The Difficulty of Being Earnest

“Love,” by William Maxwell. The 1983 New Yorker short story makes no bones about its topic. “He’s not afraid to write emotionally about emotions,” said writer Tony Earley, in discussing the story, which he had chosen to read aloud on The New Yorker fiction podcast. He and The New Yorker fiction editor were trying to figure out how the story managed to take on its topic and honor its title without being too sentimental—cheesy, rosy, or unrealistically sweet.

“Sentimentality doesn’t scare [Maxwell].” the editor suggested.

“Well sentiment doesn’t scare him. I don’t think one can make a case that this is sentimental. At least in writing workshops, the ones I teach, anyway…” said Earley.
“It’s a dirty word,” the editor finished for him.

“It’s a pejorative.”

 “Love” portrays a boy’s childhood affection for a kind elementary-school teacher, Miss Brown. Her eyes are brown and her voice is “gentle.” “She reminded me of pansies,” the narrator says. This was not romantic love but the hand-holding feeling that children have for caring adults. The children in the story adore their teacher, and the story says so directly: “We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We meant to pass right up through the sixth, seventh and eighth grades and on into high school taking her with us.”

I thought of “Love,” when reading a piece in another genre on another, much less accessible topic: Virginia Woolf’s essay about why Greek literature can be difficult to understand on an emotional level, language barrier aside. “On Not Knowing Greek,” one of the essays in Woolf’s book of literary criticism, The Common Reader (1925), describes how Greek literature is difficult for modern people to understand in part because it addresses emotions directly, without evasion. English poets, Woolf says, cannot “be direct without being clumsy” or “speak simply of emotion without being sentimental.” The Greeks, on the other hand, could “step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an age like our own.” Rather than looking at them directly, the writers of Woolf’s time, she says, look at emotions “aslant.” This description of the modern poets does not sound so different from Earley’s comment, on the fiction podcast, about writers today who “either bury [emotion] between the lines,” or “write about it ironically, so that if a critic says, ‘this seems awfully emotional to me,’ the ironic writer can say, ‘oh, I was only kidding.’”

Why is it hard to look at emotions directly, the same way that it’s hard, indeed, dangerous, to stare into the sun? Woolf invokes the differences between the ancient Greek world with its sunny, “out-of-doors” vibrancy, with people shouting at each other in marketplaces, and the English moderns at their desks watching the rain on the windowpanes. Nowadays, even out-of-doors, people are composing into their cell phones, so if one believes the argument that modern isolation breeds indirect speech, no wonder people stay away from blinding sentiments nearly a century after Woolf wrote her essay.  

It may be the climate. It may be that straight emotions make us uncomfortable; that we would rather take them in cocktail form. But I would like to propose another explanation, or another way of explaining our discomfort with emotions. Perhaps it’s not that we can’t face distilled emotions; it’s that we don’t quite believe, or want to believe, that they exist, that is, at least not in the pure form that words like “love” and “remorse” and “jealousy” would imply.

I think the literary version of this idea is that sentimental writing—saying things like, “he was in the depths of despair,” or “I adored her,” or describing warm, fuzzy moments in life without pairing them with harsh ones—fails to capture the complexity of sentiments like love. It is wrong, the argument would go, to write simply about love because love is not simple; rather, it is a lazy term for something much more complicated, a whole range of behaviors and feelings. Those complicated feelings would better captured by “showing” (as in the exhortation to “use showing not telling details”), or describing what people do, than by simply “telling” the reader directly how they feel. This may be just another way of describing how people can't quite stomach straight emotions. 

There’s a term for the opposite of a philosophy that mistrusts abstractions: it’s Platonism, the idea that abstractions exist apart from their manifestations. For a Platonist, abstractions like “the Good,” and love are real things, invisible though they are, that incite the confusing emotions and behaviors writers, suspicious of sentimentality, would “show” their readers. So it makes sense that the Greeks, particularly those in Plato’s circle, would write directly about emotions, as Woolf says they did. Why beat around the bush when you could describe the bush directly? On the other hand, if you believe that the bush is just a non-existent abstraction that refers to the behaviors of people beating around it, then describing people’s actions would make sense.

It’s ironic that Woolf should be the one pointing out the directness of the Greeks, since she beat so beautifully around the bushes of emotions in her novels; and even in her essays, to me it seems that her thesis is not something laid out at the beginning but, rather, the ringing left in the air after the music of her story has finished. (I hope it's obvious that I approve.) As critic James Wood puts it: “In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward—from a beautifully neglected center.”  

Part of the modern fear of saying things directly probably derives from the tendency, in literary criticism, to interpret texts based on what they don’t say, based on what lies between the lines. It would be to one’s advantage not to directly say what one means in this system; if a writer speaks of love, this sort of deconstructionist critic would assume the piece was really about something else left unsaid. If a writer wants to talk about love and be taken seriously, the last thing he should do is mention the ‘l’ word. Though trying  to communicate anything to such a critic would probably be a lost cause, since, from what I read, that sort of critic may not even trust what’s between the lines if he thinks the writer consciously put it there.

Of all the sentiments I could discuss, I keep coming back to love. It is an easy choice. It is the title of the story I'm talking about. Yet it also reminds me of an unspoken point about sentimentality: it more often refers to happy or warm fuzzy feelings than to unpleasant ones. People can be corny when talking about unhappy things; they can “bleed on the page” or be melodramatic. But sentimental, I think, usually implies being too rosy.

I don’t particularly trust simple, happy stories, either. I want more complexity. “There must be more to it!” But people are less hasty to question misery, to ask why things aren’t simpler or happier. I think people believe Murphy’s law and consider good fortune to be a suspicious anomaly.

One last reason not to be sentimental is a rather sweet one: the fear of having one's happiness made fun of or called names. Criticize my misery all you want, but don't make me feel embarrassed for my love. That's a writer's reason not to talk about sentiment directly; not because she doesn't like it but because she loves it too much to put it at risk.  

The William Maxwell story, “Love,” ends with a woman placing flowers on a grave. The beloved teacher gets sick and is replaced by a substitute. The children go to visit Miss Brown, expecting to sort of save the day or at least make their teacher happy for a moment: “We wouldn’t have been surprised if she had come to the door herself and thrown up her hands in astonishment when she saw who it was.” The reality was different: “Instead a much older woman opened the door and said, ‘What do you want?’” The story describes the teacher on her deathbed, using familiar expressions, not complicated, unique ones. “Her arms were like sticks,” and her eyes “had dark circles around them and were enormous.” These could even be called clichés, but I would call them frank expression of the universal. The narrator sums up the sadness: “She didn’t belong to us anymore.  She belonged to her illness.”

The story is told in the voice of a child, and I suspect that explains some of the story’s frankness. Growing up is learning about life’s complexities and learning that “love” is not as simple, as obviously happy, as it may seem at first. The story may be more childish than Greek. Perhaps if Maxwell had written the story about the love of an older man, it would have been more complex.

But I doubt it. Those stories people tell that end with the expression “from the mouths of babes” are the ones where a child expresses a simple truth that cuts to the center of something that adults are—consciously or unconsciously—avoiding. I think Maxwell, the writer, meant exactly what he said. 

And the narrator, speaking in the voice of a child, may be older than we think. Earley thinks the narrator is an old man remembering his youth and contemplating his own death. The story is ageless and timeless. There is no irony or eye rolling. It is earnest, and courageously so. 

Interview with Bagel Bard Doug Holder

Images courtesy of Doug Holder.

Poet Doug Holder may be best known as co-founder of the Bagel Bards, a Saturday-morning poetry and writing group that meets at an Au Bon Pain in Somerville, Massachusetts. The name bagel bard perfectly captures Doug’s lighthearted attitude, his sense of humor, his social nature, and, of course, his poetry, which has been widely published.

In addition to being a poet and a sort of community organizer for Somerville writers, Doug wears many other literary hats, not to mention baseball caps and fedoras. He runs (along with two collaborators) the Ibbetson Street Press, an independent publisher of poetry. His column, “Lyrical Somerville,” appears weekly in a local paper, The Somerville News, and he hosts a literary talk show, “Poet To Poet: Writer to Writer” on Somerville community television. He teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College.

For 30 years, he has worked as a counselor at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, a place not unconnected to poetry. McLean is the psychiatric hospital that Sylvia Plath fictionalized in The Bell Jar, and the institution was morbidly fashionable among poets during the 50s and 60s. Poets Plath and Robert Lowell were treated there. Anne Sexton, Plath’s friend and rival, taught poetry seminars there before being admitted as a patient. Continuing the poetic tradition at McLean, Holder led poetry groups at the hospital for a decade.

I first met Doug when I lived in Somerville, contributed to The Somerville News, and occasionally visited the Bagel Bards. Doug generously granted me a phone interview, and many post-interview correspondences. We talked about his writing, his inspirations, and his approach to capturing the personal and uncomfortable.

Were you always a writer, or when did you start?

I started keeping journals in the 70s after I got out of college, and I got the idea from working as a teacher in a program for adolescent youth in the South End of Boston. It was actually housed in a mental hospital, Solomon Carter Fuller, and I noticed that they took notes every day about patients and clients, so I started just taking notes about my own life in journals, and then I started picking up snippets of conversation, impressions of things, snippets of readings that I’d done. Eventually all this stuff I collected became fodder for poetry.

What was your first publication?

The first decent one was not till I was like in my mid-thirties and it was in this Canadian magazine, subTerrain, and it was called “Public Rest Rooms.” It was sort of how I viewed bathrooms as religious places, you know: you wash your hands in the holy water, looking at the mirror to see your flaws—sort  of your meditation in your private stall.

Public Rest Rooms

I once viewed them as religious places
men with their backs to me,
in front of urinals
hands clasped together
as if in prayer,
facing the Wailing Wall
reading cryptic messages,
written in urgency, anger, bitter
humor.
A standing chant.
A prayer for the common man
as the vile within came out in a steady
stream,
and then a slow trickle...

The intimacy of the stall,

I saw the feet of my fellow congregants
alone with myself and my maker...
my silent meditation.

The mirror and the powerful light,
I faced myself squarely in its glare
my flaws in full view
and washed my hands
in holy water

 -Doug Holder

-Originally published in subTerrain

Who were your writing mentors?

 I used a lot of stuff that I read—novelists—in my poetry, like Richard Yates, John Updike, a lot of different people. And I was reading a lot of the beat poets, of course, and I was reading a lot of the novels of Jack Kerouac. But I was sort of on my own… I didn’t have any people I was seeing every day, actually, I didn’t have community of writers, that wasn’t till much later.

One of these later mentors was poet Hugh Fox. How did you meet Fox?

I can remember the first time I met him. ... This guy pulls up in front of my house in Somerville—I was living on Ibbetson St. at the time and was running a literary journal—and just pulls up and knocks on the door, talks like a Bronx cab driver, he says,  “'How ya doin’ Doug? Hugh Fox here.” And I was like in my pajamas. He says, “You got a blonde in there?” And I go, “Alright, my wife’s sort of blondish, she’s in there.” And then he sort of realized that I was not in a state to be talking, or whatever, have guests, and he just left, got back in the cab and left. And then after that I had him at The Somerville News Writers Festival, I’ve had him on radio shows, so, it’s interesting.

Do you have a writing routine now?

Whenever I get a chance, ’cause I work three jobs. Could be on the toilet or in a coffee job. Whenever I have a chance. Downtime at the job. In between doing lesson plans and grading.

How did you get into the mental health field?

I got into teaching, mental health, actually, 'cause there was a big fiscal crisis in 1980 and I got laid off from the teaching job at South End and then I got hired as a clinical educator, you know, working with adolescents, at McLean—they had a school there. But then I was offered a job as a mental health worker, too, and there were opportunities for overtime. I figured I needed the money, so I took the job. But I always taught on the side—I was a substitute teacher—to make extra money.

  

Do you like Sylvia Plath’s work?

I don’t know if I like her work that much; it’s not my style. ….She’s part of the confessional poets. I don’t know. I guess I’m a bit more raw than she is. She wasn’t to my taste. A bit too refined, I guess.

What do you mean by raw?

I guess my poetry is a bit more accessible than hers. I think she uses a lot of classical references, used mythology, all kinds of things. I don’t bring that much into it. I’m very much a realist type of writer. And just sort of certain melodrama in her poems, about suicide and things like that, sort of posturing, I guess I don’t like so much.  But you have to remember that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, they talked about who was going to commit suicide first. …There’s a lot of posturing and craziness, romanticizing suffering that seemed a little off-putting to me.

Is it difficult to write about working at McLean?

No, I wrote a book of poems about it, called Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward. It’s not difficult to write about it. … The situation is extreme and the people are challenged. In any good form of writing, you have to have conflict. If you’re writing about cookies and mom’s apple pie and hot chocolate and rosy cheeks, it’s not gonna make good writing.

Did you ever worry about breaking patient confidentiality through your poems?

No, because I never used their names, or anything like that, and they’re usually a conglomerate of different clients.

Cigarette on Psychiatric Ward

 
“Can I have a light?”

What was that sudden spark in her eyes?

that flame

from cloudy, dormant pupils,

when I lit her cigarette?

That sudden, driving ambition

to inhale,

the sunken chest’s almost boastful expansion.

The smoke filling the yawning cavity.

A woman of substance…

until she exhaled

© 1998 Doug Holder, from Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward

Do you write about people who are still alive in your poetry?

Well, I don’t identify them, but yeah. I’ve written a poem about my mother recently. Don’t have to be dead, no.

Do you worry that your poems will make the people you portray uncomfortable? 

Yeah, that is true. You know, if you’re gonna be a writer, you to have to be honest, like Philip Roth once said, “If you really wanna be a writer, you have to be willing to insult your mother.” Not that you have to insult her, but if it’s for the purposes of the poem and you have to bring out some warts or something like that you have to be willing to do that, write honestly. That being said, I haven’t always followed that.

If you write a poem about somebody, capturing somebody, do you show it to them before you publish it?

No. I wrote this poem “Mr. Freimour” that wasn’t very flattering about a childhood friend of mine, and I never showed it to him. I don’t know how he would take it. But it was a good poem; I liked it, and it was published in an online journal that’s pretty good [The Blue Jew Yorker].

What’s your favorite of the poems you’ve written?

I wrote this one about the Boston Public Library, the eccentrics of the Boston Public Library. When I was writing my thesis there, I would go there every day, and there was a whole cast of characters there. A homeless woman, disheveled, reading a stack of books with a little magnifying glass. There’s another guy who sort of walked the halls; he had a Brooks Brothers suit and a watch chain. It housed all these eccentric characters, always been a fascination of mine, and then being there, I took my place among them, ’cause I was there every day writing and mumbling to myself, eventually.

Les gens sont-ils jetables, commes les gants en caoutchouc?

Dès qu’on les touche, c’est sûr qu’on va les jeter?

Aimez, mais ne touchez pas.

Troquez la perte contre la solitude.

Pour préserver quelqu’un en mots faut-il l’abandonner en vie?

Parfois, oui.

Pour vraiment voir quelquechose, faut-il le détruire?

Et pour le garder, sacrifier le regard?

Parfois, oui.

Pour examiner quelquechose sur le microscope électronique, il faut le tuer d’électrons.

En faisant sa connaissance, on le tue.

Regarder, c’est détruire. La connaissance, c’est la mort.

On revient au jardin de fruit défendu.

Voir, connaître, c’est tomber.

Regardez de loin celui que vous aimez.

Fermez les yeux, sans regarder, afin de mieux garder sa beauté.

  

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Fantastic and real, touching and true

The orchestra started playing too soon after the audience had finished clapping. Andrew Sill launched into Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade For Strings,” and I thought, “That’s it? The big moment? The beginning of the ballet I’ve been anticipating all year?”

That opening phrase was loaded. I'd listened to the CD of "Serenade" (pronounced like tapenade) countless times after my closest friend gave it to me the year I was in ninth grade. I still had the pointe shoes she wore in her "Serenade" performance at the boarding school that had separated her from me in those days when I loved dance and her more than anything. I'd danced to "Serenade" in my bedroom but had not watched the ballet. With all this anticipation, I could have easily written a sappy piece about finally seeing New York City Ballet perform the first piece that Balanchine, City Ballet’s late, great choreographer made in America. The essay would describe how my expectations were either realized or disappointed. I could have written that essay without ever seeing the ballet.

Here's what really happened.

After the first phrase, the orchestra stopped and the conductor started to talk. This wasn’t the beginning of the ballet after all but a lesson about the music. Balanchine changed the order of the last two movements of Tchaikovsky’s score, Maestro Sill told the audience, in order to end with the “Elegy” that I’ve written about before. The “Elegy” ends with harmonics, high-pitched whistling sounds created when string players barely touch their fingers to the strings above the wooden fingerboard, instead of pressing them down. Sill said that he thinks of the harmonics rising Heavenward, the kind of religious sentiment I avoid, but then he dedicated the performance to the late Hugo Fiorato, a former conductor of New York City Ballet’s orchestra and his first conducting teacher who died April 23, 2012. If anybody were going to dedicate a performance to me, that “Elegy” is the one I would choose. Or “Pavane For A Dead Princess,” though I would feel uncomfortable about the implications there.

With that dedication, “Serenade” began in earnest. A Stonehenge of dancers, standing straight, one arm held out high. A field of females in their hard-toed shoes, long blue sleeveless dresses, waiting until Balanchine tells them to move. Their bare thin arms make quick, concave motions, somehow Grecian. They are his muses; he is their sun, immortal in his choreography and his legacy.

"Serenade" is many domino chains of precise movement, one dancer moving after the next, with just enough repetition for familiarity but not enough for boredom. By the end of the first movement, one female is singled out. She waltzes with her partner in the second movement.

During the next, folk-like movement, pointe shoes becomes clogs, and the dancers intentionally make them noisy (dancers try NOT to clomp), beating the toe of a pointed foot against the stage in a pose called “B+”. This is stylized clomping, not quite at home in ballet nor in a country dance.

At the end of the this movement, I realized that in the “Serenade” poster I’d seen, the female dancers had long, flowing hair. These dancers all had buns. Yes, at the end of the movement, the lead dancer falls to the floor and lets her hair down, as do two other women. I have mixed feelings about women’s hair being part of the choreography, about the male choreographer deciding the women should let down their hair. I don’t know why I feel this way now.

Why do I feel uncomfortable appreciating the visual beauty of ballerinas? I love ballet and respect Balanchine. It’s not wrong for a choreographer to appreciate dancers’ beauty. And in life, it’s not wrong for men to appreciate the beauty of women in ways that go beyond art. Or for women to do so. Anyway, dancers are concerned with their own reflections in the classroom mirror, audience aside. I am that way when I take ballet class, either correcting myself in the mirror or avoiding it, never indifferent to it. I don’t perform.

Yes, the women make a living by being beautiful, physically, artistically. A ballerina had to be beautiful to Balanchine in order to succeed in his ballet company, and the company had to be beautiful to the audience in order to stay in business.

So I’m not criticizing Balanchine any more than I would criticize Petipa or myself or any other audience member for loving to watch ballet. But my discomfort remains.

For most of this piece, there is only one man and many women. At the very end of the "Elegy," two other men come out, in order to pick up the fallen dancer by her pointed feet, and she stands above their shoulders like an elegant, sublime cheerleader. They carry her away as the women rise onto their toes, arms outstretched, yes, to the Heavens.

The ending felt beautiful and right to me.

The second piece, “Kammermusik No. 2,” reverses the gender ratio: it’s almost all men. Hindemith’s music took more of my attention than the dance. It made me think of so many other composers at once, but I can’t think of who they are. It sounds like a musical revolution, competing styles fighting for prominence.

The third piece, “Tchaikovsky Pas De Deux,” is Balanchine’s choreography for a bit of the “Swan Lake” score that, according to the program notes, was composed later than the rest, didn’t make it into the ballet, then got overlooked. The best part of this section was not the lost pas de deux but the male and female solos that followed, encores taken from “Swan Lake” proper. Tiler Peck did the fouetté turns for which “Swan Lake” is so famous; her partner, Joaquin de Luz, did the male equivalent of fouettés, turns in second (with one leg out to the side) — and a few little jumps, too. The crowd screamed wholeheartedly. You don’t need to know what a fouetté is to see that this was amazing. After the performance, the dancers bowed and curtsied in the usual courtly way, which seemed ridiculous in response to the hooting in the crowd. Modesty.

Intermission: The Plastic Flute

Intermission was a story not of modesty but of self-importance. I stood in line to buy a plastic flute of champagne from a bartender standing in front of a bowl of shimmering strawberries. A woman carrying her own flute cut to the front of the line and asked the bartender for a strawberry.

“All these people behind you are waiting for strawberries; I’m sorry,” the bartender said.

“Why aren’t there strawberries over there [where she’d gotten her champagne]?” the woman pestered.

“’Cause I’m the only one who has ‘em,” he answered, in a circular way. “That makes me special doesn’t it. I’m the strawberry man.”

The woman huffed off.

“Would you like a strawberry?” he asked me, when it was my turn.

“Oh yes, I must,” I replied. I was wearing a full backpack, turtleneck dress and jeans.

I drank my champagne out on the balcony, in the cool but not rainy night.

After an intermission, the choreography turned to another bird ballet: “Firebird.” This was the beautiful scenery of Russian painter, Marc Chagall, come to life. Or is the painting real life made inanimate? No, this is real life filtered and embellished through Chagall’s mind and his paintbrush, then brought back to life again in ballet, a form that is to the way people really move what Chagall’s paintings are to the way things really look.

The prince wears strawberry-red velvet pants. The ladies of the royal court wear long white, embroidered dresses, some with blue velvet tunics, long hairpieces dangling behind them. The toes of the men’s shoes point up at the ends in a comic, Russian way, something that I suppose is no more ridiculous than the heels of women’s shoes pointing down. These dancers are fairy tale characters in their own world. I forget that this is Balanchine. Instead, it’s a royal court and a magical bird dancing the way they normally do.

The Firebird dances in a spotlight that follows her around the stage, and in that spotlight, she casts a shadow on the stage. Her arms and legs flit around the round shadow of her tutu.

Firebird was one of two unimaginably beautiful experiences I’ve had this week. The first was the peonies and azaleas at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. So I’ve been similarly bowled over by nature and by a fantastical story performed in dreamy, trippy costumes designed after Chagall. Is nature actually fantastic? Maybe Chagall’s “wild imagination” is capturing reality. Perhaps what we consider our real lives — going to offices, walking down sidewalks — are not practical realities dictated by fate but actually inferior products of human imagination. 

I was neither fully satisfied nor disappointed with “Serenade,” but my night at the ballet surpassed my expectations. It seems too much to see the reverence of “Serenade,” the technical magic of “Swan Lake” and the majesty of Stravinsky, Chagall, Balanchine, not to mention the dancers themselves, in “Firebird” all in one evening. It’s like having four desserts in a row.

Actually, not too much. I could get used to this.

So, what’s for after dinner?

Enduring Stars

Sixty-two-year-old researcher, Elizabeth Spelke stares out from the Science Times with bright brown eyes. Reflecting on those eyes, I wonder what makes the brown eyes so bright. Not the color, certainly. I go back to my newspaper to look again. Through the frames of her glasses, each eye has a tiny dot of white, not the eyes themselves, but reflections off them. I immediately think of another woman I know and realize this isn't the first time I've described an older person as having beautiful, shining eyes.

I turn to the next portrait in my mental album. The skinny woman in her forties, dressed like someone in her twenties, face framed by a frizzy mane of brown hair, also has sharp brown eyes. Why don't her eyes strike me as shining, beautiful? Here the eyes are the last thing I describe.

Aren't the eyes the same, anyway?

It's not a question. The eyes do look the same as we age. That's what is striking. A woman's face becomes pasty, puffy, wrinkled, her hair fades to gray or white. Striking, dark, angular becomes muted, softened, blurry. The eyes remain perfect, glossy marbles. The shining blue eyes of an older person aren't cliché. They really do shine, particularly against a subdued background. Like the inner rings of a big tree or a time capsule buried in the backyard, they make the connection to younger days .
Why don't the eyes age? Maybe they don't see as well as they used to, but they are "well preserved." They are like museum pieces, displayed in the frame of the eye socket, moving behind glass. The eyes move from side to side, up and down, hands exploring the fishbowl for a way out. They try to escape, but find they are trapped. Trapped in time.

Though the eyes can't escape the cage, the frame, the fishbowl, they can and do move the whole thing, turn the head, lift the body from the chair, pull it across the street.

The eyes are more free than the mind in its bony cell. The mind relies on the eyes to bring back photos of the world outside.

My own eyes like to look inward or focus idly on the page, or somewhere between the page and keyboard, more interested in what they have already seen than in what they might see now or later. These eyes are content in their cage.

And as I dance, it's not the eyes that direct my movement. My mind responds to a sound or to the sensation of feet against the floor. My eyes watch as through a train window. They are not manipulative, dragging me around face first.

Artificial Intelligence at the 92nd Street Y

"Reading is just the opposite of writing," someone declared to me the other day, "right?" I didn't think it was, but I didn't know why I disagreed. The answer seemed rooted in this idea of whether or not a writer plans what he is going to say ahead of time. The reader gets the product of a writer's work. If the writer envisioned the final product, put it into words and the reader accessed that very same vision by reading the words, then reading would be the reverse of writing.

But I don't start with a vision of my final product when I write, and even if I do start with some vision, the final work won't be just like it. Even if the writer could magically conjure up an idea into words, I doubt that the reader would arrive at the writer's original idea, because words have so many meanings and connotations, and everyone reads them differently.

Dancing certainly doesn't feel like the reverse of watching a dance performance.  Last night, listening to choreographer Lar Lubovitch talk about how he makes dances, I realized that watching a dance is more the reverse of choreographing than of dancing. The dancers are like choreographer's words.

The audience sees the choreographer's vision -- if he had one.  Lubovitch certainly did, as he explained in an onstage interview with Anna Kisselgoff, the top dance critic for The New York Times (1977 - 2005), last night at the 92nd Street Y. This was the first performance of a five-part series called Stripped//Dressed, in which choreographers present excerpts of their work and explain the concepts behind the dance.

Their conversation hammered into my head this idea that art that seems to flow perfectly, even spontaneously, is often the product of elaborate planning. Just as David Foster Wallace perfected a stream-of-consciousness writing style and Jackson Pollock, a child-with-a-set-of-paint-tubes style, Lubovitch affected a dancers-doing-what-felt-good-and-flowed style.

Almost. The dances were not as spontaneous-looking as that last phrase implies. People leading with their shoulders and chests or holding their arms too high above their waists, wrists slack, don't look natural. Granted, I'm used to ballet, but to me, these movements looked less natural than a ballet where everyone pretends to be a swan. I could tell these dancers were playing roles. It was neither improvised, like a dance party, nor planned and consummately acted, like "Swan Lake."

In the first excerpt, "North Star" (1978), the dancers looked as if they were moving together as one body, like an amoeba moves as a group of cooperating cells. Afterward, Lubovitch revealed his structure: the dancers were moving as one body, but a more orchestrated one than I had imagined. The piece opened in what Lubovitch said looked, from the sky, like fifth position, with different dancers representing right and left legs, torso, and arms. Different groups of dancers represented different parts of a dancer's body, and together, the group executed steps from the ballet canon: glissade, tour jeté, two jumps where the legs move one after the other. These ballet steps are the building blocks of ballet, the epitome of structure. In order for the dancers to represent those steps, they couldn't just do what felt good, by any means, even if it looked like that's what they were doing. The definition of a ballet step and a person's position in the collective dancer's body determined who could do what and where.

Learning how Lubovitch had structured his dance, I had the same feeling of betrayal that I felt when I learned that pieces of music had key signatures that determined the first and last notes of the piece, that the composer hadn't just happened to land on the note he ended with. I try not to feel wounded. It's art, I tell myself. That's one way to define art: something artificial, that comes across as one way (spontaneous, in this case) and is actually another (structured). Just like actors in a play pretend to be living real life. It is deceit, and that's why I feel betrayed when I discovered that art I love was crafted, in the sense of crafty, art in the sense of artifice.

But this artifice is not necessarily malicious. I'm not trying to say that structure is a bad thing. I'm just let down when I realize that art is not what it seems to me. I want the concerto to end on a note because that was the right note, the one-and-only note, the note the composer fell in love with at first hearing, not the note betrothed to the piece by the key signature. 

Unlike a key signature, which composers use but didn't invent, Lubovitch came up with his own rules for the dance, then followed them. The creativity was still there, but not where I thought it was. He wasn't creative in deciding which direction dancer A would go in a tour jeté, but he was creative in deciding to make a dance in which a group of dancers perform ballet steps as one body.

In the second half of the show, the company performed "The Legend of 10," in which 10 dancers, he said, map out a Brahm's Piano Quintet. This was the "dressed" half of the show, a more formal performance. The dancers wore those trendy, calf-hugging hunting boots, black pants, a velvety, ab-hugging bodice with a sheer top, so that they were all black but their arms and faces, which were all white (the color, not the racial descriptor). The dancers moved in a flock when the quintet played together, moving their arms as if doing the macarena, or clapping in a threatening pack (like hyenas), or they were swans running offstage, elbow first. These hand motions seemed purposefully, mockingly affected. The flock of dancers sometimes held hands and danced in a circle, then looking even more like hunters, though fake, fairy-tale hunters, whose flimsy boots are meant to look like the trendy hunting boots people wear on the street but were actually meant for another purpose, in this case, dancing. It's a double affectation, since those boots, even in real life, are fake, flimsy boots made for fashion that look like they were made for hunting or tromping through the woods.

I thought the costumes and movements seemed unnatural and jarring. I interpret that as the artifice of the performance coming through.

Beyond the structure of the dances, there was the interaction between critic and choreographer. Kisselgoff and Lubovitch matched. She wore black with a red and black scarf; he wore a red plaid shirt. They were both born over 60 years ago.  In the way that Lubovich thought about how individual dancers could move as a group, Kisselgoff, dance critic, thought about how the styles of various choreographers--Balanchine, Cunningham, Graham--fit together to create patterns or dissonance.

Kisselgoff had known Lubovitch since the days when he was a dancer in the Harkness Ballet, before he founded his own company. She'd seen his entire modern dance career. She referred to questions that she knew not to ask, like "What does it mean?" and grilled him with better questions, like, "Do your dances have emotion?" and "Do you choreograph as a frustrated dancer or as a choreographer?" She asked the last question more delicately than I'm putting it here. Lubovitch stopped performing earlier than other company founders of his time, they said. Kisselgoff's question was akin to asking me if I wrote about science because I wanted to do scientist but had been unsuccessful in the lab.

Lubovitch responded that he "sat right in the center of a hot fire of emotion" and that dancing, but not necessarily his own dancing, inspired him to choreograph. It was truly a deconstruction of dance, down to its emotional core, so often hidden behind the art.