Soil Samples · 12 December 2009
Deluge continues. It’s fine. It’s pouring on the pyramidal skylights. A mad crow attacked one of those windows on the new moon last month, so a bit of the deluge is dropping on to the floor. Down at the Masonic Temple, where we’ll meet for dance and I’m worried there will be some departure ritual (dance people express fuckin’ everything), it’ll be damp and grey. I’m relieved.
Dance is all ponderous when there's a little weather. Rain gets in the way of the stimulus-response reflexes on the floor, slowing and quieting us down. At the end when I leave, we’ll let the weather take responsibility for setting the tone. Half these people make films and the other half are healers: they experience themselves as part of a mise-en-scene and don’t labor—like sociologists and ashtangis—under the illusion that they are little worlds unto themselves. If the rain holds, they’ll send me out easy. Still I’ll go in my black hooded coat and park near the exit. People project some heavy weirdness on to ones who leave – no need to overplay a part.
Honestly… I’ll miss that scene more than the others. Dance isn’t a discipline, like everything else in my life. It’s catharsis. And it’s completely absorbing, so that you forget the problem of existence without even trying. Which I why it’s boring to discuss.
But it occurs to me—as I consider some tocks on the hard, sloped Orange County beaches, where I’ll spend the day afternoon with college friends—that dance is what opens my body most. Not ashtanga – though that is where the measure is taken. There has been another layer of letting go the past year, along the whole length of the spine. There are god knows how many layers that asana cannot touch: dance just goes the next level deeper.
So does a trip to Mysore, even if that zone is on the surface nothing but summer camp for the rich and sinewy. And so does loss, some times. This has been such a loser of a year. The job market crushed last September and my career path thrown in to confusion. My adviser dying on his motorcycle in January. I started the year listening to this achingly beautiful record called The Letting Go, but then the world around me started playing the same thing more dramatically and I put the CD away.
Cleaned out my desk last night. Campus deserted at the close of finals week except for a few clutches of high-energy law students cramming in the coffee shop for a last exam. Dark, rainy, “cold.” So much the better. I ran across a to-do list from 2004, written in a tighter, more angular, more precise hand. Reminders of a note I had to write to my previous teacher (now a world away), a research meeting with my adviser (now an eternity away), oil change for a much younger car, a phone call to a friend who was about to exile herself deep in to the Vajrayana. There were two other lists from even earlier, but I didn’t read them since I was already all emotional.
That desk: it’s like a fault, exposing old layers of self. The lists are pure little soil samples. I don’t know why they make me cry. It’s just backward-looking fantasy, and always in to beautiful moments that meant nothing to me then. Probably, the tears are just for time. Primal. To do lists are this existential problem; throwing them out admits that existence passes.
I’m dead-set against forward-looking fantasy. I want live by intuition and—sorry—grace, rather than take life and form it to my will. So I don’t visualize what will be, and don’t layer my expectations with pictures and emotions. But… here I am absorbing right in to backwards-looking fantasy. I am a human, more sentimental than superego, yes; but it’s all the same stuff in terms of my organismic economy. Losing myself in to scripts and visualizations and sensory evocations, using that to fill my body with some emotion. Damn! This could make for a pretty hot fantasy life if I turned it in the other direction.
Or not. No need to make the torture double-sided. And dance, and this rain in the skylights and smoke from the fireplace, are more real than all of it. I will allow today’s good byes to be sweet.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: having a body
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Enjoyed this very much. Thank you.
Bob Weisenberg
Posted by: Bob Weisenberg · Dec 12, 11:45 AM · #
“No need to make the torture double-sided.” applause
Funny how what looks tempting, for whatever reason—a skill, maybe, a lure of something to be granted, a talent to be explored simply because it’s there or inviting, any thing not done—can be as easily a door as a trap. Or other things too.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 12, 04:32 PM · #
Oh please, butch the fuck up (as they say) and get on with it.
The longer you spend on this ridiculous, syrup- drenched valediction, the less time you’ll have for boosting the kukku-coffers through ‘Introductory Weekend Workshops’ up in the frozen North. Think of the house fund – even with my patronage, your place in the pantheon is far from assured.
All this cavilling and mooning about like some dippy gothic ‘heroine’ will do you no good – once these dopes have ‘read’ you, they’ll be back to their own rather feeble ‘practices’ with nary a thought for your impending impoverishment.
Get with it, look to your nose, and start counting the dollars along with the vinyasas.
Ahhrimbhamabangabinghasanghamboombong.
Posted by: catygay · Dec 13, 01:27 AM · #
catygay, it seems there must be somewhere you can go make snow angels, no?
says jim harrison, poet, “in all of the eons, past and future, not one day clones itself”—
“to do” lists might, but they’re like asana— the intention and execution vary bit by bit by bit, not always visible on the surface.
dance at its best can rob of you of the faculty that self-critiques and organizes movement along should-lines. in this, it seems to wake up the nervous system within the nervous system.
it’s also a good way to celebrate.
Posted by: Sara · Dec 13, 01:45 AM · #
See what I mean?
Posted by: catygay · Dec 13, 05:17 AM · #
Yes. Snow angels.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 13, 05:49 PM · #
Self is a network phenomenon. This is GREAT. So is the preceding episode.
Some Ramachandran (haven’t listened to these yet): Synasthesia in Mystical Traditions, A brief tour of human consciousness
Illest Buddhist back online after being mysteriously censored by unknown entities when it first came out last August. Arj Barker is from Flight of the Conchords and the filming’s at Spirit Rock in Marin. I can’t stop listening to this… the durvasasana sex ref in the chorus is so wrong…
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 13, 05:59 PM · #
Sorry, I still haven’t found that Joseph Campbell manuscript about what to do AFTER you find your bliss. Though to paraphrase I think he said ‘if your bliss gets blown away go find some more bliss..’. Apparently, and I cannot vouch for this myself directly, there is plenty to go around.
My 2 cents? I think you should be a Bond Girl next.
Posted by: Gregor · Dec 14, 05:24 AM · #
Once again, a ridiculous suggestion. Bond dealer, maybe.
Posted by: catygay · Dec 14, 08:04 AM · #
I think after you find your bliss you have to floss.
Posted by: Sara · Dec 14, 08:43 AM · #
Who, Bond? That chap works for me. Goes by the name Catygay.
If bliss were insight, Mysore would be Michigan
Hahahahaha! This owl is done molting.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 14, 02:15 PM · #
I presume you are drunk. Permissable, once in a while. I admit my tipple-infused tongue has saved me from Durga’s wrath on more than one occasion.
That’s how it works up here. Not bad, eh?
Posted by: catygay · Dec 14, 04:17 PM · #
It really is too bad that we don’t molt. Wouldn’t such a physical manifestation of transformation be cool?
Posted by: Wombat · Dec 14, 04:32 PM · #
I did just have two Shirley Temples at a sushi bar. Wombat, instead we get tattoos to mark transformations – marking instead of shedding. The latter would be better, but, admittedly, would make a terrible mess.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 14, 09:05 PM · #