A few weeks ago, i tagged along with a good friend to a meditation class she regularly attends. Seduced by its practitioners’ encouragements to “wake up” through meditation, i thought it might help with my narcolepsy. i understood that the suggestion is to make it a daily practice, and that some sort of collective experience is also recommended. Being in a room with other people who might have questions about how and what to do during meditation is supposed to make the process less daunting. It also suggests the possibility of building that elusive leap of faith called “community.” Having spent most of my life in school, i am no stranger to the taunt of theory vs practice and theory as practice, to the dialectic, to the deconstruction of false binaries, to the codependency of materiality and abstraction. And not to be reductive, but i am also very familiar with the relationship of practice to necessity–as in the times when practice becomes a necessity as well as the times when necessity blocks the possibility of practice.
i enjoyed the meditation, which i guess is not always how beginners respond, but it took me a day or two to realize why it had also been an unheimlich/heimlich (two terms, meaning “unhomely” and “homely” used by Freud to explain the dialectic framework of “uncanny” experiences) incident. My therapist has often warned me that in some scenarios, if something feels familiar, i might be better off heading in the other direction. In fact, learning how to tell the difference between liking something and finding it familiar has been one of the hard lessons of therapy for me. Having bounced around an abandon and then never abandon m.o. for some years now, i have become a supertaster for broken. Even this blog started as a way to pretend that i could refuse loss. i thought that archiving what was missing might keep it alive. Before that, my dissertation was in pursuit of something i called “permanent melancholy.” Giving up or moving on seemed like the ultimate sellout. Whole, safe things reeked of rotten milk and advertising. Busted, with soft scents of burnt wood and booze, i could love it. i collected cinders and tossed kindling outside.
So, realizing that i had enjoyed meditating, i felt a little panicky. What felt right, and why? The feeling was not unlike the usual bliss i experience when i am doing something most people might interpret as unquestionably “bad,” but i was just meditating, and doesn’t that count as textbook healthy? i finally sorted the recipe: i had been in a room largely made up of punks, but no one was angry. i use punks here very loosely, but i had unknowingly stumbled upon the Dharma Punx. i was in a concrete block room that doubled as a yoga studio and the speaker’s bald head was covered in tattoos. He, as well as everyone else in the room, was dressed casually, and the space was packed. i smelled bodies. And the atmosphere certainly tested positive for broken (lovingly familiar), but for something else soft and unfamiliar. Wayward Council, Wild Iris Books and even the Hardback, teaching, potlucks with my students, cramming into someone’s living room to watch a shitty old VHS copy of Surname Viet Given Name Nam, waking up in the shadow of a housefire, gardening in the middle of the night–Gainesville then–flashed up heimlich. That other feeling was something like, experience without the compulsion to make it count or blame. The possibility of having convictions that aren’t necessarily fueled by aggression or judgement. A space for a kind of permanent melancholy that had no guilt about its unwillingness to transform. The shock that mourning might be possible precisely because “adulthood” was not?
noVacancy 