How to Love a Wolf: June 9, 2021

How to Love a Wolf:

It's been a long time since I've felt like writing.

I've been getting familiar with the feeling of close restriction, like a layer of gummy fluid in the veins of a blade of grass. It's the space in my body where desire presses up against refusal. As if fascia were a debate contest with multiple stations in a superdome. It's a strange feeling: frightening, reminiscent of early adolescence and early adulthood. It is as if my tissues have built cities in the open spaces inside the recognizable, known space of my body. The gummy fluid covered with flexible playground concrete that won't cause broken bones but doesn't begin to replicate grass.

I feel suspicious of this desire-refusal dance. It seems to stop me from moving in ways I once found habitual, necessary; I stop myself from typing "addictive."

I think some dancers can't imagine a life in dance without shaping their bodies to have a particular outline deemed pleasing to a particular gaze. The conflation of dance with conventions of fitness is so engrained that when the conflation begins to fail itself, and to leak out the edges, the new errant possibilities are pushed back into place by prevailing societal somatophobia in its many billion-dollar guises.

I can't imagine a life in dance that's not about questioning the assumptions I've been taught to make around form, function, fitness. I can't imagine a life in dance without testing the limits of my body to simply be, without force, power-over, or disciplinary tactics designed to minimize, flatten, smooth, or organize my flesh. I beseech the spirits of dance to teach me this discipline of being-as-dance. To remind me of what I already know. My goodness, to remind me of what I teach.

It occurred to me only recently that these experiences—the desire-refusal dance, and the realization of absence-of-assertive-change as viable research—are related.

Tears hustle into place behind my eyes. They just sit there, sunning themselves in the hammock of my lids, waiting for some breeze of emotion to topple them over the ledge. The breeze doesn't come. I look up to see the sun now retreating into a pale golden sky and the tree line has darkened now to the pleasing depth-green that so comforts and calls up mahogany libraries, plaid, and hunting prints. Not my world, but one to which I have occasionally gained entry. Birds call their evening calls. My cat is quiet after a flurry of pretend hunting just a few moments ago.

At some point in this process—a process I mark as beginning when Trump was elected, and slowly phasing out now into a new unknown world with little structure besides poking fun at the word "post"—I started breathing into my belly again. Not my abdominals, but the belly of my belly. The identifiable but unreachable space of inside the most known inside. I sometimes marvel these days at how much of my life I spent shaping my body for some unidentifiable, unreachable gaze. Unidentifiable, unreachable, yet assertive like a firehose, pervasive like gnats in a heavy gnat season. I breath to check that my nostrils are clear.

I hope to repair this relationship with dance, with movement. My closest friend and most cherished partner. We are estranged yet together all the time. When I speak, I hear my wisdom. I even hear it as uncontrived; yet something about it feels in that belly of bellies like the chatter of a wind-up doll just as the whirring turnkey begins to remind the doll's owner that the key is more real than the doll.

June 9, 2021

pictured: 1910s Vaudeville star Clara Morton (my great aunt) of the "Four Mortons."