Transcendent Dancing in the Literal World

Originally Posted Friday, October 24, 2014

Here is one of the first of the old Polaroid process pictures that I took.  She was a dancer, a dance instructor.  She was, like many dancers I've met, quite literal.  I don't know why, but that has been my experience.  I once worked on a documentary about ballet dancers that never came to fruition.  The documentary, I mean.  The dancers themselves did.  I was eager to interview them as I had many questions about the interface of art and athletics.  Every time I asked the questions, though, I got a blank stare.  They didn't think about dance in those terms or any other that I recognized.  They danced learning one move at a time, stringing them together, muscle memory of a lifetime of dance carrying them through a dizzying array of movements, over and over and over again.  They began dancing at an early age, just after infancy, and had continued dancing.  They had been the best dancers in their classes and so they were rewarded.  Year after year, again and again and again.  There had never been a conscious decision to dance.  They just did it in a more and more competitive way.  I remember asking the lead in the ballet what she liked to do for fun.  She lived in a trailer with her boyfriend who was a mechanic.  They liked to go to the truck pulls and big wheel things.  She didn't know a lot about art.  I have known three Olympic gymnasts in my life, all medal winners.  They're lives were much the same.  They reminded me of Tanya Harding. 

I'm not saying my limited experiences are definitive.  It is just what I have found on many more than one occasions.  No one ever adequately answered my question on the artist/athlete dichotomy (if it is one), at least not in a manner interesting enough to air.  I am a romantic, and I try to romanticize the world, but it is not an easily romanticized place, sometimes.  My understanding of what I thought the term meant is diminishing.  Words are a battleground and mean less and less (and consequently more and more) than I would have ever guessed.  Images, too.  This picture is four or five or six years old, perhaps, and where I once thought I knew what I was trying to say, I am now uncertain of what the picture says.  Perhaps it is literal like the dancer herself.  Perhaps that is all that is left in the end, things stripped of intention.  Symbols and metaphors are like the seasons, like the wind.  They are not at our command, a shocking thing after so much time spent learning to understand them, of garnering a "command" of the literary language. 

I think of stopping, of course.  It is maddening at best and shameful at worst.  This trying to leave a creative record, I mean.  I close in on a billion written words, I think, some here, some in handwritten journals, some an journals saved to computer hard drives.  There are half a million pictures, too. 

Last night eating dinner with a friend, I quoted Roy Batty ("Blade Runner") in reference to our experiences--moments lost like tears in the rain.  She liked that, she said.  Memory.  Is it the thing that makes us human?