Dead cool
Jeremy Clarke
Three times a week I lie on the floor and pretend to be dead. Shavasana, or corpse pose, is the concluding pose of the Astanga yoga sequence I'm learning down at the local yoga centre. (Basically, Astanga yoga consists of spending two hours trying to put your nose up your bottom from every conceivable angle, then quarter of an hour lying supine on the floor as if the effort has finally killed you. In ray case it often very nearly has.)
Pretending to be a corpse is the most difficult pose of all, according to yoga practitioners. Lying on one's back, perfectly relaxed, with an empty mind is, they say, virtually an unattainable goal. But they attach great importance to it. If you've been rehearsing to be a corpse all your life, they say, when it's time to lie down and die you can put in a great performance. Personally I find the corpse pose the easiest of the lot. I have an innate talent for lying down. The banal content of my mind is easy to dismiss. And I'm looking forward to dying. I'm such a natural at the corpse pose that my yoga teacher has even complimented me on it. It was the first compliment he'd given me. I was chuffed. But as I was pretending to be dead at the time, I didn't acknowledge it.
To begin with I was contemptuous of my yoga teacher and his puny frame, his ponytail, his holier-than-thou attitude. Now I admire him. He has almost supernatural strength and he is a careful and patient teacher. He has this detailed plastic model of a human spine, for example. For every new pose he teaches us, he whips out this little spine and flexes it this way and that to illustrate how it should be done safely and properly. I have had only one conversation with him outside the classroom so far, however. Normally he is monopolised by one of the others wanting to consult him about things spiritual as if he were some sort of a guru. Alison, for example, is always seeking his advice about the 'negative energy' in her life. And Charlotte is demoralised because she doesn't feel as 'energised' by the Astanga yoga course as she was hoping she would be. I keep out of these post-session spiritual surgeries. As my grandmother once advised me to, I keep my mouth shut and my bowels open.
But as we were getting changed after our Friday class, instead of taking questions on the metaphysical, our yoga teacher asked us all what we were doing at the weekend. Gavin said he was doing some holistic singing. Selwyn was going on a meditating retreat. Alison and Sarah were dining out at a vegetarian restaurant.
This led to various asides about vegetarianism. It was sort of taken as read, I realised, that we were all vegetarians together. Our yoga teacher said he was a vegan, actually. He ate no animal products at all and he didn't wear leather either. Being a vegan was an integral part of his philosophy of absolute respect for all life. I thought we were about to shoot off into the cosmos again. But turning to me and resuming his survey, he said, 'What about you, Jeremy? Are you doing anything interesting this weekend?'
Up to this point all they knew about me was my Christian name. Three times a week I turned up, got changed, did the yoga, got changed again, and legged it. I said hello and I said goodbye, and that was about it. All I want from the yoga is a sweaty work-out and nothing else, The others, as far as I could make out, were doing it for spiritual reasons and I didn't want to get involved, And in fairness to the others, a sensitive lot, they realised this and left me alone. If I wasn't careful, answering a direct question about my private life, now, in front of the others, could be the thin end of the wedge. Others might follow. But apart from being rude there was no getting out of it.
'I'm taking my son to a bullfight,' I said. 'An indoor one in Madrid. We're going to see El Juli.'
Stunned silence. You could have knocked them all down with a feather. 'El JuliT said my yoga teacher weakly. 'The Second Coming,' I said staunchly. 'The finest matador since Manoiete. And still only nineteen!" The others, in various stages of undress, gaped at me. 'I could never quite see the attraction of bullfighting,' said my yoga teacher, speaking, I sensed, on behalf of everybody. 'Plastic Art, John,' I said, lacing up my shoes. 'Plastic Art.' And since I gave them this one insight into my life outside the yoga centre, I have been conscious that a slight froideur has crept into my relations with my classmates.
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