Holy Bones, Part II: Reading the Entrails · 31 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 hesitancy to “own” the thing. I don’t want to identify with it—and that’s for the better—but I also have a fear of granting that it is inside of me. That, in a sense, it owns me.

Ooh but we can be superstitious about our pains. I am looking for a way to face this that isn’t in the form of complaining but that also doesn’t dive hopelessly into pain-interpretation. Because it is possible to read the pain patterns with all the misplaced sincerity that a shaman reads chicken entrails.

I’m all for interpreting my entrails, but not as if they contain a big scary-serious message from the beyond. And on the other hand, I’m all for expressing that I’ve been stuck, but have a childhood-engrained disgust for whining that sometimes gets my tongue.

Meantime, groping about for honesty, here I am, talking about this “injury,” this “shifting,” this dark night of more than just the sacrum, as a “thing.” Interesting.

We are always creating objects. What’s up with that?

It’s ok on some level—completely ok. We objectify as part of the process of transcendence. It’s only nasty to objectify the wrong stuff, like the beings we’d do better to treat as subjects. But yes, we do turn processes into things. Sociology and Buddhism both criticize this rigorously: Sociology in the critique of reification (which grew out of Marx’s “fetishization of commodities,” through the Frankfurt school’s cultural nonsense and into the critical work of my hero Bourdieu), and Buddhism in the injunction not to treat feelings or processes as if they were “solid” when truly they are fleeting. Both disciplines are always on the watch for what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is part of why I feel at home (albeit on the margins of) both.

But sometimes there’s a place for concreteness. I’ve been excited this week about Hegel, the original owl-of-minerva curmudgeon who I never really understood. His theory of history, which I’m now learning is uncannily adaptable outside of western philosophy, is the “phenomenology of spirit.” Shit. What? Long story.

Basically, it’s something about how in the process of growing up and out—in the process of becoming our ultimate essence—we step up out of (Wilberspeak: “transcend and include”) certain stages. And then turn back and regard those stages as somewhat concrete, done-over-and-wrapped-up, elements of ourselves.

Maybe this is obtuse. But I’m caught in a liminal space here, between being wordlessly inside a process and being able to stand outside it and mark off its boundaries in words.

I will keep trying… even as I keep falling on my face in UKK-C. (A chicken pose, no less....) I plan on making it there eventually.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Comment

1. Oooh phenemenology. A favorite area of Sartre too presented in “being and nothingness”. What are we really seeing and experiencing, what does it all signify and why? The “pour soi” and “En soi” and Hegels remarkably similar “Fur sich” and “sich” are interesting ideas and I think apply directly to the practice. But Sartre did believe as opposed to Hegel that “negativity is the structure of being mind”. It’s interesting to ask yourself those questions with the poses in mind. The poses are something and nothing. Sartre says “cessary that the unity of this being include its own nothingness as the nihilation of identity.” Are we really conscious during our practice and can we be? Maybe this comes back to being in the present.

   Enough of my Sartre banter!

   Posted by: CJ · Jul 31, 06:01 PM · #

2. so, um, where is the talk of your sacrum?

   Posted by: cranky housefrau · Jul 31, 07:43 PM · #

3. I’ll have to think more about the in itself/ for itself thing in relationship to embodied practice. That’s good.

   I’ve often seen Sartre’s “nothingness” as about physical death, and his entire project one to cheat death through making the self bigger and “immortal” through its creations. But this makes me think of it as less about the self-creation “project” and more about just a recognition of emptiness. Emptiness and form… so uncanny (Heidegger’s word) how these guys resonate with ideas of the east.

   Anyway, ahem! Curtailing the Sartre banter now.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 1, 04:21 AM · #

4. Uh oh. Been tagged repeatedly with the 4 Things Meme, and do not one to be the one who drops it. Here are my answers:

   Four jobs I’ve had
   Survey design consultant
   Journalist – Politics and Culture beats
   Server at a Brewery/Winery Restaurant
   Library Circulation Desk Clerk

   Four movies I can watch repeatedly
   Touch of Evil
   Star Wars
   Chinatown
   Hero

   Four places I’ve lived
   Managua, Nicaragua
   San Pedro, Costa Rica
   Washington DC
   Dillingham, AK

   Four TV shows I love
   N/A

   Four places I’ve vacationed
   Angkor Wat
   Barcelona
   Nova Scotia
   St. Thomas

   Four of my favorite dishes
   Gala apple slices with almond butter
   Spinach salad with arame, hijiki and avocado
   Baked acorn squash with cinnamon
   Fresh Willamette Valley raspberries, roadside mid-bikeride

   Four sites I visit daily
   nyt
   jstor.org
   crookedtimber.org
   social sciences citation index

   Four places I would rather be now
   Meditation retreat anywhere
   On a fjord, with a picnic blanket and a loved one
   Hiding away in a sleek superhigh Belltown penthouse with a baby grand and a laptop
   Reykjavik?

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 1, 04:34 AM · #

5. It’s clear you’re not a whiner. But still, there are things that need to be said.

   Objectification. One of my big sins, for sure. It seems to ride the coattails of my obsession with analyzing everything. Which is one of the reasons I love Buddhism so much. Just be, just be, just be. . . .

   Thanks for being a sport. :) (Orson Welles was a great really bad guy in Touch of Evil. Speaking of Welles, I loved The Third Man, too.)

   Posted by: gartenfische · Aug 1, 07:03 AM · #

6. You’re definitely building some mystique around this sacrum thing. Are we to surmise from the vagueness that it’s a place you’d really prefer not to go?

   Posted by: Carl · Aug 1, 08:28 AM · #

7. Sorry for the mystique. But… the whole pelvic bowl is a garden of delights and surprises, you know. At least for a girl.

   It’s true that I prefer not to go there in writing. Thus, I am going there. This was just my running start that face-planted right off the board, like my urdhva kukkutasana C (which is panfully bad right now—my nose was actually sore on its bumpy little bridge today).

   Continental philosophy as red herring. A common side-track in my experience.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 1, 10:37 AM · #

8. ...pelvic bowl of delights and surprises…

   I love it! I’ll remember this one for later use.

   Posted by: Carl · Aug 2, 04:19 AM · #

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