Ghost Funnels · 6 June 2010
Sirens last night. Wailing down the hill from Main Street, over the traintracks. Not like an ambulance alarm or the screaming fire horn we had out on the Ranch. Instead: relentless, eerie, mixed in over storm-winds and summer rain.
The city-sized whine woke me up with memories of WWII air raids. Straaange.
Feeling ghostly, and staying sleepy to protect a 4:45 wake-up, I took the pulse on Twitter. Tha-thrum, tha-thrum, tha-thrum, tweets bumping down the queue. People all around me if unseen, stepping outside in search of a funnel cloud, ridiculing the giddy TV weatherman, waiting it out in the basement with a bottle of Scotch. I felt them close, cluing me in to this new Midwestern rendition of the natural disaster.
Seriously: a roaring 300-mile-an-hour cloud reaching down to spin select bits right out of existence? They particularly like motor homes, school buses and the Main Streets of tiny suffering prairie towns. There were something like 11 of them last night, from Illinois to Ohio. On the Fugita Scale—the Richter of clouds—there are six stages of storm. The last three are described as such: F4 = homes leveled; F5 = homes blown away; F6 = inconceivable. Anything above 319 mph is an F6.
In the basement, the Editor and I listened to the thunder and rain while Twitter tweeted and a red clot of pixels edged east on wundergrounds’s Doppler. Abruptly the rain stopped. Señor Nonchalant shuddered, Look what just happened to the air.
Everything was flat. I felt dizzy and short of breath. The red pixels blipped over the Old West Side. I felt haunted from all directions in spacetime—buried in the packed dirt basement, pinpointed by god’s hellroaring proboscis, full of false memory that I am fifty and fearless behind blackout curtains in a London basement. As apocalypses go, tornadoes are the most haunted.
Practically speaking, don’t get where the EPA and FEMA are at on this. Sure, I understand the difficulty in guaranteeing the immobility of techtonic plates, but in theory funnels are pluggable. We should be able to manipulate death spirals, not take them lying down. Much less curled up in our dirt-floored basements, asleep next to the washer-dryer on a black Manduka. A species so capable of destruction and denial can’t even plug some funnels. We are not keen.
Speaking of dumb, for a full thirty minutes on Tuesday, I was absorbed into the giant holes in the earth. It started with the new house-eating sinkhole in Guatemala City, photographed from the air with the shadow of a helicopter in its maw and fed through some margin of my RSS. Which led me, wilfing, to Syria, where humans have dug the Mirny diamond mine so deep its winds suck aircraft right inside. Mirny now has its own no-fly zone, like any good field of battle. There’s a mine-hole in Yellowknife so big it has its own airstrip, and a smooth, terrifying glory hole drilled in to the Monticello dam.
When the Editor looked over my shoulder and told me to stop being morbid, I woke up from haunting the holes of earth and aestheticizing its spillways. There is a little bit of mindfulness growing in me, around the internet as an energy-hole. How do I want to use it? For attention, escape, simulated productivity, pseudo-education, the pursuit of unconciousness? I am a happy little cyborg, and regular bits of self-expression and relational play seem very wonderful; but I don’t want to be a tool of received structures that suck the meaning I make in to their revenue spectacle. To live fully, fearlessly within this infrastructure without becoming its drone: it takes a lot of care. Some of you—SB, KK, JD, GB—you give me clues.
…………………………
The summer of viparita chakrasana started on Monday, Memorial Day, at YogaView in Chicago. Rather than yawp and hurl my way through it in a new room, I waited for the easy assist. Perfect beginning. Next day, back home, I made it over on the forearms for the first time. This is in some ways more difficult than taking it straight from the hands, simply because the maneuv has its own original fears which have to be mapped and mined.
But in the full expression, I got to the more precipitous edge and then observed it. This is a pattern. The rare occasion a mental block arises, I will instinctively sit with it rather than blasting right through. Backbend-standup was the same… I contemplated it a little playfully, edging closer and closer, until it couldn’t not happen. No hurling of limbs or other derring-do.
It’s as if a part of me enjoys the leverage to delve back inside the emotions that well up at the block, using it as some kind of fulcrum to pry open the unconscious. Inching in, using the body itself to push ghosts out in to the open, allowing the positive emotions of interest and commitment to buffer the negative energies of fear, boredom and distraction. That seems to be the way for now. But still, the block feels solid and frustrating; and I don’t understand it.
I guess it’s not coincidental that tomorrow I’m finally making good on an old plan to get my head shrunk in this town. UM is the one big-school bastion of traditional psychoanalysis. Relationships with your parents, shoring up the subconscious, getting a handle on your projections: you got a problem with that?
UM therapy is boldly old school, from before the rise of this results-based, ad-hoc CBT stuff. I guess Ashtanga and Vipassana have made me a sucker for clear method. No need to personalize my processing systems, bending them to accommodate my ego.
Some of my friends here talk about therapy like we’re all in some Philip Roth novel. I wonder how much I’ll want to say.
But back to the bending. It’s not just emotion and unconscious muck that pools up against the block at the very end of practice. There’s also enormous energy, which tries to redirect out my mouth. Aarrrrrrgh!
I’d forgotten this principle of intermediate practice: as the backbend sequence grows complex, you have to learn to preserve a bead of energy. You suck the energy-bead through the middle of the series, guarding it in the pit of your belly, or the belly of the muscles—I don’t know which. Then for the tremendous demands of backbending, and later handstanding, you give it your most clean, refined fuel. How else is the crazy stuff going to come together?
In ut pluthihi, you burn off the fumes.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, having a body
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History of tornadoes in Michigan
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 03:12 PM · #
Monticello glory hole
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 03:15 PM · #
Interesting to delve back in; my own version of that is that whatever emotional block it is, whatever chewy something it is, will come back around. If I blast through it here, I’ll no doubt come across it again later over there. Perhaps that’s mistaken….same river twice, and so forth….
Posted by: patrick · Jun 6, 07:39 PM · #
there is sth WWII to twitter, like a strange radio signal, this image of you and the Editor sitting and basement, checking out tweets, made me think of Depardieu and Deneuve in Truffaut’s Le Dernier Metro.
The Monticello glory hole photo is kind of asking me to jump in, in an Alice in wonderland kind of way, maybe a parallel universe awaits on the other side, one with purple swans and all. Or no purple swans, but clean and happy pelicans? Huh, yeay to having one’s head shrunk.
Posted by: fatou2002 · Jun 6, 10:21 PM · #
I am excited about the head shrinkage.
Posted by: RE · Jun 7, 11:10 AM · #
Me too, bring on the head shrinkage! LOL
Scary stuff that tornado. Is that a very frequent occurrence? I like that you stayed huddled up on your manduka.
Posted by: susananda · Jun 7, 10:40 PM · #
I’m homesick for tornados now? What magic is this, Owl? Please write a book. You’re too good not to.
bises xxxooo
Posted by: joy · Jun 8, 08:04 AM · #
The siren went off again this afternoon. Day clear as a bell, but I’m green, so I didn’t realize it was a test until I was down in the basement with my lunch, consulting the internet. Twitter was still reactives – a few little shudders – but turns out it was only the monthly siren-test.
There were five deaths from the Saturday storms. In Ohio, a father went upstairs to get a flashlight a moment before the twister hurled both his home and his body out of existence. The mom and children huddled down and lived.
Patrick, I’m not sure if I’m just being overcautious or practicing intelligently. Many of us would just manifest some extreme tapas—or desire—and go for it. I’m sort of amused that I choose every day to instead just chip away at it… at least for now. We’ll see. :)
Fatou, I just put the Truffaut in my Netflix queue.
The head shrinkage is pretty delightful. Pretty strong mutual resonance this week—strange to have the patient/therapist relationship be a subject of inquiry from the get-go. Apparently at this point “they” think that traditional analysis is too difficult for most individuals, and only useful for people who are fairly stable and resilient. Of course, I’ve always stereotyped analysis as a tool developed for neurotics! (And this is why I hesitate to share that I’m doing it… not because I don’t want to look vulnerable but because part of me doesn’t want to look especially crazy.) But at this point, it seems that professionals regard analysis as specialized work for already sane people. For some reason, I find this very funny.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 11:54 AM · #
Joy… uhhh!!! I want to be writing creatively. It’s hard to keep it in the box of a couple of hours at the end of the week. I dunno.
Sort of Random: Susan Piver writes well and gives interesting talks on contemplative writing (she spoke to Buddhist Geeks last year).
This reads like Natalie Goldberg inflected with the Vajrayana. I feel skeptical, reading it, but this is because I need more specifics. It seems a bit optimistic. :) But in a way, the methodology she suggests may most like the way dharma talks are prepared: resting in to spontaneity, contacting some theme, grounding in the body and staying in touch with the group. Maybe.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 12:00 PM · #
just peeked at the Susan Piver site, looks amazing, thank you for the link
the story of the father being blown away by twister is terrifying. I never thought of these tornados as real, since I only saw them in the movies, but that sentence about this family, it made it so real, oh, I am so sorry for them all
Posted by: fatou2002 · Jun 8, 12:14 PM · #
Head shrinkage for the sane? Are you mad! Mwhahaha!
Not sure what style you are doing, but I get that really its all an indirect form of coaching, and like all true disciples of their own desire, it takes just that same capacity of energy to stay present for who knows what when you hit your own psyche’s backbend(s), and you can do those until you have the strength built up.
Shrinkage, storms and backbends. Sounds like the Tower card…, dreams, what of them?
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 8, 03:20 PM · #
that’s:
and you can’t do those…
you can do backbends, I cannot, somehow that got in there! :)
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 8, 03:38 PM · #
Huh, I’ve only listened to a handful of BG podcasts but I did hear that one. She was talking about retreat, wasn’t she? I should go back and listen.
xo
Posted by: joy · Jun 9, 10:53 PM · #
“analysis as specialized work for already sane people”
Exactly what Twyman said to me. The idea being that the analysand must be able to order experience and articulate it (at least reasonably) well. Not necessarily hallmarks of the deeply disturbed.
Posted by: karen · Jun 10, 11:25 AM · #
I was hoping Twyman concurred.
Joy, that’s right. :) The last two BGs with Trudy Goodman were brilliant, especially the end of the second one, in which she discusses the way that her therapy patients regularly had major openings in the week after she (Goodman) returned from Zen Sesshin.
Fatou, it’s so odd how little circulation the horror stories of tornado deaths get. Why? Distance from the news-net of the coasts? Pure outright, freak horror? There was also a family last week who narrowly survived, running in to their stairwell just seconds before their entire house exploded, leaving the intact central stairwell standing in the middle of dust.
Apparently that’s what happens – the roof flies off as the twister approaches and then BANG the whole house blows to bits.
Dreamlife has been all over the place. Too much going on for me to keep track. Each morning I just zero in on the dream that resonates the most, spend some time building it back out in conscious-time and asking what it might have to offer. Two nights ago, the dominant dream was that I was lost in the French Quarter in New Orleans (on the radar because of the spill and because Sonya’s there at the moment). An old boyfriend was there (someone I knew in Alaska, where there was also an oil spill) with his very wizened, crabby elders. And there was a big meeting of spiritual psychotherapists in the town. They were all deciding to move to New Orleans, with the result that all the global resources of insight in to the psyche would be focused in that place. Just as the accidentally-released muck washes ashore.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 12:03 PM · #
BTW, have I mentioned the TCGS lately? Oh yeah, I did, but here I’m mentioning it again.
In his brilliant, escapist, neurotic, adorable way, he simply effing nails it on why you don’t freaking skip practice. Implicit is the reasoning for why “practicing” when injured doesn’t mean pushing in to any tweak or injury— it means cultivating energy and awareness. Also people are happy playing with their egoes instead, 1-2-3, and TMT. Grain of salt and all that. Boom.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 12:10 PM · #
I like the head shrinkage.
Posted by: LIAshtangini · Jun 10, 12:26 PM · #
Methinks the dream portents well. The psyche likes the therapist. The whole clean up crew is going to the liminal space between the conscious and the unconscious to help clean up the muck coming iup from the depths.
So, as we say in Scottish, thats a fucking great dream!
As per Tabby. I have practiced every day since my lesson on Saturday because I know I cannot stop. As Shinzen would say, the words ‘um not today’ are TALK. I feel borg-like now, I am happy to be folded into the collective. I am awash in pleasantness. :)
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 10, 03:51 PM · #
Right on.
About the dream. I’m tempted to say that sometimes an oil spill is just an oil spill. But yes, it’s also true that the psyche likes the therapist.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 11, 05:22 AM · #
Sinkholes near you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X0D1B1QGYA
http://www.physorg.com/news160645491.html
Posted by: Jamie · Jun 11, 10:07 AM · #
!!!
The purple algae is beautiful and mysterious.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 11, 04:15 PM · #
:)
You’d like my friend Andrea, she says that to her analyst all the time! The concept of the symbolism of dreams is usually around ‘what does this mean to YOU symbolically’. Oil for example could mean energy, vast loads of it, coming through from the Gulf (the unconscious).
Then again, it could just be just oil.
I am tempted to disagree, but I think you know why.
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 11, 05:19 PM · #