four boding starts
at three o'clock on the fourth day of Christmas, i was startled awake by a dream of a theater in North Carolina. i worked there as an undergraduate, and in the Dreaming i was mid-return. something about this scenario was disturbing, however, and as i lie in the dark my mind began to fill with questions about the future.
barring unforeseen calamity, i will complete my graduate work five months from now, signaling another of those life junctures where nothing is known, and one finds himself face to face with the enormity of endless possibility. every moment is like this, of course, but rarely do we accept it for what it is: exciting, but also frightening, especially at 3 o'clock in the morning.
rather than allowing my mind to spin in circles, i got up and went to the living room. i took out my mala beads and meditated:
vision of the fragile glass shell of my mind. i find myself trapped inside it, bumping from one side to the other. suddenly, i'm outside of it/ti fo edisni – i am the air filling the room and all that lies beyond.
eventually i grow tired again and go back to bed, but this insomnia and meditation stays with me throughout the day. i rewake at 8am, tend to various chores and meet with my half-Canadian friend mid-morning. i go to my yin's hatha class at noon, and in the afternoon i finally start revisions on the second chapter of my thesis.
a frustrating hour passes.
our weekly meditation group meets that night, and we spend an hour discussing the application of yoga-darsana in our lives, which is a medium-pretentious way of asking:
"do you practice what you preach?"
i talk about the conflation of, and confusion between, meditation in the colloquial sense and meditation in the philosophical sense. the former is more aptly described as a sitting practice, which sometimes (and perhaps atypically) results in the latter (what Patanjali calls as dhyana).
Buddhism (at least Zen variety) seems to outline this delineation more clearly than the yoga practitioners i've known, and in my limited, yet sincere, readings of such texts i have arrived at some understanding of the dangers involved with turning one's meditation practice into a substantial object (which can be possessed) rather than recognizing it as a transient, ephemeral process. put more simply:
one gains no-thing from meditation.
with the mysteries of the universe put to bed for the night, we practiced sitting together, and i had another damn vision, this time of a leaf spinning itself (counterclockwise) into a tight spiral, extending lengthwise towards the sky and the Earth. it had the shape of a elongated seed or pod, and was enveloped by a flame burning all around it. i have a blank canvas in my closet, given to me by Saylor years ago, and as soon as i come into some oil paints i plan to attempt a rendition.
but this is beside the point.
the point is that my yin and i came home and finished watching Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire:
the film is surreal, comical, and features les belles femmes above playing a single character named Conchita. Fernando Rey plays the male lead, of course, and he attempts to bed Conchita with all the absurd enthusiasm one would expect from Buñuel:
i know how he feels
there are innumerable failed attempts to realize his desire, and the film's French title (Cet obscur objet du désir) literally spells out the need for a Lacanian interpretation of these things. right now, though, with more revisions looming this afternoon, psychoanalysis is the last thing i want to write about. besides, these ideas are illustrated with images more forcefully than could ever be accomplished with words:
this poster is available here
suffice to say that terrorist plots by the "Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus" wreak havoc in the background, and Buñuel has this magical way of allowing the camera to linger in one place just a little longer than necessary, so that Rey's bourgeois nincompoop exits the frame and a second figure (a housekeeper, a gardener, a homeless man) is revealed to be the actual source of labor supporting his opulence.
visions and revisions,
mediation and surrealism –
thus concluded the fourth day of Christmas.
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