During an intensive meditation session in early March, I experienced a focused awareness of a feeling that has been with me for a long time – that something separates my head from my body, in a physical sense, as if my head has been severed and merely placed back on top of my neck. I often feel pain in my throat, physical or emotional. I associate this with one of my greatest regrets in life – the fact that I cannot sing. I am also reminded of a line from a Morrissey B-side: "She would die if we heard her sing from the heart, which is hurt."
While I was in Arkansas, I think communication was a problem for me. Perhaps that is why I am back in England now. One thing that intrigued me was that at one point, someone who was trying to guide me admonished me that my habit of pausing in my speech was rude, and that I should just say what I'm thinking and 'put myself out there'. She even mentioned the fact that I stutter, and this is what intrigued me in particular, because no one else has ever mentioned this. I don't have a real stutter, in the sense of stuttering on every, or even most sentences. But I am aware of stuttering with some regularity. It's never been a problem in itself, though it is certainly a symptom of great nervousness. Perhaps one reason her mention of my stutter, slight as it is, fascinated me, was because of a passage from Mishima Yukio's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The passage in question deals with the main character's feelings about his own stutter, and it arrested me when I first read it, as something I was familiar with, so that I wondered why I myself did not have a stutter. Apparently I do. However, now that it has been pointed out to me, do I want to make an identity out of it? I hope that's not what I shall do. I hope I am only making a blog entry out of it. Here is the passage in question, from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:
"My stuttering, I need hardly say, placed an obstacle between me and the outside world. It is the first sound I have trouble in uttering. The first sound is like a key to the door that separates my inner world from the world outside, and I have never known that key to turn smoothly in its lock. Most people, thanks to their easy command of words, can keep this door between the inner world and the outer world wide open, so that the air passes freely between the two; but for me this has been quite impossible. Thick rust has gathered on the key."
Did you know there’s a Zen exercise you can do where you meditate by imagining you’ve got no head? I tried it the other day and it was very strange… I felt disoriented at first, then very solid, it had the effect of shifting my centre of awareness to my chest and stomach instead of my head, and I felt oddly relieved. By concentrating on the ‘fact’ that I had no head throughout the day, I managed to maintain this state, and it got easier…I felt very calm and the tube ride home had an almost mystical quality – and I don’t use that term lightly.
Hey, I left a comment here last night, and for some reason it didn’t stick.I basically said I’d try out that technique, though I wondered if it wouldn’t have the opposite effect on me – of making me even more aware of my head.