The Fundamentals of Modern Dance
by Marion Cline
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
From “The Star-Splitter” by Robert Frost
The purpose of the complete breath is to acknowledge mortality. Just as it easily enters, it easily dissipates. The purpose is to hold the breath, let it swim for a little while in the lower pit, and to let it go. Let the air recycle itself. This might have been the same breath exhaled by dinosaurs. This might have been the same breath my great grandmother took right before technology got out of hand, saving her from the weight of ambiguity all of us survivors have to bear in the face of unbridled research.
Unbridled potential investigations of each other.
In plunging forward, hands on the studio floor, my head a ribbon weaving through the eye of my needle I am watching a head a few paces behind shake and nod. The head is a clump of straw, and the vigorous motions resemble hidden rodents fighting. Eventually, we disassemble ourselves to the ground. Each of us is sure to distinguish left and right, to prevent accidental eye contact. Twisting the leg with the arm turning the body into a cross. It is like driving a car, this test in direction.
As I wait for my friend to descend and let me in the apartment, I watch the faces of pedestrians. This time of year, their faces are clenched against the cold. Homogeny in clenching. We are all the same face in the blunt vacuum of chill. So then I look at the driver’s faces on Gilbert Street. Homogeny in squinting the early noon out of their eyes, although some are more distracted than others. Some are trying to fit a mouthful over the steering wheel as if the wheel was a plate at a cocktail party. All the snacks are manufactured and preserved so as not to leave a crumb on the paper plate. Chex Mix for instance, is a good mix, if crumb-less. And others are talking to their copilots, or letting the drowning light slump them into the weary mentality of the moment they finally arrive at their designated rooms, preserved as they left them, calcified. Coming into one's room after the day’s activities is like searching the sunken chambers of the Titanic. Where is the light, where is the light?
Others are peering at the street names from the periphery windows, some are grimacing into their laps. My great grandmother died as soon as the lap became synonymous with the phone.
Square your hips to the front of the room. It should feel like car lights beaming over a pool. (From where we’re standing I can see through the gym glass faces framed in rubber caps falling backwards everytime.) Imagine having been hooked in the chest like a fish, that’s how your head should fall back. No, imagine a flashlight emanating from the sternum.
On the first day of class we find our seats in a distracted and bewildered manner. Briefly searching the faces of others, feeling the dissonance of summer still breathing outside and air conditioning plucking us all into naked geese. For some reason, these seats become permanent, framing the student’s installation in the oncoming symposium. One might forge a sincere connection with another individual across the room, but is committed, consecrated to the first seat. The seat, chosen in a disheveled state, is a vantage point, a fixed perspective, the only perspective.
There is only one God.
I can’t explain why the flat part of his foot hasn’t touched my head. It is a crowded class. Hold your hips in place as if you were wedged between two plates of glass.
Even better: your back should be so rigid and flat that I could serve tea on it. I could have a tea party on your back. All of us would stop our stretching and come over to your straight and fixed back and enjoy tea on it, with pastries! This can all be true with a little bit of weight shifting, you might have to lower the torso to fit into the crook of the thighs, but the back is still, descending like an elevator to those of us who prefer to take our tea with the solemnity of cross leggedness. Tea should also be balanced on the heel, as it orbits the torso, the orientation of the thighs makes this so.
I used to say that movement was only soberly permissible in this society within the designated class space, and sex, if you were lucky enough to engage in sex soberly. The vocabulary of body language constitutes seventy percent of language in its entirety. In theatre, the actor is meant to speak with an all encompassing body verbiage. If he is facing up-stage, away from the audience, his back must be talking, his shoulders must be talking, his fists, his ass, etc.
I stand in the middle of the room where my peers approach. At first they are disinterested, at first they don’t know where to go. Then one starts shaking my left arm, like a toy snake. One begins scratching my scalp, one begins to pat down my thighs, like an airport inspection. One is tracing my toes.
For this moment I am designated, crowned. Yes, it resembles Martin Shongauer’s engraving of “The Temptation of St Anthony” from 1475, which was mimicked by Michelangelo in 1488, which also resembles the Ascension, the right of purity through torment. Most depictions of an Ascension require a crowd, an entourage, typically of cherubims and saints, but not exclusively. See El Greco’s “Ascensione”, see “L’Ultimo Giudizio” in the bulb of Santa Maria del Fiore.
To be social is to be forgiving, said Robert Frost. St Anthony, despite the torment and oppressive entourage in these depictions, is wafting over the earth, levitating by the heated crescendo. Is he, through the purification of his pain, lifting the demons or are they lifting him? Is this the sullen action of collective redemption, are we to approach enlightenment like Shongauer’s engraving, stolid, unwavering, rigid?
Isn’t this the face we are making to our laps?
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Marion Cline is a poet and literary translator who aims to frame reality in its truest form. God speaks in semiotics; the divine perspective for her is delivered through word collage and fragmentary monologue to evoke the serendipitous. She will receive her BFA in Creative Writing and Translation from the University of Iowa, is featured in several publications and zines including The Core Review and Wyrd, and is the author of the chapbooks Fruit and Every Maria.
Instagram: @mazzycline