SLIV: Scylla and Charybdis · 25 May 2008

How do we resolve the conflict between shapeliness, or control, and our sense that we are never entirely in control, in that we can never entirely close the gap between the work we envision and the work we create? Hoagland writes that “control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity.” He writes in praise of unsubordinations against the dominance of “repression as a useful agent in creative shaping.” The call is not to let anything go, but to allow for passionate excess, and the irrational… Do we admire the Navajo basket, not only beautifully designed but also so tightly woven that it can hold water? Or do we prefer nonfunctional pottery, the howls of the Beats, the delirium of Dada, the splatters of Pollock? Do we have to choose? (A glance toward the dance floor: The Talking Heads sand “Stop Making Sense” to a perfectly rhythmic beat.) Can’t we admire… Flaubert’s meticulously considered Madame Bovary and mark Twain’s uncivilized Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… the wilde-eyed riffs of Moby-Dick and the canny constructions of Borges? We can, and will—so long as, whatever its temperament, every map, every story or poem, persuades us of its purpose and justifies its methods.

-Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination, p. 21

Around here, allowing for vices, letting the little irrationalities have their space: I am finding a kind of sanity in fennel seeds, chewed slowly the way an old man chews his pipe. And an herbal coffee substitute called Teeccino, discovered on Friday at an environmentalist conference where the very fine catered lunch did not have a vegetarian option (they eventually brought me a plate of steamed broccoli) but did feature un-coffee.

Dissertation today. I will not see what the rest of you did yesterday—the film about the anthropology professor whose off-campus, esoteric adventures do wonders for his sex appeal. But after I crashed yesterday there was this wonderful old BBC program; and tonight I hope to get to Steve Dwelley’s latest, which will doubtless be a subtler and more true discussion of what I’ve been trying to say about the letting go, and the training, of the mind during yoga.

Letting go is: deferential; humble, intuitive.

Training is: intense, expert, intentional.

So: intuition and intention. Both in meditation practice; and in writing practice. Or:

Will without surrender is a tight-ass; surrender without will is a wuss.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , spirituality

Comment

1. Letting go is inherently right brained, while the training is all left brain.
   In ashtanga, we are intensely over training, constantly pushing the brain and the body so that we can finally pass all that left braininess and relax into stillness and
   surrender.

   Good luck on the dissertation:)

   Posted by: Susan · May 25, 10:41 AM · #

2. I didn’t know Berger’s brilliant and imperfect book was also a TV program; marvelous!

   Not to nit-pick, but Dada needs to be appreciated in historical context, in order for its non-sense to make, if you will, “sense.” It very much belongs to when, where and how it happened, and it is coherent within that context, down to the last “fmsbw” (go go google!).

   ps, I just taught twelve hours worth of Dada in the past two weeks, and the lion expert in me is ready to go.

   Posted by: patrick · May 25, 10:50 AM · #

3. Susan: nice. You get a pass to hate ashtanga because you understand it so essentially. Maybe what you hate isn’t so much the system as the widespread non-understanding of it.

   Or maybe that gives ashtanga too much credit. Heh.

   Posted by: (0v0) · May 25, 11:12 AM · #

4. Patrick! I was wondering what gift you might give me here for referencing Berger and keeping the Dada and Pollock in the Turchi excerpt.

   I do not appreciate Pollock or the Beats, so maybe I need even more cultural context. But does context change the fact that they’re spoiled little brats? The more I learn about their actual lives (rather than their more general milieux), the brattier they look.

   The Berger programme is imperfect, but that’s Frankfurt School for you: all the more engaging and fun for its shortcomings. It’s wonderfully put together and Berger is himself the tousled, almost but not quite sexy academic. We watched all four episodes on youtube and enjoyed.

   Episode Two features this amazing, if oddly abstract, interview with several women about the female body in art. MUST-SEE MATERIAL for any woman who feels playing passive is necessary to getting a man. And for any man who suspects he still, for all his self-awareness and efforts to open his heart, might relate to women as objects more than he relates to them as equals.

   Posted by: (0v0) · May 25, 11:21 AM · #

5. Won’t argue the brat thing with you re: Beats and Pollock. I’m not a fan of the Beats’ work — but Pollock? Really? Have you seen any in person? I quite love them, and in much the same way I love Carl Andre’s work. Speaking of brats.

   Posted by: karen · May 25, 12:14 PM · #

6. Karen is right – when you see a Pollock hung on a wall, it practically vibrates and hums with life and energy. He was the real deal.

   Posted by: RE · May 25, 12:18 PM · #

7. (ahem) excuse me while I put on my art historical hat, here. (turns around and dons costume)

   One, you can’t mess with Dada. Dada rocks the planet. Ok, more specifically: it’s a cultural, political and aesthetic platform which claimed that it could/wanted to undo or at least broadly attack West European history from the Enlightenment to World War One. WWI was understood as the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment, so the “anti-program” of Dada is anti-war and anti-the-culture-from-which-the-war came. Brattiness and childishness were an essential part of undoing, disrespecting, and otherwise attacking that culture.

   Pollock: apparently put paint not randomly, but where he wanted it. The go-to story is an exhibition where he hit a doorknob with a spot of paint, from fifty feet. Some critic was talking about his work as a “chance operation,” and Pollock, incensed, said, “There’s your fucking chance operation,” and forced everyone to handle the painted doorknob on the way out. Sure, he was into the sauce, and he likely had a real live existential crisis and made bad choices, but that’s not sheer brattiness any more than Rimbaud and Verlaine’s three-day benders, scandalizing the countryside farmers, was sheer brattiness. We have poems like “Vowels” and the legendary “Season in Hell” because of that brattiness.

   Beats: Kerouac’s periodic return to his mother after bouts of travel and booze does have a brat flavor to it, but have a read of Desolation Angels, when you can almost see him deciding to take a “line of flight” into the deep. He might have chosen unwisely and wound up a supporter of the NRA, but a line of flight is a line of flight. See Rimbaud, above.

   Beats II: William Burroughs’ Dada-like experiments, the “cut-up method” specifically, are seminal sixties formal play, not unrelated to those of Fluxus and my buddies the Situationist International. Sure, Burroughs has the emotional depth of your average frilled lizard, but postmodern literature WOULD NOT EXIST without him (take THAT, Don Delillo). If he’s a brat, he’s a damn important one. See also the brilliantly trancey film he made with Brion Gysin, “Cut-ups” (www.ubu.com).

   Many of the avant-gardists from Europe in the 20s came from bratty upbringings, and were technically bourgeois, or else richly sponsored (Dali, anyone?); hell that was the whole case that the Soviets made in refusing the Surrealists party membership. The Beats in large part inherit this (add some Zen books to your translation of Rimbaud and you get Kerouac, in some ways). To dismiss bratitude is, however, to set up a weird and untenable dichotomy between “real” artists and “fake” artists, and based solely on fame, who wants to call Dali, who was sponsored by a British patron all through the 30s, a “fake” simply because he had some good fortune and/or knew how to play it?

   Posted by: patrick · May 25, 12:45 PM · #

8. If you watch the Berger film, he intimates that appreciations like these ones of Pollock are the beginning of mystification! It’s great!

   Yet standing before Pollock’s canvasses, as I did on Thanksgiving 06 at the Baldessari Surrealism spectacle, I do the same thing. It’s so transfixing! His work is wonderful. It does vibrate. From here, though, when I think of Pollock I envision Ed Harris. Harris is, to me and my context, the artist who says more and thus the artist who has (slightly) greater power to tell what those paintings are about.

   Same with what the beats mean to me—context conditions my appreciation. Kerouac, and Sal Paradise, view women as pure objects, do not think women can transform or create, and use women to do all worldly work (both domestic and wage work) so they can do otherwise. For me, that is not inspiring on any level. It is oppressive, and all the more haneous because presented by a movement that pretends to be—before all else—jumping out of its self-limiting social roles. What that is to my context: a message even worse, even stupider, than the Christian form of sex-based repression. At least the Christians don’t pretend to be liberated. It is generous of me to curtail my write-off of Kerouac to “spoiled brat.” If they are indeed the avant-garde that they claimed to be, I will have to come up with a meaner term of abuse… one that doesn’t take the first tack of socio-economic status but attacks the artists as people. That can be not very nice (as is the way Harris “makes it personal” with Pollock) and also a kind of personal compliment that makes them enduringly important. Since I actually don’t care about the Beats, I stick to writing them off as products of their social structure. And look for creativity in places that have more consciousness of self and other and social life, more love, more freedom.

   Posted by: (0v0) · May 25, 01:57 PM · #

9. Ah, well if you had come out and said “their misogyny ticks me off,” I would have had to nod and go on my way. This sin colors the Beats pretty thoroughly, from Kerouac through Burroughs to Casady and so on. Barbara Ehrenreich does make some moves toward seeing the Beats as a rebel masculinity in her book Hearts of Men, but a rebel masculinity doesn’t necessarily recoup misogyny (Hi, Mr. Durden!).

   Posted by: patrick · May 25, 02:23 PM · #

10. Yeah, I’ll grant that socio-economic critique is often a little too easy. Sadly, the correlation between starvation and art seems awfully tenuous: a little money and free time can enable great things.

    Posted by: (0v0) · May 25, 03:16 PM · #

11. Hi (0v0)
    Do fennel seeds leave you a pleasant lingering taste, such as cinnamon would? An environmental conference without vegetarian food? How ungreen. I had to read Steve Dwelley’s a couple of times to understand the message about yoga mind. I certainly felt yoga mind today at practice. My practice was so intense there was no room for thought in my brain. I suppose that is right brained.
    Cheers,
    Arturo

    Posted by: arturo · May 25, 07:22 PM · #

12. Owl, nice. I think you are right, it is mainly the overall misunderstanding of yoga in general(not specifically ashtanga)that makes my skin crawl.

    Pollock though, he makes my skin vibrate.
    VIBRATE. His paintings make my whole body vibrate actually…have you seen one in person?

    Posted by: Susan · May 26, 08:08 AM · #

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