122. Ballet, Yoga, Sexual Intercourse.

The difference between ballet and yoga, I now know, is that although in ballet the interaction between men and women dancers is an allegory of sexual intercourse that never happens, in yoga it happens. It’s supposed to happen. According to William J. Broad, my instructor in a recent NYT story, “Hatha yoga [the current guru kind] used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts” to get copulation going. The entire discipline, all those painful, health-giving postures, all that wholesome effort next to the weight machines, the whole thing, it all “began as a sex cult.”

Knowing that, I will no longer be surprised to learn from a reporter that another guru, preaching “a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness,” has been diddling his devotees. It’s a history I should have known, really. The serial philandering of celebrity guru Swami Muktananda did make the papers in1981, and there have been a number of scandals, beneath the Times’ attention, reported since, including one involving the swami who gave the invocation at Woodstock. By 1995 there was so much sex between teachers and students that the California Yoga Teachers Association had to impose a written code. “We wrote it,” Judith Lasater, the group’s president, told a reporter, “because there were so many violations going on.”

Well, that’s all vulgar and in its unconstraint it teaches me the value of ballet, where I see such wonderful constraint, such tense holding back. All is formal, stylized. As I watch I hear instructions to the dancers: “Keep the lips from touching, hold the pelvis short, simply brush the finger tips.” Keep it allegorical, that is. Each slip into the literal is vulgar.

And, I would say, each slip lowers the erotic temperature. The heat is highest before the lips touch. That would be for dancers, artists, maybe viewers. Can’t say the same for real people, living life. Except maybe for Anton Chekhov, who apparently couldn’t go beyond foreplay with women he loved. The touch of genitals was a comedown. There’s your ideal viewer of ballet, excited by foreforeplay. The heat of refinement.