Profound Thoughts on Yoga Blogging? (for April Fools...)

Those who know do not speak,
those who speak do not know.
Tao Te Ching 56

...and those who really really don't know
write blog posts about it...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 4.1

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

Surfacing...with Court and Spark, Enlighten Up, and my new chair from IKEA..

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.
Lao Tzu

...I have very little to say...so this is gonna go on for a while...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 1:1

...have always loved Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album...despite always disliking that really slick L.A. production kinda sound....but, then, that’s kinda what Court and Spark’s about: she trades her guitar player boyfriend with the madman’s soul for the city of the fallen angels...as her friend David Geffen gives up feeling unfettered and alive in gay Paris for stroking the star maker machinery behind the popular songs...turning to surfaces because depths and ideals have gotten too painful....and yet, it turns out the superficial life sucks, too...since, even at the most stylish and faceless people’s parties, the old emotions and desperate search for love and contentment keep welling up....so, in the end, she ends up with jazz and the therapist’s couch....I can relate...

...speaking of surfaces...finally saw Enlighten Up!...okay, actually, I’m watching it as I write this...while also eating my dinner...yeah, I know, not mindful at all...though, for what it’s worth, my dinner’s vegetarian...unlike my lunch....so it goes....anyway, this filmmaker sends this guy who has no particular interest in spirituality on a spiritual quest...which, to me, seems somewhat self-evidently silly...and—big surprise—he doesn’t end up having a spiritual experience...not even after sampling this vast yogic smorgasbord, ranging from your most fundamentalist religious kinda scenes to your most crassly superficial gym class kinda scenes to your most totally style-conscious new agey kinda scenes...not to mention all the disagreements about the history and definition of yoga, as well as the ubiquity of practitioners who don’t seem to know or care....raising, I'm told, all kinds of major, troubling questions...

...whatever...personally, I got into the yoga thing because I thought practicing in ways that made sense to me, and avoiding those that didn't, might have a positive affect on my life...and, as it turns out, it has...in some ways I didn’t anticipate, even...so I’m gonna keep doing it...no big whoop...

...gotta admit, though, in recent months I've mostly been trying to counteract the effects of sitting on the crummy beaten up futon couch in my apartment...lumpy as a gigantic, lopsided bag of potatoes on top of a bent frame...but, what the hell, it was there when I moved in...and filled a need, as I’d just returned the easy chair I’d been using in my last place to the dumpster where I found it....seriously, there was nothing wrong with it, then, other than a stain...and my chair before that one was this old recliner, which was basically okay except that I kept finding nuts and bolts and things every time I cleaned under it...I mean, lots of them...like more than you’d think would even be part of a chair in the first place...so, it seemed like only a matter of time before it collapsed, causing untold injury...and, when I saw the one with the stain out by the dumpster...which couldn’t’ve been placed there more than a few hours earlier...y’know....anyway, it started falling apart, as well, and most likely wouldn’t have survived the trip to the new place, and so began the physically abusive relationship between the old futon couch and me, which lasted until...

...one rainy Saturday morning...when I got in the car and drove to..............................................IKEA...yes, dear friends and readers...IKEA...and, before I left, made a vow never again to shop anywhere other than IKEA....if they don’t sell it at IKEA, I don’t want it....am even quitting the yoga thing in favor of whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA....this blog will soon be renamed Whatever Traditional Swedish Equivalent to Yoga They Offer at IKEA for Cynics...which, I believe, will make it the first and only whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA blog on the interwebs....and, thus, more cutting edge than ever...not to mention written...like this post right now...while sitting in my new IKEA chair...with matching IKEA footrest...and ooooooh is it a cool chair...and really not difficult to assemble at all...

....only trouble is, now I gotta make the rest of the room worthy of the chair...which could take a while...

Huh?! What?!

Is this love, baby, or is it...confusion?
Jimi Hendrix

...some people appear to have found recent Yoga for Cynics posts confusing....that might be a good thing...or maybe not...I’m rather confused about the matter...

Confusion is next and next after that is the truth...
Sonic Youth

...the last four posts were mostly written while yoga retreating in Mexico...the exception being the Marvin Gaye one, which was mostly written by hand while waiting for a train to take me home from the Philly airport....like last year's retreat, which inspired the creation of this blog, this one included writing workshops led by legendary writer/performer/teacher/holy lunatic Ann Randolph , in which I found myself rhapsodizing about things like...y’know...Vikings walking on water, and how the Hulk manages to keep his waistband intact...with some more serious soul-searching stirred in...which can get confusing...then, maybe confusion is the point...

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
Salvador Dali

...I find these days I’m opening more and more to my deep inner weirdness...as normalcy is always and ever nothing more or less than a social construct, you’re never gonna get in touch with yourself until you learn to embrace your deep inner weirdness...even if that’s, ultimately, a social construct, too...and my deep inner weirdness is very deep and weird...can anyone reading this disagree?

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.
Tom Peters

...I’ve always found it strange the way people take statements like truth cannot be known and hold them up as truths that they, in fact, know beyond a shadow of a doubt...even I don’t know, it seems to me, needs to be spoken with some degree of skepticism...unless I’m confused...I mean, what if you do know and are simply too confused to know you know?

he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know
Lao Tzu

...I suspect that Lao Tzu knew he was being inherently contradictory...and therefore inherently confusing...and that may have been his point...he wasn’t offering something to repeat in a wise voice to one’s acolytes...but something by which to be confused...so that one might eventually learn to live more comfortably in confusion...or maybe I’m just confused...

Ripples, Mental and Otherwise....

Rippling is the Way, flowing left and right!
Its tasks completed, its affairs finished,
Still it does not claim them for its own.
Lao Tzu

....I had another one of these kinda psychedelic experiences in yoga class...it was at the end of class and we were in savasana...that, it should be noted, is the one pose that is nearly always given its Sanskrit name in yoga classes, even if everything else is half-moon, sleeping pigeon, radiant warrior, crazed aardvark, etc....that’s because, in English, it’s corpse pose...kinda makes ya appreciate the Sanskrit, doesn’t it? Anyway, I was lying there, eyes closed, minding my own business, and started seeing these ripples in blue water...like in a large creek...just vaguely at first, but then I started to focus in...and no, I didn’t actually think I was outside looking at a creek...but it wasn’t like the way I’d normally imagine something either...more like projected onto the backs of my eyelids...what my hippie freak friend Jedediah calls an eyelid movie...but a bit less colorful and chaotic than what he’s described...so I lay there watching for a little while...then kinda refocused...like I moved back a bit, and suddenly, just for a second or two, was looking at the ocean...and then back to plain old eyelids, somewhat illuminated by the sun coming through the window....I tend to put my mat down in an area of the floor somebody called the beach...as, if there’s any sun at all on a given day, it’s shining there...

The river flows, it flows to the sea, wherever that river flows, that’s where I want to be....
Roger McGuinn

About forty mile south of Rochester, New York, the Genesee River runs through a long and spectacular gorge with a series of waterfalls in a place called Letchworth State Park. I did a lot of hiking there, and found some cool, out-o’-the-way spots, including a high cliff overlooking the largest of the waterfalls. It was off an unofficial trail, so there were no guardrails or anything, just a sheer drop to rocks and blue water rippling in a very shallow stretch of river far below. Most importantly, the cliff was concave, meaning that there’d be nothing to get caught on, nothing to stop you, no matter how the wind might shift, from plummeting to your death—no chance of ending up quadriplegic, nothing but to sleep, perchance to dream. But...as it turned out, a grad. school friend was getting married that weekend. We weren’t that close, so the wedding wouldn’t have been cancelled, but it would definitely have put a bit of a dark cloud over it...and who would want that? Two weeks later, the planes crashed into the towers, and, on September 12th, having gone to the hospital to give blood, only to be turned away, since, apparently, everybody else had the same idea, I considered walking over to the psychiatric ward and having myself committed, but ended up taking a long bike ride along the Erie Canal, instead...more rippling blue water...and so it goes....

Gettin' Soft

The softest thing under heaven
gallops triumphantly over
The hardest thing under heaven.
Lao Tzu

Who needs action when you got words?
The Meat Puppets

A couple years ago, my dog friend Fargo and I were taking a late night walk in the Park Avenue neighborhood of Rochester NY—not to be confused with that other Park Ave. somewhere else in NY state...I was looking after him while his human roommate was out of town...or he was looking after me...probably a bit of both. Anyway, we were over near some bars where college kids hang out, and, there in the back parking lot of one, a college guy and girl were grappling with some violence, as she—kind of a classic sorority girl—was trying to get away, and he—kind of a classic jock—wasn’t letting her, was holding on tight, in fact, as she struggled to escape.

This created a bit of a quandary. I’m really not the kinda guy who gets into street fights, especially not with drunk jock types slightly more than half my age who could easily kick my ass. Then, I also like to think that I’m not the kinda guy who’s gonna keep walking while a girl gets assaulted. I had to do something—though, preferably, something other than simply taking her place as his object of brutality. So...I stood there...for a minute or two....

Then, however, she, still in his drunken grip, turned to me. Tell him to let go of me! she shrieked.

It sounded like a plan. So...I, in a soft, calm voice, said let go of her.

And here’s the weird part: he did—almost as soon as I’d said that, she was released from his grip and walking rapidly across the street, while he, galumphing like some old Hollywood Frankenstein monster, followed. So she turned to me again, yelling tell him to leave me alone! And I, ever valiant, in the same soft, calm voice, said leave her alone.

And then—seriously—you can ask the dog about this—the guy stopped in his tracks like a trained bear, pivoted, and walked away.

Procrastination as a Lifestyle Choice

he not busy being born is busy dying
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been doing much productive lately...some editing and tutoring to not quite pay the bills...working with recovering addicts, writing this blog, practicing yoga, biking, a few other things...but not exactly doing my part to fulfill the hard-working, pulling-up-by-the-bootstraps American dream...more in fact, like the modern American reality of deficit spending and lack of accountability...and I’ve tended to think of that as a problem...and some of it—like that last couple of items—definitely is... but maybe not all...

Nonbeing penetrates nonspace.
Hence,
I know the advantages of nonaction.
Lao Tzu

...procrastination and inertia might be more useful than they seem...which is not to say that not doing shit is a good idea...necessarily...though there is stuff that’s better off not being done...and that really shouldn’t be done at all...or even thought about...actually, I disagree with myself about that last bit...everything should be thought about...because it’s being thought about anyway, down below, on an unconscious level...so it needs to be brought forward...looked at and understood....but, actually, the darker recesses isn’t really where I meant to go with this...I was thinking not of those deep awful urges from the id...even if there might be something to all that stuff about idleness being the devil’s play pen...though, if so, it’s the angels’, too...and that’s my point, I think....idleness is simply the space between something and something else...

Who can stop what must arrive now?
Something new is waiting to be born...
Robert Hunter

...in some cases, admittedly, inertia is caused by fear....the ongoing lack of real effort to get my novel published would be a perfect example of that...but I’m talking about other stuff...practical stuff...stuff that can make me money but leaves me cold....coldness freezes...can make life a glacier...slow moving, destroying whatever’s in its path...

One day you’ll wake up in the present day
a million generations removed from expectations
of being who you really want to be....
Ian Anderson

...sometimes procrastination happens because people deep down know that what’s to be done won’t get them any closer to what they want and need, and might prevent them from getting there at all, despite all necessary considerations....and inertia is the ground in which new, as-yet-unknowable life is going to grow...if we let it...

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi

A handful of nothin’

Thirty spokes converge on a single hub,
but it is in the space where there is nothing
that the usefulness of the cart lies.
Lao Tzu

So, there are these two prisoners—Dragline, kind of a leader, and a bully, and Luke, a perpetual wiseass locked up for cutting the heads off of parking meters. Quickly running afoul of Dragline, Luke gets challenged to a fight, and the two face off in a makeshift ring of their fellow prisoners. Luke is knocked down almost immediately, but quickly regains his feet, only to be knocked down again, and again, and again. Each time, he rises, painfully, only to be knocked down yet again. Over and over, as he's mercilessly battered and the other men plead with him to stay down, Luke hits the dirt only to lift himself back up. After a while, a distressed Dragline himself says “stay down. You're beat.” To which Luke, coated in blood and dirt, mutters “you're gonna have to kill me...” and gets up yet again. In time, frustrated and amazed, Dragline walks out of the ring, leaving a staggering Luke on his feet, worse for wear and tear but victorious, simply because, no matter how many times he was hit, or how hard, he refused to stay down.

Dragline (played by George Kennedy): Nothin'. A handful of nothin'....He beat you with nothin'. Just like today when he kept comin' back at me—with nothin'.
Luke (played by Paul Newman, January 26, 1925—September 26, 2008): Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Cool Hand Luke (1967)