Embodiment

I can’t help but think I’ve been substantially misled by the environment I grew up in when it comes to how I think about the body. 

I feel like a general message I came away with in my childhood was that cultivation of the mind is more important than cultivation of the body. That may be generally true and especially incentivized in this economy, but that way of framing it as a comparison privileges mind over body as if they’re two separate things, and they’re not. They’re just not. 

And I understand how that kind of thinking made me and helped others feel better for not having cultivated their bodies, or for the real health struggles many face that make it really difficult to cultivate the vitality of the body. But at the end of the day, the psychological programming that led me to neglect my body also weakened my mind. 

An integrated approach would acknowledge that how the body works has an effect on the mind. This would mean that what (and when) you eat and drink affects your mind. How you move affects your mind. Your sleep, breath, the drugs you take (including caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc.), and your interactions with people affect your mind. The exercise that you do or don’t affects your mind. 

The integrated approach acknowledges these things, and then asks, so what should I do in order to become satisfied with my body and mind, so that I’m not falling into any psychological traps like unnecessarily comparing myself or physiological traps like being incapable of doing what I strive to do. 

Everybody may have different standards for the strength and flexibility or knowledge and mental acuity they want to have, but that’s not necessarily what I mean. Satisfaction doesn’t come sustainably by reaching goals when it implies dissatisfaction with the current state, i.e. the state of not having reached a goal yet. That kind of striving makes satisfaction contingent on reaching a goal and, having achieved something, tends to make continued satisfaction contingent on reaching yet another goal. 

The sustainable way is to find satisfaction in the process of striving. But that also means that there is no fixed end-goal, only a process. Rather than deciding you’ll be happy when you reach a certain weight, career, or educational degree, it becomes about being at peace with where you are now, submitting to the process of being alive, and improving from where you are at. 

This means that temporary diets that have narrow aims (like weight loss or muscle gain) generally become replaced by an approach to food that integrates all of the ways food affects the organism. Instead of sacrificing general health and performance for weight loss (like the keto diet), it prioritizes health and performance in a way that constantly builds upon these with no apparent end (though maybe some lapses). Becoming healthy, strong, knowledgeable, or skillful isn’t something you do and then stop doing; it’s a choice you are constantly making, so it’s less a temporary diet or training and more a lifestyle. 

My mind often thinks of the Elric Brothers, how they made a sacrifice (their bodies) they weren’t ready for that bore only horror and went searching for an answer (a way to get their bodies back) they didn’t know was there.

The Elric Brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward and Alphonse, search for the philosopher’s stone to restore their bodies after a failed attempt to bring their mother back to life using alchemy, which in this universe, operates under the law of equivalent exchange: for something to be gained, something of equal value must be lost.

I think that I sacrificed my body for an excess of something that I thought was valuable (knowledge). The result was a chronic illness that debilitated me for a few years, a high level of educational achievement, and a low level of actual knowledge retention. I overloaded in classes constantly, and I paid the price for it. 

My Watson year outfitted me with a blueprint for how to treat my body and mind so that they engage in a process of healing and improvement. Like the Elric Brothers, I’m on a journey to get my body back. 

Aspects of my year abroad established that a) physical strength, flexibility, and general looseness, mobility, and relaxation are worth striving for, not instead of but in conjunction with knowledge and understanding, and b) many steps in the development of deeper understanding are facilitated by putting the body in order. 

When Eugenio Barba went to India and encountered Kathakali, he was struck by the ethos of the boys at the Kerala Kalamandalam school of Kathakali, who got up every day at dawn to do their exercises for hours in silence. Their ethos sprung from the discipline, meticulousness, and humility with which they learned the demanding technique of their tradition. The act of doing theatre was encapsulated by their submission to the process of it. This embodied ethic, a craft’s foundation, is a popular ethos in traditional Asian theatre, and an ethos which under the Western separation between mind and body, muddling of the meaning of spirituality, and linking of work put in with the product that’s supposed to come out, is often absent in Western theatre. Étienne Decroux sought to achieve it in Corporeal Mime, and Eugenio Barba has sought it in training itself.

Eugenio writes, “All the physical exercises are spiritual exercises which relate to the entire development of the man [person], his way of making all his physical and mental energies burst forth and be controlled”; “training does not have a utilitarian goal. It is the amplification of the life of our body.” The training at the Odin Teatret varies widely from actor to actor, with most actors having developed their own individual training over time. What is shared universally is that all the training works on the body, voice, and mind, and is rigorous and consistent. Training is more than a career-motivated goal; Eugenio writes, “the mastery over this technique becomes a personal process which makes the actors discover their own interior flora and fauna, introducing them to the shared territory of their collective imagination… the training and the work on the performance become essentially the work of the actor on him/herself, also as an individual.” Since Eugenio encountered Kathakali, his tenet has become to let roots grow out of the need not to belong in any one place but to shape an ideal homeland made of values without borders. He calls this “to sink roots in the sky.” He writes, “There are people who live in a nation, in a culture. And then there are people who live in their own bodies.”

I speak of theatre because it is embodied philosophy. In The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, philosopher Mark Johnson writes of the embodied mind that “Our task is not to supersede the body but to embrace it, to learn how it allows us to have meaning, and to nurture it as the locus of our world” — because it is through our bodies that we experience the world. And when we view the mind as embodied, then meaning, imagination, and reason are embodied; reason and emotion are not separate but linked; and spirituality, too, is experienced through the body. The meanings we derive about the world therefore become grounded in our bodily experience. The concern of a world without a God was that there would be no inherent meaning. But by noticing our own experience, I think we can come to appreciate how we create meaning for ourselves individually through our experiences, and collectively through interpretation of our experiences. We can start to build that appreciation by becoming aware of, and learning to cultivate, the organism through which we experience life.

My research has largely been about seeing, and in particular, seeing people in their art. I could not see people until I could, at least partly, see myself. Something which has become abundantly clear is that we live within several different ways of knowing how to live, and these ways affect us, and influence our expression. I am not saying that art directly represents the inner state of the artist, but that it gives us a glimmer. Just as we are what we eat, we produce based on the lives we live, and where, and how we live them. I am not surprised that in the past my default expression was of suffering, nor that in the present it is of bliss. Suffering was my pattern of feeling then, bliss is my pattern of feeling now. What I created, listened to, read, watched, said, thought, was guided by how I felt, and how capable, or incapable, I was of separating or aligning myself with my feeling.

Our bodies are representations of how we live. When we move, we therefore represent our strength or weakness, our security or insecurity, happiness or unhappiness. If we’re not to fake who we are, then projecting the person we want to be is a matter of becoming that person emotionally, intellectually, and physically. If we’re not to live stuck thinking about the future, then we should do this wherever we are in the process with less interest in what we will become and more in what we are.

If I for a moment adopt an evaluative lens of my physical progress, I’ll say I’ve overcome the chronic sickness cycle that was holding me back and the lingering cough that was keeping things unpleasant. I can touch my toes now, but in the context of what’s possible for me in the long run I’m still inflexible. My pranayama breathing ratio averages 12 seconds (in) 24 (hold) 24 (out), but in the context of pranayama training and the yogic path this is a beginner ratio. I weigh 136, which is still slightly underweight for my height (6 feet). I ran my second half-marathon this week (the first one in Denmark in July), but my time (2 hr 40 min) is still slow and I have a long way to go before I’m ready for longer distances. I’ve built a lot of strength throughout my body, but I still have a lanky physique and have a lot of strength to build throughout. To get to where? I don’t know. My evaluative lens has standards. I try not to listen to it so much, because wherever I’m going, the journey’s amazing.

Music in Yoga (and other distractions from suffering)

I like music a lot. In the past I’ve been a big fan of alternative music. Circa Survive, St. Vincent, and Julian Casablancas were my jam. For several years I had on rotation a cooing mix of introspective and sadness-infused slow-march ballads that carry the astral beauty only found in loss. I imagine if I put all the album covers together, it would look as if the night sky were wrapped in cellophane. During my first month in Paris in a tiny apartment without WIFI, I pretty much just had that playlist and another that I’d downloaded on a whim before a flight—Soulful Disco. This meant that when I listened to music, I got a choice: either to be haunted by my past or confronted with boogie. The tonal juxtaposition achieved a Neon Genesis Evangelion-like eeriness, where Fly Me To The Moon punctuates every episode like a joyful meditation on death. Stuff like Shake Your Body and When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going did not work well then as my potato-peeling anthems.

When I was starting to get better after my nasal coblation surgery in January, all of a sudden I was more receptive to happier music. Then, I came to a place where I enjoyed pretty much all the music I was hearing. Then I started to experiment with (gasp) not listening to music.

There is the case of too much music. I used to play music to help me study or write, run, workout, etc. (I still do sometimes), but I’ve learned to wonder what noises I’ve been drowning out. One of my teachers at Tattva Yogashala, Sunil Sharma Ji, said it well when he expressed that Western yoga classes play all sorts of music. “But your breath is already such beautiful music!” And listening to things is great, but we have our own internal music—the sounds of our bodies, and all the stuff going on in our minds. I realized that by drowning myself in music, I was drowning out my thoughts, railing myself onto a familiar track so that I wouldn’t confront the terrible roar of silence.

And Sunil said something which deeply challenged me: music is one way we can distract ourselves, and television and video games and such too, but we also distract ourselves with books. Certainly, all these things have the power to inspire, to teach, etc., and are very capable of doing so for a quiet mind. But how much of my reading did I do because I was unable to sit with myself? How much joy, learning, and inspiration from it did I miss because I didn’t take the trouble of organizing myself first? 

Here’s me some years ago, writing about how even though I was taking literature courses, I didn’t seem to be experiencing what I was reading:

Two semesters of British
Literature and I’ve got
to return to you Spencer
Bacon Shakespeare I’m
I’ve forgotten you I never
really experienced your
pleasures I read you
but not really and now
that I’m here I know
that I wasn’t there when I
sat and I leaned down
and words passed through
a machine

There’s a frantic pace to it that comes from the constant reiteration of self (“I”) and the lack of punctuation, embodying in form the very opposite of what the speaker (me) of the poem wants: to slow the hell down and really hear something.

Here’s the first poem I wrote on the Watson, I think it was on the plane to Edinburgh:

If there are thoughts let them be heard
I hear
no thoughts
in here

I’ve had the pleasure of carrying around a book of Rumi’s poems for a while now. Here’s a fragment that pokes out at me at the moment:

“Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands
or your own genuine solitude?
Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room
will prove more valuable than anything else
that could ever be given you.”

It’s this kind of respite from noise that I needed, and that I’ve gotten. In a macabre, surreal (and narcissistic) sort of way, the problematic bits of my nasal turbinates that went up in smoke in January carried around the world and became a pandemic cold for everybody, as well as a shrewd imposition of global isolation—and for some, solitude.

Art comes naturally from a quiet mind, but so does learning, and so does clarity, ability to see. They all feed into each other so that art is an authentic and essential expression of both the individual who makes it and of all that’s around the artist, or to put it in more transcendental terms, of the very universe itself.

For me to begin to quiet my mind, I’ve needed to learn to stop constantly filling it with distractions and to take the time to really sort through what’s already in there. Sometimes I don’t succeed in that. Right now it’s hard. I distract, sometimes to soothe or numb myself, when I know that the hardest and maybe the best thing I can do is sit with myself until, whether the cause of the pain stays or goes, the pain I experience transforms into something else.

Happiness

I’ve been reading my notes from over the year. Here’s one I wrote in January before my surgery: 

Getting the Watson for me was like the universe telling me “all right Blake, good things are going to start happening in your life again. But here’s the catch. It’s going to all happen with your nose clogged. That’s right. Your nose, totally clogged. And it’s going to drip into your throat and make you feel like coughing. Without pause. The whole time.”

In my senior year at Pomona, I became fixated with happiness. Who was happy? Who knew what happiness was? I’d ask a lot of people “are you happy”, and I was usually pretty disappointed with the answers I got. Many people who said they were happy weren’t convincing, and people who said they weren’t happy tended to be at a loss for how to attain happiness.

When the quarantine started, I took an online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” The professor prefaced the course by saying that she herself didn’t feel happy or well. The course was about what makes us happy and what doesn’t. E.g. breaks make us enjoy positive experiences more, so commercials make watching TV more positive; experiential purchases make us feel more alive and less susceptible to social comparisons; we overestimate what our emotions will be like, so doing stuff like getting bad grades, breaking up, or getting married won’t make us feel as bad or good as we tend to think they will—at least not for long, because we adapt to good and bad events. 

But if the professor herself was unhappy, then something was probably missing. Becoming aware of how our choices really affect us and so making more happiness-adjacent choices in everyday life is one thing, but there seem to be missing pillars in here.

Edmond Dantès in Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo says that “I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.” In Confucius From the Heart, Yu Dan writes that “increasing our ability to hold on to happiness is the greatest thing we can learn.” 

According to Yuval Harari in Sapiens, people experience happiness only through pleasant sensations in their bodies. So “the only thing that can make us truly happy,” Harari writes, “is manipulating our biochemistry.”

By adopting changes in consumption (like vegan-based eating focused on healthy foods and a large reduction of distractions) and by adopting practices like yoga that facilitate changes in the body and mind, I’ve re-engineered, however much, my biochemistry.

Moshe Feldenkrais writes, “Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process and you improve the quality of life itself.” In pranayama, just the act of breathing becomes blissful. Improve the quality of breathing, and of course quality of life will feel improved. Learn techniques like abhyanga for self-massage or Feldenkrais, and it becomes easier to remove tension from the body, and with tension reduced and the body able to relax, life feels better. Heal a chronic cold and by golly, life feels better. Reduce craving for stimulation, and the mind becomes clear and life seems to get better. A general feeling of health and wellness in the mind and body doesn’t equate to happiness, but it means there’s a lot less to struggle against to get there. 

Family and community have a larger impact on happiness than money and health. It’s one thing to become capable and well and another thing to address the fear of loving. Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra “Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.” When I graduated, I was at a point that I no longer felt much love within myself. I had to learn to love myself first, and then I started to find family and community everywhere.

More than anything, happiness consists of seeing the entirety of one’s life as meaningful and worthwhile. We make meaning together, so maybe happiness is synchronizing one’s delusions of meaning with the collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conclusion. That was easy to do at the creative environments I found myself in over the Watson year, but has been harder since I came back home.

Finally, a little passage from The Catcher in the Rye has opened up to me.

“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit the bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement is designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

I thought my own environment couldn’t supply me with the feeling of love and meaning, so I looked for it in something else. I looked for some feeling of purity, I looked and looked and I found it outside. I’d given up on finding it at home, and possibly, even in the US. But whatever that purity is, as a character named Jeff in the TV show Community (about community college students) says, “Purity that demands exclusion isn’t real purity.” If I can’t find all-inclusive meaning for myself, then I haven’t found true purity, have I? So long as I’m able, I should keep “looking.”

The Non-Verbal Humanities

Though I’ve learned some things about how to write, I am realizing that my capacity to represent on the page will always be incomplete so long as I don’t know how to draw. In drawing, the principles are the same as I’ve been learning. Corporeal Mime is often taught to visual artists because, as a discipline that tries to express thought through movement, it teaches the artist to see the thought in movement, and so, to represent the character of bodies, objects, environment—all things. 

Reading through one of Tom’s books as he explains each movement of a piece in words, I realize how imperfectly words track the dynamism and fluidity of physical movement. Listening to an audiobook about Zen Master Ryokan, it’s evident that a description of each individual calligraphic line won’t give a clear image of the whole. The word and the image are each sublime, in different ways. When the word or the image try to explain the other, naturally, they fail.

Our education is largely verbal, so it fails essentially to do what it attempts to do. It inflicts on the world students of the humanities who know little about humanity, their own or anyone else’s (paraphrase: Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote,

“I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.”

I remember summer 2018, having daydreams of an angel with a clipped wing and writing that “I have a difficult time believing that I have a bright future.” I think I saw myself risen as an angel, having gotten to Pomona, and then having fallen by everything seeming to come apart, me returning home that year, ill, with nothing on my plate to do. 

Huxley explicates,

“Systematic reasoning is something we could not as a species or as individuals do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, into the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended.”

Systematic reasoning is a gift of the verbally-educated elite, a gift which to William Blake makes them angels. But, as Thomas Aquinas asks, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The question is nonsense. The separation into angels is a product of systematic reasoning. 

The key out is unsystematic direct perception. To direct perception, concepts are distortions that make facts into familiar likenesses, general labels, and explanatory abstractions. Nature, as the primary fact of existence, cannot be fully realized by concepts; it can only be realized by experience. I am no angel, I never have been—I’ve just thought I was.

Goethe wrote that “I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches… A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether.” Echoed through my mind is Beckett’s “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” I still think stains are important, even if they only take something transparent and make a spot of it visible, but I see how much more important it may be experientially for the individual organism to draw, and even, to move—to represent directly.

The non-verbal humanities don’t have to do with the perennial humanities question, “who influences whom to say what when.” The non-verbal humanities ask “how do we make ourselves more aware of inward and outward reality; more open to the spirit; less apt by psychological malpractice to make ourselves ill; more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system” (paraphrase: Huxley). Unbeknownst to me, maybe this is what I have really been studying.

I set out to learn about movement. What I knew was that the way western society has grown to move reveals a deep inner chasm where some essential somethings seem to be missing. I didn’t expect I would learn that the way we breathe, what we eat, and even the way we perceive time are getting in the way of our ability to be expressive. I did not expect that going on a journey to explore the body would take me into a process of healing my mind—but that is exactly what happened.