Our America

  

This is how beautiful and complex it is. It's not just "Cubans" vs. "Americans"--that's a neo-nationalist idiom. I heard an English speaker from the 786 area code call me. After all, she's 29, born here, but a (second generation "Cuban-American") santera for 24 years. The first words she spoke had me confused. I first greeted her in Spanish and then turned to English once she responded to me in English. She said: "oh, you speak really good English," having thought I was Hispanic (after all, I run "Folkcuba"). So, we started speaking "perfect English" together. After the WTF reactions, we then began to speak to each other in "Spanish" again, and then in the more restricted idiom of  santeros. Our conversation "switched" between "perfect English," Cuban Spanish, and "Osha," which "Spanish" speakers, non-santero Cubans, or Americans would understand. So, she's at least "tri-cultural" and probably has Spanish and creole ancestors, not to mention African. I am--descending from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with roots in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires--perhaps, tri-, quad-, pent-, hex-cultural. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. More to come...

Selfies and Narcissism

YogaAnonymous tells us: "Research | Scientists Link Selfies To Narcissism, Addiction & Mental Illness."
http://yoganonymous.com/research-scientists-link-selfies-to-narcissism-addiction-mental-illness/
Will Wonders Never Cease. I've not read the article but it seems dubious on its face, confusing cause and effect. It would seem that Narcissism, Addiction, and Mental Illness lead to Selfies. Or not. Way back when, they were worried about blobs eating Philadelphia. Now anxiety about runaway technology produces a ridiculous Jeremiad twice a day. Why not focus on more pressing concerns such as global warming, world hunger, environmental destruction, genocide, social inequality, invasive surveillance, fundamentalism, etc, which will make us all dead way before Selfies make us crazy maladaptive alcoholics.

Yoga on Instagram

YogaAnonymous tells us: "A picture might be worth a thousand words, but in the world of yoga on Instagram, a photo could mean a whole new career."
http://yoganonymous.com/yoga-instagram-turned-lucrative-business/

Yoga itself has been a lucrative business since it hit these shores in force--for some people with certain ambitions. In cases, it's gone multinational. The Starbucks story might soon be applied, for example, to the Paul and Sonia Tudor-Jones' corporatized luxury "Jois" studios, which have moved in next to the humbler original students of Jois himself. So the "lucrative business" angle is nothing new. Instagram and other social media are potentially revolutionary social media technologies--witness the Arab Spring. Careful. If the medium is the message, then one major internet capability is to efficiently commoditize anything and suck us consumers into its vortex. So, perhaps Yoga photos might be a "lucrative business." Do we yet have criteria for evaluating them, not to mention their business model? I would want to go on a case by case basis. Can any of us look at just one more Bikram speedo photo shot against a background of 500 sweaty bodies or 40 Rolls Royces? The gorgeous Equinox YouTube videos are as notable for their magisterial poses as they are for their soft-core porn allusions. On the flip side, the communicative and community-building possibilities of the internet offer to (mostly) women and very small businesses the possibility not only to survive and flourish, to surprise us with gorgeous poses and individual creativity we thought not possible, and to offer some visual competition to the daily round of bears driving cars, drunken teens, and wardrobe malfunctions. As well, from this new marketplace of Yoga photos, we can sharpen our criteria for discriminating good poses and virtuous teachers from bad snapshots and crass propaganda. So much out there begs the attention--especially of wide-eyed new students. If we potentially benefit from a grand visual array of beckoning photographs, would we not also benefit from a public exchange as to what content makes us the Yogis we want to be?

Wounded Healers

"Affix your own oxygen mask before turning to your child." We've heard that endless times. Those of us caring for others, whether teachers, therapists, or parents, are human, hence, imperfect, and invariably still smarting from our own past hurts. That makes us "wounded healers." A contradiction? Not if we are ethical, seeking to walk in the present. Heal yourself first, then turn to your charges. Accomplishing both at once is a tricky proposition. This is  where we can get confused and cross boundaries. In reality, in the present, teachers, therapists, and parents do not require their students, patients, and children, respectively, to treat their own past hurts and needs--clearly an impossibility, except in fantasy or delusion. This, indeed, is confusion, and leads nowhere but to abuse. Seek your oxygen and then breath life into your charges.

"Zombies" and Nzambi: There's Oh So Much Confusion

For those of you who don't know, in variants of Kongo cosmology, Nzambi-Mpungu can be conceived of as the "High God;" more specifically, he reigns over both Ntoto, the mountain of the living, and Mpemba, or Kalunga, the world of the dead beneath the water, which is chalk white, like the kaolin at the bottom of the river. A special category of the dead, very close to Nzambi Mpungu, consists of "Nzambi creatures," chalk-white beings. "Zombies" are the stuff of American hysteric...al legend, originally brought to these shores and immortalized in ethnocentric fiction by soldiers returning from the US occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century, just as was "Voodoo." In Haitian Vodou, people believe in "Zombi," but they are not at all the stuff of ludicrous and endlessly repeated American B-movies. Though many and varied, some Zombi are purgatorial anti-social persons, who have been condemned, captured, and taken "to the north" to labor eternally as slaves--the greatest fear that a Haitian can have, given the torturous history of the island. Therefore, contrary to popular conception, the Zombi does not come after you; a priest charged with carrying out the "sentence" comes after the anti-social person, adjudged as such by local secret societies. (Please correct any errors you see here, my knowledgeable friends.)

My Android, My Zombies

Zombies? Facebook is an insatiable Zombi and David has likely become one. I awoke to a Brave New World. Facebook inserted 1,120 "friends"--a swarm--into my Android phone's contact list. Someone opted into the Facebook "sync" app linking a mobile device and Zuckerberg's global social media circus. Having no conscious memory of opting in, I ask: who did this? Was it a butt call? David in a sleepwalking episode? David bitten and possessed by a Zombie? If I were possessed by a ni...neteenth-century doctor, he'd have no social media skills. The only conclusion: a millennial who had met an untimely end possessed me. So, now I've got 1,120 souls crashing my lonely little corner of New Jersey. I want my life back. Nothing personal, Facebook friends.

The Verizon wireless representative, a media saavy baby boomer, sympathized with me; but no one can "unsync" what's been done wholesale. So, this morning I spent two hours individually terminating all of you Zombies. Sorry good people.

Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen

How do we want to approach a traumatized person--in this case, who has committed a heinous crime? Bracket for a moment Oscar Pistorius' guilt or innocence and focus on the court-appointed psychologist's characterization of the session: the "double-amputee athlete had sometimes cried, retched, perspired and paced up and down during sessions in which she tried to assist him....Some of the sessions were just him weeping and crying and me holding him." Her sentiment was, though sympathetic, driven by pity and her takeaway that he was a "broken" man; this, as if there were something else he was supposed to perform in the session, such as remorse. Legal institutions require the cleanliness of remorse and the ultimate assumption of responsibility; this pure human wreck should, ideally, stand up like a man and face the music, or be simply warehoused in a psychiatric institution.

No apologist for the crime, I understand that a normative, and here, forensic, therapy serves as critical data in any legal consideration of an insanity defense. Still, the psychologist had unwittingly succeeded just enough in creating a safe space for the patient's discharge of lifelong trauma (the tip of the iceberg): perspiring, pacing, weeping, crying, retching, need to be held. These are progressively more profound levels of emotional discharge--like the peeling of an onion--for early-installed humiliation, brutal hurt, and existential terror.

Should it be a matter of "sane" people standing trial or their incapacity to stand trial, wherein you should drool, in a drug-induced stupor in a corner, until you are no longer a threat to society (perhaps neutralized with electroshock therapy). Is this healing? In the latter context, he would, undoubtedly never receive the kind of treatment he fortuitously received in his initial "sanity session."

Who knows, if that "accident waiting to happen" had received genuine therapeutic resource, instead of re-enacting the narrative of miraculous and salutary triumph over adversity, which we all prefer. It's no coincidence that we encounter recurringly, like clockwork, young celebrities falling all around us, like bleached skeletons in the desert. We love heroes and we lament their fall. We celebrate Bill Cosby's triumphant career and lament his "fall." Why is it that no one cared to bat an eyelash over almost five decades?

It's of course lonely at the top. Our celebrities, heroes, and leaders need no support--they float our dreams. Aren't they really our charges rather than the reverse, wherein we avidly devour them for diversion? This is why I love celebrity culture and the institutions that support it and utilize celebrity for its own ends.

(this is a work in progress; go easy)

 

Agent Provocateur

Agent Provocateur. From the 19th century French: literally "provocative agent". I can be really bad. Yo estoy malito. Right after the Shavasana final Yoga relaxation pose today, two male students start on baseball and their favorite teams. This is just where I want to go after meditation. So one says, "My brother loves the St. Louis Cardinals and I have a bet with him". I chime in, "the only thing you can bet on in St, Louis is how many more black teenagers the police are going to kill this year". He says," that's a little harsh." I say, "what's harsh is that they killed him with his hands in the air." I am très obnoxious; baseball fans deserve their practice, too. Obviously, I need more Yoga. Alas, said the Bard, "get thee to a [monastery]."

 

See Paris First

SEE PARIS FIRST

Suppose what you fear,
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.

Then you would have the courage,
to go everywhere in the world.

All the directions of the compass,
open to you,
except the degrees east or west,
of true north,
that lead to Paris.

Still, you wouldn’t dare,
to put your toes smack dab,
on the city limit line.

And you’re not really willing to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights,
come up at night.

And just to be on the safe side, you decide to stay completely,
out of France.
 
But then danger,
seems too close,
even to those boundaries,
and you feel the timid part of you,
covering the whole globe again.

 

You need the kind of friend,
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”

 

—M. Truman Cooper

The Moment

View of Little Bighorn Battlefield, Montana

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,...
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper.
You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

--Margaret Atwood

Elena Brower

David with Elena Brower after her "Art of Attention" Yoga workshop, Stanhope, NJ, September 14, 2014. Just a lovely practice.

Belonging

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

                                       
- Max Ehrmann

Our Israelites

 

So rocking was the summer of 1968 that, when I was eleven at Boyscout camp, my whole troop hoisted my tent flaps at 6:30 a.m. as I sang The Israelites at the top of my lungs and danced. No self-respecting Boyscout had ever heard this music, much less seen a strange Jew singing and dancing it as it rained torrentially in Stokes State Forest, New Jersey. Let's just say that I was driven out of camp for doing a "strip tease" unbecoming of the reigning creed.

The question remains, do you remember the days of slavery?* At eleven I had no idea what "Israelites" Desmond Dekker was talking about, except, that in my little head, I was one of them. We had celebrated Passover only a couple months before and all I was thinking about were the Exodus and Promised Land stories. Well, it wasn't coincidence that so was Desmond Dekker.

*see Burning Spear.