Reflections From a Stagnant Pool #1

So long as the mind is seeking further experience it can only think in terms of sensation; and any experience that may be spontaneous, creative, vital, strikingly new, it immediately reduces to sensation and pursues that sensation, which then becomes a memory. Therefore, the experience is dead and the mind becomes merely a stagnant pool of the past.
J. Krishnamurti
Reflections of
the way life used to be
Reflections of
the love you took from me....
Diana Ross & the Supremes

Thoughts written down after late night yoga (a little over a year ago) (edited somewhat, to protect the guilty, as well as to eliminate stuff that doesn’t make sense even to me...though those who get freaked by my weirder posts might consider themselves warned):

The body has its problems, suspicious pains here and there—all over, really, aches, noises, chronic gas. These are the things I can’t get rid of. But everything else—fleeting impressions that swirl around, in and out, but are they just that? Are they interchangeable? They are mirrors of reality, or shadows, at least—not necessarily in the Platonic sense, but resonances. Precious things I can’t let go of....For a friend I’ve known, the outside world seems to be as ephemeral as passing thoughts, though even he tends to suffer and be made self-conscious by it, having to hide away in the booze and weed, sometimes....

Thinking of that Lou Reed line—yeah, I got a million of ‘em—I’d like to have a kid I could pass on to/something more than rage, pain, anger and hurt. I like that, in the sense that the child is father to the man (who wrote that? Emerson?...off to google...is the internet a blessing or curse?) (the porn and kinky chat rooms at times make me think one, but are probably proof of the other) (of course, what comes up first, in the first three or four hits, no less, is that fucking Blood, Sweat and Tears album, but then...Wordsworth, the Prelude):

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Having something to do with holding on to something, inside, that is deeper than the rage, pain, etc. (though he doesn’t refer to those. Then, Wordsworth wouldn’t. He and Lou Reed probably wouldn’t have hung out much, even if given the chance)—a sense of wonder and beauty, here: the very definition of Romanticism, I guess. It’s also what both Stephen Batchelor and M. C. Richards talk about, though: creativity coming from that inner, still, solid place, rather than an escape from this world, a way to create and flower within it.

And, certainly that Lou Reed/Wm. Wordsworth notion relates to the experience I described before, half a year or so after first starting yoga, seeing a then-three year old niece playing twister at the cousins’ place, and realizing that she was, without knowing it, doing a perfect downward facing dog—that’s what you can do, I thought, without thirty-plus years of tension built up in your body. And yet: can it all be released?

...and later, watching Hiroshima Mon Amour—the meeting of parallel lines of personal and political, or the fact that they were never separate in the first place, along with the strange Japanese love of neon—like my just-post 9/11 experience, in the midst of my last great depression, when I was actually, for a moment, there at a good friend’s house, with another friend puking in the bathroom, feeling like here we were all together in it, all in ruins like those buildings: but then, the next day, there I was, and everyone else was back to work, back to normal, and I couldn’t even give blood because there were too many others who wanted to, and they got there ahead of me, so there I was, standing in front of the fucking hospital, thinking maybe I should commit myself, but instead took a bike ride on the Erie Canal towpath beginning just behind there—and then, riding along, I seemed to have almost a vision of a small towheaded child, deep inside, so like what Eliot described, in Preludes of his own—the notion of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing—almost glowing in strange yellow mind-neon. And there, and then, feeling a connection to that wounded self, still whole and alive, tears flowing as I rode, glad to have sunglasses on especially when passing a couple of students who would’ve been in class with me then if I hadn’t cancelled—probably it would’ve been okay though, because it was, hell, the day after September 11—and I knew then, seeing that wreckage inside, so like the wreckage on all our minds, but far more ephemeral, that I was going to be okay, even if America and the world weren’t....