Pikaia
by Jennifer Doyle
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One more iriminage. Right side. Left side. Right. Left. Right... Ah, breathing. I am breathing in, I am breathing out. In, out, in, out. Now kokyu ho.
One more kokyu ho. Stretch. Stretch. "A flower is blooming from your centre; this is where the movement comes from." I hear the advice sing to me as I bend back, hoping that one day my head will touch the floor with my feet still fully planted on earth while my knees point towards the horizon and my hara towards heaven. Twenty-year throw — and a lifetime of kokyu ho — will have gone by before that time comes, perhaps. Pikaia was a bottom-feeder who never washed its gi, never did an iriminage or complicated sums, never ran for a streetcar, never read Canterbury Tales, made a stir fry or went to Yuk Yuk's, but somehow still went about its business, knowing what it had to do.
Backward ukemi now. Pikaia. Did Pikaia do this too? Did it tumble round and round in the warm oceans that once covered British Columbia? Did it ever feel playful, like this? I reach into my pelvic bone, and it takes me over my back, and I stand, not all that steadily, I guess. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I grow a little taller, I think. My vision is clearer, and for a split second, hues are brighter, I feel lighter and life is no longer a problem to be solved. "My back just opened up," I say to Richard, feeling the need to explain what must quite obviously be a brilliant golden light emanating from my entire, newly-transformed self. "Yeah, your eyes look clearer," he concedes, and I am grateful. As we switch roles so that I am nage, he taps between my shoulder blades, laughing, and quips, "Yeah... C'mon, let's get ridda the hump, huh?"
The hump. The hump. Every woman in my family has it. It is not from any kind of spinal deformity, unless one considers an unusually long torso to be a deformity. Yet there is a kind of beauty in deformity. I am beginning to understand the hump as a physical manifestation of a kind of mental deformity. Last year, I met with one of my cousins whom I had not seen since I was about two years old. We were drinking beer, talking about the women in our family and looking at pictures. That's when I noticed. She had the hump. She was smiling, happy, chatty, but now, fatigued as the day was coming to an end, she let her shoulders slump, her chest cave in, her spine drop. Like every single one of us.
"Bend your knees," I say to myself as Richard attacks and I respond. Ushiro katatetori ikkyo. Head reaches towards heaven, sacrum towards earth. Sacrum, sacrum, the sacred bone. Let go. Let go. Do all these things, but let go. Ushiro katatetori ikkyo, and again, "Bend your knees!" Oh, yeah! And don't think about it so damn much. Every single one of us... We bear down. Under pressure, we bite the bullet and bear down. Why can we not swim, like Pikaia? Or see in all directions, flow out, like Pikaia's fellow Burgess Shale creature, five-eyed Opabinia? Why bear down? Why have I always identified more with the turtles and the mules, than I have with the sleek jaguar or gazelle? Did Pikaia scrunch up the tissue and muscle nearest its head whenever it saw a trilobite approach? Did it sense the catastrophe, the great mudslide that buried it alive?
A perfect specimen of the first chordate, frozen in time. Our common ancestor. Our spine. Our evolutionary parent, preserved in stone, so that we may see it. What is now preserved in stone was once a flexible system of tissue, near-bone and muscle that moved and danced with the waves. One more iriminage. One more breakfall in this great ocean of air. Slowly, slowly, my old friend, great hump on my back, who has accompanied me this long while, I begin to feel you melting and swimming with me...
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