Reptiles of the Mind

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake

...thinking about stuff is generally easier than actually doing it, but less satisfying...unless, of course, you’re thinking about doing something really stupid...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 16:731/2

...just wrote this review for Elephant Journal of a book called Writing Yoga...and, in the process, got kinda self-indulgent...which is what I do...without apology...(I mean, seriously, it’s not like I get paid for this shit)...(and, anyway, like to think I’m working in the tradition of the late great Lester Bangs)...(remember reading Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung while in grad. school, and thinking “why can’t I write literary criticism like this?”...probably shoulda known my days in academia were numbered right then)...

Some years ago, my yoga teacher told me about a retreat she was leading on a beach in Mexico, involving instruction in not just yoga but writing.** The yoga and beach-in-Mexico parts sounded awesome, but thought I’d probably skip out on the other in favor of more wandering-on-the-beach time—I mean, I got me a PhD in English, done taut reedin’ n’ ritin’ at the college level, for chrissake, completed a novel, and published all kinds o’ crap; so y’know, what could be more fun on a trip to the tropics than having somebody correcting my split infinitives and instructing me not to end my sentences with prepositions?**** As it turned out, the writing teacher, Ann Randolph, was more holy lunatic than didactic schoolmarm. Right from the get-go, she had us radically stretching, pushing boundaries, moving beyond comfort zones into all kinds of places I really wasn’t expecting to go.***** At the end of the week, when asked how I felt about the balance of yoga and writing, I said I didn’t feel it was a combination, per se. Rather, it felt to me like it was all yoga, the writing as much as the asana practice. And this, along with, according to what I’d read, a desperate need for writers these days to have something called a web presence, led me to create my semi-famous blog, Yoga for Cynics…(mentioned in Yoga Journal and yada yada yada).****** (And, when people point out that, often, the content isn’t really about yoga, I point out that writing the blog is yoga…and, at least fifty percent of the time, I mean it).

...(yes, in this blog where, in better times, I’ve shared the words of Whitman, Shakespeare, and Kinky Friedman, I’m now quoting myself...at length)...(you’ll have to read the actual article to see the hilarious snarky footnotes, as well as get to the point where I move beyond shameless self-promotion and actually mention the book I’m reviewing)...(and yes, this is also shameless self-promotion)...

Oh, help me in my weakness, I heard the drifter say...
Bob Dylan

...so, anyway, running through this bit of personal history, particularly the cryptic web presence thing, reminded me that part of what got me into the blogging thing...in addition to, y'know, becoming one with the blogosphere and spreading peace and contentment throughout the interwebs...was a need to market my writing...(for which I also need to work on the shameless self promotion thing...as I’m doing in this post)...specifically the novel I put the finishing touches on nearly four years ago, but still haven’t gotten published, Drifter’s Escape...(yes, the title comes from that Dylan song)....(what are songs and poems good for if not to provide titles?)...(note how well that Blake line fits with the pic from my trip to Costa Rica, up there...even if it doesn't have all that much to do with the content of the post....can't have it all)...

...though, as it turns out, Yoga for Cynics has kind of taken on a life of its own...and perhaps the strategy of continually planning on getting back to the process of querying agents really soon but never actually doing it might be reevaluated...though whether that means actually getting back to querying agents, or developing a different strategy...(and, y’know, actually implementing it)...is up to question.....more on this, perhaps, as it develops...

...trying to get shit published might be yoga, too...but we're not too sure about that...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 121:97

The Clinically Depressed Trickster Figure

You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later...
Mitch Hedberg

...turning leaves, blankets and warmer clothing, and lotsa tasty stuff made from various forms of squash...shifting from that edgy, anxious spring-and-summertime depression to the more cozy, lethargic fall-and-winter variety...

We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

a mystic looks at the universe and sees mystery...an existentialist looks at the universe and sees absurdity...I look at the universe and see absurd mystery...or mysterious absurdity...

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Chuang Tzu

...would like to start a non-religion based around a clinically depressed trickster figure...offering annual, year-long retreats at the long-awaited Yoga for Cynics ashram...where the mountains kiss the sea and floppy-eared dogs wander among recycled building materials inscribed with inspiring words from Chuang Tzu, William Blake, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Mitch Hedberg....all specific commandments, sutras, and holy dogma written on any available outdoor surface in colored chalk, to be seen, or changed, or ignored, by anyone at any time, or simply washed away by the rain...

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
William Blake



*was looking for an image for this post and googled “trickster figure”...and what did I see but the cover of this obscure book of literary criticism called Trickster Lives, published a full decade ago, now, and happening to feature a chapter on a poet named Thylias Moss, written—in semi-fluent academic jargon—by none other than your humble author in PhD-student mode...never woulda imagined that was still in print...*

Prepared for Lift-Off...All Systems Go

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare...
David Bowie

...for the next month, Yoga for Cynics, along with its affiliates, partners, and corporate subsidiaries, will be shifting its base of operations from West Mt. Airy, Land of Mellow Sadhana and No Snow Plows, USA, to the mystical highlands of Kripalu...the Berkshires, Massachusetts...cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown...(or, at least, the Google Maps directions are really, really confusing)...where its proprietor, webmaster, chairman, publisher, president, CEO, CFO, Grand Poobah, consigliere, Most Exalted Muckamuck, First Citizen o' Love, minister of information, malcontent-in-residence, spiritual advisor, guru, sensei, Grand Vizier, Imperial Lama, First Among Equals, and most humble author will be attending a 200 hr. Yoga Teacher Training...

...(which, yes, represents a significant step toward laying the groundwork for the long-promised Yoga for Cynics ashram.....anybody out there got a tropical island you’re not using for anything?)...

...was planning on some serious tidying up around the place before I go...but decided spring cleaning’s better left ’til spring....last night my mom gave me an early birthday present a sweater to replace, she said, my old favorite, now full of holes, which she tried to get me to promise to throw out, or, at least, never wear when anybody can see me...I explained that it didn’t matter, because I’ll still be the kinda guy who wears ratty sweaters with holes in them....even if I’m wearing a custom-made, designer-original tuxedo, anybody talking to me will always figure that out in no time...

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise
William Blake

...had coffee three or four...maybe five...times this week, after three months off... which, whether defensible in terms of yamas and niyamas or not, lemme tell ya, felt like three or four big steaming cups o’ happiness...

...which I’ll try to kiss as it flies, before heading up to Kripalu tomorrow, where, most likely I'll spend a month largely without caffeine, junk food, alcohol, T.V...probably a whole bunch of other minor vices, as well...while learning all about yoga...and god-only-knows-what about myself...and beyond that, who knows?...will I come back a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love?...or at least muster up the energy to clean up that filthy apartment?...throw out that rancid sweater...or perhaps more fully inhabit it?...

...guess we’ll see...

Giving Credit Where It's Due...the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

...just got back from the eye doctor because my artificial doors of perception are badly scratched...missing a nose piece, and, since I stepped on them on getting out of bed last week, badly mangled enough I decided finally to do something about it...could be there’s a metaphor in that somewhere...


As long as we associate happiness with getting what we want, we’ve associated it with exactly the opposite thing that makes us happy. Getting what we want doesn’t make us happy, not wanting makes us happy.
Adyashanti


...it's easy to envy the bliss we see in little kids, especially when it's brought on by so little...an ice cream cone or a favorite cartoon coming on...but, then, with that, there's the total abject wailing despair when the ice cream cone falls on the sidewalk or mom decides that's enough TV for today....there's definitely something to be said for the kind of quiet equanimity you see in older people...


Some say they can recall a thousand years
Some say they have already visited the next thousand years
On a windy day I am waiting for a bus.
Ko Un (stolen from the legendary Brooks, who got it from Yoga for a World Out of Balance, by Michael Stone)


...for a while now, been biking around Philly taking pictures of some of the amazing street art that’s appeared over the past couple decades, and have quite shamelessly used it to illustrate Yoga for Cynics posts (particularly this one and this one) as well as an Elephant Journal article. It wasn’t ’til recently, though, that I found out where all the art was coming from, and realized I’d been severely remiss about giving credit where it’s due. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, led by Jane Golden, began as an offshoot of the city’s anti-graffiti network, channeling the talents of graffiti artists to benefit their communities as well as themselves, and is now, as America’s largest public art program, responsible for Philly having more murals on its walls than any city in the world, working with a variety of non-profits, including Philly’s own Yoga Unites, to empower young people through art. I should mention I’ve showcased only a tiny handful of more than 3,000 in the city, and simply the ones I happen to have biked, walked, or driven by and liked with camera handy. In fact, they're everywhere, including neighborhoods where you probably wouldn’t expect to see dazzling public art (and, actually, a few of the photos here were taken very quickly before skedaddling away...making it highly inconvenient to realize suddenly that my back tire was going flat)...

Walking With Waves

...thinking, wondering, imagining...lust, love, loneliness...building, dissolving, receding...this, this, only this...*




*...was walking by myself along this beach in south Jersey, from populated areas to a somewhat wilder one by the wildlife sanctuary—sand above the surf line roped off to protect nesting areas for piping plovers, people allowed to walk through but not stop, sunbathe, or swim, since the shy little birds need to run to and from the water, and won’t if anybody’s in the way...seems reasonable enough, so keep up a steady pace—seeing no plovers...(sorry, that’s not one in the picture)...though can’t deny looking probably more than watchful boyfriends like at women in bathing suits...but, more than that, another, less superficial and piggish aspect of mind caught on someone...far inland...wondering if she thinks about me...imagining, hoping...that old song...tip-toeing a narrow course between solitude and loneliness, dipping precipitously, despite such gorgeous tranquil surroundings, seemingly made for peaceful reflection, toward the latter...trying once again to be mindful...and all that...observe thoughts floating by instead of getting caught up in them...gain that awesome sense of wonder found in pondering the infinite in one’s own breath, sun on skin, cold salt water on the toes, even a bit of pain in one hip from walking so much in the sand...for a sudden moment feeling somewhat jarring comfort in the knowledge that, really, I know nothing else...the rest only thinking, imagining, longing...speculation on reality that’s always something else...and not even that ten minutes later...gettin’ all Krishnamurti-like n’ shit....and then, of course, thinking about writing about it, maybe quoting that famous William Blake line, something like “to see infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour”...( having to work by memory even once the walk is through, since there’s no Collected Poems of William Blake nor consistent internet access at the beach house)...though, by the time I got back, reduced it all to the few simple formulae above...wondering if the wave thing’s too clichéd...as well as whether a cliché’s always such a bad thing....or whether anybody’s gonna get what I’m talking about at all....anyway, it works a whole lot better than all this...doncha think?

Yogi Don’t Surf! (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Cinco)

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
William Blake

...someone told me the forecast for Philly for the following week, when we’d be home, had highs in the upper forties...which’ll feel just balmy, said she....or would if we hadn’t just spent ten days down here, said I...


Charlie don’t surf!
Colonel Kilgore, Apocalypse, Now

...the Pacific coast of the Nicoya Peninsula is renowned as a major surf haven, attracting incredibly buff wave riders from around the world...including most everybody else on our little retreat...and yet...alas...this cynical yogi...(with a history of ear problems...culminating in chronically infected scar tissue from operations meant to remove other chronically infected scar tissue resulting from previous operations meant to stop chronic ear infections)...(all of which makes water sports that involve submerging the head highly inadvisable)...does not surf...

...and, anyway, there are an awful lot of underwater rocks, there...so ya never know, when floating about the surf, just what might be lurking underneath....and this is starting to sound like yet another metaphor...

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
attributed to Swami Satchidinanda

...there’s a book called In Search of Captain Zero, about a couple of surfers and ex-weed smugglers who, earlier in their lives, decided that someday they’d find the perfect beach with the perfect surf break...paradise...to spend the rest of their lives...

The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment...

Allen Ginsberg

...in time, though, they lost one another...and the author, Allan C. Weisbecker, has the idea that his friend, Christopher...Captain Zero...may have finally found it...so heads down through Mexico into Central America...doing lots of surfing along the way...

That ‘s how thick the wave was and how deep within it I found myself. I was in a crouch, which is pretty much instinctive in that sort of situation, but I could have stood up and still not gotten my hair wet. For the three, maybe four seconds before that wave spit me back out into the sunlight with my feet still planted firmly on my board, I was exactly and without doubt where I wanted to be on the surface of the planet earth. And there was not a drop of water in my universe that was out of place.

...eventually finding Christopher, and it, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica...only to learn that, having found his paradise, Captain Zero’s developed an addiction to crack....sometimes, it seems, there’s nothing more dangerous than finding your ideal...especially if the plan is to try and hold on to it for good instead of simply enjoying the perfect moments you get before letting them go...

...back in slowly-melting-snowy Philadelphia, found my difficult adjustment to cold weather after ten days struggling to stay cool, itchy skin flaking off from sunburn, arms and legs so bug bitten they've been compared to Saint Sebastian, garnered little sympathy...

...and, anyway, here’s where I am now...and, with temperatures reaching up toward the low sixties, and purple flowers blooming where snow was days ago, it's probably best to let go of that beach...for now...

It'd Be a Lot Easier to Find Lost Glasses If You Could See Clearly

...it’d be a lot easier to find lost glasses if you could see clearly....that’s gotta be a perfect analogy for something...

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

...bought an unlimited pass at a local yoga studio and ended up going to twenty-five classes in a month...concluding this past Saturday...which brought up a number of insights, including: that’s a helluva lotta yoga classes...

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are...
Ernest Hemingway

...Sunday morning biked sixty-five miles...pre-coffee...fifty of them as part of this Bike Philly thing...which I joined in support of some of the women-in-recovery I work with...though they did the more intelligent and mostly flat ten or twenty mile routes instead of the knee-breakingly hilly fifty...plus another fifteen or so getting there and back...which also involved a really big hill...bringing on thoughts like: that’s a helluva lotta biking...

...not that there's anything to complain about in any of this...'cause there really isn't...

Watery Reflections

...had a moment there in yoga class when this bead of sweat was dripping down the bridge of my nose...gradually making its way down to the tip...and I was doing one of those mudra things so didn’t want to lift a hand to brush it away...so instead just felt it there...imagining its glassy clarity...possibly reflecting the ceiling lights...or the entire room...like one of those beads of sweat William Blake didn’t write about in Auguries of Innocence...but probably would have if he’d ever attended a yoga class on a hot July day in Philadelphia...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake

....afterwards was going to see this Shakespeare in the park thing...A Midsummer Night’s Dream...stopping for a while under a railroad bridge to wait out a lightning storm...the kind where being under a solid stone bridge doesn’t really keep a person or bike from getting wet...as sheets of misty rain entered horizontally...a couple of other guys were there at first...but gradually made their way away...to somewhere...I stayed, coming out once it stopped to a bright blue above, seeming to have thoroughly forgotten what it had been doing moments before...got back on the bike, dodging fallen trees, branches, and rainwater running down side streets like raging streams, making it just at the time the play was supposed to start...to see actors packing up their truck, promising a rain-date next week...

...clearly, there's more than one kind of midsummer dream...

Really Deep, Intense Discussions With Myself...

and if my thought-dreams could be seen,
they’d probably put my head in a guillotine,
but it’s alright, ma, it’s life and life only...
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been talking much to people lately...at least not in much depth...though I’ve been having a lot of really deep, intense discussions with myself...

...that’s included trying to do some writing by hand every day...which is notable because I never, if I can help it, write with anything less than a full-sized QWERTY keyboard...don’t even get me started on how I can’t stand text messaging...and yet, I've found myself letting loose with some personal thoughts the likes of which I’ve never let see the light outside my brain...often painfully embarrassing, shameful...offensive to anyone other than...or, sometimes, including...myself...and, it occurs to me, the reason for this and the reason I don't normally write by hand might be one and the same...that what comes out is thoroughly incomprehensible to anyone but me...and, sometimes, to me, as well...thus eliminating the worry that, no matter how well hidden, someone might stumble upon and read it...and freeing me to write absolutely anything I want...

...of course, it could be decided...possibly after my death...like with William Blake, Emily Dickinson, or Henry Darger...that what I write’s important enough for scholars, handwriting analysts, or freelance pharmacists to go combing through the hieroglyphics...then, that might be cool...would make my unauthorized biographies a lot more interesting...certainly, people talking about how boring I am after I’m dead would be adding insult to injury...comb through my hieroglyphics, baby, comb through ‘em all night, dig into my present past darlin’, bring it all to light...then, I could also end up buried in intensely dull jargon filled written-for-no-reason-except-to-get-tenure scholarship...

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
William Butler Yeats, from “The Scholars”

...then, such are the perils of posthumous fame...probably better to be alive and obscure...

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...

Rain, Conflict, and Green Tea

rainy day, dream away, let the sun take a holiday...
Jimi Hendrix

...or else just sit around feeling miserable...there are days when it seems like conflicts spring up out of the dirt like weeds...watered by incessant rain...make ya wanna run home and hide....then, the worst conflicts are generally those experienced alone...and most disagreements are actually about something entirely different than those caught up in them think...maybe most agreements are, too....often we tend to drift from one argument to the next, never really plumbing the depths...never finding out what's really behind any of them...

...is it closed minded or judgemental to tell a friend his dislike of dogs is a personality flaw?...I say it with a smile, at least....my friends at the coffee shop were running down their latest rude-customer stories while I finished up a mug of green tea I’d let get cold...making me realize how quickly I’d be fired if I had their job...and that I should tip more....I used to try to get elite college students to write papers on an issue that matters to you....how bad the food on campus was tended to be the most pressing...and I couldn’t disagree it was lousy....but they’d also talk about how rude the servers were...though, whenever I forgot to bring my lunch, I’d end up standing in a line with ten or so undergraduates, not one of whom would say please or thank you...sometimes barking orders like particularly irascible drill sergeants...acting like their privacy was being violated if the guy behind the counter interrupted their conversations to say excuse me, sir, do you want fries with that?...

...Henry David Thoreau, after starting a forest fire by accident, saw it from a distance, finding it a glorious spectacle if one can part the burning from the burned...or so I read in the New York Times Book Review...I can remember somebody saying something similar about footage of the first space shuttle explosion, back in the 80’s...some people like to use a flower as a symbol or metonym of life...others use war in much the same way...William Blake said everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth...and he was probably right...

This is It

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Walt Whitman

...was talking to a friend while walking to dinner in Mexico about the Yoga Sutras...she didn’t like the part about abstinence...I don’t either...then, I don’t particularly care...

...not that I’ve got anything against Patanjali...whoever he was...just don’t see any reason why disagreeing with something somebody etched on parchment in India thousands of years ago should be a problem...any more than if it was written in Philadelphia yesterday...or vice-versa...

believe it if you need it; if you don’t just pass it on...
Robert Hunter

...for every love thy neighbor there’s an injunction to kill thy neighbor for one highly spiritual reason or other...for every ancient discipline of self-realization, there’s an even older caste system that labels some inherently holy, and others untouchable...for every life-saving medical procedure there’s a new weapon of mass murder...for every nice modern idea like democracy, there’s a nasty one like fascism....neither tradition nor innovation is inherently good or bad...valid or invalid...wise or stupid...

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
Annie Dillard

Rhyming With Nothing

...a word that rhymes with nothing...and so, called difficult...like anything else that refuses to fit into the formalities of a society’s ever-conventional poetry...unappreciated...reduced to cheap jokes...orange you glad I didn’t say banana?...denied credit endlessly...like those old blues singers dying in poverty after writing the songs that made Elvis, Clapton, Zeppelin, and the Stones famous...waaaaaay down inside...it’s Muddy Waters, dude...and it's orange...and you can see it, even...and yet still you call it red...but orange never complains...

...flames, “red” rocks and cliffs...worlds of orange defining the most inspiring and mystical grottoes of the American southwest...‘red’ foxes...corgis...Mittens the corgi was our first dog...named after her white paws though most of the rest of her was orange...I was terrified of dogs when we got her, having been jumped on at two or three by what I’m told was a yellow lab...apparently, the dog just wanted to play and inadvertently knocked me down...though I took it as an attack...thus, mom and dad deciding to get a puppy to help overcome the resultant phobia...and it worked...it was I who kept poor Mittens alive when she got old and ornery, parents knowing life with teenaged me would become completely unlivable if they dared have her put to sleep just because she snapped at them...repeatedly...then, I was considered a bit of a problem, too, at that point...my good points, it seemed, underappreciated, like orange...

...orange oranges...clementines...peaches...mangoes...mango daiquiris on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean...orange tastes goooood...again, falsely called “red,” like the fire it resembles, a hair color associated with quick temper, with passion...with heat...with Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore, with Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with anonymous wild women of the Australian Outback...red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme sings Richard Thompson, though I have faith he knows in his heart that ‘red’ is really orange...

...with freckles, the visual equivalent of an Irish brogue...(Dogs and Irish Need Not Apply read job postings a century ago)...(making the political associations of orange in Northern Ireland rather strange)...(even Ireland, it seems, saves its love for green)...orange the robes of Buddhist monks and swamis...orange prison jumpsuits...orange birds of paradise...orange the color you wear to keep from getting shot out in the woods during hunting season...orange sunshine...along with black, color of Halloween...pumpkins...makings for pumpkin soup generally dumped in the making of jack-o-lanterns...so much orange wasted...

Tyger, tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy mortal symmetry?
William Blake

...the tiger, yes, also orange...but cares little about being called red...no need at all to be concerned with such things when you’re a tiger...

Sick! Sick! Sick!

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
William Blake

...sickness will surely take the mind where minds can’t usually go...
Pete Townshend

...it should say something about how crappy I’ve been feeling that I’ve barely been able to do my morning yoga thing this week—this despite the fact that I generally put less time into it than most people spend in the bathroom first thing in the morning—this despite my apparent reputation as the on-line yogamaster supreme—really: people keep e-mailing me at this blog to ask about yoga—though I stress that I’m still working on doing basic asanas without hurting myself...and thus am not about to try and teach anybody else....

...though not a doctor of medicine, I nonetheless try to follow that part of the Hippocratic Oath...the only part I know, in fact...that says first, do no harm...which according to a google search I just did, isn’t even in the Hippocratic Oath...so it’s all good...

I have a good friend I call...affectionately...the foul evil bringer of pestilence...that’s because I believe, on good, solid evidence, that she was responsible for passing on to me the two worst colds or flus I’ve suffered in recent years...and, actually, while she was across the country when I contracted this one, in L.A., city of the fallen angels, I did meet up with her husband for lunch in South Philly on Saturday...

...anyway, the illness—apparently a flu bug of some kind—seems to have passed, leaving only the slightest rusty residue of the red nail that was lodged in my forehead for three or four days...and so life begins again...like I’ve just come back from a really crummy vacation...though at least I didn’t have to pay for airfare or hotels...sickness is the crappy vacation you experience in the discomfort of your very own home....

...and, actually, it does have some of the advantages of a trip away...even a crappy one...in terms of knocking a person out of the standard routine, and thereby providing a view of it from somewhat on the outside, allowing one to evaluate it from the standpoint of not-quite-in-it...ask if it’s really a horse anybody’d wanna climb back onto...or if changes need to be made...yeah, I know I’m mixing metaphors...like I said, I’ve still got some lingering symptoms, including being a good bit stupider than usual...so I’ll blame it on that...and wish good health to everybody reading....

I Saw Walt Whitman Strolling Through the Park Today

I saw Walt Whitman strolling through the park today...alive as you and me, like they say...along Forbidden Drive...called that—this is true—because you’re forbidden to drive on it...above the legendary Wissahickon Creek....I’ve seen him along there before...maybe up in Mt. Airy, too...though this was more notable because it was right near the broken bench with the inscription from Song of Myself that they got wrong,
I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware that I sit content
adding that that that doesn’t belong at all though somebody—maybe Walt himself...certainly this sighting makes me suspicious—kind of corrected it with a black magic marker....anyway, he seemed content enough...if a bit worse for wear...which you can’t blame him for...I mean, the guy is closing in on the end of his second century...and the Civil War really seemed to take something out of him...

I am nothing, and therefore I am everything, and all energy
J. Krishnamurti

Energy is Eternal Delight
William Blake

Tonight the bottle let me down, and let your memory come around....
Merle Haggard

It’s raining outside, started while I was in the park, and I brought the rain into the coffee shop. The rain follows me, and I follow the rain, and maybe I am the rain. The rain is in my hair and the rain is inseparable from my hair...though my eyes are two suns...sons absent a father brain, wandering aimlessly from place to place, but never lost because knowing always that lost is where they belong....

Coffee is energy. Then, so is everything else...maybe. Energy is in crisis, always. We fuel the wars we fight for energy with energy, though it’s often lacking when I need to go home but can’t get away from this window seat, looking out at the rain. Coffee fails me sometimes, like Merle Haggard with his inconstant whiskey bottle...like anything, really, but it tastes good, at least...and that’s not like just anything.

Walt Whitman wrote about Nature without check with original energy but he doesn’t come into the coffee shop to talk with me about it, at least not when I’m here. Perhaps he’s made his peace with the rain.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and...Whatever....

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
Emily Dickinson

She had nothing left to say, so she said she loved me.
And I stood there grateful for the lie.
Doug Hopkins

Everything Possible to be Believ'd is an Image of Truth.
William Blake

The Quakers believe very strongly in telling the truth. In the early days they called themselves “Friends of Truth,” which eventually morphed into “the Society of Friends.”

Then, they're also quite proud of the role they played in the Underground Railroad, which wouldn't have worked so well if they'd told slave catchers "I cannot tell a lie. They're hiding in the root cellar."

The moral of this story is: there's a time and a place for everything, even those things that don’t happen to be true.

Kind of a Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

And now...an exclusive, never-before-published haiku by a famous dead American poet. Really. Seriously:

Just wandered in from
the void for a poetry
reading, the next morning
I was hung over.
Allen Ginsberg

You’re probably thinking that doesn’t look much like a haiku—in fact it looks even less like one on the original page, since the line brakes above are really just where the writing hit the edge of the paper, and he certainly wasn’t even trying for 5-7-5 (though it has been argued that, given the essential differences between Japanese and English, that schema isn’t important for English-language haiku, anyway) (then, those presenting that argument might simply be lazy) (but...far be it from me to get into debates about poetic form).

It was back in the summer of 1990, I believe, though it could possibly have been '91, while I was embarrassing my parents living the life of a slacker out in Boulder, a year out of college, no prospects for or particular interest in a promising career of any kind, and, when not wandering in the mountains or otherwise sacrificing brain cells to unknown gods, attending a free Zen meditation class at the Naropa Institute, which was also attended, at least once or twice, by Ginsberg, who one Saturday (I think), as part of a benefit for something or other, along with some other poets, did this thing—basically, you stood in line, paid a few or maybe five bucks, and a famous poet would ask you a few questions, then write an instant haiku on the spot....I told Ginsberg I was just wandering, kind of a bum—apparently thinking maybe he’d be impressed and tell me I reminded him of Kerouac or something (he wasn’t, and didn’t)—I also told him I’d gone to a poetry reading the night before, and now, in the morning, was hung over...and so ended up with a piece of rag paper, with this poem, a little drawing of a flower and what looks like a snake, and Ginsberg’s signature on it. I’ve still got it, though in the midst of a long summer living in my van, something apparently got spilled on it, staining and smudging it badly, particularly the signature, though you can still read it...kinda.....

That summer or maybe the next one, I also attended a seminar Ginsberg did—once a week for I think three weeks we read Blake and Whitman, and Allen related the poems to his sex life, drug experiences, and conversations with Bob Dylan...which could be interesting, sometimes, like when he talked about this Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

and applied it to how, at one time in his life, he’d kept taking acid, each time hoping this one will last until, finally, he learned to kiss it as it flies...and he drew attention to this part of a line from an obscure version of the well known I asked a thief:

‘twixt earnest & joke

arguing that it was central to his own poetry as well as that of Shakespeare and lots of other people...now that I think of it, it’s probably central to Yoga for Cynics, too...and, some years later, in grad school I used it as the basis for what became my first published scholarly article, called The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss. Thylias Moss writes stuff like this:

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His mustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from thinking he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God....

but, that was another time....

Mental Mountains

In the mountains, there you feel free.
T.S. Eliot

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
Steven Wright

In Valley Forge National Park—best known for George Washington’s troops eating bark and freezing their asses off in the long winter of 1776—a couple of hills are home to what I like to call the allegorical hike. First, I walk up the soft, grassy slope of Mount Joy. Then, after a pleasant jaunt among the rabbits and deer, I come down, cross the road and creek, and begin to climb a steep colonial ruin-lined trail to the top of Mount Misery, following a noose-shaped course before going back the way I came, again reaching the heights of Mount Joy, descending to my car, and driving home. Deep, isn’t it?

I thought of you as my mountaintop, I thought of you as my peak
I thought of you as everything I had but couldn’t keep...
Lou Reed

There’ve been times I’ve been hopelessly infatuated with someone I didn’t know well at all. Looking back, after things have gone bad, or didn’t happen at all, I’ve wondered how I could’ve been so wrong, or what the hell it was all about in the first place. The trouble, I think, has generally been that I saw a projection of something I’ve always wanted, or needed, or lost, not another person at all. There’s this movie called An American Crime—young Ellen Page gets left with Catherine Keener who turns out to be a psychopath and tortures her to death, with the help of her children and their friends—based on a true story—the kind of movie that’s well-made with strong performances, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to subject yourself to it. Shortly after seeing that, I was reading about David Pelzer, who’s written a bunch of books about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his deranged mother. “How could they do that to an innocent child?” is a valid question, certainly. But I wonder if they see that innocent child at all, rather than a malevolent symbol, or some part of themselves they hate. Maybe it’s similar to the way depression causes a person to see nothing but itself, and mistake it for the world.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
William Blake

Playing With Puppies

A fellow blogger commented on my last post: “I order you to go play with puppies this instant!” I suspect there may be some implication here that recent Yoga for Cynics posts have, perhaps, indicated a somewhat introverted, depressed and/or generally out-there state of mind. Could be. As a shrink once said, after an hour in which I'd brilliantly subverted her every attempt at introducing a more positive outlook, “it’s rough inside your head!” Point taken.

And yet, alas, I have no puppies at hand. Nonetheless, here’s a picture of my good friend Fargo, who's moved to Colorado, so I don’t get to play with him much these days.
It's nearly impossible to do yoga around Fargo, and he's anything but a cynic. That has not, however, kept me from writing fragments of an epic poem about him, collectively known as the Fargo Cantos (imaginary gardens with real dogs in them), including the following:

Because I could not stop for Fargo—
he kindly jumped up –
and got mud all over my pants

and:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and Fargo—
He kinda ran back and forth between them, like a maniac.
And that has made all the difference

and who could forget:

What happens to a dog deferred?

Does he curl up
like a pillow on the couch?
Or growl and snarl
like Oscar the grouch?
Does he slobber on your knee
Like a leaky hose?
Or whine, bark and puke
right on your toes?
Maybe he just slumps down
on his furry butt

Or does he go nuts?

or:

Fargo! Fargo! Barking bright,
In the backyards of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Apologies to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and William Blake. And thanks to April for the pic, and to Dano MacNamarrah for a lovely blog award that I can't figure out how to paste into this post (so it's in the sidebar).