For Josie, Marie, Nilou, Karen, Sandra, Shirley, the two Margarets, Lucy, Maxine, Aisling, Linda, Helen, Sue and Mary
Try again. In a further, expensive, bid to recover from the impact on me of the Undercover Surrealism show at the Hayward this summer, I booked to go on a one week yoga holiday in Crete. I spent two weeks on the island, first travelling on my own for a week, mainly in the mountains south of Rethimnon, bussing it and hitch-hiking.
Our home for the yoga holiday was a small, friendly, family hotel Peli in Kastelli at the quieter western end of the island. Kastelli is a pleasantly nondescript seaside town, a low key resort catering essentially for local tourists, i.e. Greeks from the mainland, respectable, many of them middle-aged in, I imagined, secure, moderately paying jobs. Our hosts were the delightful Juliet Green and David Lister of West Crete Holidays.
On my first day on the island, my low of the summer disappeared. It was as if, while I took a bus one way, from Rethimnon to a little place called Thronos, it took a bus elsewhere. Good riddance. But in Kastelli it returned, with knobs on, the evening I got there. Arriving late, I found myself joining the end of a table of my class-mates to be for the week and our teacher, overlooking the beach, after dark. They were waiting for their main course. My heart, registering that I was the only man among twelve women (two more were on the way) sank to my trainers as I sat down. I had assumed, not without pleasure, that there would be more women than men on the holiday but my ego, still battered by the summer, was too delicate for this. Somewhere between this first moment - the group was welcoming and full of life - and the end of our first three hour class the following morning, I spun into a hole and was struck dumb. My nearest approach to conversation for five days was, at our late morning, post-class, breakfasts, 'Could you please pass me the honey?'.
The first class was tough, as all the morning classes were. While no slave driver, our excellent teacher Margaret Rawlinson, stretched us, hard. "To your limit and a little beyond!", was one of her mottos. I wasn't a complete yoga beginner but in this class I was the beginner by some way, so stiff that Margaret, patient and encouraging, had to get me to do my own half and baby versions of the poses. It was Iyengar yoga, not that I knew what that was on waking that morning. All the lithe, bending, beautifully clad, female figures, their shared consciousness of the female body, a certain longstanding difficulty, to which I must admit, of relation to one female body never mind fourteen, Margaret's included, lithest, most bending of them all naturally, unable to just be in the space of my body with all my class-mates at odd angles around me, awareness of my lack of competence turning into a psychic arrow aimed at myself, penetrating the still low summer defences of my ego, got you, producing another arrow and another, waves of them, by the end of this first class three hours in, going under, almost, in a sea of self-hatred, buffeted around, having difficulty breathing, parts of me turning to air, spun into a hole, struck dumb and then making the supreme manly effort over breakfast : "Could you please pass me the honey?".
Psychopathology, of course, that had burst on me a few years ago towards the end of writing my thesis, leading to depression, that I've learnt to hold at bay then dismantle bit by bit, dilute and dilute, using such cognitive behavioural primers as Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko's Reinventing Your Life, a good book despite its title. Sometimes, though ...
Why had the Undercover Surrealism show upset me so? Its focus was a French art magazine called Documents from the period of Surrealism. My thesis, that I turned into a book, had been a history of the magazine, from a particular angle, that of one of the people who had founded and run it, a German writer called Carl Einstein. My thesis supervisor had promised me a central involvement in an exhibition on the magazine, if it happened. She was the curator of the Undercover Surrealism exhibition but did not contact me about it. The show was built on the assumption that the writer Georges Bataille, who was Documents' managing editor, had masterminded the magazine, an old claim that I had undermined in my thesis, by showing how central C. Einstein was to its beginnings and strange life. Einstein had been cut out of the picture for the show, clip, clip, clip, and my work with him.
Clearly upsetting but why had the show upset me to the degree it had, leading to this speechlessness among my fair companions on the Bay of Kissamos (where Kastelli lies)? A strong identification with this man C. Einstein had led, in writing on him, to the unearthing of some layer of feeling and thought from my early childhood. Everything had settled again, more or less, then along had come this exhibition, like a large wave, knocking me over, churning things up again.
The holiday has done me good. After five days, with two days remaining, I began to find my tongue again. Not exactly set free but working.
I think I may have been hard work. I wonder what it's like to be on a yoga holiday with twelve other women and one man in a silent, non-smiling, state. Possibly not a bed of roses. I must email a link to this to my yoga class-mates and to our teacher Margaret.
I am following up with yoga classes at the Iyengar Institute in Maida Vale here in London, and here are a few holiday snaps.
