Still Sundays

November 21st.

God or no God, Stillness exists. Hawking & Whitman. Gardner: “A true artist is saner than the world and demonically mad.” Love.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

It is a cold, dark Sunday morning in New York City. I am hoping this is only because I woke up before dawn. I bowed out of foggy dreams thinking about Prague. Still. This was accompanied by the thought: why? The why too immediate to decode, my mind moved on to recall the beautiful frolic yesterday afternoon in New York City’s famous Bryant Park with a dear friend.

Right around the holiday season Bryant Park turns into an ice-skating “pond” and several rows of “mini-shops” peddling Christmas gifts and ornaments pop all around.

Prague is not as “bright” as New York, even when it is sunny it is subdued compared to New York City. New York City is an intergalactic spaceship of bright lights and yet we miss a lot of its quiet corners tucked away in sacred solitude. Prague despite being dubbed “dark and dreary” has just enough light that one can’t really miss its sensual beauty.

I don’t know what to make of the mystery that is Prague or perhaps that is a mystery after all: a restless riddle.  Today’s stillness swathes memories of dreams in Prague.

To state that Marco Roja’s yoga class this past Wednesday was intense would be an egregious understatement. Unlike most yoga teachers, Marco Rojas doesn’t do any yoga sequences or postures in front of us to impress or teach. He walks around the class, instructing and adjusting—sometimes with a slight touch of one finger tip, sometimes with his entire knee, other times with his foot, and then there are times with his shoulder.

Marco Rojas does not have a prescribed yoga sequence before class begins. He comes in, power and humility personified, breathes in our collective energy, and offers what we need as we continue from beginning to end. One never really knows what will happen.

This Wednesday, as soon as I saw “rock star yogis”—dressed in their expensive “yoga gear,” dolled up and decked out for an imaginary photo-shoot, chattering prepubescently —I knew we were in trouble. Our egos were going to get handed to us, stripped out all the way from our deepest core to our periosteum, the membrane covering our bones.

I was mostly immobile on Thursday. The hip flexors—a group of ten skeletal muscles that act to flex the thigh bone onto the lumbo-pelvic complex, i.e., pull the knee upward—are said to be the “seat of emotions” in yoga. And that is about all I know. My knowledge is limited on “chakras” or “force centers” which are considered whorls of energy permeating from a point on the physical body. I just step into yoga class and follow Marco’s directions in his beautiful accent and soothing voice and explore deepest integration given where my body and I are at that time.

The real inferno wasn’t Thursday—the hip flexors declaration of war on my physical senses—but what knocked me besides myself came Friday, extreme sense of disorientation and a heightened emotional state. Add to that the upcoming full moon, vivid dreams, exhaustion from writing and thinking about writing, and voilà: you are hanging from the glorious chandeliers of surreal creativity and maddening doubt.

I reached for extinguishers—-family and friends I trust— to control the fire within only to discover I was water. And quite alright.

I wish I could have reached out to John Gardner on Friday but it is now, while looking for a different quote, I re-read his chapter on “Art and Insanity.” I share an excerpt:

The tradition of [the artist’s] art has set before him and filled his heart with an idea of the good which is incomparably more attractive than the filth and foolishness around him, so that when he’s wakened from his trance, his artist’s dream, he comes up raging like a madman. This is a modern way of saying what Plato meant when he described the artist as “mad.” It is not that the artist is possessed by a god—or not in any sense that I’m able to understand. But out of the fullness of the tradition of his art, and out of his deep pleasure in struggling at art himself, he has chosen, irrevocably, art over life. Art possesses him, establishing his norms, which are not the world’s norms; hence he is saner than the world, and demonically mad.

At certain times in my own experience the sense of entrancement has been vivid. The artist and the psychotic make use of the same faculty and similar energy, the same ability to escape external time and space. The artist is free, the psychotic—helplessly driven by his fear—is not. The theoretical border between art and madness seems to be, then, that the artist can wake up and the psychotic cannot. In fact, though, the difference must be one of degree. Psychotics, we know, can snap out of it, and sometimes do, and an occasional artist relinquishes his hold. Sanity is remembering the purpose of the game.

We began with the observation that what distinguishes great art is its sanity. Now we must admit that the observation is a half-truth. Art’s essential method verges on the psychotic: the artist creates, by the energy of his mind (including his anguish or, at least, concern), prodded and assisted by the substance and convention of his artistic medium, a world that isn’t there, a dream.

Other things being equal, the more intensely the artist imagines his dream world, the more fully he surrenders to it, the more passionate his devotion to capturing it in words, images, or music—or to put it another way the deeper his trance and the greater his divorce from ordinary reality—the greater is likely to be the effect of the artist’s work on the reader, viewer, or listener. So long as the artist avoids what I have described as “hollowness” […] which substitutes for true intensity—and so long as the artist is a master of technique, so that no stroke is wasted, no idea or emotion blurred, it is the extravagance of the artists’ purposeful self-abandonment to his dream that will determine the dream’s power. The true artist always mad with all his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed […] but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.

True art is not rabid. […] True art’s divine madness is shot through with love: love of the good, a love proved not by some airy and abstract high-mindedness but by active celebration of whatever good or trace of good can be found by a quick and compassionate eye in this always corrupt and corruptible but god-frightened world.

That was a trip.

“God” came up during a recent correspondence.  Not quite an exchange, given the non-responsive interaction, but a mini monologue where I had used the word “God.”

I seldom use the word “God” for the same fear as my contemporaries, in the words of John Gardner, “God still exists […] but we’ve swallowed him.”

I was reminded of “Song of Myself Part #48” by Walt Whitman:

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious about God […]

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Upon my return from Bryant Park Saturday night, balancing fluid stillness as I moved  through concrete crowds, I saw this quote inside the subway:

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.  ~ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

God or no God, a certain underlying order there is.

Stillness is my oar to row through the currents of synchronicity.

Love.

We can’t define it but it surely defines us every time we sincerely risk opening to it.

I offer my obiter dictum: love is a revelation. Every. time.

Thinking of Anne Lamott’s words: “To love yourself as you are, is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.”

I fell off of my hip flexors on Wednesday night and through some miracle, while seeking myself, found myself.  Again. For now. What can I do with the past? The future can’t provide a good enough fix.  Sometimes it is a good thing now is all we have.

There is a melody in this silence borne out of this stillness where I choose freedom over fear.

I can dance to that.

My words that frame this mosaic of stillness are a flute and you create the music by breathing into it. I am grateful to hear what I imagine.

~a.q.s.

For those interested: here you can find numerous photos on Bryant Park in different seasons by Ed Yourdon.

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