Writing, standing on your head - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 4: Making Perfect Bodies
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Inez Baranay
IN MY RECENT NOVEL NEEM DREAMS (Rupa, 2003), I give to my character an early experience of
a yoga class:
Pandora is learning the ropes at the new yoga school. Into the ropes, the teacher says. People dive toward the walls, where ropes hang in an occult configuration. Doubled pairs, top and bottom. Hands holding onto the upper ropes. Stretch arms behind arched bodies, heels against the wall. Palms turned down. Bring the sacrum forward, lift the sternum, roll the shoulders back, hanging for ten, moving for ten. Another new language.
There is bewilderment and frustration in the early stages, not unlike, come to think of it, working out where an unwritten novel is going to take you, and then ...
One day in the downward-facing dog stretch, Pandora feels her spine move, her spine lengthen, she feels herself grow long, she feels her chest open and move toward her thighs, she feels her buttocks extend upward, she feels part of her body move and extend where she hasn't known there was anything to feel. She feels her upper arms turn, locates strength within herself, understands the movement, understands a new way to understanding.
Much better, the teacher remarks.
What's more, Pandora realises, first she hears Barbara say adhomukasvanasana and, before the English term follows, finds herself, kneeling, arms stretched, rising into the pose. Without thinking, recognising the Sanskrit term. Without thinking, the body welcomes the instruction, moves gratefully into this stretch.
Yoga requires close attention not only to the performance of a pose but to its effects, the effects today not necessarily the effects you will find tomorrow, the effects of being in adhomukasvanasana not the same at the beginning of a session as at the end, not the same after a triangle pose as after a headstand. You learn to observe these things, and thus to know your body, which is one way to know your self. Partly know a part of your self, anyway.
WE ARE TO SOME EXTENT OUR BODIES: rigid in some areas, flexible in others; more or less open, more or less strong, more or less resilient. Poses with back-bend actions develop our courage, poses with forward-bends develop our capacity for surrender, twisting poses wring out our abdominal organs, developing a feeling of lightness; inverted poses develop our ability to see things differently. Holding poses longer develops ability for stillness; doing poses in quick succession gets the blood moving, the heart pounding, the energy stirring.
The writer channels those abilities into the writing itself. I got serious about yoga when I was getting serious about writing and, though there's no way to test this, I know I'd never have been able to do all the writing I've done without yoga.
A writer must find her own voice, no doubt beginning with sincere imitation of those she admires. I felt I was finding mine around the time I first met B.K.S. Iyengar in 1984 and interviewed him for a radio program. "Are you a guru?" I asked him. "Your guru is your practice," he said. This answer made yoga possible for me.
This is not quite the answer heard by those who believe the yoga we do is that of an ancient tradition, the final authority in correct practice. The idea is, while yogis of old did not wear leotards, carry coloured sticky mats to their classes or practise to DVDs of celebrity teachers, they basically did what we do.
Well, they didn't. Yoga as we know it today is a construct of recent times, a contemporary form derived from a historical tradition, subject, as all traditions are, to varieties of influences, interpretations and political manipulations.Finally, when you're on the mat, you've read and listened to those who have more experience and insight, but it's you who must place your hands just so, each and every part of the hand extended, aligned and active, and see if you've forgotten about your feet. To merely obey an instruction is antithetical to the introspective, truth-seeking driving spirit of yoga.
In writing, too, tradition is cited as authority in like, you know, English, when new expressions get taken up 24/7 or whatever. But tradition as authority is antithetical to the inquiring, even disruptive spirit of writing, its spiritual drive.
We are not the same kind of humans, as those in the mythic or historical times of Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras: we have different relations to our bodies, our texts, our bodies of work. (I hope to become a yoga-practicing, text-producing cyborg.) Still, a writer is aware of antecedents and influences, a history from which we emerge. As far as I can tell, this is what people mean when they insist we write "within a tradition", such insistence usually being trotted out to censure beginning writers who do not read the classics, or teachers of writing who set contemporary texts for their students.
It seems to me that anyone serious about writing will eventually read their predecessors, and usefully wonder whether there is anything new to say, and what that might be; whether the exciting changes in everyday language might be enriched by disused vocabulary; what wealth of references you can share with others who also read texts that have been around a long time and what qualities keep a book current well beyond the context of its creation; how a chain of influence binds us to the practice of literature; what deep pleasures can be found in stories, language and thought from that strangest country, the past.
But we do our writing and our yoga inquiring into the present, shaped by contemporary developments in both practices, finding our own particular and original methods, and attaining the spiritual by being absorbed in the present.
And, maybe, it helps to think of these things while standing on your head. ♦