I went to my favorite yoga class in the world last night, Bobby Clennell's restorative yoga class at the Iyengar Institute. It fixes everything. We hung upside down from the rope wall for a long time, did a shoulderstand with the chair, and ended up in a pose I'd never done before called Bhishmasana. The pose has a bench under the buttocks and blocks behind the heart and under the head. It makes you feel like you are floating. You can also really feel the beating of the heart against the blocks, and a strange feeling of tenderness or ache in the heart.
This pose is named after Bhishma from the Mahabharata. Because he made a lifelong vow of celibacy, Bhishma was rewarded with the boon that he could choose the exact moment of his death. He was shot through with so many arrows in the great battle at Kurukshetra that he lay down on the arrows like a bed. From there, he rested and waited until the constellations had reached an auspicious position for him to die. While he waited on his bed of arrows, all his family gathered around him and listened to his final teachings on virtue.
Bhishma asks the gathered warriors for a drink. They fail to satisfy him until the great archer Arjuna shoots an arrow into the ground, causing a jet of water to shoot up into Bhishma's mouth. Bhishma thanks Arjuna for this drink fit for a warrior. He asks Arjuna to make him a pillow so he can rest his head. Arjuna shoots an extra arrow beneath Bhishma's head to be a pillow.
Bhishma is my least favorite character in the epic. He's sort of the ancient equivalent of one of those gay men who hates women. A lot of the tragedy in the epic could have been avoided if Bhishma would have been less rigid in his behavior toward women. But this is his role in the epic. He represents the patriarchy, the old guard. It's still sad when he dies.
It's been a hard year for me in terms of deaths in the family. I went out for dinner after yoga with my friend John, who is a doctor. We got to talking about death. He told me this Buddhist story:
A rich merchant commissions a monk to make a calligraphic banner celebrating the merchant's family. The banner is supposed to describe the prosperity and good fortune of the family. The monk goes away and comes back in a month with an exquisite piece of calligraphy that says: Grandfather dies, then father dies, then son dies.
The merchant is irate and refuses to pay. "This was supposed to describe my family's good fortune!" he exclaims. "Why have you written this?"
The monk asks the man, "How would you feel if your son died today?"
"I would feel terrible," says the merchant.
"And how would you feel if your little grandson died today instead?"
"That would be even worse."
"So," says the monk, "the best possible thing that could happen to your family is for you to die first, then your son, then your grandson." That is the natural order of things. That is true prosperity.
James Agee wrote a beautiful book about his father's death called A Death in the Family. It begins, strangely, with a prose poem called Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for James Agee. His writing on race is particularly honest and heartbreaking. And he wrote the screenplay for the fabulously creepy movie Night of the Hunter.
Here's an excerpt from Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Samuel Barber set this for soprano and orchestra:
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child....It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes....
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there....They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
