i go to yoga class almost every night, in one form or another. last night i walked into the studio in NW and knew that i was in the wrong building. so i walked out. i made some laps in the neighborhood, scouting, scouting myself. i found a building not too far away to climb; a five or six story industrial building.
(for the flâneur, life is not a series of equable moments; no, it contains moments that are greater than others, not becuase they are filled with more meaning, or adrenaline, or love, but because the moment itself discloses itself more forcefully, it’s worth a bit of investigation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur)
last night i got to witness a large moment, and witness myself. i had to mount the building via a large gutter main, steel. on one side of the pipe was a brick relief detail, about a quarter inch proud of the building, on the other side, blank. as i got off the ground, i began to struggle, my feet inching up the large pipe like an inch worm. my body reminded me to layback off the building. a layback is where the feet come up higher, closer to the hands, and the arms fully extend, using the structure of the upper body, rather than muscle. the pipe ran up about twenty five feet before crossing over to a fire escape. the layback felt good and i stopped thinking and went. i trusted. the unintuitive part of this move is that it “feels” much more vulnerable, exposed. it is, however, a much better way.
hamlet says,
there is a certain providence in the falling of a sparrow.
that is, a grace, a way. all things can be done with grace. the trick is learning how, learning to breathe, to get out of the way of oneself. so i went through this doorway to myself last night and climbed the building.
it was a dramatic evening: a clean cold night, clouds rushing overhead, blowing past a nearly full moon, half eclipsing a bank of stars.
i trained and did a different kind of work-out and meditation. for about an hour i stood and let my eyes drink in the scene. a few blocks away was another buiding, from another time: a limestone and brick building with a copper mansard roof and limstone dormers, the sides more heavily weighted than the middle section of the building. this is a poor capturing of it from my iphone:
the mansard roof is indicative of European architecture, a steep hip, often clad in copper or something extremely resistant to weather and rain… as it is probably one of the more expensive maintenance tasks on a building like this. this is the Benson Hotel. this roof throws one into another time, perhaps more so when the view of it is lateral, like from another rooftop. it comes from a time of romance and care: to make a roof like this, you have to love what you’re doing. it’s classic. it’s the head, the capital, an ornament yet extreme in function and beauty. and last night, there were a few lights on in it, hovering way over the damp city, shining out from another era. i imagined a musician in there, playing a violin, with a lover nearby, making loose tea in a low lighted side kitchen with a gas flame. nothing new, nothing fancy. walk through time like every moment discloses these pregnant qualities of human thrival.
or at least begin to be like hamlet: ready.
i came down off the roof in another moment of myself, full and nourished. full of the sense of another world, an intense realm of imagination and health. i had a spicy thai dinner with a friend and we talked about the economy. the words floated out of our mouths and sloshed around in the room, then fell softly to the floor, to be vacuumed later. we walked after dinner to the Benson Hotel and went in. it’s gorgeous, with grand mahogany casements, marble, crystal and well maintained.
we asked the man at the desk about the roof, and he seemed not to know what we were talking about: mansard? he showed us up to the penthouse, and yet we could not get any sense of the roof… we were in the building to the left there. i realized that i would have to climb the building to get there.
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we went to see the new film Coraline, directed by Henry Selick. a story of two worlds.
i had actually been to Laika, the animation studio where the film was made, about three years ago, at the beginning of production of the film. the studio is incredible and the sets that i saw were unbelievable. the whole process is actually crafting these puppets, building physical sets, costumes, armatures, and actually animating the figures. for all that work, it looks far too CGI for my taste, but the craft is amazing nonetheless.
my evening was punctuated by the film, shifted into two worlds itself… by this story about a little girl, Coraline, who has two pre-occupied writers for parents who’ve recently moved to a spooky old house with three apartments. Coraline isn’t allowed to explore the rainy exterior of the new habiliment because of a fear of mud on the part of her mother. she soon discovers a little door on the ground floor of their house, at first revealing only a bricked off entrance. that evening, though, as she falls asleep, some jumping mice come to her room, from the circus that her upstairs Russian gymnastic neighbor is cultivating, and urge her to follow them through the door… which now opens on another realm. in it, Coraline discovers another similar house, just slightly more colorful, slightly more fantastic, with two similar but more animated parents, who seem to love her more, love mud more, and love life more. they have button eyes. that’s a little scary.
the overall aesthetic of the movie is GOOD. the storyline is not. i love the idea of these two worlds. i was in it already last night, in the real way. i found that as the story unfolded, i did not care about any of the characters in the film, they were all rushed onto the screen too quickly with odd little vignettes in between, like Coraline jumping up an down on a hall carpet that would not smooth flat. the movie landed between worlds, between a world of adult fascination with this craft, with the escape, and the world of blow-up childhood fantasies and fears. the film approaches the mythical realm of C.S. Lewis (walking through a closet) and Amy’s Eyes, but falls harshly flat by poor writing and story visioning. it reminded me of the difference between someone who breathes while they’re speaking and someone who does not, taking short, necessary, raspy breaths between rushed words.
after the film, i realized that i want to help craft this second world, the classical realm of imagination and myth. are you there?