MOVING WRITERS FROM THE CENTER TO THE PAGE

 

The Yogic Path to Poetry and Conscious Activism

delivered at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, March 21, 2008

 I’d like to offer a series of vignettes that hover around some questions regarding poetry, yoga, and conscious activism.

 1. Questions

“What are poets for in a destitute time?” That question brings some of us here, a question Friedrich Holderlin posed at the end of the eighteenth century. At the end of the 18^th century as the Industrial Revolution started rolling its machinery across Europe amidst political, religious, and economic upheaval. As this nation emerged under the auspices of human rights and liberty. 

 And here we are, 2008. $316 billion dollars worth of mortgages defaulted this past year. Over $500 billion spent on the attack on Iraq. An estimated 700,000 Iraqis killed. Over 400 million refugees. Over 4000 US soldiers killed. A countless toll on Iraqi wildlife.

 “What are poets for in a destitute time?” And for us here, perhaps, another question is, “What’s Yoga got to do with it?”

 2. A Stranger’s Song

In the South Indian city Chennai – what used to be called Madras – roughly six million people live together, side by side, paper hut by palatial house. At 38 years old, I lived there for a couple of months to study Yoga with Sri TKV Desikachar. One afternoon, I sat on a dusty step in front of the sweet shop I visited each day and watched the crowds of women, men, and children in their uniforms pass along the narrowed street. I ate a piece of burfi, a South Indian sweet made of condensed milk cooked with sugar. Within a few minutes, a man sat beside me, a man with hair matted like natural dread locks, who smelled of dirt and wet leather, and who must have carried all of his worldly possessions in the plastic bag that he sat on his other side. He nodded and smiled a brown smile; I did likewise. He reached for the bag and handed me a half-eaten chocolate bar. I declined. He reached for the bag again and proffered a mashed, darkening banana. Again, I declined. Then he handed me a newspaper, some of which was written in English. It was three days old. I accepted and smiled and muttered “Thank you.” I reached in my bag and handed him a burfi. He took half and put it in his pocket, and the other half he lifted toward the sky and broke out in song. For three, four melodious minutes, his hand gestured toward the sun, toward the mongrel sleeping a few feet away, toward the woman who walked past and rolled her eyes, and toward me. He was singing. Doing what poets for centuries have done best. Reminding us of the power of praise & gratitude. Of relationship unmediated by ego and defense. If I could have remembered the words to “Luckenbach, Texas” or “Morning Has Broken” or “Song of Myself,” I might have returned his gesture.

From the ages 21 to 33, I had been a teaching and writing head.  I knew I had a body down there but wasn’t sure how to feel or think with it. And then at 33, I returned to a Hatha Yoga practice and a Zen practice, both of which brought my consciousness to my feet and to the earth beneath my feet. Within months, Yoga heightened my concentration and soon would begin tooling with my consciousness and craft. A regular, daily Yoga practice of postures, harnessed breath, sitting meditation, and an ongoing series of existential reminders shift something on a subtle level. My brain wave patterns changed and continue to change. My brain chemistry changed and continues to change. Gang members of my brain’s neighborhoods, I realized, begin to communicate. My heart beat changed. And as I immersed myself in the practice, something else frightening happened to a 33-year-old male: My heart’s armor broke away. So, on the sly I completed two Yoga teacher trainings, immersed myself in the texts like a good writer, and went to South India to study Yoga in more depth, to move toward the source of Yoga with Desikachar. Desikcachar’s father T Krishnamacarya had a brilliant mind and could have made a handsome living as a scholar in the remote Himalayas. But Yoga, he told his son, is for the people, men and women, Brahmins and the poor. So in the city he stayed, teaching students the texts and the philosophies, teaching women Sanskrit chanting and yoga, and working with individuals ailing with diabetes, anxiety, depression, cancer.

At Desikachar’s center in his father’s name, the Krishnamacarya Yoga Mandiram, the teachers work with autistic children, children with Down’s syndrome, adults with epilepsy, diabetes, and more. Yoga, I learned, is a mode of social activism and more. And as one young man who worked at that same candy shop said to me when he asked what brought me to his city, “Ah! Yoga. The art of living.”

3. The Heart of Yoga & the Poet’s Other Brain

In the 1840s and 50s, during the antebellum period, about 40 years after Holderin’s question, Henry Thoreau lamented his own destitute time with this optimistic observation: “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”

So, Thoreau, who knows and quotes the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, expresses what I began at last to embody in India and then back home: The heart of Yoga is to live consciously, artfully, habit by habit, relationship by relationship in this body, in this embodied mind, in this physical world.

To try to explain the nature of this change as it relates to poetry and conscious activism, let’s consider the Buddhist androgynous figure Avalokiteshvara, which translates to “He (or She) Who Hears the Outcries (Sounds) of the World.” So struck and moved by hearing and seeing humanity’s cacophony of suffering, Avalokiteshvara sprouted a thousand arms and hands—with an eye in each palm—to help not only hurting humans caught in their own hells, but suffering animals as well. To practice karuna, active compassion, is part of what we poets are here for. This is Carolyn Forche. Adrienne Rich. Rilke. Ponge. Keats wrote in 1818 about the poet’s character: “It is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing..It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair…rich or poor, mean or elevated—…The Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually … filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women.”

And hear that Yogi-poet Whitman:

“Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs….”

For me at least, before Yoga, these were all grand ideas – possible poetic postures I could summon with my intellect and craft. But by the time I was 33, something changed. I came out of my house, so to speak. I began to talk to people. I let myself feel sorrow and suffering, my own, others’. I listened.  I began to encounter human beings and animals and plants and things differently. My sense of Self continues to unravel. There is, at last, more space. Ego goes underground even for only a moment as I and thou and the globe overlap, as my SUV-driving, Bush-voting neighbors become part and parcel of me.

Yoga, at its heart, is about expansion, of expanding time with awareness and of expanding space with your heart. Yoga alters consciousness, and consciousness shapes craft.  I have become more privy to the reservoir of images that is the seed imagination; I heed the voices and vibrations that rumble underground. The very creative faculties on which I rely as a poet are not as elusive. Poetry has become less about expression and, like Yoga, more about expansion.

Poems stopped becoming intellectual exercises. Some of them became prayers. I now write odes to earthworms. To herons. To the embittered farmer down the road. A series of poems from women’s points of view. Of an Indian woman burning another woman for a dowry. Of my 35-yr-old brother-in-law who sits perched atop a humvee as it takes supplies outside of Baghdad. Of a Serbian soldier named Slovak. Of Brahminy myna birds.

Perhaps what some of us are for in this time is to awaken one another to the plights of our global neighbors and to the magnitude of this one life. Our poems perhaps become strings that vibrate and tweak consciousness and chink at our heart’s armor.

The heart is so intricately woven with cells that some scientists call it another brain. So, the question is not only, what are poets for? But what source are poets writing from? What is the core source of our words? Thoughts? Actions and activism? How much of that source are we writing from? 

And “What are we writing for?” A question I ask every morning – What am I writing for? That question shapes my actions as a writer with an intention, and then I move through sequences of postures and breath work to explore that intention, that help me see in the dark recesses of consciousness and write on the mat so to speak.

If we are part and parcel of one another, if we share the same atoms as Whitman sang, then let our words, actions, thoughts reflect that amazing intelligence.

5.  Bring It Home

As a side-note, I will mention an insight that Yoga has given me, a lesson that I shared with a 25-year-old screenwriter two weeks ago. This young writer was bemoaning to me the utter hell that is this world and how no one but him seemed to realize it and how only he seemed to be receiving special visions and insights into the nature of reality. I listen empathetically, and then I offered this: You are not special, and the sooner you realize you are not special, the sooner you may serve this world as a writer.

When I returned from India a few years ago, I came back with a new embodiment of community. The utter open-heartedness of South Indians, rich and poor, toward me and toward one another, awakened a calling to serve. I started hosting Woodstock’s first open chanting circle that brought together some amazing musicians for the diverse community that they may experience the power of Bhakti Yoga chanting called “kirtan.” And I kept sensing that our local yoga studios were incomplete. That charging $16, $17 dollars for a 90-minute yoga class in a designer-painted studio that encouraged all the beautiful people to be more beautiful was not resonating with my populist sensibilities.

My wife and I live in upstate New York, not far from Woodstock. Around us are old stone farm houses and trailer homes with tires in the front yard, rolling farmland and metal storage sheds, farmer’s markets and a slew of convenience stores with junk food & liquor stores. Some of our neighbors come from five generations of poverty.

My conscious activism is increasingly more local now without being provincial. This May, my wife and I will open our barn again to offer low-cost and by-donation and by-trade open community Yoga classes, meditation, permaculture training, gardening. We’re hosting two free readings and music for the people—one including a workshop & reading by Kazim. We’re beginning to talk more with our neighbors about how to bring people together, how to re-imagine our local economy, how to revive our local farms and food production, how to bring mobile food markets on wheels into our area’s food deserts, how to steward the patches of land for our other neighbors, the bobcats and bullfrogs, the cedar and the feverfew.

Real change happens with our feet on and our ears to the ground.

And we here at this festival are part of something happening that is beyond any of our comprehension. We live in a destitute time. We live in an extraordinary time of human action. For environmentalist and journalist Paul Hawkens notes in his new book Blessed Unrest we are experiencing the largest unorganized human movement in history with over a million organizations working on behalf of environmental sustainability and social justice. 

He writes, “In a time when people feel powerless, a history of altruism can be a balm because it reveals the power of helpful and humble acts, a reminder that constructive changes in human affairs arise from intention, not coercion.”

Yoga and Zen granted me this gift of intention – What am I writing for? What am I acting for? What am I practicing for? Intention characterizes for me conscious activism. Conscious activism is acting with compassionate and truthful intention, and, to paraphrase Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, on what is Yoga, conscious activism is to act with resolve and self-possession, without regard for results, open to success or failure.  

Conscious activism, for me, begins in awakening the heart and embodied mind, in this center, in this subtle body. It extends to the page, to the bedroom, the kitchen, the town board meetings where my vocalizations on behalf of destitute neighbors earned me last month the dubious honor of serving on our town’s comprehensive plan committee, to this simple life, to dream, to act, to write, to act.