Jacks-O'-Lantern · 31 October 2011

We went to Detroit again for Devil’s Night, leaving before the fires appeared in derelict houses and brown-skinned immigrants and paleface hipsters linked arms to defend their neighborhoods. Sunday morning after so-called church, I drove east in to the city, listening to the soul station. Detroit 97.9 JLB: pronounced J, O, B.

The sky was the thin October celestine that transmits so much sound and sight. When the sky is like this, my Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast selves expect snow-dusted peaks in the distance. So my imagination projected Mount Hood, flickering up in the distance on top of Windsor, Ontario. I drove toward the mountain, through downtown, past the redundant bridge and tunnel to Canada, and past the 73-story GM Renaissance Building, which I hadn’t visited since the day they declared bankruptcy in 2009.

The day I rented the benignly haunted 1910 that’s now home. I’m sitting here now, under its huge schoolhouse globes, while people I know carry groceries down Spring Street. A cargo train is rattling the windows. The cats—Zelda Spoonbender and Lynxx Moonpie (a.k.a Falcour, or Pumpkinhead)—are sleeping in an open-hipped jumble on a chair. Zelda is a white witch, but Moonpie is a simple Halloween cat: in addition to the pumpkin-head, she has the black triangle nose of a scarecrow, and a habit of staring at candle-flames for hours.

Yesterday, the soul station took me as far as Detroit’s fantasy island: a half-abandoned, Victorian retreat in the River Rouge, once done-up for 19^th century family weekends. Belle Isle. There are crumbling Coney Island pavilions and a botanical garden. My phone thinks it is someplace else: every time I crossed an invisible line that bisects the baseball fields, it would chime with an SMS warning about the high price of roaming charges in foreign countries.

We joined recent-immigrant families, drunken Marxist urban planners, and Wayne State Lit profs for softball and hot dogs (or, alternatively, Oreo cookie dirt cake with plastic spiders and ghosts). One of the Marxists had just bought a house on the internet for 3,500 dollars. Empty freighters from Montreal limned the water-line between us and Ontario, sounding the Great Lakes Salute. A union plasterer and father of four talked to me about his mother-in-law, who speaks the ancient-otherworldy language of Nahuatl. When she refuses to talk the oppressors’ language (Spanish), he shakes his head and ups the ante: Whatever, he tells her.

Later, Hiram Bingham’s biographer told me about a bounty of Inca skulls he’s just found in a back room of the Smithsonian. They have an extra bone – the Inca Bone – a small, triangular puzzle piece at the peak of shushumna. The stories of ancient brain surgery are true: hundreds of these erstwhile heads had a bone-piece cut out by human hands. There is regeneration at the bone-edges: these Incas went on living after their skulls were opened.

Between games, I walked through overgrown paths in the island’s interior with an exquisite ashtangi who reports for NPR from all over the Latin American political labyrinth. She said Belle Isle felt like Jurassic Park; and she told me about The World Without Us, a book about what it’ll look like when nature re-takes the cities. For example, sea water will plug the New York subways as soon as the pumps shut off, and then the Atlantic will rise into the streets. With that image hanging, we ducked through a hole in a previously electrified fence and through a back door of the abandoned Belle Isle Zoo. The old tiger house is a cell block. Each room has a metal funnel in the center and a fake tree for scratching. From inside, we climbed a service ladder to an elevated walkway once used to view the cats’ fenced-in yards. We took this skywalk to a rotting pavilion, where trees were growing through floorboards and what was left of the broken glass had ground down to pebbles and dust. The ashtangi/foreign correspondent talked about how some days on the mat now her concentration surprises her, just whooshing in to suck all awareness into the breath body. Without effort, or self-congratulation. I said maybe when nature runs its course, entropy is not the only way. Maybe awareness can trip into a habit of self-organization.

Now, before attending the same early-exited Halloween party as last year, I will break the rule on advanced practice and massage. No really: it makes little sense to let someone massage your body when you are doing deep asana practice. My teachers told me to work out my own tension, same as they do. I never thought to do otherwise. But things in the body feel different with the introduction of 28.5 hours of physical instruction per week. A sweet little demon appears under the right jawbone and crouches down, the way it used to do behind the left ilium and then the right scapula. Over the last ten years, ashtanga has taken over this territory from the ground up, starving the cave-dweller and pushing what’s left of her to the edge. Now, she’s hanging on to the chin-jutting sternocleidomastoid, a muscle that sounds like a dinosaur and feels as sinewy.

So this afternoon, I’ll see someone who works the head as if it’s a body part. She approaches from inside, with gloves on. She thumbs my occiput between the vocal chords, opens up the sinuses by stretching the soft palate. Afterwards, my tongue rests on the salty part of my throat, above the top of the mouth. Sometimes it tastes like battery acid; sometimes like sex. The halo-line Kali would trace on my head just before she lopped off the top of my skull to make a drinking goblet: ecstasy bubbles fizz out of this fissure. My head feels like a space-travel capsule cracking a door that’s spent decades under pressure-lock.

Halloween tonight. I wonder if the cats will freak out. This night opens a portal for me every year: three liminal days for hunting demons and winking at hungry ghosts; and then it’s my birthday on the other side. This year, puzzle skullpieces are falling everywhere, and there are dis-em-brained pumpkins on the porches all over the Upper West Side. Last year, we had one cut out with the triangle of an Illuminati eye. This year, the triangle is kind of a peace sign.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , having a body

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1. Each morning, I exit on Bingham on my way to practice. The
   Hiram Bingham of Machu Picchu is the grandson of Hiram Bingham, the first missionary to the Hawaiian Islands. He built the church that still stands downtown and converted the ruling ali’i to protestant Christianity (some later monarchs preferred the Catholicism of French missionaries, but the American Protestants won out in the end as the sons of the missionaries became powerful landowners). A bit too involved in politics, he was recalled to the U.S., but his son returned to Hawaii as a missionary. And their influence is reflected in the street names…

   Posted by: Wombat · Oct 31, 10:36 PM · #

2. I read the first sentence of the second paragraph about the sky and I started melting. Every time I read you blog, for a moment I think like a writer, thinking of ways to describe the the things, places, that I see around me. Then the rat race takes over again. But, for a moment, I think about how it feels it to be you and have these words popping up in your mind and on your screen. Anyway, pleasure reading you, as always. Big hugs from cold Africa.

   Posted by: fatou2002 · Nov 1, 03:30 AM · #

3. Love esoteric shit :)

   Happy soon to be Birthday!

   Posted by: Annie Simone · Nov 1, 04:59 AM · #

4. :-) Faotou, Annie.

   Wow, the streets are still named for HB. Wombat, here is a review of my friend’s book. If you like the genre at all, you’d enjoy it.

   Belle Isle Zoo.

   Skullcups.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 1, 05:44 AM · #

5. I love being transported to all these places you visit. Much appreciated. Maybe the tension that has been traveling your body is about to bid you goodbye? If its in the head, it is running out of territory. Wishing you loveliness on your birthday.

   Posted by: Maria · Nov 1, 06:01 AM · #

6. Maybe. But when the weird tension waves and flashbacks of the original car wreck started last fall, that’s what I thought too.

   I’ve been interested to talk with Qi Gong practitioners lately. The do a lot of energetic clearing of the body, depositing the tension or stagnant energy in buckets of salt water, or “giving it back to mother earth” to compost. I’ve played around with this with them, and am a bit rueful to say it makes sense to me. But this little demon is denser than the little energy flickers I can feel with my hands. I’m interested in taking responsibility for her and actually digesting her… composting her myself rather than tossing her out to be a lonely, wandering, hungry ghost. Ok… too much muscle-knot anthropomorphism. But still. I’m interested in allowing the tension-bolus to transfigure into air, in addition to inviting it to leave.

   This reminds me, oh my god, pardon the histrionics in minute 11, because I’d deem this the most original and true 12:58 I’ve ever seen on Ted.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 1, 07:49 AM · #

7. Wow.

   Posted by: LIAshtangini · Nov 2, 05:39 AM · #

8. Dear Owl, This reflects and refracts in such ways as I can not even scan their surface, really. That said, I’m sharing your TED link with two womenfolk who are battling cancer. Bev is an uberwarrior and runs a FB page about her experiences, gathering of knowledge, treatment choices, and experiences…. The other, Trish, is a family-based rebel angel who is partying, travelling and opening her heart to any miracle sent her way.

   Keep up the good work; and yes, it’s okay to receive bodywork, as long as you are okay with it.

   Sending loving light.

   Posted by: katherine · Nov 15, 11:22 AM · #

9. Katherine :) :) :-)

   Hi Dear.

   For the record, though not that it matters, I am not in agreement on the bodywork piece. I’m not basing my position on my preferences or okayness in emotional bodymind – intermediate series usually makes the nervous system hypersensitive but then leaves a person fully grounded and re-integrated by the time she’s fully understood it. That’s why emotional/nervous system sensitivity isn’t the thing I’m considering.

   It’s more that four days a week of advanced, for several years, is such a strong program, and so transformative, that I and others like me don’t want amateurs (i.e., anyone who is not a senior ashtanga teacher who has done this for a long time herself) messing with it energetically or physically. The program is teaching us to learn to own and very gradually work with our own tension and tweaks. There’s no way that I’m going to outsource that and miss the learning process. (Admittedly, I’d have said the same about primary or intermediate at the time too; and I think that this is part of why I got to understand them.) Meantime, even the most subtle, experienced and non-egoic bodyworker’s idea of what I “need” isn’t going to come with an understanding of this practice.

   In short, here’s the thing. After 4/5 years, I don’t understand this practice yet. I do understand primary and intermediate, enough to know that this program is very different. So for now I’m remaining agnostic and letting it work on me. Just my take on it, though. As someone who doesn’t really understand the series yet, I don’t pretend to have a coherent view. :-)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 19, 06:10 PM · #

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