Facebook, Junk Food, Suffering, Compassion, and Robin Williams

The hole I dig is bottomless but nothing else can set me free...

Robert Pollard, I Am a Scientist

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprach Zarathustra

 

...a friend posted something on Facebook about how baffling it is to see people...middle-class, educated...who should know better in this day and age...eating at McDonalds...I told him I could relate...it’s the same way I feel about cigarettes, and people who don’t exercise beyond the effort required to walk to the car or find the remote....but that a lotta people I know feel the same way when they see people eating pizza...(which my friend passionately loves)...(real pizza...not that soy crap)...

Dairy and gluten and grease, oh my!

Dorothy Gale, The Yoga Teacher of Oz

 ...of course, thinking about it much at all makes me realize how little room I have to judge...(to paraphrase Bob Dylan, if the full extent of my unmindful consumption could be seen, the granola crowd’d probably put my head in some kinda earnest, self-righteous, painfully passive-aggressive equivalent of a guillotine)...especially since, with a PhD and a decade or so in the crunchy, life-affirming yoga world, I know, like, waaaay better...

 If I don’t know I don’t know

 ....................................I think I know
If I don’t know I know
                                     I think I don’t know
R.D. Laing, Knots

 ...really, I said, what I think it comes down to is that life is hard....(realizing, in retrospect that I might’ve been unconsciously plagiarizing something Kurt Vonnegut wrote about why we keep destroying our environment even though we know better)...(or maybe it was somebody else, and I’m still unconsciously plagiarizing)...(and so the list of my sins of consciousness or the lack thereof continues to grow)...

...I mean...I’m more than aware that a handful of raw organic kale grown in the backyard garden I’m too lazy to cultivate, in an extremely rural region where with a minimal quantity of carcinogens and other toxins in the rain and groundwater, would be a far better choice on just about every truly conscious kinda level than a cupcake or a beer...and yet, I’m probably gonna both eat the cupcake and drink the beer, anyway, for the sheer momentary pleasure of it...(though I will put a handful of store-bought-and-probably-not-organic-‘cause-that-shit’s-too-expensive kale in my daily smoothie)....just like I won’t spend nearly as much  time meditating as I do getting into idiotic arguments with relative strangers on-line...

...with so many sinkin’ now you gotta keep thinkin’ you can make it through these waves:
acid booze and ass, needles guns and grass, lotsa laughs...
Joni Mitchell

 ...and that’s because, deep down, to be painfully honest, no matter how many positive Buddhist quotes I might like to recite while people are holding poses for five minutes at a time in Yin class about the wonder and sheer illimitable awesomeness of the present moment, it doesn’t seem worth it...with so much despair lurking in the recesses of mind and body, those little things that help us through through the minutes of the day, things we love, even if they don’t benefit us in the long run, can't be so easily forsaken...

...Thoreau wrote that most of us live lives of quiet desperation...(and Pink Floyd, somehow, a hundred years later, appropriated that and called it the English way)....Freud’s death instinct...mean, grumpy old thanatos...often powerful as the life instinct, more upbeat and personable eros...sometimes more...no matter how many ridiculous positive affirmations we in the yoga crowd try to force-feed ourselves when we’re not trying to blame it all on being modern and western and thus trying to shed our modern western skins...(without realizing, of course, that there’s really nothing more modern or western than the romanticism that causes us to think that becoming ancient and the far away other will cure us of our despair)...(and now, it seems, I’m pointing the finger of self-righteous judgment in the opposite direction)....(I’ll stop)...(but not quite yet)...
 
...(here, without further ado, is my own painfully pissed off and horribly self-righteous Facebook post from a week ago, following the news of Robin Williams, dead of chronic despair: If there's one aspect of the yoga world that I absolutely loathe, it's how many people there are—including teachers, yoga bloggers with tens of thousands of "likes," and major revered gurus--who seem to think they're experts on depression even though they clearly know absolutely nothing about it—thinking it's synonymous with being bummed out and can be fixed with positive affirmations or an "attitude adjustment" (clearly unaware that depression might be defined as the inability to take on a positive attitude), or that it's synonymous with sadness, and thus, is something we all experience from time to time and should be seen as a natural and beautiful part of life. No, it isn't. And if you don't know that, you should keep your mouth shut on the subject, no matter how many people fawn on you and tell you how wise and spiritual you are.....harsh, but, if nothing else, it’s my own blood in which I’m writing)...

....ultimately, I think it all points to the incredible necessity for compassion...for all of us...in all of our junk-food eating, time-wasting, un-compassionate, judgmental, self-righteous, sometimes flat-out nasty glory....because of all that, in fact...because we have pain and because we all do what we do, however unmindful, however counterproductive, to make ourselves feel better...right here, right now...

A Metaphor For...Something....

...got lots of response to that skeleton post...about skeletons as metaphors for...something.....a couple nights ago I was walking past this health club...in my peripheral vision coulda sworn I saw naked people...so, then, turned and looked more closely...turned out they were skeletons, next to the massage tables...so, basically, I was right...it’s just that they were really really naked people...

...one time when I was a kid my mom was reading this book...think it was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou...I asked her what it was about...she told me it was about this girl growing up in the south and dealing with racism and...basically nothing to do with birds or singing....I said so why don’t they just call it that instead o’ this misleading crap about birds singing?...or something like that...quite indignant about the willing obfuscation...

...my understanding of metaphor has evolved since then...somewhat...though, I still don’t actually know why the caged bird sings...since...gotta admit this...I still haven’t read the book...but I have a copy and I’m planning on it...

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Shakespeare

...Shakespeare was good with metaphors, but he didn’t seem to like them much...since neither a summer’s day nor the sun itself really seemed to do justice to anybody worth writing a poem about....Lawrence Sterne went on and on insisting that, when he mentioned a nose, all he really meant was, in fact, a nose...and some time later, Freud said sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar...though I’m less likely to believe him...

One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor.
Joseph Campbell

...of course it’s also been suggested that life and existence are themselves nothing more than metaphors...though the question remains for what?...then, if that could be answered there might not be any need for metaphors in the first place....anyway, what if it’s the other way around?...what if those great unspeakable mysteries are all just metaphors for stuff that’s in your kitchen cabinets?...or what if everything’s simply a metaphor for itself?

...if this blog is a metaphor, I can only hope it’s for something not too onerous...like a minute or two spent sitting in full lotus on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream, margarita in hand, music whirring through the pines, and a loved one nearby...

...as opposed to slopping through rancid muck to get nowhere....though, if it’s that, you really should’ve stopped reading by now...

Dogs, Downward Facing and Otherwise

I struggled horribly with that downward facing dog thing, feeling so much pain and discomfort in so many parts of my body at once despite the fact that my back was still in more of a “cat tilt” and my heels were nowhere near the floor. Then I saw my three year old niece playing Twister. As a cousin called out commands, she moved her little feet and hands until...there it was, without flaw, effort, or knowledge. Picasso said “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child” and I believe him. But how much longer would it have taken him to paint like a dog?

The best thing about dogs is that you can be as dorky as you want around them. I find myself speaking in high pitched voices like an idiot, making absurd gestures of affection, and of course talking about all kinds of things the dog could never possibly understand, and, no matter what, her tail keeps wagging I like you I like you I like you.

Of course, the burden of trying to be cool is always a bit ridiculous, like Sisyphus carrying his rock up the hill, except that the hill in this case doesn’t exist—he just stands there looking at that imaginary mountain, expecting he’ll climb to the top as the rock forms from his expectations, becoming bigger and heavier until it crushes him.

I was a dork for most of my formative years—not a nerd; nerds have their own culture, their own networks, their own language—as far as I can tell, some strange mixture of Middle Earth, Klingon, and Weird Al Yankovic—but dorks are on their own. Except I had a shrink to talk to. Once I was telling him about the new puppy we’d gotten—really the only good point in that awful year called seventh grade, and so seemed a safe, positive topic to bring up instead of whatever uncomfortable shit he wanted to talk about. I mentioned we’d taken the puppy to be fixed. “That must be very upsetting for you,” he said. “Ummm...” I replied, “no. Why would it be upsetting?” “Oh come on, now, you know why! Your puppy was just castrated, and that’s something that worries you very much!” “Oh. What’s ‘castrated’ mean?” “You know what castrated means! It’s something you’re extremely concerned about!” “Ummm...I do?” “Of course you do! It means they cut his balls off! You’re terrified of that at this point in your life! You think they’re going to do it to you!” “Oh...okay.” Later that day, I took a look between the puppy’s legs as he ran around the backyard, seeing that there was, in fact, something still hanging there that, though I didn’t inspect it closely, looked a hell of a lot like balls. I mentioned that the next time I saw the shrink. “Ummm...y’know what you were saying about the puppy’s balls? I think they did something else to him. They’re still there.” That really made him hit the ceiling. “Of course he was castrated! And it’s so upsetting for you that you’re in denial about it!” As it turns out, veterinarians generally leave the scrotum, then remove it later. You’d think a medical doctor, and dog owner, would have known that. This may have something to do with why I had so little interest in Freudian theory in grad. school.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain

I’ve spent time working with prisoners—maximum security prisoners—i.e. not people who failed to report a bit of income, got caught with a bag of weed at a rock concert, or made an illegal turn in front of a cop after one two many drinks at a cocktail party—and at times I’ve been dumbfounded by what I hear from perfectly nice people when I mention that—how can you want to help those animals?! Why the hell should I care about what happens to them?! Who cares if they get raped?! They deserve to be tortured to death! Let ‘em choke to death on their own genitals...—though it’s not too hard to understand why. Many of us know people who’ve been victims of violent crime, and we all, to some degree, live in fear it (though, admittedly, the sensationalist news media is at least as much to blame for that as actual criminals). At the same time, isn’t it just a bit ironic that a person can say “violent criminals are a different species from myself” while simultaneously demonstrating just how untrue that is by expressing the most cruel and inhuman of sentiments? Is it really possible to deny someone else’s humanity or worthiness for compassion without sacrificing at least a bit of our own? Of course, many will go to the opposite extreme, pleading that those who commit unspeakable acts are helpless pawns of capitalism or fascism or communism or Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism, or whatever, but that's just another form of dehumanization, suggesting that the people are like dogs—without moral agency, only misbehaving if mistreated by their masters. If we’re really going to confront violence and try to move beyond it, I think we need to begin by acknowledging, like Walt Kelly’s Pogo, that we have met the enemy and he is us.