Yoga, sex, Bill Hicks

A follow-up to my earlier post on matters yogic...

Harsh yogi? I took some leave over Christmas so was able to attend a yoga class for a change (I usually do my yoga at a home, using a manual). I went to a Mysore-style ashtanga session where everyone does their own thing and the yogi wanders round correcting things. Since I was new to the class the yogi introduced himself and told me to start with the very basics - so I duly started with a sun salutation A while he wandered round the class watching from afar. When I'd completed this most basic of manoeuvres, he came over and told me to pause. He then said,

I don't know what you're doing, but it's not ashtanga

Whoah tiger! Bit of a confidence-knocker that! Fortunately I had an idea that he was pretty harsh so I was kind of expecting it. Over the next two hours he completely took my basic postures apart, and started me off from scratch again. Although it was a pretty severe process it was exactly what I wanted: I've now got a hell of a lot of things to work on at home on my own...

Libidinous yoga. Or, as Derek and Clive might put it, yoga and the effing horn. Pootling about on the internet I came across this article about tantric yoga. It describes how yoga can be used to ease sexual dysfunction. I noted it because [cough] I'd noticed something similar myself. To put it bluntly, yoga turns you on.

How it does this is a good question. In the article above it says:

My opinion on the subject is that you’re getting more oxygen to your brain and increasing blood flow to all areas of the body.

... And so your libido increases. More subtly, it also places you more firmly in your own body, so that you become aware of the many different aspects of your body, including the sexual. Finally, I'd add that when I practice yoga my self-esteem is strengthened. Although I'm not very good (see earlier section!), at the end of a session I have a noticeable alpha-male type feeling. And we know what's on the mind of your average alpha-male...

Bill Hicks. My man the Stevenage responded to my earlier yoga posting with a link to a video of the late, great Bill Hicks. You can view it below; I'll leave you to decide how relevant it is to the subject at hand.

Magnificent murmurations

Yesterday I saw a massive flock of starlings - you can maybe just make them out in the photo above. It was absolutely incredible. I appreciate that one could not deduce this fact from the photo, so you'll have to trust me.

Every winter starlings form gigantic flocks which are known as murmurations. One of the biggest flocks in the country happens to be quite close to Bristol: up to one million starlings come together every evening throughout winter at a bird reserve called Ham Wall near Glastonbury.

I was at Ham Wall yesterday between 3pm and 4pm. During that time I saw three extraordinary ornithological sites: first, the starlings. Second, I saw a great white egret - there are thirteen of these in the whole of the UK; four of them live at Ham Wall. And thirdly, I saw a bittern. These were once extinct in the UK but they have recolonised and now breed in two or three places in the country. They're usually very shy and hard to see but this fellow flew right over my head!

Thank god for bitterns, egrets, and starlings. It's nice to know that, amidst all the scenes of environmental catastrophe, there are still places where nature can thrive. Just to reinforce this, I've made a list of some memorable birding moments that I've experienced recently around Bristol. It's worth reminding ourselves that we can still enjoy wonderful nature almost on our doorstep...

(Depressing aside though: as we headed out to Glastonbury to see the birds, we encountered a mighty snarl-up on the M5. We were a bit worried that we might spend the day in a traffic jam but, no, we soon realised that all the traffic was leaving the M5 and heading for Cribbs Causeway for the Boxing Day sales. Is the human race mad, or what?!)

American History Y and Z

I am currently a little bit obsessed with the history of the United States. I've used this blog before to quote from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. If you want a good overview of American history then there is no better source.

This time, though, I want to refer to a couple of more specific histories. The first is Randy Shilt's And the band played on, a history of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's a thick tome but it reads like a thriller; I heartily recommend it. The tale starts in the late 1970s when a handful of Europeans and Americans started to fall ill and die in mysterious ways. (Some of) the medical fraternity really started to pay attention in the early 1980s when it became clear that gay American men were dying in greater numbers (and in the most bizarre and hideous ways - one guy died of a disease previously only found in sheep, many men went blind or suffered very distressing brain damage as the disease killed them).

However the AIDS epidemic is a tale of two tragedies. First is the horror of the disease. Second, and just as deadly, is the horror of prejudice and bigotry. For a long time it was just gay men that were dying. Then they were joined by Haitians and intravenous drug users. None of these groups count for diddley in the grand American system. So no one paid any attention - no media, no government officials, no one with any power to do anything...

Reagan assumed office as AIDS reared its ugly head, and his administration refused even the most basic funding to combat the disease. (He was spending all his money funding death squads in El Salvador, but that's a story to be told in a different history, thanks Noam Chomsky.) Indeed it was May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term) before he even spoke the word "AIDS" in public". When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases.

The media were just as bad. With a few very heroic exemptions (Shilts himself, for instance) the media virtually ignored the epidemic. The impression one receives on reading this account is that this silence not only killed people in the 1980s but it is klling people now. If scientists had received funding, and the people had received education, then AIDS could have been stopped in its tracks. As it is, HIV has infected millions of people around the globe and it is killing them. The first world finally woke up to the tragedy (after respectable heterosexuals started dying, initially through blood transfusions) and AIDS is now somewhat manageable with modern drugs... but not in Africa.

And now for another tragedy. I'm two thirds of the way through Dee Brown's Bury my heart at wounded knee; I'm reading it in stages as it is one of the most harrowing books I've ever read. It tells the story of the "conquering" of the American West by the white man; and it tells the story from the perspective of the original inhabitants. As Brown himself puts it:

Americans who have always looked westward when reading about this period should read this book facing eastward.

This book is not a tale of two tragedies, it is a tale of many. Or, perhaps, it's the tale of one tragedy repeated over and over and over. Native Americans living their traditional lives encounter the white man, first as an oddity, then as an irritation, then as a threat, and finally as an inexorable and appallingly destructive force. There are many tales of great heroism, as tribes people give their lives to protect their family, their country, and their way of life. But you read this book with ashes in your mouth - for the story always ends the same.

Sitting Bull

The book contains photos of many of the main protagonists and I find myself repeatedly drawn to look at their faces. These are heroes, heroes the like of which we may never see again. Their experience as humans could not be more different from my own yet, although I cannot imagine what it would have been like to live my whole life on the prairie, I am immediately drawn to the nobility and purity of their fight. They knew things about life, and love, and land, that white people may never know. That they were defeated in battle is all the more tragic, for the winners are now inevitably and completely defeating themselves...

Yoga!

Let me tell you about yoga. Forgive me if I sound like an insufferable hippy. (I'm really not. I wear socks with sandals really rather infrequently. And I dislike reggae intensely.)

Four years ago I thought yoga was for girls. I play football, end of story. Despite this, for various reasons not worth sharing now, I started to go along to yoga classes to support my partner. Six months later I was still going, and really enjoying it. Nonetheless my practice at this stage was a little sporadic, and yoga was languishing a long way behind football in my set of priorities.

Then a year ago I attended an ashtanga yoga class. It was 1 1/2 hours of serious work-out and I left shattered and very very intrigued. Over the last six months I've started to do ashtanga yoga regularly and now, it's fair to say, I LOVE IT. There are times (and I don't say this lightly) when I'd rather do yoga than play football.

My God.

Let me explain the attraction. Firstly the physical side of things. Football is great because it clears my mind, gives me an outlet for my physical energies, and leaves me mellow yet somewhat elated. Yoga also has that effect on me. Particularly ashtanga yoga which is more strenuous than other forms of yoga, and so appeals to my desire to be physically stretched. It gives me the high.

I also have a sense of progress. I am no natural yogi; I am bony and angular and not naturally flexible. When I started I had trouble sitting cross-legged. Yet now I can sit with cross legs, I can touch my toes with ease (even put my palms on the ground), I can stay in a head stand for a couple of minutes... in short, there are a multitude of postures that were once beyond me and now are quite achievable.

It has benefited my health. I used to suffer from chronic lower back pain but yoga has now got that under control. (As it happens I have had back troubles again recently, of a different sort, but this seems unrelated.) I have noticed a dramatic increase in lung capacity (all the positions in yoga are coordinated with the breath, so one learns to regulate one's breathing and to breath more deeply). The other day I swam a kilometre for the first time in my life (I'm shit at swimming); this was with almost no swimming practice, but lots of yoga.

I have much more control over different parts of my body. Whereas playing football benefits only a subset of the muscles in the body, yoga does the lot. Before I did yoga there were whole areas of my body that were weak and unutilised - that I didn't know were there. Now I have awareness of these areas, and can use them (for instance when lifting heavy things, instead of busting my back like I used to).

Yoga isn't just physical though. It also challenges and benefits my mental/ spiritual side. Firstly this takes place through regulating the breath. I have learned to breath deeply and slowly, thereby lowering the heart rate, and naturally calming the mind. This aids concentration and eases stress: when we're stressed our breathing tends towards shallowness and hyperventilation; by dealing with the physical symptoms of stress, some of the mental symptoms are also relieved.

Yoga also builds awareness of the present moment - what the Buddhists would call "mindfulness". Yoga requires awareness of one's whole body and full involvement in the here and now. Just as when I play football I am entirely focussed on the game without thought or worry of the past or future, so too in yoga I am freed of these distractions. Yoga seems somehow more beneficial though, because my mental state remains calm. (I'm not calm when I play football!)

I used to meditate regularly, but since having a child have found this very difficult. My yoga practice is a pretty good substitute. I find that the physicality of it allows me to maintain concentration in circumstances when I find sitting meditation impossible (e.g. with the child charging about the place). Many of the benefits of meditation - a calming and clearing of the mind, an awareness of the present, etc - can also be achieved through yoga.

Let me end by saying that I'm still shit at yoga. Or, to be more precise, I still can't do the vast majority of the poses in the ashtanga "full flow". Of course, that doesn't really mean I'm shit. Yoga is refreshingly non-competitive. While I admire very talented yoga practitioners (see video for an extreme example), a good session of yoga for me can be much more modest yet still push my physical and mental boundaries, and bring just as much benefit. With this in mind I'd recommend yoga to anyone, no matter what their state of physical health, for they will surely benefit.

The worst night of my life

Let me share the worst night of my life. It was, I think, in February 2009. It played out very similarly to other nights of that month, and the previous, but this particular night I cracked.

My son, you see, was born the previous August. My first child, fruit of my loins, apple of my eye, love of my life. So, indeed, he continues to be. Those first months were hard, but wonderful - adrenalin is a wonderful thing! By December we were struggling. The adrenalin was used up and his sleeping - patchy at best - was deterioriating dramatically.

Around New Year a pattern was established where we put him to bed around 8pm, with us hitting the sack as soon as possible after that - 8:05, 8:10... Sometimes he'd start crying before we got to sleep, other times it would be a couple of hours. In any event we lay down in a state of tension, knowing that the best we could hope for was sleeping until 11pm. For the rest of the night we were woken at about two hourly intervals.

Our initial approach was to work together to get through the night - trying to give each other support. We took it in turns to get up and soothe him. Some nights I'd take him out for walks in the buggy to try and rock him to sleep. But we were in a cold snap and this wasn't so effective (I walked one night from 2am to 3am in below freezing temperatures and returned home with a bright eyed little boy with no thought of sleep).

We realised that we couldn't sustain this so we decided to split the nights in two. I slept with the little fellow on a mattress downstairs in the lounge. We'd stopped feeding him at night, so I didn't have to wake Mum up if he started crying, I could deal with it myself and let her sleep through. Then, the first time he cried after 4am, I'd take him upstairs and she'd take over for the rest of the night.

Some nights were better than others, but none of them were good. One night he refused to sleep in any position other than strapped to me in a sling so I gave up and watched movies perched on the edge of the settee (he wouldn't let me lean back!) until it was time to hand him over.

On the awful night, though, I was too tired to face that and I was determined to get him to sleep. He'd woken me around midnight I think, I guess for the second time that night. I'd soothed him and he'd quitened on my shoulder and started to drift off. Then I gently put him down on the bed.... and he'd started to scream. I repeated this, I think, about seven times over the course of the next hour. Waiting longer and longer before I lay him down, until I was CERTAIN that he would stay asleep... except, of course, that he didn't.

I was starting to feel desperate; I was exhausted and I was acutely aware of a strong feeling of hatred towards this screaming baby. The last time I lay him down, and he started to cry, I had a sudden very clear and distinct vision of picking him up and flinging him with all my might at the wall of the lounge room. Sitting here, writing this, I can still see that image in my eyes. It was a tipping point and it could have gone either way. That vision scared me so much that it jolted me out of my exhaustion and I picked the child up and took him up to his mother. It was two hours early, and I knew that these months had taken a much worse toll on her than on me, but I was scared of what I might do.

I woke her, and told her that I couldn't go on, and she understood immediately. It was OK and I went downstairs and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning though I woke with a new knowledge of myself. I knew that I was capable of terrible things if pushed far enough. True I'd stopped before I did anything awful, but only just, and perhaps only because I had someone to turn to.

* * *

I share this because, after talking to others, I've realised that such an experience is not uncommon for new parents. People don't want to talk about it because it's scary and horrible, but I think it's important to know that others have been through it.

Such an experience also demonstrates how vital is is for us to have support, and to try and arrange our lives so that others can take the strain for us before we reach that point of no return.

Such an experience renews my admiration and respect for single mothers.

Such an experience gives me a great feeling of sympathy, empathy even, for the parents who in their desperation have tipped the other way and done something awful. I think of news footage of mothers being led into a court. Such horror.

Teenage sex

It's a great title, isn't it? Whets the appetite! God knows we see it used that way often enough. Under-age sex is one of those standard topics that newspaper editors recycle whenever public moral outrage seems in danger of dying down and threatening sales (there are a bunch of others: drugs destroying young lives, youths destroying old lives, immigrants destroying British lives,...)

I saw a particularly great example of this a couple of months ago in the Australian newspaper. Their front cover advertised a full-length feature article inside entitled "The Yes Generation". OMIGOD, boys and girls saying "yes" to sex?! Let me buy that paper! Tell me more!

Except that when I turned to the article in question and waded through the preliminary sensationalist gumph, it turned out that the article was covering recent scientific research into the sexual behaviour of teenagers today and - wait for it - it turns out that there was no evidence whatsoever that teenagers were having more sex now than in the past. Headline news! Teenagers are having sex at about the same rate as they've always been!

An interesting subtheme in the issue of teenage sex is its relationship to class. There is a strong emphasis in some newspaper coverage of the issue of the wayward morals of the working classes; or, more precisely, of the unemployed classes. One has images of an army of sixteen year olds pushing prams across council estates and rubbing their hands together gleefully at the prospect of a life on benefits; their lives subsidised by that most feted of tabloid archetypes, the hard-working British taxpayer.

I came across an illuminating take on this subject in the classic novel "Germinal" by Zola. "Germinal" was written in 1885, with the events described therein being set about twenty years previously. Zola's concern is with a group of miners in northern France, and he chronicles their daily struggles in a way that reminded me of Dickens. Like Dickens he has a lot of sympathy for his subjects, although Zola makes less use of caricature than Dickens - his sympathies are held in check by his desire to describe his subjects accurately and without prejudice. (The other similarity is that, like Dickens at his best, "Germinal" is a belting good read.)

With regard to sex, then, Zola writes bluntly. The youth in "Germinal" take their pleasure when they can. They creep out of their over-crowded homes in the evening and copulate in back alleys, and in the waste ground round the mine. They are promiscuous and irresponsible, and entirely free of a good example - their parents' primary concern in all this is the worry that they will end up with pregnant daughters unable to work, and then nine months later another mouth to feed. The people in these villages are viewed by the middle classes as little better than animals for their lack of morals, and their utter surrender to their carnal desires. Yep, the same sneering attitude, just 150 years earlier.

What makes Zola's treatment of the subject interesting, however, is that he understands that this is more than a moral issue. The people in these villages work the mines from the age of six or earlier. They work long long hours in terrible conditions for a pitiful wage that barely covers their food bill. (Zola describes how some of the women are forced to pay their grocery bill by prostituting themselves to the grocer.) When the villagers organise to try and force an improvement to their situation, they are opposed by the mine owners, the police, and the state. In other words they are locked into a life of unrelenting wage slavery, with no prospect of any escape.

The only recourse one has in this situation is to take one's pleasure where you can find it. So the men spend too much of their money in getting drunk and buying favours of prostitutes, the teenagers take their pleasure with each other (and the women and children have very little pleasure of any kind). It makes a lot of sense; Bernard Shaw was another who saw the logic in this outlook - consider this speech from "Pygmalion":

What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: 'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.' But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving...

It is interesting to observe that the insight of Zola and Shaw still holds true today. Despite what the tabloids might say, there is clearly NOT an epidemic of teenage sex in modern society; as the research I mentioned above suggests, teenagers are having sex about as often as their parents did when they were young. On the other hand, if society is worried about teenagers having sex, then it would be as well to recognise that the primary motivation is, more often than not, a lack of alternatives. People living on estates in Britain might be materially better off than miners in 19th century France but still, if you've got no money in today's society, then you are nobody. You have nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Better get your fun for free (e.g. via sex) or cheaply (via booze) or you'll have no fun at all.

The media's obsession with an absence of morals in the young and the poor is a big old red herring. The real issue is the lack of opportunity for whole sections of British society, and the complete lack of interest that recent governments have had in changing this state of affairs. Far easier to point the finger of judgement at today's teenagers, than to put energy into providing them with real opportunities for self-improvement.

Heathrow immigration horror

Today I saw an awful thing. I was making my way through the passport control at Heathrow airport in the mental haze which normally engulfs me in this sort of setting: my brain goes into "hibernate mode", and I enter a sort of protective fog that muffles the relentless sensual stimulation that seems to be mandatory in the modern airport.

So I did not immediately clock the little scene that was playing out next to my queue. Indeed I was almost under the nose of the barrel-chested customs man, before I realised what he was up to. He was perched on the side of a table, arms crossed high up that expansive chest, belt shining, big bunch of keys hanging off the side (probably a squawking radio in there somewhere); in short, successfully giving that impression of being slightly oversized that comes so naturally to officers of the law, and their ilk.

He was gazing down at an unfortunate couple who'd obviously been dragged out of my queue for some irregularity. The first words I heard him say were "all I'm asking is for you to be honest with me..." The sort of on-the-face-of-it decent, reasonable request that is another speciality of officers of the law. Reasonable, that is, until you think what their request implies. What will happen if you're honest with this man? What will he do with your truth? If you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to fear, right? So the (faulty) logic goes.

"I just want to know if you've been earning any money.... So you've been earning £25 a day, for the last nine years.... In a kitchen..." His volume as oversized as his chest, his voice rang out as my queue passed him by; I couldn't hear the responses of the couple - they were just ordinary-sized.

I didn't want to make them feel objects on display but, still, I turned as I passed to properly look at the couple. And as I saw them clearly for the first time - focussing on them not on the immigration officer - I suddenly felt sick. They were of South-East-Asian appearance, a man and a woman, in their forties I would guess. But it was the look on their faces that caught me; they were caught, and I could see the fear in the tight muscles of their face and the aliveness in their eyes, as they sought desperately for some escape.

I didn't hear them make a sound; I barely saw them make a movement. They weren't causing a fuss; I don't know what their story is. I imagine that they've spent nine years in this country making a very marginal living and now, finally, for whatever reason, they want to go home. But in trying to board that plane, they've crept out of the shadows and into the full glare of our immigration system, and now what they want and what they were planning is a matter of no consequence. Because someone noticed that they have an out-of-date stamp on their passport, now other people will decide what will happen to them. Other people who, god damn it, should not have the right.

I wanted to shake my head at what was happening, but I didn't want the couple to see and think I disapproved of THEM. I didn't want them to feel like the inhabitants of this island are as heartless and inhuman as the laws that govern them. So I did nothing and went on my way, sick and unseeing. I write this just a few hours later, and God knows where that man and woman are now. I hope with all my heart that they are on their way to their desired destination; I fear though that they are in a cell somewhere or in an interview room with a barrel-chested immigration man who just wants them to be honest...

* * *

I got to the front of the queue, was processed, and found acceptable. My reward: entry into the duty-free/ restaurant area that precedes the boarding gates. Everywhere there were people pulling their little suitcases on floors of shiny white tiles, browsing aisles full of single malt whiskey, or celebrity magazines, or high-quality leatherware. There was an oyster bar, and a steak house, one wall was covered with the picture of a naked lady (some actor; she looked familiar) sitting on a couch with her legs crossed and wearing huge green jewels.

I ate a sad dinner in a sushi bar where plates come round on little tracks, and the walls are covered with different ways of writing the characters "YO!". I walked past a Bulgari shop where I could buy a £7000 watch, or a £10 000 necklace with BULGARI written in big letters across the front of it. Shiny, shiny, shiny, people, people, people.

I remembered a documentary I watched a couple of nights ago about the swingers club Plato's Retreat. People who'd visited Plato's in its heyday were interviewed, and they told stories of wild nights eating, drinking, dancing and fucking at Plato's. A couple of people talked about "the mat room" - a big room with no furniture but an almighty great mat on which an orgy took place every night: dozens of bodies writhing around taking their pleasure any way they could get it. One woman, a regular at Plato's, said she found the mat room "a bit full on"; she preferred to take her men one at a time....

If Plato's Retreat is a metaphor for our big shiny consumer society, then that shopping area in Heathrow felt like the mat room. Take your pleasure any way you can get it. But God help you if you don't pass the entry test...