Begin with navel gazing

Palms pressing against the floor, head between my outstretched arms, hips pointed upwards, heels pressing down: I strained to see my navel. The room, alarmingly, began to spin

Downward dog is supposed to be a restful position and though I have often wondered why if this were the case no one ever chose to rest in such a way--why, for example, no one would ever encounter a TV watcher in downward dog--this was not my typical reaction to the pose.

I slowed my breath in the hope that the room would be compelled to follow suit and still itself too. In yoga the breath is very important. The focus of the practice, I have often been told, is on the breath and this focus is meant to keep one in the present. Experience has taught me, however, that this is not always a desirable state. Once as a teenager I did so much coke that I lost the ability to breathe automatically. For hours I had to concentrate on each breath, performing the simple act of sucking in air and expelling it back out as if I was learning how to knit or drive a stick shift. I was absolutely in the present, caught in a Gertrude Stein poem without end, in which each moment repeated one refrain, "This is now, this is now, this is now." Stretched across a scratchy grey carpet that served as a bed for a boy too punk rock to buy a mattress, I thought incessantly about my body while the boy beside me struggled to stay awake and breathe with me. This, I thought, was love.

These days I sleep always on a mattress and think about my breath only after paying 10, 15, or sometimes as much as 17 dollars an hour for the privilege of doing so while I move from squat pose to crow pose in a room full of people in racer-back tang-tops and spandex capris. I am upwardly mobile.

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The Cypress Is A Flame

Between us there is an absolute gulf, a kind of ontological difference, and yet this unbridgeable rift also occurs in the experience of introspection. In this relationship between us and within ourselves, we have lost our mystery and yet have not become any less impenetrable. The diversions with which we try to occupy ourselves bear witness to a kind of being-left-empty as the essential experience of boredom - things are still there but they have nothing to offer us, they leave us completely indifferent, yet in such a way that we cannot free ourselves from them. Into this succession of days and tasks that recur each day, there come bad hours in which we sense that the forms we have given our lives are coffins. Hours when we can't sleep, and the darkness has blacked out the workplace and the tasks that await us. This kind of night can also occur in broad daylight. Emptiness opens up between oneself and the environment, one feels oneself drifting in this void. Anxiety is the sense of the emptiness, the nothingness. Anxiety is a premonition of dying, of the phosphorescent environment being extinguished about one, of being cast into nothingness. What we really want is to be objects. In a courageous mood, we treat ourselves less as free subjects than as objects.