I was sad one night and sitting at the end of the dock at our cottage on Georgian Bay. It was very late. The sun up there sets at around ten at night. By eleven, the stars take over. The mosquitos abate by then, too, feeding time done. It’s the hour people who grew up up there know they can have it all to themselves. I sat casting my sorrows over the water. Pain of life stuff. Pain of love. Pain that makes us want to shed our skin to have more breadth to hold it all. If you feel it deeply enough, magic occurs, magic like the great Trumpeter Swan that flew out of nothingness to alight upon the water feet away from me, a great light stolen from the dark, a form out of shadow. I did not have my phone and was grateful I did not have to take a picture. I could hold it like this in the space between us, the space of magic.
Thank you, I whispered in a breath as close to stillness as I could make it, just enough to let it know I was paying attention.
My daughter, a Creative Writing major, told me today that they have discovered the secret to writing: just write what happens. How beautiful. For all the books on how to write, for every Bird by Bird and Poet’s Handbook, my kid found the elusive definition of art: life, itself. With the right mix of awareness and attention, we hold the pen up to the moonlight and describe all the moon illuminates, seen and concealed, revealed and withheld. This is the formula for what I have no doubt will my their first book. It is a sweet reminder of the time I spent at an AWP in Chicago, a decade or so ago, avoiding one session of the hundred. Marie Ponsot was the presenter. Her title was A Poet’s Job. I would not go because I knew I could not bear being told I was lacking at the one job I felt qualified to do, make poems. To avoid it, I planned to attend a reading by another poet I would then invite to read at Asheville Wordfest. It was business. I had to do it. I was a festival director. I had to fest. In the magic-box arrangement of room partitions and ballrooms, though, I met my demise. In order to get to this poet, I had to walk through a ballroom. I did my “Pardon me, excuse me, sorry, pardon me” skulk through the strikingly big crowd. I was nearly at my destination when I heard Marie Ponsot begin. Of all the gin joints, I had walked into hers. I wanted to hurry. I wanted to fly. I had miles to go before I could escape. Then she said it. She said, “A poet’s job is to pay attention and to make good poems.” I sat down. I don’t even remember who the poet I was on my way to talk to was. I’d probably forgotten already. I sat down and paid attention. This is the lesson I learned again today from my own child. And because I am paying attention, I know better than to not do so when such a lesson strikes twice. It’s my birthday in 12 hours. I was born at 10:31 a.m., and here I am writing at 10:31 pm. I’m exhausted, but something wants to be said. And I know what it is.
Swan Lake.
On November 2, 2023, I slipped on a fallen dog-gate-thingy in my kitchen while feeding said dog. My legs flew up from under me. I flew up with them and landed base of my skull-first. I went unconscious for a little bit, and when I came to, I had no idea about anything. My dogsitting assistant and daughter’s beau lived downstairs. He was on the floor next me me. I’d called to him mid-flight. I pulled his name out of oblivion then the name of my daughter and the name of the man I’d been dating. These names were all I had as my dogsitting guests picked kibble from the folds of my sweater and jeans. That was the beginning.
Swan Lake is Tchaikovsky’s adaptation of a Slavic folktale and well as other mysterious lineages, as is the nature of all stories. Also in keeping with the nature of stories, Swan Lake glides across the surface of darkness of the shadow realms we explore in our journeys to wholeness. This is not in the program notes. This is in the music itself, in the story itself. It is wound up in the terrifying beauty of these two combined without words to hide behind or to find safety within. In a much-shared video clip that flits around on social media, an octagenarian former ballerina with dimentia in a wheelchair hears the Dying Swan music on the iPhone her grandson holds up to her ear, and the woman turns into Odette the White Swan right there, the Ballanchine choreography a fountain of her youth. In under two minutes, we are all in tears. That is how powerful this ballet is.
Nathalie Portman in the film Black Swan physically and psychologically explores the nature of story and art. Nervous and cowed by Barbara Hershey’s smother-mother (a term I learned from an article about this movie), then befriended and/or seduced by Mila Kunis as understudy, Portman accesses her sexual power and follows it into her pure animal self where mastery of any craft dwells. Free of repression and judgment, she soars into her own shadow where she finds what it takes to destroy the wall between the self and creation, leaving technique far, far behind to paddle around in its own sad pond. She fully surrenders caution of thought to the fierce-winged, all-possessing force of nature itself, instinct. It is the lesson of all folktales if we can remember how to read them. Their danger, of course, is they are more than tales of transformation. Like the editors of the Magical Greek Papyri and The Demotic Spells in their acknowledgements and in memorium discovered. You don’t just read some texts. Some texts read you. (Not all the editors survived.) As hard as Disney tries to sentimentalize and infantilize old stories of the people, the message still gets through. That dark feminine energy does not get toned down. It doesn’t matter even if she sings.
The World Ballet performance on November 3, the night after my less than grand jeté in the kitchen was magnificent. A quick read of the company’s short bios suggest the story was performed by dancers from nations in conflict that they soared high above. My daughter, who studies to the soundtrack, gripped my hand throughout. It was a week after my mother’s 81st birthday. I wanted to do something special, and it was. My mother took me to see the Royal Canada Ballet in Toronto in the 1970s. I remember moments of them all as clearly as I recall the texture of the velvet dresses she made for me to wear to them. I memorized the programs featuring headshots of Karen Kain and Frank Augustyn. I carried the something-anniversary booklet with stills from all the ballets through some twenty changes of homes and even now feel confident it is in a box in my basement. Any book can become a sacred text when you pay attention as Marie Ponsot told me to.
It is now 45 minutes from my birthday. The house is dark. I have made it darker by turning off this peacock lamp on my kitchen island. The night outside is dark. The house inside is dark. The dogs are sleeping. I’ve taken my hearing aids out. Equilibrium. Homeostasis. Balance.
Concussion protocol states do nothing in the 72 hours following a head injury. Avoid light. Rest. Allow the brain time to heal. Concussion protocol states do not go to the fucking ballet where beautiful lights and loud applause with do great harm to your noodle. Stay home, it says. Rest. A week later, I was back in the E.R. suffering from the kind of pain that makes you forget who you are. I could not name it. I could not separate myself from it. It was not local to any body part. It did not seem local to this realm. It was not a headache. The only phenomenon I can compare it to are those scenes in werewolf movies and TV shows where a teenager turns into one. All the bones have to break, they seem to tell us. Metamorphosis is exactly what the caterpillars say it is. You have to go down to a spore of your entire being. You have to wrap yourself up in silk and darkness. You have to die. Nathalie Portman’s ballerina’s knees bend backwards because she is turning into a bird. I did not turn into a bird. I am still discovering what the following and continuing 18 months (and counting) are turning me into. I’m writing so many of these essays because eventually I will stumble upon it. At some point I will know a name.
When the pandemic struck, I changed my Twitter handle to COVID’s Metamorphosis. When a whole planet gets the memo to cocoon, it doesn’t matter if people rile against it and make everybody want to stay home more. The call is the call. The harder you try to avoid it, the greater your chances of walking into a seated ballroom full of it. It’s how transformation operates. One thing changes, it all changes. This is why you have to pay attention. I knew when I changed my Twitter name. I didn’t know something in particular. I knew I was not coming out of that the same as going in. Did I put a cosmic bull’s eye on my back taunting the archer? Writing from here on the other side of a winter in utter darkness and its ensuing painful but less emergent Spring, I can say I didn’t return. If Nathalie Portman’s ballerina lost her neurosis inside her great black wings, I lost mine in a crunchy rain of dog kibble. That part that didn’t come back reminds me of a pocket watch my maternal grandfather took apart on a black velvet cloth he spread over the dining room table.
“Listen,” he said once finished and holding the now ticking watch to my ear.
“But Poppee,” I said, “There are still pieces on the cloth.”
"I know, Pet,” he answered. “They were the problem.”
The months of darkness inhabit me. Like the glacial river I fell into at 19 in Switzerland trying to catch a better view of the shadow of bird the midnight moon cast upon a cliff, I recall that place that held me in it both times. The first was brief. The second was long. But they were exactly the same. Odette and Odile. The White Swan tormented by the Black Swan. In this space, they are the one swan.
I didn’t think of any of this when I purchased tickets again to take my mother and my daughter to see Swan Lake by a different company at a different venue. This time, it is for my birthday. The mythopoetic resonance, the chiastic symmetry. When one thing changes, everything changes. Mother’s birthday going in. My birthday coming out. My mother’s grand-daughter and my daughter between us in our seats, hands gripping our hands in the presence of the darkness that defines great beauty, the darkness that turns life into art if we pay attention.
It is 11:58 p.m.
Happy Birthday to me.