Yesterday, my friend told me he wanted to give up everything for dance.
"I want to live in the body," he said, "instead of living life in my mind, as I did all my past."
This is what I want to tell him:
In order to live in the body, you have to live in the mind. All that Shelley, all that Shakespeare, all that Keats and Yeats - especially Yeats, with all his longing and sorrow, all his unrequited love and perfect form, for what is the body but a collection of injuries, a vessel filled with everything we were never given? - will come in handy. You need poetry when you get to know the intricate twisting of toes and pressing of metatarsals into the floor, the intimate twitching of the calves, the cramps in your gut. All that structure and form and geometry, the mathematics of perfect engineering. You will need it.
Live in the body through your mind, and don't worry what your parents say when you give up the stock options and future rich wife, from a respectable family. I, for one, always loved you without the ties, your collar unbuttoned, your shoelaces loose.
Comments (2)
I love, and agree, with the insistence that one needs poetry--along with structure, form, geometry--in order to live in the body, in order for dance to become a life's work.
But most importantly: I love the kind of friend you are, the acceptance and tenderness in the last line, "I, for one, always loved you without the ties, your collar unbuttoned, your shoelaces loose."
Posted by Wendy | May 14, 2003 11:24 AM
Posted on May 14, 2003 11:24
What a wonderful little piece, Karrie.
You and I are both writers who married dancers. And so naturally I love this one.
Posted by Michael J. Totten | May 14, 2003 8:12 PM
Posted on May 14, 2003 20:12