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An Elegy for Dancing 쮿 19 1 An Elegy for Dancing Christina Pugh In the modern sense of the term, the elegy is a short poem, usually formal or ceremonious in tone and diction, occasioned by the death of a person. Unlike the dirge, threnody, obsequy, and other forms of pure lament or memorial, however, and more expansive than the epitaph, the elegy frequently includes a movement from expressed sorrow toward consolation. —New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Is it possible to write an elegy in prose? What about an allegorical elegy—an elegy for an aspect of the self that has been lost, or that remains in regression or remission? This essay—this attempt, to paraphrase the French verb essayer—will try to do both of those things: to enact a prose elegy for a dancing self, replete with some small measure of sorrow and a gesture toward self-consolation, as suggested in my epigraph’s definition. For I no longer dance, due to the limitations of injury and chronic pain. Up until now, it has only been in poems that I have tried to describe the kinesthetic sense of dancing (though more often than not, the poems have made use of the very specialized vocabulary of dance rather than the so-called “experience” of it). And by virtue of its very genre, a poem may have what Lucie Brock-Broido has called an autistic quality: “I think of poems as autistic, in the sense that they’re trapped in extremity’s small room—they’re large thoughts that don’t get to speak in prose” (1998, 146). Though we might question or quarrel with Brock-Broido’s definition of autistic, it’s clear to me that 19 20 쮿 My Life at the Gym she is obliquely referring to the preverbal synergies that animate the best poems: what Kristeva discussed as the chora. Such energy also makes for some salutary blindness, a blindness not completely unlike that which fascinated Paul de Man. But even when I write in prose about my experience, I am likely never to see clearly when it comes to my own narrative or narratives—particularly when they concern something as quicksilver in constitution, as ephemeral in time and space as the act of dancing. I remember the beauty of the open studio, its floor covered in a smooth black tarp called Marley. Doubled by the mirrors, it became a broad and virtual terrain—sprung so that dancers’ feet were torque, traction, instrument. The quality of the floor is paramount to the dancer: too hard, and jumps become belly flops. And the risk of injury is that much greater. When I see the empty studio in my mind’s eye, I also see the margins of my modern dance classes—the moments before class began and after it ended. There was the ritual of warming up (and down): stretching knees, calves, ankles, shoulders, feet, spine. I was very flexible , as I am today; a doctor recently called it hypermobility. But despite my flexibility and high extensions of the leg, despite my training and devotion to class week after week, I was not a good dancer and never would be. I could not learn combinations—the stitching together of steps in muscle memory—and this failure was never reversed, even by years of study. “Either you have it or you don’t,” a teacher once commented on the subject; for the first time, I wondered whether there might be something constitutional or synaptic that was getting in the way of such learning, something quite different from but analogous to dyslexia, for example. (One of my best friends from college has had no sense of smell from birth. Even at the age of twenty-one, he tried to keep it a secret. He was ashamed: he thought he’d failed to learn something essential as a child.) But I had dancing in the blood, and so I chose to struggle—or, more aptly, to remain—in a chronic state of nonmastery. My favorite teacher was fond of sinuous and very complicated combinations; according to her biographical profile, she was interested in “dynamic physicality with lyrical phrasing, and the dancer’s relationship to space.” I had never encountered someone so exacting and yet with so much public equanimity. She could sense the precise lay of vertebrae through a sweatshirt. She grabbed my hips and manhandled me across the Marley. She adjusted my head one inch to...

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