Anatomy Trains

It had been blowing at 20 knots from the north all day, and it was forecast to blow from the northwest all night.  Most harbors are protected form the prevailing southwest, but Georges Harbor, between Allen and Benner – awful in a southwest - would provide good protection in this wind and sea.  We rounded Old Cilley Ledge, bouncing over a cross-chop in a shiny metaled sea, but it settled down immediately we entered the narrow passage of the harbor.

Andrew Wyeth bought these islands many years ago from a group of owners who included my father.  Since, he cleared the north end of trees and built a series of buildings in various New England architectural styles.  At first, they looked a bit Toytown, but with age they have mellowed into the island landscape.

A woman with gray hair on the dock, I presume Betsy Wyeth, offered us a mooring on our way in, and we gratefully accepted.  The afternoon waned in peace, the goats who keep the brush down wandered onto the high pier, the evening descended upon us; we and the Wyeths, judging by lights out, went to bed at the same time.

In the morning, after a good breakfast to shore us up for the long sail home, I raised the main, left it loose and backed the jib to turn us on a dime, slipping off the mooring and up the slender harbor between the other boats.  The screen door of the perfect, spare, silvery gray Cape opened, and a spare old man with silvery hair and wide shoulders lifted his arm and said “Beautiful!”  We lifted our arms in return salute, too floored to speak, until we thought to offer a belated “Thank you” for the use of the mooring.

It’s not often you get called beautiful by the most understood painter in America.

I traversed the country on my thumb in the 60’s and 70’s, but circumstance threw a 60-year old out on the highway, just a couple of hours drive from Belfast to home.  No rental cars, bus already gone – what choices did I have?  It took about 4 hours – a sampling of who picks you up:

The first guy pulled over in his pick-up, with his angelic face and gut spilling over his belt, he cheerfully maneuvered a computer out of the front seat into the back of the cab to give me room, and offered a critique of my sales job as a hitchhiker.  “Button up your shirt, and the sunglasses shouldn’t even be up on your head, and you’ll do better with a sign saying ‘South, please’.  And a book – ax murderers don’t read books.”  A full-on marketer:  “You only have a couple of seconds to make your impression.”  McCain.

He dropped me at a store, and armed with a sign and reading my book, I awaited the next ride, which came from a young man, whose bandana sloped his hair straight back from his forehead while his goatee, in the manner of kids these days, pointed straight ahead.  Obama.

Next came a blonde in a white summer dress, maybe a doctor as she said she worked at the health center, who made me sit in the back of her SUV and wasn’t inclined to conversation.  Obama, I guess.

The next ride was also from a woman, a Subaru with a couple of huge white dogs “Hope you don’t mind hair!”, who had just spent ‘four hun-dred dol-lars’ on stuff to send her 14-year-old to school with.  Obama.

Another woman, traveling secretly down to Brunswick to buy music while the rest of her family camped for the weekend, took me the rest of the way down the coast to Damariscotta, where an older couple looking over brochures for pumps lifted me from the bypass into town (Obama, they had a sticker), and here I broke down and asked Quan to come fetch me.

Slow way to travel – I spent about 15 minutes between each ride waiting, but I was surprised at how many women were willing to give me a ride.  I suppose, with my gray hair and unprepossessing manner, I am not that threatening, but excepting the doctor and the old couple, nobody who stopped was moneyed.

I put the 2nd edition book galleys to bed in Jonesport, the manuscript spread out on the boat table, on the cell phone with Joannah’s lilting brogue from Edinburgh, we leafed our way through the final changes in each chapter.  With this year-long project finally in the bag, we leapt out of Moosabec Reach on a singing north wind, with only jib and jigger (two of the three sails) up.  Two were enough – we roared around the corner in gulps of air, the rigging keening in the wind, up into Chandler Bay, pausing only because we caught a lobster pot on the rudder, which in the end we had to cut.

My dad used to chant “Robert Augustus Gardner Monks carried his money around in trunks”.  The Gardners (or the Monks, don’t know, they married) own stately and beautiful Roque Island, the easterly goal of our cruise.  I had been there once, years ago, and had put my boat on a rock and otherwise not acquitted myself well.  My father, alive at the time, had been philosophical about my troubles, having gotten himself into many scrapes in his sailing days.  I hated sailing with him when I was young – he was a yeller, which I now realize from my own tendencies happened when he was scared – but had reveled in it since I had grown and become the captain myself.

As we rounded from Chandler’s into Englishman’s Bay on the north point of Roque, the Gardner-Monks compound revealed itself – house after large house on a beautiful green sward, surrounded by the grey granite cliffs of Roque, to which the trees cling with Maine tenacity.  As we changed tacks in Shorrey Cove, there was a strange thumping roar we didn’t understand, and then a helicopter lifted out of the trees, and tilted off through the thick northerly air toward Bangor.

We worked our way up the bay to Roque Bluffs, where we anchored of  frigid beach, and I went overboard to check that the lobster pot and all its line was well and truly out of the propeller.  The water was so cold that after surfacing I could not find my testicles for some time, except by the ache.

By the time we left, the wind had risen to a shriek, and we roared down Englishman’s (past a castle – three stories complete with crenellations, the whole Rapunzel bit, on a small island that marked the border between the two bays – like an English folly.  Who pays to cart an entire castle – every worker had to be imported, every stone would have to be loaded into a boat and unloaded again – to be carted out to a small, remote, treeless island?  Another Monks?) into Machias Bay, with the huge round antennae of the sinister Cutler naval base.

The sky was grey, the sea was up to a steep chop, and the boat was straining downwind at 7+ knots, but we were exhilarated – this was as far east as either of us had been, and certainly the farthest east I had been with a boat under my command.  At that moment I decided “This is enough”- as modest an easterly run as it might be for real sea sailors - and shaped around the Libby Islands to turn back to Roque for the night.  Just as I uttered that order to myself in my head, a large dark blue dragonflty flew under my arm, around between Annie and I, and then disappeared upwind.  We are talking a mile or more offshore, with a heavy wind – what’s a dragonfly doing out there?

My father always appears to us in dragonflies – even when he was alive, it was his totem – he often commented on them and their colors and their flying ability, and a dragonfly swept similarly through his hospital room at the moment of his death.  So forgive me, it’s unutterably New Age, but I believe Edward paid us a congratulatory visit, toasting our easterly achievement.  I am glad he’s still around.

George Kousaleos - head of the Core Institute, a ‘competing’ Structural Integration school, our host for this trip along with his wife Patty, and my co-teacher for the course part of it - is a large man. Not tall, especially, but broad and expansive, with an Old Greek smile that widens to take in his cheeks, and then his ears, and then the whole wide world. George has a flexible agility (he runs the morning stretch class, comfortably encircling his foot with his bear-paw hands where my thin artisan fingers are fighting my short hamstrings and bound hips to claw for my ankle), belied by his stocky legs and almost ponderous movement through his daily life. I feel like a darting hummingbird beside his calm ursine warmth.

His large head is necessary for all those brains; his bull neck was forged in rugby and football; only large ribs could encircle such an expansive heart. His girth probably started with a Greek’s love of food drenched in olive oil, but additionally I recognize a brother: he has been playing the role for a long time that I took up only a couple of years ago – that of padrone. He is literally a grandfather, with a Greek’s eye on the extended family of cousins, nephews, and assorted associations. But he also has his school, his employees, his students, and the bodywork community under the umbrella of his generous care and intelligent concern, and after a time this responsibility begins to induce a gravitas inside that expresses itself in a belly-centered heft outside. Or so I’ve found.

George and I have just discovered we were both at Harvard at the same time. He completed his degree in the famous Soc Rel (Social Relations) program that was sweeping Harvard at the time, which combined psychology with sociology in a world-saving reach. The real opportunity at Harvard, besides Widener Library, was that one could get close to truly great people, leaders in their field. While I was being inspired by the sonorous tones of the playwright William Alfred in Mem Hall and Shakesperean actor Dan Seltzer and learning evolution from Ernst Mayr, George was across Prospect St. in the William James building, riding the elevator with B. F. Skinner, and learning how to bring people back from addiction with Erik Erikson. What a playing field!

But the late ‘60’s was a rebellious time. George’s rebellion was not to complete his doctorate, a sin with which his father (“I’m only thinking of you and your future!”) beat him about the head. I was an English major (what you did in those days if you didn’t know what else to do, though for me it was a way of getting credit for what I would have done anyway – hang around the Loeb Theater), a year ahead of George.

In the ferment of ’68, when the ‘revolution’ was in full swing and the cops in the baby blue helmets clubbed us out of University Hall, I dropped out – not because of the heavy-handed response to the war protest, but because in the aftermath there was suddenly a socialist revolution, with all these classes on Fanon and third-world farming that I, television revolutionary, found unutterably boring. My father, a Republican WASP, kept his counsel with only a disapproving look on his face that well I could read. I went on to a minor college to study with Bucky Fuller and never went or even looked back to Harvard. George, however, is still associated with the Harvard Admissions, and says he could help me complete my undergraduate degree based on my book and other work – tempting.

What George and I both share from that time, more than any intellectual snobbery or revolutionary fervor, is a deep and abiding conviction that the body means something more than a vehicle for the mind, that this rise in massage and somatic education is more than just an upper-middle-class indulgence in sybaritic excess.

Both of us were inspired into this field based on an intuitive flash, and only later realized the fuller social and evolutionary – essentially anthropological - implications of the ‘Me Decade’, better named at the time as the Human Potential movement. Both of us stayed in it despite the re-appellation ‘New Age’ and the population of well-meaning but needy do-gooders who tend to populate the associated professions. Both of us conform to the laws and rules of schools, buffeted by market forces and everyday business realities rather than hiding in the tenured womb of academia.

George got his SI training from Bill Williams, one of the first of Ida’s ‘buds’ to feel the frost of the Rolf Institute’s exclusivist attitude that lasted 30 years until the formation of IASI, though it still remains in some hearts and minds. I confess to having the same thoughts myself – that CORE and Soma and Hellerwork were ‘cheapening’ the work by teaching it … what? Too short, not high concept enough? not in the direct line from Ida? – some such bullshit until in 2000 I myself was outside the pale and the scales fell from my eyes. In any case, George combines a massage school and the SI program, and has had deep ties with the development of massage as a whole and is a leading light in the AMTA, sports massage for the Olympics, and school standards – but his heart remains with the structural work. I lay on the table for him to demonstrate his take on Logan Basic, and I defy any Rolf-trained teacher to do a better job of freeing the back.

We are all doing our best to revivify and re-incorporate a society gone mad into somatic alienation, where physical education and remedial medicine daily walk ever closer to the robotic, disembodied way of doing things where human beings are just adjunct pieces to be used for the good of the stockholders, whoever they may be. George’s intellect, coupled with his intuitive sense, is a force for re-inventing our society in its fully psychosomatized form, where we prepare our children for the demands of the 21st century, where we teach the Neolithic bodies our children are born with to live fully, successfully, sensually, sexually, and autonomously in this electronic world. Thank God for his intelligence applied to this problem, for his calm warmth, and for his steady, water-like pressure on the cold logical machine of maximum profit and minimum involvement. George is a human, in the sense the Greeks invented them.

We have our first view of the Santorini caldera exactly at sunset (I am sure George engineered it this way).

Easy enough to find pictures; hard for those pictures to convey the drama of emerging from the close little alleyways of the town (almost Arabic in their coolness, though totally cruise-ship oriented in their contents - good jewelry, bad painting, “We ship anywhere” on crockery) to a sudden view of the whole circle of the volcano - raw, edgy, dipped into the sea opposite us, but clear in its crescent moon-like embrace of 24 square miles of ruffled water dotted with ships, bigger than Haleakala in Maui, with us perched on its highest point above the absolute black cliff straight down a couple of thousand feet into the harbor far below.

The explosion of this volcano, around 1600 BC, shook the Mediterranean world. The ash has been found in the Greenland ice, and in the rings of fallen sequoias in California. It produced a tsunami of 500 feet (the Javan tsunami of a couple of years ago was 60 feet). The island of Santorini itself was of course obliterated, and the island of Kriti (Crete) to its south took the full force of the tsunami and earthquake, and these two islands were the seat of the ancient Minoan civilization, that of the House of the Ax and the Labyrinth, the bull dance and the mosaics of Knossos, which ruled the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps beyond before the rise of the Phoenicians, the Athenian states and the whole Platonic school (Plato himself, writing many centuries after the event, theorized that the earthquake and volcano sank Atlantis, placing Atlantis here in Santorini), and way before the Roman triremes ruled the waves. The mighty Minoan empire was wiped out in a matter of days, never to rise again. See Mary Renault’s The King Must Die for a fictional but brilliantly realized tale of this time.

And oh yes, one other minor effect of this huge cataclysm: the initial pull of the tsunami drained the water around the head of the Red Sea, allowing a small group of escaping slaves from a minor tribe on the Levant to cross to safety from Egypt to the Sinai, while the pursuing army was caught in the returning water of the tsunami itself. “Pharoah’s army got drownded, Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

One of the most vexing questions in evolution is why and how we got up off all fours and started to walk on two legs.  The plantigrade human posture is quite unique in the mammalian world, and no other primate adopts it for long, let alone as a lifetime strategy.  Owen Lovejoy posits throwing (rocks at stationary or moving prey, or indeed predators, as the baboons still do today, standing on three legs and bravely seeing off a leopard with a hail of stones) as the basic impetus for getting up on two legs, and even for developing calculation and language.

(http://williamcalvin.com/1980s/1983JTheoretBiol.htm)

Don’t tell meine freunde Simone, as she is quite wedded to another controversial theory - the aquatic ape theory that we went through a period of being aquatic (and therefore lost our hair, gained fat, and a number of othet things that can be explored via the articles of Aliter Hardy and the books of Elaine Morgan, et al.) where we learned to stand, hold our breath (and thus initiated the impetus to speech), lost our hair, stood up in the bouyant environment, and came back to land a changed monkey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis

The throwing theory has a lot going for it, though it does nothing to explain how we lost our hair, but then the aquatic ape theory does nothing to explain why our eyes moved around to the front of our head.  The bicameral mind that results is certainly different from the whales, dolphins, seals, rabbits, and squirrels (for instance), who kept their eyes on the sides of their heads, the better to spot attacks from the side and behind (lions and tigers and bears, oh my).

Bringing the eyes around front - generally a hunter’s strategy - allows for parallax, which is useful in catching a branch while brachiating, and it also allows the calculations for a ‘launch window’ and trajectory for a stone thrown now to collide with it’s object somewhen and somewhere later.

Whether we stood and walked from throwing, or stood and walked in the water and later put our new-found hands to throwing may be put to rest in our lifetime, or it may remain part of the wonderful mystery that surrounds our origins.  But there is no doubt that throwing is an art we have taken to, developed, and finally perfected in a big way.

The image that ends the first scene in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, of the ape throwing the bone-tool into the air and it becoming a space station (cue the Strauss waltz) is an accurate one.  We have become so good at throwing that we can throw cars down the highway at 120 km/hr.  We have become such adept hurlers that we can hurl an airplane at 1200 km/hr.

But the real test of throwing comes in our ability to throw small ’stones’ at other planets.  After a couple of trial runs, the folks at NASA have just succeeded in throwing a half a ton ‘rock’ at Mars.  Not only are we good enough at throwing that we can accelerate a rock fast enough to escape the Earth’s gravity, we can then aim that rock at a planet that is 35 million miles at its perigee, which means it takes more than 3 minutes for any light-borne electromagnetic message to get to the ’stone’ of the satellite for any course changes we might initiate.

Anyway, not only can we throw this stone out of the Terran pull, but ‘hit’ a planet more than three light minutes away.  Not only can we hit Mars, we can just miss Mars at precisely the right angle so that our stone goes in orbit around it.  Not only can we go into orbit around it, but we can take a half-ton piece of it and so calculate our throwing such that this 1000-lb piece will land where we want it, within one degree of the angle we planned, and with such a soft landing that the machinery inside the stone will still work to take pictures, dig, analyze the results, and report back to Earth over the vasty spacingness in between.

This is what has happened with the Mars lander:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

I salute the men and women of the team that accomplished this refined form of throwing, which may help us know whether life is easy or difficult to start in this universe (and thus whether God is a K-related or r-related species - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection).

I suppose I should salute those who are throwing bullets and shells with a smaller but deadly accuracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I find it hard to justify this aggressive or defensive throwing, as it seems just one step above the murderous ape in 2001.

But our ability to throw extended into space seems not a waste of money to me, as war does, but a very refined development of a basic ability.  If we were to look at the same thing applied to swimming, we can certainly point to the development of the aqualung and fins, and maybe sailboats and navy ships, but nothing up against this wonderfully precise application of throwing we call the space program.

New York, this time, is by turns wonderful and awful.  From the pleasant spring sunshine of Maine, I dive into the canyons of the city, where a cold wind tunnels down between the buildings, turning umbrellas inside out and getting in your crevices.  The clerks seem hostile, the traffic aggressive, the streets dangerous.  Intending to take a long walk, I get some water instead and quickly return to Michael’s loft, softly lit, warm furniture, full of good cooking smells.

By yesterday the sun is warm and the clerk at Starbucks gives me a coffee rather than break my $100 bill, and I am so warmed I come back to give her both the money and a tip later when I have change.

The course - my last in a long string of traveling gigs - is likewise up and down as we search out a modus vivendi for conveying what we have in bigger ways to the yoga, Pilates, and personal training professions.  Sometimes I feel we have a coherent message, and sometimes it feels as if we are being spread way too thin, but such is the nature of experiment and working into new areas.

But I am too tired to really pop in the class, so let’s go home and see if there’s a rest available for me to recharge the batteries for another round later this year.  Fatigue is something I often feel temporarily, but this  - 45 of the last 54 days teaching or traveling (so those 9 recovering, packing, doing laundry) – feels a deep tiredness – systemic, a more profound level of chemistry, and a Dantean level of lostness that goes along with it.

The fatigue spreads like a virus – I am tired of the election.  I am tired that after one or two debates last winter where, for one brief shining moment it looked like we might have a discussion of the truly pressing issues at hand.  But instead we have been dragged back into old-style gutter politics by the very first woman who had earned our grudging and then genuine admiration as the first woman to contend on the playing field of the presidency.  I am tired of the non-work on energy and the silly prating of the chattering classes while the world spins out of control and we, the people, can seemingly do nothing, and evince no interest in doing so.

So it was with some interest that I emerged onto the street to the sounds of 60’s protest chants, and the sight of banners across the sidewalk.  It was a small but well-organized protest by W.A.R. – a PETA-like group called Win Animal Rights – who had discovered that Roger Waltzman, an executive with ties to a lab that kills test animals, lived across the street, and was embarrassing him to his family and neighbors by holding this noisy protest outside his home.

“Huntington Life Sciences Kills 500 Animals Every Day – Novartis Pays Them to Do It” read the headline on the paper they were passing out.  Huntingdon Life Sciences kills these animals for product testing – toothpaste and tanning lotion in the eyes, poisons, cuts, burns, broken limbs – if it is all true, then more power to these folks, at least they are up and doing something.

Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, publishes Netter, a great service to our trade.  But if you want them to stop being associated with killing animals, you can email Roger Waltzman at roger.waltzman@novartis.com, or follow up with WAR at http://www.myspace.com/winanimalrights.

May my children, real and children of spirit, rise up and take control of our country.  “The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases,” I paraphrase Nietzsche, “and one of those diseases is Man.”  Are we a disease or an embryonic demi-urge?  The next few generations will tell, and it seems a pretty close run question to me.  I am interested in the continuation of the human experiment, but not at the cost of all these innocent animals, all these innocent children, all these nascent countries, and the exquisite resources of the earth – our yolk sac for this developmental journey.

Cheney has amassed $40 billion out of this war and the attendant oil profits. The continued ascendancy of him and his ilk is the most fatiguing thing of all.  He deserves to be on trial in Den Hague.

I’m with David Mamet, who says:  “I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly.”

Here’s the full paragraph, quoted from the New Yorker:  “I hate the computer, I hate their spell-check.  I won’t ever do email.  I love working on a typewriter, the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do too.  I’m afraid of only two things:being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work.  I love to write.”

You can have haggis.  Like the pig intestines in Taiwan, everyone urges me to try it, each assuring me that this recipe or that restaurant transcends the bad reputation to achieve edibility, while each one actually manages to approximate a different kind of cat food.  I will somehow survive without delving further into this line of nutrition.  I don’t expect you to try raw oysters or urchin roe or clam chowder when you come to my house either.

I walked up on Costorphine Hill this dawn, ahead of my presentation for 100 or so therapists.  It was colder and windier than it looked, ruffling my shirt so I buttoned my cuffs and sought out a pathway up through the woods. After a sleepless night (there was a wedding at the hotel, and the DJ had the whole building thumping until well after midnight), it felt good to let the muscles loose and the mind coordinate to the rhythm of feet on the ground.  At the top was a beautiful view east over the zoo to Edinburgh, certainly one of the most comely cities on this planet.

Walking along the ridge among the mossy trees and lichen-covered rocks, I scared up a bunch of rabbits, small like Quan’s, and similarly poised between curious and scared.  The wild rabbits at home – used to hunters and beagles – are seldom seen and disappear like a shot if discovered, but these fat and happy little beings were clearly protected, as they loped calmly out of my sight in the ferns and rocks of the glen.

God knows if I used the word ‘glen’ right.  It means ‘shallow’, as in glenoid fossa, the shallow shoulder joint, but these Scots are as fiercely protective of their language as they are of haggis, so my natural tendency to imitate is not received kindly, but rather with severe looks, declarations, and dismissals.  It is with joy, not ridicule, that I affect assimilation, but they have had enough of English dominance, and American attempts at badly-accented chumminess are about as welcome as ‘MacDonalds’ – a perfectly good Scots name that is known the world around for the bland reliability of its mediocrity. .

Ducking into the men’s room in the midst of the Schipol polyglot after my ride over the pond, I came across something I had heard about, but had never seen.  The report said that putting a fly in the urinals improved men’s aim.  Sure enough, they had etched or somehow engraved a black insect shape into the white ceramic.  Despite the fact that it looked more like a trout fly than a real one, and despite the fact that I clearly knew it was a simple image, it was irresistible.  One’s aim is indeed truly drawn toward trying to hit the fly, even though one ‘knows’ it will do no good.

Of course it does do some good, because the fly is placed where it is on purpose, as this is the spot with the least ‘sprayback’, so aiming there reduces cleaning and public hazard.  So simple, and such a strong psychological effect.

We’ve been pooping and peeing for 350 million years, and we’ve been dealing with the result of waste accumulation due to crowding since Hammurabi wrote out the first law of sewage.  We’re still not doing every well.  As I walked away from the from the wall of gleaming porcelain mouths, my unit tsked, clanged, and whooshed a couple of gallons of water through, mixing a pint or so of liquid waste with perfectly good water, and then dumped the whole lot into a system that produces nothing but cost.

We do the same with solid waste, and back at home, we are about to spend a great deal of money for the privilege of mixing our waste immediately with tons of good water and running it gradually out through our dense Presumpscot clay ground to filter it.  The first builders of latrines and privies had to deal with the smell, which isn’t, of course, pleasant.  The invention of Sir Thomas Crapper’s toilet, on which modern toilets are based, had the wonderful advantage of allowing you to void waste inside your shelter without having to put up with the smell.

Today, the waste of good water is more a problem than the waste itself.  What we now have available to us is technology that could rapidly dry out the waste (thus eliminating the smell also) which would give is a net gain in good water, and incidentally, give us the basis for a dry composted material.  This may sound disgusting, but the composting toilets my father installed in 1972 still produce, over time, a dry and odorless dirt that can be added to a garden without penalty.

Why should we mix our bodily waste with clean water and then run it underground to settle out without using it again?  It is another of the ways of human beings that make no sense.  Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If we could capture some of the resources we waste, everyone – even the poor Zimbabweans trying to vote today – would succeed.