August 2 2014 THE ART OF FALLING
for Amanda, with thanks
I sprained my ankle a week ago. Playing badminton. In the dark. Don’t ask. We were having fun…until I found a small crater in the lawn and then down I went like an old English spinster.
The last time I sprained my ankle I was 15; racing toward the finishing line in the 100 yard dash and over I went. I was carried back to school by two sixth-formers, one of whom I had a crush on. The boys held hands to form a seat for me, while I held on to them, an arm around each neck. Further details upon request.
As a four-year old my ankles were so weak and spindly that the doctor advised my mother to either put me in leg irons or send me to ballet. I am most grateful she chose the latter, a rare act of kindness on her part, which not only strengthened my ankles but awoke in me a sense of poetic expression and the profound understanding that action does indeed speak louder, and truer, than words. Because, by the age of 4 I was deeply confused by the discrepancy between that which I was told was true and that which I sensed to be true.
Perhaps it was this distrust of the spoken word that eventually turned me to writing in the innocent, if futile, attempt to gain purchase with language, if only to hold myself accountable. The distrust of language increased throughout my school years, when something as simple as a teacher ridiculing me in front of the class for having written, in a short story, of a bird singing in a dark forest. The teacher laughing as she told the class that everyone knew birds didn’t sing at night. How I wish I’d had more courage than shame. How I wish I had stood right up and refuted her before turning to the class and singing the plaintive notes that drifted through my bedroom window; notes so achingly sweet as they left the branches of the hawthorn tree and floated out onto the summer air of a near dark sky.
In my teens the hypocrisy of language as practiced by men of the cloth further entrenched my distrust. And then, of course, there were the ultimate lies of love affairs, myself by then, as accomplished a liar as the next.
However, anything to do with the body and the world rang true to me; athletics, dancing, swimming, running for a bus, skipping rope, hanging upside down from a swing and, certainly making love. Those moments when every cell in one human being communicates with every cell in another…the wordless look of recognition before truth becomes unbearable to uphold; the gaze averted, a cigarette lit.
I did all the right things for my sprained ankle…rest, ice, compression, elevation, arnica, ibuprofen, but injuries are always a drag and I don’t do well sitting around. Of course, I’m grateful it’s only a sprain, no torn ligaments, nothing broken. I like to think that all those years of dancing taught me how to fall. I remember well last week, the exact instant that the edge of my foot reached the edge of the crater and the ankle began to give, how I instinctively let my body keel over in order to take the weight off the ankle.
I had a similar experience many years ago, when still dancing professionally. Hitching a ride to my waitressing gig, I’d put my then 5 years old daughter next to the driver in the cab of a pick-up truck, before sitting next to her, my back to the door as we chatted. As the truck went round a bend the door flew open and I can see the look on my little girl’s face as she watched me disappear, the swift knowledge that I was positioned in such a way that within less than a second the back of my head would hit the tarmac, the ease with which I tucked chin to chest and swiveled my torso slightly in order to roll on impact. Well, yes, there was a hell of a lot of bruising, but I didn’t break my neck.
Yet as instinctively smart as I can be physically, that’s how stubbornly stupid I am when it comes to accepting that the time required for us to heal properly applies to me, too! So, this afternoon, having done the laundry, gone to the Saturday market and made lunch for us, and a houseguest, the old ankle swelled up and sent me to the couch where self-pity and a whiff of depression sat next to me.
As we know, the cure for depression is action; something impossible to take when sprawled on the couch with an icepack. Well, I thought, if I can’t take action, let someone else do it for me. And so it was that I turned to the great dancer, Sylvie Guillem and watched her in a series of YouTube videos. I watched her soar, her body singing through the air, undulating movements arcing through arabesques and sudden contractions, a ripple forming in her throat from where, left unspoken, it surged along her arms, arching her torso with longing, liquefying her limbs into extensions that reached beyond her toes, the movements truly ethereal; a fleeting truth to be inhaled.
Once again ballet strengthened my ankles, sending me out to the garden, to the joy of bowing to pull weeds; a curtsey to the roses, their petals falling, falling, to the sunbaked earth.
Click on this link to witness the art of falling, as practiced by Sylvie Guillem
http://youtu.be/2YSlk9l1qKg?list=PLvZkJ6U3suSVwIZOSrUEDcrs1OU_ZqRAL