Are you having trouble processing the torrent of news? Has your ability to multitask, or just plain “task,” been shot to shit? Do you find yourself struck dumb in the face of the violence, cruelty, lies, disinformation, greed, fraud, and just plain stupidity of <waves arms> everything? And yet you keep trying anyway?
I realized the other day that much of what I’m working on right now is about effort, in one way or another. I’m interested in what it means to try — what it feels like, why we do it, and how it looks to others. Obviously, I’m curious about the physical effort of dance and movement, and the function of joy and seemingly frivolous pursuits in times of crisis. More broadly, of course, I’m thinking about the effort involved in fighting fascism, and also about the grinding work involved in just plain holding the ground — whether that be in journalism, in publishing, in teaching, or any of the countless fields currently under attack from racist ideologues backed by global capital. In my private writing I’m trying (there’s that word again) to connect the two. It’s hard! But still I chip away at the words.
In working on a longer essay about all of the above I also realized this is not a new area of inquiry. Because we are who we are, even if our own internal consistency only reveals itself with time. I came back to this piece, which was published in 2015 at the Rumpus, the other day, and thought I’d share it here. It was written when I was 47, nursing a bruised heart and anxious about the future, even though back then the possibility of a Trump presidency was still preposterous. I had started taking aerial circus classes a year earlier, and was still in the throes of a nice beginners high.
I’m back in regular aerial classes now, after training was interrupted for almost three years by cancer treatment and two consecutive broken bones. I’ve lost a lot of hard-won strength and have slipped back two levels, back to “advanced beginning” status. It’s a lot harder; the high has worn off and my 58-year-old body is just not as resilient as it was in what I now see to have been the prime of my 47-year-old youth, which I stupidly believed nine years ago to be ancient. I have spent a fair amount of time lately wondering just what I’m trying to prove. But still, I’m trying. It was nice to find this essay.
Here’s a teaser:
I worried that I was escaping into my body—that I was running away from age, running from ambition, from engagement with the wider world. Derided since Juvenal as pap for the masses, or children, circus still gets a bad rap as both art and practice. But, as a friend pointed out, the circus always flowers with the end of empire—in Rome, in Russia, in Britain and France. Here and now, in a season of mass degradation, the culture stupefied by clickbait and terrorized by war, my own city perpetually under fire and up for sale, and my body ever-more alert to the end of its own empire—its fertility, its beauty, its strength—it felt curative to turn away from the public narrative toward some private spectacle stripped of words but heavy with sweat and risk. Can it really be escapism if you’re working so hard?
There’s an ongoing debate in performance circles about whether circus can communicate narrative and emotion—about its potential to tell a story rather than deliver a spectacle, or, aspirationally, do both at once.
Typically, the circus is short on meaning, and long on showstopping display. The aerialist hooks onto the trapeze and all but the spotlight dims. The peripheral activity—the other rings under the big top; the story being told on stage—stalls and all eyes turn to the tumbler in the air, breathless, until the act is over with one final flourish. When the applause dies down, the rest of the action picks up again, as though nothing ever happened. Plus, the physical restrictions of circus performance—both the grueling demands on the body and the technical requirements of rigging and padding—are a problem when it comes to creating theatrical narrative. The aerialist can only stay aloft so long before her body breaks, and it’s hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief theater can require when there’s a four-foot-thick mat on stage.
Still, the physical stakes of aerial work in particular—the ever-imminent risk that an artist will fall from the high wire, will fail to catch a trapeze partner by her ankles—give the form an immediacy other forms of performance can’t channel. “You cannot perform a 5-meter drop towards concrete or throw and catch seven objects without complete investment in what you are doing,” argued an article on the website Circus Now. “And this investment has a quality of honesty and proximity in that the artists themselves are in a position where failure is as real, non-negotiable and tangible as the possibility of success.”
It’s that immediacy of failure that kept me coming back to class, week after grueling week. When the story I’m trying to tell doesn’t make sense, when the narrative is stuck in the mire, bogged down by the weight of its own ambition, its preposterous dreams, the circus, in all its nonsense, offers clarity: up or down?
As part of the Soup & Bread community meal project I run, my friend Sheila and I created these cute “SOUP MELTS ICE” t-shirts as a fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights — a group that is doing the work. The online pop-up shop is open only through Sunday, February 8, so get your orders in now. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Available as short- and long-sleeved tees as well as a crewneck sweatshirt, as modeled below.
“Life is, though, of course, a balance of crying at the state of things and enjoying our breakfast. In between, we figure out what to do. Ideally with a deep breath.”
“Sometimes you watch someone die on your phone and you can’t do anything for two days but shake and cry. You go to the protests. You send the money. You join the Signal group. It’s not perfect, this stuff, but it’s real.”
“Their bodies had been objectified, sexualized, and disregarded, yet here they were, claiming their bodies back with each swish of their hips. They had made it another year, another day. And now, they were here dancing.”
One of the most sage beliefs I’ve repeatedly said is , “ if something you loved was in your life at one time it will come back .
It’s your long ago past , but I’ve thought of you throughout this moment of pride in Puerto Rico and Spanish speaking
Take care
Love this 💕