Space · 19 April 2009

So it’s glorious here. Forgotten fruit in season, a bike valet at the farmers' market, friends happy together, people saying “President Obama” on the radio. Spring quarter on campus, deadlines that ask for integrity and not acts of sleepless masochism, actually good art everwhere, Wolverine looking intense on billboards, the most perfect weekend playing on repeat, my hair turning weird strawberry blonde again as the 6-week brunette washes out, an appointment for contact lenses because I’m ready for cheap sunglasses and finally tired of the wire rims between me and people I’m teaching. Artists talking about how it’s time for high stakes creation and academics having the economic stakes raised in a sort of useful way. Let it be a little tougher for a while; let us get a little more serious… Serious can still be light.

::: It has been given to me to live this life; and it’s  allright for that living-out to be beautiful and fulfilled no matter the conditions.:::

No more apologies for being complete. Nor distrust of beauty, for that matter.

In this, these particularities, what makes Los Angeles itself? What makes me different when I am here? Three people have said that it feels like I am closer, reading here now compared to reading here a month ago. Isn’t that funny? The intimacy is increased, even as there’s nothing different about the url or where you sit as you read, and even though I never email personally anymore because my inbox has grown over in vines and stubbornly refuses to open anymore.

Space is a category of the understanding. No: that’s not Sri Aurobindo or some shit. It’s Kant. It’s good phenomenology too.

But in any case it’s interesting… to observe that space comes in to play in perception across a flat screen as much as it comes in to play in chopping kale, merging in to freeway traffic, scratching a dog behind the ears. And it’s not just in your head; it’s in mine too. I feel closer too. More cradled by taken-for-granted meanings, supported by relationships that have some age and meat to them, at home in the arts and the sciences I practice. Less en thrall to huge amounts of new information flying at high speeds into my grill.

In a sense, it is freeing to be able to take the perspective of the culture you inhabit. The more you move around, the more languages you speak, the more you understand intuitively that every history and culture is accidental. The more you can see from the integral meta-vista. But even so there is a richness to being able to participate, in a grounded way, as yourself, wherever you are, without compulsively translating everything in to some previous worldview or language. Hold steady, little scientist. There will be time for translation when the space changes.

I’ve been ruminating on PJ these days, feeling what space he occupies in the categories of my understanding. Early-early practice in the dark alone, a happy crooked-toothed version of him on the floor, propped against the wall. I light a candle that casts a shadow above and behind the photograph, a dark space in the shape of Teotihuacan or one of the other flat-topped Mexican pyramids. And PJ’s inside the pyramid-shadow, buried, preserved in middle age, seeing me through the dark. As he passes over, it’s easy to imagine he would pass in to this space even more strongly if that’s what I ask. I don’t think that I do ask that—other avatars resonate more strongly with me—but right now he also feels, well, closer than before.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration , science

Comment

1. Beautiful. Like this:

   If you look at a flower, and then close your eyes and see the counterpart of the flower inside, would you call that imagination? It is true that the flower is not inside, but your chitta has assumed the pattern of a flower.

   When you have visualized the flower clearly and completely within, and you know that you are visualizing it, you are on the subconscious plane. When you have visualized the flower in exactly the same color and dimension, but you are not aware that you are visualizing it; when you are not aware of time and space, when the process of visualization is beyond cognition and you are not aware of the symbol, there is only a flower, exactly as you see here.

   Yoga Nidra — Swami Satyananda Saraswati

   Posted by: karen · Apr 19, 05:28 PM · #

2. Oh my god. I’m really tempted to write about… oh shit. Nevermind.

   Also, I found out yesterday that the nidra I ordered through ILL and listened to on cassette—the nidra that consistently sends my alpha waves straight to zero so I have no memory of its actual contents—has been remastered. Here,

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 19, 05:40 PM · #

3. I feel sorry for the anthropologist, but then I am biased. She was trying to be very PC about asking you to coauthor a piece with her, you know all this informants as authors stuff, this is all very positive
   But little did she realise that you are way ahead of her in theories etc. ;-)
   I would be curious to know more about this anthropologist. American is she? Grad student? If you are not bound to some privacy clause…
   Also more of your thoughts on good phenomenology would be most welcome.

   Posted by: Fatou · Apr 19, 10:21 PM · #

4. Remember you telling me about this walking along side the Thames, very funny.(damm you plane for getting in so later ) The book I Mentioned at the time, the Heideggarian Anthropologist guy
   tree, leaf, talk
   by james F. Weiner

   Posted by: grimmly · Apr 19, 11:36 PM · #

5. Outstanding. But this idea of the ‘commodification of spirituality’, well that i find a little disturbing. Let’s hope we don’t reach the point where even the pot we piss in must be mauve-tinted and om-hinted.

   Posted by: meniscursus · Apr 20, 05:58 AM · #

6. Hmm… Grim I do not recall that too well. Might have been a bit spacey. Fatou… Trust me, you’d have been put off as well. There was another intriguing anthro doing great fieldwork in the community (no wonder… it’s an excellent site), but this case was a little different. I now realize I’d have to tell many of the details to explain why. Suffice it to say this is a very powerful, senior, well-known researcher. She’s pretty brilliant and it might be good to work with her, but she doesn’t understand this case. This whole experience showed me intimately the limitations of ethnographic methods. I love qualitative research and find it a lot more compelling than most of my statistical training… but it takes time, a lot of background knowledge, and sensitivity to the ways in which straight-up interviewing people (and asking them why questions) is not really interesting or illuminating to me.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 20, 05:23 PM · #

7. Good phenomenology… recognizing that it’s actually a theory of mind. That the original idea is not that we work with the phenomena themselves but that we all have a mental map of our experience-in-the-world. Or… Naive phenomenology thinks it’s talking about direct experience only… good phenomenology remembers it too is a philosophy of mind?

   Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 20, 05:38 PM · #

8. Am I hallucinating or did you delete the bit about the anthropologist from the OP?
   You made me all curious about the well known powerful senior researcher. Will you name names off record in an e-mail? Has stuff been published about anthropology of ashtanga? I only know of this guy BR Smith, you wrote an article in Body&Society in 2007. Haven’t read it yet, but looks like interesting stuff.
   About the senior person not getting it, I think it is about her not getting it the way you get it, and maybe informants would never like what anthropologists write about them anyway. How about if you think of yourself as being a ‘native’ and do not have the ability of a “view from afar’. This is a possiblity after all.

   Posted by: Fatou · Apr 21, 02:13 AM · #

9. Fatou, Merleau-Ponty is about as good as phenomenology gets, but as with most philosophers he’s a bloody awful writer so probably best to go with a collection of his writings (with a good editor) rather than trying to dive into Phenomenology of Perception. There’s a lot of renewed interest in him lately because of his….‘reintroduction’ of the body into Phenomenology. All the embodiment stuff, floating around lately, proberbly derives from him. Interesting for us too because we can’t but be confrounted by the body in our practice. I keep telling myself I need to read him again

   Posted by: grimmly · Apr 21, 06:19 AM · #

10. Grimmly, I have limited knowledge of Merleau Ponty, in fact my knowledge stops at this quotation: “To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born in the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted, in the first place we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities”
    But I was curious to know if the Omniscient Owl had some helpful insights, which she usually does.
    And yes, I too have been meaning to read M-P (properly this time, not just useful quotes for my PhD). But somehow he always gets pushed aside due to some more pressing, usually useless stuff.

    Posted by: Fatou · Apr 21, 06:52 AM · #

11. Hello :-)

    Look at Husserl and Schutz. This stuff makes way more sense to me on an everyday practical level now that I have done a lot of Vipassana. It starts to be beautifully, efficiently applicable in… er… research.

    I remember an undergrad semester when we read Being and Time, followed by Being and Nothingness, followed by P of P. The first two were soooo dark: I kept feeling I was embracing the void, breaking free of a lot of Calvinist cosmology. Then we got to Merleau-Ponty and I was like, “That’s it? It’s that simple? Thanks Maurice!” So I guess that I still have an oddly celebratory feeling for him.

    Re the edit, yes, I just realized that I was being unfair to put that out there without also serving up my methodological beef. It’s not a critique of her perspective (which is a fascinating and useful one) but of the quality of information gathered under certain conditions. You can’t understand the rules of the Balinese cockfight just by asking the betters why they play. But that’s a 1500 word discussion, not a short-form blog discussion… and not a discussion I get to devote cognitive resources to when I have deadlines on other topics. I’m a really undisciplined scholar because I just do what interests me and could not care less about status or achievement (this is not an apology; I like it that way)... but it’s especially important to put boundaries around my soc of yoga thoughts or they will carry me away. Thus… I deleted rather than re-explained.

    Speaking of… time to clock in here! Ack!!! Love,

    Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 21, 08:45 AM · #

12. Hi Owl!
    Great writing… just popped in to say hello. I’ll have to re-read and try to digest this later, right now it’s just floating on my brain like oil on water.
    um. Did you know that if you do a spell check for Tittibhasana that one of the suggested words is Teotihuacan?

    Posted by: Liz · Apr 22, 07:39 PM · #

13. Hey Owl… yeah you sound really mellow, I love this entry, it’s true you seem much closer.

    Contact lenses changed my life, good luck!

    Oh, and G is making want to read Merleau-Ponty : )

    Posted by: susananda · May 1, 12:59 AM · #

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