Imaginary Dogs

...Winston Churchill called depression his black dog....couldn’t relate to that at all when I first read it...thought what I was feeling, there in my mid-20’s, must be something far worse...more like an unstoppable white whale, swallowing, mutilating whatever tried to stand against it...nothing, certainly, small and domesticated enough to be held in a lap or walked on a leash...

...my metaphors have come a long way since then...no rainbows or unicorns, but still don’t quite get the black dog thing....depression’s more like a cat I'm highly allergic to, but know well...this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine....shedding all over clothes and furniture...dropping dead birds and mice to be found when I least expect them...that I push gently out the door but always seems to find its way back inside...

...sometimes, to calm my mind, I imagine a dog...when consciousness madly flips through topics, surfs fantasies, tells itself outrageous jokes, working with such frenzy that any attempt at following the breath or simply drifting away seems like tilting at windmills....

...floppy eared and friendly, gamboling calmly into the room...an older, wiser dog, most likely...perhaps sniffing around just a little bit before resting...seeking only quiet companionship and warmth...unconcerned with any of that...

Fools Rush In (Semi-Obligatory April Fool's Day Post 2010)

He’s as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see...
John Lennon

‘Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind...
William Shakespeare

...this old king had three daughters....two of them...one with a name like a venereal disease, the other a dead president...filled his eager ears with empty flattery...stroked his vanity with ridiculous lies...fed his ego with pretty crap...which, as it turned out, was exactly what he wanted to hear...so he split his kingdom between them...

...the other daughter...named, apparently, after a character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer...told him the truth...unvarnished...a bit harsh, perhaps...and got nothing...was banished...disowned...

...and they don’t call this stuff tragedy for nothin’....suffice to say the story turns out very VERY badly for everybody involved...particularly that foolish old king...

...but isn’t he a bit like you and me?

Laughing Matter

...Shakespeare had one of his characters say All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...which would indicate, by dramaturgical standards of the day...reaching back to festivals of Apollo in ancient Greece, when theatre first emerged from religious ritual...that life is either comedy or tragedy...

...Bob Dylan, some time later, wrote there are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke...which would appear to indicate wide support for the comedy thesis...though how you take that might depend on your definition of the word joke...seriously...

...someone I knew well seemed to view life...or at least his own life...as something like a Greek tragedy....little to do but keep up a noble bearing, marching on toward a preordained doom with moral uprightness and dignity...knowing that even therapy and religious faith can only do so much to cure the inevitable tragic flaw....and that a joke is something inherently trivial, and often inappropriate...as life is no laughing matter...

...Ken Kesey might have said always star in your own movie...which could present a few more options in terms of genre....I’ve tended at times to see life as a dark comedy...like Heathers* or Dr. Strangelove...since, when tragedy seems to be attacking from all sides, tempting one to curl up into a ball and pretend not to exist, laughter can smell an awful lot like victory**...

Laughing at our mistakes lengthens our life. Laughing at someone else's shortens it.

Cullen Hightower

...Shakespeare also wrote a play called Henry IV...then a sequel and a prequel to cash in on the popularity of one of its characters...that’s not a joke, by the way...let’s face it: Shakespeare was no more aesthetically pure than George Lucas or Mick Jagger...or whoever created those brilliant Mentos commercials...and you have to decide for yourself whether I’m joking about the brilliance of Mentos commercials.....anyway, the character, Falstaff, makes no claims to purity, either...he's a drunken, amoral buffoon...though he often speaks truths that could only be uttered on stage safely by a fool....anyway, at one point...I think it's in the sequel...he responds to mockery with I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men...takes it as a compliment, that is...and there might be something to be learned from that...

For life is quite absurd, and death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin

Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow...
Eric Idle

...ultimately, it’s all there...the tragedy, the comedy, the tragicomedy, and everything else...but allowing for improvisation, and not at all bound by classical unities or conventional plotting....and, like any poem, wide open to interpretation....

...maybe it all comes down to matter...we are matter...and things matter...and yet we laugh...making us, essentially, laughing matter....these are the jokes, folks...



* just googled Heathers...turns out Winona Ryder says a sequel’s in the works....I hope that’s a joke...

** yes, that was a darkly comic reference to Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm...

Flowers In the Ruins...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins...
T. S. Eliot

...for a little while, worked on a trail crew in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia...where some hundred and thirty or so years earlier John Brown tried, and failed, almost single-handedly, to free the slaves....since it was late fall, rapidly turning to winter, the Park Service let us use an building in the old section of town...people crammed three or four to a room, and, when I showed up, the only available bed was in a room with an older guy who snored like a rhinoceros with a bad case of gas....as it turned out, though, there was another room...practically a suite...with its own bathroom...and a couch...empty in the basement...apparently somebody’d drowned a hundred or so years earlier, and everybody said it was haunted....I dragged my mattress down there without a second thought...

...we were dragging these massive slabs of rocks down a hill to build this great big staircase on the Appalachian Trail, right below an old graveyard overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers...where Thomas Jefferson said something really impressive...and, a few years after I was there, Bill Clinton and Al Gore pretended for the cameras to lay the final stone for the project we’d actually completed that winter....what I liked, though, was the way the ground was like waves, swallowing up the gravestones...just like they’d eventually end up swallowing our gigantic slabs...and all of Harper’s Ferry, and every last trace of John Brown or the guy who died in that basement, and me...

The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been so dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains as to have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that, continuing to rise, they have at last broken over at this spot and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base.
Thomas Jefferson

...I’ve always had a thing for ruins...ghost towns...cliff dwellings...pyramids....is it morbid of me to find it kind of comforting to see peoples’ proudest accomplishments gradually crumbling into dust...the best laid plans of mice and men reclaimed by dirt and grass?

...when in Rome...this was the spring of 1987...I loved walking around the Forum...seat of the Roman Empire...where, according to Shakespeare...who I have no reason to doubt...Mark Antony, standing over the multiple stab wounds of Julius Caesar, yelled Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth...by that time, though, it was nothing but ancient ruins covered with wildflowers...revealing that, though sticking flowers into gun barrels may not have ended the war in Vietnam, flowers will, in the end, win out...

...it's all too easy to become anxious about being anxious...just as I can become depressed worrying about getting depressed...all in all, it all comes down to lingering remnants of the past....the question is, what kind of flowers am I letting grow out of my ruins?

The Discontent of My Discontent

...gotta admit, despite my reputation as a badass...the Vladimir Putin of the yoga world...my eyes kinda almost teared up watching that Susan Boyle video...repeatedly...

...the thing was, the first part of it...the interview segment...pretty much epitomized everything that’s foul and loathsome about reality TV in general and the American Idol type shows in particular...judges and audiences mocking someone who fails to fulfill their society’s incredibly narrow, superficial, and often unhealthy standards of beauty...licking their chops in anticipation of tearing her to shreds once she starts singing...all for the unforgivable crime of having the nerve to think she belongs on the same stage as the beautiful people...

To be born woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school-
That we must labour to be beautiful.
William Butler Yeats

...in simpler times all a person needed to be as beautiful as the folks on magazine covers was hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery and an eating disorder...now, things have gotten more difficult...replace labour with airbrush in that Yeats quote and you’ve got it...

Now is the winter of my discontent...
Richard III (Bill Shakespeare)

we live in a culture of discontent...we’d be nothing without our discontent...most Americans are descended from people who crossed oceans because of discontent...moved west because of discontent...and now endlessly earn earn earn so they can buy buy buy because of discontent....the system wouldn’t work without it...without discontent we’d be oblivious to advertising...and, let’s face it, the economy would collapse in a way that would make these recent perturbations look like a penny falling down a sewer drain...

sometimes there’s no poison like a dream
Tanya Donnelly

...I’ve always wanted to be a rock star...can’t think of any mode of existence that could compare to that...no, not cynical yoga blogger with a small but dedicated cult following...not even Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love....really, it seems like it'd be the fulfillment of...everything...howling out my deepest anguish to a crowd of adoring millions like Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin...lolling in Viking-like decadence backstage like Gram Parsons, Keith Moon, or Jimi Hendrix...attaining cosmic trances in an electric haze of music and spirit like Bob Marley or Jerry Garcia...and that’s precisely why it’s probably best that, in all likelihood, it's never gonna happen...

Winter on the Brain, Pt. 1

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude...
William “Billy” Shakespeare

...so, it was just about this time last year when I drove up to Kripalu in the Berkshires for a weekend yoga workshop...first one I’d ever been to...first time I’d been to Kripalu...about which it’s not said enough that the food is amazing...would be worth it to go just for that, really....anyway, I drove up to in the midst of a major wet snow/slush/freezing rain/ice storm....okay, here’s the painfully ironic part: I was rushing, going faster than I should have given the conditions so I could get to the afternoon yoga class....I make absolutely no claims to enlightenment at this time...or, certainly that time....so, anyway, crossing the Hudson, I went into major skid, managing to careen right into the opposing lane, moving at a steady pace toward the guard rail...at which point, I began actively engaging in negotiations in my head....amazing how much thinking you can do in second or so in a situation like that....basically, “okay, forget the damn car—I’m totally cool with it getting totally totaled....coming out of this not paralyzed from the neck down, on the other hand, would be a truly optimal outcome and..."...the car stopped. As it turned out, conveniently enough, I'd managed to slide over during a momentary lull in traffic on that side....so, mumbling shiiitttt under my breath, I made my way back onto the Eastbound lanes...and, driving at a far more sensible pace, managed to make it to Kripalu with time to spare before the afternoon yoga class...and, actually, if you're gonna show up somewhere completely wired and freaked out, that's an awfully good place for it...so, ummm...I guess I behaved stupidly and got away with it...not exactly the best yogic parable....

what doesn’t bend breaks....
Ani DiFranco

It did get me thinking, though, about one of the great unspeakably unjust truths of modern times, which is that in a collision between a car with a drunk driver and a car with a sober driver, the drunk driver is less likely to be injured. This is because, when drunk, the body is less likely to tense up, and therefore softer and less likely to break. So...I wonder if the same goes for if you get in an accident after doing yoga...breathing more slowly, body and mind more relaxed, less tense and softer in general....not that this is something I’m gonna wanna test, myself....

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....

Untitled

...quiet November afternoon treading across arboreal curves high above the muddy banks of near-mythical Wissahickon Creek...exalted by Poe, as well as, in different registers, that motley assortment of dogs always swimming by the Kitchen’s Lane bridge...down from West Mt. Airy, State of Poignant Steady Exfoliation—which, quite unexpectedly last Tuesday, went green orange yellow even a bit of red as well as expected blue—along a narrow rocky path, not really marked on maps I don’t think but well traveled nonetheless...it makes no difference, not at all...feeling myself...but that didn’t come out right...or it did, but probably not conveying anything like what I meant it to impart...filthy minded readers...that sense of being embodied that gives an intense yoga session sometimes its more psychedelic qualities...the traipsing through some undiscovered country beneath and in the flesh...the body acoustic as well as electric...deep notes in every foot, toe, knee, back, neck, shoulder, head...knowing there...here...if only for a minute...then back to sleepwalking...along the muddy bank....

Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue....the brook is narrow. Its banks are generally, indeed almost universally, precipitous, and consist of high hills, clothed with noble shrubbery near the water, and crowned at a greater elevation, with some of the most magnificent forest trees of America....The immediate shores, however, are of granite, sharply defined or moss-covered, against which the pellucid water lolls in its gentle flow, as the blue waves of the Mediterranean upon the steps of her palaces of marble.
Edgar Allen Poe

All the bullshit of the past texts? Simply gossip. Simply someone else’s ahh-moments on record. What are you here to do? Discover your own.
Jennifer Schelter

I’m no fucking Buddhist,
but this is enlightenment.
Bjork

Now I’m wondering if I should title this post Feeling Myself...would that get me more readers, or fewer? Not that I’d have any problems with any connotations it might bring up...even if that’s not what the post is about...nothing worse, certainly, than Shakespeare using all those dick jokes to tempt groundlings away from the visceral thrills of bear-baiting for an afternoon of theatre....Once saw Jon Stewart—the man who, it must be acknowledged at this time, did as much as anyone to get me through eight years of tortured American history—asking a crowd of five thousand: if you’re a guy and you don’t masturbate, clap...and you could've heard a pin drop.... I told that to somebody and she objected to the singling out of guys. I said I didn’t know if it was the same thing, remembering all those Alice Walker type stories about women empowering themselves by getting in touch with their bodies for the first time when they’re like forty...when, for an adolescent boy it’s more like something that just happens...by sudden, unnamed, undefined, unprecedented, unbelievable imperative...and then happens again.....

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Rene Magritte, The Human Condition

Is it possible to plagiarize yourself? If so, we’re probably doing it constantly. I know I am...imitating myself, as well as being highly critical of what are often shoddy, dissolute, unconvincing performances. I am not, I’m afraid, anything like my own Tina Fey. Then, isn’t much of life little more than bad acting? And isn’t that understandable, with such nonsensical scripts? Like Liam Neeson playing a Jedi knight with a mullet more appropriate for a monster truck rally than inter-galactic combat, aren’t we simply working with what we’re given? People talk a lot about the importance of being yourself—from Polonius’ to thine own self be true to Mr. Rogers’ you’re special! to Monty Python’s “You’re all individuals!” “Yes! We’re all individuals!” to those lame-ass red and white Be You t-shirts for sale at the Boston University bookstore when I went there....so, whoever the hell you are, it’s obviously pretty damn important. I will not speak lightly of it. Trust me.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.
Bob Dylan

A sudden death in the family is upsetting for lots of reasons, of course—a lot more than I’m about to go into here, and, anyway, to communicate any fraction of them effectively would be to tell the complete life stories of all involved, and even then there’d be countless unfillable holes in the plot...the conclusion in particular not making one lick of discernible sense...like if Moby Dick had ended while they were right in the midst of chasing the whale, or the closing credits started running on Gilligan’s Island while it still seemed like they might get off the island this week....All in all, it’s difficult to shake the idea that life isn’t a novel or sitcom, or anything else that might have any chance of obeying the narrative rules we try so hard to lay down....There are a lot of ends, but few satisfying conclusions, and more perfect comebacks are spoken in a single Oscar Wilde play than you’re likely to manage in your entire life....

Rachel Getting Married (Kind of a Movie Review #5)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

I know I can’t be the only whatever I am in the room....
Ani DiFranco

...went to see this movie last night called Rachel Getting Married, in which Anne Hathaway comes out of rehab and in to the heaving bosom of her painfully fractured family for a wedding....really captured the dynamics of dysfunction...the deep, festering wounds that only those within the circle can see...the ways something that might seem so harmless to any onlooker can explode so suddenly...as well as, even in its brightest moments, the excruciating awkwardness of always being the most fucked up person in the room, even in the midst of such of a family...or at least to feel that way...even in a wedding hip enough for the groom to start singing Neil Young songs in the midst of self-written vows...to feel like nobody else there is or ever was or ever could be so out of place...to simply wanna, needta get out...

Another time or place, another civilization
would really make this life feel so complete....
Neil Young

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

Miranda (The Tempest, Shakespeare)

...apparently, the movie was originally supposed to be called Dancing With Shiva...after the figure in Hindu mythology who, according to yoga teachers I've known, dances in fire without being burned....this morning was in yoga class, where, like in every really good yoga class, I found myself going into surprising new areas of this place where I’ve been so long but have never, as long as I can remember, ever felt very comfortable...that I’ve never really gotten to know in 42 years...and that’s the real issue, isn’t it? That, often, the only place we really need to go is in....

Here and Elsewhere

Life is elsewhere.
graffiti seen by Milan Kundera during the Paris uprising, 1968
There’ve been times when I’ve been in a beautiful place, with good friends, at a show, spending time with someone I want to get to know better...and I’ve thought "man, it’d be cool to be here...doing this."... The logical fallacy isn’t exactly hard to see...but the problem remains that life, often enough, does appear to be hopelessly elsewhere...and experienced by someone else....

Depression does get boring after a while...I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory....yeah, yeah yeah, tell it to yer goddamn shrink, Hamlet...no shrinks in Elsinore?...tough break, but maybe just as well...as a million despondent teenagers sing along with their Pink Floyd mp3's running over the same old ground, of how we found the same old fears....

History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but any student of history can see that’s often just as true of those who remember it. The past holds on tight, those memories from growing up that everyone tells you to treasure often as not taking the form of wounds...no matter how many yogis and Buddhists say it’s nothing but illusion...which is not to say that they’re not right...in most cases, the only walls that matter are those in the mind...but that’s not to say they’re easy to get over....

I work a few hours a week tutoring recovering addicts in reading. How amazing it is to see an adult go from having a handful of very basic nouns at her disposal to reading full sentences...even if she never gets to the point where she can read Dostoyevsky, it means a lot...far more than any particular words on the page...then, how great is it to be writing this right now?...skipping through thoughts and experiences, messing with words and meanings...lines from Shakespeare, Joyce, and Wish You Were Here...or even to be reading it, even if you think it’s all pretentious, boring bullshit...you can enjoy thinking what a dickwad I am...life given to words is itself miraculous....

Why I Disagree With Everything

Knowledge is a good thing—of course it is. I’m all for spreading knowledge. Hell, I’ve been a teacher, and a tutor, and a writer of informative articles in which I barely made anything up.

And yet...maybe...not knowing can have its value as well....

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Shakespeare

Guess I can be somewhat of a contrarian—that’s kinda the opposite of a chameleon—in blue surroundings, I turn red—not so much politically—at least not in the current “red states” and “blue states” sense—though, admittedly, back in the late ‘80’s when I was at Evergreen State College—one of our nation’s most celebrated granola schools, with alumni including Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and the founders of both Sub-Pop and the riot grrrl thing—prevailing local winds of academic Marxism and acid-burnt utopianism did blow me away from the far left...though the icy gusts of ReaganBushism then blanketing the country certainly prevented any serious drift toward the right....

Good and bad, I defined these terms so clear, no doubt, somehow...
Bob Dylan

But here I’m more concerned with that sticky “spiritual” stuff that people I hang out with either get all gooey about or have complete and utter contempt for. When I’m kicking back with the atheistic academic crowd—to the extent that people on the long march toward tenure ever “kick back”—I tend to be much more likely to indulge in the mysteries of cosmic consciousness, life after death, and the possibility of some kind of something for which the big G could be a workable metaphor. If I really wanna get antisocial, I’ll argue that to negate takes as much a leap of faith as to believe, so that atheism’s really just another religion, and that, anyway, if absolutely forced to choose, I’d probably trust the sages of the ages before the likes of Derrida and Foucault....

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God....Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us....Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
Pema Chodron

Of course, when hanging in the yoga crowd—to the extent that one can “hang” with people who pay such careful attention to their posture—my perspective changes...especially when people start talking about that new age crap—fake tribal bullshit, self serving evocations of karma, positive affirmations with all the substance of green jello....When people ask my sign—and won’t let me change the subject—I say “I’m a capricorn,” to which the answer is inevitably “just as I thought,” to which I reply “actually I’m a libra,” eliciting an “okay, I knew you were either a libra or a capricorn,” but... “I’m really a virgo,” “that explains it...,” “no it doesn’t, because I’m a scorpio,” “of course!” and so on....Then, who can blame them for failing to guess that I was born under the sign of Charlie the Three Toed Sloth?

If they had a king of fools then I would wear that crown
and you could all die laughing because I’ll wear it proudly.
Elvis Costello

I was on a yoga retreat where we did these writing exercises, which were then shared with the group...one of them with a prompt of something like “what surprises you at this point in your life” and, after a couple of days of wondering if there was truly a place for a yoga cynic in such mellow touchy-feely environs, I went off on the whole group: “I’m surprised I’m here. I don’t believe in crap. I hate that all that new age shit. I hate positive attitudes. I hate people who have positive attitudes. I hate people who believe...” for twelve minutes. Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time I had to eat lunch alone. But get this: people liked it. Told me they appreciated my honesty and sense of humor. Hugged me and shit. What’s a contrarian to do?