On Asceticism

You and I both know what asceticism is, right? And who ascetics are? Sure, asceticism means giving stuff up, and ascetics are not just people who give up these things, but (and I think this is really part of an active stereotype) ascetics are also those preachy people who can never tell us enough times or with sufficient volume about what they've surrendered and how important it is/they are and how morally-or-other superior they are either because of their better health or their discipline or both.

So an ascetic is disciplined, for sure, and (to those around them) likely annoying with this preachiness. I used to know a woman who turned "juicer" because she wanted to extend her lifespan. Nothing about quality or anti-factory-farming or anything like that: pure and simple lifespan extension, pure issue of mortality. Fair enough.

You'll expect, probably, given how few punches I've pulled of late, that I'm going to beat up ascetics. Not so. I'm seeing some current practices of mine as ascetic, but that's not a label I'm willing to accept (because "ascetic" is also, and very much so, an identity) without a little finessing first.

Easier one first: I started having pain from the wisdom teeth on April 2, and stopped drinking booze at that point. I'm still off booze; today is day 28. What is this about? Mostly it was about pain and pain-killers, but now I'm six days off painkillers, and still have no real desire to drink booze (particularly, craft beer, which I was drinking about 8-12 pints of PER WEEK in March). It has nothing to do with claims to moral superiority or health, calories, all of that. It has everything to do with curiosity about discipline (can I just refuse it, no matter how much I'd like a pint? Let's find out, hm, yes, ok) and also the realization that I'd been drinking booze to put down stress or at least to draw a line between myself and my stress, but those are not healthy (psychologically speaking) reasons to drink booze. Those are the roots of an addict's reasons. Can I drink booze out of celebration? Probably. What is there to celebrate? This week's coming birthday? Maybe. We'll see.

Primarily, I understand booze as a social buzz; it promises "company" even when you're alone, just like coffee does (same imaginary promise). So an under-companied extrovert like me is drawn to coffee and to booze out of the social factor. I tend toward solipsism, too, which means basically that my imagination is almost stronger than my reality, so when I'm alone and can "drink myself into company," that really WORKS for me, but then reality is, by comparison, depressing, which I can see leading to the need for further intoxication--see how the cycle begins?

So I'm currently a little puzzled by how/why I might drink booze, and it's backed up by my second ascetic practice, to which we now turn.

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Ok, as you expect (it's been a while since I deviated from this formula), I am about to GO THERE again, in the usual euphemisms but with a bit more detail than before, so if you'd like to stay out of my writing-bed, please skip to the next section.

I've gone through several periods of what could be called sexual asceticism, but really, it's been more like emotional asceticism, or maybe what one could coin "interpersonal" asceticism. When I was 16, I swore off all female people, because they were (as I put it at that age) too damn confusing. Now, I hadn't really any close female contacts to "give up" at that point, so what I meant was, I'm going to stop lusting for female company. So that asceticism was very much of the emotional variety. I did it. I completely stopped relating to women with any "romantic interest" for ten months. It didn't really reduce my angst about the whole affair, but it did reduce any horrifying awkwardness at the same time that it reduced any chances of coincidental marvelousness.

When I was married, I pretty much swore off any sexual contact with my then-wife, because her body issues mixed with Catholic guilt mixed with rapist ghosts mixed with passive-aggression was FAR too toxic to bother getting close to. Talk about putting your head in a lion's mouth. I still wanted her to behave "like we did in the old days" (i.e., our first five months together), but that never happened.

It's occurred to me that I need to say something about "who I am" in these terms also, because you can't understand what one refuses without understanding the desires and fears of he who refuses. Otherwise, this will all come out as some objective indictment of "how screwed up women are," and that's both inaccurate and impolite.

I'm highly verbal, and I prefer partners who are also highly verbal. If I feel like you keep your "private business" actually private, and particularly on an emotional-energetic level, I'll find you very difficult to relate to as a partner. I can read this kind of energetic honesty and foregroundedness (or its lack) on people within a few minutes. But at the same time, this really isn't about sexual behavior ITSELF, because I can also read people who are "easy" but "shallow" pretty much on contact, and I find easy shallowness to be deeply repulsive. Really I prefer partners who are keenly aware of their embodiment, their physicality, and who also have clear psychological-intellectual-emotional links to and through their physicality. You need to BE your body, to get into a relationship with me. And ALL of these preferences are not so much what I want from partners, but what I MYSELF WISH I HAD. So partners need, on a certain level, to PROVIDE, and to BE, what I'm worried myself that I am not.

This is, in one way, what my post about Gandhian vows is about: the desperate desire to become myself, to find myself in a relationship, an embodied relation, to meet the REALITY of myself, beyond and better, alongside and integrated with, my ferocious intellect.

This is also what my coursework is about: Surrealism, Abject Art, video art where the art is immersive. Affective relations, feelings and sensations, immersion and totality, bath of the senses, all spectators one, bodies relating, all in the same experiential pool. I make a point of striving to turn my classrooms into this.

It's all that same desperate (so desperate!) wish to FULLY OVERCOME the mind-body problem, the key to all suffering in my existence.

But this is also how I become the Cult Leader, the paradigm of embodiment, speaking yoga with one hand and hallucinatory immersive art with the other, creating a whole bunch of drug-addled naked followers rolling about together, like the climactic orgy in the film PERFUME.

And for all of those reasons, I can't solve any problem through sexual expression or through relationships. None of this leads to what the Sutras call the "Shining Self."

And in this way, what some people call "the heart" becomes that Third Way between the intolerable poles of Mind and Body. Body can't heal Mind: it can't. If it could, I would know by now how to do it.

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Sorry folks! If you made the jump to avoid the sex stuff, you'll just have to JUMP AGAIN because I got into a more productive tangent there (but the good news is, you can now go back and read, in relative safety! Whooohooo!).

Let the euphemistic section begin!

What J and I usually do, even in our silent-and-infrequent nights these last few years, is begin in some fairly innocent touchy/snuggly position, with some chitchat about the boy or what we'll do in Seattle over the summer vacation, or some other random topic. If I'm interested in more, I move a hand somewhere (which might not be any of the classic hot zones, right? Because for some people, an earlobe or the side of the neck, or the foot, is totally a sex organ, let's not be simple-minded, eh?). J does not give verbal consent these days, and I really wish she would, because I both like it for clarity and because consent makes me hot. So I have to sort of increase the touch-ante and see how/if she responds to it. Often she responds in a silent affirmative (breathing, moving, some signal of that type) and things proceed nicely from there.

Less than a week ago, things proceeded like that, and then they got TOTALLY awkward. I had gotten to the "increase the ante" phase, and there was *no ambiguity whatsoever* about what was going on (I can't politely say more about that without transforming the nature of the blog). Let's just say that no one could have been confused about the topic of the touch-as-question.

Total silence, and no movement. Not just non-verbal non-consent, but more like total silence, utter shutdown, but with no hot emotions, not even sadness, no trauma, NOTHING. Like caressing a parking meter.

And that's NEVER happened to me, ever in my whole life. When I get physically close to people, it's because I've gotten INTERPERSONALLY close to people, and she just totally shut down the interpersonal, as if she switched her own humanity to "off." I was completely horrified and backed off and then she started this random conversation about the boy and the weather, that went on for fifteen minutes, then she drifted off to sleep.

I stayed awake trying to process that for THREE HOURS. And then the whole next day, and night, it was like nothing happened. No resentment, no trauma, no bringing it up for question or discussion, nothing. Literally like nothing happened. And J does not repress stuff like that, she doesn't keep stuff under wraps. So this had me thinking, "Wait, You've Done That Before...You've Had That Sorta Relationship Before." She has said that past partners have found her unresponsive, even calling her "frigid" in one case. And J DOES fit play in around work; she has always been "work first." So if she's got a lot to do, or doesn't have energy to spare for play, she just shuts play off, she just stops existing there. AND she's an introvert who never gets enough alone-time for recharging, with the boy and work and such, and so she's really starved for time and space for self-realization, and while I find sex play to be massively stress relieving and productive, I can see how she finds it One More Damn Thing To Do.

So maybe that's what happened.

In any case, it completely horrified me away from sexual contact with her. I do NOT get close to cold people. That DOES NOT HAPPEN. But as I was processing this, I realized that if I backed away totally from the relationship, I'd help to chill the whole thing to perhaps-unrecoverable coldness (duh), and so I HAVE TO retain organic contact with the relationship, which means that, for my own interpersonal PROTECTION, I have to choose the nature of my sexual interactions with J. Not on a simple basis of refuse/engage, but conditionally, occasion to occasion. I have to stay right there, up close, but I also have to control my own participation in our relationship where all of this is concerned, I have to be able to raise, lower, and otherwise manipulate the energy as needed, on command.

No longer ever again can I be prey to the appetite alone, trying to "satisfy it." First because that's impossible (see many posts on "samskaric business"), and second because it's damn time that I was in charge of my sexual business rather than it being in charge of me.

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OK, welcome back everyone.

So long story short, I've given myself the mission of being in charge of the energy, and currently that has meant sexual asceticism. Asceticism in the sense that I'm avoiding imagery and language that stokes that energy, but also accepting that when I see people in the halls in strappy summer dresses, there's going to be some appeal, and it's ok, and also, that when I grab J in a hug and get turned on because that's what happens, that's also ok.

Energy management (in any respect, any energy at all) is never about "yes" and "no." That's far too simple. It's really about awareness, first the sheer ability to feel the nature, density, insistence, the "direction" or "tendency" of the energy. Yes and no are answers to questions that maybe we pose about the energy, and in a sense, they only come after the management, the interaction (perhaps interaction has a less "managerial" flavor). Playing with energy doesn't necessarily circuit up through the mind for a clear "yes/no."

I was thinking about this in terms of asana practice: if I want a floaty jump-back from Paschimottanasana, it's not a thing I think about. I change the gaze up to my feet, press into my hands, inhale and pull the feet to crossed, and really press into the base of each finger, inhale up, and then exhale is pure extension back. Gaze moves down under, maybe in a way pushing the hips up and back, like the gaze chases the hips backwards. And if my feet scrape and I didn't "want" them to, I immediately break a smile and cease caring. Keep breathing and go to the next one.

Energy management isn't about "I made a thing happen," it's not all this bullshit about "manifest the Secret" (as I've snarkily said here before). Energy management is more like conscious focus on the ability of the energy to "reach" or "recede" and the force with which it does so. My teaching in the art history classroom is a good demonstration of energy management, and it FEELS GOOD to teach in the highly performative and somewhat seat-of-pants way that I do. There is a call for papers in a conference on teaching, where I will send an abstract soon, and it's about "innovative strategies in the art history class," and I'm really tempted to put in a thing about energy management, because the common belief now that lecture is by definition a stultifying format ("students are born multi-taskers and become bored"), is really unthought.

Boredom comes not from a format, but from the energy and force that is IN that format, and so really (by me, anyway), bored students are produced by bored teachers. Or, put another way, if students don't ramp up the energy of a format, and the teacher doesn't ramp up the energy of a format, that energy's PROBABLY not going to get ramped up, and that's why throwing an eraser or setting off a fire alarm is a valid way to ramp up that energy.

Is lecture in this way "boring"? I don't think so; I teach lecture classes of 80 students as if I'm doing stand-up comedy, complete with call-outs and random emotional "outbursts" and tangents and then a "return to topic" as if we're a TV show coming back from commercial.

This is getting pretty tangential, but again, it feels good to write here and to really let all of the people that I am, come out to play. To try to make this a "yoga" blog, especially after seventh series started, was just impossible. "Where" is the yoga? "How" do I contain it? Contain it? Fuck that, the last thing I'm after is containment.

Unless of course it's about asceticism, right? But even there, energy play isn't about containment, it's about feeling the force and, when and where necessary, interacting with that force. More focus; narrower beam; broaden the reach. Requests of this kind. Like shining the world's coolest flashlight around the universe. Like closing your eyes and feeling the walls of a subterranean cave with just your hands and feet.

Vows and Essentialisms, or, What's Inside Us, Anyway?

I should not read around on the interwebs.

But first:

I often think of how a Gandhian vow was defined to me, way back in 1992 when I was in college, in a course called "Gandhi and Merton." It was really informative, and I liked it (with time) more than I realized while I was taking it. Gandhi apparently believed that one could not make a vow about anything one doubted that one could achieve; a vow was not to be a prop for willpower. This is in total opposition to, for example, how Americans make New Year's resolutions.

"This year I will stop smoking...no really!" A Gandhian vow would be like, "This year I will stop smoking," and you put the thing down and you never pick it up again, not because you Magically Succeed at willpower, but because you knew beforehand, that you had the willpower.

There are two definitions of "vow" there: in the Gandhian case, it's simply saying out loud what you know you will do. In the American case (and sure, more than Americans do this, and not all Americans do this, either), we're not sure that we can do the thing, so we say it out loud to see if The Powers That Be will PERMIT us to have the wish.

Nietzsche hates that about us ;-)

One can do more with this type of thinking: there are so many damn yoga blogs about whether or not the practitioner will make it to the mat today, or so many queries about if someone should be traditional or not, or when to take pranayama, or whole blogs about apparent disagreements between teachers, "who is right in this case, well, let's see what everyone says."

Maehle would do this in a cleaner, more authoritative way than I will, but do you see how fluffy and relativistic all of that is? "Will I practice or not?" Well how about you just practice or decide not to, and call it at that? "Am I traditional?" Well, do you have a teacher you follow? Do you have a tradition you follow? Yes or no? Ahh, I see, what you're REALLY asking is, "Is the tradition I'm aware of, worth it?" Why not just decide that it is or that it isn't, and then proceed? Or, as a teacher in Austin put it, "For your first ten years, you are just trying the system out." "When should I take pranayama?" Well, when does your tradition say to? Ahh, you have no tradition, or you're not sure? See the prior question. "Who is right in this case?" Well, who's teaching you? How much do you trust them? No, not much? Then why is that person your teacher?

One can cut and dry a lot of wheedling and in-the-middling with this type of thinking.

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I am going to officially call my seventh series practice "transformative." So there.

Sure, you can hand me that Bad Advaita and be all, "There is nothing you need to transform, for you are whole already" and then I'll hand you my crazy sex samskara stuff and you can tell me all about contentment, right?

So fuck off with that shit.

Anyway.

Transformation's first siddhi is the ability to see through all semi-transformation, all pseudo-transfomation, all "talk" of transformation that has nothing to actually do with transformation. I said in 2011 that I would reduce my practice, in order to commit more fully to parenting, and I did both of those things. Gandhian vow. Did I want to make such a vow? No, of course not: one IS an ashtangi, right? One IS a practitioner, right? An identity, a discovery, a self, at last at last, right? All bullshit. Who cares what one is.

My Facebook feed is UNRELENTINGLY full of "happy yoga nuggets" and quotations of wisdom and little "discoveries of joy" and "feel good moments" and all of that Hallmark Card of Yoga nonsense. Now, TRUE, a lot of it can make one feel better, or open up a vista of new things to see, but MOST of it has that depressing "New Year's Resolution" flavor of "this is how I wish I felt" or "this is how actualized I know I can be!" where the "know" has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with a flimsy untested faith.

Kierkegaard hates this in us ;-) So does Dostoevsky, for the record ;-)

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What transformation does NOT provide, and in fact the new test that it creates, is that one cannot use this siddhi-for-seeing-the-pseudo to convey transformation to other people. It's as if seeing the actually-transformative from the shadow, is a completely separate skill from manipulating the actually-transformative and the shadow. Or, if you will, your transformation "eyes" have very very little to do with your transformation "hands."

It should be painfully obvious by now that I have a lot of shadow stuff in my sex stuff; anyone who can't see that hasn't been reading here for the past four years. I used to let that imagination run hither and yon, wherever it liked (and in fact that was my modus operandi when I was in my fuckedup marriage), and that resulted (particularly in those days) in a lot of time spent (wasted? spent? who knows anymore?) in online conversations and research (yes, I count some of that activity as research) and curiosity and discovery and so on. Nowadays, I hook my erotic imagination strictly to J (where it is suprisingly content to rest) and I address all of that energy as needed, down the shortest circuits and the most effective outlets. Saves time AND energy, and sure, one could be less euphemistic, but first it's not that kinda blog, and second, you read me loud and clear and You Know It.

This is why the yoga students I've talked about before, the ones I sometimes call the "enthusiastic submissives," are the most dangerous but also really interesting, energetically. They give me a CLEAR opportunity to handle my shadow, to really manage energy. Because the shadow is like, "go on, get in her personal space" and I make myself step back and replace my presence with that of the yoga, I make myself go against the shadow, explicitly, right then and there, face to face with it. I turn it down with no illusions. And I have never failed to turn it down, at least in my yoga classroom (there are not exceptions in my non-yoga life, but I didn't want to come on like He Who Beats the Shadow; that's pretentious). This is also why I had nothing to do with a student a few years ago who in email after a class basically said, "You can have me if you want."

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So what are we, if we need to trust The Powers That Be, to grant us boons? What do we believe about ourselves?

I'll give you what will seem at first an unrelated statement: I believe that monogamy is chosen rather than built-in (either genetically or culturally in a way that is "so deep" that it's essential). Why does this matter? It means that my monogamy with J (for example) is a choice, and we actually did have that conversation, early on in our relationship, because I was doing a polyamorous thing when I met J. Now, don't confuse this with "oh ok you were dating two people at once" or "oh yeah you guys were swinging." The partner I was with when I met J, was doing real live theorized, intellectually defensible, practicing, workable polyamory. Was it messy and a lot of interpersonal work? You bet your ass it was. J asked me after a few months of this if we could "do" monogamy (because interpersonally, poly is just not her thing) and I agreed, so our monogamy was consensual, and I liked that.

This is a vow.

"Will you do monogamy with me?" "Yes."

As with most things, American culture is both willing and able to be stupid. Google "open relationship" some time and see the fascinating range of idiocy that you get, besprinkled (as again with most things) with some actually informative nuggets. Some of the most pernicious idiocy is this idea that men are "naturally" going to seek more partners and women will "naturally" pick the mate with the "superior" DNA, which sounds like a scientific basis for human behavior but which is total bullshit, in large part because human beings are social creatures and have a lot of social sex, and you just can't accurately make them fit a box like that, which might be accurate for reptiles but is just not the model for homo sapiens. Some of the OTHER rank idiocy available is that polyamorous people are "incapable" of monogamy just because it's not their choice--as if not committing to monogamy with your full faith is going to crack the edifice of relating itself, and the world will cave in. This kind of thinking is typical of American conservatism.

Compare this to my Gandhi vs. New Year's idea above: in one model, you choose to do a thing and you do that thing and the world continues to exist. In the other model, you need to have faith that you will somehow be enabled to do (by whom?) or stop being prevented from doing (by whom?) the thing that you want but don't actually believe you can have. And this non-believing often needs to be backed up by imaginary limits of "what's possible" and "what isn't" with a whole lot of bullshit pseudo-science and likewise bullshit "certainty" from some made-up authorities or "unchanging phenomena" (like "marriage" or "heterosexuality" or "decency" or some other undersea fearmongering horrorshow from the conservative imagination).

A vow is certainty. There was no doubt, no "me" to question, to wonder, "OMG, CAN I be monogamous, is it my NATURE?" Nature never fucking entered into it. "Can you do this?" "I can." That's it.

Now, wait a minute, am I not monstrously frustrated with my relationship right now? Why not re-negotiate? Good question; now, of course, I can re-negotiate (I would expect "no" as an answer, but that's fine, sometimes you get no), but the real reason why I don't re-negotiate is that I don't have the damn time or energy to get into another relationship. It would be like periodic booty call, and if I rev up enough imagination, I can basically do that one myself, energetically speaking (tangent: as with all things, the multiple bodies, the koshas, figure into EVERYTHING we do, because we are five bodies: if you take something that's usually considered annamaya, like eating, and you start to understand it in pranamaya and manomaya and other terms, it becomes freakishly intimate and interesting; you read me?).

This is not a copout. Poly people understand that relationships take time and energy, and it has nothing to do with "how much I need," but has EVERYTHING to do with "how much do I have to give?"

And to return to my opening statement here, ONE of the reasons I should not read the interwebs (or, apparently, my FB feed) is that a friend of mine liked this article called, "15 ways to make your marriage last 15 years" and one was basically how the husband (note how hetero the article is, too) should never criticize the wife, because she's already criticizing herself (essentialist feminine self-criticism? really? what a bummer), and another was "become each other's sexual rock stars" which basically said, "get really good at sexing each other, ask questions, figure out your deepest needs" which of course (as you expect, right?) set me off on exactly the rant I just wrote here. NEEDS? QUESTIONS? Not all relationships work on cutting each other down to the bare bones of intimacy. Not all relationships work on needs and questions and the discoveries that NO ONE ELSE HAS EVER MADE, don-don-daaa!! This article to me seems rife with all of the anxieties of unchosen monogamy. It really laid heavily on "it's the couple against the world" and "don't choose danger" (leave exes alone) and "be each other's best" and all this. As if monogamy needed to be cemented in, made into a fortress where you invite only your close (but not too close) friends in. "How fucking cowardly," to be honest, was my first reaction.

"How to Protect Yourself From Other People," perhaps would have been a better title. And of course, yes, sure, you do have to protect yourself from other people's interpersonal bullshit, not just if you're teaching in a yoga room but in many life situations, sure. But the whole idea of couple-as-fortress just made me think of Chogyam Trungpa's monkey stuck in the cement block with no idea why he can't move.

BE HUMAN.

I can't tell you "stop disbelieving" or "exchange faith for knowledge," because only experience can teach you to do that. Maehle is big on this in his Sutras translation, at one point declaring, "You don't have to have faith in your right ear. You KNOW it's there."

If you're going to listen to Tim Miller on koshas (as for example in his recent Columbus workshops), then REALLY BELIEVE in the five koshas. Try that on for a while, is what I tell students. LIVE IN IT. And people made this big deal about Tim saying that his one-day workshops on the first three series were "the bullet train to samadhi." Idiots. You can't take a bullet train to samadhi without the PREPARATION; it wasn't about the destination, but how to streamline the journey.

"But, but, but, am I making the sattwic choice?" If you REALLY have certainty in that system and know your choices well, YOU WILL KNOW the answer to your doubting questions.

GET THERE: I'm not sure how to advise. For me, it was probably seventh series (but I didn't know this would happen). I committed, I set the vow, I did it. I got transformation, from what I call "doing the dharma." I got realer, more down to earth, than ever before (and sure, I still tend to have my head in the clouds, but I got real-ER, not realistic). And with it comes this unwillingness to take other people's half-assing nonsense, not in an uncompassionate way, but because of my own certainty as to what is transformation and what is not. Certain things are no longer questions.

Clear Vision, ranging from "Transgression" to "Differentiation"

***FOREWARD*****

The following post, to a much greater degree than I expected, is a sort of relationship therapy post. As seventh series, all the Chogyam Trungpa, the collapse of the long-standing "architectural neurosis" associated with dentistry, and two years of pretty intense reflection on my "samskaric business" all come together, long-term neurotic business dries out, gets old, ceases to function and collapses. It's like a slow-motion photo of the collapse of Sauron's tower. It's about transformation, but I realize that watching someone else's relationship go through changes is maybe not the world's most compelling reading. Still, there may be nuggets of advice hiding in here, or maybe you're just a voyeur who likes reading people's personal stuff. All of this is fine. If I really didn't want you here, I wouldn't write this shit out in such verbose proportion. Still, I mean this post as a record of transformations, things moving, or as Larry put it, "watch[ing] things appear and disappear."
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I think it was over a week ago when I said out loud to myself that what I REALLY feared happening was not that our relationship would become asexual but that it would become asexual *in the way that my parents' relationship was* and then I immediately hated how Freudian that was.

As far as I could ever tell, occasional hugs and obligatory-looking kisses were the extent of my parents' public affection. My father's sole relationship advice to me while I was a teenager, "Keep it in your pants til you get married," did not clarify anything. Particularly because I wasn't worried about WHEN to get such access but HOW to get such access.

But these details are beside the point.

Two days ago I, again, talking it through to myself, said that all of my interest in transgression comes down to "being evil," which under a deeply internalized ideology of lay Catholicism, meant "being embodied." Being a body at all. As I put it in my early 30s to a willing listener in the university's GLBT office, "it was like I had to come out of, not a homosexual closet, but a sexual-AT-ALL closet."

Only I, probably, can make easy sense out of the slippage from "embodiment" to "lay Catholic" to "evil." Or maybe anyone with some Catholic background can do it. Briefly (hahaha! do you KNOW by now never to trust me when I say, "briefly"?) it's this:

My parents told me I was a good person. They used lay Catholicism as a type of community-building. First communion wasn't so much about metaphysics as it was an excuse for the relations to throw a party. It was about "being a family," not so much about rigorously obeying some codes in order to get to heaven. They just gave that the necessary lip service.

So "good" ran alongside "Catholic" but I have a mystical-tending constitution, so I just swallowed up "good" and "Catholic" and made them identity terms, because that's what I do with identity terms, same way I would, decades later, with "climber." It's how I do business.

And then when puberty happened, as I've described earlier, it set off a massive and unresolvable metaphysical crisis. If the body is sexual and sexuality is evil (well, unless it's sanctified as "good" by certain rituals), then who am I? Am I not my body? Am I just a mind? Why didn't I have to worry about this when I was 12? This body and its new superpowers and the desires associated with them were far stronger than anything else I knew of. Am I "becoming evil" like someone in a werewolf movie? Can a body not be "good"? How come I can, say, do public service (that's "good" isn't it?) and still feel "evil" at night when I'm alone? How in the world can this be resolved?

To put it lightly, the priesthood in that little town was NOT equipped to deal with the kind of questions that I had. What I was supposed to do was to take lay Catholicism as lightly as my parents had, and then been a good Irish Catholic and made the body public-ly quiet while then doing in my private time, whatever sins I liked, and then we'd wink about the whole thing and reclaim God on the deathbed and go home happy, because that's how Irish Catholics like it (and yes, I get to stereotype them because they're my people).

Unfortunately, and maybe because I'm adopted from someone else's tribe or something, what I wound up doing was building this elaborate construction where the body was evil, and to be a body (to resolve the mind-body problem), I had to BECOME evil. NOT just to "commit" or "partake in" evil, but to ACTUALLY BECOME IT.

Now, if "partake in evil" had been enough, one drunken college party would have solved everything. But to BECOME evil, it was going to take systematic instruction, a whole set of rituals and behaviors were going to have to be involved. Don't forget, I was a kid who played a lot of D&D and all that stuff. BECOMING evil was ritualized the same way that lay Catholicism had rituals, but of course, nobody knew this but me. I built a sort of anti-cosmology with sexual initiations carried out by "evil" older women, initiations and pedagogy in the dark ways (which were really nothing other than sexual identity itself, achieved, without guilt--a sort of catharsis of Catholicism for embodiment).

Now, try to explain all of that to some drunk college girl when you're 19.

In art/theory terms, what I did was invent Georges Bataille and Surrealism before I'd ever heard of either one.

Last night, I posted the following as a Facebook status:

"sees the whole picture now, regarding transgression, being, transformation, embodiment, subjectivity, patriarchy, and all the Surrealism, the Foucault, the Bataille and the Deleuze and Guattari. I see the original doomed (but fascinating) project, its genesis, its outcomes and its tangents. I see a coherent possibility for understanding incompatible readings of one thing and for reconciling contradictory methods of approach for a second thing. And there are weird paradoxes everywhere, like Lautreamont and Keats watching a lightning storm together. Hint: are they not Kin? Unless you See Their Writing? Shhhhhh (don't let them know). DON'T TRY TO AGREE."

Do the first two sentences now make sense?

Let me say a word more about "transgression," which is really where this blog post properly begins. And of course let me tangentially say something else, beforehand. Once I had some sexual experience with partners, I became attracted to any activity which seemed to me to be "transgressive." This included who-does-what-how, levels of day- or artificial-light, all kinds of variables. It wasn't like hard S/M or anything (well...). At times, and more and more frequently over the past month, I've thought about setting up a sort of "cousin blog" to this one where I let myself have greater honesty about those events and preferences so that I can write in more honest and explicit vocabulary (a realm in which I have skill, but a story that I would only tell on that blog).

Hmm.

In any case. "The transgressive." Now, if you look at how "transgressive sex" is used culturally, it's a minoritizing term. It could mean minoritized practices like S/M, it could mean generally any sexual practice which breaks some kind of moral or other law. To transgress, to cross over, to cross a line. It could be local, as in "my parents told me not to do it in their bed" or it could be more global, like, "don't do it with animals." In real practice, it's impossible to set any hard-and-fast lines about what exactly "the transgressive" would mean. There are entirely too many variables.

What it meant when I used it in my younger days to label a thing that turned me on was, "not allowed in my current complicated cosmology." And you've seen, briefly, how complicated that cosmology was. Because I wasn't able to dump my Catholic identity simply by having partner sex, that was ridiculous (and that too is the "original doomed (but fascinating) project" that I refer to in the FB status).

So "transgression" came to mean, anything at all which crosses any line that I can see drawn by anyone in any situation whatsoever.

So, because for me to have a sexual identity at all was "evil," all sexual activities were immediately transgressive. When I started teaching students at the college level in 1996, I showed a class two rape scenes (one from STRANGE DAYS, the other from FRENZY) to show them the difference in aesthetic approach and to sort of smack-from-a-distance the woman who was making us show STRANGE DAYS, a film that I've always found to be patriarchal no matter how "phallic" Angela Bassett was. The students were horrified at the Hitchcock rape scene, and I had to sort of "break down" the class in order to discuss my aesthetic project here and to talk about gender politics and viewership and whatnot, and this "discussion format" based on shocking imagery, was also "transgressive," in that it transgressed what a classroom "should be."

So I used "transgression" broadly to mean invention, daring, experimentation, avant-gardism, confrontation with fear, novelty, and a hundred other things. I also thoroughly revelled in it and drank too much and too early and did a thousand other things that were variously improper and/or illegal and so on, all in the name of "transgression," and at the core, all based on trying to "become myself," a perpetually disavowed imaginary self that I was certain waited at the end of a dark enough tunnel.

"its outcomes and its tangents."

Back to the FB status: of course, a "transgressive" identity didn't await; that's an impossible pipe dream. But I maintained it all the way up until this year, basically. Up until now, all the way back from adolescence. Briefly, the once-in-a-blue-moon sexual encounters that J and I have now, have (of course, as you'd expect) a thoroughly "transgressive" flavor, because they happen even when she is "too busy," they happen sort of as a potlatch, a free-for-all outside the "scheduled time" of our lives, and they happen privately, away from "our lives," our family-and-job lives. And in part, trying to process my long frustration about that situation was what finally made "transgression" show up as the game I'd made it into.

Transgression is the disallowed.

I disallow myself, to create myself, I am created from the disallowed, the excluded. Self as abject. Clear connection to years of coursework; it wouldn't be accurate to say that I "taught my situation" but instead much more accurate to say that I taught the "set of discourses which surround me." A Sovereign of the Bataille underworld, the Dark Sublime. The witch doctor, a cult leader. But ever solitary, inhuman, over again like we've seen before. When I learned from reading a lot of Buddhism that I was not only NOT my history, but NOT my mind, and also NOT my body, the bricks of transgression began to slip, I think.

Only a couple days ago--only in writing with that FB status--did they really fall out of the edifice.

Oh wait, I'm not this mind, AND I'm not this body. Mind-body problem resolved.

And then I didn't have to lay so hard on transgression any more. Of course, my history and my coursework and my sexual practices are HEAVILY imbued with years of transgression-philia, so that won't be undone any time soon, but the drive for identity-by-means-of-it is over.

******************************************

So wait, what does the REST of that status mean? No, I don't figure that you care, but hey, apparently a lot of you read here, so let's find out.

"I see a coherent possibility for understanding incompatible readings of one thing and for reconciling contradictory methods of approach for a second thing. And there are weird paradoxes everywhere, like Lautreamont and Keats watching a lightning storm together. Hint: are they not Kin? Unless you See Their Writing? Shhhhhh (don't let them know). DON'T TRY TO AGREE."

This is entirely about me and J, although it could apply to any social relationship. Basically, here I have said that SHE is Keats and I am Lautreamont. Keats is all beauty and lyricism and nature and Romanticism and all that, and Lautreamont is all pre-modernity, darkness, evil, and mastery. Now, I like Keats, but I prefer Lautreamont. J has asked me on many, many occasions why I didn't read literature for escape, for "happiness," and I've said, "happiness doesn't teach you about reality," which is a direct reference to my lifetime frustration over the mind-body problem and Catholic/body good/evil questions.

Two poets sit side by side and write different poetry: Keats will praise the power and beauty of the lightning and Lautreamont will see it as the weaponry of a merciless agnostic God who hates us. They're not opposites, but they're quite different. As long as they just write poetry about lightning together, and don't try to CONVINCE THE OTHER ONE THAT THEIR VIEW IS THE RIGHT ONE, the two are kin. Poets watching lightning.

J is a proper hippie in her sexual politics; she's a feminist, but doesn't march, doesn't like to be seen in public, wearing a costume for her politics, and she's an environmentalist, but likes to practice in her daily life (recycling etc) rather than, again, being out in the street "being seen" as an activist. She is practical and unflamboyant. She said to me once, "to me a flower looks like an orgasm, a bloom of color." She's very hippie-ish in this, and I've always liked that.

I am a dark theorist in almost everything I do: in bed I like sweat, I like flow and fluids, I like dissolution and lightning and flashes of psychedelic color and disorientation and power games and surrender and lycanthropy and Altered States and time travel and primordial carnality and pre-Oedipal inchoate octopi and the first string of DNA rising from the muck with a howl out of a Francis Bacon painting. You know, the usual: devolution, transgression, desublimation down to the Bataillean sovereign dark sublime.

But in practice, I really like tenderness, a lot (although by many accounts, I am also a relentless tease, which is also accurate; how else do you desublimate somebody, man? :D).

ANYWAY.

"incompatible readings of one thing" and "reconciling contradictory methods of approach for a second thing."

J understands touch as sensation, and because she's an introvert, she only lets a VERY SELECT FEW experiences (and/or people) provide her with sensation. Sensation is very intimate with J. I have historically understood sensation as one of the great doorways to the Transgressive Paradise (tm), because it's sensual and reminds immediately of embodiment (and we all know where that ride goes, right?). This is the Keats-and-Lautreamont metaphor again. Two poets write together, about the same phenomenon, and yet as long as they DO NOT SHARE THEIR WORLDVIEWS ON IT there will be no fighting, no sadness, no disappointment where the one realizes that s/he is NOT FULLY SHARING with the other.

This silly idea that two people together are having the same experience. But it's so central to our idea of what Love(tm) is, isn't it?

So that is "incompatible readings of one thing."

Contradictory methods of approach refers, of course, to how and why we go to bed in the first place. There is a larger difference of values here, because this type of thinking is continuing not just as I write this, but day to day, this snowball's not done rolling yet.

J was raised with a large dose of the Protestant Work Ethic, and so I think that she sees parenting-and-work as "do the work first, if there's any time left over, play" and I was raised not just without that, but with the idea that one needs to play to stay sane, very "all work and no play..." and so my parenting-and-work ethic has been "play is more damn essential now than it has EVER been," which is a nice summary of our basic disagreement for the past nearly four years.

Finally, my last line: "DON'T TRY TO AGREE." So what I saw for resolution was NOT agreement, some negotiation which would end with a sip of grappa and some mutual undressing (sorry, quick flashback to the old days).

There is a guy in the world named David Schnarch, and he's a sex therapist but he's not one of those wishy-washy self-help guys (well, unless you think that's an accurate characterization of that Entire Field, right?). One of his big contributions to that field is about "differentiation," a term he did not coin. Differentiation in Schnarch's usage is about being OK that you and your partner are two different people. This sounds obvious, but you'd be suprised, perhaps, at how easy it is to NEED THAT PERSON to be someone specific for you, to feel betrayed when that person is NOT THERE FOR YOU.

Examples: J once said that she felt somewhat traumatized that for all the affection I showed her, I "wasn't there as much" as a parent, and to that, I directly replied that there was trauma on my end also about what parenting did to us as a unit (and yes, I was that euphemistic about it).

That's each of us stating our wish that the other one were more like our imagined priorities for our relationship. Neither party is getting what they want, but neither party is realizing (at that point in the discussion) that they are also NOT ACCEPTING who the other person ACTUALLY IS.

It's been years since I read Schnarch (his major book for laypeople seems to be PASSIONATE MARRIAGE, which is the source for everything I've said here about Schnarch, and it is constantly being re-issued, written in 1997 and reissued just again in 2011), but I think these paragraphs are accurate to his ideas.

You should probably read that book if you're totally confused by my use of it here (and it might be a good read if you're in any kind of long-term relationship), but the confusing question is probably, SO WAIT, YOU ACCEPT THE OTHER PERSON'S INABILITY TO PROVIDE FOR YOUR NEEDS? WTF KIND OF SOLUTION IS THAT???

Well, you do and you don't. Think of it like Rick Hanson, the Buddhist relationship guy, might: you understand not just that someone has priorities different from yours, but has priorities that are theirs and which are important to them. By changing your view of that person from "not you" to "her/himself," you move them FURTHER AWAY from you and at the same time into a space in which you can empathize. You can't empathize when all you want to do is ask them WHY, WHY, WHY?????? but you can when you chill out a bit by realizing their true and natural distance from you.

So for me it's like, "oh, hi desperately overworked woman. hey, i'll put the kid to bed tonight" and so forth, and it's MUCH easier to say that from this empathy-distance than from my demanding trying-to-squeeze-more-love-from-her-like-a-ketchup-bottle approach.

I still think she's as attractive as ever and my pulse rate still goes up at her sight and I'd still tear down a concrete barrier with my bare hands to get to her, none of that has changed at all. But now I don't see her as the concrete barrier.

And who am I? I'm the guy with different priorities from hers. By realizing this, I change her from "that person who used to love me and now for some reason doesn't as much" to "that person who's too busy to have the arrangement of priorities that we used to have, which, let's admit it, were largely governed by me anyway." With the loss of that frustrating mystery ("who am I? who are you? Why aren't you who you were?"), the tactics all become very practical. "I know you're exhausted much of the time, but I'd like to do this" and so on. As the same friend of a friend who originally GAVE us (different us, a story I'll tell another time) Schnarch's book used to say, "Ask for one hundred percent of what you want, a hundred percent of the time. Expect to hear no." It's fine. Two people really relating to each other, without the illusions created by "you need to be X for me", should be able to figure out most anything. Now, is this guaranteed? Of course not. I don't know how able and/or willing J will be to do this, but if I can turn down the weight of my neurosis on my life and our life, I bet some of the pressure will release, and less pressure in the system is more fluidity, isn't it? And more fluidity is more random unpredictable time....isn't it? Here, give me a month or two and let's find out.

Rambling Under Medication, about Teaching the Yoga and Intimacy

*this section of this post was started Saturday afternoon*

I just subbed an ashtanga class of 17 people. I knew maybe ten from prior classes, I know a few beyond strict "yoga student" identities, and at least six were totally unknown to me in any way.

Family stuff got me there just as class was beginning; no 20 minute hang-about intro so that I could ask about experience, names, or any of that. Three people looked "first time," as if seeing that I (obviously) wasn't the set teacher (whose name is female) was aleady upsetting.

So I said that I learned all the stuff they'd do, from the person who was supposed to teach the class, and we'd just go and I'd teach with a lot of variations to try to suit the room's mixed levels.

Those strategies belong to the random (and yet standard) "not full Primary but led portion of sequence" format that we do in most Indianapolis classes. Complicating this interestingly were the seven or so people doing Mysore-style practice of full Primary series, and one doing some Intermediate beyond that (she got that practice, as far as I know, from my Sunday room, so I had no trouble with her doing "her practice").

I've passed my eyes over some of the Remski pieces that Jason has been, to quote, "melting [our] faces off with boredom about" for a few weeks, and this should not be understood to be a reply to that, but it might borrow some vocabulary.

Is teaching intimate? No, I don't think so, at least that's not the word I'd use for it. To me, intimate is a relation, most commonly understood to be between different people ("an intimate relationship"), but can also refer to one's relationship with one's shadow stuff, or to one's meditation discoveries (I think it can, anyway).

I've asked people to "breathe for peace, not for survival" in class, in hard postures, I've asked people to feel hipbones rotating, I've asked for some fairly physical-energetic introspective stuff, and of course in jumping workshops I've asked people to send their conscious awareness to the pelvic floor and used the quadrant of bones to which it is hooked, to do so, and everyone laughs and blushes a bit. But unless we're going to say that breathing and having a body are THEMSELVES intimate (and how then would we characterize a change in one's relationship to those things? Shades of intimacy only? What about ahimsa? What about people who are sensually "blind" for example in the shoulder or hip, who literally CANNOT feel movement in those places?), then I think that teaching is not an intimate relation, but it might intensify the intimacy that a PRACTITIONER has with breath or prana or energy or the hamstrings or the toes.

*this part of it is being written Monday night, 9 pm Eastern Standard, while I'm about 90 minutes into a dose of a generic for Norco, which is a version of Vicodin, higher on narcotics and lower on acetaminophen*

I had the lower two wisdom teeth taken out today, and with them, I think that eventually I will discover that I had the fear associated with them taken out also, or, as a friend puts it, "you don't get rid of the stress when you get rid of the stressor." We'll see. I think it all slowly dissolves into nothingness now, like morning fog.

I think it's dangerous to make teaching intimate, to reach out and energetically "touch" students unless you know exactly how you're touching and with what energy. This goes all the way back to my "crushing" post, and hopefully here I'll put that in more accurate vocabulary.

I have (and so do you), as I've said earlier, a lot of energies. Energy is conveyed, in relation between people, via the senses, via speech and word choice and emotional tone, via the koshas also (food body, energy body, emotional body; can't speak for the last two yet). A wide range of relating bodies. Haven't thought that you can relate to someone with your or their nose, or ears? Ever practiced next to (or been) the funky smelling practitioner? Ever heard of wise speech? Not all relations are you hailing someone on the street, not all of them are chosen and voluntary and certainly not all of them are vision-based.

What is it to touch someone?

The very words I use, in a yoga class, determine in a way what happens, what is heard, what the effect is. The weight of my hand (what Swenson calls "choose a level from 1-10") determines in part what an adjustment is going to be, how it's going to go. This is very "with power comes responsibility" stuff.

Eye contact matters, the funny "opening line" that Larry used to recommend we come up with, all of that matters. With Mysore-style ashtangis, it is (as Owl has said a few times) getting out of the way. But with new people, it's about invitation, permission. Figuring out whether I'm leading gently or leading with more attention to the method, or leading in another way. Figuring out whether I carry on with my "meta" and "snark" or make myself be quiet so the room can run.

"My" room in the yoga sense means something about the type of contact, and I guess I'm waxing phenomenological here, but whatever: being in a room is contact. Being around a group of practitioners; if there is magic in a room of ashtangis all "taking practice" together, particularly un-led practice, then it is this. BEING together.

But now we're in intimacy language, aren't we? Or are we?

Bedroom intimacy language tends toward either euphemism ("being together") or pornography (and no, I'm not interested in finessing erotica/porn here, I can do that blindfolded and half asleep at novelistic length any time I want to: BORING).

J finds it intrusively intimate for yoga teachers to talk about her breathing; it's a transgression of her privacy. I've never, to my memory, been transgressed in that way in any adjustment or advice. I've been annoyed a bunch, and injured twice, but not "invaded."

I would like, in my ashtanga room, for adjusting and advice, and eventually practice wholesale, to remain strictly an "intimacy" between practitioner and the koshas and the method. I realize that if we push phenomenology far enough, I'm part of every student's experience, but I don't think we need to get that hippie-dippy about it or to follow Merleau-Ponty all the way to Cosmic Flesh (because we all know what happens to me when we fall that far down the rabbit hole).

At the same time, I care a lot about my regular practitioners and if they have discomfort or pain or pride or struggle or irregular practice or frustration or sadness I have to restrain myself from going over there to be part of it. I think that this is, in part, "seventh series" training. But I am good at said restraint, and generally, I will try to ease somebody's labored breathing, or work the shoulders back, or soften the trapezius, or I'll ask if a practitioner is able to go further before I do anything with her/his pose. I like challenge, also, and my reputation as a teacher is usually that "my class is harder than hers" and that's fine, it's not true, it's just in the "tone" of the teaching environment.

I notice that this disembodies my own ideas of what constitutes the intimate, and allows me to pick and choose (same as with the ego: just one of many voices that I can listen to). The great problem with this is that other people cannot or do not or are not in the habit of doing this. So you can take a practitioner in a bear hug in Marichyasana D, but not in a standard "hey, great practice" hug after class, without it perhaps "getting weird."

And sure, those energies are different, even by my own definition: one is the student and the pose, and I just happen to be providing the bind or the bigger twist, and the other one is "social" between human beings. As Matthew Sweeney once said, in the West we don't get to touch people enough, so learn some shiatsu or something; make touching ok.

So in my yoga room, touching is ok. Sure, sometimes I can feel a vibe of suprise from someone in an adjustment, but I'll immediately ask if the adjustment is ok, or I'll just continue to do that "energy" of adjusting throughout the room, and it seems to "get alright."

People seem most neurotic about "that's just for me" or "that's just for her" or whatever; anything that seems "just for one" is either favoritism or perversion or jealousy or so forth. It's essential that the room BALANCE its level of physical and energetic intimacy. This is why assisted tick-tocking (which sometimes happens in my room) is a good thing for other people to see, because it's so hands-on-hips and so hip-against-hip-balance and it's obviously such a massive trust-and-fear exercise. That is sort of a mark, like, "this intimacy is ok in my room, in fact it's standard."

I like it best when students sort of "apply me" to their practices, when I can turn down my own agency in the room. Sure, my ego wants to be on stage all the time, but this, like seventh series, is good for me. The dangerous students for me are the flirtatious souls who want attention, because I like to be that "rock star" persona, and sure, I completely understand at least one narrative that could be told about what went down with John Friend. Those temptations are real, and when I'm dealing with those students, I both flirt back (because I like it, and I know I should shut up, but it really does foster the relationship, IF YOU CAN BALANCE THE ENERGY) and I step off and demand more work in the posture.

This is where the "crushing" post comes in, in part. This flirtation that can be (at best) turned into interpersonal energy that can be (at best) then turned into listening to me-as-the-practice which can be (at best) an equation that drops me out and leaves nothing but a practitioner in love with her/his practice.

But that's a dangerous game. I still play it, but I'm happier in my yoga room when that game isn't there. I do the same thing in my art history room, particularly since I teach about artists who use masturbation as a concept (Dali, Duchamp) and women who have their insides video-scoped and Judy Chicago doing "vagina art" (her own term is less polite), and abject performance art that feels like Oedipal abuse, and art with blood and painting with ejaculate and performances that use animal entrails and people making themselves barf, as ways of undoing "body armor." And that's just some of it. But there I have turned up the volume of history and concept, so that the "saucy content" is all nested in what is hopefully compelling (and accurate) intellectual content.

As with everything else, teaching becomes a lesson in energy moving around, and lessons in what I want and what I wish were true. I like confronting temptations, playing with some danger, it's like training yourself to be a tightrope walker, and of course, the key to all of that is NOT USING OTHER PEOPLE for your training. That's not even consent; there is energy in the yoga room (or in the waiting room, or in traffic, anywhere) that simply cannot productively go certain places. You can rage on the road, sure, but for what? You can find people attractive in your yoga room (particularly given how dumb yoga fashions in the West are), but for what? You can say saucy things in the art history room, but for what? It's only in that last case that I have an answer that I can, myself, respect.

When I'm a student, I tend to (as said in the crushing post) crush on people who give me life-changing adjustments (notably: a Baddha Konasana, stand-ups and drop-backs, Kapotasana) and that's not a romantic thing, it's an energetic thing. Same with the days when I used to play with endorphins: whoever provides that endorphin rush gets some puppyish following. But that again moves the energy which is properly mine (from the hips, in the dynamic movement, in the confrontation with terror) into some imagined or desired relation, which often has no clear object. Again, "but for what?" and the lesson is still, hold your energy. See if you can re-establish potential from kinetic.

It's the same again with seeing sexy movie footage or being reminded of the old days when breakfast took four hours.

Once you've got potential energy back from the kinetics of whatever set it off, you can make choices, and THEN we can talk consent. So much talk about sexual energy and yoga practice doesn't even go as far as re-taking potential energy. Or if it does, it's like some unreflected discovery: I have better control (and it's like even then you don't believe it).

Sex play itself is not an energy, it's a manifestion. Like asana practice. Like eating. Like road tripping. Where and into what are you going to put what energy? You have to (ideally) HAVE the energy to yourself before you can really constructively think about these questions.

Usually when I post something here, I reread it once it's up. I can't quite reconstruct for myself the pattern or chronology of thinking here; it might be coherent or it might be nonsense. In any case, up it goes.

On Feminism (My Own and Other People's)

Ok, so wait, what happened to the yoga? You thought this was a blog about the yoga, right? That's why you came?

Hey now, it says, "and stuff."

I was thinking, as I walked across a parking lot with a paper bag full of yummy Thai curry soup, that I've claimed the term "feminist" as an identity for almost twenty years. Certainly since the late 1990s.

But what I really mean is "anti-patriarchalist."

Now, no definition of "feminism" is solid simply by itself, in my opinion. They're all historically-based and grounded, and when rhetoric from a feminism is taken away from its historical ground, it can be made to do dangerous and stupid things, which is how almost all anti-feminism that I've ever seen, operates. I mean, more largely, that's how most conservative rhetoric about almost anything, in the States, operates. Take the history away, disembody the concept, make it into pure rhetoric, and then beat it up with your counter-rhetoric.

The left is also guilty of that strategy, but I see it more often, more easily and more frequently on the right.

In saying feminism isn't "solid," I suppose that what I mean is that I understand effective feminism to be a combination of theory and practice, and so for it to be effective, it needs historical ground. No one can be an effective feminist by just spouting rhetoric; if you can't link that rhetoric to a practice you want to change or a belief system you want to alter or historical conditions which produced it or on which it can act, you're just talking out loud.

This is also how I understand art and yoga. Dada, for example, is just nonsense (haha) without the historical context of World War I and the idea that the non-art object is still aesthetic (and as such, non-aesthetic, because Art didn't recognize it as such). Dada consummately operates on specific histories.

The yoga needs practice; a yoga that's all theory isn't a yoga. Even jnana yoga, which is so cerebral, aims to change your cerebrus (yes, I just coined that). The "historical context" which the yoga changes could be understood to be your "you," with all your samskaric business and your gunas and all of that.

So, feminism. My feminism is anti-patriarchal. By this, I mean that my feminism hasn't historically been about being "pro-woman," it's been about being "anti-patriarchy." As Chantal Akerman once said about patriarchal understandings of gender roles, "men are hurt by it too."

I learned that in my long abusive relationship. 1995-2002. When in those days I said I was a feminist, it meant more like, I am a body-ist (notably, NOT a "human-ist") and this body challenges and shakes the rhetoric of what a "man" and a "woman" are and how "he" and "she" should behave, and who should have the power, and who is abusive to whom under what circumstances. Basically, as I had with Catholicism, I retreated into embodiment, into blood and sensation, in order to smash linguistic and conceptual formations from the partially-colonized turf of the body itself. No wonder that led to my later enjoyment of Foucault.

Now, I realize how half-baked this "assault rhetoric from embodiment" is, but it's an apt description of how I tried to manage my own subjectivity.

But see how that kind of thinking never led to my being "pro-woman" because it was about something far more interior and personal than the legal, social, economic and other status of women in Western culture?

As a reckoning with patriarchy and an attempt to undo its pernicious effects not just on my psyche (bodymind) and others, my "feminism" took a direct line of assault to patriarchy's fingerprints on my bodymind, and by extension, to others' bodyminds as well. This is the type of ranting I was doing from 1999-2004, at least, on internet personals (you'd think that'd be off-putting, but no, my friends, not in those days, those were the high days of BUST magazine and that sort of publication; pierced angry do-it-yourself feminists were EVERYWHERE).

Those were the days of my investigations of trans communities and kink communities, embodied beings and practices that, in their deviance, either did or could be made to take up a counter-rhetoric. And there again, it wasn't "pro-trans" or even "pro-kink," it was anti-patriarchy. Smash the man, with whatever's at hand. Smash the man with anything. But smash the man, for damn certain. Vengeance.

I ran with feminist groups on campus and did activist things, but that didn't change the energy: anti-patriarchy. And my adoption of a "sex-positive" rhetoric (which seems to have shown up coastally in the 1990s and then more broadly, even in the Midwest, in the first decade of the 2000s), was about smashing the man, also. The sex-negativity of conservative talking heads. To fuck freely, was to make Rush Limbaugh shut the fuck up. How sixties of me! And sure, I was also learning about Reich's orgone rhetoric and anti-fascism. Sexy stuff; incoherent, but then, so is a lot of Surrealism (and speaking of Surrealism, there's a lot of that "body as transgressive" stuff there too--who remembers that Dali was Catholic? Right on!).

My personal preferences for company colored my "feminism," so that I'd be willing to talk feminist ranting and rhetoric ALL DAY with someone who was smart like me, angry like me, understood sexual expression as revolutionary like me, who was basically LIKE ME.

A one-man feminism for THOSE LIKE HIM. Doesn't sound as complimentary and activist leftist when it's put THAT way, does it?

I got quieter about my feminism as 2004 rolled on, and the nation seemed to also. In 2002, students would just up and declare that they were feminists. By 2005, this got very, very quiet. Maybe the two bohemians in the back, who oddly read a lot of Beat literature, would claim to be feminists (it's well-known that the Beats are not a feminist group by a long stretch). But no one else. Students began to declare that they were avidly NOT feminists. They began, when prodded, to speak old stereotypes about bra-burning and man-hating (this is precisely what I mean by ungrounding the rhetoric from its historical base).

And still now in 2012, only the occasional student or two even knows what BITCH or BUST are, and those are always the hipsters who are simultaneously wearing vintage clothing and listening to death metal or some other combination of identities that, at best, belies a do-it-yourself feminism, but with no clear platform often than, well, anti-patriarchy.

I don't mean that as some stereotype; I'm not trying to attack my students' sensibilities, I'm trying to describe them as I actually experience their discussion (or not) of what feminism is today. Keep in mind that this is at a public art school in the middle of a big city in the middle of a famously conservative state in the middle of the country.

So when my household got pregnant and J simply stopped our sex life in its tracks with no warning, no discussion and no consent, I did not have what you might call a "feminist" reaction.

Perhaps a feminist would have said, "Ah, I feel your discomfort." Empathy or something. She at one point gave me a link to a "feminist father" blog (there are many, many more than you'd think) and the writing there just made no sense to me. No frustration, no angst, no confusion, no wrestling with inner demons.

Now, my insistence that we retain some kind of a sex life (and sure, 3-4x/year is SOME kinda sex life, but it's almost more frustrating than anything else, like it's JUST ENOUGH to remind me of what it is that I'm not getting) is not a patriarchal thing, not in any way that I can understand.

I don't insist on it, I don't bring it up a lot, I rarely give her guilt about it (that only happens incidentally when we argue about our priorities, it's never a thing I consciously do, and I'm unhappy about it when I see that effect), and I would rather kill myself with a butter knife than pull the "I'm the man, you have to please me" card.

But at the same time, right around every three months (i.e., right before the tension ends), I am virtually HOMICIDALLY INSANE with frustration. What is a "feminist man" supposed to do in that kind of situation?

Well, if you're me and your feminism is largely anti-patriarchy, you can't do a damn thing. She's not a patriarch, and doesnt, as far as I can tell, have any patriarchal sex-negativity, she's simply too busy to afford the energy expenditure of sexing me on a regular basis. She's said as much. Or she'll say, she wishes that love could come in little packages, like presents, and you just unwrap it and then it's all done.

There is nothing for my "feminism" to attack, and I realized, thinking about the relationship, that my feminism doesn't have a positive edge, what you might call a "pro-woman" edge. But I don't want it to. What "pro" could I possibly have, that would be good for ALL women, for all those different races, ages, histories, experiences? And then that's when I discovered (again, but in my personal, felt experience, which changes everything) that identity politics really won't work. It didn't before, it doesn't now, and it won't later. For my feminism to be anti-patriarchy is RIGHT. It's effective, and it lets me activate and act with total ideological accuracy, because what I believe is Anti-Patriarchy. When I see patriarchy and its bullshit, I act against it in some way, even if it's just reposting a meme on Facebook. I know who my enemy is and I know how and why to organize others against this enemy, and I don't have to get all anxious about "who they are" or "if they fit the model" or any of that identity crap.

But what this feminism does NOT do is tell me how the fuck to deal with my relationship. "The personal is political," sure, but what does that mean when what I have is an overworked household and one partner who thinks sex is an additional expenditure of energy (how tiresome! do we HAVE TO? I'm so sleepy!) and one partner who thinks that sex is brilliant stress relief (ahhh, FINALLY) AND interpersonal contact (ahhh FINALLY) AND a revolutionary affirmation of the body as affectionate and incoherent, the bodymind as a temporary pulse of warm blood in the universe (ahhh FINALLY)? A conceptual and embodied re-affirmation of the REAL TRUTH of the body, in full impermanence.

And I don't link here often, but this post got a nice answer (and before I even WROTE IT) here: http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2012/04/08/on-the-nature-of-being-nice/

"...But Fear Itself": Three Ways

Besides sounding clever and having notable historical resonance, what might "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" mean?

Fear: the thing wished to be avoided. Aversion. Take this cup from me.

Is fear in the thing feared (spiders, dentists, the dark, heights) or in the relation, or in simply its own factness?

If we accept that heights or spiders are universally fearsome, then human variance is very great indeed, as some people are more or less or not at all afraid of whatever it is that we find universally fearsome, and then we have to do that persistent existential labeling the West is so obsessed with (to be an X-gamer, to be a daredevil, to be a risk-taker, for example) with everyone from Steve Irwin to your average rock-climber.

If the THING is fearsome, then those who aren't afraid of that thing (or not as much as we think they should be; and who sets that average "we" anyway?) have to be accounted for. Upbringing? Personality? Suddenly it's all about us (and really, it's about our labeling) and we've totally lost track of fear and can't say anything useful about it.

Is fear in the relation?

There's the spider (or Kapotasana, or heights, or whatever), and here I am, and boy howdy, there's some fear here. This works better; it's closer to how reality functions. But where is the fear, what's it made of? Cultural history? Watching the wrong movies? Or is it experiential (do you remember your first encounters with Kapotasana? Me too)? But what about people who are afraid of other people (racism, classism, others)? That's supposed to be countered by experience, not enhanced by it. Perhaps there's a cathartic thing that happens, like when people touch snakes and find out that they really don't feel like slime, they feel like purses.

But what if fear is energetic, not a thing-to-thing relation, but an energetic relation, an energetic expression?

Let's go to Empire Strikes Back for this one. "I feel...cold...death. What is this place?" "That place...is strong with the Dark Side of the Force. In there you must go." "What's in there?" "Only what you take with you."

In his fear of Vader, Luke strikes himself down. Creates his own nightmare. Perhaps it's a duty that he feels, also, but that duty/destiny (Star Wars is so, so big on destiny, right?) is also something to be afraid of. Aragorn has a related problem, and there too, it's family.

If fear is energetic, then it is both a thing (energy is a thing, ask any physicist) and a relation (in the same way that desire is also an energetic relation). In French, the expression is "avoir peur." To have fear. We have this in English also, but our active expression is "I am afraid." In French, it's "j'ai peur!" I have fear! The closest we get to that in English is some Beat novel I've forgotten the title of, where the guy shouts, "I got the fear!"

Hunter S. Thompson used to play games with friends, to become as paranoid as possible. You see some sunshine reflecting off something and imagine it's a sniper's rifle. Eating huge meals of fear, stoking it with the imagination.

Let us have some examples.
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This morning I had two wisdom teeth extracted, and I'm five hours into a dose of Vicodin as I write this, and if writing this takes an hour, I'll take another one.

I'm about to talk dentistry here, so if that really terrifies you (see how topical?), go to the next dotted line and proceed.

I haven't, for reasons I'll go into in the next section, been to a dentist's office in twenty years. The short version of that narrative which I gave to the assistant on Wednesday when I had x-rays, was "I was an argumentative teenager and my parents really wanted me to have some teeth taken out and I said no, so they arranged non-consensual surgery and it didn't go well and it put me off dentistry for a long time."

And I knew, from all that time ago, that I have at least one wisdom tooth that is totally horizontal and would likely, with time, press into the rest of the teeth in the bottom jaw, and create all kinds of pain and problems. On Friday night a week ago, it began pressing, as it does about one night of every three months or so. I usually press back against it, and it backs off after a few hours of pain. That tooth and I have been relating like this for years.

But this pain did not stop, not Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I went through a number of emotional and cognitive reactions. Should I get it looked at, and risk the diagnosis of decay and root canals and ugly surgeries and guilt and all that crap that dentists did in the old days? Who? How? Should I grin and bear it? Should I require that someone take this one and ONLY this one, should I try to set rules? At first there was pretty enormous fear, mostly of a "return to surgery," a direct return of the repressed. But with time, the fear sort of fugued, split, fell into numerous sections, like I couldn't find the "I" who felt it. This is also what's been going on with my "ego" identity since I became a parent.

Or in jnana terms, "who is afraid?" "Who is fearing?"

And then all of the accumulated thinking/wisdom (I'm sometimes not sure which is which, it sounds pretentious to ever say, "I have wisdom!" (what are we, D&D characters?)) about "I'm not this body" and Buddhist moments where the past is dead, one dies every day, that person isn't this person, the wonderful creative dissociation that is living in present tense.

And I started to wonder if that person with the non-consensual surgery did nothing more than PASS ME A NOTE, tell me to be afraid of this.

Can you consent to fear? We never think of fear as something ON OFFER.

So I stepped off of my own history, and the fear became a thing I could look at, and what became very strange is that the fear became UNFEARSOME.

I could still become the person Who Was Afraid, but I could also NOT be that person. The fear existed, but it Belonged to Someone and Didn't Belong to Someone Else. And because the fear belonged to "a me" (if you will), it didn't belong to surgery, and I got less afraid of surgery (plenty nervous, but less directly afraid).

And I think that "fear itself" can concretize as a relation, but a relation between "a me" and an event, and as time passes, the concretized relation pretends that it has immortality (for nothing wants to die, not even energetic concepts), and it doesn't. The same truth I discover for myself, I discover for my fear. "My" fear, right?

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And now you've made the jump, and I'm still going to talk about dentistry, and you're like DAMN IT PATRICK, talk about YOGA or something. Oh I will, I have something to say about that too, but make the next jump and you'll get there.

I forget the precise chronology of my adolescence, not because it was long ago and I forget, but because I realize with more time, that I've re-tread that ground so often, mining it for the "causes of pain" and all of that, trying to find the root of various traumatic things that I believed happened, that I can't see the original footprints and haven't been able to for decades, and now it doesn't matter.

Milan Kundera once said that the past is multicolored taffeta.

I had braces, and I didn't want them. I knew that they made one "uncool" and since I got glasses at 13 and really needed them all the time by 14, and wasn't particularly sporty or popular, I knew that braces would doubtless be the death knell and that would be that.

Gregg Araki once said, about his "Teen Apocalypse Trilogy," that teenagers were amazing people to make movies about because they get a pimple and they treat it like the world is really and actually ending.

So I got the braces, and I got some guilt about not keeping the teeth clean and immortal enough (of course they didn't say "immortal"; I did), and then the fittings for bands (those metal rings they used back in the 1980s, hopefully you never had to remember those crazy things) really hurt and they tried one that was too small, and then the gluing the little metal squares on, and then the (I think it was) 18 months or so of slow pulling, which really was what the wisdom-tooth-pressure reminded me of.

All of this, of course, was accompanied by tooth removal. I forget the exact why and wherefore of the non-consensual surgery; I think the story was that I had some teeth taken out for braces preparation and then needed some more taken out, and I was totally pissed off about that. My parents were not keen arguers, and when I said no, they answered with "Well you have to." Have to? Who says? What for?

And I realize now that they could never have seen any difference between basic adolescent orneriness and real material questions, but I wanted ACTUAL answers. SERIOUSLY. What WAS all of this for? Fixing an overbite, right. But did it REALLY interfere with my ability to eat? Not that I could see. Ok, well fashion and cosmetics, then; people judge you on how you look. "Well that's bullshit, I'm not doing it."

What I wanted them to say was, "We live in a world where appearances create opportunities, and first impressions, while shallow, are how this particular world works. We don't know how to fix that and it's so deep-set culturally that we can't change it right now. If you choose not to do this, you'll always be angry with other people for judging your appearance and you won't be able to change them, and we're afraid that you'll wind up permanently angry and unhappy and that would suck."

That would have at least made me pause and think for a while.

But instead they said, "This is how the cookie crumbles" and I believe I said something like, "I'm going to turn this freaking planet upside down if it takes every day of the rest of my life."

Dada, Surrealism, angry art cinema, Debord, psychedelics, Abject Art, climbing walls, ashtanga yoga, Buddhist non-ego, all of that. It's simplistic, of course, but look how keenly I've pursued a rhetoric of revolution, failingly politically and then individually, practically for/on myself, and now in a way, and most effectively, invisibly. But that's off-topic.

The non-consensual surgery was billed to me as a checkup. No gas, no unconsciousness. There was gas, but they said, to me in the chair, that this would just be to make things easier. I woke up from darkness, with a mouth full of bloody gauze. I was at the front counter before I realized thre was gauze in my mouth and didn't see blood until I was in the car.

I made my parents pay for that for MONTHS. Any mention of dentistry whatsoever, even in passing or on a TV show, and I'd be on my soapbox about lies and deception and blood and how evil and wrong their decision was. I ground that into them HARD.

And only now with great distance, and the re-confrontation with the dental *because of pain* do I see how it basically all had to fall out that way, because they were them and I was me and dentistry liked guilt and the world really looked, and still does to some people, like something that "has to be that way."

It's all emotions, that I inherited, that stayed as they were. There was really no trauma, or if there was, there wasn't a traumatized "me" who stayed permanent, immortal, unchanging. He's one of many. But this memory and that identity made it impossible to walk into a dentist's office "just for a cleaning" and have them look around and tell me they'd need to do some horrifying surgery.

So this is a weird gift: begin with surgery, get a cleaning in the process which is mild by comparison, and what's even better is that while they did find a lot of accumulated goo, they said my hygiene is quite good and that there need be no root surgeries and no crowns or other reconstructions.

Even though I have to have the lower two wisdom teeth taken out sometime in the next few weeks by an oral surgeon, which means sedation (and sedation always knocks me on my ass, except for the one time when I was a teenager when I woke up in mid-surgery and they didn't put me back down), this isn't "the same," and it's not a revisit to "the traumatic." It's just an event and some history.

And another life narrative falls apart.

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Ok, you made the jump to our YOGA chapter! Well done, good on ya, Sheila.

Or words to that effect. Ok, sure, the medication's wearing off now.

So there are discussions, and have been for months, about how/if/when the Indianapolis ashtanga scene builds a morning practice room. Where? Who? How? Endless discussion about this.

I was added, by the owner of the studio where I teach, to a Facebook group called "317 yogis" and it's all of the yoga people who teach in 317, which is a big middling stripe of an area code right across Indiana. A lady shows up with a post saying, "I just did 200 hours and if you're into ashtanga, my pilates place might be doing some Mysore-style!"

Now, my first reaction to this was confusion with some fear in it. Oh crap, some north-end studio I've never been to is going to jump into the tricky waters of Mysore-style? Who, what, how long, which, what, whaaaa?

So I said hello and asked a bit about the program (Dallaghan's Thailand training, good stuff) and we've agreed to say hello and have chitchat sometime soon, and this friendliness-despite-suspicions-at-first has really depowered the fear. As the Sutras say somewhere, when you feel negative thing X, counter it with its positive version.

Mysore-style in town is all about enthusiasm; a somewhat unhinged enthusiasm which is dangerous in its lack of guidance and specifics, but we're trying simultaneously to tie it down and to let it flourish, which anyone who gardens can understand.

So I didn't use "my" program to dominate everything else on the block, and I'm glad I didn't, because Yoda's tree is strong with that kind of authoritarianism, and it's tempting to squash people rather than to set up a conversation.

A lot of fear in me, both hither and yon, is/has been about self-preservation. I'm not interested in saying it ALL is, because I'm not certain that's true. Preserving my "cool" such as it was, preserving honesty in my relations (such as it was), preserving my teeth as they were (overbite and all; not all self-preservation is wise or guided by right), preserving "my program" as it is. We could certainly add "preserving my relationship as it was" or "preserving my practice as it was."

But preservation is also done with formaldehyde in some cases.

And the past is alive, but not all of those lives are lives we need, and not all the time. To hold "I" together, to really try to make "a life" out of all of the events of "I," seems impossibly contradictory and complicated. Who would ever attempt such a thing. The "I"s all remain, and you can pick and choose. Maybe most importantly you can put them down. What better teacher of the impermanent than a blast from the past?