Whirr of wings

for Zori

The whirr of wings you live within
Its feisty, rapid, quickfire hymn
Of questions here and answers there
Ideas, plucked dancing from the air.
Are you quite safe amid this pace?
That drives you with such frantic grace?

Do hummingbirds, I wonder, think
As they consume their weight in drink
Of nectar each and every day
Do any of them stop and say?
"I should slow down and rest and wait,
or all this stress will seal my fate.

"My heart can only beat so fast.
I cannot stay. It cannot last.
But still I love the whirling dance
Of movement, flight and speed's romance."
Do any of them stop with care
to pause still fluttering in the air?

Of course not. Such a thing would be
A tragic waste, a travesty.
To pose the question is absurd.
Just keep on whirring, hummingbird.

The Harry Potter School of Heroism

An iconic line from ‘Batman, the Dark Knight Rises’ embodies a sentiment so cruel and abusive that it shook me. The line is “You have my permission to die”, first triumphantly spoken by Bane after snapping Batman’s spine in single combat as a monologue revealing his dastardly plans for Gotham. This was glorious stuff, a key moment in the story where Bane stands with complete power over his adversary, choosing his words carefully to inflict as much despair as he can on his helpless victim. This is a man devoid of humanity, a monster worth fighting, a Bad Guy.

Now, this wasn’t the thing that bothered me. The thing that made me stop and think ‘hold on a second there’ was when the tables were turned. When, on the steps of City Hall, Batman (now recovered from his spinal injury) fights Bane mano-a-mano, and wholly defeats him. Standing over his wheezing, pathetic-looking body, Batman re-echoes Bane’s words: “You now have my permission to die”. At the time of writing this essay (2013), the phrase has become an online meme, echoed by anyone seeking a quick laugh at the melodrama of its overblown callousness. 

Thinking a little deeper, I’d say that this was the moment Batman lost. He lost by becoming as cruel and heartless as his enemy. Naturally, the logic is that Bane deserved it, he was simply getting his just desserts. Payback’s a bitch.

Another line, this time from Nietzsche, springs to mind: “Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster.”

The theme of ‘good but badass’ heroes is ridiculously common in action movies. Tough, ruthless men and women: warriors, mercenaries, soldiers, cops, spies, bodyguards, commandos, ninja, assassins and hitmen are frequently portrayed as heroes. The distinguishing feature they possess are a very particular set of skills that usually come down to the ability to kill people (and to look sexy doing it). They are Good Guys. They kill Bad Guys. Sometimes in a spectacular fashion that elicits cheers and applause from movie-goers. This could be a beheading, a knife through the crown of the skull or perhaps an explosive detonated within their adversary’s body just after the bad guy realizes what is about to happen. The image of ‘a good guy with a gun’ is glorified and eulogized, enshrined in legend and admired by lots of people, copied by some in their choice of profession or their own self image.

Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, is an object lesson about cycles of violence and vengeance: an eye for an eye, a rape for a death, a mutilation here, a little cannibalism there. One must admit that the bard went a little berserk at the end there, but the underlying theme is pretty clear. Payback is a bitch and an uncaring, undiscerning one at that. Violence inflicted on your enemies will in turn evolve into violence inflicted on you and the moral arguments you might try to use to continue justifying retribution become ever weaker as you continue. Moreover, the situation perennially escalates, becoming more entrenched as you progress. Once you start with vengeance, you will find it harder to stop. This is the tragedy that gets played out again and again in places like Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Algeria, Belfast, and even on the streets of my home: Los Angeles. Men fight and men die based on the same tired, empty, cycles of revenge and retribution.

If these people have heroes, they are as the ancient Greeks imagined them: Hector and Achilles, cutting through swathes of enemies to wade in their blood, gloriously terrible and beyond the scope of lesser men. To me, these people aren’t heroes, but bullies, driven by ego and a need to dominate and overpower others. 

Consider an alternative 'school of heroism', where evil can be confronted by intelligence, force (if necessary) but always by humanity, decency and goodness. 

Consider Harry Potter.

There’s a moment in HP7 when Harry is fending off the evil machinations of the dastardly Draco Malfoy. They’re flying around the Room of Requirement and someone starts a fire which traps and threatens to engulf Malfoy. Harry then places his own life in danger to rescue Draco, just simply because it’s the right thing to do. At a later stage, when Voldemort has supposedly killed Harry, Malfoy’s mother examines his body to find he’s still alive and she lies about it to Voldemort. Why? Because he had saved the life of her son.

This embodies the sentiment expressed by Abraham Lincoln when he said: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”. By steadfastly holding on to his decency, even in the face of all manner of provoking circumstances, Harry provides an exit route from this steadily spiraling cycle of violence, as similarly demonstrated by Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

An important aspect of the notion of heroism is that it presents idealized people who we admire and aspire to emulate. I wonder how many professional murderers chose their profession because of James Bond, the Godfather, Scarface, American Sniper or maybe even Batman.

We need to choose our heroes wisely. I choose Harry Potter.

The Barbarism of Fear

Weapons are funny things. I'm a pretty seasoned competitive fencer, or rather, I used to be. Nowadays, when I show up at a good club for a bout or two and can expected to be trounced by everyone, but in my day, I wasn't half bad. I was a pretty good foilist: 75th in England in 1995. I trained with Olympians and even beat one of them once in serious competition (it was his first bout of the day and I'm pretty sure he was half asleep). So, I knew and still know how to fight with swords. I watched swordfighting movies with a high body count and would be generally more concerned about the techniques being used than the actual events being depicted. I loved Akira Kurosawa's classic 'Seven Samurai' or Robert Mitchum's 'American Yakuza' and 'The Princess Bride' remains one of my favorite movies of all time.

I wonder how I'd feel if my interest in swordplay was linked in the public mindset to the Rwandan genocide, so that people associated me with the brutal members of the Interahamwe, who killed close to a million people in Rwanda in 1994. After all, they largely used machetes which could be considered to be a little like swords at a pinch. Naturally, the connection would be a little ludicrous and grossly unfair.

I think that this may be the way that some gun owners feel when they are associated with the atrocities of mass shootings. Even if you might disagree with the comparison, I think they feel unfairly judged. Like me, they have an interest in perfecting their skill at using their weapons. Like me, they might even romanticize the martial art itself. Like me, the idea of actually using a 'live version' of their weapons on real people might horrify them. There are a great many gun owners who would never, ever kill anyone, except in the most extreme of circumstances. It's an interesting fact that the majority of US infantrymen in WWII would not fire their weapons at the enemy; to the chagrin of their commanders, but also as a loud testament to the natural goodness of humanity. Training programs in the army put paid to that pretty quickly so that soldiers in Vietnam were much more likely to kill when facing a real person (and suffer the associated psychological trauma into the bargain).

The crucial distinction about weapons arises from a person's underlying intention.

There are people who learn to use swords and other weapons in martial arts classes with a focus on self defense. This could include sticks, knives or other 'realistic' approaches to using and defending against weapons (including unnarmed techniques). The intention here is to hurt, injure, blind or even kill your opponent. Similarly, there are gun owners who obtained their weapons for 'self defense', to protect themselves and their families. When someone has that intention, I feel that they transition into a new state of being; you become someone capable of killing.

The much-overused phrase: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is true, but if you bought a gun with the intention of firing it a human being (for whatever reason) then you might well just be one of those people who kill people. It may even be the case that the process of holding a gun in your hand, of firing it at a target that looks like a bad guy crouching and waiting to strike, of enjoying action movies that depict bad-ass heroes kill bad guys makes someone more likely to be one of those people that kill people.

I practiced martial arts (including Krav Maga and Jeet Kune Do) for several years, it seemed like a natural progression from fencing and I liked it. I was good at it and still am (up to a point). I remember though, watching the movie 'United 93' about the 9/11 hijackings, how my body felt during the film. As I saw the action on screen, I started to internally visualize choke holds, takedowns and elbow strikes that I would have tried to use, had I been there. It was intensely vivid and visceral. In my mind, I would have fought, gouged and strangled and my body and brainstem was happy to help. At that moment, I confess, I was quite capable of being a killer. If I had been trained to use firearms, I'd probably have been planning of how I'd shoot them instead of choke them. Guns simply make it much easier to translate this sort of murderous intent directly into action, reality and death.

Barry MacGuigan, the great irish featherweight, grew up in Northern Ireland amid the murderous violence of the troubles. He used to say 'Leave the fighting to MacGuigan' as a counter to the rhetoric being slung about between Protestants and Catholics. He was the inspiration for the 1997 movie 'The Boxer' starring Daniel Day Lewis where the main contrast between protagonists drew a bright line between the men who fought with their fists to win and men who fought with guns to kill.

There are times, I suppose, when we might need to fight, tooth and bloody murderous nail, for survival. I hope never to be placed in such a predicament. If I was, I hope to acquit myself with the same level of courage shown by Victoria Soto, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn, Alex Teves, or Brian Murphy (heroes from Newton, Aurora and Wisconsin). To have to ponder such a situation is to have to consider a truly horrifying choice. Must we all train ourselves to become killers in order to survive? 

This is barbarism. I feel that we have to ask these questions about why we have become so afraid of one another. Why are we willing to become killers? Are we that afraid of each other? Do we really need to be able to kill our opponents in order to feel safe? Or to feel powerful? Or relevant? At the heart of this question is a deep seated fear of other people in our society (or even of society as a whole) and addressing that issue directly is what we need to do.

Posting gun-owners' addresses online absolutely will not help, neither will asserting that 'genuine monsters' live amongst us, neither will spouting nationalistic rhetoric with accompanying conspiracy theories and threats of violence. Finding effective methods to reduce gun violence in the long term would be a smart thing to do (and the research shows that rates of gun violence tend to correlate with the availability of guns). I think that finding some courage to act with restraint and consideration towards people who scare us might just make a much bigger difference in the long run. 

West Coast Vibe

The grey is grounding,
After all, it is December.
Standing here
In workout clothes
On the beach in Santa Monica
And not freezing.
I look out over the Pacific
Amid the beach's paraphernalia
Restrained from exuberance
By the light drizzle.
I watch the Ferris wheel,
Bright and gaudy
Unmistakably childish
With a west-coast
Commitment to
A non-serious vibe.

I think a little of
An English grey
A little harder than this:
Slick, hard pavements
Wet and cold after the rain,

And I smile.

Stationary Glide

When the wind catches,
Their outstretched wings,
Birds glide,
suspended in space.
I'd guess, they laugh
to themselves
As the rush of air
Buoys them and holds them,
Propels them and frees them.

When my own breathing
Catches
A hidden edge
Of balance,
And lifts me
Muscle by muscle,
Bone by bone,
To a hold
Previously unreachable
I chuckle inwardly.
Not quite as graceful
As a gliding gull,
But hey.

The eyes on the wire

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

'Bird on the wire'
Leonard Cohen

I was driving from work in the early evening, waiting at a red light in the grim no-mans-land of the space beneath a freeway in Los Angeles and just glimpsed a view of a pathetic, saddening sight. A struggling, misshapen, bundle of feathers, flapped uselessly as it dangled trying to escape from a wirelink fence. I sat, a little horrified, not sure what I was seeing and the light turned green and I drove off.

It was a crow, it's legs somehow entangled and bloody on the wire. Trapped, dangling, helpless, waiting to die.

In the space of thirty seconds, I turned the car around and started looking for a place to park so that I could find some way to help. I had to park illegally and jaywalk to return to the spot. As I walked up to try to figure out what to do, another car pulled up and a guy hopped out with precisely the same thought on his mind as me.

It was a moment of immediate recognition, cooperation and shared humanity. We started trying to figure out what we could do. The crow had some sort of plastic twine wrapped around it's legs that had snagged. It was ten feet up and neither of us could reach it on our own. The only cutting implement we had was a plastic knife. The other man made a cradle with his hands that I stepped into and we started trying to cut the crow free.

Naturally, the plastic knife was completely useless and I had to try to be careful to avoid hurting the crow, avoid being pecked and scratched by the barbs of the wire. I'm not exactly a dainty, little thing: I weigh a solid 180lb and as I was dithering trying to cut the twine, my new friend was finding it hard to keep hold. We took a break to reexamine our options. It was then that we noticed a whole murder of other crows, circling and screeching. They could see what we were doing. They probably thought we were trying to kill or eat their friend and they making a lot of noise. Their caw-cawing probably meant "You bastards! Leave him alone!"

We looked at each other, hopping up to try again. This time, I tossed the knife away and just tried to pull the wire apart with my hands. My friend kept it together, holding me steady. As I came close, the crow on the wire stopped moving, his black eyes focussed on me in a moment of realization. I swear that I saw something glimmer in his eyes at that moment: a sort of desperate hope, perhaps even the recognition of me as a friend.

The twine gave way, and I scratched my hand across the barbs of the fence. The crow fell in a bundle of bones and feathers, but the sudden movement returned him to his element. He unfurled his wings and transformed in an instant from a clumsy, broken thing to the majestic shape of a bird in flight. He swooped away from us effortlessly, rising to join his brethren in the sky.

My new friend gently lowered me to the ground. We looked at each other and smiled. I held out my hand. "I'm Gully" I said. We shook. "I'm Bruce", he replied. I think I said something like "Very well done, sir" and with that we got in our cars and went our separate ways.

There we were: two complete strangers, coming together without any forethought in a moment of crisis to help. Neither of us could have managed on our own, we needed each other. We both knew precisely what we were doing and why we were there without bullshit, without ego, without any need beyond the fierce urgency of saving a life, hanging helpless from a wire.

It is this urgency that we have lost. We rarely see the sheer, bloody, inviolable miracle of looking into another creature's eyes and seeing a thinking being there. We rarely have our interactions be simple expressions of love and support, strength and courage. We sully the miracle of our lives with petty fears and concerns, with our defense mechanisms for our vulnerable egos, with our fantasies for things we see in movies or on TV, with our arguments to diminish other people and elevate ourselves.

But there are rare and real moments of pure clarity that provide the antidote. They are what matter and strangely enough, attempting to construct them artifically almost never results in their authentic expression. Better to live true, be kind, and be ready for them when they appear. I hope that I will be able to.

Walled Gardens

Last year, I signed up to a 300-hour teacher training apprenticeship program in a new up-and-coming school in Santa Monica. I should not have, I had nothing like the sufficient time available in my schedule but I knew a number of the teachers at the school personally and the owner charmed me. He promised that he would do everything he could to make my experience really fantastic. I had the impression that there were things I could learn with this man - his wit, his sense of humor, his laid-back approach to the practice. It all spoke to me of places in life that I, with enough instruction or patience, could one day arrive. It spoke to me a place that I did not inhabit, a walled garden, a sanctuary. I wanted to live there.

Fast-forward a year and the final, guillotining communication from him that severed my contact with this studio echoes with condemnation of me as a person.

"I am sure you are angry ... it is your anger that prevented me from discussing the [DELETED] matter with you and kept me from quickly responding to your demands. You scare me and you have for a long time."

Here, the walled garden was now protecting its serenity, through force.

When I was still in the program back in February, I was going through a rough time. I had met someone at the studio who I had developed strong feelings for. Those feelings were not reciprocated, however, and there followed several weeks where the woman I liked was not attending class. I sent her texts: "Am I the reason you're not coming to class?". "No, no, I'm having roommate issues" came the replies. Something was wrong and I wasn't sure what. I finally came to the realization "No, no, you are the reason she's not coming to class, (you stupid douchebag)" and I immediately left the program, informing her voicemail that I was going and it was now OK for her to return.

During this time, I felt pretty low. The feeling of rejection surrounding the entire experience was traumatizing. I wanted to talk to the owner of the studio about this and maybe ask for a partial refund of the money I had spent to sign up. No dice. He was slow returning my emails or calls. After 6 weeks of waiting, I got angry and told him so. It all degraded even further from there. I wrote a strongly negative review for the studio online and the owner posted a number of quite hurtful, dismissive rebuttals and then sent his final email to me (partially quoted above). He said nastier things in this mail, some of which were deliberately intended to be hurtful, coercive, threatening even. I was quite careful not to make my communications personal (either private or public), but even then, he obviously interpreted the whole event as an attack on him.

I think back on this interaction and furrow my eyes in perplexed confusion. As a business owner, his handling of my participation took a perfectly straightforward situation requiring a little humanity and turned it into something really nasty. Some of the things he did were things I consider both egregious and unethical.

Why would someone apparently committed to the pursuit of yoga treat one of his customers so badly? He seemed genuinely frightened of the 'negative energy' that I had suddenly introduced into his world. I think that he felt that he was fighting for his livelihood against someone who he couldn't empathize with or understand.

All of his actions were geared towards excluding my 'issues' from his life. He initially ignored my requests for communication. When I posted my review, he tried to have it taken down. He then attempted to silence me by discrediting me and then his final communication has the tone of an act of violence: an emphatic rejection of me as a person. Naturally, this had a strong impact on me. I thought that perhaps that it might have had a traumatizing impact on him too, but no, he only really cared about the negative 'one-star' Yelp review I posted about his studio online. When I published this post, I also took down the review since now, it's time to move on.

As he wrote in his email to me, I scare him. Perhaps the purpose of yoga is to make people happy, and it's natural to attempt to preserve a space of happiness around ourselves. It's natural to attempt to avoid negativity, and to shy away from people with issues. We hang out with people we like, we avoid people we don't. It's simple, right?

Well, no. To paraphrase some Sanskrit (and hopefully do justice to millennia of ancient wisdom), yogic philosophy describes the four essential causes of suffering as egotism (asmita), desire (raga), revulsion (dvesha) and our own fear of dying (abhinivesha). These can all be bundled together so that each is a different expression of the same underlying root: a misperception of reality (avidya). Dvesha is related to this fear of negativity. The act of pushing away and ignoring the things that we recoil from prevents us from engaging powerfully with them. One might say even, that it is the basis of hate, of non-acceptance, of cruelty.

How do we learn to mistreat people? We start by distancing ourselves from them.

It seems that we think of 'happiness' as an idyllic walled garden: peaceful, tranquil, and full of gorgeous, happy, perfect people who never cause problems. Here, negativity can feel a little like a smelly homeless man mumbling quietly to himself in a corner. Most people just stay the hell away from him. Some people want to tidy him up a little and maybe make him a little more palatable for everyone by giving him some new clothes and a bath perhaps. Some people want to chuck him out, make sure he doesn't ever come back and attempt to eradicate any trace that he was ever there. Now, that's dvesha in a nutshell.

A little compassion goes a long way. Negativity is usually based on some sort of unresolved trauma. Even aggressive, argumentative, upsetting negativity is worthy of an ear just to listen to. In fact, people who are upset often only want to be heard and understood. Some of the most profound moments of communication I've had in my life were with people who were angry and shouting. When I was able to hear what they were actually trying to tell me, the whole situation usually transformed in a heartbeat. Sadly, that has not always been possible and, God Knows, I've been on the other side of that situation, saying how I feel, trying to be heard, but using a tone or a timbre that frames the conversation in a way that prevents the other person from hearing me. I'm sure that this is what happened with my experiences at the studio.

The defenses of these little walled gardens of human perfection are cold, hard and sharp.

Even now, I value my negativity, my shadow, my 'issues'. It serves as a barometer to gauge people's resilience. If someone can't handle a little honesty about a sticky point of conversation or the authentic expression of an emotion, what sort of person are they going to become when genuinely difficult situations arise? What will they do to protect their own little piece of perfection?

Life is as it is, negative and positive. For me, yoga is somehow to seek a sense of equanimity that treats the negative with the same respect and attention as the positive and isn't afraid of it. My personal challenge is certainly to understand the impact that my negativity has on others and be responsible for that impact (in some contexts though, I still assert that it's not unreasonable to expect a little courage, humanity and compassion from the people around you, especially in the context of something so personal as yoga). Having said that, there is a trend in the emerging multimillion dollar self-help and self-improvement industry towards the complete eradication of negativity. We are encouraged to try to build some version of the pristine, perfect, personal walled garden. These are now being sold as services, practices, tapes, books, courses, gurus (and yoga teacher trainings) as possible vehicles for you to transform your life into something beautiful, a place where you can strive to be perfect and happy: a walled garden all for yourself.

All I can say now, is 'Buyer beware'.

"Don't try to transform yourself.
Move into yourself.
Move into your human unsuccess.
Perfection rapes the soul."

- Marion Woodman quoted in Stephen Cope 'Yoga and the search for the true self'"