Presque vu and the Way of the Hoop

OMG!!! Can it truly be that the Maus at long last is going to speak???

Well, I've had plenty to say, but trying to maintain a blog is just one more dam' thing I don't have time for, yanno? I share the odd rant or rave with my own e-mail list, but I have barely hung around Tribe at all, because I'm generally up too late composing my usual screeds and diatribes (and then when I do come back to check on things I discover that I have the opportunity to pay for Premium Service so I can get a gold star by my name...hurrah!!!! At least I can still ignore my profile for free...).

Still, this recent one of mine involved a reverie of one lovely evening at Le Maison du Chat, and I felt it was worth sharing around.

Other entries may appear at irregular intervals, or not. Here's this one.

M.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


It was a coolish night in the sodden and squelchy season that passes for late winter in Kentucky when I first met Poosie Kat. She was wearing a winsome smile and a lime-green knit cap with cat's ears on top, and she was holding forth on the merits and virtues of the hula hoop. Her own hoop was propped against the wall nearby, and she had brought extra ones as well, the better to introduce others to the Way of the Hoop.

I was amused, and, naturally, intrigued. I had never considered the possibilities of hula hooping as a method of meditation, but I immediately made a connection with the Sufi practice of achieving an altered state of consciousness by whirling slowly in place; this was one of those minor epiphanies that leaves one thinking, "Why hadn't I seen that before?"

Enlightenment has a way of sneaking up on you sometimes.

The occasion for this meeting was a party at Le Chat Noir's pastoral estate over at Fox Creek; he and Karine, in an effort to hold the cool and the damp at bay, were hosting a gathering of their fellow Burners, and they had intimated that FrauMaus and I might enjoy the company as well.

Well, we did.

The evening was a confluence of various persons of all varieties but with a shared spirit of creativity that manifested itself in various ways; there were artists and artisans of various sorts, fire dancers and drummers, poets, mystics, dreamers, doers, and thinkers of ponderous thoughts, all bouncing off one another in a series of happily careening conversations, fueled by boxes of wine, plates of eclectic hors d'ouvres, craft beer, and perhaps a dash of Bourbon, it being Kentucky, after all.

Of course, there was fire. Where there are Burners, there must be fire, as sure as Goddess made the little gold apple; it is simply their nature. "Ignis est bonus,"--"Fire is Good!"-- read the characters cut into the 55-gallon drum sitting in the back yard; the barrel was further ventilated by a series of glyphs and emblems--each with a particular meaning and significance--rendered earlier the same day with a portable plasma cutter. As the crew mixed and mingled, people swirling in knots and eddies in and out and around the house and yard, someone was always near the Burn Barrel, feeding it pieces of deadfall, cleared brush, and scrap lumber, the fire forming a focal point for the gathering, the center of the community for the evening. Sooner or later, everyone drifted out to the fire at some time, staying for a moment or a while before going back to the kitchen or the side porch or points between. The evening was suffused with a feeling of relaxed fellowship, with no agenda nor concern save just to enjoy the night and the company, to simply be, and be content.

It was a good place to be.

Late in the evening, as I was beginning to wear down, I found myself out in the back yard, standing near the edge of the circle of firelight, absent-mindedly tapping out an increasingly flaccid beat on my hoop drum--the drumhead was hide, and the night, as I say, was damp--when I turned away from the fire and looked toward the far end of the yard, toward the back of the shop building down by the road.

There in the cool and the mist, outside the firelight, but softly backlit by the orange glow of the sodium-vapor lamp above the neighbors' drive, shadowy figures moved in the night, maybe three of them, maybe four, gently swaying back and forth in time to the drum, slowly, silently rolling their hula hoops around their hips.

And I thought to myself, "Mausi, you are ferdamshure not in Kansas anymore."

I had the strangest feeling, considering the overall absurdity of the situation, that I had been privy to some important something, but had managed to miss it by the time I realized its significance; like Parsifal glimpsing the Grail, I had witnessed the curtain drawn back for the merest moment on something Grand and Wonderful, but owing to some lack of wit or defect of virtue, I failed to grasp It before the curtain fell again and It was lost to me.

Presque vu is the phenomenon, "almost seen," and I know about it thanks to Joseph Heller and Catch-22. It is akin to the phenomena of deja vu, "seen again," and jamais vu, "never seen," wherein the percipient is struck by, respectively, a sensation of familiarity in an unfamiliar place or a sense of complete unfamiliarity in a very familiar place. With presque vu, the percipient is cognizant of some profound insight or revelation but is unable to quantify what it may be; when the Chaplain in Catch-22 witnessed a vision of a naked man in a tree at Snowden's funeral, he was tormented by a sensation of presque vu, never realizing that the naked man in the tree actually was a naked man in the tree.

I did not see a naked man in a tree, although the possibility of my having done so was probably not entirely out of the question.

No, all I saw was a group of funky young women quietly hula hooping away at the end of my brother's back yard in the misty moisty stillness of a cool Kentucky evening, and for the briefest, briefest instant I was transported somewhere...else.

And then I was back.

Presque vu.

Hula hoops.

Who knew?

Enlightenment, I say, has a way of sneaking up on you sometimes.

Almost.

So now that you know the backstory, you'll understand why I experienced a mildly rapturous moment when I came across this item in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. It immediately called to mind what I can now honestly say is the unlikeliest dam' mystical experience I've ever had; this isn't synchronicity exactly, but, well, a pleasant surprise, and further evidence of the mysterious and apparently universal appeal of the Way of the Hoop.

Make of it what you will.

And to my regular correspondent in The City, seen anyone hooping it up in your neighborhood lately?

Thine,

M.

www.newyorker.com/talk/2007...k_schulman