Yoga Training II
I’ve been struggling to complete projects lately. I’ve got most of a memoir that I’m not able to finish because I left the hardest parts for last; I’ve got the first part of a sci-fi adventure in Esperanto I’m slowly moving forward on; I’ve been not really learning Sanskrit. Yesterday and today I’ve been playing with DJing, because I wanted to prepare some playlists for yoga classes. I’ve always got more photos to develop (digitally), and I just recovered my camera from Sacramento, so I can take more pictures. Avaryl Halley died two weeks ago, so I’ve been rewatching episodes of Movie Bitches because there are never going to be any more.
And there’s the training itself, which I’m about two-thirds of the way through now. At least that one I think I can see through to the end. Śraddhā is the term for faith used in Yoga Sūtra I.20; the bhāṣya commentary glosses śraddhā as cetasaḥ saṃprasādaḥ, “serenity of mind”. This faith is one of the prerequisites to the elimination of suffering: faith brings vigor, which brings memory, which brings absorbtion, which brings insight. I’m pretty sure that I can see this one through, and hopefully the rest of what I need to get through it will spring from that calmness.
As Christopher Smart says, God sometimes plays his harp, and “this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul” (Jubilate Agno, Fragment B,2). In high school, the chapel choir sang Benjamin Britten’s setting of (excerpts from) Smart’s poem (called by its English title, Rejoice in the Lamb). Someday I’ll be ready to talk about it. And someday I’ll be ready to go back there. But those are some of the hard parts of the memoir I’ve not gotten to yet: I haven’t even touched on singing, which I’ve only just realized will have to be a huge part of the piece.
As my mother would say (referencing Heinz Kohut, but I haven’t dug into his work enough to trace the citation), “singing in a group reminds us we’re not alone.” It’s been nice to sing oṃ together in classes for that reason.1 When you sing, your vocal folds vibrate and transfer those vibrations to the air that flows through them and out into the world. The vibration travels to my ear, where it stimulates (ultimately) my brain which, in turn, controls the vibration of my vocal folds. In a room with enough people making a noise, the vibrations resonate in the cavities of our bodies; together our throats make a noise that we share.
The image is clear in my head but is difficult to describe in words. When I’m blogging, I emphasize concision over clarity but try to maintain precision. I’ll continue refining the exposition of that idea, which will, I’m sure, eventually make it into a bigger piece, where it will go on for quite some time.
The blog has the advantage of being a project that, as a whole, is never done. And the individual blog posts are not the result of sober editing or a guiding structure (as the Paul Ford epigraph I used to have on the home page said): they’re word vomit, free associations, journal entries. Maybe that’s why the format works so well for me. When I was younger, I wrote best when I was most emotional: then I would pour out the entire text in one flow. I worried, and worry still, that I couldn’t write well on command: I need some impetus that comes from I-don’t-know where. Sometimes I’ve got to let things sit and percolate, but at least I’m keeping them on my mind and coming to them when the moment’s right.
In the training today, Erin Gilmore said I seemed “even-keeled” as she was giving me feedback on my practice teaching. Historically, I’ve been the opposite of even-keeled. My capsizings (and occasional turtlings) are the main subject of that big memoir project. But since my mom died I don’t sweat the small stuff. That’s a pretty generic sentence, but once you’ve held her body down as she thrashes and gotten her blood on your hands, once you’ve watched her asphyxiate on her own saliva and her skin turn sallow yellow as she gasps for air with fish lips, it’s hard to get worked up about anything anymore.2
I’m going to leave that train of thought aside, though, because it’s depressing, and it’s brought this post to a crashing halt. I guess it’s true, what they say about art projects: they’re never really done, just abandoned. The trick is to abandon it at a phase where it’s complete enough for other people to look at.
