Nonsense Verse

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

So you think you can _____.

I am sitting, on a gray, rainy Sunday, in my neighborhood bar on the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B. I’m in a booth in the back, in the darkest corner of the room. The glow from a fist-size lamp casts a meager light across my table. This booth has been witness to much boisterous drinking and blind swapping of spit on many a Saturday night, may very well have been the scene of just such amorous and savory activities mere hours before this, but it is empty now except for me. I have to my right, as I do on most Sundays, a stein of coffee dressed up with a shot of Bailey’s. And I have a deadline. So here I sit, sipping, thinking, staring into space, trying to figure out what to write.

But I don’t know what to write. And so instead, I read. And Haruki Murakami provides a sort of answer.

There’s a moment in Murakami’s After Dark when two characters, chatting over coffee and sandwiches in a diner, have what starts as a fairly pedestrian conversation about work and study. The female character, Mari, knows the male character, Takahashi, only through a couple of chance encounters. She knows that he plays the trombone. In a band. And so engaging in small talk, she asks if he plans to be a professional musician, to which he gives a baldly honest answer: “I could never make a living at it.”

“There’s a big difference,” he continues, “between playing well and playing creatively. I think I’m pretty good on my instrument. People say they like my playing, and I enjoy hearing that, but that’s as far as it goes.”

She then asks him what he means by “playing creatively.”

“Hmm, let’s see,” he says. “You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.”

In the past weeks, months, years, I’ve had numerous people ask me why I don’t write more, whether I want to write, and if I do in fact have that impulse, why I don’t just sit down and get it done. But it’s not that easy.

Let’s begin by considering Takahashi and his trombone. I understand this Takahashi. What he says about music could apply to any art — to painting, to filmmaking, to dancing, to writing. These are interests at which many people play, whether the art presents a diversion or a more serious challenge. But eventually most of these people, like Takahashi, at some point simply stop, or at least put less stock in the pursuit, because they know they aren’t and never will be the ones for whom it produces “a kind of physical shift.”

Years ago, though, I was the anti-Takahashi: my art was dancing — specifically, ballet dancing — but I was not among the dabblers. I practiced because the dancing equaled nothing less than life. When art becomes life, when it is sent “deep enough into your heart,” it is something that changes you irrevocably. Even when you can no longer do it — if you’re a violinist with tendonitis in the elbow or a pianist with arthritis in the fingers or a dancer with fickle ankles — the tug of it does not relax. And so you are haunted by the feel of it, by the certainty that this is what you were meant to do. And once it is taken away, and you must figure out life anew, everything that comes afterward feels somehow not enough. Which raises the question: If the thing that comes next does not provoke that familiar physical shift, how can it possibly be worth taking up?

I don’t know yet if writing is enough — or if I’m enough for the writing. I have always had the technical capacity; “I’m pretty good on my instrument,” as Takahashi would say. But what of the magical moment — that “physical shift”? It’s a moment not unlike that mystical sensation of love at first sight, the one felt so deeply that its place within oneself is impossible to locate. It is not to be mistaken for the moment of lust at first sight — that electric connection sealed with heat behind the eyes and felt in the back of the head, and deep in the throat. Would-be artists struck with lust at first sight are those who in the end recognize that theirs is an intense though fleeting desire; and so when they walk away from it, like Takahashi, it is with the understanding that this infatuation was always destined to become but a fond memory.

But for those who have fallen in love with an art, walking away, or being forced away, creates an irreparable wound, not unlike that of the amputee haunted by phantom pain. The limb is gone, and the amputee, no matter the prosthetics applied, will never be what she once was: whole. The artist severed from her art may not suffer in the same physical sense, the pain may not be located in a specific place, but the ghostly ache is there and always will be.

This all may sound overly dramatic, and yet, the comparison is apt if one is to comprehend the difficulty with which the artist, having lost one art, can even begin to consider picking up and moving on to the next. The artist is haunted by pain. And so fear becomes part of the equation. A defense mechanism kicks in. For example: Take the person who has been separated from his lover, by force of animosity or simply by force. Imagine that the one gone away was the true love of this person’s life. That the departed love is the one who once inspired thoughts like “forever and ever,” and “for you, anything,” and “could not live without.” The pain at that love’s departure is greater than any pain the one left behind has experienced before. And the suffering takes years to dim. The one left behind cannot enter a certain park, because it contains the tree where the lovers once scrawled their initials into the bark. At a movie he cannot eat popcorn along with sour-sweet candy, because that combination was her favorite, and it now brings acid to his mouth. The one who has felt so deeply will be cautious about letting any person get that close to him again. And so it is for the artist whose first love has slipped away, and who must now choose whether to practice another in its place.

I have done it once already: put myself through it, ardently embraced it, clung to the art until I knew continuing to do so would mean the end of me. I danced through torn ligaments and shin splints and bruised ribs. I performed through bronchitis and asthma attacks, racked by coughing fits offstage while repeating over and over, “The show must go on.” I starved myself for the love of it until each of those bruised ribs could be counted by the people sitting in the front rows. I withered to 90 pounds, 85, 79, 78 … all the while still dancing. And then I put myself through worse than that, until it was clear: one day, it would kill me. And so I stopped. But unlike the lover who will not enter the park, I could not stay away. I kept going to the theater to be met by friends at the stage door, to get walked through the green room and the wings, through the orchestra to the back of the house, to take my place at the standing-room banister and watch my friends dance on. I cried every time. For two years. Practically on cue: as soon as the lights went down and the music began, and as soon as it entered my body and I felt that physical shift. The observer might ask why I went. Well. I couldn’t not be there. I didn’t know anything else.

Many years have passed since then, and over time, the intensity of the loss has diminished, though not the love. I can go to a show without crying. Sometimes. Distractions help — a distraction like a date who has never seen the ballet and is thus eager to be coached through it in whispers. But even then, I may sit in the dark and hear the overture and need to compose myself, to dig the thumbnail of one hand into my palm to divert the pain from the heart to the skin, before I can lean in to whisper, “Yes, I used to do that.”

But back to writing.

For the longest time I’ve made the excuse that writing is my Takahashi’s Trombone: it’s something I do pretty well, but which I could never do truly creatively. It could be that to tinker is my destiny, that this is something I ought to play at, but should never expect to really do. But is this honest? Or is it the mantra of one who has loved and lost, and is therefore afraid to try again? I cannot pretend to know. When it comes to writing, I find myself wondering about that “physical shift.” I have friends who’ve described writing much as I used to describe dancing: as a manic need, as something that has to be done in order to breathe. But that sort of compulsion has come only in fits and starts for me. Is it that writing simply doesn’t work that way? Or is it something that just takes more time? I would recognize it if it happened, I think — the physical shift — because I’ve had those moments before.

The first I remember: I was eight years old. My hair was curled into tight ringlets, and my face was coated in stage makeup, applied by some kindly woman who’d had me sit on a stool while she dabbed and powdered and painted, and brushed something rosy onto my lips. I wore pink tights and a mustard-colored dress with many layers of petticoats. I remember holding hands with the other ringleted ones waiting to go out on the stage, giggling softly, bursting to leave the wings. The moment had been preceded by weeks of rehearsals, each conducted with the utmost precision, hit this mark here, do this step in time to this music, smile, jump, tumble, run, stand up, bow, again from the top. But when I stepped into the lights, anything mechanical about the process vanished. There was a swirl of music and costumes and the sweet scent of baby powder (to ward off the sweat) and rosin and dust, and all sound except the music disappeared, and all conscious feeling left me except that physical shift, a shift I could feel within myself, as well as within the audience, and we achieved, as Murakami’s Takahashi would put it, that indescribable “shared state.” And that was it. Eight years old, and I knew what I would do for the rest of my life.

My mother would probably say that the moment came earlier. It was a moment she witnessed but which I cannot recall myself. I’d gone, at age five, to my first ballet class, as a favor to one of my little friend’s mothers. The friend’s name was Marnie, I think. She refused to go to ballet class without a friend by her side. And so her mother had asked my mother if I would go, and my mother said that was fine as long as she didn’t have to buy me anything special, like ballet slippers. “No, that’s all right,” Marnie’s mother told her. “She can just go in socks.” My mother dropped me off for the first class, which must have lasted all of half an hour, because that’s all you’re given when you’re five. I remember how slippery the floor felt under my socks. I remember running and jumping, and learning that “pas de chat” meant “step of the cat.” I remember the peace that came over me when I took “first position.” What I don’t remember is what happened immediately afterward, though my mother says she does. I came running out, as she likes to tell it, and said, “Can we come back tomorrow?” Marnie stayed for three classes, grew bored, and quit. I kept at it for thirteen years.

There were many subsequent shifts, of varying degrees, over that stretch of time, from the classes at age five, to the first performances of Nutcracker at age eight, to the first time I tied on pointe shoes at age ten. Dancing Clara, Sugar Plum Fairy, Cinderella. Performing at Stern Grove, the Palace of Fine Arts, the War Memorial Opera House, the Kennedy Center. The casting calls. The hours of rehearsals. The blisters. The pain. The getting it right. Perhaps these built each one upon the other into an endless series of layers — layers that, each time they are now peeled back, such as when I hear a particular strain of music from Cinderella or Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty, tear away like a piece of tape taking with it a scrap of skin, exposing the vulnerable parts underneath. It always stings. Whatever it is that shifted within me all those years ago, it has made me, for quite some time, loath to build on top of it again. I have tended to run rather than face it.

And that’s where I begin to wonder. Could it be that writing is not just another Takahashi’s Trombone? Could this be why the thought of it can thrill at one moment and bring waves of nausea at the next? Maybe that’s the truth in all this: that in the past I have chosen not to write not out of pragmatism, but out of (a not unreasonable) fear — fear of failing or, worse, fear of succeeding, or of coming close to success, only to fail again. Since I quit dancing, I have not allowed anything else I’ve done stick fast enough to sting. An observer might say that the thing that could stick and that should stick is write right in front of me. (And see? I read over that last sentence in the editing and found I had mistakenly typed “write.” Freudian slip?)

People say I should write — people who know me and people who don’t. Really? I say. “Yes!” they say. “We like your playing.” But perhaps now you’ll understand, having heard part of the back story: It’s not as simple as that.

Ed. Note: Parts of this post are slightly different from the original. This is a good thing — what happens when someone other than the insomniac does a close read.

On artists and the audience

Back in the day, when I'd meet ballet fans outside a stage door or simply get into conversation with people who knew what I did but had no idea what it entailed, I used to get asked the question, "So why do you do it, anyway?" (Or, from the less tactful: "What's the point?") It's hard to explain the "why" to people who can never truly understand: they'll never walk in your shoes, get up on that stage, or know what it is that drives a person to dance (or sing or act), despite the blisters and the bruises and the sprains and the intangible wounds and struggles that go oh so much deeper. But the public would demand an answer, and so I would try to find the simplest response. Sometimes throwing a question back at the original question worked: "Why do you breathe?" Oh, yeah. Deep. That tended to elicit a lot of thoughtful "hmms" and slow nods of the head. There was also the Honest but Not Helpful response: "It's hard to explain. I just love it," trailed sometimes by another question: "Can you explain why you love?" (More nods, more "hmms.") But the thing is, it was not always about me. That was hard to explain, too. This passage, though, from Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, by Kate Bornstein (I'm culling all sorts of good stuff from this book), taken from correspondence to the author from David Harrison, then her partner, could have stood in as a useful response:

What's important is loving the audience. It's not about what you feel as a performer when you're up there -- it's not about your personal catharsis. As an audience member, I want you to make me feel something. That's why I come to the theater. The artists I have the most respect for, and I'm most moved by, are those who give so much of their hearts. To me, a good performance is, in its essence, an act of love.

So beautifully put. In other words: It's not just that I love what I do -- it's that I'd like to share this love with you, and I expect you to demand that of me. It's hard to find fault with that.