Art and Yoga

Tonight, as I lay in Savasana, I thought about something my teacher said:

“Yoga makes you a better observer.”

Earlier, she had noted the changing season and daylight saving time — that the studio would be dark before the end of class, and then the dreaded: “it may snow tonight.” I moaned a little with my sweaty forehead pressed to my kneecap, slightly annoyed by the distraction.  She then added, “Hot yoga helps me tolerate the cold better.  In the same way, I tolerate heat better as well.  I don’t judge the hot or the cold, I just observe it.  It is hot.  It is cold.”  

This may also be the case as I deepen my artistic practice.  Admittedly, I’m not reading as much as I’d like, or rather, I’m reading differently.  I don’t read longer works like I used to.  As an English teacher, I read the same works over and over, and that’s enough for me right now.  Can one ever read Hamlet too many times? Things Fall Apart? Brave New World? I’m happy to report that I still enjoy “A Modest Proposal” as much today as I did 15 years ago.  It’s become more relevant for me today anyhow.

An observer? Yes.  Decidedly so.  Distractedly so.  

I can’t watch a movie without tearing it apart by its imagery and locking away turns of phrase that I might weave into some poem.  I heard an anecdote today about a science teacher whose lab experiment went haywire and I made a note to fold it into a story.

Detached from judgment?  I’m not sure yet.  I have always been overtly positive about art — rarely critical, but not inarticulate.  I appreciate a “bad” seventies B-movie, especially in the horror genre, as much as a good David Lynch film.  It’s just a different appreciation (and you can’t tell me he didn’t study those movies, too.)  

It’s art.  Not hot, not cold.  Just art.  Does it matter what the purpose is?  Sure it does. At least, it still matters to me, in the sense that I’m still moved.  Aesthetics is still critical to creating art — otherwise we are like strictly technical jazz musicians with perfect timing but no swing.  No soul.  Of course judgment is still involved in my observation, but there’s judgment about form and technique, and then there’s the life of the piece.  The luminous heart of the work. That which induces a trance-like state for me, not unlike the bliss of a sun salutation.

I’m reminded of the rabbit-like palpitation in my chest and shortness of breath I cherish when I read Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”. I use the poem when I teach meter, scansion, and sonnets.  We look at the form, discuss the ways it fits the sonnet, and then the ways in which it doesn’t.  With purpose, we tease out the syllables that hold irregular stress, leaping over the fixed form to draw our ear to the key words and images — hunted, death-blow, dying.  That’s technical.  It explains a lot.

But thankfully, it will never explain my swoon.