I didn't realize that this was my 500th post until I came here to post this little middle-of-the-night, perhaps tedious screed about Yoga Journal, Gandhi, truth-telling, E.E. Cummings, my failing memory, and Ernest Hemingway. In that order. I'm like Thomas Pynchon over here, eh?
Anyway, here it is. I call it:
Ahem. You May Have Mistaken Sanctimony for Sanctuary
Oh, God, I hate Yoga Journal.
I hate the page-by-page appearance of yoga washed clean, yoga whitewashed all the way down to its being nothing more than the quasi-spiritual practice adopted by thin, bored, white women and men with enough disposable income to buy special yoga outfits and special yoga water bottles to drink out of while they sweat away their Catholic sins on special yoga mats. I hate that all the models in all the Yoga Journal pictorials all have these vacant, wide-eyed expressions (the middle-class American version of enlightenment) and bleached-toothed smiles and bleached blonde hair. I hate that even one page of Yoga Journalis devoted to those same women and men doing yoga on the beach at some exclusive resort that holds yoga retreats for those who can afford to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to other white yogis and yoginis. I hate that the one thing you will never find in Yoga Journal is a actual Indian from India doing yoga. It’s cultural appropriation at its finest, Yoga Journal, and I hate it. And I especially I hate the sanctimonious bent of Yoga Journal writers.
Only, there’s this: A recent article in Yoga Journal (a copy of which is sitting on my toilet tank even as I write this) mentions Mahatma Gandhi. (You remember him? He’s the guy who looks like Ben Kingsley and who led his people to freedom, such as it is.) The Yoga Journal article is ostensibly about truth. Gandhi wrote an autobiography called My Experiments with Truth. Here's a quote from it:
“Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must, therefore, continue to bear testimony to Truth even if I am forsaken by all.”
Beautiful, huh?
Reading that, one would think that maybe the Yoga Journal author might address some of the more intricate, nuanced approaches to truth. But if one thought this, then one would be wrong, because what really happens is this:
The (I’m sure) very nice white woman (whose name I don't recall, but who has probably adopted some Hindu-ish sounding name like Shiva or Namaste) mentions Gandhi’s work, then summarily dismisses Gandhi’s work. I mean, she all but flat out calls him a liar.
The first thing that offended me about her blithe dismissal was that it wasn’t even a dismissal on the order of “He was a holy man and, let's be honest, ain’t a-one of us mere mortals has the ability to hoe that row.” (I mean, that’s the kind of dismissal that I could understand because, seriously, having read something about how one should let the dead bury the dead made me run up against a wall of culturally sanctioned thinking.) No, her dismissal goes something like this: People like Gandhi, Kant and maybe Seneca (well, one of the pragmatic Romans anyway) are simple-minded in their analysis of truth and virtue; They never had to deal with the same kind of truth that she has to deal with. She goes on to actually suggest that things were easier for people like Gandhi because, as they adopted truth as a virtue, they woke up each morning with a very simple path before them. She then dismisses the whole truth-telling school of thinking with a kind of valiumed-calm, entitled wave of her pen. In fact, she decides, telling a lie is often the kinder thing to do and so guess what, that makes it okay to lie to people.
It was like a particularly violent car accident, that article. I was sickened by it, but I couldn’t look away from it. I actually read the whole thing. And one positive thing came of it: I was compelled to go and look at Gandhi’s autobiography as a result.
Here’s something:
Gandhi was enamored with truth, oriented himself and his actions always with respect to it, but he was clear-eyed about his own limitations in the face of it. Witness:
But I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacrifice the things dearest to me in pursuit of this quest. Even if the sacrifice demanded be my very life, I hope I may be prepared to give it.
--M.K. Gandhi, from An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth
There was nothing even half as sophisticated or compassionate or powerful or truthful as that in the article in Yoga Journal. And all I really want to say is that Yoga Journal can suck it.
Suck it, Yoga Journal.
After reading that article and some of Gandhi’s autobiography, I had to go off and read some poetry just, you know, as a way to take my mind off of things.
I’ve been looking for a particular E.E. Cummings poem for awhile now. Maybe you know it, it’s the one that starts with “a always don’t there b being no such thing for c can’t casts no shadows” and ends with “i item i immaculately owe dying one life and will my rest to these children building this rainman out of snow.” (I memorized most of the poem maybe seventeen or eighteen years ago, but I don’t know where the line breaks are--and I think some of the poem has faded from my memory, including the central part that has "grass is flesh and swim who can and bathe who must” in it.) I couldn’t find it online, but I did find a website with several other poems by him. The same website also featured a half dozen of Ernest Hemingway’s poems.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it, but I adore Hemingway. I adore him in the crazy “I’ve read everything he’s ever written and everything that’s been written about him that I could get my hands on” kind of way, but when I saw the link to Hemingway’s poetry, I was, like, Hemingway wrote poetry? Well, of course every budding author registers an attempt at poetry, and Hem was no exception. Some are clever or just slightly more than clever, but it was clear that he wasn’t really a poet, you know?
Neo-Thomist Poem
by Ernest M. Hemingway
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want him for long.
Clever, see? And here’s just slightly more than clever:
Chapter Heading
by Ernest M. Hemingway
For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
See what I mean about the cleverness thing? It was never really Hemingway’s bag to pass himself off as a clever novelist, but it’s almost as though he couldn’t help it when he was trying to speak poetry. But that’s not important. That was really mostly just a thinly-veiled attempt to get you to read some poetry, because what I really wanted to do was introduce this quote from Hemingway about how he dealt with the times when he had difficulty writing:
"I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say."
--A Moveable Feast
See, we’re right back to truth again. As always. The same article about Hemingway also had a quote from The Sun Also Rises, from the part where Lady Brett Ashley decides to break off a relationship with a young bullfighter because she thinks its in his best interest that she do so. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it relates to truth, but it does relate to God, which Gandhi would have you believe is something called Absolute Truth. Really. So I guess, newsflash: God is not love. God is truth.
So here’s some of both:
"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.... It's sort of what we have instead of God." --Lady Brett Ashley, from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
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