Prayer is nothing but poetry
that achieves the destruction of its reciter.*
...Matt Remski thinks a helluva lot about
mālā beads...hell, he thinks a helluva
lot about a whole lotta stuff...but
mālā beads
more than most...,turns out he’s a recovering Catholic...
redeemed through pain, not through joy, as
Jim Carroll put it...as
well as rehabilitating himself from various more coercive forms of Buddhism and
yoga...and has written down some of those thoughts in a thin volume called,
with nods to Baudelaire as well as a number of spiritual traditions,
Rosary {or les fleurs du mālā}...
Having been possessed
by Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Kṛṣṇa, rage, the destruction of idols, the empty dawn,
so many books, the weight of my love’s foot upon mine, I wonder: what rosary
could string these holy crises together?
...honestly, was a bit leery about it, at first...coming
from a liberal and largely secular Quaker background, ceremony, spiritual
hierarchies, sacred objects, and incantations have always struck me as suspect...at best....even
if that didn’t prevent me from buying a beaded necklace or two at a roadside
stand in the Navajo Nation on the way to the Grand Canyon at nineteen...(always
figured wearing beads was like long hair without the long hair...and combined with long hair?...the 80’s neo-hippie
girls at Grateful Dead shows were gonna hafta
wanna share their Indian blankets with me)...(but they didn’t)...(so much for the
power o’ fuckin’ beads)...
A double helix can be
formed by twining a rosary and a mālā together. It seems to be in the nature of
the human genome to blur the boundaries between east and west.
...later, much later, three and a half years ago, having
gotten into the yoga thing...if never, like Remski, the whole appropriated-Hinduism-with-a-paternalistic-guru
thing...while doing teacher training at Kripalu, was given mālā** beads in a highly ceremonial fashion...and learned a mantra to
recite with them... Om Namo Bhagavate
Vasudevaya...and recited it...a lot, in fact...if never quite figuring out
what it meant for me...felt, at least, that it tied me, in a sense, as if on a
string, to the people with whom I’d spent that very special month.....(wore it
every day until a night-time pool party that summer, when I took it off when
changing into a bathing suit...and, later, while a buncha of drunken hipsters
were doing the kinds of tricks in the pool any responsible adult would’ve yelled
at them to get out of the pool for if they’d been kids, deciding I didn’t
really want to be there at that horrible second when bacchanalian revelry
turned to blood on the edge of the pool and drunken tears and ambulance sirens,
took off)...(though, as it turned out, nobody got hurt)...(and I
never saw my beads again)......
...the mālā is a
non-denominational tool possessing enormous flexibility and power because it is
symbolically void. It can hold and accelerate and multiply the power of
countless aphorisms, deities, or seed syllables issuing from thousands of
contrasting streams of Eastern rhapsody.
...been poring through the book over the past week or two while
simultaneously re-reading Kurt
Vonnegut, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Manuel Puig, making yet another valiant effort at getting all the way through Sprach Zarathustra, drinking beer, and
waiting none-too-patiently for amazon.com to finally deliver my copy of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of
Pilgrimage...making Remski, perhaps, a bead in a mālā already containing
Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Puig, Nietzsche, beer, the internet, and Murakami...better
him than me...
Baby’s first rosary
consists of two felt balls attached to the ends of a length of twine. He
dangles it over the cat, prefiguring how he himself will be teased by beautiful
ideas.
...stylistically, I’m kinda doing a really lazy
approximation of what Remski does, here...along with my usual thing...y’know,
the rambling and ellipses n’ all that...which, let’s face it, is also pretty
lazy and self-indulgent, too....hell, I’m a yoga blogger...making a claim to
uniqueness by, just now and then, doing something other than complaining about
how everybody else is doing it wrong...(though, yeah, there were a couple
pretty snarky remarks up there...if not nearly as bad as the ones I deleted)...(kinda
like my own little anti-guru bead)...(see what I did there?)...
True maturity might
involve making a mālā with no guru bead. No bead more important than any other.
No bead that conceals the beginning and end of the string.
...the book is itself self-consciously fashioned as a kind
of mālā...incorporating poetry and prose, prose-poetry, math and numerology,
sex and violence, mysticism and neuroanatomy, child- and fatherhood, the
earthy and the ethereal, earnest and joke, as well as the various liminal
spaces Remski would no doubt call the string connecting all of these....sometimes,
quite honestly, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about...but that’s not
a bad thing...nor is it apart from the book’s overall intent and theme, as I
understand it....which involves expanding rather than contracting meaning...to
set already-overloaded signifiers and the thin strings that bind them free...without
breaking........(I think)...
(Zero is a perfect
bead, into which all calculation and meaning disappears)
.
.
.
,
* all quotations (in italics, set apart from the rambling, are from
Remski’s book, unless otherwise attributed) (I also stole the lovely pic at the top from
his website)
** can I tell ya what a pain in the butt it is quoting Matthew Remski with all his fancy schmancy letter symbols? So, I'm gonna write
mālā in just that way, with the pretentious little lines over the a's every chance I get...
