a prayer for Daddy

It might be possible to make too much of the fact that I can bend forward easily enough but not backwards. In my yoga training it has been implicit that I would bend over backwards to please my teacher, since she has done so much for me. But in that direction my stiffness can attain comical levels.

With my teacher, I have been able to perform supta virasana [sitting on knees, then lying back (not illustrated: that over on the left is a bad version of vrksasana)]with only one bolster. But now I can't help wondering if that one bolster weren't a little puffier than the ones I use these days. True, with my teacher, supta virasana would throw my legs into a nearly immediate combination of numbness and pain. The miracle was less about doing the pose than about the fact that it didn't do me permanent injury.

Lately I've taken to sneaking a rug and a sofa cushion onto the top of two bolsters. Embarrassing. But at least I'm doing the pose. And if I can shut off my brain and its fancies and fantasies for a moment and simply do the pose, so much the better.

Today while I'm in the pose little Liam comes and stands on my legs as I've taught him to do. My eyes are supposed to be shut, but just as in the days of public prayers in Christian church I would sometimes peek, so here I watch him through half-closed eyes. He sucks his right thumb and strokes himself with the other hand, balance impeccable, dreaming a world for both of us.

Self in the world

Lourdes, France, the Catholic healing village and tourist complex. Signs for downtown and paradise point the same way. I apparently caught a virus here, August 2005. I began writing Bad Yogi soon afterwards.




My friend David Noble Green Self says that after he hears about suffering in the world, like that in New Orleans or today's problems in Guatemala in the wake of tropical storm Stan, he can empathize, but it doesn't really hit him until he gets his heart pains. He doesn't have a career, and his theory is that men in late capitalist society without careers get heart trouble. Perhaps such men are suffering vicariously for the sins of western empires, he says.

Self has various theories about what service hypochondria performs for late capitalist societies. We feel guilty, for example, for not feeling guilty enough for the suffering of those we hear about on the radio. Heart pains "solve" this problem.

Me, I'm interested in forgiveness. Can I forgive myself? For what?

Yoga's blue rectangle, the mat, shuts the world out but keeps inside the one feature that, in this world, most desperately needs work: the self.

"Do the pose," says my teacher.

view from a kettle

Here's Liam (age 5) in a portrait of the artist as an American child in England, face to face with the, uh, exigencies of cultural deformation. Seems to be weathering it cheerfully.