I started sobbing the other day in Sabrina’s class. I was learning how to move my arms. And I wasn’t getting it. Maybe I just needed to cry. Maybe it was the beauty that broke me--that adherence of clumsiness to finite and infinite beauty was spellbinding, horrifying, and brutal at the same time. The exactness and precision of the line itself and the passage of the line in motion; it is breaking space within space, reworking it, shaping air, flesh, and bones, incorporating sculpted air into your body. It begins with resistance, creating a resistance against your body so strong that you screen out all possible options except the one. The one thing of beauty: a beautiful shape that continues to renew itself within space, time, memory, and existence. A shape that holds presence, character, nobility and pure, unadulterated strength, intelligence, diligence, and discipline. These are the lessons of our lives.
To dance is to speak in the language of images: to speak with abstract articulation, precision and eloquence. This is the language that you never learned how to speak, but find yourself speaking, hoping someone will understand what your limbs have to say. To dance is to walk with failure lingering at your heels, ready to take your arm when you are not wary, an ever eager partner waiting to whisk you offstage and out the door, an unwelcome stalker. But I tell you: do not dance with failure waiting to embrace you in the wings, because failure is external and success comes from within, tucked intricately into the folds of carefully constructed organs and sculpted muscle fibres, in the mitochondria of every cell. Call them to arms and integrate your body into one organ made up of many parts. In dance, you must frame every movement in time and space, within and without so that you will never be caught in the flat death of a two-dimensional plane. To move is to create illusions of truth, truth through illusion; create infinite depth, length, extension, and suspension. At the end of every no, at the utmost end of every road, there will be a yes, a path that leads to the beginning of the next extreme, so that the more your drive your ribs down, the more your sternum will rise to the light; the beginning of presence, the exposition of heart, hence soul, spirit given forth beneath light, shadow--sharing.
That day, I was realising the utter loneliness of every moment. I think that’s what made me cry. If you want essence, which was what was going on, you will have strain everything through the sieve with every ounce of strength you have in your body. Otherwise, it’s not enough. It is absolute simplicity, an unbending, uncompromising simplicity that has the power to break through every thing you hold dear, everything you have ever known or thought you knew. It is mind-boggling, beautiful and breath-taking. It is purification. Simplicity is the act of purification, of erasing wayward lines, superfluous bits and pieces that distract from the core of existence of being. As you push through every barrier that impedes the expression of simplicity, you are wandering through thorns on your own. When you walk out on the other side in rags and tatters, you will see the truth on the edge of the cliff, but you will be standing alone with no riches, no status, no recognition, only the knowledge that you have surpassed the temptation to give up sustains you and you will be radiant. Only then will you be able to fall; fall to the depths of the mountain’s craggy surface to discover the pockets of softness and suspension that will catch you in your disciplined abandon. This is integrity. This stripping away of every material comfort, every vestige of all that is human, social, economic; the core of humanity. Be forewarned; your body will betray you. You will be deceived. You will stumble, thirst and cry out. But the path is ahead, the sky above, the earth below. I challenge you: walk.
I cried because it was real. Because I felt real. Because everything was gone and I had only myself; I had to face myself, where I was that day, that second, at the end of it all, at the end of failure, and the beginning of comprehension.
I was angry that day for no good reason. Halfway through our educational performance, our director Dian, stopped the show to ask the front row of third graders to move up to make room for latecomers. The other dancers and I were standing in the wings, shaking our heads at this lack of foresight in seating. We heard the theatre’s sliding door rumble open, then closed. Dian explained to us backstage that we had an audience of mentally challenged adults coming into the house. After perfunctory apologies for the disruption, the lights dimmed to black. We resumed dancing, but we could hear someone moaning in the audience over the music. It made me want to jump higher, sink deeper into the role I was playing as a way of attempting to escape this unusual audience or at least erase the extraneous noise, but that was not an option. What an odd swirl of contrasts: young, ordinary third graders glowing with impetuous, intelligent energy seated beside a leaden file of mentally challenged adults varying in age from their mid thirties to late forties. The stage lights managed to dimly illuminate several distorted silhouettes of physically challenged adults. It was a mediocre performance that day, but it was ultimately a powerful lesson in humility.
As we were breaking down after the show, one woman kept asking us, one of us, any one of us, to zip up her coat, an old bedraggled coat which hung limply from her crooked shoulders. She was oldish, her speech was halting, repetitive, and the two folds of her coat lay feebly open. After repeated pleas, I finally knelt down to try to zip it up, but the zipper would not catch. She barely seemed to notice. I thought the zipper was broken; or maybe I simply did not know how to zip up someone else’s coat. I mumbled a helpless apology as she was shuttled down the corridor by the group leader.
From outward appearance, they are almost frightening, like a travelling group of ghastly apparitions with their stiff, shuffling steps, somewhat glazed expressions and distorted bodies. Still, I suspect that art has the ability to reach beyond their broken shells to touch a vulnerable spot somewhere beneath their mussed hair and old clothes. They made me want to speak to them, to heal the brokenness that lies etched clearly into their bodies, but perhaps not their minds? I do not actually know the degree or the ability of each person there, but perhaps it was a triumph in itself that they had arrived to sit in the darkened theatre space to see the changing of lights, costumes, colours, bodies and stories. They silenced me out of my anger, which melted into a dull sadness and yearning to let them taste the blessings of movement, music, performance, and life, which I have been given. Yet, perhaps they are happier than a privileged person could be; perhaps they understand and know the blessing of simplicity best. It felt appropriate and symbolic that I knelt at this woman’s feet, trying ineffectually to gather the two folds of her coat into one piece that would protect her from the unforgiving cold outside. She could not help herself; I could not help her either. The weakness of one equals the weakness of another despite superficial appearances, further revealing the common denominator of human frailty, and the gifts of grace and redemption that are so undeservedly bestowed. The rest of the group made their way down the creaky wooden corridor. I wonder how they made it down the stairs.
enter here. An existence coloured, lit by scar: the scar of memory on skin and on self. The ephemera of existence, of remembering--wispy recollection. I offer you a breath to sustain a moment’s respiration: scar lit and redder than sunset, blood, or roses hanging to dry from closed venetian blinds.
Intransigent steps, a solitary path, severed feet walking a lonely waltz into the distance of mist and fog enveloping the erect body. You are enchanted, enrapt, encircled by… night polluted by light, and cold, clearer than day, and the lamp that illuminates your bare feet on the smooth stone floor.
A strange welcome; the journey promises unravelling intrigue. let the mystery begin.
It begins with a break. The startling clang of glass on pavement stone splitting into reprobate shards that wind their way into skin under skin drawing bubbles of blood scarlet to surface. In time, with the wearing of days and hours of minute healing, the scab loosens to reveal the smooth scar beneath, waxy pale glowing in inconspicuous light. Here is memory forged in flesh.
Glass vase travelled from exterior space into microscopic lesions of your body where matter lies inert, waiting to be recalled.What do you remember?
Sound. The sound of falling. The sound of breaking. Water spilling. Glass wet on stone wet on your bare feet.
Scarlet. Roses bespeckled with water, smooth resplendent red against textured grey stone. Thorns hide amidst luxuriant leaves. Green blends into grey into invisible glass, clear water to meet scarlet petals and a fading red trail that leads deeper into distant interiors.
Here we begin again forgetting self and other, entering a newly created world; die beautifully to reality in order to grab hold of new life, a novel taste of the extraordinary. Here I am rambling through rain and clouds behind the dusty window sill of my cluttered room , trying to die in order to remember, relive stories sitting dormant in nail beds and bones, trying to call them out of their slumber into my waiting open palms cutting the humid air into wistful slices.
This is an exercise in dying. You live by creating worlds within worlds so powerful that the one you live in fades away, allows you to step out step away to fall into a gossamer brilliance so fine you will be walking on air, water, and fire at the same time. Laugh, cry, tremble, and witness miracles in the black box of the mind. Enter the fantasy.
You cannot look apologetic or uncertain; there cannot be a question of ‘can I do it.’ Repeat after me: it must simply be ‘I can do it; I am doing it.’ In moments of weakness, I do not believe in the fantasy I profess to create. And there, I die, never to awaken. It is a question of ownership; inhale the space into your body. Give birth to movement, stories, emotions, and images splayed out on the body’s malleable canvas. What do all these realisations, this constant repetition of knowledge do? How do you remember? How do you forget the halter of doubt, insecurity, paralysis that pulls stridently against mind, body, spirit?
It almost seems sultry outside, even though the air is grey, the streets wet, and the rain intermittent. Sensuality pervades the gloom in the heavy dampness. What does it mean? Where does it come from? What is it saying? Maybe, it’s always there, tucked away in the shadowy crevices of dusty corners, beckoning the bored passerby to slide a finger along the vertical line joining two walls, palpate the grey film that now coats your extended index finger. What do you do with this extraneous filth, this settling of air particles, sawdust, and dirt? Draw patterns on the swept floor: circles interrupted by squares and trapezoids trip triangles that revel in their sharp pointed edges. Step away when it is done. You open the door. The street reappears in its grey jungle, a jumble of cars, lethargic pedestrians, the swish of water falling from whirring wheels. The maze opens before you, green hedges give way to gaudy storefronts, restaurant windows filled with hanging poultry dripping with a tawny golden glaze. You turn the corner and disappear.
When you write, in your confusion of images, subjects, thoughts, you are mapping out stepping stones. But understand that one line will not lead to the next in the correct chronological order. Still, you set it down, mark it with ink, a coloured pencil, a magic marker. Hopefully, this will allow you to go back in, peer into the cryptic symbols you left for yourself, clues to some mystery you have yet to realise.
Sheets of rain sliding down the windows look like a molten glass curtain. Quick percussion of water on glass on brick on pavement. Contrasts with the wild grey smoke puffing thinly from the candle burning within a glass cylinder; wax pools still and liquid smooth.
Darkness breaks before you a little lighter with each word that falls from your lips: a deliberate exercise in sound. You are trying to speak, to think in another register, a language that has closed its doors on your exposed wrist. Caught in this vise with your veins running perpendicular to the sliding doors that now cannot quite meet, you utter a fragment of thought one syllable at a time in a voice you never knew you would hear rising just beneath your throat. From the other side, you are a faceless hand on the edge of the road begging for the gift of speech. Your palm grows heavy as veins threading the narrow expanse of skin over bone turn bluer beneath the mute weight of descending sky.
You recede reside in such interior worlds: a mysterious and muffled existence where you distance yourself from the surreal reality that permeates the humid air. You are conscious of the scent of flowers rising from damp earth stretching just past the black painted bars of the small cathedral next to the prison. A jumbled triangle of stone: basic brick chapel, synthetic stone prison, magisterial marble courthouse and the snaking uneven river of pavement connecting their cloistered walls.
Darkness lights up with your blistered steps, setting off surveillance motion censers and illuminating the uneven asphalt road behind the prison. Thin oblong windows are cut into quarters by thick round bars that slice light with the shadow of a cross. Darkness closes in behind you as you leave behind empty pools of light to blink off as stillness descends.
Enmeshed in street-lit darkness, wrists rotate in undulating circles, fingers follow to meet palms, meet air, meet each other, bearing the silent weight of day and its labour. Shadows settle onto your skin; ink drips from your extended fingers, leaving an invisible trail on dirt-laden pavement. You are painting a black on black self-portrait using the city as an unprimed canvas, stretched across a frame of air and water.
