I
am
sickened.
This man will, Gods willing, suffer the worst backlash of karma I could wish the universe to boomerang at someone.
Oh, Sekhmet? Mighty lion-headed warrior goddess, born of the fire of Ra’s eyes to be a creature of vengeance; you who protect the good and annihilate the wicked… just step this way, please…
Wandering through one of my favourite second-hand bookstores here in Oakville, I found a copy of Karen Kain’s Movement Never Lies: An Autobiography for only twenty dollars. Needless to say, although I walked away from it virtuously, I stopped by again later in the afternoon to take it home with me. Karen Kain was a goddess to me when I was a child. I’d borrowed this autobiography from a friend of my mother’s when it was released a few years ago, but when I saw it on the shelf, I knew I had to own my own copy.
I danced for seven years as a child. I wasn’t obsessed with the ballerina stereotype, the way some girls are; it might have had something to do with how much I disliked the colour pink. No, what I loved was the physical expression of dance. I could use my body, my awkward clay, my shy hands, to tell a story. I forgot that I was shy when I danced. I could be graceful, and un-self-conscious, and light.
It didn’t hurt that I was naturally very flexible. Exercises that others had to fight to achieve were second-nature for me. Music, too, was a part of me without effort; others had to struggle to internalise music in order to fuel the dancing, but music has always been a language I have been able to hear and understand without difficulty. I was not, as you might guess, a favourite of my dancemates, just as I wasn’t popular among children in regular classes – too quick, too smart, too easy.
My mother took me to see a ballet at Place Des Arts as often as she could, usually once a season. I have had the excellent fortune to have seen the Kirov ballet do Cinderella; I saw the National Ballet of Canada do their celebrated Giselle and Romeo and Juliet, among several other ballets. We saw a lot of theatre, too. My mother has always been very determined that I would be exposed to the same kinds of culture that she had been exposed to as a child. Her father would always take the children to see the new Rogers and Hammerstein musical as it came through town, and one of my mother�s fondest memories was going into the city to see Romeo and Juliet with her older sister. She passed that appreciation of art on to me, and I expanded into opera as well, which I adore.
I began dancing at six. After a year, the National Ballet School recruiters were coming through town, and my teacher requested that I be allowed to audition. At the time I didn’t understand what an acceptance into the National Ballet training program would entail. Yes, I would be able to train to be a dancer; no, I truly had no concept of the discipline, the homesickness, the pain, the chances of failure, the depression. My mother, knowing perfectly well the horrors that children go through at ballet school, refused to allow the audition. I was disappointed, of course, but at seven, these losses come and go, and are easily forgotten.
I danced until I was just about thirteen. At thirteen, we were considered old enough and formed to a level where we could begin pointe work. This is what every woman who has ever imagined herself in place of a ballet dancer moving gracefully across the stage dreams of: the elegant long line of leg and arm, the ethereal illusion of floating, of weightlessness created by balancing on her toes. A woman en pointe possesses an ultimate secret femininity. Part of me yearned for that; part of me yearned for the slow, controlled moves that pointe work requires. Another part of me eagerly anticipated harder work: exercises, developing a new centre of gravity, working different muscles. Going en pointe was a rite of passage from child to adult.
I would have kept on dancing but for the fact that my teacher sat me down and explained that although the next step was to move on to dancing en pointe, there would not be enough students to fill the class. I and my sole remaining classmate would have to be put back a year, repeat what we had just learned, and then go en pointe two years from now with a full group.
I was crushed, and affronted, and insulted. Repeat a year when I had been so successful? Be held back to dance with people a year younger? Did she not understand what going en pointe meant to me? Had I not paid my dues, put in seven years of work to reach this moment?
Being a few weeks shy of thirteen, however, and still shy, I felt my eyes sting with tears and said little. And I just didn’t go back in the fall.
I regret it immensely now, and I have for about a decade. At thirty-one, you can see that a year – a single year of evening classes once or twice a week – forty-odd hours of extra work is nothing. At thirteen, though, it’s a lifetime.
I tried to go back when I was twenty-three. I called a dance school and they invited me to an evening class to try it out before I registered. I was terrified, but I went. The teacher was wonderful, and had I tried a class early in the session I might have registered with them and still be dancing today. The class I audited, however, was near the end of the term, and the dozen women in the group all knew the sequences the teacher was calling out. I tripped; I stumbled. I couldn’t recognise what the teacher was calling for next. I got in people’s ways. At the end of the class I avoided the women as they cooled down, skulked into the changing room to pick up my bag, pulled my coat on over my dance clothes without changing, and slipped out, my eyes burning again with tears.
And again, I never went back.
So re-reading Movement Never Lies makes me think about a lot of things. I wonder what might have happened if that audition had gone through. I look at Karen Kain’s life and although at times it was glamorous, like any kind of theatre, the effortless and natural illusion presented to the audience covers a community clinging to sanity by the skin of its teeth, performing despite sprains, back spasms, bitter and violent fights with a co-star, touring conditions that would horrify rats, and the artificial society that never quite fits into the real world. I deeply admire any man or woman who has the physical strength and mental and emotional endurance to commit to a life of dance. Had I kept on dancing, my knee and back problems might never have existed � or I might have been crippled by them. The Might-Have-Been game shoes no horses (to mix metaphors); I do my best not to play it. Dance formed my body and my love of theatre, and for that, I’m thankful.
Seven years of dance when you’re in such a formative stage leaves its mark; it is a part of me now that I could not shed if I so desired. I am complimented on my movements, both on-stage and off. I am usually quite aware of my body and how it is reaching, stretching. It is now natural for me to stand just so, legs turned out, usually with one foot slightly in front, heel of one nestles into the arch of the other. Arm movements always lead with the hand, thumb underneath the palm. My pelvis is tucked underneath my torso � and if I catch myself not doing it, I correct myself without thinking. I rarely stand face on to anyone or anything; three-quarter front was drilled into me as being more aesthetically pleasing. If I’m sitting, I sit on an angle, or at the very least turn my head slightly. And when a man I dated for a time welcomed me into his circle of friends, the sign of acceptance was being given a mock Native American name.
He named me Walks With Grace.
I have had the most marvellous birthday weekend.
My birthdays tend to be hit or miss. This year, I�ve discovered a solution: plan things all through the weekend so everyone gets a chance to see me at least once, and I get to do all sorts of stuff I find enjoyable. Why haven�t I thought of this before?
Friday night was spent dining on gazpacho and home-made oatmeal whole wheat bread with good friends. Saturday we had a handful of people over to read A Midsummer Night�s Dream, which, to my delight, was such a success that as soon as we ended, someone asked, �Can we do another one?�. Saturday I also saw three films I�d never seen before: Zeffirelli�s Romeo and Juliet (and Olivia was indeed divine!); Moulin Rouge (which was absolutely spectacular, but then I love the theatre, and this was a synthesis of theatrical spectacle and cutting-edge film); and The Matrix (yes, I worked at a science-fiction bookstore when it came out, and became so turned off by every customer coming in and raving about it that I didn�t see it in theatres, and was never really in the mood to watch it when we got it on DVD). Sunday I shopped, and with some birthday money acquired an elegantly stunning linen and brocade dress in black and purple for practically nothing, and a pair of leather arm bracers to serve as arm guards with my husband�s birthday present, a 35 # bow. And then, Monday night we did the cider and baked Brie thing at Hurley�s, where people gave me a group present: the music stand that was the subject of much comment here over a month ago: a fold-out music stand that can hold (as I discovered when I got home) five sheets of music. I�ll never have to turn pages again! Coming home, I found one last present had been left for me: a hardbound double volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, which I�d been seeking without much luck.
I haven�t had so much fun in ages! I should have a birthday every month!
Actually, I think I�m just relaxing enough to enjoy life again. It�s awfully nice not to be wound up, and to be able to sit back and appreciate friends, art, and literature again. I�m rediscovering how much I love art and culture, how hungrily I reach for intellectual exercise now that I have the room to do so. I�m rediscovering my analytical skills as well (I am shocked to see how much they have truly devalued, so I�m exercising them and bringing them back up to scratch!), mainly through rants on the state of culture here (you lucky readers, you), and, um, well, that book of alternative religion that MLG told me to write last summer over lunch one day. I deliberately didn�t sit down at the computer all weekend; I just wanted to live, instead of writing or thinking about living.
I�m also preparing to visit my parents for a week, taking the train up to Toronto tomorrow for a week of quiet and my mother�s home-cooked meals, so if I appear unreachable, that�s the reason why. Genteel teas; a visit to the ROM; lots of napping and reading and writing, with less distractions � bliss!
Degree: 1: A receipt for tuition, suitable for framing. 2: Some piece of paper that has absolutely no relevance to what one does after obtaining such. 3: Something one may not get if one fails math and/or has to take entirely too much math to obtain it.
This is from Kat’s list of alternate math definitions. Check them all out here. More math-related gems:
Absolut Value: The price of a bottle of vodka. The difference between this value and one’s disposable income determines how trashed one can get after the math exam.
Encryption: Step following mummification.
Harmonic Number: Opus of a given musical work.
Harmonic Series: Orchestra programs. Inevitably including Beethoven’s 5th, the New World Symphony, the 1812 Overture, and/or another indistinguishable Haydn symphony, every stinking season, season after season after… ahem.
Nonagon: Everything’s here.
Proof: 1: It was in the pudding. And *then* the dog ate it. 2: It’s in the alcohol. Pass the Absolut.
Proof by Cases: Figuring that if one gets exceptionally drunk, one’s solutions will make more sense.
Ray: A drop of golden sun… Mi: a name… hey, why isn’t anyone else singing?
Tangent: One of those weird hybrid citrus fruits, most likely.
It was a nice start to the day. I guess you just had to be there.
Gods, I love random blog links – through the Pepys project I just discovered a site called Wealth Bondage that touches on what I was trying to work out yesterday about art and capitalism, the role of the artist and philosopher in today’s increasingly inhospitable anti-intellectual society:
I think sometimes that we define altruism or philanthropy or charity too narrowly.We think that first you make money and then, if you are charitable, you give it away for a good cause. But, we all know that many people live lives of service, in which they voluntarily forego making much money: Saints, poets, teachers, artists, priests, activists, soldiers, firemen, stay at home Moms: All of these people are doing something other than profit-maximizing. Some have what used to be called a vocation or a calling, as opposed to a trade. They give of themselves, rather than accumulating what A. Bartlett Giamatti used to call “mucky pelf.”
The most generous and philanthropic guys are not Gates, but some poor schnooks who have devoted their lives to other people, accepting low pay and hard and often dangerous work on behalf of something larger and more important than themselves.
All of us have to make a living, but in setting up a business, or making career choices, or making choices outside of work, we can contribute to the social fabric, re-weaving as best we can what profit maximizing sometimes inadvertently and unintentionally tears asunder — the environment, economic justice, and the quality of our media and our culture.
You can profit maximize profit and give away some money, or you can simply devote your life[…] to something more important than money, or you can strike some kind of a balance.
We live in the world of economics, but […] we dwell in civil society. – from Nichomachean Ethics for Dummies
Whoa. Yeah, that. What he said.
I tripped across a blog called Veiled 4 Allah this morning, and the young woman, Al-Muhajabah, who keeps it has a wonderful set of articles and essays on being a Muslim woman in American society. Many of them revolve around the visible, physical recognition of a Muslim woman, mainly the wearing of the hijab, the full body covering, and the niquab, the face veil. She is intelligent, highly articulate, and has impressed me to no end by writing plainly and thoughtfully about her faith, rather than using it as a club like so many others do. This is a woman who has thought through her beliefs, and has made a personal choice rather than being a sheep.
Second, we can look a little at psychology. Sometimes the observance of outward things, like dress, seems trivial. Surely it’s more important to work on the inner things and on becoming a good person. Yet the outward things can often help us improve the inner things. There are several ways this is true. A woman may struggle with herself over the decision to wear hijab. It may be that she’s nervous about it, or that perhaps she likes to take pride in her attractiveness. Finding the courage to overcome fear is a positive character development, and subduing pride is a positive character development. Thus, the process of coming to wear hijab can be beneficial to a woman’s inner self. Also, when a woman wears hijab on a regular basis, she makes a decision each day to put it on before she goes out, and she sees it every time she looks at her reflection. She may often think, “Why do I bother with this?” And she may answer herself, “Because God commanded it, and I know that He watches what I do.” Or it may be that her awareness that her dress makes her a walking symbol of her religion reminds her not to do things that would bring her or her religion into disrepute. All of these are ways that the act of undertaking an outward observance can promote inner development. A woman may come to have a greater consciousness of God because she chooses to wear hijab for His sake, and this can only improve her character. – from On Veiling
If only everyone who wore a symbol which identified them as belonging to one religion or another considered each of their actions as reflecting upon their faith! We are all ambassadors for our faiths, cultures, educational institutions, families. So often in this society we are determined to be seen as individuals, and yet we judge by appearance and association, pigeonhole people into groups, and make generalisations. Until we learn to treat others as we wish to be treated, how can we have a society that respects the rich and varied tapestry of life this planet has to offer?
Insh’Allah, Al-Muhajabah will go on being a quiet inspiration to those who come across her site, portraying her faith as a thing of beauty.
Don’t think I’m anti-progress. That’s not what I’m advocating at all. I’m arguing for an educational system that values the past equally with the present and the future. Nostalgia certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s a dead-end, idealised, two-dimensional reality. Everything old is not necessarily good. However, everything new isn’t bad either. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater presents a problem eventually.
I was reading this article by Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times on the (ab)uses of nostalgia by the media, advertising, the populace itself, and the state. I was agreeing with most of it and getting all excited until I realised at the end why it all seemed so familiar: I wrote a thesis like this. In fact, the very title Up the Down Escalator sounds so darned familiar I’d almost swear I read it as research, except it was just released.
Leadbeater’s previous book, though, is called Living on Thin Air, which examines how to balance a society skewed:
Individually and collectively we are all trading on ideas, creativity and judgement to make a living. Put it another way, this is the thin air business and these are the thin air commodities. The difference is that we’re now promoting a new type of brand: ourselves. “Knowledge,” states Charles Leadbeater in Living on Thin Air “is our most precious resource: we should organise society to maximise its creation and use. Our aim should be to harness the power of markets and community to the more fundamental goal of creating and spreading knowledge.” Big ideas, but for the truly knowledge-driven society, the prize, he says, is “radical and emancipatory.”
[…] Ultimately, Living on Thin Air is concerned with the task of channelling the tensions and energy between the major forces in society towards a new era of harmonious collaboration: “a society devoted to financial capitalism will be unbalanced and soulless. A society devoted to social solidarity will stagnate, lacking the dynamism of radical new ideas and the discipline of the competitive market. A society devoted totally to knowledge creation would be intelligent but poor. When these three forces of the new economy work together, they can be hugely dynamic,” he concludes. It makes a provocative manifesto. (Or so sayeth the Amazon.co.uk review.)
I’m now very curious to read what else he has to say, and how he says it.