TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

Today's quote comes via Warren Ellis by way of Bruce Sterling:

Twitter has killed/replaced blogging for lots of people. What’s next? Nothing but bit.ly-style shortcode payloads? I don’t see it. But then, the question invites binary thinking, which is always death. “What’s next,” these days, is always a cloud, not a single arrow. 

TALEB TWEETS

Nassim Taleb has been tweeting aphorisms like crazy. 

They are really quite good; a pinch Ancestral with a dash of Situationist, and all highly memorable.

These are some of my favorites.

1. You will be civilized the day you can spend time doing nothing, learning nothing, & improving nothing, without feeling slightest guilt.
2. You have a real life if & only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. 
3. You have a real life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
4. If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead -the more precision, the more dead.
5. Their sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.   
6. You cannot express the holy in terms made for the profane; but you can discuss the profane in terms made for the holy
7. Charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.  

SKINNY STICK-MEN

Haters gonna hate.

Y'know buddy, you're not doing yoga in the West much of a favor here, what with your skinny, emaciated Charlie Manson-on-meth look.

Unless this is Charles Manson, of course, in which case, carry on.

'Course, this could be Frank Zappa, too.

Either way, I have no idea of the context of this photo.

Still, it reminds me that there's nothing worse than perpetuating the idea that yoga is something to be practiced by skinny stick-men and women, insect creatures with protruding hip bones and prominent wrist bones, eyes sunken and hollow from the fires of ascetic practices.

This picture calls forth a descriptive turn by the author Thom Jones: "the sound of two skeletons fucking on a tin roof."

My god, not that I'm one to talk — the second time I returned from India, I was 140 pounds soaking wet, a prime example of 90's Skinny. Don't worry, I've packed on some husk since then.

And so I would encourage our friend here to unfurl his twigs from lotus and pick up a fork. You're not entering samadhi. You're light-headed 'cause you're starving.

ASANA, DRISHTI; MUDRA, MANTRA

Hand mudras.

Ujjayi breathing engages our audio faculties. It is sonic in nature. It as a technique is an intimate and profound mantra, its intrinsic structure dispensing with names and forms.

Meanwhile, drishti, gazing point, engages our vision. As Dr. Douglas Brooks would say, it is photic.

To engage sight, the photic element, with drishti, as well as ujjayi breathing, and at the same time to ritualistically, rhythmically place the body in a grand and unnecessary posture — that is, to engage the tactile sense — is in fact to perform a mudra.

This mudra is not separate from nor does it transcend time, and in fact the very use of ujjayi, drishti, and asana — and mudra and mantra — allows us to experience more fully our time-bodies.

Some say  time does not truly exist, and perhaps on an absolute level this is true. But on a relative level, time exists and it is not separate from our bodies.