A yoga class is different things, depending on the teacher and the size of the group. Sometimes a reflective monologue, sometimes a story, sometimes a hip, nature-based rant. At Yoga to the People on St. Marks Place in downtown Manhattan, which runs on donations and offers just the one Power Vinyasa class eight times a day to a packed room of fifty-odd people, they tend toward the last option and the message leans to: "do what you want, whoever said you had to listen to me, but keep breathing or you're not doing yoga anymore and you need to get that stance even again, honey..." however the word-stream might vary, the delivery is always slippery-smooth. Yoga teachers are to America now what card dealers once were: host and judge at the same time. And just as at the card table, no one ever breaks the host's practiced patter: "That hand's doing absolutely nothing; it's sort of this alien hand, right? So make a choice and commit to that choice..."
Outside the studio you're a block down from the Astor Place 6 subway, on a two-block stretch where any night of the week you'll see the refracted prism of a vision thirty years old. I'm struck by it anew every time I open the door to leave: upscale Asian restaurants, check -- karaoke bar, two-story with a large screen upstairs visible from the street, flashing a film of what looks to be Japanese Go-Go dancers circa 1965, check. Mandala Tibetan Store. Whatever Tattoo. Pinkberry. Pho 32 & Shabu Noodle and Shushi, Qui Gong-acupuncture on a second-floor landing with a cheap sign and the lights out. Half a block down to a mega-sized window display of the latest Halo shooter. Strolling musicians in saris with tiny cymbals; a wizened man in sunglasses on the violin taking "aid for Japan". Two half-drunken Chinese in need of shaves stumbling away from the harsh fluorescents of the sub-street level grocery, leaning into each other, punctuating their camaraderie on each syllable: "there was no way... I didn't know a nice ass like that..." They wander away down the sidewalk strafed with dancing neon from each eatery, past 2011 Vespas and Ferraris purring the other way, their acceleration disquieting, as cars made of money always are when you really look at them.
Around the corner are the ripped, geodesic domes of Cooper Union; the subway's lately had a Jimi Hendrix lookalike and masked, blackwear mimes using that one Michael Jackson song from Rush Hour.
Every time, down on St. Marks Place, I look around for the 100-foot screen with the Geisha smiling as the cops' hovercar flies by: it's the opening shot of Blade Runner, and it's right there, every time.
But there's more going on than my geeked-out awe at how urban evolution brought the shadowpunk dream to life and no one noticed. There's this: to whatever degree you can feel non-human in a large city, as if you were never born but just popped into view along a concrete path dotted by telephone poles and graphic designers and brisk waiters, you can feel it here. It's a feeling anyone can recognize -- it's as old as this country's rush to power. In New York, you can't get away from it. I don't quite have the language for it; you might need an alphabet that goes past Z just to begin.
On the way to St. Ives...
It's a precarious vantage point to write from.
It's a precarious vantage point to write from.
What is it in our minds or souls that filters our experience into sense? What's the nature of the solvent that makes a stranger into a friend, a friend into a soulmate, a soulmate into a stranger, like a dance partner it's time to let go of?
On the way to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives...
A few years ago I had a friend I'm not going to name here: we'll call her Sarah. Sarah had been coping with bulimia since she was sixteen; more than half her life, when I met her. She weighed less than eighty pounds but her self-image told her she was elephantine. She'd recently broken up with a boyfriend of ten years and was living on an apple every couple days in a barren apartment. When I left Oakland for New York, she was living out of her car. She had about her an unhealthy intensity that makes perfect sense for someone who's been throwing up for eighteen years.
I spent a lot of time with her over several months, because I'm enough of a reprobate misfit myself that the friendship worked, and because I was afraid she'd just up and check out of this life if someone wasn't taking the ride with her.
It was the only time I've ever seen this particular form of self-mutilation up close. I got the impression that bulimia is just what it looks like: a FUCK YOU that brooks no comeback. A body worker to whom I explained her situation told me that once an eating disorder's been in place for a few years, it's almost impossible to treat, because it's ingrained in the system: the aching and craving for something isn't just physical or physiological: it's spiritual. Sarah would say, often, that she didn't belong in this world, with a kind of fierce despair that always made me feel that she'd earned the right to say this, to mean it. To seek it: something else. Another life.
Her case was unusual, of course: her family had never accepted that she had a real disorder needing real treatment. ("Isn't it time you just got a job?" Et cetera.) Sixteen years in, with no support network and no learned skills to fall back on... of course she was consumed by paranoia. Wouldn't you be?
To reside that far away from the rest of life and not be dead takes some serious willpower. We'd sit in a park all day, talking; she'd lie in the grass, smoking while ants crawled over her. ("Dude, there's ants crawling on you." "Love me, ants! Bless me and ravish my body!") Or she'd lie on the sidewalk with the same result.
Our friendship ended badly. She sent a long, chatty email, opening with "say hi to New York! I'll probably be dead soon..." and I reacted the way commonsense dictated. And then life went on. As you might expect, she does not have a perky Facebook account adorned with pictures. I never knew if she lived or died. She most likely would rather I never said a word about her to anyone, ever again. Let alone this.
On the way to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks.
New York is the home of Paul Auster, who I've written about before: a writer I once idolized, inasmuch as you can idolize someone who writes pitch-black stories about loners. He built a career, first in poetry, then novels, out of his own kind of self-mortification: an endless paring away of everything clumsy, of trying to hit the essential something, the intangible perfection of a phrase or scene, always just out of reach. The people in his imagination are always barely there, forever on the verge of disappearing, locking themselves up in dark rooms to become stones that think and never coming out again, or coming out baroquely disturbed; pathologically magnified with nightmarish, breathtaking grandeur into Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men of crazy.
Every sack had seven cats.
And I guess the sticking point for me about Sarah is that I could have lived where she lived. Auster's one of those writers that believes that when you write, you take whatever really happened and appropriate it for your own use anyway, stacking memory on memory until the truth, the real event, the way things happened is long since gone.
Every cat had seven kits...
When you choose to persist in putting words on the page simply because you want to write, you always touch the vanishing spiral. You choose to go in, and then you choose to wander. Or you choose to let it go and return. But everyone who's ever seen their own personal, potential Don Quixote in their mind's eye has made these choices.
And these choices, quite simply and profoundly, change you. I don't know if many of us understand that, these days.
Then again, neither did Quixote.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?
Only one, of course. The only one going to St. Ives is the one who tells you the story.
I've seen two productions of Twelfth Night this year. Feste, the singing clown, speaks some of the finest lines that the author ever set down about words and thoughts.
A little while ago, the world begun...
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain...
A foolish thing was but a toy...
And the rain it raineth every day...
It's all just clever nonsense, of course.
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