Trail Difficult to Find Beyond this Point

 

I've never seen myself as a city mouse, used to think quite the opposite, in fact. My ideal was to get as far away from the noise, the pollution, the frenzied mass of raw humanity, as possible. Lengthy wilderness backpacking excursions seemed a kind of training for a time when any trips I took would be in the opposite direction, some untrammeled (except by me and maybe a few select friends) region my home.

I still see the appeal in that. Yet, I've come to realize that extremes of isolation aren't actually all that good for me. And, for a lifelong introvert, being way out in the country makes isolating oneself a little too easy.

Then, here in the northeast, so does wintertime. In February, a steady period of high temperatures in the low twenties or teens, lows in single digits, had finally convinced me to forsake the bike, find other ways of getting around town...or, y’know, stay in like a hermit when I didn’t actually have to be anywhere. It made for perfect timing for a visit to friends who'd had a baby, in the low desert metropolis of Arizona.

Full disclosure: they had the baby almost a year earlier, but I waited until it was twenty degrees in Philly and low eighties in the Sonoran desert, to fully enjoy the contrast between biking in a ski mask and standing barefoot on a rock to pluck a huge, juicy, red and yellow grapefruit from a backyard tree each morning for breakfast. Went with them to the botanical gardens, the zoo, and local parks with cacti and rock formations, watched the Oscars, and read their adorable little daughter extremely expurgated toddler versions of Moby Dick, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein.

Also rented a shiny silver Mustang—seriously, the people at the airport wanted me to have it, for the same price as whatever purely practical low-mpg Japanese compact I'd originally agreed on—and took off north one day by myself. Ten years I’d been away from the high desert and on the drive up, just seeing it out the window, remembered deep in the fascia just how desperately I love it, ipod plugged in to the dashboard, Gram and Emmylou singing twenty thousand roads I went down down down and they all led me straight back home to you.

(Meant to drive all the way to Flagstaff, where I lived for two years while getting my Master’s, to see another friend, on another day before I left, but the forecast was for snow up there, and I’d be seeing that soon enough). (This time, I was heading for my favorite spot in Arizona, an out of the way area known as the Wet Beaver Wilderness).

(Yeah, it’s really called that. You drive maybe an hour and a half to two hours north from Phoenix, forty five minutes to an hour south of Flagstaff to the Sedona exit—fifteen miles to Sedona, but go the opposite direction just a couple miles, then hike in about three and half or four above the creek, along some red rock cliffs inhabited by lizards and the occasional petroglyph, before taking a little unofficial spur trail just before the mail trail crosses the creek. Then, in maybe a couple hundred yards, you see “the crack”—yeah, it's really called that, too—an area of perfect red rock swimming pools surrounded by soft cliffs).
 

Got off the highway and went barely a mile before running into a road crew re-paving the road. When I first visited there, in maybe 1994, I think the road was all dirt. Now, they told it’d be half an hour before I could get through. It was only a mile or two to the trailhead, so I thought about parking and walking, but instead turned around and drove into Sedona. It’s been built up and commercialized a lot in the past decade or two (actually, as old-timers used to tell me, long before that, as well, which I have no doubt is true, but one's own nostalgic grumbling doesn't generally have that long a scope). Nowadays, you have to pay to park at a trailhead, but only if you’re gonna leave your car. So, I stayed at the car, looking up at the big red monoliths while enjoying some leftover pad Thai (homemade by my friends the night before, and surprisingly good cold). Half an hour later, I was pulling into the Dry Beaver Creek parking area, paved and a lot bigger than it used to be, but nearly empty, just then.

(According to an internet source, one thing that hasn't changed is that the lot's still a common site for break-ins. Back in ’96, I camped in there with some friends, communing with rippling water, sun, and strange dried fungi while, an hour north, the ceremony for my Master’s graduation was happening—I promised my mom I’d go to the PhD one, so she could come and see me in my mortar board and robe, and did, eight years later—only to come out and find someone had broken into my van, smashed a  $300 window for a nearly worthless Sony disc-man that skipped like crazy and the old Grateful Dead CD sitting in it. Can't say the experience wasn't worth it, though).

Leaving the rental car unlocked and empty but for the winter coat and thick shirt I'd left in the backseat at the airport, I headed into the high desert, on foot, entering the Wet Beaver Wilderness through a metal gate a mile or two in. If I’d recalled my love for the high desert viscerally from the car, to actually be out walking in it—hiking, something I don’t do nearly as much these days as I used to, and hadn’t much at all recently—was a true revelation. Back home, low-grade, seasonal depression had been edging gradually into the deeper, nastier kind. But here, in this environment so harsh that only the prickliest life can manage to thrive, hot sun reflecting magically off the slick rock, I somehow felt a peculiar renewal—prana chi kundalini life-force happiness—in an almost magical connection to something temporarily forgotten but, as it turned out, far from lost.

Once at those storied rocks and pools, I climbed around a bit, then, yogi I’ve become since those rambling semi-hippie graduate student days when I roamed here, sat to meditate for the better part of an hour.

As a semi-responsible yoga teacher, I try to be careful not to give the wrong idea about things like meditation and mindfulness—talking about, y’know, those blissed-out kinds of mental states—satori sadhana peak experiences whatever—that, yeah, might manifest for us sometimes, but not usually, and can’t be counted on...and I'm told aren’t really the point anyway...not to mention that I've certainly experienced the oh shit I guess I'm not really enlightened hangover...the feeling that mystical awakening played with my affections and then wouldn't return my phone calls...more than once...so it’s much better to focus on the average and ordinary, the ever-returning-to-the-breath-and-being-cool-with-that. And yet, they’re the awesome when they come—rejuvenating, ecstatic, trippy, and all the more special on a good day out in the desert.

So, at the risk of sounding like a not-so-cynical yogi, let's just say that's what was happening.

Feeling inspired to extend my hike, rather than just retracing the three or four miles back to the car, I head for the quite-literal heights, across the creek and up the Weir Trail—another steep steady mile and half above a steep side canyon to the Mogollon Rim, spotting hidden waterfalls deep below and feeling an almost embarrassing love of life with every step, as if living the words of my one-time idol Jack Kerouac—who, yeah, I know, could be kind of a misogynistic drunken jerk—pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven.

And, there at the top, at the very edge of the Colorado plateau, where high desert ends and an alpine zone begins and you can see desert below and the San Francisco peaks in the distance, just where the trail flattens out, I found a sign reading: Trail Difficult to Find Beyond This Point.

And ain’t that just the way it is?

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

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

Robert Pollard, I Am a Scientist

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

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprach Zarathustra

 

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

Dairy and gluten and grease, oh my!

Dorothy Gale, The Yoga Teacher of Oz

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

 If I don’t know I don’t know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seasonal Affective Disorder

...bleah.........................

.

. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce

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

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

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

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...

Whelk Procession

...a line of broken whelks placed like some holy procession the day before Thanksgiving...where, a couple weeks ago, water whooshing back to sea created a kind of sand ridge intersecting the shoreline....some say anything can be a sacred object....I don’t know, but see no particular reason to disagree...

...too cold to go barefoot...battered hiking books press down in wet cold sand...some seepage through worn out soles...but hardly more than the idea of wetness and cold... though that might change if I don’t keep moving....barely anybody else out but the metal detector guys...one in Bermuda shorts, though I’m wearing three layers, and the strong icy wind makes me doubt I’ll get anywhere near the point...but no worn out soul, as yet...still walking... dark tumultuous, thoroughly ominous cloud roof looming above yet ending in a straight but bumpy line just a foot or so above the horizon, where there’s no blue but an odd species of luminescence...clouds, still...but glowing...bare gilded outlines in white light....rotten wooden pilings so dark against the water lapping down below...all that light and dark in sharp distinction but what lines are in between gradually fading...

...had a deep sad thought last night...like someone wrapping me in a chilly, damp quilt...but then watched it dissipate, like a winter rainstorm...

...in better moments I think I’m on the road to enlightenment...then drop the pretense, think maybe I’m just not depressed...though, really, at this point, I can’t say the distinction matters to me much...

How You React...

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

...a long dry summer ending, finally...at Hemlock Lake, down a brutally steep, glacier-carved hill from the trailer I was officially living in for the summer, water was so low it created a beach you could walk along for miles, into areas you couldn’t normally get to easily...saw a bald eagle, maybe three or four miles in, resting on a branch maybe twenty feet above...

...actually for most of July and August lived an hour north of there, at a friend’s house in Rochester...matters professional, personal, and really really personal having unleashed something that had been bubbling underneath for a long time...leaving pristine isolation too frightening to deal with....then, the same could be said for life in general, but that wasn’t quite as easy to get away from...put the dissertation on hold, along with some bad habits, got into yoga for the first time, and that, along with therapy, and the wonders of modern psychopharmacology, seemed to help...but only so much...

...apparently was feeling better somewhat, enough to be back at the trailer that morning, if getting ready to head into town for a few days...had a writing center meeting that afternoon, a class to teach to medical students...Liquor, Drugs, and Literature...came up with the title and course content myself...and was looking forward to picking up a copy of the new Bob Dylan CD, Love and Theft, released that morning....phone rang as I was walking out the door...my mom...asked if I knew what was happening...which I didn’t...

...everything was cancelled, but I drove to town, anyway...spent the afternoon at a friend’s house...nursing a migraine, she kept watching the news, while another friend puked in the bathroom...I took her dog for a walk...it was just another day to him...got stopped by a T.V. crew...said I thought it was important to be absolutely sure who was responsible before talking about striking back at anybody...or something...never saw it, but a couple people who did told me they appreciated whatever I said....gotta admit, there was some comfort that day in knowing everybody else felt as fucked up inside as I did...

We begin where we are and how we are, and whatever happens, happens.
T.K.V. Desikachar

...was going to yoga classes with a guy named Francois Raoult...great teacher as long as you appreciated his sense of humor....was wondering, hoping he was gonna mellow us all out somehow...lull us into some cosmic mellow head space far removed from all that... tell us it was all ephemeral, and didn’t matter, anyway...and actually make us believe that...

...instead, he said something to the effect that there were, in fact, very legitimate reasons for the anxiety we were all feeling...but that didn’t mean we should let it paralyze us, or prevent us from functioning...

...and that was the key...no mystical la-la land to escape to...nothing to do but deal with exactly whatever it is was we had to deal with...

shanti shanti shanti

Two Easters

Easter...theological arguments aside, it’s a time of rebirth...connected—call it a big coincidence if you want—along with all the pagan fertility symbol rabbits & eggs—to the vernal equinox...everything coming back to life...which would make it kinda the opposite for our friends in the southern hemisphere...but anyway...

...it was right around Easter two years ago when I decided I had to leave my lonely apartment outside of Ithaca, NY, and move to Philly...an area where I’d really never conceived of living again...the site of all my early—and not-so-early—failures...representing everything I’d been running away from ever since...even as it kept pulling me back...like Michael Corleone in Godfather III...okay, maybe nothing like that...but still...there were some lengthy periods in my 20’s...coming home broke and unsure of where to go next...working lousy temp jobs and hiding in the storage room upstairs to smoke weed listening to the Stones’ Black and Blue album every evening after work like a strange pathetic ritual...you’re just a memory of a love that used to be...after that, only a couple times a year to visit family, though at times things got so strained I didn’t wanna go at all, and sometimes didn’t...and to visit an old friend or two...but that was it...

...until everything changed in the summer of 2005, when my dad died suddenly...less than a week after I’d finished teaching my last college class...the day before August 15th, which I’d declared as day one of my new life writing full time, as I’d always wanted to do... in between, I’d visited with the family...had breakfast with mom and dad at a restaurant on the Cape May boardwalk on Saturday the 13th, when dad, not generally known for putting a positive spin on things, told me how excited he was that I was setting out into the unknown like this...like Walt Whitman: The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find...though neither of us knowing just how far from a safe, familiar harbor I was gonna get, or how soon....got the call the next day, while visiting friends on the way home...an urgent message left on my cell phone by my older brother while I was at the beach: call me tonight repeated a couple times with an unmistakable urgency...making clear that, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know, but needed to hear it anyway, as soon as possible...

...a year and half later, on Easter, mom, isolated and ailing, seemed to be tumbling downhill at an alarming rate...complaining incessantly about various physical problems, increasingly unsteady, memory disappearing fast, making clear more than once that she didn’t want to live many more years...and then, on Easter afternoon, when she finally rose from bed, things appeared suddenly to have gotten far worse...she couldn’t, it seemed, complete a full sentence, voice drifting off after a few words....my younger brother took her to the hospital, thinking maybe she’d had a stroke... I’m not sure what we ended up doing for Easter dinner...probably just fended for ourselves, taking whatever was in the fridge....I thought, and in retrospect was probably right, that she’d lapsed into a deep depression...not that I knew what to do about it...

...that was something I had a rather immediate familiarity with at the time....kayaking through the mangroves in Key West a month or two earlier hardly putting a dent in it...so overweight I couldn’t stand looking at pictures of myself from that trip...intense tension headaches every day...increasing amounts of ibuprofen every night, along with either a bottle of red wine or a six pack or two of Corona...and junk food, lots and lots of junk food...thinking I might need to start buying weed again, since being a stoner seemed preferable to descending into alcoholism...painfully lonely where I was living...barely any friends except long-distance, any romantic prospects seeming further and further out of reach...the big plans of a year or two before steadily crumbling into dust but no really promising ideas on the horizon...my life seeming in as inevitable and frightening a decline as my mother’s, if forty years earlier....really, I didn’t have much to lose in picking up and moving, even if it was to Philly...

Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the dice to roll
Sitting here in limbo, got some time to search my soul
Jimmy Cliff

...two years later, mom’s health problems are largely under control, even if her memory isn’t what it once was...and she’s a lot happier with two of her sons nearby, one of us at the house every weekend...a month or two after that Easter, I found an apartment and a friendly, reasonably healthy community in West Mt. Airy, State of Quiet Integration, USA...an easy train ride, or an eight mile bike ride through Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, to center city...a ten minute walk from the largest, wildest urban park in the world...got back into yoga shortly after arriving, a lot more seriously than before...finding through that a way to stop the tension headaches, as well cutting out the nightly boozing without reverting to old bad habits...in many ways healthier than I’ve ever been physically and...somewhat...mentally...still working on that...including gradually making peace with my past...as this blog attests three or four times a week...at Easter 2009, still in a transitional period that seems to go on and on, with no particularly solid end in sight...but coming to realize that’s not necessarily such a bad thing...

Hope, Joy, Misery, & Lindsay Lohan

The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain

Really Important Announcement: Yoga for Cynics is not coming to an end, despite any and all disdain expressed for the internet in that last post....I was talking about all the other crap on-line, consuming my precious time like a cat unhappily placed on a diet finding freshly baked key lime pie carelessly left within reach on a kitchen counter (and no, I’m not ticking away the precious hours looking at porn, as a commenter who will not be named so outrageously suggested—though, okay, maybe, after all that stuff about masturbation in the previous post, I had it coming) (no pun intended) (jeezus, getcher minds outta the gutter, people) (and of course I’m definitely not talking about any of the wonderful sites affiliated with the erudite, interesting and really, really good looking people who read this blog) (particularly not those of Lydia or Fancy Sweden, who’ve recently been kind enough to give me blog awards). (Listen, I check out important news, then hit links for less important news, then completely unimportant news, then stuff that really isn’t news at all, and then...basically, end up knowing way too much about Lindsay Lohan’s personal life, particularly since I’ve never even seen any of her movies) (oh wait...was she in Mean Girls? Okay, I saw that one...but my point stands). Anyway....

There’s this obscure Dylan song with even more obscure lyrics, each verse ending all I see are dark eyes...always seemed like one of those vague free association things with some good lines that didn’t really add up to anything...Dylan’s written a few of them...but then I read Chronicles: Volume 1 where he describes walking into a hotel lobby and seeing a call girl walking out with two black eyes...they tell me to be discreet, for all intended purposes, they tell me revenge is sweet, and from where they stand I’m sure it is, but I feel nothing for their game, where beauty goes unrecognized, all I feel is heat and flame, and all I see are dark eyes....

Did Beethoven write the 9th Symphony despite being deaf and lonely and old and washed up and all that? I’m inclined to think it was more because of it—not in some stupid romantic sense, fetishizing depression as a source of inspiration rather than something that deadens. No, more in the sense that, in such murky darkness, he had to find some amazing light if he was gonna live at all....

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, it is the wine of a new procreation, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for men and makes them drunk with the spirit.
Ludwig Van Beethoven

Thomas Jefferson famously cut up the New Testament to create what’s known as The Jefferson Bible or The Life and Morals of Jesus and Nazareth—essentially an Age of Reason holy book, portraying a moral philosopher, without all the miracles and such. I don’t think that was a bad idea, though it’s kinda like reading Moby Dick to learn about whaling. Then, I guess that’s how most people read it, anyway...seeing walking on the water as walking on the water, rather than a metaphor for hope—the impossible that sometimes isn’t....

Got My Yoga for Cynics Mask On...(Reflections From a Stagnant Pool #2)

It’s just Halloween.
I have my Bob Dylan mask on.
Bob Dylan Yeah everybody wear the mask but how long will it last.
Fugees

masks under masks under masks under masks
until I myself don’t know where they end
or begin, for that matter
or which mask is doing the thinking about it
or if there’s anything underneath at all
or if that’s a problem
or if it just requires a different perspective
from, perhaps, a different mask
as they all, it seems, turn different ways
some are cool like Bogart
others sputtering like Don Knotts
and all of them looking different to others than they do to me
so they all tell me that I’m laid-back
even happy-go-lucky
once, long ago, a close friend for years said she couldn’t imagine me angry
more recently someone I didn’t know so personally said I was so up-beat he couldn’t imagine me depressed or unhappy about anything
though I suspect that wily old coot may have known more than he let on
seeing through the masks and telling me through his own up-beat and genial mask that he wasn’t buying it
but what if those masks are actually the deeper ones?
what if rage and depression are merely layers of onion skin,
waiting to be sloughed off?

Reflections From a Stagnant Pool #1

So long as the mind is seeking further experience it can only think in terms of sensation; and any experience that may be spontaneous, creative, vital, strikingly new, it immediately reduces to sensation and pursues that sensation, which then becomes a memory. Therefore, the experience is dead and the mind becomes merely a stagnant pool of the past.
J. Krishnamurti
Reflections of
the way life used to be
Reflections of
the love you took from me....
Diana Ross & the Supremes

Thoughts written down after late night yoga (a little over a year ago) (edited somewhat, to protect the guilty, as well as to eliminate stuff that doesn’t make sense even to me...though those who get freaked by my weirder posts might consider themselves warned):

The body has its problems, suspicious pains here and there—all over, really, aches, noises, chronic gas. These are the things I can’t get rid of. But everything else—fleeting impressions that swirl around, in and out, but are they just that? Are they interchangeable? They are mirrors of reality, or shadows, at least—not necessarily in the Platonic sense, but resonances. Precious things I can’t let go of....For a friend I’ve known, the outside world seems to be as ephemeral as passing thoughts, though even he tends to suffer and be made self-conscious by it, having to hide away in the booze and weed, sometimes....

Thinking of that Lou Reed line—yeah, I got a million of ‘em—I’d like to have a kid I could pass on to/something more than rage, pain, anger and hurt. I like that, in the sense that the child is father to the man (who wrote that? Emerson?...off to google...is the internet a blessing or curse?) (the porn and kinky chat rooms at times make me think one, but are probably proof of the other) (of course, what comes up first, in the first three or four hits, no less, is that fucking Blood, Sweat and Tears album, but then...Wordsworth, the Prelude):

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Having something to do with holding on to something, inside, that is deeper than the rage, pain, etc. (though he doesn’t refer to those. Then, Wordsworth wouldn’t. He and Lou Reed probably wouldn’t have hung out much, even if given the chance)—a sense of wonder and beauty, here: the very definition of Romanticism, I guess. It’s also what both Stephen Batchelor and M. C. Richards talk about, though: creativity coming from that inner, still, solid place, rather than an escape from this world, a way to create and flower within it.

And, certainly that Lou Reed/Wm. Wordsworth notion relates to the experience I described before, half a year or so after first starting yoga, seeing a then-three year old niece playing twister at the cousins’ place, and realizing that she was, without knowing it, doing a perfect downward facing dog—that’s what you can do, I thought, without thirty-plus years of tension built up in your body. And yet: can it all be released?

...and later, watching Hiroshima Mon Amour—the meeting of parallel lines of personal and political, or the fact that they were never separate in the first place, along with the strange Japanese love of neon—like my just-post 9/11 experience, in the midst of my last great depression, when I was actually, for a moment, there at a good friend’s house, with another friend puking in the bathroom, feeling like here we were all together in it, all in ruins like those buildings: but then, the next day, there I was, and everyone else was back to work, back to normal, and I couldn’t even give blood because there were too many others who wanted to, and they got there ahead of me, so there I was, standing in front of the fucking hospital, thinking maybe I should commit myself, but instead took a bike ride on the Erie Canal towpath beginning just behind there—and then, riding along, I seemed to have almost a vision of a small towheaded child, deep inside, so like what Eliot described, in Preludes of his own—the notion of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing—almost glowing in strange yellow mind-neon. And there, and then, feeling a connection to that wounded self, still whole and alive, tears flowing as I rode, glad to have sunglasses on especially when passing a couple of students who would’ve been in class with me then if I hadn’t cancelled—probably it would’ve been okay though, because it was, hell, the day after September 11—and I knew then, seeing that wreckage inside, so like the wreckage on all our minds, but far more ephemeral, that I was going to be okay, even if America and the world weren’t....

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....

Letter to A Deep Depression

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
The Gospel of Thomas

How do you think it feels,
and when do you think it stops?
Lou Reed

I’ve read some powerful blog posts about depression recently (I’d give links, but always half-feel like I’m trespassing when I wander onto this stuff, myself...though any of their creators who might be reading this—you know who you are—and who you’re not—are welcome to leave links in the Comments), and was inspired to dig out something I wrote a while ago.

Winston Churchill called depression his black dog. The particular metaphor doesn’t work so well for me—dogs generally make me happy—but I like the general idea, so came up with the unwelcome guest.

(I’ll be funny next time—promise)


Here we are again. Here you are, slinking in the door a week ago, just when I was thinking you were gone for good. No doubt about it, you can still surprise me, particularly when you show up on a sunny spring day, just when things were looking up, just when I'd hoped you might be gone for good. And then, of course, you refuse to leave—by all appearances settling in for a lengthy visit—no matter how politely, or forcefully, I point to the door.

Giving credit where it’s due, you can still hit hard. You can still hit really fucking hard. Jesus Christ, I had no idea you could still hit so hard....

But...let’s face it, you’ve lost your luster. Go ahead and scoff; it’s true. Think of the times we once had, the way you wouldn’t let go, enveloped me, ran my life—hell, you nearly ended it more than once—no cigar, but, giving credit where it’s due, pretty fucking close. Hell, I thought you were my life. For a while, I thought you were fucking everything.

So what happened? Seriously, look at you now: a pale, faded, diminished thing. A soiled scrap of your former glories. Little more than the lingering stench of past unpleasantness.

Sure, you walloped me this morning. And no doubt that wasn’t the end of it—you’ll probably keep me up a good portion of the night, or simply be there, lying so naturally in my bed in the morning. But here I am. Quite calm, in fact, seeing little more significant than a recurring headache, or mosquitoes that keep getting in the house, no resemblance to the seductive menace you once appeared to be. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit I was ever so frightened of you, that I ever let you fuck with me like that.

So what to say at this point? You’re a hell of an inconvenience, but that’s all. And, in time, you’ll be gone, again. And I’ll still be here.