Gobsmacked Again
Mary Ittelson, 1/31/2021
At 19 I was burning to do it. Not sex. Well yes, sex. But that is another story. At 19, first I had figure out what “it” was. As soon as I did, I was certain my life would unfold in glory and splendor. I sought not a career path, but a calling. Once I settled on the what, I knew the how, where and with whom would be revealed. Miraculously, I did not have long to wait.
“It” became dazzlingly clear the moment John leaned over my arm rest to point at the dancer on the far right of the stage and whispered, “Look at her hand”. Pressed into the front of her hip bone, palm open, fingers splayed like the jaws of an asp. Her torso cantilevered horizontal off one leg. The other leg aimed at sky. Had I not breathed since the curtain opened? Had I ever truly breathed in the 19 years preceding that moment?
I did not end up having sex with John, my date to the Martha Graham Dance Company performance that fateful November night during my freshman year at Stanford. I know he must have been disappointed having bought front row seats on his graduate student budget with an expectation that tonight was the night. “Can you believe how long she stood still? On one leg? With all the others jumping around her? And her arm twisted behind her back?”, he implored me to take notice of him, jumping like a puppy on the walk back to my dorm. But I was impelled on a path that would become one of feverish preparation for my Julliard audition and getting to New York City where I would finally live the life I was meant to live.
Until I learned to do it myself, I did not understand what it had cost that dancer to be able to assume that position. I came to envy musicians who could put their instruments away; a broken string could be replaced while a torn meniscus could not. But that night I saw the world revealed in a gesture. In the years that followed, I danced as if my life depended on it. When I began to choreograph, I felt that my life did.
The 7th avenue IRT was my main artery. Making dances was the way I navigated. The subway connected me to ballet classes, rehearsal halls, and performance spaces, with a string of waitressing and receptionist jobs jammed between. It dumped me into the garment district where I rummaged through bolts of fabric in clearance piles searching for jersey brilliant enough for the stage and cheap enough to fit within a costume budget that hovered close to zero. The train took me north for inspiration in the twisting sculptures of medieval saints at the Cloisters, or south for respite in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
The visible terrain was New York, and the steps, the floor patterns, and the cadences of choreography. The invisible terrain was alchemy, on a good day. Shimmering movement. Sparkling music. On a bad day, making dances felt like an exorcism run afoul. All spasm and shriek. For me dance began where words failed. When dance failed, I had no plan B. But I was lucky. The successes outweighed the failures and I eventually managed to make a livable wage on my art alone.
Dance was my “it’ for a while, but not forever and for always as I had imagined. When people ask what it was like to quit dance after a 10-year professional career, my stock answer is “Dance is not a career choice, but an affliction.” For me it was less like the famous Isadora Duncan quote, ”To dance is to live” and more like the fabled origin of the tarantella - I could not stop dancing until the all the poison was sweat out of me. Dance is a hard life of discipline and sacrifice whose rewards are profound, exhilarating and fleeting. The simple answer is that I danced as long as I had to. Then I stopped.
I never missed it. Not the way my friends did; those sidelined by injuries, age, or failing to make the cut. They are pining still. I, who chose to quit dance, replaced the endorphin high with running and swimming, the kinesthetic and proprioceptor thrills through yoga and Pilates. I immersed myself in MBA studies back at Stanford. There followed a nearly 30 year career on the business side of the arts. My work kept me abreast of the latest in dance, theater, music and the visual arts. No longer a creator, nor an instrument of expression, I was satisfied as a professional advocate and a personal fan. Until I wasn’t.
So I took a sabbatical year and returned to Stanford to teach and to study. I taught arts leadership at the business school and took literature and creative writing classes, assuming I would return to my regular work when the sabbatical ended. But honestly, I was seeking another “it”.
In the years since dance chose me I had been gobsmacked by other revelatory moments that forever changed the trajectory of my life. When I first beheld my infant daughter for one example. And my infant son, for another. When I knew I must divorce my husband. Not, tellingly, when I decided to marry him. But that is another story. Now at 62 I hoped, but did not expect, to be smitten again. Not by love or its absence. But by a “job”. By work I must do lest the longing for it eviscerate me.
The teaching left me buoyant. But the writing defeated me. I failed to complete any of my creative writing assignment. I submitted more than was acceptable or less than was required. In memoir class I wrote fiction. In fiction class the prompts annoyed me, so I made up my own. These annoyed me too. Soon I was waking in the middle of the night to scribble paragraphs on stray post-its that made no sense in the morning. I worried sentences on napkins until they shredded. Typed phrases into the Lists section of my phone and forgot to transcribe them. I could spend 8 hours and eke out only a few paragraphs I did not hate. On a good day.
“Where is craft?” I’d scream into my computer screen as if there were an app for that. Couldn’t the years I spent honing choreographic technique help me now with nouns and verbs? The empty page mocked as did the barren studio when I would rent it at more than I could afford on my waitress salary yet fail to compose a single step. Lying immobile on the floor staring at the crumbling asbestos tiles in the ceiling of the smallest and cheapest among a slum of rehearsal spaces off Times Square. Knowing that the muse was not coming today.
“You know it’s a novel, right?” ventured my creative writing teacher at the end of my final quarter. “That’s why you can’t finish anything.”
Martha Graham said, “It takes 10 years to make a dancer and another 10 to make an artist.” If I stay on the winning side of the actuarial tables, I might yet spit out something decent before I die. That anyone will want, or be able, to read it seems beside the point. I am emboldened by the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder also began writing fiction at age 62. Norman Maclean at age 70.
One could fire the entire power grid of the city of New York were it possible to electrify the yearnings of a 19 year old such as I was in 1975. But the passion of youth consumes more than it fuels. Fortunately I know a few things I did not know at 19.
I know that you can have a rich and fulfilling life while pursuing a career rather than an obsession. That while in the thrall of creation the rest of your life will not take care of itself. That it is prudent to keep your day job.
I’ve learned like Zadie Smith that “Writing is resigning yourself to never being satisfied.” Like Jane Austin I know that when “I am not at all in humor for writing. I must write until I am.” That if there is a story inside that needs to get out, well, get it out.
I know to keep writing, even when the narrative thread is tangled, lost or broken. That the satisfaction of having done good work yesterday is empty compared with the prospect of work today that you are eager to do.
I know that I will be writing for a time. At it again.