Post-Apocalyptic Self-Promotion

...Sandy, the semi-mythical Jersey girl Bruce Springsteen sang about and, apparently, spurned, so that she came back decades later to wreck the Jersey shore, has moved on...or maybe that conscious universe the yoga crowd’s always talking about caught an episode of Jersey Shore and decided to get all Old Testament on it...taking lower Manhattan and Red Hook Brooklyn...(which I know about from that Dylan tune...yes, I do comprehend the world through a lens of 70's rock ballads)...and much of the eastern seaboard with it....here in Philly, I’m finishing up a can of Mad Max brand dog food...Mad Max: The Dog Food Mad Max Eats!...and hoping to head out later for Tina Turner’s post-apocalyptic vinyasa class at Thunderdome...

...alright, enough snarky pop-cultural references...in the post-apocalyptic wasteland,* it’s self-preservation that counts...along with its dear acquaintance self-promotion...and so, I come bearing a cornucopia of  links: to my latest breathlessly self-indulgent book reviews, Yoga in America: Containing Multitudes and The Yoga of Biking: Pedal, Stretch, Breathe, as well as a first-ever interview with the Yoga Cynic (who manages to be sarcastic only about 73.2% of the time), all at Elephant Journal...read 'em, "like" 'em, share 'em, tweet 'em, make 'em central to your way of life and essential belief system...

* Totally Serious Postscript: actually went biking around Philly with a camera on Tuesday, hoping to get some good  pics of the local devastation for this post....it kinda looked like we’d had a bit of rain....thankfully, not only did Philly get through with little damage, but friends and family in harder-hit areas in NYC, NJ, and rural PA also got through unscathed, though some are still waiting to get power back....others, of course, weren’t so lucky, so here’s a link for anyone looking to help out the many still in need...

Bruce Springsteen's Shrink and the Overused Metaphor of the Lotus Flower

...was readin’ this New Yorker article about Bruce Springsteen...as usual with magazines, I read somebody else's copy, months after the fact....Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news...and, though old Ezra probably wouldn’t have thought so, the same might be said for the occasional magazine article about a rock star...(though probably not even the occasional blog post about a magazine article about a rock star)....anyway...

...apparently, back in the early 80’s, Bruce was suffering from serious depression...leading to some odd behavior...

For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘what you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’”

...thinking about this, some of my own odd behavior makes a lot more sense....as if Bruce Springsteen’s shrink did more for me than some mental health professionals who’ve taken outrageous amounts of my time and money...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Lost but not forgotten from the dark heart of a dream...

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

...one of the most overused metaphors in the yoga world...where overusing metaphors is practically its own asana...is the lotus flower blooming from the muck...but, when muck is what ya got, there are really only two choices...stay down and wallow, or rise up...

Waves...

A little revenge and this too shall pass,
This too shall pass...
Bruce Springsteen

Shanti shanti shanti

Bruce Springsteen, The Wrestler, and Fleeting Moments of Grace

Totally bizarre true confession: I once spontaneously bellowed out the first verse of Thunder Road in the middle of doing 108 sun salutations in a yoga class in Mexico...believe it or not, it went over quite well...got a rousing ovation at the end, even...though I was horrified recently to learn there’s video footage out there....it’s a long story...

...didn’t see Springsteen’s halftime show...missed the whole Superbowl, in fact...but I did go see The Wrestler, with Bruce over the closing credits, which was fitting, since it was kinda like one of his slice-of-a-fucked-up-life songs in movie form...

...listen, I’ve never once referred to Springsteen as the boss...and never bought into the Bruce persona...yeah, I hear ya: what?! The boss doesn’t have a persona! He’s a regular guy from Jersey, just like me!...um...yeah...that’s kinda my point....anyway, each of his albums has at least one or two of these tiny-but-remarkably-complete short stories that make Raymond Carver seem long-winded...about people on the bottom and most likely staying there...American dreams crumbling into the dust of disappointment and desperation...I got Mary pregnant and man that was all she wrote...there’s a sadness in her pretty face a sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe...I’m tired of comin’ out on this losin’ end so honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him...like Mickey Rourke, washed up, ailing and alone, doing the only thing he knows, even though he knows it’s gonna kill him...but, somehow, all finding fleeting moments of grace...remembered swimming in a transcendent river, driving deep into the night, walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City, flying through the air as the crowd cheers...or, like Eddie and the other guy in Meeting Across the River, a couple of lowlifes who’ve stumbled into a big score that’s likely to leave them either dead or in prison...that’s their last chance...nonetheless, in the brief moments before their seemingly inevitable doom, saying tonight we’ve got style....

Losing Your Head

So...in Yoga there’s something called a sun salutation...or surya namaskar, if ya wanna get all sanskrity about it...which is a series of postures...or asanas...done in sequence in a flowing kinda motion, in tune with the breath...though what those postures are can vary...actually, they can involve all kindsa stuff...though there tend to be a couple of basic parts, at least one or two of which involve kinda looking upwards...y’know, at the sun...and saluting it, kinda...if ya happen to be outside...and it happens to be sunny....

okay, I don’t know what the hell a sun salutation is, though I’ve done thousands of ‘em...including approximately a hundred and eight at a time once, down in Mexico...somehow ending up singing the first verse of a Bruce Springsteen song in the middle of it....it’s a long story...but, see, not knowing even while doing kinda goes back to that whole feeling-oneself-from-the-inside thing that got so badly sidetracked a couple posts ago...kinda like Fantastic Voyage...that book by Isaac Asimov...where this submarine and its crew are shrunk down to where they can float through the internal passageways of somebody’s body...except without the submarine...and it's your own body...am I making sense, now? Didn’t think so....

What is meditation? You don’t know. And that is the basis on which to meditate....“I don’t know.” Do you understand the beauty of that? It means that my mind is stripped of all technique, of all information about meditation, of everything others have said about it.
J. Krishnamurti

When the logic and proportion
have fallen sloppy dead
and the White Knight is talking backwards,
and the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”...
Grace Slick

So, anyway, we were doing sun salutations last night and my teacher suggested that, in the forward bend following that big upward motion described so badly above, the thing to do is to let go of the head completely, just let it drop...which was cool....since, if there’s one thing I don’t do enough of, it’s losing my head...

...not that I’d wanna be without it permanently, mind you....it does have its uses, but it keeps awfully busy...too busy...never stopping, always charging...not forward but in endless serpentine pathways, crashing into its own walls, falling off its own cliffs...struggling up its own mountains, molehills, and mausoleums...as often as not ending up where it began...only more tired and confused....

might be good if I could put it in a box, or have it served on a plate like John the Baptist, or play beach volleyball with it....

maybe that’s what I’ll do next time I’m in Mexico...

or maybe not....