Patanjali’s Circus

Below you will find the first part of an anecdote that was written in the fall of 1988. It describes events that occurred around the occasion of The Russian Academy of Science presenting Silo with an honorary degree. You can read the talk he gave on that occasion here. Along with the various instalments of this story you’ll find illustrations by my friend and co-conspirator, Rafael Edwards.

After Silo read these anecdotes I received a number of requests for copies from friends to whom he had mentioned them. Hence, the Spanish translation which was a deeply flattering gift from some of my friends who thought it worth their trouble to render into another language, something I know from much experience is never an easy task.

Through the usual mechanism, of friends forwarding things to friends, a short manuscript with four of these anecdotes reached Karen Mulhallen a scholar, and writer as well as publisher of Descant , a Canadian journal of the arts. Karen suggested I submit it for consideration and the editors were kind enough to ask if they might publish a representative sample. They chose A Birthday Dream, which I’ll republish here eventually.

Patanjali’s Circus 

“Perfection of the body, like the attainment of  superhuman powers, can be attained by birth, by  potent plant substances, by mantra, penance, or  meditation.” 

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book 4, Verse 1 

A sort of preface
There’s a saying, Spanish I think, maybe you  know it – something about drowning in a glass  of water. From the first time I heard it I thought it  was pretty good, as platitudes go. Then again, I  always assumed it was a recommendation about  not being overwhelmed by insignificant things, or  something like that. I never suspected that it might  refer to something else, something very different.  That only became clear to me in the fullness of  time, and only after a long journey.  

You know how they are always saying that the  longest journey begins with the first step. But  how many steps before the end? How many steps  do you take in a day, in a month, over your whole  lifetime? Little steps, big steps, firm steps, halting  steps and finally no more steps.

A Real Beginning
Most of the time one step leads to another, you  walk down the sidewalk of a busy street, the sun  shines, people, and automobiles rush by on the mysterious errands of daily life—and suddenly you  step off the earth and fall into the abyss.  

Of course, that’s not exactly what happened. Really,  it was much more prosaic, like when you walk down  the stairs while thinking, in some semi-conscious  unarticulated way, that there is another step still  to be taken – then suddenly you step into nothing  and, with a start, you stumble.  

Have you ever noticed how when someone trips  themselves and stumbles, they always glare back,  as if to make sure that everyone knows that they  are not to blame but rather it is the off ending path  that is responsible for their apparent clumsiness? 

And that is how it began—I took a simple  step—and I stumbled as if stepping into the  void. My body jerked and twisted desperately,  trying to regain equilibrium; my heart pounded  and raced; my clothes were suddenly damp with  sweat. 

Predictably, like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom, or Orpheus almost victorious, I turned back. In  half-formed thoughts I imagined I had stepped  off into some unfinished roadwork accidentally left unfenced, but there was no gaping manhole,  no missing step, no yawning chasm. I glared at  the sidewalk accusingly but all I could see was a  slight crack, little more than a scratch zigging and  zagging along the concrete surface. That’s how it  began but not how it was to end. Over the next days, this strange kind of vertigo occurred more  often and more intensely. 

These disagreements with gravity happened with no  apparent rhyme or reason. In retrospect, they seem  to have erupted, perversely, in the most mundane  circumstance. For example, sitting at my desk I reach  for the phone but my hand, instead of encountering  a familiar object, plunges into empty space. Losing  balance, I lurch forward off the chair, falling forward  as if the desk had vanished completely. Tumbling  forward, I try to regain my balance; jerking my head  back, I find myself almost falling on my ass. I should  add that, while I don’t know, I suspect someone  watching me would only have perceived a barely  visible twitch, if they had seen anything at all. 

Another time, as I was raising a cup of coffee to my  mouth, I lost my balance and had to brace myself  so as not to plunge headfirst into that unsounded  depth of steaming blackness.

It didn’t seem that anything specific was required  to trigger these episodes. At first, they took place  perhaps once a month, later a few times a week  and soon, they were a daily occurrence. Had this  been happening to a friend I would have certainly  told them to make sure they were taking care  of themselves: eat well, get enough sleep and  uh, oh yeah, go see a doctor. Probably it would  have made sense to see a doctor. I didn’t do this  for the same reason I avoided mentioning my  sudden disequilibrium to my wife Donna – I had  an invitation to go to Moscow and I didn’t want  anything to get in the way of that.

Once upon a time there was the USSR
The invitation came from the Academy of Sciences,  on the occasion of their presenting an honorary  degree to my friend the Argentine thinker known  as Silo. I had to be sure that nothing would  interfere with this trip, so medical intervention was out of the question; instead, I would try not to fall  off the edge. Getting Donna even more worried  than normal about my sanity would not advance  the cause at all. Anyway, it was not like I was  hiding something from her. I mean, I’m the first to  admit that I’m giving you a very colourful version  of what happened. What are we really talking  about here anyway, a few minor dizzy spells? If  push came to shove, I’d say it was all probably just  the result of a lack of sleep or maybe because of  something I ate. 

I finally arrived in Moscow as part of the delegation  accompanying Silo. And though the Soviet Empire  had fallen, daily life in Russia had not yet fallen  apart, at least not completely. With great kindness  and attention, our small group was treated to  a kind of semi-official tour. We met with media  people, academicians, and representatives of the  military. We met with ordinary folk of all kinds;  it seems to me that we met with everyone but  politicians. Well, Silo and a few of us did meet with  Gorbachev, but he was no longer a politician per  se. In any case I was not part of that delegation  and was spared the potential embarrassment of going to shake his hand and instead falling on top  of him, or flying out the window. In keeping with  the frivolous nature of this anecdote, I won’t clutter  these pages with much more of this kind of stuff .  Really, I just want to tell you what happened when  we went to the circus. But before we get to that,  just permit me one more little digression. 

An embarrassing admission and then dinner
I had boarded an old Aeroflot flight in Montreal.  It was a jet-powered cliché; a bit like walking into  the setup for some old joke. Everything—the  seats, the carpet, the paint, all worn down with  use. Everything smelling of cabbage and cigarettes  but with a skilful pilot at the helm, one who had  probably put in lots of hours in combat. I’d heard  bad things about Aeroflot (and Ladas), but I’m  not one to worry about such things. I think that  like certain other travellers, my discomfort with  travelling is neither waiting in airports, nor that  I’m afraid of plummeting to my death trapped in  a plane spinning down toward the earth. Rather,  it’s about that particular discomfort which seems  to increase with the number of time zones we cross. Sometimes, the further we travel through  space, the more we feel like we’re travelling into a  dream where everything is so totally familiar, yet  somehow different. Or perhaps it’s the other way  around; everything feels so strange yet somehow  familiar. Either way, it makes us feel as if we were  sleepwalkers, strangers not only in space but also  in time.  

At those moments it seems to me that my life, as I  live it, is something I am seeing from another time.  As if this instant were a precognition—a warning  or a lesson about what might be. Or, in that same  instant and just as clearly, it seems to be exactly  the contrary, that really, I’m living a moment  already gone by and all this is not a foretelling  but a remembering; the review of a lesson already  learned.  

Be that as it may, I arrived in Moscow excited  but exhausted. Our quasi-official delegation was  housed at a dormitory building of the Department  of Administration of the Academy of Sciences. The  morning after we arrived, I awoke and, stumbling  around the unfamiliar room, I opened the curtain  to gaze across the campus and the Soviet suburb that bordered it. Totally lost, I thought, “This isn’t  Toronto, it’s not New York. It’s sure not Sao Paulo…”  For a moment I looked out and, almost in awe at  my own confusion, was forced to acknowledge to  myself that I had no idea where I was. Why was I  not waking in my own comfortable bed, in my own  familiar room instead of here—wherever ‘here’  was?  

Now, as embarrassing as it is, I’m owning up to this  confusion so you will know exactly with whom  you are dealing. That disorientation, profound  and brief, passed, and I went out to join my  companions just as our hosts were preparing to  guide us to the cafeteria.

Deeper into digressions
Normally, there could be no activity more prosaic  than institutional dining, but we were in the heart  of the decomposing corpse of the giant that had  been the USSR. Eating at the cafeteria was always  interesting, not only because of the opportunity  to speak to acade-micians from all over the ex Soviet Union but because, in its specific physical  attributes as much as in the rituals of dining, it  seemed a microcosm of the country itself. While  the choices of food were limited, nonetheless it ran  the gamut—from dumplings that would at home  be considered utilitarian at best, to incredibly  delicate sturgeon that, in Toronto, would have  been not unobtainable, but certainly expensive.  You could line up at the counter, make your  selection, and join the handful of people scattered  around the rows on rows of empty tables. Regional  cuisine aside, it was really just one more variation  on the functional food that you can find in similar  settings anywhere in the world. The only thing  that troubled me was why, in a week’s worth of  meals, there was never a fork available; there were  napkins, there were spoons and knives, cups,  saucers, all the usual accoutrements – but never,  not once, a fork. Mystery upon mystery.

Enough of that; it’s off to The Circus
I had always heard that circuses were taken much  more seriously in the USSR than they were in  the west. Notwithstanding the tragic failures of  Moscow’s often-monstrous regimes, this interest  in the circus was for me a sign of true culture.  

More than images of ordinary folk lining up for  the opera or of crowds filling sports stadiums to  watch chess championships, the “respect” shown  to the circus arts struck me as the mark of real  civilization.  

I sat gazing down at the performance unfolding  quite a ways below me. Entranced as I was by  an act that was as much theatre as acrobatics,  suddenly I felt myself hurtling down from my  seat in the upper tier. Terrified, I was falling and  tumbling as if targeting the bull’s-eye of the circus  ring that waited so far below. Instinctively, I threw  myself back as hard as I could and, in the process,  threw myself halfway into the lap of the bemused  stranger who was sitting beside me. I hoped my  friends would not notice my strange twitching or  the thin film of sweat that stuck my clothes to my  now damp and cold body.  

There I was, sitting on this invisible roller coaster,  my hands locked in spastic grip on the edge of the  seat; my jaw clenched hard so as not to scream  aloud. And though I was relieved to find myself  back where I began, sitting in the audience, I could  not quite relax and enjoy the show. I remember almost nothing about the acts that followed. I was  once again swaying on the edge of a bottomless  chasm, held back from another vertiginous flight  by the slightest of threads. I could feel the pull of  the abyss that was opening in front of me, calling  to me, pulling me down. I started to feel myself  tumbling again. This time, I was certain to crash  into the clowns that were now performing so  far below. As I tottered, nearly falling, suddenly  I started to formulate an unlikely thought: What  if I didn’t fall down? What if I could fall up? The  thought was completed in the moment just before  I crushed some hapless clown, and even as I  imagined that I might, I started to rise high above  the clowns and the crowd.

Curious and curiouser
I don’t know for how long the circus continued; I had  found another form of entertainment and until we  left, I hovered and swooped, floated, and soared.  It was a strange perspective. Shoulders: narrow,  broad, enclosed in suit jackets or bare. Collars: frayed,  drooping, crisp. The tops of heads: balding and bald.  Hair: tousled, greasy, and well groomed, long, and short. Eyes: somehow averted from me, fixed on the  performance being played out below. 

But that was only the beginning. After all, what  did flying have to do with falling into a crack on  the sidewalk or diving into a cup of coffee? Soon it became apparent that my ability to fly was just  one aspect of something much larger. Whatever  laws of physics governed the relationship between  my body and the cosmos had become impossibly  malleable. I could actually shrink my body down  smaller than a mouse; I could scurry between the  legs of the spectators still focused on the circus  performers. I could become even smaller, like an  insect or smaller still. I could vanish into the cracks  and scratches that covered the floor. Just as easily,  I could grow until my head pressed up on the  ceiling of that vast auditorium. These changes in  perspective and dimension seemed less troubling  than the fact that no one seemed to notice my  exploits. But what is now an obvious question  was, in that moment, only a vague unease. In the  excitement of the moment, even that perplexing  mystery seemed insubstantial.

That’s all folks
I’m afraid that I don’t have any very satisfying ending  to this rather ridiculous anecdote, except to assure  you that all this did take place. I suppose that for the  sake of completeness, I should confess that for many  years I had suffered from migraine headaches. Does  that bear on these strange incidents? Some might  think so – migraines after all have a neurological  component. Macroscopia and microscopia are  particular forms of hallucination that involve the  sensation that the objects of the world, or the  subject (me, in this case), have grown to gigantic  proportions, or shrunk to a tiny size. Certainly not  the most common form of hallucination, these are  perhaps best known as a relatively rare symptom  suffered by some migraineurs. They are also known  to occur in, what used to be called, temporal lobe  epilepsy (now more commonly referred to as partial  complex seizures). For that reason, I must tell you  that I have had more than one complete neurological  examination and was given a clean bill of health—in  this regard at least. 

Some of these symptoms also have a literary  incarnation; some critics claim they are the source of Alice’s growing and shrinking during her  adventures in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland—“drink  me,” indeed.  

Of course, there are others who attribute Alice’s  bodily transformations to the mushroom that the  caterpillar sat on or to whatever it was he was  smoking. Those who are not so readily thrown  off the scent by crude materialist rationalizations  might well consider what Patanjali tells us in his  Yoga Sutras: 

Acquiring power over the elements grants the  ascetic various perfections: the power to project  his body into the smallest atom, or expand to  the size of the greatest being, to grow heavy or  light, to extend his body or its limbs to any size,  to bend the will of others to his own… (Yoga  Sutras, Book 3, verse 46) 

If this is a true tale—and it is—what can it  possibly mean? How can I explain it? As a dream,  a neurological symptom, the perhaps accidental,  unsought and undeserved attainment of one  of the siddhis obtained by the masters of yoga,  a hallucination, or something else altogether? 

You can choose whatever explanation you like.  For my part, I will not muddy the waters with  interpretations. Why confuse things further?