosis in my head, now that I have "family." It's the same dichotomy we see in culture these days: there are actual, real, various families, then there is the "nuclear family," a construction of discourse, and then there is the conservative construction "family values." Which and how many "families" do I have? Do I have "families" that I don't want?
I have two significant exposures to conservative Catholicism: one is that I was raised by "Easter-Christmas Catholics," who inherited all of Catholicism's body fear but none of its aggressive repression. The other is that I got married to the daughter of a hardcore, aggro Catholic in the nineties. Said daughter was a rape victim, and wasn't over those events at all, and so a six year no-sex "rut" in our seven years together would work like this: with one hand, she'd invite to "break the rut however I can" and with the other hand, she'd call me a rapist, for trying to break that rut. I'm not kidding, nor am I exaggerating.
What do these experiences have to do with family?
1. Being raised by people who are terrified of the body (its sickness, its lust, and all other aspects of its physicality) means that family is never sexualized, never empowered in that way. One grows up with the idea that it's only in dark corners, covered with secrecy and transgression, that one can experiment with one's newfound powers at puberty. One grows up thinking that only behind the most closed of doors can those secrets be accessed. There is no overt expression, and no love in it; it's middle-of-the-night super spy business, taken on the sly, never admitted to, never in daylight.
2. My ex-wife used to talk a lot about "when we have kids" and "when you're older you'll be more mature," in that inclusive way that seeks not to speak actually to me, but to a "me" that she wished that I were. It is, of course, virtually impossible to have kids when you don't have sex, ever. I tried pointing that out one day and got vicious rhetoric about how I "blame her" and so forth, in payment. Logic failed. Consistently. In any case, I learned that her family experiences regarding sexual experience had functioned as sort of a "come true" case for what I'd learned from my own parents. She had, true to life, taken it on the sly. And that sly taking it took the form of "get drunk and naked and I'll come over." That's what she got used to. How was she to know that that was negativity and trauma? No one told her any different. No one told her anything. She would fight ghosts, in arguing with me, which meant that really, she was never arguing with me. She was just talking to herself and making me the target of barbs that made no sense and didn't belong to me but which stuck anyway.
3. So "family," where bodies and specifically sexualized bodies, are concerned, is almost antithetical. In those two major experiences, anyway. So now that I have "family," which family and what kind, do I have? Do you see from where the neurosis of the past pokes its head up here?
4. Jennifer's family told her all about sexual machinery when she was 6. She's always been used to it, and totally lacks the "ssssshhhhhhh" mode of my upbringing. Totally lacks that fear and negativity. She respects the fact that I was brought up with that stuff and that I got soaked in it for years in the followup relationship, but doesn't see it as an issue for our own family. "You're over it and don't want to live it in our family, right? Then it's not a problem." True. She's brilliant. Pure affirmation; she's always been.
5. Our pregnancy was savage frustration for us, but pure service and provision for Connor. He has no genetic bad guys, wasn't breach, didn't have the cord wrapped around his neck, didn't have any complications. For him, the pregnancy was auto-pilot, smooth sailing. For us, solid morning sickness, late sciatica, a cold in the middle, pain of every kind, every month, all the time. Non-stop agony and frustration. But to have a healthy kid (for which all parents wish) we said, right on. So be it. Naturally, these conditions were not suitable for a whole lot of intimate moments of ease and comfort.
6. It takes, so the rhetoric says, six weeks for a birthing mother to recover (on multiple levels) from a vaginal birth. Bleeding ceases, swelling reduces. Uterus contracts down to close to "normal" size. Breastfeeding is biochemically related to that. There's sort of an "unpregnancy" period, a sort of "undoing." We are already straight-out with sleeplessness and care. There is crying and feeding and a few hours of inconsolability every night. Yesterday I was so overworked with kid and school prep that my body kicked into a 100 degree fever for about 30 hours, which put me down completely. Then it broke, the lesson being, DO LESS. SLEEP.
7. The "seeds" (to use the Yoga Sutras language for it) of my past experiences--all of that body negativity, that secrecy, that repression--are kicking around, as the long, long sexual frustration of pregnancy and newborn care continues. I can actually feel them wiggle, psycho-emotionally, inside me as the "six weeks" marker looms in the future. It's not simple lust. It's past experience, past neurosis, an anxiety that MY "family" is actually one of "THOSE" families and that I've accidentally stumbled into a horrorshow of repression, AGAIN.
So I put it down; I try witness consciousness, I try realizing that it's simply the "seeds" of the past and not ACTUAL present anxiety, I try to practice asana each day, I try focusing on breathing while seated, I try to get quiet, however, whenever.
We have positivity, not darkness. We have information and desire, not willed ignorance. We are both interested, not just me the male "agent" and she the female "object." We are wise. We are not pure theory from some feminist book. These two women, my two great long relationships, have virtually nothing in common. There is no reason to believe there will be any carryover. Hush. Or, as Gurdjieff put it, "STOP!" Simply command the motion to cease, and do something else.
Jennifer said, today, that when Connor is crying inexplicably and being intolerable that "he's the yoga." True! Hold your inner peace, stay stable, don't be reactive, take witness consciousness, spread calm. He is TOTALLY the yoga. Master swimmers we must be!
I had to put this down, somewhere, just to have it out, to commit it to langugage.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Baby Talk, part 2, and stuff.
I've basically been living in LIVE ON EARTH since it arrived at my door. There is something in the praise aspect of kirtan (doesn't matter to whom, either: Jai Hanuman, Sita Ram, you name it) that has been able to really get me even-keeled through the craziness of late pregnancy, birth and the first almost-week. I keep disc 1 of LOE in my car CD player. All the time. I haven't led a class without the accompaniment of disc 2, in two weeks.
*************************
During my first lunch after the birth (that would be Sunday, the 31st, about noon), it occurred to me that, in seeing the birth, my experience was that God had made me PROOF against my enemies. I'll say more about this below and later.
*************************
I really want to practice today, and I can't, because I'm on baby watch while Jennifer gets sleep (she's averaging about 2 hours a day, since SATURDAY, and so is hallucinating while awake and such). This is fine, but it grinds on the lion-soul in me, of course. I had dreams, which I don't precisely remember, about Kapotasana. I haven't done Kapotasana in two weeks. My only practice since Friday's boo-yah Primary has been a Tuesday evening vinyasa class, which is always a sweatfest, but to which I added all sorts of advanced poses: a clean jump into Astavakrasana from downdog, full Eka Pada Sirsasana both sides, Visvamitrasana, Vasisthasana. We were led toward Eka Pada Galavasana (not from headstand) and I took it, both sides. Good stuff. There was also a led Hanumanasana, and I took that, too. Tacked on three wheels and two hangbacks in the backbend section too. I am downright HUNGRY for some Intermediate today. We'll see if I can buy any time from the grandparents when they arrive.
***********************
Today we had our first pediatrician appointment. Connor weighs 8 lbs 2 oz, after losing water and excrement weight in his first couple days. He's gaining, which means that breastfeeding is working (there's been some panic about that). He's able and willing to dirty multiple diapers per day (changing is my job unless I'm not home). The appointment left us both feeling big, chewy confidence. We CAN do this. I am UNSTOPPABLE when I am confident.
*************************
Perhaps all babies go through phases of "Screaming Baby Hour." Connor's choice for SBH is 4 am. It often lasts until 6. This phenomenon is simply crying, screaming, and various squeaking and howling noises, for 60 to 120 minutes. All pacifications, from feeding to rocking to swaddling, are temporary. The screaming always returns, and quickly (always within about 4 minutes of quiet). But then by 7 am, he's the regular daytime peaceful baby who only howls for food, when there's a dirty diaper, and randomly when he has an attack of The Fear (or whatever it is).
************************
Proof against one's enemies. There are things to say about this. The enemies I refer to are inner enemies: fear, anger. Proof: I had long ago declared my allegiance to "the truth" instead of convenience or conformity. I like to look the bright light, straight in the eyes. Thus the Kali metaphor earlier. I wasn't raised by truth-seekers and I haven't had much opportunity to be in their company, so much of my 20s and 30s has been standing hard through doubt, through challenge, through temptation to give in and make it easier, to make less stout choices. But I never did. I have a real, "Fuck you, I will have the Truth or else Death" ethic that can be a real pain in the ass to live with. In its good manifestation, it is tapas, discipline, focus. In its bad manifestations, it is inability to compromise, bias, hatred, rage, terror. I am an academic who studies the avant-garde in large part because I have been too angry and afraid to get a better-paying corporate job or to seek out more applicable, socially center skill sets. And so be it; it's not an error, simply a set of choices, and it's also not morally superior. Sure, I have Nietzsche in my bones, but as even he'd tell you, one of the superman's major challenges is NOT establishing himself as above the rabble, as a "natural leader" who would then become a fascist.
So "Proof against one's enemies" means that after seeing the physicality of the head and the personality of the face emerging from massively engorged and not entirely asexualized labia, and everything covered in meconium excrement, I had an experience of becoming (also becoming) part of that physicality which combined all binaries in ways that were not contradictory. Nothing was opposed to anything else, even as labels and daily life practice (we close the door when we're in the bathroom, right? Public sex is CALLED THAT for a REASON, right?) insist, STILL, that there are such oppositions. And the world collapsed into the Truth. When, hours later, my partner was helped into a wheelchair to to go recovery, a thick dark red rivulet of blood ran down her inner thigh. Creation is danger. Life is mortality. I realized that, in my body valorization (my "fuck you" to Catholic repression), I'd chosen the Truth, and only now, only witnessing this, did God/Ram/Hanuman/whoever/thefullbodyoftheearth make me PROOF against that anger. YES, young master, you CHOSE THE TRUTH. And anger (at repression) and fear (about being wrong) aren't necessary any more. I am the blood, I am the born face. Not just in my platform, my DESIRE TO BE, but in my experience. I AM.
And so it remains only to praise God/Ram/whoever.
Govinda radhe radhe shyam, Gopala radhe radhe!
***************************
Tens of people want pictures. I'm going to take a few today, I've determined. That, and doing laundry, keeping the cats fed, maybe some pranayama (I can do THAT on baby watch).
***************************
Fatherhood--about which I will have a LOT more to say--seems, so far, to be about nurture. Connor's effect in my life is much stronger and more apparent to me in my relationships with OTHERS than in my relationship with him. Right now, at 4 days out of the womb, he has the emotional complexity of, hmmm, an evolved reptile. Feed me, get this excrement off my bottom, ahhh sleeping. He's cozy and warm and fun to snuggle with, but not able to RELATE. My cat FAR outperforms him in emotional complexity. So my job is to feed, change, cuddle with (yes, pictures coming, promise). Also, when he's doing "screaming baby hour," I will ask him questions (which he can't understand, unless he's got some SERIOUS siddhis from birth) such as, "Are you sure you're dying now? I don't think you are. See, you're still alive, right now, yes, you know it because you're screaming. Or do you want to do some jnana yoga? Who is crying? You're gonna think that one over? Great, let's walk around the house and see if the answer brings you any calm." And so on.
I love that Karen called this phase of duties, "what bodhisattvas do." That has stuck with me all the way. Jennifer, two days ago, said that in the West, we think of a child as a tabula rasa, blank and able to be written on/to write. In the East, however, a newborn is the most self-centered he'll ever be, and thus in the greatest phase of suffering. I LOVE that; it stuck HARD in me. So even during Screaming Baby Hour, I try to get Connor to self-pacify. Sure, it's an epic fail right now, but I have set the intention.
*******************
Relationship with others; I said that, above. I drive with greater ease and less determination to "get there before you do." Indy is a driving town, of course, and there's all this rat-race pole-position silliness that people do on the roads. I let people pass and cut in and whatever they want. Sometimes I see snarling-looking faces and I wonder what those people looked like as newborns. A whole highway full of newborns racing around. It makes the world look comic, and tragic. I have greater generosity in both my academic classes and yoga classes (although I've always had quite a bit of that; if you enjoy learning from me, I will serve you in whatever capacity I've got).
*********************
Right now baby watch is quiet. The house is asleep--partner, cat. This is all good.
*************************
During my first lunch after the birth (that would be Sunday, the 31st, about noon), it occurred to me that, in seeing the birth, my experience was that God had made me PROOF against my enemies. I'll say more about this below and later.
*************************
I really want to practice today, and I can't, because I'm on baby watch while Jennifer gets sleep (she's averaging about 2 hours a day, since SATURDAY, and so is hallucinating while awake and such). This is fine, but it grinds on the lion-soul in me, of course. I had dreams, which I don't precisely remember, about Kapotasana. I haven't done Kapotasana in two weeks. My only practice since Friday's boo-yah Primary has been a Tuesday evening vinyasa class, which is always a sweatfest, but to which I added all sorts of advanced poses: a clean jump into Astavakrasana from downdog, full Eka Pada Sirsasana both sides, Visvamitrasana, Vasisthasana. We were led toward Eka Pada Galavasana (not from headstand) and I took it, both sides. Good stuff. There was also a led Hanumanasana, and I took that, too. Tacked on three wheels and two hangbacks in the backbend section too. I am downright HUNGRY for some Intermediate today. We'll see if I can buy any time from the grandparents when they arrive.
***********************
Today we had our first pediatrician appointment. Connor weighs 8 lbs 2 oz, after losing water and excrement weight in his first couple days. He's gaining, which means that breastfeeding is working (there's been some panic about that). He's able and willing to dirty multiple diapers per day (changing is my job unless I'm not home). The appointment left us both feeling big, chewy confidence. We CAN do this. I am UNSTOPPABLE when I am confident.
*************************
Perhaps all babies go through phases of "Screaming Baby Hour." Connor's choice for SBH is 4 am. It often lasts until 6. This phenomenon is simply crying, screaming, and various squeaking and howling noises, for 60 to 120 minutes. All pacifications, from feeding to rocking to swaddling, are temporary. The screaming always returns, and quickly (always within about 4 minutes of quiet). But then by 7 am, he's the regular daytime peaceful baby who only howls for food, when there's a dirty diaper, and randomly when he has an attack of The Fear (or whatever it is).
************************
Proof against one's enemies. There are things to say about this. The enemies I refer to are inner enemies: fear, anger. Proof: I had long ago declared my allegiance to "the truth" instead of convenience or conformity. I like to look the bright light, straight in the eyes. Thus the Kali metaphor earlier. I wasn't raised by truth-seekers and I haven't had much opportunity to be in their company, so much of my 20s and 30s has been standing hard through doubt, through challenge, through temptation to give in and make it easier, to make less stout choices. But I never did. I have a real, "Fuck you, I will have the Truth or else Death" ethic that can be a real pain in the ass to live with. In its good manifestation, it is tapas, discipline, focus. In its bad manifestations, it is inability to compromise, bias, hatred, rage, terror. I am an academic who studies the avant-garde in large part because I have been too angry and afraid to get a better-paying corporate job or to seek out more applicable, socially center skill sets. And so be it; it's not an error, simply a set of choices, and it's also not morally superior. Sure, I have Nietzsche in my bones, but as even he'd tell you, one of the superman's major challenges is NOT establishing himself as above the rabble, as a "natural leader" who would then become a fascist.
So "Proof against one's enemies" means that after seeing the physicality of the head and the personality of the face emerging from massively engorged and not entirely asexualized labia, and everything covered in meconium excrement, I had an experience of becoming (also becoming) part of that physicality which combined all binaries in ways that were not contradictory. Nothing was opposed to anything else, even as labels and daily life practice (we close the door when we're in the bathroom, right? Public sex is CALLED THAT for a REASON, right?) insist, STILL, that there are such oppositions. And the world collapsed into the Truth. When, hours later, my partner was helped into a wheelchair to to go recovery, a thick dark red rivulet of blood ran down her inner thigh. Creation is danger. Life is mortality. I realized that, in my body valorization (my "fuck you" to Catholic repression), I'd chosen the Truth, and only now, only witnessing this, did God/Ram/Hanuman/whoever/thefullbodyoftheearth make me PROOF against that anger. YES, young master, you CHOSE THE TRUTH. And anger (at repression) and fear (about being wrong) aren't necessary any more. I am the blood, I am the born face. Not just in my platform, my DESIRE TO BE, but in my experience. I AM.
And so it remains only to praise God/Ram/whoever.
Govinda radhe radhe shyam, Gopala radhe radhe!
***************************
Tens of people want pictures. I'm going to take a few today, I've determined. That, and doing laundry, keeping the cats fed, maybe some pranayama (I can do THAT on baby watch).
***************************
Fatherhood--about which I will have a LOT more to say--seems, so far, to be about nurture. Connor's effect in my life is much stronger and more apparent to me in my relationships with OTHERS than in my relationship with him. Right now, at 4 days out of the womb, he has the emotional complexity of, hmmm, an evolved reptile. Feed me, get this excrement off my bottom, ahhh sleeping. He's cozy and warm and fun to snuggle with, but not able to RELATE. My cat FAR outperforms him in emotional complexity. So my job is to feed, change, cuddle with (yes, pictures coming, promise). Also, when he's doing "screaming baby hour," I will ask him questions (which he can't understand, unless he's got some SERIOUS siddhis from birth) such as, "Are you sure you're dying now? I don't think you are. See, you're still alive, right now, yes, you know it because you're screaming. Or do you want to do some jnana yoga? Who is crying? You're gonna think that one over? Great, let's walk around the house and see if the answer brings you any calm." And so on.
I love that Karen called this phase of duties, "what bodhisattvas do." That has stuck with me all the way. Jennifer, two days ago, said that in the West, we think of a child as a tabula rasa, blank and able to be written on/to write. In the East, however, a newborn is the most self-centered he'll ever be, and thus in the greatest phase of suffering. I LOVE that; it stuck HARD in me. So even during Screaming Baby Hour, I try to get Connor to self-pacify. Sure, it's an epic fail right now, but I have set the intention.
*******************
Relationship with others; I said that, above. I drive with greater ease and less determination to "get there before you do." Indy is a driving town, of course, and there's all this rat-race pole-position silliness that people do on the roads. I let people pass and cut in and whatever they want. Sometimes I see snarling-looking faces and I wonder what those people looked like as newborns. A whole highway full of newborns racing around. It makes the world look comic, and tragic. I have greater generosity in both my academic classes and yoga classes (although I've always had quite a bit of that; if you enjoy learning from me, I will serve you in whatever capacity I've got).
*********************
Right now baby watch is quiet. The house is asleep--partner, cat. This is all good.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Baby Talk, Part 1
My partner and I are now a trio. 8.3 pounds (3.75kg) of baby boy is sleeping about 18 inches to my right, as I type. Connor, meet the cybershala and interested readers. Cybershala and readers, meet Connor.
**************
It's freakin' weird to see a little person who looks like you do. Kid has my temples, my ears, her hands, maybe her chin, hard to say. Features morph; it's like a friendly little Cronenberg movie if there were such a thing.
***************
While we were waiting for labor to develop (with IV oxytocin), I said, "it's like do-it-yourself evolution; you grow this aquatic organism, with gills and all, from the freakin' cosmic basics, from the tidal pool, you know? and then you pitch him out onto the beach and he breathes oxygen."
*****************
The chronology was something like this: Saturday morning water break, 7:50 am. Hospital arrival maybe 8:50 am, 9 am-ish. "You're not leavin' here without a baby!" Sketchy contractions get regularish at about 11 am. Oxytocin added to help, at 1 pm. After two hours of the real thing, epidural, 3 pm. The six weeks of sciatic pain vanishes, and my partner finds labor itself to be much more peaceful than the ninth month proper, was. Birth, 2:18 am on Sunday May 31. I participate, I praise, I see it all happen.
********************
SEE a human birth. And not on video; I know they don't usually just allow random people to walk in and spectate, but FIND A WAY. It'll blow your freakin' mind. I'm not kidding. I can't tell exactly what it'll do (depends on who you are and what you've got going on), but it's big and it's magnificent and you should see one.
********************
Know why ERASERHEAD bugs people out? It's because Lynch got those baby noises EXACTLY right. I've seen this child move, snuffle, cry, shake, just the way that Lynch's cow fetus does in that film. THAT, my friends, is how you summon horror movie affect with sentimentality. It WORKS.
**********************
A birth is a totally fascinating mix of blood, excrement, sex, life, death, mortality, creation, viscera, medicalization, archetypes, religion, and more, and it's all of those at once, and you're long-awake and underslept and in novel territory when you walk into that, and you start with waders but then you're up in over your head, and there's no walking back; it's a dream state. The head that crowns, a little slice of someone's body, INSIDE someone else's body, is only a fraction of that skull! It gets bigger, and bigger, and endlessly BIGGER, and then this weird, round protruding object has a FACE on it, and suddenly it's a SELF (the face is what we know, after all, it answers, WHO), and this self comes from, IS, the body, with blood, with sex, with censorship in the West, with tearing, with meconium yellowgreen mud, with powerful white-blue cord, with inhalation of burning oxygen. Everything collapses, all founding binaries tumble, all walls are knocked down, and it's stars, "It's Full of Stars!" and it's Kali and it's the LIGHT and they say "Come and meet your son," and his fingernails are perfect miniatures, smaller than the pips on a die. The room still has walls, the people are still there, the cleanup is underway, and I take that little pearl (the mindbody problem DOES NOT EXIST!) and I hide it. Maybe we all know. Even if we do, there's no need to share; there's some Zen parable about that.
***********************
A tornado touched down not far away, while we were in late labor; the power went out. But it was fine, we'd had all of the good signs. I had LIVE ON EARTH in the car with me, and we brought it in with us. During labor, we listened to the first disc, including the 40 stanzas dedicated to Hanuman. We also cruised TV channels, just surfing, just seeing what was on, and Turner Classics was playing Sergio Leone's most famous film. "Cannonfire or a storm, my friend; it's all the same to you." Ai-eee-aii-eee-aiiiiii!!!!
************************
I have to teach a class on Minimalism and Eva Hesse and such, at 5:30 tonight. I'd had about six hours of sleep in the first 48 hours; my partner had had maybe two. It was madness. Last night we let the child stay in the hospital nursery (this place is very very cool; there's room service, the nurses are brilliant, it is all good) and I was able to nip at least four solid hours of sleep. The trick about sleep with a newborn is that it comes in tiny little random snatches of time; 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 1 hour, here and there. It's not those collegiate marathon insomnia stretches of 40, 60 hours. I've been grading tests in between diaper changes and on-chest snuggles.
Baby talk part 2 coming up next time.
JAI MA!
**************
It's freakin' weird to see a little person who looks like you do. Kid has my temples, my ears, her hands, maybe her chin, hard to say. Features morph; it's like a friendly little Cronenberg movie if there were such a thing.
***************
While we were waiting for labor to develop (with IV oxytocin), I said, "it's like do-it-yourself evolution; you grow this aquatic organism, with gills and all, from the freakin' cosmic basics, from the tidal pool, you know? and then you pitch him out onto the beach and he breathes oxygen."
*****************
The chronology was something like this: Saturday morning water break, 7:50 am. Hospital arrival maybe 8:50 am, 9 am-ish. "You're not leavin' here without a baby!" Sketchy contractions get regularish at about 11 am. Oxytocin added to help, at 1 pm. After two hours of the real thing, epidural, 3 pm. The six weeks of sciatic pain vanishes, and my partner finds labor itself to be much more peaceful than the ninth month proper, was. Birth, 2:18 am on Sunday May 31. I participate, I praise, I see it all happen.
********************
SEE a human birth. And not on video; I know they don't usually just allow random people to walk in and spectate, but FIND A WAY. It'll blow your freakin' mind. I'm not kidding. I can't tell exactly what it'll do (depends on who you are and what you've got going on), but it's big and it's magnificent and you should see one.
********************
Know why ERASERHEAD bugs people out? It's because Lynch got those baby noises EXACTLY right. I've seen this child move, snuffle, cry, shake, just the way that Lynch's cow fetus does in that film. THAT, my friends, is how you summon horror movie affect with sentimentality. It WORKS.
**********************
A birth is a totally fascinating mix of blood, excrement, sex, life, death, mortality, creation, viscera, medicalization, archetypes, religion, and more, and it's all of those at once, and you're long-awake and underslept and in novel territory when you walk into that, and you start with waders but then you're up in over your head, and there's no walking back; it's a dream state. The head that crowns, a little slice of someone's body, INSIDE someone else's body, is only a fraction of that skull! It gets bigger, and bigger, and endlessly BIGGER, and then this weird, round protruding object has a FACE on it, and suddenly it's a SELF (the face is what we know, after all, it answers, WHO), and this self comes from, IS, the body, with blood, with sex, with censorship in the West, with tearing, with meconium yellowgreen mud, with powerful white-blue cord, with inhalation of burning oxygen. Everything collapses, all founding binaries tumble, all walls are knocked down, and it's stars, "It's Full of Stars!" and it's Kali and it's the LIGHT and they say "Come and meet your son," and his fingernails are perfect miniatures, smaller than the pips on a die. The room still has walls, the people are still there, the cleanup is underway, and I take that little pearl (the mindbody problem DOES NOT EXIST!) and I hide it. Maybe we all know. Even if we do, there's no need to share; there's some Zen parable about that.
***********************
A tornado touched down not far away, while we were in late labor; the power went out. But it was fine, we'd had all of the good signs. I had LIVE ON EARTH in the car with me, and we brought it in with us. During labor, we listened to the first disc, including the 40 stanzas dedicated to Hanuman. We also cruised TV channels, just surfing, just seeing what was on, and Turner Classics was playing Sergio Leone's most famous film. "Cannonfire or a storm, my friend; it's all the same to you." Ai-eee-aii-eee-aiiiiii!!!!
************************
I have to teach a class on Minimalism and Eva Hesse and such, at 5:30 tonight. I'd had about six hours of sleep in the first 48 hours; my partner had had maybe two. It was madness. Last night we let the child stay in the hospital nursery (this place is very very cool; there's room service, the nurses are brilliant, it is all good) and I was able to nip at least four solid hours of sleep. The trick about sleep with a newborn is that it comes in tiny little random snatches of time; 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 1 hour, here and there. It's not those collegiate marathon insomnia stretches of 40, 60 hours. I've been grading tests in between diaper changes and on-chest snuggles.
Baby talk part 2 coming up next time.
JAI MA!
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