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Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies. Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” We were made to understand it would be Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful Dream. The worst in us having taken over And broken the rest utterly down. A long age Passed. When at last we knew how little Would survive us—how little we had mended Or built that was not now lost—something Large and old awoke. And then our singing Brought on a different manner of weather. Then animals long believed gone crept down From trees. We took new stock of one another. We wept to be reminded of such color. Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. POETIC THEMES Ah, New Year’s Day: Lucy with the football. All of us experience at times a sense of staleness in the routines of our daily life, the monotony of our psychological issues, the desire to wake up as new. January first, even if it’s a fake-out, marks at least the hope for renewal. If you’re hunting around for a poetic reflection of the earnest, hopeful resolutions we make each January, you might go back to the wild and wooly list of “what you shall do” in Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass. But now that I’m mentioning dead white guys, I’m thinking instead of the sober ending of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” set in this dark time of year: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything.)” This might be more in keeping with the reality of a pandemic age. The tortured five sections show a man haunted by virtue misunderstood, bungling action, folly, mistaken humor, and harm done. By the end of the poem the midwinter fire has refined all of it, burning the speaker down to simple. Part of our own refining process is the collapse of time back to source, and the ouroboros of future and past in coming to know presence: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from.” To honor this week as the meeting place of beginnings and endings, let’s abandon the old and turn to some more current poems on how past and future intermingle. Maybe we could find a new way to explore the simple, somewhat broken hope of the New Year: that we could be different. In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Burning the Old Year” the old and the new are like two sticks that, when rubbed together, create a kind of burning friction. We are called closer to the flames to reconsider loss, regret, and what simple elemental truths stay around. Turning something material into sheer air is not just subtraction—beginning again “with the smallest numbers”—but distillation, separating the flammable from the enduring (and sparse) stone. It reframes what kinds of things we can celebrate, teaching us to reimagine even the most devastating loss as capable of creating a new open space for potential. When we are contracted in on ourselves, burdened, crowded in, there’s a need for mental/psychological space to breathe. With so much flammable material in the course of a year, we are invited to distill our lives down to what’s most real. And something else remains: the ominous crackling that also hangs around “after the blazing dies” is what we have not done. Regret lingers. Tracy K. Smith’s meditation is about something slower. The rebirth of old phenomena in a new form is like the reappearance of a soul in a Garcia Marquez novel. The slow undergrowth of invisible things eventually emerges. Sea changes over decades and centuries can soften even the most “rageful dream.” We need something “large and old” to handle what we’ve been handed. Smith’s epic, livid, broken land seems more like a description of Sumerian or Egyptian myth than a modern-day city. And with plagues, fires, and tornados, these days we actually seem to be in some kind of Biblical old story. So can we stagger dazed through the heart of winter, anticipating the possibility of green again? The concluding line—“We wept to be reminded of such color”—leaves us with a reminder of how we can be moved by all that is familiar, as it courses through new beginnings. Humanity has made it through plagues before; how can we be changed after this time of destruction? Ours is a fragile, urgent kind of hope. PRACTICE One popular lesson in teaching Sanskrit is to place dukkha, or suffering, in relationship to sukha, which translates to mean not just sweetness, but also space. Yogic practices offer some ways to approach the turning of the calendar year as purification—burning up what’s stale and ready for release to make space for the new. But also there’s the potential reincarnation of the old in new form. These themes give us plenty of work to do physically, although not necessarily the easiest or most relaxing work. Targeting the solar plexus, the seat of digestive fire in the body, might help us channel the element’s purifying properties. A kriya, or cleansing technique, called “Breath of Fire” by yoga practitioners (at least in America) builds heat in the solar plexus and then disperses it to create new spaciousness. A way of stoking the fire is to add a challenge to big muscles like quadriceps and “glutes” (your butt). You could stand in “chair pose,” with knees bent and torso angled forward on the high diagonal or place your back against a wall as though sitting in a chair, with knees bent as close to 90 degrees as possible. Depending on the intensity appropriate for your body (google counter-indications if you’re unsure, but best to listen to and honor your body’s responses), you might practice pumping air in a punctuated rhythm in and out of the nostrils, feeling the solar plexus snap back toward the spine with each exhalation. To up the challenge, you could amp up to a quicker pace. Notice, when focusing on what you’re ready to burn up, which moments, people, actions, or qualities come to mind. Heat is considered a somatic expression of anger, so keep tabs on your internal temperature: if swollen hate rises like Smith’s “epic wind,” take a break. Pause to listen to anger’s message, often a wise part of you requesting some kind of change. Based on the associations that rise to mind, discern whether to fan the flames or to squelch the fire. You can do the latter by straightening your legs and imaginatively saturating the chest cavity with the greenest of greens. Imagine a coloring book, and you’re filling in all the tubular branches of your lungs with your very favorite shade of green. When you feel well-cooked but not burned out, slow down your breath practice and fold forward at the waist, flooding the brain. I like to imagine (to mix my metaphors) cleaning a dirty fish tank: after the breath practice churns the stale water, the forward fold feels like dumping out all the gunky, swirling algae into the earth. Observe any imagery sparked by this inversion practice, and be sure to stretch out your quadriceps or any other “hot spot” before coming to relax and allow the breath and pulse to regulate. Is there any renewed sense of internal space? If so, what parts of you remain after the fire? Metaphorically speaking, wait for the soft little animals in your psyche to come back out, perhaps welcoming them with names.
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Carl Dennis, “To Plato”
I’m writing this for a friend, a painter, Who wants to thank you for the contrast you’ve drawn Between the frail beauty at hand and the beauty enduring eternally elsewhere. It’s helped her to give a name to the challenge she feels In confining herself to the facts before her. To thank you and then to suggest a correction To your attempt to connect the two By calling the beauty at hand a shadowy copy Of a bright, timeless original. To her it’s clear that they're wholly separate, One class containing no example she knows about, The other containing them all; One indifferent to whatever she thinks of it, The other relying on her to protect it, For a moment at least, from oblivion. She wants to thank you for explaining the impulse To climb the ladder from particular instances To general truth. Can you thank her For practicing the vocation of climbing down To dwell among entities local and doomed? Step close and look at her painting of peonies In a Chinese vase on a cherry table. Try to imagine why she considers this subject Worth the effort, why she's given these items The time required to catch the light As it falls on glaze and petal, water and wood, So that each surface looks cherished. Open yourself to musing awhile on the difference Between a longing for the eternal and a longing To hold what vanishes in a grip that time, However patient it proves, has trouble loosening. Carl Dennis, “To Plato” from Poetry, vol. 185, no. 5, Poetry Foundation. Copyright © 2005 by Carl Dennis. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Bathroom Song” I was only one year old; I could tinkle in the loo, such was my precocity. Letting go of Number Two in my potty, not pajama, was a wee bit more forbidding —and I feared the ravening flush. So my clever folks appealed to my generosity: “What a masterpiece, Evita! Look! We’ll send it off to Grandma!” Under the river, under the woods, off to Brooklyn and the breathing cavern of Mnemosyne from the fleshpotties of Dayton-- what could be more kind or lucky? From the issue of my bowels straight to God’s ear—or to Frieda’s, to the presence of my Grandma, to the anxious chuckling of her flushed and handsome face that was so much like my daddy’s, to her agitated jowls, Off! Away! To Grandma’s place! As, in Sanskrit, who should say of the clinging scenes of karma, “Gaté, gaté, paragaté” (gone, gone, forever gone), “parasamgaté; bodhi; Svaha!” (utterly gone—enlightenment-- svaha! Whatever svaha means), Send the sucker off to Grandma. Gaté, gaté, paragaté; parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha! Reprinted with Hal’s permission (smooches). POETIC THEMES If like me you’re allergic to this month’s hedonistic thrall to “stuff,” maybe we could look at our perception of materialism and tweak it a bit. Philosophically speaking, materialism is a physicalist orientation uninterested in the spiritual plane, which corresponds to the yuck of December’s focus on objects during a time that’s supposed to be sacred. The opposite of materialism, in this sense, might be the kind of ungrounded, escapist spirituality that refuses to acknowledge or reckon with the real world; what many of us think of as “woo-woo” spiritual bypassing. Might we find a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship of material and spiritual planes? We could start with Plato. Carl Dennis writes his direct address “To Plato” to re-imagine the relationship between matter and what matters. This elegant defense of artistic and intellectual work is an act of generosity—a kind of gift—upholding the vocation of his friend, a painter. Representing worldly phenomena on paper is a way of preserving the “frail beauty at hand.” Time’s grip won’t loosen, he explains, so everything in its clutches can only be saved by our witness and our care for it. The work of an artist is not to climb up toward the Eternal but downward into the cave of this world’s fleeting, earthly objects, “To dwell among entities local and doomed.” The poem argues for a shift in perspective away from an orientation upward to the spiritual plane of which our reality is merely a copy, and toward a celebration of human efforts that bring divinity down to earth. Perhaps Dennis shares Eve Sedgwick’s preoccupation with Neoplatonism, which is all about this shift. It wouldn’t be a stretch to read obscure philosophical influences into poetry by a guy who has written about Nietzsche and Hegel. And Dennis’ take on rebirth, like Eve’s, is also pretty Neoplatonic (in poems like “Former Lives,” “Eternal Life,” and “The God Who Loves You”). In any case, this school of philosophy is a useful one for reframing the aims of holiday shopping. From the thrall to high art in early thinkers like Plotinus, to the later, weirder rituals incorporating physical tokens, it’s all about pulling the divine down to our earthly gifts. Might we give new life to gift-giving by adopting a Neoplatonic view? What happens when we relate to concrete objects as talismans, elemental nature as manipulatable substance for ritual, and language as incantation? I want to borrow a word from Dennis, who argues that we save the material plane from oblivion by cherishing it: the paintbrush catches the light “So that each object looks cherished.” I’d like to linger with that word for a moment. My parents joked that they couldn’t figure out why the marriage vow would include both “to love” and “to cherish.” Redundant, no? In searching for a distinct meaning for cherishing, my mother decided it must mean that whenever the cat brought some gross, dead rodent to the door, it was my dad’s job to pick it up. And so small, furry corpses became “cherishes”—as in, “Sherman, there’s a cherish on the back porch!” There’s wisdom in this joke, as in most of their weird marital rituals: in learning to cherish our nearest and dearest, it’s helpful to practice on small things like fallen leaves and coffee cups. And half-eaten mice. In the place of grand expressions of art or thought, we can build our cherishing muscles through small, local actions, rituals, and practices that enact our care and concern in ways that make them real to us and to our beloveds. The low grounds the high: a 4-inch corpse stands in for a sacred vow. And according to the laws of symmetry in the Neoplatonic system of correspondences (as above so below), the lower the low, the higher the high. It makes sense, then, that Eve’s “Bathroom Song” uses potty training as a metaphor for the release of our mortal coil(s). This is a poem about dying. Convincing toddler Evita to surrender to the U.S. Mail her miraculous creation of “Number Two” required the perfect recipient on the other side: Grandma, the paradigmatic (Proustian) figure of the infinitely adoring, invested, tolerant fan. Its final lines borrow from the Heart Sutra, recalling the parable of crossing the ocean of ignorance to reach the banks of Nirvana. Jason Edwards, a British Queer Theorist and my favorite Facebook friend, gives a brilliant reading of the Buddhism of this poem in a book entitled Bathroom Songs. I’d like to add that this reference to Nirvana’s far shore ties back to Eve’s early mention of Mnemosyne, not only the Greek goddess of memory but also the name of another body of water to be crossed in the afterlife. This metaphysical sprawl reflects the 19th-century European mishmash of traditions that fascinated Eve, with its proliferation of deities from Asia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. The Neoplatonic brushstrokes on this poem’s Buddhist canvas are part of Eve’s distinct way of drawing correspondences between complex psychological processes and the material plane. Poop, low on the manifest totem pole, relates to enlightenment, the top rung on the ladder of spiritual ideals. “Why would it be a scandal,” Eve asks, if the work of dying and toilet training were “not so different—were, so to speak, molded of the same odorous, biomorphic clay?” Just as with potty training, in order to let go of this world, Eve needed something intellect alone couldn’t provide her. Her “very hungry” hands found in silk cords and shibori dye what she couldn’t find in theory-making or even poetry. She called it a convergence between “making and unmaking.” Her interest in fabric art dated back to childhood, and it’s unclear (I join Jonathan Goldberg in wondering, as he does in his recent book Come as You Are) if Grandma Frieda was the same grandmother who taught Eve to weave. In any case, these later textile practices were a form of rendering thought in 3D. Jason Edwards notes the continuity between her poetic flare (for enjambment, parenthetical sentences, and strings of clauses or dangling ones) and her experiments with textile practices like marbling and enfoldment. I have written elsewhere about the profound transformations of self that couldn’t be enacted through thought alone, but instead had to be fondled and woven and stained and sculpted. Rather than focusing on Eve’s cognitive habits and elemental intimacies, we might instead borrow her process of transforming abstraction into real artifacts and experiment with what needs of our own might be met by “making stuff.” PRACTICE One Christmas Eve, still inside the post-divorce shock of being without my children, I decided to make stuff. I cobbled together a Christmas tree ornament out of glitter and cardboard: a miniature package wrapped in parchment leaf, complete with a silver bow, inside of which I glued a kidney-bean sized stone wrapped in metallic wire, like a little silver Evita poo. It helped me reckon with letting go of the nuclear-family-holiday scene I’d always had, to make way for whatever divorced Christmas looked like. If material objects can stand in for subtle forms of human experience and connection, how might you craft, however crudely, some kind of talismanic gift? It might be for someone important, concretizing your connection, or it might represent a psychological task for transition, serving a more abstract function (like my weird ornament on the family tree). If the end of the calendar year resonates as a time of release, you might in fact work with excrement. And by that I mean, of course, silk, because, in the words of Eve’s therapist: “the silk and the shit go together.” I remember when I was writing about Eve’s obsession with silk, I fell into a fascinating abyss, down deep in the bowels of the Columbia library where I combed through factoids about mulberry silkworms and salivary enzymes and molting and stuffing and boiling and harvesting…. Here I’ll just say that if you want to work in the ur-medium of strange and otherworldly elemental transformation, work with silk. You could look into slow stitching, or if you need a straightforward idea, you might create an eye pillow, sewing a piece of silk (or silky cloth) into a sleeve for filler, which could also be symbolic (like pebbles from the creek behind your mom’s house, or sand from your favorite beach, or rice from your friend’s wedding). Whatever you craft, what different faculties are recruited in this kind of play? Remember, this is not painterly high art, but process-driven work that’s serving a ritual function. Resist the drive toward perfection and stay down here with the idiosyncratic, flawed entities of this realm, local and doomed. Allergic to art? Only got 3 minutes? Here's a combing practice to elicit an energetic shift down out of the head and back into the guts and groins, to reinhabit your materiality. James Wright, “The Jewel”
There is this cave In the air behind my body That nobody is going to touch: A cloister, a silence Closing around a blossom of fire. When I stand upright in the wind, My bones turn to dark emeralds. James Wright “The Jewel” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness Of women's hands that touch loaves. The spirit of a tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes and think of water. James Wright, “Trying to Pray” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Wright, “A Blessing” Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. James Wright, “A Blessing” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood-- A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is-- Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES At the darkest time of the year, we can reorient toward light, or we can delve into the transformative power of darkness. Pagan traditions hold midwinter as the most sacred time of the year, with the most potential for mysterious, secret processes of spiritual change. I love the gem-like precision of these tiny poems of Wright’s, which condense their ingredients into crystal form, like the pressurizing force in metamorphism. In “The Jewel,” the wind turns our bones to emerald. The air behind our body is a cave. A cloister. A closing silence. A fire blossom. Wright goes spelunking around in a sensual underworld menagerie, all murk and glorious riddle. I want to reference “A Blessing” mostly for contrast. This poem, probably Wright’s most famous, is atypical in its all-over sweetness. Barely a pinky finger is dipped into the darkness that most of his work swims in. Hanging out with a couple of lonely ponies by the highway, something becomes real to him: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” Those final lines are a barebones layout of one view of body and spirit: one must be transcended to reach the other. Nowhere in his other work do you find that kind of facile reading of the body’s place in the realm of spirit. These two shorter poems are in many ways more challenging. Both are working through something more complicated than body transcendence. In “Trying to Pray,” Wright proclaims, “I have left my body behind me, crying / in its dark thorns.” But then he lifts the poem from despair with a list of Good Things, all sense-based: good darkness, women’s hands kneading bread, the leaves of a tree being touched. In Wright’s poetry, the amalgam of our senses interacting with the mysteries of nature sparks a kind of transformation. Sense experience nudges our conceptual faculties toward the mystical. Wright’s focus, as per “The Jewel,” isn’t in what we can see with our eyes, the clear, controlled space in front of us, but in the mysterious zone behind or inside our body, which we can never see but always follows us. And the recognition of the mysteries one can’t quite see releases a kind of epiphanic clarity. Wind touches not skin, but bone. We have felt this—the wind down in our bones like the crystalized cold of emerald. This dark, mysterious, sensual tone is one Wright shares with Theodore Roethke (who was in fact his professor). Roethke’s hard-earned rendering of Immanence isn’t to be found in his most-anthologized poems, like “The Waking,” but in the deep dive of a poem like “In a Dark Time.” Roethke’s poetry is a relentless, inward probing, an introspection that picks at the scabs of the psyche’s machinations until they bleed again. Living just this side of madness may have thrown this poet in and out of the sanatorium, but arguably this threshold state is transformed into a “nobility of soul” by his art. It’s noble because it’s healing. At least it has been for me, having taken so much comfort in his companioning darkness. In my own dark times, I had someone to hold my hand, even “pinned against a sweating wall” or dying to myself in the “long, tearless night.” Living on the edge of what the mind can withstand isn’t so much a choice as a temperament—“The edge is what I have.” Those of us who resonate with the line “Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire” do, in fact, see better “in the deepening shade.” But the involuted process of compression in Roethke’s poetry gives hope because it eventually goes so deep as to spin us free of the poem with a glimpse of the sparkling sublime. “The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One, free in the tearing wind.” It's lines like this that help us climb out of our fear. PRACTICE Could you spend a half an hour in darkness? There is a summer program that leads clusters of people with blindfolds and canes along my block in Philadelphia. This is a simulation exercise to train people to work with the visually impaired by walking a mile in their shoes. I tried this out while walking the dog and decided it was better to leave the dog at home (sorry, Skunky). On my own, it was still brutally difficult, even without an enthusiastic fluffy thing tugging me around. It involves mentally projecting a parallel line to the movement of traffic, navigating uneven sidewalk, and using sensory cues to inwardly construct the geometry of an intersection to cross a street. I found that I was focused more on the practical challenges of being blind, as opposed to the psychology of darkness. So instead, you might simply try a half an hour feeling your way down the stairs, to the coffee machine, to your toothbrush. You can expect that few practical tasks will get done. What is the psychology of darkness for you? Does deprivation of one sensory pathway heighten others, and which? Is there any shift in your experience of the relationship between sense and spirit? You might even free-write from your own “steady storm of correspondences,” by keeping pen to paper, resisting the urge to pause. If you get stuck, you can always simply write one word over and over until your mind unclogs. Or, consider a blind drawing of any object or face you encountered in the darkness, without looking at the page and without lifting the mark of the pen from paper. This one-touch technique often alleviates any perfectionism or interest in reproducing reality, instead making manifest an impressionistic picture of something as it exists within you. If you just can't let go of the visual, here's a video. It's designed to entice you, through the visual, to enter more deeply into the auditory, with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about turning your whole body into one big huge listening vessel. A yogic approach to becoming a tuning fork is to allow your attention to rest at the crown of your head, the third eye, and at the center of each palm. You might be enticed to close your eyes, when you feel the effects. |
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