“..The
artist now submitted completely; his head lolled on his breast as if it had
landed there by chance; his body was hollowed out; his legs in a spasm of self
preservation clung close to each other at the knees, yet scraped on the ground,
as if it were not really solid ground, as if they were only trying to find
solid ground; as if the whole weight of his body, a featherweight after all,
relapsed…”
--Franz Kafka, Hunger
Artist
Day five I feel clean. It’s like a quantum custodial
staff kicked a sudsy janitorial bucket and mopped the interior terminal of my
forearms. I’m not tingling. I’m not pooping anything that resembles soup
kitchen dregs. I’m still dizzy, the recalcitrant marrow has abandoned the caps
of my knees supplanting them with globular gobs of licorice. The room is
tilting. It’s as if I’m crucified to the flimsy petal of a pinwheel leftover
from childhood, still, the concourse and avenues of my arteries feel clean—as
if sprayed with streaks of windex before being doused with a bucket of bleach.
I don’t feel like I’m ambling around the overturned ice-cube tray that is West
Peoria in the meanest winter we have had in three years. I feel clean, and the
catharsis is this: with the exception of a gaveling pulse and a Pandora
chastity box fraught with thudding literary dreams there is nothing inside of
me at all.
We don’t realize the machinery of our bodies is operating, anatomical molecules adorned in
hardhats marshaling the assurance of our bodily organs, the drapey fungus of
the liver, filtering out unwarranted debris, the bulbous kidney beakers
distilling nutrients, the serpentine Hot wheels kiddie race track of my large
and small intestines ushering white-trash cooler NASCAR events below the
serrated lid of my umbilicus, all happening, 24-7 as if operated by scaffolded
Doozers a la Fraggle Rock, my body, an infinite orgy of activity I ferry around
with me at all times, oblivious to the to the blue-collar operating every
egg-timing quantum pinch of both my waking and sleeping existence, finally
after 36.5 years (shit) getting a long overdue smoke break.
How can the anatomical cigar-chomping boss one
consciousness be so fucking pernicious to the employees operating the machinery
inside of him…
Mediation: the fifth chakra is located the level of the
larynx and is called Vishuddha. It means purified, or purging out the
animalistic system, so, in the immortal maxim of Ramakrishna, “When the
Kundalini reaches this plane the devotee longs to talk and to hear only of God.”
The lotus has sixteen petals, each bearing the engraftment
of one of sixteen Sanskrit vowels. The lotus petals are of the same pending lavender
thunder-cloud hue of Chakra 3, manipura, as Joseph Campbell orchestrates in his
exquisite lecture, “ The energy formally projected out into conquering others
is project in into conquering self.”
Meditation has been arduous since my attention span
is zippo I can feel my stomach beginning to roar only a muted ripple avails
itself.
This being valentine’s day eve, I meditated on
chakra five on the most beautiful poem I know. There’s a lot of love poems I
recite in my poetry readings (ie, the 4th stanza of Whitman’s I SING
THE BODY ELECTRIC, Shakespeare’s sonnet 116, Sharon Old’s Topography) but if I
had to choose one lotus-chakra opening poem to recite to the human beings whose
limbs and lips correlate with every metaphysical pulse of my being, it would be this one by Rumi b’low:
This Valentine’s Day may the hunger for spiritual growth, universal
kindness and streams of joy unbutton the charka of love inside of us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment