I am not a crybaby. I am a whiner.
I spent almost seven hours on Saturday writing a four-page whine. Here’s how it starts:
Howl
This is it. Four days left to go in My Tango Year. Then I’m done. I am so out of here. Good riddance.
I especially liked this little image:
My legs are not of a piece; ... My body is the Tower of Babel.
And so on. In seven hours of writing, you can work up quite a head of steam. There was a fantasia sequence featuring a marionette and a magician, some rather peevish comments regarding my littermates (beginners cohort), who have left me in the dust, and a whole lot of good, solid whining. Like this:
I am tired of being ravenous. I am tired of racing into bathrooms to collect myself or puke or cry or b-r-e-a-t-h-e. I am tired of standing on the threshold of the Turn or the Merc, looking into the ballroom for a friend’s face. (If I find even one, I have to go in. That’s the deal. Sometimes I don’t look very hard.) I am tired of being shy. I am tired of apologizing for my lack of balance and coordination and skill; I am tired of lacking balance and coordination and skill. I am tired of screwing up the lead’s dance. I am tired of wearing my game face: hug-hug, chat-chat, flirt-flirt, laying my arm across the lead’s shoulders when I enter the embrace in a way that is very smooth, very false.
Sometimes, when I’m riding a big writing wave, I hypnotize myself. Then I make comments so cosmic even I don’t understand them:
I have no corporeal axis. My center does not hold. I will accept your fiction that there are feet at the foot of my body, else why would we call it the foot?
An axis is only a concept. So is center. So is feet. So is terra firma.
None of this is real. I cannot put my finger on any of it.
All of this only preamble, winding up to the four-alarm howl, the complaint under which all others are subsumed:
David Hodgson says you must dance who you are.
Nina says, soft knees. Grisha says, move your center. Tara says, sink into your hip.
I can do these things, but not by technique, only by imagination. Every time I don a smoky, womanly, oppositional frame of mind, Nina shouts You’ve got it!” Grisha says, “Yes, that’s right.”
But I do not want to be smoky. I do not want to be a strong, grounded presence in opposition to the lead.
I do not want to be smoky, I want to be smoke. I want to float like a fragrance in the embrace, I want to be that elusive thing of beauty, which can’t be caged. That is what tango says to me in its music and lyrics. Ethereality. That is the nature of my strength, what I authentically bring to the dance. I want to be delicate and light, elegant and gorgeous.
I want be the Audrey Hepburn of tango.
???!!!
Can you imagine Audrey Hepburn dancing the tango?
Me neither.
Grrr.
* * *
What is it about a whine? Whenever I can’t do anything right, when I finally, absolutely positively hit rock bottom and give up … I whine. I rail against the things that prevent me from getting everything I want on my terms. I howl. I document my every complaint.
And then I give it up. I acknowledge defeat. Grudgingly, but cleanly. There’s no sense beating a dead horse.
I can’t do it.
I can’t do tango.
Well, that’s it then.
Good riddance.
I flop on the couch. Good. I have a lot of books to read, and a couple to write. I love my job, and I wouldn’t mind putting in a lot of overtime before spring. I have been doing nothing but tango and blog and fast for a year. This will give me a chance to catch up on things. Organize the closets. Eat. Tidy up.
For example, I could pick up my shoes from the corner where I shoved them on Thursday.
Gosh, they’re gorgeous. Maroon suede, t-strap, peek-a-boo hole at the toe. Three and a half inch heels.
Fifteen months ago, these shoes would have been ugly to me. I don’t like t-straps. I don’t wear peek-a-boo anything. And the height of the heels is laughable.
Thirteen months ago, I couldn’t even stand up in these shoes. My impossible dream was to take 11 steps down the length of the room without falling over.
Six months ago, I made it.
Now I am not concerned with staying upright, but with axis and center and counterbody motion and not screwing up the lead by turning my leg excessively out and giving each step some oomph.
Well now.
Now that I’ve given it up, I wouldn’t mind having a go at that walking business Grisha was trying to teach me.
Now that it’s just for fun. Just to see what will happen.
Bing!
I am walking, I am doing the step Grisha wants. You could see that coming, couldn’t you? But wait! There's more:
I have no center. Having complained vociferously about that in the whine, I DON’T HAVE ONE! I am no longer obligated to go seeking it.
My attention, sprung from the prison of my pelvis, roams freely. Soon I notice this: a bubble floats somewhere behind my sternum, in the neighborhood of the third rib. It is not stable; it floats hither and yon.
I can push it deep down into my pelvis, where my center is supposed to live. I can hold it there. I can let it float up to my belly button and push it back down. I can let it float up to its home perch and push it back down. Down is grounded and strong. Up is light and strong. For this step, I like down. It feels delicate-strong, not smoky.
Now, when teachers tell me to find my center deep in my pelvis, I will know what to do: Go looking for wherever it may be floating at the moment—a shoulder blade, the palm of my hand, its home behind the third rib--and push it down.
How about that?
But wait, there’s even more! (Yes, a full set of steak knives!)
To keep track of my center’s comings and goings, I put one hand on its lower home, one hand on its upper. Then I notice something: As I am using counterbody motion, when I step with my left foot, the back of both palms point to the left. When I step with my right, both palms point right. My hands are moving in concert. They are showing me two points on my axis.
Wow!
Who would have guessed it? Saturday at 5 p.m. I had nothing but a bellyful of whining. By 10 p.m., I had not only found my axis and center (wait, there's even even more...!) I found my feet!
None of this would have happened, none of it would have come to my attention, if were it not for the whine and its catalog of complaints.
Whining plucks my most bothersome complaints out of the miasma of undifferentiated frustration. Now they are prioritized and defined. Unequivocally. Now I can go to work on them.
I never knew this before. I thought whining was weak, like a crybaby. But a crybaby, at the end of its jag, has nothing to show for it but soiled hankies.
What a difference a day makes!
How can I quit tango now? Saturday’s long howl has given me another year’s worth of material to work with!
Well, OK then.
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