okay, it's been almost a week i believe. i think my last posting was on the 19th, which was about 4 days ago... but really, it feels like it's been a week. again, work sort of interrupts my life. i had to do a few progress reports and stuff like that. i'm also transitioning from teaching exclusively outdoors to teaching in my classroom. this meant moving a few shelves so that the windows could all be opened, to increase ventilation through the room. i know it may not seem to help, but it's recommended that we open the rooms up as fully as possible... so...
i decided to subscribe to adam mizner's online taijiquan course. he releases one video a week for his students to train on. so far, i got a video about loosening up exercises. they're actually really good. i may have mentioned that my right shoulder has been "clicking" a lot due to tension in the joint. well, i did some of those loosening up exercises, including one called "knocking on the door," and afterwards, when i did an arm circle, i noticed that there was no clicking! mizner feels that in order to properly do taijiquan, you have to "remake" the body. this remaking involves what's called fang song, or complete relaxation of the body. it means finding tension in the body and relaxing or dropping it. i think this first stage (the loosening up exercises) seeks to release tension around and within important joints in the body...
not much else to report, honestly...
i had a dream about cutting off my own thumbs with a pruning shear. during the dream, i remember repeating "compassion means with passion" over and over and over again. once i viewed the bloody stump where my thumb had been, i felt a kind of sadness and remorse and regret at the stupidity of that irreversible cut. that's the thing about cuts, they're irreversible. you can't fix things back the way that they were- only if you're a salamander, or in stupid marvel movies... when i woke up, i was releaved to find i still had both of my thumbs... but the sense of that irreversibility remained with me. there are a lot of things in life where you can't go back. in fact, maybe every moment in the present involves an irretrievable loss of the past- a very real pruning of things. we have a narratival recollection of time, so this pretends a kind of connection, a blurring, or an afterimage effect of the past... but really, we can't go back. we can never go back...
i always imagined, when young, that people were doorways or windows to other realities. and that each person contained a universe within themselves... as i got older, i started to feel that maybe a lot of those so called doorways were actually prison gates... in fact, maybe a majority of them were... and the people inside were, like me, just trying to get out... also, there were people that HAD universes within them, but more often than not, they were sinister and dark universes... the sense of finding people that had a kind of light and carefree world within them... well, it's been rare indeed. there is always a kind of darkness or need or compulsion that gravitates within most people... it makes of them, well, a sort of dark gravity well... that their light tries desperately to escape...
i despair of writing a narrative. a convincing narrative. a part of me no longer believes in narratival reality. maybe the point of my life is that disbelieving. maybe liberation is found only through a complete destruction of the narratival experience. maybe narratival reality is the one delusion/illusion that maintains this social fabric... we all love stories, we all love to tell stories...
in writing class, we try to liberate ourselves from "thought", and write more or less spontaneously. i think that's the whole point of the random prompts and the time pressures (like we have 1 minute to write about something random, like "teeth" or "she"). i sometimes despair, because i think that my controlling narratival brain is so hungry for dominance and so effective at taking over that it clouds over any chance for open sky and possibility to infect me. it steals the mike, in essence... and the result is dead words from a dead mouth. i don't know if it's possible to ever write something "real." "living." because by the time an inkling starts to break through, it's suddenly taken over by that other side of me...
i have in fact had this vision of myself... of the past me... that maybe once had a shot at capturing the truth... but that was so drowned or buried, so long ago, that probably nothing remains... i think that's why it's so hard for me to feel... it's so hard for me to even sympathize, or empathize, with much of anything any more. i am a kind and respectful person by habit, by rote habit... it's not that i'm genuinely caring, it's that i've been trained and molded to be this way, and i simply don't know how to be otherwise. it's not in my shape to be anything else... and meanwhile, that little voice, it is so indistinct as to be imaginary. a hint of something, an echo of something, drowned in this overwhelming and hungry darkness... is there any hope? is there any possibility that i could ever release myself?
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