Working the Traps
Flight - Yoga Joe - Bulgakov
Room to Operate
People are so critical; they take a scalpel to every fault. Even the ones you love put on their thin white rubber gloves and say you only have yourself to blame, freely exercising their freedom of speech.
Having never been to medical school, you slip quietly from beneath the cool sheet, while they debate the severity of your condition. You refrain from offering your own prognosis of the case.
Their voices becoming ever fainter as you slide across the cold floor of the waiting room, where you waited all your life. You waited for true friendship, true love, and total acceptance.
You walk out of the building into the feeble light of the late afternoon. As the light of stars and streetlights sprinkle the sky, you breathe in the warm unanesthetized air, and walk into the park.
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Headphones
From all sides the sound cuts in, like a murder of cawing crows. With each accusation they widen the sound, till all of creation shakes with the thunder of your sins. With their megaphones of Truth in their feverish hands, they stand still on a pedestal, their marble eyes of judgment ever-rolling.
You put on your headphones and walk into the forest.
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Flight
You wandered through the trees, thinking of God and the flight to Qaf * when the hunter raised his weapon, to bring down the sun. You quacked into the forest, and a chorus came back, ringing in your ears. You were in the cross-hairs, but now the 29 ducks can hear the hunter and his gun. You fell upon the roots of the pine tree, and no longer have the words for forest, tree, or One.
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In Attar’s Conference of the Birds, 30 birds (si murg in Persian) fly to the peak of Mount Qaf in order to find the mythical king of birds (the Simurg). After attaining selflessness, they attain union in mystical annihilation.
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Yoga Joe
Pose 1: Swan in the Mist
Yoga Joe sees flowers along the edges of the carpet, impressionist paintings along the bare corridor, water lilies dripping onto the grey cement. He doesn’t acknowledge the cage-makers, and instead stretches his hand into the lush jungle and seizes a banana.
Pose 2: Barking Dog
Yoga Joe gets a taste for the banana, its smooth and yellow charm and then makes the mistake of thinking that he can tell the cage-makers where it might grow. The cage-makers are furious, and tell him that they own the bananas and that they alone can say where they can grow.
Yoga Joe throws a banana at the cage-makers and refuses to be told where he can and cannot contemplate the cultivation of a banana, which he now regrets throwing at the cage-makers, who keep it as evidence in his upcoming trial.
Yoga Joe consults a lawyer, who tells him that the cage-makers have every right to treat him like an animal as long as he continues to throw bananas that technically aren’t his.
Pose 3: Cat Lapping a Creamy Plate of Warm Milk
Yoga Joe counts the bananas left in his cage and realizes that if he resists the urge to throw them at the cage-makers they will spare him the legal talk and threats. He turns his face from the cage-makers with a smile, two dozen bananas on the floor, next to a bottle of Victory Gin.*
Pose 4: Firefly at Dawn
In his old age Yoga Joe thinks to himself that Bombay Sapphire would have tasted good, but he has learned to swallow the injustice and to believe he did all he could. The Victory Gin tastes sweet, much sweeter than it should.
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* Victory Gin is the grim drink of defeat in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. His description of it at the beginning of the novel is as grim as his description at the end. — Early description: “Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine. Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.” — Final description: “He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.”
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Bulgakov
~ after reading The Master and Margarita ~
Master of legerdemain, auteur de haute conscience, I salute you, Bulgakov, who beneath the subterfuge and the downtrodden, beneath all the writers crushed beneath the yoke of Stalin, Pilate, or Dionysius the Greek, and beneath the sheer unbearable heaviness of being, manage to transfuse with fitting words what we fear, here on the heavy ground of the system’s weight, but cannot speak.*
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* From Shelley’s Adonais: “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! / Follow where all is fled! — Rome’s azure sky, / Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak” (stanza 52).
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Next: Letting Go
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