Mon., 7 Nov: storm blown out //
Thump K-27 points for a minute or so to clear the brain fog and calm down. The leader of the breathwork class on Saturday said that the reason we yawn in the morning is to calm down, not to forcefully wake up. The body emits cortisol to get us out of bed, and then we yawn to induce a parasympathetic state and slow the roll of that hormone.
The K-27 points are soft indentations that can be found about an inch below the inner ends of the clavicle bones. I got this exercise from Donna Eden, from a book of my mom’s. When our friends came to stay from Zurich I showed them the Heaven & Earth exercise and we did it together. Stephan really liked it. I wonder if he would use energy medicine with any of his clients (he’s a psychotherapist). They tell us the rent is about the same in Zurich as it is in the Bay Area, but the pay is generally higher.
Pull the Nine of Pentacles reversed today: the wealth card. Appreciate all you have to grow into what you still want. I was surprised not to feel any envy in the hospital visiting N’s new baby. My mother had trained me to expect to feel that. She was adorable, and the shape and smell and sounds were irresistible. Possibly my phobia of hospitals colored my experience with anxiety. My love of sleep, my revulsion of codependence too. I have feelings I don’t wish to share on these topics.
Last night before going to bed Erik floated into my head, asking if I had any questions for him. This has never happened before, but made sense maybe since I had fallen partly asleep during a meditation of his earlier in the evening. Jealous of his publication record (both academic and popular) and his prolific speaking and blogging, I asked, How do you write?
You do it for yourself, he responded instantly. But it’s a prospectus for the department, I whined. No, he said firmly. It’s a plan to help you write the book you want to write. Write it for yourself, then make it sound like it’s for them.
Do a Cross Crawl. It occurs to me that when sitting in a chair, the energy pools in the pelvic girdle and cuts off the flow of circulation throughout the body. I have a theory that the most popular poets in the modern and postmodern literary worlds are responding to the failures of secularization in their particular cultural moments. They exist to fill in the gaps of religious, or ‘spiritual,’ leadership; they function as guides.
Whenever I start to write on this topic I feel constricted by my own intense desire to ‘put a bow on it’ and say in a few dense, un-unpackable sentences what requires a book to unravel. John Ashbery and Rainer Maria Rilke register disenchantment’s discontents at the beginning and ending of the 20th-century, respectively. Their personal biographical religious affiliation or lack thereof is of less immediate interest than their outstanding ability to absorb and reflect the spiritual needs of their communities and environments.
This dual work of absorption and reflection describes the role of the artist in the secular and postsecular centuries in the West. It happens to be interesting that the lyric poet represents these centuries (in this case the 20th) because the speaker’s voice, the “lyric I,” stands uniquely poised to capture the modern/postmodern individual subjectivity, atomized, disconnected, and cynical, but still seeking. The ways in which both Ashbery and Rilke deploy the lyric “I” may show us how we see ourselves in relation to what’s out there.
Deine ausgeübten Kräfte spanne,
bis sie reichen, zwischen zwein
Widersprüchen . . . Denn im Manne
will der Gott beraten sein. //
(Stretch your practiced powers
Until they reach between two
Contradictions . . . for the god
wants to be advised from inside man.)
—Rilke, mid-February 1924, at Muzot
