I can't help it, it's my major (Day 4&5)

Transparent Things




I think that one of the main unspoken themes at PCP is awareness. Awareness of our body and awareness of our food, and making hidden things, like muscles and food culture, visible. Zazen has a lot to do with awareness too. I think awareness is a difficult thing, and that its opposite is vices, like smoking or drinking three beers. I’ve always wanted to ask a Zenner what’s so great about awareness of the present moment. In my limited opinion it definitely feels more pleasant to escape in a vice than to be present with sadness and a headache. I do believe that awareness is important, though, probably one of the most important things we can do for each other as human beings.

This spring I was feeling dried out and looking for some beauty and coincidentally found myself in Paris. It didn’t take long to find the two things I was looking for: a good sausage and butterflies. I found the butterflies in Deyrolles, a naturalist’s shop with a stuffed giraffe and tables and tables of butterflies. Beside them, a once-living snake was reconstituted into a tiny ivory staircase under a glass dome, and I said, “ah, so that’s what a snake looks like inside.” It reminded me of the plastic eggs vending machines dispense. I was always disappointed by those eggs. My imagination filled them with far better things than the crappy plastic toy they held.

I always wanted to create my own version. It would be a 25 cent haiku for adults. I would make them out of glass and fill them with the replica of a mouse’s heart, a button mushroom, a bee’s wing, three cherry blossoms, or a scoop of river mud. Once, I bought a plastic one and cracked it in half. I took out the plastic toy and pasted a desert scene around the edges, and filled it halfway with sand. I added little matchsticks for scrub and a placed a green agate in the middle. It was a start.

One day, I was sitting with my friend listening to some African singers when he grabbed my arm and crowed, “that’s hemiola!” Hemiola* is a musical pattern that is rare in American music but common in renaissance and African rhythms. My friend gave a name and history to something that I thought was random noise. We can do that too. There is a history to cans with their syrups and brines and there is a history to soda, with its early alembics and phosphorus cures. And when I sit in the doctor’s office feeling the way that early sailors felt about the dark continents of my body, there is a history and a name for them too. It’s important to see inside of things. Maybe it will be difficult and we will give up, or maybe we will stand in awe of things made transparent.

PCP Proper:
Completed my workouts and my meditations. Still not much luck with my push-ups, but can feel my pecs (all of them). During meditating I had “Life Sucks” by No Cash (which is actually a pretty funny song) stuck in my head the whole time. It’s like a freakin’ radio station in my head. I also boiled my first piece of chicken, and when I was yelling at my salad cookbook (“fennel! I’m not touching a fennel, you perverts!”) 20$ fluttered from the pages. Exactly the cost of a wet-suit rental I’ve been coveting. Boogieboard, here I come!

*For an example of hemiola, listen to the song “Benja: Ma Mere Leila.” Try clapping along.

Thanks for reading and major respect to PCPers, especially those with jobs and families! I give you not one, but two movies: