Monthly Archives: July 2007

I mentioned over a week ago in this space that I would write out my dark night of the sacrum in the next posts. Interesting how the commitment has clammed me right up. There is avoidance here, a wish to be able to speak of the thing in the past tense. And there’s also a […]

Today I caught an early kundalini yoga class in time to get to the beach before the heat. I’ve been a little sour lately, if you haven’t had the misfortune of a direct taste; and I carried a seed of skepticism into class although I like the teacher very much. Now really, if you need hocus-pocus to […]

Monday a teacher knelt by my mat and told me that nobody understands. I felt so understood. This teacher has worked with thousands of practitioners over the decades, so if he says the shift in my skeleton is something nobody understands, that’s something. “You can’t even talk about it because nobody understands, I know,” he […]

Allright. Today I’m abstracting 12 law journal articles—on the WTO, labor standards and environmental regulation—for a globalization archive. Very nice to get paid for reading the intimate details of a history I need to know anyway. But: no relief to the suspicion that I’m not fully living these days. These articles are thin if long, […]

The windchimes rustled in practice this morning. They’re soft and deep, and slow. Very Music for Airports in tone. (Their maker must have intended that—it’s too perfect to be coincidental). They probably rustle often, but we don’t always have our window cracked like we did today, and I’m not always aware of sounds besides the background whispers […]

Thanks to those who went in for the what is fashion? Rorschach test the other day. I didn’t give you anything to go on, and you turned up many good and unexpected bits. I have this tendency to seek puzzles and hidden ironies in the things humans do (think Freakonomics, the apotheosis of the academic gimmick), but there’s […]

What is fashion? What is it? Throw me a bone, people. I think I have 75% of the answer worked out, but what interests me is the remaining 25%.

I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works. And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation. Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain… or “causes” of the brain’s effects on the meditator (clearly, the research […]

Visitations from my past, lately. From C, with whom I re-walked the sweaty bloody steps of the Vietnam War, and who later would cook me Sechuan on Fridays before I’d go to wait tables…, who has somehow been reborn as a lover of the downtrodden (sorry man: it shows), and who now is telling me […]

Conspiracy theorist self: Holidays are power-written histories on the palimpsest of social memory—“Christmas” to cover for the solstice and “Easter” for the equinox, “Thanksgiving” to cover for smallpox, and “Memorial Day” for Mayday since the latter is so awfully dangerous. Practical self: Ease up already. None of these “meanings” is inherent. Commemorate what you will. The specifics […]