At a happy event in early January, I was in a small room with some of the people I hold dearest in this life, playing rounds of Victorian parlor games gleaned from a box set called… Victorian Parlour Games. The first round we played was so simple. Player one says, Ha! Player two says, Ha! Ha! Player three says, Ha! Ha! Ha! and so on, with each player required to utter their Ha!s with a straight face or be disqualified from the game. It worked! Our little group was laughing in no time.

But. On this night, as on the other nights adjacent to it, I was fearfully facing the did-it-appear-it-could-be-imminent? fact of my own mortality. Intermittently during this happy evening, a dark diaphanous curtain descended between me and my loved ones and all I could see were laughing corpses, laughing and drinking corpses as surely as those Victorians whose games we were playing are all themselves now the laughing dust of corpses. Ha! Ha! Ha!
‍
I’m not ready to disclose the circumstances of the last several weeks which have brought me whimperingly, angrily, exhilaratingly face to face with this undeniable fact of my mortality. Nor do I wish, really, to talk about the way this direct view through the door of the truth of my demise was a sort of straightjacketing of my eyes to the terrible prize: once glimpsed, impossible to look away.

(Reader, don’t worry. The doctor assures me I am, now, very likely, fine.)

Living with Reality is the title of a podcast I occasionally listen to. The host, Dr. Robert Svoboda, is one of many master teachers and circulators of the Vedic sciences, especially Ayurveda, in the West, and I am a student of Ayurveda. Dr. Svoboda delivers his eminently absorbable teachings in a light Texan drawl; he has much to say on many subjects. The teaching I think about most often, however, is this very phrase living with reality. What does it mean?

I suppose I can say what living with reality is not: not magical or wishful thinking, not illusion, not delusion. Magical thinking might be the paramount problem of our age, willful delusion despite the evidence; the very opposite of living fully with and within reality. I’ve been one of those susceptible to magical thinking, by way of childhood training and maternal influence. I became willful — I willed the shape I wanted and grafted it atop the real, despite the evidence.

That’s how we all live, much of the time, is it not? By contrast, to live with reality is to see things as they are, to accept that things are what they are, and then to act from within that clear seeing. Of course, I can’t “live with reality” if I can’t know it for what it is. 

Perhaps in an act of willful grafting, the word “poetry” for me has always stood in for something more like “total work of art” — the total work of living and being human, the engagement and expansion of that innate creativity which is being alive and all that living is comprised of. I longed for an art that was transcending and transforming, rather than confirming and conforming, a practice that pressed against the bounds of what I knew, felt, perceived. I wanted to construct rhythms, experiences, landscapes, and environments, internal and external. I went to poetry — where language could be broken and shaped to make meaning beyond language and beyond meaning — in part I think because I imagined — no, no, I believed — it would break open the surface of reality to the real reality beneath it. This real reality would, by its very nature, be a better version of the one I knew.

Then, at the end of 2020, my attention turned toward a path of knowledge I’d long wanted to study and engage, the five-thousand-year-old traditional medicine of India, Ayurveda.

Ayus, meaning “life” or “longevity” and veda, meaning “knowledge” or “wisdom.” Ayurveda is the “science of life,” the study and practice of everything to do with embodied reality, and it offers a complex, multifaceted set of avenues within which to beautifully practice this work of being alive. How do we live? We breathe, we eat, we sleep, we experience, and, when we are balanced, we digest, and integrate, our breath, our food, our sleep, our experience. Ayurveda’s tools for enhancing and balancing mind, body, and consciousness can include food, herbs, body work, meditation, pranayama (breathwork), mantra (sound), color, scent, nature, or image. These tools are sometimes used in consultation with Ayurveda’s companion sciences Jyotish (“knowledge of light,” i.e., Vedic astrology); Yoga (“union” of body, mind, spirit); and Vastu (“science of the dwelling-place,” i.e., dimension, space, architecture).

Does this expansive science not call to mind a “total” work of art? The “total work of art” is sometimes sketched as having fascist undertones, associated with Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk (all arts under one roof, knit together for a totalizing experience). So what is an anti-fascist total work of art? Is it living with reality?    

Some things that might be said about poetry might also be said about Ayurveda: The practitioner, frequently, feels called to the form. To the uninitiated the practice might appear esoteric, hermetic, abstruse, obscure, arcane; the practitioner understands its structural underpinnings. The form activates both gross and subtle processes; it understands sound as effective, affective, transformative. It draws the light of the immaterial to bear on the material. The practitioner waits, accepts, and then liberates the creative force of movement the vidya, or knowledge, generates; the practitioner is medium, channel, vessel. The form offers an avenue to break habits of mind; it can facilitate the encounter with reality.

Material facts, material forms: Pressing the rolling pin rolling into the dough, spinning the wheel that is spinning the clay, pushing the crochet hook into the empty space demarcated by the loop of yarn. Grinding herbs with my great grandmother’s mortar and pestle, mixing the herbs with a bit of honey to create a paste, chanting while grinding and chanting while mixing the paste, then applying the paste, or eating the paste.

I face my mortality, momentarily, and for a few weeks insight and realization arrive in a ceaseless stream. Patterns of understanding shift so quickly it’s useless to try to take hold. Every day I wake up, discontinuous and continuous. My work here is interrupted by other work: heal; see a client; look after mom; earn a living. Think, think, think. Sleep.

Walking barefoot across the sand with Carla, parallel to the water’s edge, a sunny winter day, not particularly cold, even though February. I have to take off my sweater. The sand is soft in places, strewn with the fragments of sharp shells in others, and as we walk I feel the shells wearing down the rough outer layer of skin, my feet growing more pliable, more tender, more awake to what is sharp against them. As we walk and talk, I notice I’m not completely honest with Carla. About what? Doesn’t matter. It isn’t that I’m dishonest, it’s that my kaleidoscopically shifting reality (I am alive, I am alive, I am alive) makes it difficult to keep track of what is currently true.

When I was nineteen, I was riding trains between Calcutta, New Delhi, and Nepal. In the early mornings the train slowed long enough for passengers to purchase steaming cups of chai from the chai wallahs who boarded the train (or ran alongside it), swinging large metal kettles from one arm and balancing slender wavering stacks of miniature clay cups in the other. I wanted to bring one of these tiny rust-brown vessels home, but, shaped from clay dug out of the Ganges, baked in open fires and unglazed, they crumble right away, meant to be tossed out the train window and promptly ground back into dust.

Is the aim to inspire and to heal a banality against art? Or is that the point?

Claudia’s right — perhaps this essay should clarify or define what “reality” is. Perhaps I should elucidate what I mean when I say, “to see things as they are.”

But how? I’ve got a quite unrealized mind. The borders and boundaries I apply — the boundaries of life, its edges (birth, death); the boundaries of the remedies applied (herbs, mantra, pranayama); the boundaries of these sentences set against each other — these material shapes have form and form hides — but also reveals — what is real. The Vedas tell us that consciousness is all that there is. A shape between: sky-shaped, vast, multiplicitous, empty, total.

I ask myself: Are you aware that you are alive? (I am alive.) Are you aware and can you know and feel, absolutely, that you will, absolutely, pass out of this life? (I will die.) Is it not the total work of art to devote myself, between those edges, to discerning the unreal from the real?

This essay trails off, I can’t resolve it, there’s no resolution. I’ll take the subject up again, in the future, in another way. Would that it were sky-shaped, vast, multiplicitous, empty, total.

‍

‍