Who’s In There?
It’s 2016 and I’m in Kovalam, India on a month long practice retreat with David Garrigues. My morning routine is to arrive at the shala early, while it’s still dark, to sit in meditation before I start my asana practice. I’m the only one in the shala. It’s eerily quiet and I’m settling in pretty deep when this question enters my mind, “Who’s in there?” and without hesitation the answer comes back “Everyone”.
Each month, the good folks of LA Yoga Club, Erica Mortan Magill and Spiros Antonopoulis, send out a magnificent newsletter chock full of gems of dissent and upliftment. The Sept 16th edition opened thus,
“In an opening scene of Lovecraft Country, the black protagonist Atticus begins to tell his travel companion about the sci-fi novel he’s poring over. She stops him: “Hold on. You said the hero was a Confederate officer.”
Atticus tells her: “Ex-confederate.”
“He fought for slavery. You don’t get to put an ‘ex’ in front of that,” she reprimands him.
“Stories are like people. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You just try and cherish ‘em, overlook their flaws.”
“Yeah, but the flaws are still there.”
“Yeah, they are.”
This conversation is both the heartbreak—and heart opening—of the series that re-imagines the world of HP Lovecraft, a widely known racist and anti-Semite. Do his views require us to be so offended that we don’t read his stories? Are his novels not capable of sparking the imagination of black and Jewish folx? Do these facts necessitate that we cancel him? The HBO series defiantly says: "No. But we will retell the story, and we will take back our agency."”
I read this bit in the newsletter in close proximity to reading the following excerpt from Darnell L. Moore”s book, “No Ashes in the Fire”.
“My fear of the bath dissipated more and more after each repetition of calm instruction offered amid safety in the presence of my father, who in other instances used the same hands to do damage. There was a lesson to be learned in the water. Bathing correctly was one lesson, but I also learned how tenderness and violence, care and harm, are strange bedfellows. They can coexist in our complex webs of human connection, the bad always canceling out the good, until the food that we are able to express smudges away the traces of evil even the best of us are prone to mete out. Looking back, I no longer see a young black father who was the totality of recklessness and lovelessness. I see a human being, a young balck man, struggling to transform what he otherwise used as weapons into instruments of care. His hands, his strong and soft hands, were the source of contradiction in my youthful mind. His hands, his human and fragile hands, used gently and violently now symbolize the complexity I too carry within and negotiate as an adult. In the water, we received instruction.”
Happenstance? The world works in mysterious ways I guess, but I was shaken to the bone by the relationship that I perceived between these two pieces of literary finesse. You see I do believe we live in an and/or world wherein it’s quite possible for a person to be a shining light one day and a beacon of darkness the next. It’s all within each of us. We are everyone.