The super short version of this is:
1. Shoulder injury is healing.
2. Toes in Kapotasana, by myself and assisted.
3. Much inspiration from recent blog postings.
The longer version of this is:
I've been doing a hybrid practice of about first-half-Intermediate with the backbendy portion of Sweeney's Simha Krama. This isn't intended to be a new practice, it's an injury measure. This is driven in large part by Monday night's Intro to Intermediate where I only did up to Eka Pada, but it was all brilliant. Modified backbends and all, it was very much an ashtanga practice, and it's the most at-home I've felt in practicing in at least two weeks.
This injury, which prevents me from jumping back and from doing much of my accustomed twisting and non-overhead backbending, has been a serious sort of psychological injury; it has taken my "standing post" in the seventh series storm from me, and I'm all off kilter, or, to put it in last post's terms, afloat.
So my hybrid practice is, generally speaking:
standing backbends (like Linda's Venki standing bends) and lunges, with
Pasasana and Krounchasana, with
Simha Krama Ustrasana variations instead of Bhekasana (which really hurts to do),
then Dhanurasanas, grabbing as far down the shin as possible (that hurts less),
then as much of an Ustrasana/Laghu as I can do, with Simha Krama Ustrasana mods,
then Kapotasana, on my own, twice, as I was doing in full practice,
then Intermediate up to Eka Pada, modified as needed, with Simha Krama FBH developers.
Then backbends, drops-and-stands (which actually have been the best thing in my whole practice lately, very springy, although I still pop my heels to come up), and a modified closing, and shoulder now permits elbows down, in Sarvangasana, which is really a relief.
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I got my toes in Kapo on my own, even without doing a full Primary prior. Monday night, adjusted, and Tuesday, solo. This is good news, builds my confidence that I can backbend without having to do eighty damn poses beforehand.
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Inspiration comes with all kinds of emotional valence, very complicated. The inspiration comes from Susan's most recent post about Thailand practice; it's a thoroughly amazing post.
There is definitely something to be said about doing practice as a solid spot in which to stand, while all else devolves into storm and insanity. That full practice is focus perhaps through everything else. Lovely stuff. Thus, my instability at not being able to do what I consider my traditional practice.
Frustration, over teachers, access to teachers. Hey universe, what's the point of having me do this intense home practice habit with no regular teachers around? I'm even anxious about Seattle where I'll probably visit two long-term teachers. My practice is almost in a "hey, no strangers touching me" mode; I'm very reluctant to have someone MESS with it, as it is. Makes me wish I was about to see a teacher that I've at least seen before, that I know from before, with whom I feel some degree of comfort. Sure, comfort can develop on contact, can develop from a single adjustment, but I feel an almost emotional risk, a sort of uncomfortable intimacy coming up. Weird.
It does make sense, as an emotional situation: two years, of very intense emotional stuff that is non-practice, during which time the practice has SERIOUSLY served a stabilizing function. There's logical fear/anxiety that a change in this stabilizing practice might/will make it "different." I notice that I don't care about Kapo progress if it means destabilization, and I can't tell from here if it would or not. It's as if this is NOT THE TIME for teaching, NOT THE TIME for changes.
Maybe July will be different. It is, after all, not yet May.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Livin' in a wave pool.
It's the back-and-forth motion. Closer, further. Surface, depth. A set of pairs that guarantee only that one is always in the middle. One angle here is that I've always hated anything that sounds like, "Follow your bliss" because bliss cannot be followed; it's not like we're attached by some fucking leash to the Blissmeister who then takes us without effort to Blissville. It just doesn't work for me as a model for existence, at all. So when I see bumper stickers reading FYB, I'm annoyed. This is petty. Much of what I do--maybe what we all do--is petty. Many a postmodern novelist has made a career out of writing this stuff down.
Another angle here is that it takes effort to even try to get anything out of the wave pool. Basically one sets an intention (or properly, a goal, because only "yoga people" set "intentions," let's be honest). If we do not drive for the hoop, whatever the hoop is (and however many times it morphs, multiplies or vanishes from sight), then that basket is not coming. I suppose that if I were to adhere to a cliche, it would be, "God helps those who help themselves." That suits me better, aside from the capital G which can't help but imply a Christian eye in the sky.
The Sutras lesson about non-attachment is made for the wave pool, where all attachments are denied, are pointed out as illusions (although real illusions, which can come with real pain). I see more and more now--in large part thanks to the vision provided me as I've accomodated seventh series--how silly almost everything I believe and think that I am, is. As a younger man, I accepted this as part of the existential condition, but that existential condition was part of the world, and thus didn't affect my RELATION to the world, as I accepted that "I" and "the world" were made of the same material (in Sutras terms, I united the seer with the seen, and thus avoided REAL pain and REAL separation, but also a REAL path to enlightenment).
One could do worse than to sum up my "twenties" with that sentence.
I will be forty years of age (an age which sounds sexier and nobler in almost any other language: German, Russian, French, etc etc) in eight days. One is tempted to divide time into decades (and to, in a quite disturbingly literal way, to divide ONESELF into decades) in order to "see how progress has been made." If that doesn't sound problematic as a project in at least three big ways, you're not listening.
An example of silly things that I believe and which I do not abandon anyway:
Kino (from whom one cannot currently escape, having Arkie Yogini just out of a workshop and Susan and Kevin and others, just in one) will be in Indianapolis a year and about two weeks from now, for a weekend workshop. I find that I feel a strange responsibility to "grow" ashtangis here, proper ones, who can recite the banana leaves myth, who memorize the sequence, you know, CLASSICAL ashtangis, so that we can "measure up." Wha'?? Measure? Did I just SAY that? Measure to WHAT, exactly, measure to WHOM, measure in fact BY WHAT MEANS? It's insanity. Here's what I think I mean. It's HARD to grow ashtangis in this vinyasa town. It's too hard, it's not "fun" enough, it's not LOOSE enough, it doesn't sort of banquet-ize yoga language in order to call itself "Sacred Dancers" or whatever the fuck the Midwest Yoga Conference is calling itself this year (snarkity snark).
So I feel a weird (and yet eagerly accepted) responsibility to carefully tend my soil and grow my ashtangis (MY? are you KIDDING ME??) and tend them and water them just so (and you know, it becomes like Bugs Bunny and the Abominable: am I planning to CALL THEM GEORGE?) and then to have a CROP of CLASSICAL ashtangis here, who are "properly" ready for said weekend. There is defiance in this, defiance of Indy's long vinyasa tradition, where everyone borrows from ashtanga but no one really practices it. Extended defiance of the American yoga scene for the same reason. A sort of too-deep-plunge into serious confrontation with mysticism, a yoga practice taken a BIT TOO SERIOUSLY. Or is it? Not according to the tone of Maehle's book, or Ingram's book (which admittedly is meditation, not yoga widely writ), or a strict enough teacher's room.
In a weird way, I want it known that Carol and I CRACKED THIS PLACE. We fucking planted the impossible here and now we both (her on Saturday and me on Sunday) are getting classes of six-seven DIFFERENT people per day, in ashtanga classes. There is a rebel hero flavor to my defiance here, this strange "achievement" of finally growing some "ashtanga fungus" in this town. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!
And so the leadership of the studio got us certainly one of the best-known and most famous travelling ashtangis ON THE PLANET, a year from now. And sure, that's about cash and it's about pulling from Ohio and even from Chicago, and so on, and it's no doubt also about sheer studio press. But without an ashtanga "scene" which can be perceived to be growing and lucrative, this would never have happened. And, again to be petty, I feel that part of that scene is MINE, something I GREW HERE.
Example ended.
See the attachments throughout? About WHO I AM, about WHAT I DO? About HOW MUCH IT MATTERS? Clear as a crystal vase. I know, from seventh series, that those are all as fluid and as transient as my climbing history, as my sex life, as anything that has gone by the wayside, whether it returns or not. It isn't a matter of WHAT ONE HAD, it's a matter of being able to list WHAT ONE HAS BEEN, all of which is both illusion (past, dead, gone) and yet TRUE (factual, real, insofar as one accepts oneself as real). What is identity? It's a HORIZONTAL trail of footprints, NOT an accumulation, NOT an addition, NOT a sum. Repeat after me: NOT. A. SUM.
It ISN'T this existential bit about "action makes the man" (Hi, Jackson Pollock!). It's a series of footprints, where we always leave "ourselves" in the prior footprint. Identity is an act of DEPARTURE, never an act of ARRIVAL. This is why "I am" is always wrong and "I was" is always correct even if it's self-deception. Self-deception is TRUE. The TRUTH is not. As Gerhard Richter said about his paintings, it is about FACTS, not about the TRUTH.
The "sum of ourselves" approach ought to be counted as its own samskara. Trying to derive a "core self" from a stack of past footprints all of which are departures from the more recent steps, is like trying to build oneself out of one's past junked automobiles. Or like trying to build oneself out of a neatly carved pile of "decades" of experience.
About nine days ago, I realized, out of the blue on a sunny day, looking out the back window of the house, that the Lion would return this spring. Empowering everything, being my worship, my costume and my dance. I haven't had a "Lion vision" (and this wasn't a vision proper, just a felt certainty) I think since before the boy was conceived in late, late summer 2008. That's a LONG TIME. I started to believe that the Lion days (and should have known better, because the Lion as I use that term is all, everything, quite in a Nietzschean vein of beyond good and evil) were of the past and the Camel days had come for the rest of my life. Not so.
What does the return of the Lion mean (really, the return of my awareness of the Lion)? It means that this big "loss" (apparent) of one identity, after the abandonment of a prior identity, isn't a loss, isn't the whole game. It's a square on the board, not the board. It's a chute, it's a ladder. It's a pressable dice-boggler. It's Boardwalk. However you want to put it.
Look up, roll the dice and play on.
Another angle here is that it takes effort to even try to get anything out of the wave pool. Basically one sets an intention (or properly, a goal, because only "yoga people" set "intentions," let's be honest). If we do not drive for the hoop, whatever the hoop is (and however many times it morphs, multiplies or vanishes from sight), then that basket is not coming. I suppose that if I were to adhere to a cliche, it would be, "God helps those who help themselves." That suits me better, aside from the capital G which can't help but imply a Christian eye in the sky.
The Sutras lesson about non-attachment is made for the wave pool, where all attachments are denied, are pointed out as illusions (although real illusions, which can come with real pain). I see more and more now--in large part thanks to the vision provided me as I've accomodated seventh series--how silly almost everything I believe and think that I am, is. As a younger man, I accepted this as part of the existential condition, but that existential condition was part of the world, and thus didn't affect my RELATION to the world, as I accepted that "I" and "the world" were made of the same material (in Sutras terms, I united the seer with the seen, and thus avoided REAL pain and REAL separation, but also a REAL path to enlightenment).
One could do worse than to sum up my "twenties" with that sentence.
I will be forty years of age (an age which sounds sexier and nobler in almost any other language: German, Russian, French, etc etc) in eight days. One is tempted to divide time into decades (and to, in a quite disturbingly literal way, to divide ONESELF into decades) in order to "see how progress has been made." If that doesn't sound problematic as a project in at least three big ways, you're not listening.
An example of silly things that I believe and which I do not abandon anyway:
Kino (from whom one cannot currently escape, having Arkie Yogini just out of a workshop and Susan and Kevin and others, just in one) will be in Indianapolis a year and about two weeks from now, for a weekend workshop. I find that I feel a strange responsibility to "grow" ashtangis here, proper ones, who can recite the banana leaves myth, who memorize the sequence, you know, CLASSICAL ashtangis, so that we can "measure up." Wha'?? Measure? Did I just SAY that? Measure to WHAT, exactly, measure to WHOM, measure in fact BY WHAT MEANS? It's insanity. Here's what I think I mean. It's HARD to grow ashtangis in this vinyasa town. It's too hard, it's not "fun" enough, it's not LOOSE enough, it doesn't sort of banquet-ize yoga language in order to call itself "Sacred Dancers" or whatever the fuck the Midwest Yoga Conference is calling itself this year (snarkity snark).
So I feel a weird (and yet eagerly accepted) responsibility to carefully tend my soil and grow my ashtangis (MY? are you KIDDING ME??) and tend them and water them just so (and you know, it becomes like Bugs Bunny and the Abominable: am I planning to CALL THEM GEORGE?) and then to have a CROP of CLASSICAL ashtangis here, who are "properly" ready for said weekend. There is defiance in this, defiance of Indy's long vinyasa tradition, where everyone borrows from ashtanga but no one really practices it. Extended defiance of the American yoga scene for the same reason. A sort of too-deep-plunge into serious confrontation with mysticism, a yoga practice taken a BIT TOO SERIOUSLY. Or is it? Not according to the tone of Maehle's book, or Ingram's book (which admittedly is meditation, not yoga widely writ), or a strict enough teacher's room.
In a weird way, I want it known that Carol and I CRACKED THIS PLACE. We fucking planted the impossible here and now we both (her on Saturday and me on Sunday) are getting classes of six-seven DIFFERENT people per day, in ashtanga classes. There is a rebel hero flavor to my defiance here, this strange "achievement" of finally growing some "ashtanga fungus" in this town. Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!
And so the leadership of the studio got us certainly one of the best-known and most famous travelling ashtangis ON THE PLANET, a year from now. And sure, that's about cash and it's about pulling from Ohio and even from Chicago, and so on, and it's no doubt also about sheer studio press. But without an ashtanga "scene" which can be perceived to be growing and lucrative, this would never have happened. And, again to be petty, I feel that part of that scene is MINE, something I GREW HERE.
Example ended.
See the attachments throughout? About WHO I AM, about WHAT I DO? About HOW MUCH IT MATTERS? Clear as a crystal vase. I know, from seventh series, that those are all as fluid and as transient as my climbing history, as my sex life, as anything that has gone by the wayside, whether it returns or not. It isn't a matter of WHAT ONE HAD, it's a matter of being able to list WHAT ONE HAS BEEN, all of which is both illusion (past, dead, gone) and yet TRUE (factual, real, insofar as one accepts oneself as real). What is identity? It's a HORIZONTAL trail of footprints, NOT an accumulation, NOT an addition, NOT a sum. Repeat after me: NOT. A. SUM.
It ISN'T this existential bit about "action makes the man" (Hi, Jackson Pollock!). It's a series of footprints, where we always leave "ourselves" in the prior footprint. Identity is an act of DEPARTURE, never an act of ARRIVAL. This is why "I am" is always wrong and "I was" is always correct even if it's self-deception. Self-deception is TRUE. The TRUTH is not. As Gerhard Richter said about his paintings, it is about FACTS, not about the TRUTH.
The "sum of ourselves" approach ought to be counted as its own samskara. Trying to derive a "core self" from a stack of past footprints all of which are departures from the more recent steps, is like trying to build oneself out of one's past junked automobiles. Or like trying to build oneself out of a neatly carved pile of "decades" of experience.
About nine days ago, I realized, out of the blue on a sunny day, looking out the back window of the house, that the Lion would return this spring. Empowering everything, being my worship, my costume and my dance. I haven't had a "Lion vision" (and this wasn't a vision proper, just a felt certainty) I think since before the boy was conceived in late, late summer 2008. That's a LONG TIME. I started to believe that the Lion days (and should have known better, because the Lion as I use that term is all, everything, quite in a Nietzschean vein of beyond good and evil) were of the past and the Camel days had come for the rest of my life. Not so.
What does the return of the Lion mean (really, the return of my awareness of the Lion)? It means that this big "loss" (apparent) of one identity, after the abandonment of a prior identity, isn't a loss, isn't the whole game. It's a square on the board, not the board. It's a chute, it's a ladder. It's a pressable dice-boggler. It's Boardwalk. However you want to put it.
Look up, roll the dice and play on.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Ow, ow, modify, modify.
Took on the usual 82 poses today, the march to Kapotasana. Much had to be modified. The majors are binds, twists, and non-over-the-head backbends. The right shoulder gets very touchy in any movement which demands length between the pectoral muscles and the outer shoulder (so any bound pose, but also any backbend which take the elbows behind the rib cage: hi Shalabhasana B, Bhekasana, Ustrasana). I can jump back just behind my hands, and then walk the rest of the way, and I was able to cleanly jump through for most of the practice.
If you look here you'll see a diagram of the shoulder. The actual pain (before practice) is a bruised feeling right at the clavicle/acromion connection. I'm not sure if that's a ligament or irritation in the bursa, or what. It's very much a surface, palpable sensation. As I practice (or lift the kid a lot) muscle soreness sinks down into the front of the joint, but then moves around into the deltoid or even around the back toward the scapula. It's pretty light pain; an hour or two of calmness and it's pretty well gone unless poked at.
It cracks me up--and I mean actual laughter on the mat--that of all of my Intermediate backbends, really only Shalabhasana A, Dhanurasana (without the Parsvas) and Kapotasana are unimpinged by this. Ustrasana's almost impossible, and so is hanging back from standing, with hands to hips. I have to hang back with palms flat on the front of my thighs; that's the only way that's pain-free. Well, that and formally reaching over my head, that's fine. Overhead is a go.
So for Laghuvajrasana, I put my hands on my quads, hung back as low as I could and then levered up; it's like the quintessential Laghu strength training. All backbends, of course, were reduced. I got my hands within probably six inches of my feet, but it took three Kapo hangbacks to get there. I dropped back against a wall, hands landing about waist-high. Eh. So be it. That's now how it is.
The closing sequence is also largely unavailable to me now: Sarvangasana with this shoulder pain? Can't be done. Had to do the muscular "candlestick" variation, with no hand support. Halasana? Again, no hand support available. And so on.
I can perform Ustrasana if I get there from Sweeney's Simha Krama, which is really backbendy and actually shoulder-intensive. In fact on Monday I did a half-lotus bound Ustrasana, which today would have been crazily impossible.
So when I have longer morning time to practice (that's MW) I might do a modified standard Ashtanga. When I have less time (TRF), I'll do Simha Krama.
If you look here you'll see a diagram of the shoulder. The actual pain (before practice) is a bruised feeling right at the clavicle/acromion connection. I'm not sure if that's a ligament or irritation in the bursa, or what. It's very much a surface, palpable sensation. As I practice (or lift the kid a lot) muscle soreness sinks down into the front of the joint, but then moves around into the deltoid or even around the back toward the scapula. It's pretty light pain; an hour or two of calmness and it's pretty well gone unless poked at.
It cracks me up--and I mean actual laughter on the mat--that of all of my Intermediate backbends, really only Shalabhasana A, Dhanurasana (without the Parsvas) and Kapotasana are unimpinged by this. Ustrasana's almost impossible, and so is hanging back from standing, with hands to hips. I have to hang back with palms flat on the front of my thighs; that's the only way that's pain-free. Well, that and formally reaching over my head, that's fine. Overhead is a go.
So for Laghuvajrasana, I put my hands on my quads, hung back as low as I could and then levered up; it's like the quintessential Laghu strength training. All backbends, of course, were reduced. I got my hands within probably six inches of my feet, but it took three Kapo hangbacks to get there. I dropped back against a wall, hands landing about waist-high. Eh. So be it. That's now how it is.
The closing sequence is also largely unavailable to me now: Sarvangasana with this shoulder pain? Can't be done. Had to do the muscular "candlestick" variation, with no hand support. Halasana? Again, no hand support available. And so on.
I can perform Ustrasana if I get there from Sweeney's Simha Krama, which is really backbendy and actually shoulder-intensive. In fact on Monday I did a half-lotus bound Ustrasana, which today would have been crazily impossible.
So when I have longer morning time to practice (that's MW) I might do a modified standard Ashtanga. When I have less time (TRF), I'll do Simha Krama.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Rotator Cuff!
Wednesday, last week, was a great practice. But after it, I had some soreness in the right shoulder, way over at the top of the end of the collarbone (I forget the technical name of that bone right now; directly under it is the shoulder bursa and the rotator cuff musculature).
It's still there. Thursday's practice had to be modified, and I haven't practiced since. But with time, as with all injuries, one learns which movements are impinged. It hurts to move the elbow backwards, "behind" my rib cage; that's the major not-to-do movement. Overhead is OK if I'm careful, out to the side is OK, although rotating "forward" when the arm is out to the side, is also a little dicey.
This makes fingers-to-tailbone (my regular Ustrasana approach) hard to do. It also makes vinyasa challenging, in that I need to do them with REALLY close attention (particularly chaturanga alignment; this is, I imagine, the same injury that people who dip below 90 degrees, often get). But on Thursday I did pull vinyasa (with jumps back and through) all the way into the Marichyasanas.
I'll probably begin building practice this week again, but I want to maintain backbends, so the new program might be "Primary til I can't, and then Intermediate to Kapo." Not ideal, but so be it. There might also be some Simha Krama, which is lighter on the vinyasa than proper ashtanga is.
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J said yesterday that we should just "wait until she's in the mood." Hahahahaha! That'll be what, 2013????? I love how she can just say stuff like that, with absolutely no regard for how demon-haunted I am about all of this. I freakin' LOVE that.
It's still there. Thursday's practice had to be modified, and I haven't practiced since. But with time, as with all injuries, one learns which movements are impinged. It hurts to move the elbow backwards, "behind" my rib cage; that's the major not-to-do movement. Overhead is OK if I'm careful, out to the side is OK, although rotating "forward" when the arm is out to the side, is also a little dicey.
This makes fingers-to-tailbone (my regular Ustrasana approach) hard to do. It also makes vinyasa challenging, in that I need to do them with REALLY close attention (particularly chaturanga alignment; this is, I imagine, the same injury that people who dip below 90 degrees, often get). But on Thursday I did pull vinyasa (with jumps back and through) all the way into the Marichyasanas.
I'll probably begin building practice this week again, but I want to maintain backbends, so the new program might be "Primary til I can't, and then Intermediate to Kapo." Not ideal, but so be it. There might also be some Simha Krama, which is lighter on the vinyasa than proper ashtanga is.
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J said yesterday that we should just "wait until she's in the mood." Hahahahaha! That'll be what, 2013????? I love how she can just say stuff like that, with absolutely no regard for how demon-haunted I am about all of this. I freakin' LOVE that.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Solo practices and the Continuing Creep to Kapo
I took up an earnest and motivated home practice in the fall of 2006 and especially into the winter of 2007, before going to San Francisco for teacher training and my first Mysore room (after about 2-and-3/4 years of practice) in May of that year.
I've had a home practice ever since; spotty at times, and sometimes with a month off (like November 2009), but a sustained home practice, for three years now.
I have precious little exposure to famous/authorized/certified teachers: five days of Sweeney in 2008, four days of Mysore in Boston in that same summer, three days of Kino in Chicago in October 2009.
This means, for one, that those of you who think home practice is hard and who want more exposure to teachers than you get, will get ABSOLUTE AGREEMENT from me, but at the same time, NO FUCKING PITY AT ALL.
I am still, with yesterday's exception of taking practice outside, practicing on gym mats in the wide open at a northside YMCA in the city. I like that space now; there are ritual movings of the mat for kneeling backbends, and other things, that really help me "take the space." I forget that people are there, how public it is, although certain regulars see me and say hello now and I'm "the guy who does those amazing things on the mat." Sure, that's fine.
I did a streak of full Intermediate for about two weeks, but besides that, it has been Primary-and-to-Kapo, over and over and over and over and over again. I'm really fixated on the classical practice now, and it is actually working.
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Monday I practiced twice: one at 9 am, and one at 7:15 pm (which was the Intro to Intermediate class). Some postings ago (before the relationship madness) I was talking about seeing my feet in a Kapo B pressup and also taking the toe knuckles (meaning that I'm beyond the toes, onto the foot). That vanished for a while. Monday morning I couldn't get it, and Monday night I only got it on the second Kapo and with a big adjustment.
Tuesday, outside, and somewhat disoriented from pouring sweat in sunshine heat, I also couldn't get toes. Worked the pressups instead.
Today I got into my Y spot at 9 am (MW are my morning practice days) and did a somewhat sore and a bit tired Primary, which somehow picked up after Krounchasana. I had energy, downright eagerness, for some backbending. They went like this:
Shalabhasana A, take the gaze straight on, keep the ribs in contact.
Shalabhasana B, take the gaze up. Yeah, maybe not classical, but it helps me energetically. If I look down, the energy moves down.
Bhekasana, think of Tim Feldmann's advice (is this from Arkie Yogini?) to move the tailbone toward the floor. ARCH, and hold for eight breaths.
Dhanurasana, make it a backbend. PRESS with the feet, and FEEL IT predict Ustrasana.
Parsva Dhanurasana, is for me ALL about the right side psoas. FEEL it lengthen.
Ustrasana, per Kino, hands to tailbone, breathe, lengthen, ARCH, just like a dropback. Then hands back and PSOAS, PSOAS, PSOAS. I hold the hands-hips-hangback for a full breath and feel it deepen. Kapo prep.
Laghuvajrasana, per Kino, set up same way. I've been moving the gaze from mat to nose, and it still works. Good.
Kapotasana, today came in stages. Usually I take an Ustrasana set up, take a formal Ustrasana for a breath, then arch, hands over head, and hang for five. Today I took it more slowly: tailbone Ustrasana set up, then two breaths with hands to heart center, and the arch deepened. Two breaths with hands to forehead, and the arch deepened. Less shock, less intensity. Good. Hands go overhead, hanging for five. Down, touch, PRESS. Walk in. PRESS. Walk in. I did this three times in the first Kapo, think I could have gotten my toes, but bailed and pressed to Kapo B and sprung up.
Kapotasana II, came in the same stages; land, PRESS, and I felt the quads get into it, and remembered K telling me, in 2008, "FIND YOUR LEGS." I found them. The quads glow from knees to psoas, and they LIFT the hips. Brilliant! Walk in, PRESS, walk in, PRESS. I did this FIVE TIMES until my fingertips were past my toes. When I got that deep, the pressups moved from arm-straighteners (which they are at first) to barely extending the bent arms. That pose is HARD when deep. I moved the hands in, finally, breath like something coming out of an industrial cellar furnace, and moved them DOWN to take the knuckles of the big toe (well on the foot). Five there, elbows almost touching the floor, and then four breaths of Kapo B with hands just off toes, before I slipped and the fingers popped back more than an inch. That's ok, it gets spring-loaded, both physically and emotionally.
But it's definitely REAL. My Kapotasana had been a sort of required impossibility for a long time, and it's real now, it's A POSE. This really demystifies it, and now I can truly talk about it in mechanics, although it is still amazingly difficult.
I want it, I look forward to it, I'm eager for it. The massive, huge bending that I feel in the lumbar, which somehow does not hurt. The light in the quads, the deep, deep abdominal work of stretching in A and then pulling me upright in B.
I LIKE it. It's actually BECOMING a "homeopathic dose," as was once said to me.
After Kapo I take a vinyasa which makes me wish I could jump through straight-legged (because crossing ankles on a jump through after that backbend is MURDER), and then I do my three-to-five wheels, three dropbacks, and a Kino-style "final backbend," which again, is Chakra Bandhasana training. Hands and feet definitely within 18 inches now, after final backbend.
I'm only occasionally popping up to standing after dropping back; I still need to lift my heels to get the rocking going and I sometimes tiptoe to standing and then sink them. What I usually do is drop back, walk in, press to fingertips and take five suprisingly intense breaths before lowering; something about fingertipping really cranks up the backbend.
But it is good, and tomorrow, even with achiness in the right front pec/shoulder, I aim to have it again.
I've had a home practice ever since; spotty at times, and sometimes with a month off (like November 2009), but a sustained home practice, for three years now.
I have precious little exposure to famous/authorized/certified teachers: five days of Sweeney in 2008, four days of Mysore in Boston in that same summer, three days of Kino in Chicago in October 2009.
This means, for one, that those of you who think home practice is hard and who want more exposure to teachers than you get, will get ABSOLUTE AGREEMENT from me, but at the same time, NO FUCKING PITY AT ALL.
I am still, with yesterday's exception of taking practice outside, practicing on gym mats in the wide open at a northside YMCA in the city. I like that space now; there are ritual movings of the mat for kneeling backbends, and other things, that really help me "take the space." I forget that people are there, how public it is, although certain regulars see me and say hello now and I'm "the guy who does those amazing things on the mat." Sure, that's fine.
I did a streak of full Intermediate for about two weeks, but besides that, it has been Primary-and-to-Kapo, over and over and over and over and over again. I'm really fixated on the classical practice now, and it is actually working.
****************************
Monday I practiced twice: one at 9 am, and one at 7:15 pm (which was the Intro to Intermediate class). Some postings ago (before the relationship madness) I was talking about seeing my feet in a Kapo B pressup and also taking the toe knuckles (meaning that I'm beyond the toes, onto the foot). That vanished for a while. Monday morning I couldn't get it, and Monday night I only got it on the second Kapo and with a big adjustment.
Tuesday, outside, and somewhat disoriented from pouring sweat in sunshine heat, I also couldn't get toes. Worked the pressups instead.
Today I got into my Y spot at 9 am (MW are my morning practice days) and did a somewhat sore and a bit tired Primary, which somehow picked up after Krounchasana. I had energy, downright eagerness, for some backbending. They went like this:
Shalabhasana A, take the gaze straight on, keep the ribs in contact.
Shalabhasana B, take the gaze up. Yeah, maybe not classical, but it helps me energetically. If I look down, the energy moves down.
Bhekasana, think of Tim Feldmann's advice (is this from Arkie Yogini?) to move the tailbone toward the floor. ARCH, and hold for eight breaths.
Dhanurasana, make it a backbend. PRESS with the feet, and FEEL IT predict Ustrasana.
Parsva Dhanurasana, is for me ALL about the right side psoas. FEEL it lengthen.
Ustrasana, per Kino, hands to tailbone, breathe, lengthen, ARCH, just like a dropback. Then hands back and PSOAS, PSOAS, PSOAS. I hold the hands-hips-hangback for a full breath and feel it deepen. Kapo prep.
Laghuvajrasana, per Kino, set up same way. I've been moving the gaze from mat to nose, and it still works. Good.
Kapotasana, today came in stages. Usually I take an Ustrasana set up, take a formal Ustrasana for a breath, then arch, hands over head, and hang for five. Today I took it more slowly: tailbone Ustrasana set up, then two breaths with hands to heart center, and the arch deepened. Two breaths with hands to forehead, and the arch deepened. Less shock, less intensity. Good. Hands go overhead, hanging for five. Down, touch, PRESS. Walk in. PRESS. Walk in. I did this three times in the first Kapo, think I could have gotten my toes, but bailed and pressed to Kapo B and sprung up.
Kapotasana II, came in the same stages; land, PRESS, and I felt the quads get into it, and remembered K telling me, in 2008, "FIND YOUR LEGS." I found them. The quads glow from knees to psoas, and they LIFT the hips. Brilliant! Walk in, PRESS, walk in, PRESS. I did this FIVE TIMES until my fingertips were past my toes. When I got that deep, the pressups moved from arm-straighteners (which they are at first) to barely extending the bent arms. That pose is HARD when deep. I moved the hands in, finally, breath like something coming out of an industrial cellar furnace, and moved them DOWN to take the knuckles of the big toe (well on the foot). Five there, elbows almost touching the floor, and then four breaths of Kapo B with hands just off toes, before I slipped and the fingers popped back more than an inch. That's ok, it gets spring-loaded, both physically and emotionally.
But it's definitely REAL. My Kapotasana had been a sort of required impossibility for a long time, and it's real now, it's A POSE. This really demystifies it, and now I can truly talk about it in mechanics, although it is still amazingly difficult.
I want it, I look forward to it, I'm eager for it. The massive, huge bending that I feel in the lumbar, which somehow does not hurt. The light in the quads, the deep, deep abdominal work of stretching in A and then pulling me upright in B.
I LIKE it. It's actually BECOMING a "homeopathic dose," as was once said to me.
After Kapo I take a vinyasa which makes me wish I could jump through straight-legged (because crossing ankles on a jump through after that backbend is MURDER), and then I do my three-to-five wheels, three dropbacks, and a Kino-style "final backbend," which again, is Chakra Bandhasana training. Hands and feet definitely within 18 inches now, after final backbend.
I'm only occasionally popping up to standing after dropping back; I still need to lift my heels to get the rocking going and I sometimes tiptoe to standing and then sink them. What I usually do is drop back, walk in, press to fingertips and take five suprisingly intense breaths before lowering; something about fingertipping really cranks up the backbend.
But it is good, and tomorrow, even with achiness in the right front pec/shoulder, I aim to have it again.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Seattle. July. Speak.
July 7-20, that's Wednesday to Tuesday. Sunday the 11 is a moon day. I know of two possible Mysore-style opportunities. Talk to me about doing the yoga there. GO!
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Depression over, Fakin' the Funk and Those Tangents
Ok, a while back on another site, I posted that "something's coming." Now I know what it was. The freakishly deep, dark, impenetrable depression that was the first week of April. What fucking hell. Now that it's clearing, I see a sort of realization about all of the loss and mourning, like a last, deep-felt, inescapable squeeze of that bad business before it loosens its grip.
The boy is chatty, cruising (which is pre-walking, walking by means of furniture as prop), pink-cheeked, pleased, interactive, cheerful most of the time. It's prime-time to sell out to the "Awww" affect. In a way, we have ARRIVED as parents, who can still have a kid AND potentially still have lives. True, we're still totally pinned between job and parenthood, but I see life peeking through the darkness, all over. It's a real springtime now. I think we might make it through. This is very good. Let me not underestimate the TOTAL SERIOUSNESS with which I thought that this might NEVER EVER HAPPEN, over the last eighteen months.
I cannot fake the funk when I write; it's simply not in me, because I began writing in college, mostly first-person stuff, life-sorting stuff, and I rely on writing heavily for sorting out my shit. That's why this blog is private (although if you look for ashtanga and Indianapolis, you get me, more often than not, as the first 2-3 hits). So it's not that I'm honest BECAUSE I'm private (Foucault would fucking hate that, anyway), it's that I am private BECAUSE I am too honest about my stuff (particularly my emotion-driven exaggerations of my own experience) here. So I would love to have some "yoga blog" where I talk about the inner world and being centered and all that lovey-dovey idealist peace shit, but that's NOT HOW IT IS. There is stuff in here that I don't even say at home; there's stuff in here that fewer than probably ten people in the world know. Nonetheless, writing for me is very much secondarily communication, and it is primarily sorting, reflecting, looking, studying, and particularly so when I'm in pain about something.
Tangents from last time! They look heavy to me now; that's ok, they were written with heaviness.
I think the ego is a tool, a real live practical tool. This is to distinguish it from being some magical disembodied thing that is either "in us" and inseparable (can you imagine saying that your shovel is PART OF YOU, MAN???) OR that it is this separate thing that "can be burned." You don't REALLY want to burn your ego, you want to burn your EGOTISM. Your ego serves a purpose, dude: it's to keep your "self" contained, until you are ready to HANDLE being egoless, or even wading in those waters. You and I NEED the ego until we are ready to move beyond it. Just like training wheels.
De-centering is more profound to me than centering, by which I mean the "sense of self," that some people refer to as a center. You know, the "power cave" stuff from Fight Club, "Go to your cave!" Yeah, and Durden's reply carries over too, "Don't run from this!" In 2002 most my identity fell to pieces. In 2008-9-10 this happened again. I wanted to lose 2002; I took vengeance on it, pushed it over the cliff, gloried in its flames. I agonized about the death of 2008910, I mourned it for months, it fucked me up quite substantially to feel that slipping away. And the slipping away, the LOSS, is much, much more profound to me than any kind of "retaining center." So who am I? My practices, pretty much. Not yoga practices, but daily practices. One could say, "I am bottle-washing, I am teaching, I am bending, I am baby-tending," WITHOUT saying, "I am a parent, I am a householder, I am a yogi, I am blah blah blah."
In a way, I am (blank) which is usually a nominative, is much more ACCURATE if we make it into, I am (blank) which is GERUNDIVE. I am -ing, I am -ing. Time-based, and historically specific. Sure, it's easier to--look at it--NOT LIVE IN THE PRESENT--by turning that into a TEMPORALLY INSPECIFIC category like "yogi," "parent," and such. I think of this as Jnana Yoga, take one. Turn the wider category, the broad temporal categories, into shorter moments, closer to INSTANTS. It freakin' echoes insight meditation.
And moments, unlike Sartreian existentialism, do not ADD UP to one's identity, but they also don't mysteriously establish some "place holder" identity which is then "threatened" by the moment-to-moment contingency of living closer to the actual flow of time and experience. This is something that has historically annoyed me about the ways that language puts identity crisis: "I feel x, oh the agony, oh!" Look dude, if you REALLY feel x, then you ARE x. It's like the ways that Native Americans apparently do not dance FOR rain, but ACTUALLY, THEMSELVES, RAIN.
"They are raining."
One puts a placeholder on experience: I am doing x, I enjoy y, I suffered z. No, don't half-ass it, don't step away, DON'T RUN FROM THIS. But Durden comes with the goal of negation, massive almost admirably deep negation, which turns into fascism because the line of flight (per Deleuze) leads to darkness and only fascism (or perhaps ART--Nick Zedd, Isidore Isou, Arthur Rimbaud) can save a deathtripper from destruction.
I retain an "I," but I'm not sure who "I" is, in terms of what "I" preaches. I is, as Rimbaud put it, "an other," but that's also not true. The I who acts, the bottle-washer, is fully I, insofar as bottle-washing is the present. I type. Ok, same. Those "I's" are not Others, but they are historically contingent (i.e., I am not always washing bottles), and so insofar as "I" is gerundive, those I's form a TEMPORAL SEQUENCE of I's, a sort of trail of footprints where "I" is each and every footprint, SEPARATELY AND INDIVIDUALLY. Who is to say who the stepper is? Some print-leaver has left us a TRAIL OF INDIVIDUALS.
And "I" does not do that, not in this mechanism as (haha!) I understand it. Basically what I've done is subjugate the subject to temporality rather than seeing the subject as something that moves through temporality like a river (which is the usual metaphor). Here, "you can't step in the same river twice" not because of the river's movement, but because "you" cannot in fact step AT ALL without leaving "yourself" in the footprint. Then there is "you again" and you leave "you again" in the next print, and so on. One always is, but one is never what one was and there's no continuity (well then how do we have memories?).
I believe that the "sacred yoga text" answer is that time isn't linear, but that requires us to toss our understanding of physics out of a very complicated little window.
The ego is a tool that keeps one from going crazy confronting things like that, until such things aren't confrontational. So "do you have a central core personality that weathers change?" No, not exactly; better said, I don't understand change to work like that.
I thought I knew what I was, in the negative, and then I thought I knew what I was, in the positive. It doesn't matter; one is ALWAYS WRONG. But that wrongness need not lead to months of suffering unless (in my case) I insist on understanding "what I am" in terms of BEING THE ONE WHO DOES THINGS rather than in being THE THING DONE.
The boy is chatty, cruising (which is pre-walking, walking by means of furniture as prop), pink-cheeked, pleased, interactive, cheerful most of the time. It's prime-time to sell out to the "Awww" affect. In a way, we have ARRIVED as parents, who can still have a kid AND potentially still have lives. True, we're still totally pinned between job and parenthood, but I see life peeking through the darkness, all over. It's a real springtime now. I think we might make it through. This is very good. Let me not underestimate the TOTAL SERIOUSNESS with which I thought that this might NEVER EVER HAPPEN, over the last eighteen months.
I cannot fake the funk when I write; it's simply not in me, because I began writing in college, mostly first-person stuff, life-sorting stuff, and I rely on writing heavily for sorting out my shit. That's why this blog is private (although if you look for ashtanga and Indianapolis, you get me, more often than not, as the first 2-3 hits). So it's not that I'm honest BECAUSE I'm private (Foucault would fucking hate that, anyway), it's that I am private BECAUSE I am too honest about my stuff (particularly my emotion-driven exaggerations of my own experience) here. So I would love to have some "yoga blog" where I talk about the inner world and being centered and all that lovey-dovey idealist peace shit, but that's NOT HOW IT IS. There is stuff in here that I don't even say at home; there's stuff in here that fewer than probably ten people in the world know. Nonetheless, writing for me is very much secondarily communication, and it is primarily sorting, reflecting, looking, studying, and particularly so when I'm in pain about something.
Tangents from last time! They look heavy to me now; that's ok, they were written with heaviness.
I think the ego is a tool, a real live practical tool. This is to distinguish it from being some magical disembodied thing that is either "in us" and inseparable (can you imagine saying that your shovel is PART OF YOU, MAN???) OR that it is this separate thing that "can be burned." You don't REALLY want to burn your ego, you want to burn your EGOTISM. Your ego serves a purpose, dude: it's to keep your "self" contained, until you are ready to HANDLE being egoless, or even wading in those waters. You and I NEED the ego until we are ready to move beyond it. Just like training wheels.
De-centering is more profound to me than centering, by which I mean the "sense of self," that some people refer to as a center. You know, the "power cave" stuff from Fight Club, "Go to your cave!" Yeah, and Durden's reply carries over too, "Don't run from this!" In 2002 most my identity fell to pieces. In 2008-9-10 this happened again. I wanted to lose 2002; I took vengeance on it, pushed it over the cliff, gloried in its flames. I agonized about the death of 2008910, I mourned it for months, it fucked me up quite substantially to feel that slipping away. And the slipping away, the LOSS, is much, much more profound to me than any kind of "retaining center." So who am I? My practices, pretty much. Not yoga practices, but daily practices. One could say, "I am bottle-washing, I am teaching, I am bending, I am baby-tending," WITHOUT saying, "I am a parent, I am a householder, I am a yogi, I am blah blah blah."
In a way, I am (blank) which is usually a nominative, is much more ACCURATE if we make it into, I am (blank) which is GERUNDIVE. I am -ing, I am -ing. Time-based, and historically specific. Sure, it's easier to--look at it--NOT LIVE IN THE PRESENT--by turning that into a TEMPORALLY INSPECIFIC category like "yogi," "parent," and such. I think of this as Jnana Yoga, take one. Turn the wider category, the broad temporal categories, into shorter moments, closer to INSTANTS. It freakin' echoes insight meditation.
And moments, unlike Sartreian existentialism, do not ADD UP to one's identity, but they also don't mysteriously establish some "place holder" identity which is then "threatened" by the moment-to-moment contingency of living closer to the actual flow of time and experience. This is something that has historically annoyed me about the ways that language puts identity crisis: "I feel x, oh the agony, oh!" Look dude, if you REALLY feel x, then you ARE x. It's like the ways that Native Americans apparently do not dance FOR rain, but ACTUALLY, THEMSELVES, RAIN.
"They are raining."
One puts a placeholder on experience: I am doing x, I enjoy y, I suffered z. No, don't half-ass it, don't step away, DON'T RUN FROM THIS. But Durden comes with the goal of negation, massive almost admirably deep negation, which turns into fascism because the line of flight (per Deleuze) leads to darkness and only fascism (or perhaps ART--Nick Zedd, Isidore Isou, Arthur Rimbaud) can save a deathtripper from destruction.
I retain an "I," but I'm not sure who "I" is, in terms of what "I" preaches. I is, as Rimbaud put it, "an other," but that's also not true. The I who acts, the bottle-washer, is fully I, insofar as bottle-washing is the present. I type. Ok, same. Those "I's" are not Others, but they are historically contingent (i.e., I am not always washing bottles), and so insofar as "I" is gerundive, those I's form a TEMPORAL SEQUENCE of I's, a sort of trail of footprints where "I" is each and every footprint, SEPARATELY AND INDIVIDUALLY. Who is to say who the stepper is? Some print-leaver has left us a TRAIL OF INDIVIDUALS.
And "I" does not do that, not in this mechanism as (haha!) I understand it. Basically what I've done is subjugate the subject to temporality rather than seeing the subject as something that moves through temporality like a river (which is the usual metaphor). Here, "you can't step in the same river twice" not because of the river's movement, but because "you" cannot in fact step AT ALL without leaving "yourself" in the footprint. Then there is "you again" and you leave "you again" in the next print, and so on. One always is, but one is never what one was and there's no continuity (well then how do we have memories?).
I believe that the "sacred yoga text" answer is that time isn't linear, but that requires us to toss our understanding of physics out of a very complicated little window.
The ego is a tool that keeps one from going crazy confronting things like that, until such things aren't confrontational. So "do you have a central core personality that weathers change?" No, not exactly; better said, I don't understand change to work like that.
I thought I knew what I was, in the negative, and then I thought I knew what I was, in the positive. It doesn't matter; one is ALWAYS WRONG. But that wrongness need not lead to months of suffering unless (in my case) I insist on understanding "what I am" in terms of BEING THE ONE WHO DOES THINGS rather than in being THE THING DONE.
Friday, April 9, 2010
One-liners to develop later.
1. The ego is a thing, like a broom or a sink.
2. Tangibly feeling identity dissolve is, for my money, more interesting than feeling a permanent "core" sense of self.
3. Yesterday I used the past tense, for the first time, when talking about seventh series' effect on my subjectivity; it's FINALLY coming around to acceptance.
4. Existentialism actually solidifies subjectivity.
5. Abstract expressionists talked about "immediate knowledge beyond reason" and a "vivid sense of ineffable presence."
6. That isn't about otherness, in the same way that Rimbaud's famous "I is an other," is ALSO not about otherness.
Now I must run to teach.
2. Tangibly feeling identity dissolve is, for my money, more interesting than feeling a permanent "core" sense of self.
3. Yesterday I used the past tense, for the first time, when talking about seventh series' effect on my subjectivity; it's FINALLY coming around to acceptance.
4. Existentialism actually solidifies subjectivity.
5. Abstract expressionists talked about "immediate knowledge beyond reason" and a "vivid sense of ineffable presence."
6. That isn't about otherness, in the same way that Rimbaud's famous "I is an other," is ALSO not about otherness.
Now I must run to teach.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
SILENCE!
Enough, seriously, with the psychosis.
I don't even have anything to say, because due to a muscle/nerve freakout in my right lats and intercostals, I haven't practiced since Wednesday, but nonetheless, ENOUGH of the freaking insanity with this relationship.
SURE, YES, I will need to process here, because writing is valuable to me as a processing tool, and I learned a lot from the very, very long post about history and community and belonging. Nonetheless, SILENCE!!
Randoms:
I think that practicing full 2nd the way I do (with modified Kapo, Dwi Pada and Karanda) is easier than practicing Primary to Kapo and really intensifying the backbends in order to develop them into a full Kapotasana and more limber drops/stands. That is one HELL of a practice. Wednesday I was so sore I couldn't make it up from Kapo, and that's pure soreness and lack of willpower, not lack of ability.
Sunshine is good; I still deny that I'm seasonally affective, but I do love to see those longer days and earlier sunrises. Although winter got better as it proceeded, same way that child at six months is still a baby growing out of hell, but child at ten months is a micro-toddler with all the superpowers that implies.
There's fear, about something. Sure, there's plenty, but I mean actual fear, every day, about something, and I can't see the something. This keeps me from looking forward to my annual May Lion-fest, which I'm not sure will happen. What the hell?
Our city is possessed tonight with Final Four mania, and if the current 46-41 score where the locals lead, ends in victory, there is going to be MADNESS in this place; fortunately downtown is 5 miles from here.
I aim to return to practice on Monday.
I'm doing an "Intro to Ashtanga" workshop next Saturday, and will do all the majors: chants, ujjayi, uddiyana and how you do it, dristi and why it matters, prana and apana, the lotus and the gastric fire and the amrita, forty or so poses, and if we have extra time, I'll probably even introduce viloma (as a modified and easy version of active retentions).
Kino in May 2011 (check ashtanga.com, it's there). I feel like it's my job to get my gang ready for that.
I don't even have anything to say, because due to a muscle/nerve freakout in my right lats and intercostals, I haven't practiced since Wednesday, but nonetheless, ENOUGH of the freaking insanity with this relationship.
SURE, YES, I will need to process here, because writing is valuable to me as a processing tool, and I learned a lot from the very, very long post about history and community and belonging. Nonetheless, SILENCE!!
Randoms:
I think that practicing full 2nd the way I do (with modified Kapo, Dwi Pada and Karanda) is easier than practicing Primary to Kapo and really intensifying the backbends in order to develop them into a full Kapotasana and more limber drops/stands. That is one HELL of a practice. Wednesday I was so sore I couldn't make it up from Kapo, and that's pure soreness and lack of willpower, not lack of ability.
Sunshine is good; I still deny that I'm seasonally affective, but I do love to see those longer days and earlier sunrises. Although winter got better as it proceeded, same way that child at six months is still a baby growing out of hell, but child at ten months is a micro-toddler with all the superpowers that implies.
There's fear, about something. Sure, there's plenty, but I mean actual fear, every day, about something, and I can't see the something. This keeps me from looking forward to my annual May Lion-fest, which I'm not sure will happen. What the hell?
Our city is possessed tonight with Final Four mania, and if the current 46-41 score where the locals lead, ends in victory, there is going to be MADNESS in this place; fortunately downtown is 5 miles from here.
I aim to return to practice on Monday.
I'm doing an "Intro to Ashtanga" workshop next Saturday, and will do all the majors: chants, ujjayi, uddiyana and how you do it, dristi and why it matters, prana and apana, the lotus and the gastric fire and the amrita, forty or so poses, and if we have extra time, I'll probably even introduce viloma (as a modified and easy version of active retentions).
Kino in May 2011 (check ashtanga.com, it's there). I feel like it's my job to get my gang ready for that.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Brief morning conversation (7th)
Quick morning conversation about how parenthood and bodies relate. Interesting in the fact that we can have such a thing, but not with the content that I want such a conversation to have had.
"After the real thing, what used to be just for entertainment and relating doesn't seem quite worth it."
"I think you'll find that guys don't have any such transformation."
"Well it's just that reproduction is so much more present..."
"Ah, so it's like a re-purposing, sort of hard to get back to what that body used to be doing, et cetera."
These were the major lines, there were a few more, but these are the big ones in my memory. I'm proud of the fact that my social constructionist training did not leap out with flames at the phrase "real thing" and the perjorative-sounding "just for entertainment." I was VERY proud of myself that I was able to control my instinctive reactions there.
I'm very much hoping that this essentialized-maternity-my-body-is-the-kid's-vehicle mentality sort of wanders away, when the first year is over. Numerous mothers have told us that there's a "moment of change" when you do what one in particular called "lose the crazy from the hormones."
So I'm hoping that this mentality where the kid is all that matters, and where I neither matter nor exist, will just wander off, when that happens.
Otherwise, our relationship is dust.
I already, for my own psychological and emotional safety, considered us to have broken up after about three months of pregnancy. It just wasn't possible to be so close to her all the time, and to be pushed off by that fucking curse against life that pregnancy is. It was safer--still massively painful, but safer--to just believe that we'd broken up, and that I now inhabited some weird liminal space where I live with a roommate and a small child and am too busy with work and everything to have a dating life.
It's ESSENTIAL to maintain no outside play right now. If I were to drop a dose of the Lion-energy into this funerary urn of a relationship, it would be matter and anti-matter and the universe would turn into the plasma of nuclear fusion.
Message to women of the world:
BEWARE. When you get pregnant, you will MURDER your relationship and you'll think that it's A GOOD AND PROPER THING to do. You won't be able to relate in any rational way, through the hormones, and you won't be able to explain, either.
Maybe in two months I won't ever have had to write this.
"After the real thing, what used to be just for entertainment and relating doesn't seem quite worth it."
"I think you'll find that guys don't have any such transformation."
"Well it's just that reproduction is so much more present..."
"Ah, so it's like a re-purposing, sort of hard to get back to what that body used to be doing, et cetera."
These were the major lines, there were a few more, but these are the big ones in my memory. I'm proud of the fact that my social constructionist training did not leap out with flames at the phrase "real thing" and the perjorative-sounding "just for entertainment." I was VERY proud of myself that I was able to control my instinctive reactions there.
I'm very much hoping that this essentialized-maternity-my-body-is-the-kid's-vehicle mentality sort of wanders away, when the first year is over. Numerous mothers have told us that there's a "moment of change" when you do what one in particular called "lose the crazy from the hormones."
So I'm hoping that this mentality where the kid is all that matters, and where I neither matter nor exist, will just wander off, when that happens.
Otherwise, our relationship is dust.
I already, for my own psychological and emotional safety, considered us to have broken up after about three months of pregnancy. It just wasn't possible to be so close to her all the time, and to be pushed off by that fucking curse against life that pregnancy is. It was safer--still massively painful, but safer--to just believe that we'd broken up, and that I now inhabited some weird liminal space where I live with a roommate and a small child and am too busy with work and everything to have a dating life.
It's ESSENTIAL to maintain no outside play right now. If I were to drop a dose of the Lion-energy into this funerary urn of a relationship, it would be matter and anti-matter and the universe would turn into the plasma of nuclear fusion.
Message to women of the world:
BEWARE. When you get pregnant, you will MURDER your relationship and you'll think that it's A GOOD AND PROPER THING to do. You won't be able to relate in any rational way, through the hormones, and you won't be able to explain, either.
Maybe in two months I won't ever have had to write this.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Ten months of seventh series (plus the nine prior)
Let's do the cute bit first. Nine month old children are pretty fantastic. They interact, they crawl quickly, they get food all over themselves, they climb up to standing on EVERYTHING, they make all sorts of consonant-and-vowel noises, they play with toys in inventive ways, they crawl over you, they clap hands, they chase the cats, and they give you faith that the squiggling mass of helplessness which they were nine months earlier, WILL actually grow up into a coherent, thinking human. All of this is very, very good, and most of the time, also very fun. So this is a massive change for the positive from, say, the torment of summer 2009, which was some of the worst hell in the history of life on earth.
Anyway: ten months now (each end of the month is a birthday). Thinking about moving away from liquids toward a food diet. Wondering if the nearby daycare will take one-year-olds next academic year. You know, the future, always.
******************************
Attention: I will now spend some time digging around a bit deeper in my personal neurotic bullshit re: seventh series. You should know that this is all going to be about my inner state and history and NOT about generalizations, so unless your bullshit is very terribly similar to my bullshit, there might not be a lot here for you. But people do seem to read when I post this sort of thing, so here we go.
*****************************
April is the hardest month of the year for academics; I think that it is rivalled by November, but if you're faculty, it's harder in April because there are awards and ceremonies and all kinds of bureaucratalia due by year's end, so April does actually have a harder service load. If J and I make it to the end of April with our continuing sex debt, it will be twenty months, which makes a nice clean SIX HUNDRED days. That's one fucking hardcore sadhana.
What did I learn about this, almost by accident, some time ago? That the continuing "get it, do it" voice in my head is NOT ME. That was unbelievable, once I had time to process the insight: you/I are/am not your/my sex drive, in fact, that drive ISN'T EVEN OURS. When I was younger, I thought it was a voice inflicted on me by media culture in the US, but now with some Sutras and meditation practice in my head, this insight becomes valuable for DRAWING BACK from destabilizing desire, an ever-destabilizing one, one that never ends and can't be fed, even and especially by what it demands. And that was a picture, in micro, of ALL desire. So that's incredibly important.
It's weird now, and I can't tell if it's from the long debt or seventh series generally or from age or from indifference or from what: when I see attractive bodies, I immediately think about how difficult the relationship would be. So sure, have your curves and have your snug clothing and whatnot, break out the springtime, it doesn't mean you're not going to all be hard to relate to. That's the truth. What did Nietzsche say about this? "One must be able to converse with a woman, for all else fades," or words closely to that effect.
I still envision my age-old paradise where people are honest and self-knowing and where sexual encounters are simply ways to gain further knowledge and share wisdom, but that isn't how this world works. So I greet bodies with a sigh. And I can still be worked into a familiar rage by talk about college date-rape and people being stupidly essentialist about monogamy and so on, but the old LSD-influenced paradise of being "one with everything" is losing its shiny glimmering. It's no longer all-bodies-are-one-hey-wanna-get-down (and in practice, it never was, I was always, until 2003, too terrified to ever act on my own vision). In fact, the Sutras late in Book I (I think) talk about "unity with prakriti" as achieved by improper methods and thus not being real enlightenment.
So I don't expect to spring into some mid-life crisis; relationships are hard and bodies ARE relationships. I was never big on objectification, and while pornography (and as Jason pointed out with the customary snark, not long ago, Yoga Journal) does rely on objectification and sure, it's fun, it's not my practice in real life.
Frustration *actually* fades, and in a way, I'm spooked by the eventual return of sexual activity because I'm certain that it will flood those now-quieter seeds with fresh water and sunshine. How terribly, terribly, ironic.
******************************
Community. My family identifies itself as Catholic, but as I've said before, it's a light-weight, unserious Catholicism, and I never, when I was younger, figured out why it was so light-weight. Only in conversation with J did I ever put this together. Catholicism for my family is simply a way of GENERATING community, of making social links; it's NOT a belief system, not REALLY. People talk about heaven and such, and funerals are a big deal (whereas I find Christian funerals to be such a farcical celebration of misery that they make me want to FUCKING VOMIT), but really, the familial point of BEING CATHOLIC is simply to be RECOGNIZABLE TO OTHERS, to sort of "have the badge" whereby one belongs.
My family doesn't care for deep, inward-looking, verbally complicated explanations of things, and they also don't care for meta-knowledge, by which I mean knowledge of WHY and HOW one knows what one knows, or believes what one believes. They wouldn't care for how long that prior sentence just was, for example. I, of course, LOVE that shit. The more complicated something is (provided that I'm interested in it to begin with), the more interested I get. The more "meta" it is, the juicier I find it to be. In fact, one of my strategies for making boring stuff interesting, is to crank up its complexity and my meta-cognition of it.
So when I tried to really BELIEVE in Catholicism (thinking, "well it's religion, right, that's WHAT ONE DOES, right, you believe in it, RIGHT?"), my family immediately didn't understand. "You're taking it too seriously." Taking it too seriously? What the fuck are you talking about? This is FOR LIFE, right? This is a set of ethics by which one can STEER ONE'S LIFE, yes? That's the fucking POINT, right?
But all of those questions went unanswered, and what made it all more irritating is that my family could NOT tell me what the ACTUAL point of application was, because they just DO IT, they don't THINK ABOUT IT. "Well just don't take it so seriously." "Because it just is."
Now, if you want to piss me off, you say "It just is" or "That's the way the cookie crumbles." Give me a blank wall to stare at and tell me that I can't learn about it or change it.
No.
Unacceptable.
So in adolescence I started to do what only in graduate school would I acquire a name for: I began doing a dialectical and materialist analysis of their ideological commmitments. I've never believed in Marxist history or its teleology or any of that, but I find dialectics to be a SHARP FUCKING SCALPEL and to be BRILLIANT at cutting through self-blind bullshit about "It just is."
This did not, however, enlighten me as to HOW my family used Catholicism. It told me a lot about the belief system itself and its own power commitments, but my family's USE of Catholicism remained totally fogged to me. How was it possible that they BELIEVED but also did NOT? How the fuck was that even MANAGEABLE on a cognitive level?
It took a conversation with J (and this only happened a couple years ago, when I was something like 37, 38 years old, trying to unpuzzle this business that landed on me when I was TWELVE), to realize that they MAKE COMMUNITY with other extended family, via this belief system. It's like clothing or face paint; it's how you RECOGNIZE THE MEMBERSHIP. That's why hardcore metaphysical commitment is UNNECESSARY; it's not HOW HARD you believe, it's that you CLAIM BELIEF AT ALL so that you can BELONG SOCIALLY.
********************************
Why does that matter, aside from being potentially interesting in itself?
Family and reproduction. Seventh series.
I experience my family as basically metacognitively blind. Generally speaking, they are not AS A GROUP (and group overrules individual quirks in this usage) aware of why they do what they do, because that would REVEAL THE MATERIAL COMMITMENTS of group-making, and thus ruin the sincerity of the community, which is in a way GUARANTEED by committing RITUALS WITHOUT AWARENESS.
That paragraph is why I find tradition to be kind of terrifying.
Tradition and the very notion of "family," the idea of belonging, ITSELF, has a necessary and ESSENTIAL blindness in it. At least in my family, it does. My curiosity, which has always been native to me (I'm not pretentious enough to call this "intelligence") as far as I can remember, can't accept those blind walls, those "unquestionables." Things exist to be questioned and learned about; if I can't learn about it, it's because the fucking light isn't turned high enough.
So blindness is NOT acceptable to me, and as with most people who claim that, what we mean is that blindnesses which WE OURSELVES DO NOT ACCEPT (i.e., OTHER people's blindnesses) are not acceptable to us. OUR OWN blind spots are fine, hah!
A break with the familial unit was called for; it was the only way to not internalize the deadly, traitorous blindness. In a sentence, that's why I live in the Midwest now.
*************************
Again, why does this matter? Take my brother, who is a year younger than I am. He lives in the suburban Boston area ("the way you're supposed to"). He has a kid, and a wife to whom he is married (again, "the way you're supposed to"). He has a job (again, TWYST). And so on. And he is good people, none of this negates him in any fashion or should be understood to do so.
I got married once, and it was the biggest disaster of my existence (adolescence runs a close, close second, and in fact, the two echo each other in ways that are freakishly similar). I don't live in the suburbs, and in fact, I cannot even WRITE the word "suburb" without wanting to spit venom and nuke those fucking horrorshow things out of motherfucking existence. I have a job, but it's a job teaching Dada and advising graduate MFA students on making phallic symbols.
AND I have a kid.
That's the one exception to the list of differences.
The kid "connects" me to my family. My brother, on learning that J and I were pregnant, said, "Wow, this is the most conservative thing you've ever done." How many of you are laughing at that? See? He didn't mean socially conservative (my family's voting record is that of "yellow dog Democrats"); he meant, "non-wingnut." He meant, "This doesn't fit with your long record of doing crazy shit."
What's the connection? It's doing something THE WAY I'M SUPPOSED TO. All four grandparents want me and J to get married, and it's for the same reason. It's just like lightweight Catholicism (J's parents, for the record, are Protestant/atheist, much much more religiously lightweight than even my parents are).
Having a KID ties in to the community, but unfortunately, this also becomes a sort of ethernet cable which allows communication, two-way, between COMMUNITY BASED IN BLINDNESS and my ever-aware meta-community. And that creates friction and fire.
I resist instituting various bans, first because that never works and second because you can't ban people from doing things they're not aware of existing in the first place. My parents know better than to insist that their grandchildren become Catholic; when they asked my brother about this, he said that his family was tending toward Unitarian Universalism (one could do worse). J and I probably will tend toward generally Buddhist principles, but more in daily practice than in any sort of metaphysical umbrella.
I find myself VIOLENTLY OPPOSED to family "membership," not because it's harmful or abusive in any way--it's not--but simply because there is BLINDNESS IN IT. I'm perfectly willing to take the kid out there and hang out with the family, and all of our conversations and what are great and entertaining, and stories are told, but in me there is a guardian, like that sword of fire that surrounds Genesis' garden, which DOES NOT PERMIT the "blind traditions" to be downloaded.
When I started climbing and doing non-monogamy and doing ashtanga yoga, it made me very, VERY foreign to my parents' whole lifestyle and history, which I loved, because I could go home and still "be me" and do all kinds of family events and so forth, and as deep as I went, into their traditions, my own practice made me UTTERLY foreign, made me INDIGESTIBLE. Various relatives of mine like what has generally been described as my "persistent craziness," and there is a streak of that in my family as well--someone always moves far away and does weird stuff, in every generation. I am that person for my generation.
My intelligence alone makes me that person, what I've called my "meta-awareness," that stone on which I build all of my communities. Really, if I wanted to acquire discriminative knowledge, what I would deconstruct in my meditation practice is not my sexual stuff, but my INTELLIGENCE. THAT is where my ego is TRULY built.
****************************
J and I don't have the same conversational dynamic as we did before we got pregnant. Somehow in all the insomnia and the confusion and the needs to drive-here-pick-that-up-get-the-kid-omg-panic, we forgot how to hear each other, to speak clearly, to have time for chewy conversations. We've become literally dumber, less able to hear each other.
I used to have a set of priorities, arranged in 2003, which became my sword of discrimination between the two decades of my life prior, and my "future for evermore." I was climbing a lot, doing the yoga, having chewy conversations and a lot of sex with a marvelous smart woman who related healthily and with wisdom, and drinking a good bit of locally produced micro-brew beer. Ahh, life. Arrival!
And I crystallized those priorities, I made them "THE WAY and THE PATH." And I was going to run them out until death. I was going to re-pave my history and the whole history of the entire universe with those priorities. Death to stupidity, death to ignorance, death to the past! Death to error! Death to silence! Death to censorship! Death to repression! Death to fear! Death! Death, I say!
I was strident and proud and something approximating "free" after the very, exceedingly tight prisons into which my long-runnining persistent ignorance had led me. Of course, in Yoga Sutras terms, what I really did was just institute a more fun prison (which too would have decayed in time), but comparatively and back in those days, it was liberatory.
AND then we got pregnant and it all went to hell in less than six months.
Total assassination of our sex life, instantly, even before month one was over; as I said above, we're now creeping up on month TWENTY. Total dissolution of our ability to communicate, both in ability and in time to do so. Relationship put on the back burner, and then a back-er burner, and then even further back. Soreness in her body, illness, colds, kicking and sciatica, the pain and wounding of birth itself, non-stop colds since New Year's--the end of healthiness. Less beer consumed, both for chemical reasons and for time reasons. No time to climb, can't be away for a day, too "recreational," not serious enough.
I kept the yoga; I basically drew a line and said YOU DO NOT TAKE THIS FROM ME. I REFUSE TO DIE ALL THE WAY.
Of course, it wasn't death, but given that I crystallized "liberation" in that set of practices, all of my liberation evaporated, all except for the power to breathe and move.
I set myself up for this bear trap, and I own all of the pain now, it's all mine, I asked for it.
And I didn't realize that my ex-marriage had greased various paths with demonic powers, evil karma shit, but once I "joined the family" I got a good close look at those things.
My parents are, as far as I know, asexual. I was a VERY curious kid and if there had been ANY evidence of such activity I would have known about it. Family has come down to me, conceptually, as being asexual and based in "blind traditions" which reproduce themselves in generation after generation. So the idea of "family" to me, particularly after an asexual marriage myself, isn't really positive. Sexless blindness about one's identity and community? NO FUCKING THANK YOU.
What, in appearances, do I have now?
Family.
Asexuality.
Shallow conversations, the lack of depth which used to be there.
That looks to me AWFULLY LIKE something I've tried for DECADES to avoid.
And of course I deceive myself; J and I are NOT MY PARENTS, we are NOT. Many many indicators point to vast differences. But until we can reinstitute an avid sex life and return to our nicely chewy conversations, I will always have doubts, suspicions, anger, pain, resentment. I often feel BETRAYED by J in that she chose the child over me, chose asexuality and shallowness over RIGHTEOUS PRIORITIES. See how biased that sounds? That's MY DAILY LIFE. I INHABIT THAT BIAS and I CANNOT LET IT GO.
J does not understand why I cling so hard to "what used to be." It's because that brief five-year span was made into my LIBERATION from twenty years of PAST STUPIDITIES. And the vanquishing of that liberation into this PSEUDO-VERSION of the SAME STUPIDITIES makes me very, very, very very VERY anxious.
J does not have my prisons, my liberation rhetoric, or my long bad relationship, she doesn't have my neurosis where all of this is concerned, so she wants me to "commit more" to the family relationship. I am trying with all my might. It's like embracing horror, it's like embracing my own negation. It's embracing something that I am TERRIFIED OF.
The kid himself is great; what I am so horrified by is the POTENTIAL MEANING of the FAMILY RELATIONSHIP.
Have I killed myself? Have I doomed myself to the prison I've tried so hard to escape? For me it's all faith that I HAVE NOT. But the relationship WON'T GUARANTEE THIS FAITH, will not LET ME KNOW that it's ok.
A man tied to a stake and set on fire tells himself,
The flames are not real.
The flames are not real.
The flames are not real.
Anyway: ten months now (each end of the month is a birthday). Thinking about moving away from liquids toward a food diet. Wondering if the nearby daycare will take one-year-olds next academic year. You know, the future, always.
******************************
Attention: I will now spend some time digging around a bit deeper in my personal neurotic bullshit re: seventh series. You should know that this is all going to be about my inner state and history and NOT about generalizations, so unless your bullshit is very terribly similar to my bullshit, there might not be a lot here for you. But people do seem to read when I post this sort of thing, so here we go.
*****************************
April is the hardest month of the year for academics; I think that it is rivalled by November, but if you're faculty, it's harder in April because there are awards and ceremonies and all kinds of bureaucratalia due by year's end, so April does actually have a harder service load. If J and I make it to the end of April with our continuing sex debt, it will be twenty months, which makes a nice clean SIX HUNDRED days. That's one fucking hardcore sadhana.
What did I learn about this, almost by accident, some time ago? That the continuing "get it, do it" voice in my head is NOT ME. That was unbelievable, once I had time to process the insight: you/I are/am not your/my sex drive, in fact, that drive ISN'T EVEN OURS. When I was younger, I thought it was a voice inflicted on me by media culture in the US, but now with some Sutras and meditation practice in my head, this insight becomes valuable for DRAWING BACK from destabilizing desire, an ever-destabilizing one, one that never ends and can't be fed, even and especially by what it demands. And that was a picture, in micro, of ALL desire. So that's incredibly important.
It's weird now, and I can't tell if it's from the long debt or seventh series generally or from age or from indifference or from what: when I see attractive bodies, I immediately think about how difficult the relationship would be. So sure, have your curves and have your snug clothing and whatnot, break out the springtime, it doesn't mean you're not going to all be hard to relate to. That's the truth. What did Nietzsche say about this? "One must be able to converse with a woman, for all else fades," or words closely to that effect.
I still envision my age-old paradise where people are honest and self-knowing and where sexual encounters are simply ways to gain further knowledge and share wisdom, but that isn't how this world works. So I greet bodies with a sigh. And I can still be worked into a familiar rage by talk about college date-rape and people being stupidly essentialist about monogamy and so on, but the old LSD-influenced paradise of being "one with everything" is losing its shiny glimmering. It's no longer all-bodies-are-one-hey-wanna-get-down (and in practice, it never was, I was always, until 2003, too terrified to ever act on my own vision). In fact, the Sutras late in Book I (I think) talk about "unity with prakriti" as achieved by improper methods and thus not being real enlightenment.
So I don't expect to spring into some mid-life crisis; relationships are hard and bodies ARE relationships. I was never big on objectification, and while pornography (and as Jason pointed out with the customary snark, not long ago, Yoga Journal) does rely on objectification and sure, it's fun, it's not my practice in real life.
Frustration *actually* fades, and in a way, I'm spooked by the eventual return of sexual activity because I'm certain that it will flood those now-quieter seeds with fresh water and sunshine. How terribly, terribly, ironic.
******************************
Community. My family identifies itself as Catholic, but as I've said before, it's a light-weight, unserious Catholicism, and I never, when I was younger, figured out why it was so light-weight. Only in conversation with J did I ever put this together. Catholicism for my family is simply a way of GENERATING community, of making social links; it's NOT a belief system, not REALLY. People talk about heaven and such, and funerals are a big deal (whereas I find Christian funerals to be such a farcical celebration of misery that they make me want to FUCKING VOMIT), but really, the familial point of BEING CATHOLIC is simply to be RECOGNIZABLE TO OTHERS, to sort of "have the badge" whereby one belongs.
My family doesn't care for deep, inward-looking, verbally complicated explanations of things, and they also don't care for meta-knowledge, by which I mean knowledge of WHY and HOW one knows what one knows, or believes what one believes. They wouldn't care for how long that prior sentence just was, for example. I, of course, LOVE that shit. The more complicated something is (provided that I'm interested in it to begin with), the more interested I get. The more "meta" it is, the juicier I find it to be. In fact, one of my strategies for making boring stuff interesting, is to crank up its complexity and my meta-cognition of it.
So when I tried to really BELIEVE in Catholicism (thinking, "well it's religion, right, that's WHAT ONE DOES, right, you believe in it, RIGHT?"), my family immediately didn't understand. "You're taking it too seriously." Taking it too seriously? What the fuck are you talking about? This is FOR LIFE, right? This is a set of ethics by which one can STEER ONE'S LIFE, yes? That's the fucking POINT, right?
But all of those questions went unanswered, and what made it all more irritating is that my family could NOT tell me what the ACTUAL point of application was, because they just DO IT, they don't THINK ABOUT IT. "Well just don't take it so seriously." "Because it just is."
Now, if you want to piss me off, you say "It just is" or "That's the way the cookie crumbles." Give me a blank wall to stare at and tell me that I can't learn about it or change it.
No.
Unacceptable.
So in adolescence I started to do what only in graduate school would I acquire a name for: I began doing a dialectical and materialist analysis of their ideological commmitments. I've never believed in Marxist history or its teleology or any of that, but I find dialectics to be a SHARP FUCKING SCALPEL and to be BRILLIANT at cutting through self-blind bullshit about "It just is."
This did not, however, enlighten me as to HOW my family used Catholicism. It told me a lot about the belief system itself and its own power commitments, but my family's USE of Catholicism remained totally fogged to me. How was it possible that they BELIEVED but also did NOT? How the fuck was that even MANAGEABLE on a cognitive level?
It took a conversation with J (and this only happened a couple years ago, when I was something like 37, 38 years old, trying to unpuzzle this business that landed on me when I was TWELVE), to realize that they MAKE COMMUNITY with other extended family, via this belief system. It's like clothing or face paint; it's how you RECOGNIZE THE MEMBERSHIP. That's why hardcore metaphysical commitment is UNNECESSARY; it's not HOW HARD you believe, it's that you CLAIM BELIEF AT ALL so that you can BELONG SOCIALLY.
********************************
Why does that matter, aside from being potentially interesting in itself?
Family and reproduction. Seventh series.
I experience my family as basically metacognitively blind. Generally speaking, they are not AS A GROUP (and group overrules individual quirks in this usage) aware of why they do what they do, because that would REVEAL THE MATERIAL COMMITMENTS of group-making, and thus ruin the sincerity of the community, which is in a way GUARANTEED by committing RITUALS WITHOUT AWARENESS.
That paragraph is why I find tradition to be kind of terrifying.
Tradition and the very notion of "family," the idea of belonging, ITSELF, has a necessary and ESSENTIAL blindness in it. At least in my family, it does. My curiosity, which has always been native to me (I'm not pretentious enough to call this "intelligence") as far as I can remember, can't accept those blind walls, those "unquestionables." Things exist to be questioned and learned about; if I can't learn about it, it's because the fucking light isn't turned high enough.
So blindness is NOT acceptable to me, and as with most people who claim that, what we mean is that blindnesses which WE OURSELVES DO NOT ACCEPT (i.e., OTHER people's blindnesses) are not acceptable to us. OUR OWN blind spots are fine, hah!
A break with the familial unit was called for; it was the only way to not internalize the deadly, traitorous blindness. In a sentence, that's why I live in the Midwest now.
*************************
Again, why does this matter? Take my brother, who is a year younger than I am. He lives in the suburban Boston area ("the way you're supposed to"). He has a kid, and a wife to whom he is married (again, "the way you're supposed to"). He has a job (again, TWYST). And so on. And he is good people, none of this negates him in any fashion or should be understood to do so.
I got married once, and it was the biggest disaster of my existence (adolescence runs a close, close second, and in fact, the two echo each other in ways that are freakishly similar). I don't live in the suburbs, and in fact, I cannot even WRITE the word "suburb" without wanting to spit venom and nuke those fucking horrorshow things out of motherfucking existence. I have a job, but it's a job teaching Dada and advising graduate MFA students on making phallic symbols.
AND I have a kid.
That's the one exception to the list of differences.
The kid "connects" me to my family. My brother, on learning that J and I were pregnant, said, "Wow, this is the most conservative thing you've ever done." How many of you are laughing at that? See? He didn't mean socially conservative (my family's voting record is that of "yellow dog Democrats"); he meant, "non-wingnut." He meant, "This doesn't fit with your long record of doing crazy shit."
What's the connection? It's doing something THE WAY I'M SUPPOSED TO. All four grandparents want me and J to get married, and it's for the same reason. It's just like lightweight Catholicism (J's parents, for the record, are Protestant/atheist, much much more religiously lightweight than even my parents are).
Having a KID ties in to the community, but unfortunately, this also becomes a sort of ethernet cable which allows communication, two-way, between COMMUNITY BASED IN BLINDNESS and my ever-aware meta-community. And that creates friction and fire.
I resist instituting various bans, first because that never works and second because you can't ban people from doing things they're not aware of existing in the first place. My parents know better than to insist that their grandchildren become Catholic; when they asked my brother about this, he said that his family was tending toward Unitarian Universalism (one could do worse). J and I probably will tend toward generally Buddhist principles, but more in daily practice than in any sort of metaphysical umbrella.
I find myself VIOLENTLY OPPOSED to family "membership," not because it's harmful or abusive in any way--it's not--but simply because there is BLINDNESS IN IT. I'm perfectly willing to take the kid out there and hang out with the family, and all of our conversations and what are great and entertaining, and stories are told, but in me there is a guardian, like that sword of fire that surrounds Genesis' garden, which DOES NOT PERMIT the "blind traditions" to be downloaded.
When I started climbing and doing non-monogamy and doing ashtanga yoga, it made me very, VERY foreign to my parents' whole lifestyle and history, which I loved, because I could go home and still "be me" and do all kinds of family events and so forth, and as deep as I went, into their traditions, my own practice made me UTTERLY foreign, made me INDIGESTIBLE. Various relatives of mine like what has generally been described as my "persistent craziness," and there is a streak of that in my family as well--someone always moves far away and does weird stuff, in every generation. I am that person for my generation.
My intelligence alone makes me that person, what I've called my "meta-awareness," that stone on which I build all of my communities. Really, if I wanted to acquire discriminative knowledge, what I would deconstruct in my meditation practice is not my sexual stuff, but my INTELLIGENCE. THAT is where my ego is TRULY built.
****************************
J and I don't have the same conversational dynamic as we did before we got pregnant. Somehow in all the insomnia and the confusion and the needs to drive-here-pick-that-up-get-the-kid-omg-panic, we forgot how to hear each other, to speak clearly, to have time for chewy conversations. We've become literally dumber, less able to hear each other.
I used to have a set of priorities, arranged in 2003, which became my sword of discrimination between the two decades of my life prior, and my "future for evermore." I was climbing a lot, doing the yoga, having chewy conversations and a lot of sex with a marvelous smart woman who related healthily and with wisdom, and drinking a good bit of locally produced micro-brew beer. Ahh, life. Arrival!
And I crystallized those priorities, I made them "THE WAY and THE PATH." And I was going to run them out until death. I was going to re-pave my history and the whole history of the entire universe with those priorities. Death to stupidity, death to ignorance, death to the past! Death to error! Death to silence! Death to censorship! Death to repression! Death to fear! Death! Death, I say!
I was strident and proud and something approximating "free" after the very, exceedingly tight prisons into which my long-runnining persistent ignorance had led me. Of course, in Yoga Sutras terms, what I really did was just institute a more fun prison (which too would have decayed in time), but comparatively and back in those days, it was liberatory.
AND then we got pregnant and it all went to hell in less than six months.
Total assassination of our sex life, instantly, even before month one was over; as I said above, we're now creeping up on month TWENTY. Total dissolution of our ability to communicate, both in ability and in time to do so. Relationship put on the back burner, and then a back-er burner, and then even further back. Soreness in her body, illness, colds, kicking and sciatica, the pain and wounding of birth itself, non-stop colds since New Year's--the end of healthiness. Less beer consumed, both for chemical reasons and for time reasons. No time to climb, can't be away for a day, too "recreational," not serious enough.
I kept the yoga; I basically drew a line and said YOU DO NOT TAKE THIS FROM ME. I REFUSE TO DIE ALL THE WAY.
Of course, it wasn't death, but given that I crystallized "liberation" in that set of practices, all of my liberation evaporated, all except for the power to breathe and move.
I set myself up for this bear trap, and I own all of the pain now, it's all mine, I asked for it.
And I didn't realize that my ex-marriage had greased various paths with demonic powers, evil karma shit, but once I "joined the family" I got a good close look at those things.
My parents are, as far as I know, asexual. I was a VERY curious kid and if there had been ANY evidence of such activity I would have known about it. Family has come down to me, conceptually, as being asexual and based in "blind traditions" which reproduce themselves in generation after generation. So the idea of "family" to me, particularly after an asexual marriage myself, isn't really positive. Sexless blindness about one's identity and community? NO FUCKING THANK YOU.
What, in appearances, do I have now?
Family.
Asexuality.
Shallow conversations, the lack of depth which used to be there.
That looks to me AWFULLY LIKE something I've tried for DECADES to avoid.
And of course I deceive myself; J and I are NOT MY PARENTS, we are NOT. Many many indicators point to vast differences. But until we can reinstitute an avid sex life and return to our nicely chewy conversations, I will always have doubts, suspicions, anger, pain, resentment. I often feel BETRAYED by J in that she chose the child over me, chose asexuality and shallowness over RIGHTEOUS PRIORITIES. See how biased that sounds? That's MY DAILY LIFE. I INHABIT THAT BIAS and I CANNOT LET IT GO.
J does not understand why I cling so hard to "what used to be." It's because that brief five-year span was made into my LIBERATION from twenty years of PAST STUPIDITIES. And the vanquishing of that liberation into this PSEUDO-VERSION of the SAME STUPIDITIES makes me very, very, very very VERY anxious.
J does not have my prisons, my liberation rhetoric, or my long bad relationship, she doesn't have my neurosis where all of this is concerned, so she wants me to "commit more" to the family relationship. I am trying with all my might. It's like embracing horror, it's like embracing my own negation. It's embracing something that I am TERRIFIED OF.
The kid himself is great; what I am so horrified by is the POTENTIAL MEANING of the FAMILY RELATIONSHIP.
Have I killed myself? Have I doomed myself to the prison I've tried so hard to escape? For me it's all faith that I HAVE NOT. But the relationship WON'T GUARANTEE THIS FAITH, will not LET ME KNOW that it's ok.
A man tied to a stake and set on fire tells himself,
The flames are not real.
The flames are not real.
The flames are not real.
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