Welcome the Tormentor-Sage · 5 March 2007

New wrench in the flow this morning. Unexpecting, I was instructed to stand on one leg with the foot of the other behind my head, press the palms together and look up. I long since went native on astanga yoga, so this doesn’t actually horrify me.

Still, that the posture’s called Durvasasana—for an ugly brahman blight and the worst houseguest in subcontinental history—is right unsettling. It’s like having your soccer coach name her secret strategy the “evil mother-in-law play” or “IRS audit play.”

Patthabi Jois’ first series of yoga postures is literally-named: pose to the east, to the west, head-to-knee, bound angle, upward angle, and so on. It is all science and supplication. In the second series, you play charades to make yourself into animals—heron, camel, firefly—then pass through a gate and make the sacred cow on the other side. The third turns out to be something between dirge and carnival ritual, a succession of tormentor-sages en route, it’s said, to the defying of gravity.

I’ve never been one to think of yoga postures as symbols—they don’t need to point beyond themselves to bear meaning. My position has been that there’s enough immediacy of being in Janu Sirsasana C that it’s a bit lame to reach beyond for an added poetry of meaning, as for example does Donna Farhi (2000:133): “Like the symbol of a spiral…, the spiritual journey is one in which the destination is reached when we return to the self…. These postures represent just such a return” (emphasis mine).

No, ma’am. Janu Sirsasana’s a gut-probing, hamstring-rending, toe-cranking surrender of the head to the leg. Let it be that. No need for theory. “Representation” and “symbolizing” create doubles, manufacturing extra culture where immediate experience should be sufficient.

Yet making nice with the extreme shapes in third every morning is re-shaping my drop-the-theory thing. I have to respect a posture named for an irascible god, and at the same time let it revive the poetry and the humor of what we do. For a while I’ve shrugged off my original motive to practice, which was a supersimple love for the immediate wholeness of experience in a Mysore room, rather than any prospective “yogic” inquiry into the nature of mind and being. But my origins may not have been so shallow: maybe I’m just new, but it’s hard to imagine getting any rewards from Durvasa other than (as he finally did for Krishna and Rukmini when he concluded his torturous visit) a release. 

Moments in this series can be bizarre, aggressive, and poetically unbeautiful. These postures need not point outside themselves to some “symbol.” However, inviting the history, the characters, and the stories in to the practice brings an awesome, particular texture.

This makes me think that when yoga can be as much about 1) intense inhabitation of the present moment as an end in itself as it is about 2) devotion to a progressing method-path-inquiry, then there’s not such a need to parse it between theory versus practice, or science versus art.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , spirituality

Comment

1. interesting post (even for those of us who can’t put our feet behind our heads). your old self’s point about how the act of symbolizing creates “doubles” and interferes with the immediacy of experience seems kinda compelling. i’ll be interested to hear more in the future about how your thinking on this evolves…

   Posted by: r · Mar 6, 11:12 AM · #

2. NO MORE CYMBALS! I MEAN, UM, SYMBOLS!

   This post is particularly relevant given Baudrillard’s death yesterday. Isn’t the simulacra/hyperreal essentially an endless reproduction of symbols for the real? I especially like this paragraph: “Moments in this series can be bizarre, aggressive, and poetically unbeautiful. These postures need not point outside themselves to some “symbol.” However, inviting the history, the characters, and the stories in to the practice brings an awesome, particular texture.”

   We don’t have to limit this to yoga, either! Exciting. This means no more symbolic or metaphorical lyrics for me.

   Posted by: Alex · Mar 7, 07:06 PM · #

3. Do it Alex! A whole album of lyrics that refer to nothing outside of themselves…

   Posted by: r · Mar 8, 02:03 AM · #

4. Hey Alex! I’ve done my best to ignore Baudrilliard, but I would presume him to be with those to say it’s just signifiers all the way down. No thing-in-itself, or “the real” out there (I could be mistaking him for a confused 1980s English professor). But who needs continental metaphysics to get through daily life, anyway?

   Making symbols is reaching for meaning. But god knows life is specific.

   We seem to want to universalize when something is beautiful or deep to us (John Mayer’s fundamental problem). This is why there is so much bad poetry.

   But seriously, what are the good songs? The ones so specific they lodge in your mind. Aaah, Regina Spektor, Phil Elverum, Gordon Lightfoot. You’re right there.

   Posted by: owl · Mar 8, 08:02 AM · #

5. specific lyric:

   still wearing last night’s mascara now that her pet was gone for sure
   she was shivering so hard it looked like there were two of her
   i could see through the sleeve on her blouse the plans of her architect lover
   a tattoo of a boarded up house an ink door that belonged to another
   when the rain hits you it hits you slow
   stitch after stitch

   -Silver Jews

   Posted by: r · Mar 9, 01:02 AM · #

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