Dear Yoga,

thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.

nothing like breath to make you feel not-drowning.


love,

Day

Tuesday, there was a cinnamon roll--breakfast, grabbed on the way to class--without guilt. A cinnamon roll, a banana, a glass of water, that I did not feel ashamed of, did not want or try to hide. An incidental meal, eaten without caving to the sugar and fat and lack of whole grain--without thinking, how dare I violate this propriety--thinking, I'm hungry, it's time to eat. And I'm going to eat what I want to.

When I got there, Newlin turned around to me and gave a big thumbs up; same breakfast. Is this how normal people eat? So relaxed, casual?


I see my body mostly as betrayal. Its fatness, its roundness; its weakness. Injury and breakage and pain that must constantly be accommodated. Needs for food and sleep and rest that are always slowing me down. Helplessness, fear. I want to live in a body, yes, but I want to live in a fighter's or a dancer's body, lithe, powerful, open, graceful, strong. Something for living a fiery and glorious and short life that also isn't mine.

For the first time I catch a glimpse of it, my body, my broken body as it is now, as some sort of victory. I have been taking care of myself, in some way; there are other parts of me deserving of care, not just this body on which the war has been waged, other needs besides hunger that deserve to be filled. This has been my compromise, my choice, my survival--and maybe that's ok. Maybe it's alright to be the marginalized fat woman, forever explaining to people that I didn't need that lover or that job, I never expected to live past thirty, thirty five. May be a freedom worth having, keeping, holding up against the world.

It's not a choice to say no unless you can say yes.


I don't want to always say yes, but for now--for now, yes. Glorious.

I miss my feet.

Dancer's feet are important, strong. When you dance you feel your feet, know exactly where they are. Foundation for everything, they can be more expressive than your hands or face. Lately, I've been walking a lot, and I feel them differently, torqued and sore from all directions, jelly, mush. They are overworked to stabilize my unconditioned stride.


Sometime 'round the end of January, a Very Awesome Friend invited me to hike to the Havasupai falls with his family in June. I was pretty thrilled at the chance; it seemed perfect in several ways. First, for all my cavorting about the country, I've never been to the Grand Canyon, and I'd wanted to see it this summer. Second, I've wanted to take up backpacking for half a decade now, but things keep interfering. Third, this particular Very Awesome Friend also has a Very Awesome Family, and who wouldn't jump at the chance to observe such a thing so close to it's natural habitat?

Initially, I was bummed. After the thirty seconds of jubilation, I remembered that I have a mutineer spine, and ten incredibly steep miles with a pack on seemed both unlikely and not bright. After several days of moping, I came to a compromise: I'd set up a training program and at least try. If I got injured along the way, I'd find a shorter more local hike to do and invite friends for a "celebration of failure" party.

Thus it came to pass that I abandoned the cautious exercise program I'd been, with so much self restraint, following for the past month and a half. I traded it in for the aggressive sort that falls somewhere in that gray and shadowed land between "unwise" and "categorically stupid."

It was going really well till Monday. I'd done a 13 miler on Friday at an incline setting of 5 (my commercial grade treadmill goes to 15). Then I'd had a really hard time sleeping for a couple of nights, and woke up hurting on Monday. . . then I planted a tree. And THEN I hiked another six miles. It was after the six miler, doing a careless/stupid forward-bend hamstring stretch, that the moment came.

Have you ever watched a potter use a wire cutter to take a vase off the wheel? It's a bit like that. All the pieces are intact, but something has definitely just shifted a bit sideways. The pain is sharp across that line, but also aching everywhere else. As you try to move a little in the moments afterwards there are hints and flashes that if you do something wrong, it will soon be shattering. You hold yourself up with your arms and you try to breathe, try to tense your core muscles, try to will them into putting whatever it was back.

It turned out not to be too bad. Definitely not another herniated disc; I can walk with ease. Still, the whole incident has been a reminder; dear self, this is what it's like to live in a body that can't be whole. It is more fun to ignore this, to try to forget this body is heavy and slow and weak, the kind that will give out on you indiscriminately, at seven o'clock on a Tuesday or five minutes before the biggest show of your life. Ultimately this is all human bodies, all of us, and it makes us nervous to know this something we'd rather forget. Some days I get lessons in remembering, and this is what I've learned.

It feels way better to get hurt doing something hard than washing your dishes or tying your shoe.

It feels weird to be able to walk thirteen miles up hill, then not to be able to tie your shoe four days later.

It feels weird to walk thirteen miles up hill, and not to dance.


I'm reminded of my college PE teacher, kindred spirit; as he put it, yeah, I know this isn't some kind of promise. Maybe I'll still die young, I could drop dead tomorrow of a heart attack or a stroke. . . but no matter what, I will die running.

I will die running.

Lately I think a lot about existentialism and feminism--particularly the Beauvoirian concept of Other, and immanence vs. transcendence. I wonder a lot about how to not be Other. Fashion, architecture, and cooking are interesting to me because they are inherently involved in immanence, but can become art--maybe, become projects of transcendence?

In dance they talk about something called spatial intent. It's used to describe a movement that really claims the space in which it takes place, where it's clear what the dancer's intentions are with regards to the place in which they are confined. I think life is the same way; maybe it's the passion we have as we approach the space we're confined to--even these inescapable projects of immanence--that makes everything worthwhile, or not.

Corpse de ballet / Imperfect

The only other time I've posted any of my poetry on here, I asked for gentleness. As before, I present to you a classic instance of a new genre I'm pioneering: emo spine poetry. By now (I wrote this when I was still trying to dance) I've much more come to terms with this sort of thing, so if you would, I'd like you all to be as brutal as possible. I don't know much about the craft of poems, but I enjoy them and would like to improve. Also, I KNOW there are some really smart English majors who read my blog. Hopefully you'll have something to say. :)



I'm tired of laying here, trying to remember what it was for my body to be whole.


I want to climb into the mountains and
wrap myself in God
but tonight I can not walk

So instead I feel
the God who pools himself
as numbness across the heel of my left foot

reaching up in patches till
he thrusts his
flames into my
un-wrapped
spine.

I remember what it was to dance
or some days only try to
see congre devant, derriere, but suddenly

the memorable corps
de ballet
has snapped
broken spine dangling
and my eyes fill up
with blood


I was always wrong for ballet
but I loved

the slow music
and the long degages
where I could breathe into my body
and not have to be anywhere
else.

anything to dance like water

In response to this.


I find it a frustrating when people say, "I took a dance class, but I'm not any good." We wouldn't expect to have decent handwriting after studying it a couple hours a week for a year, but somehow dance is supposed to be different.


I have a theory about why this is.

Grace is when you belong in your body--when the conscious you and the physical you--all of it, not just brain and eyes and hands--are one. It lives in our breath, which acts on whole body movement, reflective of emotion and subject to conscious control.

So we can all Feel grace--feel how it's supposed to be, in our own breath and bones. When we hear that music on the street, our lungs and hearts are already responding, sending messages out about that Supposed To Be, but somehow the limbs and shoulders and hips have been left behind. . . because we've taught them how to sit still in class, but never how to move again. Busy with our brains and hands, we never taught our bodies how to write.


If you are serious about grace, start with two years of yoga and ballet, focusing on technique and breath. At maybe six months in, add hip hop or African, and movement analysis--focusing on Head-tail.

After two years you will have begun. :)


A favorite dancer, of late: here.
Photo is from here.

Streetcorner ballerina

Today was an altogether new job experience; I started work as a Sign Holder.

I'd thought that this would be a straightforward matter of selling my body to the market in a whole new way, but no; not at all. There's much more to it. Perhaps this wouldn't be so if I weren't such a perfectionist, but here we are.

You see, there are people in all those cars. People who are bored, hurried, tired, stuck. Waiting, at the light. Captive people, who will expect a fake and tired smile, half hearted sign wiggling, whole hearted efforts to avoid eye contact. They will watch me count the minutes. We could all be zombies together, I supposed, and I would still get paid. . . But I am not a fan of Terrible.

So it goes something like this. I walk; sign held aside, arms moving adagio, third and fourth. I am listening to well tempered clavier on guitar without an ipod, feet pointed, tracing, articulating; torso lifted, ever so subtle the epaulement. I am open, projecting, concert hall virtuoso making sparkling eye contact with every passing car. At the change of the light I return to the corner and hold the sign out like a barre, doing a few rounds of exercises while the audience returns again.

And they watch; they more than watch. My favorite expression is on the faces of the ones so clearly delighted it can barely be contained.

After an hour I can't hack the precision for ballet. I try African, ballroom; general overplayed goofiness. They stop watching; some give the ultimate insult, too cool to make contact, eyes resolutely ahead. I am tired. I wonder why the coffee shop doesn't put just their advertising money into sponsoring community events in the arts, and then remember--this is not expected of me. We are all used to be zombies.

It seems a little elegance and calm, warm-wrapped in irony, has clearly been the order of the day.

waltz

test # 3, Zemansky and Sears Ch. 8-10.

note to self: do not simply allow blog to become only a homage to all your favorite websites. . .


How Day hopes to pass:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_velocity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_frequency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_acceleration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_(physics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_axis_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_momentum#Conservation_of_momentum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collisions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_body_dynamics#Angular_momentum_and_torque
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematics

How did anyone ever learn anything before the internet?


On the bright side, I've actually enjoyed lecture both times this week, and paid attention, I think, more than 35% of the total time. It's hard to resist things going-round. . . There's something very satisfying about seeing the whole world in constantly moving shapes and arrows, with different colored quantities that interact with each other in mathematically meaningful and lovely ways. Everything dances.


this was fun too:
http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hangar/4421/#Rotational_Mechanics_and_the_Pirouette

for dancers--and everyone else?

I came upon this on youtube tonight, and was delighted. I found it said something about the dance that I've been failing to articulate for some time now.

Metal is very stylized, and in some ways that makes it perfect for the ballet.

Ballet is all about extreme stylization. Each generation of dancers since the court of Louis XIV has faced some pressure to be lighter, more stately, graceful, delicate, and higher on their toes--growing generation after another towards heaven, up out of dark medieval symbolism that associated downwards and bodies with hell and earth.

As time has come and passed, that heavenly ideal became an idol of self-destruction. In a world where virtually all the stars are women, blooming young and retiring by thirty, generations of men follow student to master as they shape, dictate, choreograph and direct. By the late 1980's the image that dominated ballet was the inherited ideal of Bruce Balanchine's work: transparently slender, long limbed, tall, and young, with the disposition of an adoring child and skin the color of a freshly peeled apple.

In keeping with the tradition of Dance, the visual surpassed the corporeal. Balanchine taught his dancers how to "cut some corners" on technique, creating spectacular stage performances alongside premature retirements and tendinitis. Children ready to give anything for the New York City Ballet sacrificed physical maturity as they starved themselves into--and then sometimes out of--the shape proscribed.


Set against nightwish, figurine grace and surreal, doll-like perfection have made ballet real for me again. In this fantasy playground, historical footage emphasizes every marionette pause, and the dark undercurrents of ballet's approach to sexuality and gender are left clear. Here we remember her invisible bones, the impossible thinness of her ankles, the irrevocable constancy in which she exists only for her beauty, and the way all of us worship her for it as she dances on, forever--in every way that matters--alone.

Here, removed a step from The Great Western Heritage of Culture And Dance, it is easy to believe the ideal is not real; it is easy to believe that no one really thinks this is the ultimate embodiment of who and what I am supposed to be.

Here it is possible to conceptualize ballet as only one aspect, to raise it from it's dark beauty and, in some small way, integrate it to myself--without being eaten by what I would have left behind.



Here's a link to the blog of the fellow who did it; deep thanks for a masterful and insight provoking job.

This is another amazing film piece. It showcases a very tangibly corporeal side of the dance, and at the same time, overwhelming performance, grace, and technique.