Dance/Trauma

                                                                  

                                                                                Halprin Dancers Workshop

       We stay up late because we love late nights and silence, and rarely set the alarm. Except for Thursday mornings, when I wake early because I’m going to Dance. On the Mountain. In the studio that has windows, not mirrors, so you look inward or outward, not at your reflection. Or, if it’s nice, we dance on the extraordinary deck among the Redwoods, where Merce Cunningham was once photographed leaping across the length of it.

       Once I wanted to be a dancer, but there was that injury, and lost extension, and then there was rheumatoid arthritis at 30, and only being able to walk to the corner, (which is four doors away), and the slow build up to two miles each morning.

       The dance class begins with a long, slow, meditative warm-up on the heated floor, and there's the music - the music! Last rainy, blustery week the Mountain was hidden behind a low fog bank, and wisps of cloud were snarled among the trees, and then it poured, giving us another rhythm to dance to.   Every week dance-mind and dance-body return to this aging one, but what is aging when your teacher is 90?
                                  
                                               “Aging is like enlightenment at gunpoint”. says Anna

    
    When I saw the film about Anna Halprin, Breath Made Visible; when I saw her dance the cancer out of her body, and dance Intensive Care after her husband had been there, and score the elderly in rocking chairs, I knew I would attend her Thursday morning class.

"When I was a young girl, I danced to rebel!

  When I was half a hundred, I danced for peace
  and justice.

  When I was seventy-two, I danced to understand
   the ants,  the insects, the birds, fish, the mountains,
   deer, the rolling hills, and the ocean.

   And when I will be eighty, I will seek to be a healer.

   And when I become ninety, I will dance the essence of things…"

      Anna & Larry. If the 60s & 70s on the West Coast were about changing models and embracing change, alternative life styles, and facing the fact of race, who were more innovative than the Dancer and the Architect? Collaborating on new forms of community, new ways to integrate the public into what Lawrence Halprin was designing, new forms of response, public scores, and unpatterned dance, choreographed from inside out. After a workshop I once took with the Halprins, I realized that the basis of community was myth, symbol and ritual, and no class I ever taught (except perhaps for Logic, but that’s another story), was complete without that realization.

      I am not one who looks back to the 1960s and 70s with pure nostalgia, since I experienced the shadow side of that era, as well as its creative expressions. But I think, in these traumatic times, when expectation and possibility seem to be shrinking, that Anna’s work is like a silk ribbon extending from an era when the words ‘human’ and ‘potential’ were often uttered one after the other.

                                       Dance/Trauma
               
                                                      for Anna
                   
                                                                    “I’ve searched my whole life to find
                                                                      a dance that means as much to me as my
                                                                      grandfather’s dance meant to him”  
                                                                                                      Anna Halprin

                                                                    "Trauma culture": bodies, morgues, 
                                                                     brain-bits, addicts, skulls, strife…….”
                                                                                                       John MacIntyre

Anna  how many dances have you made?   Was one most meaningful
or is it still to come?  I too have watched those rapt Hassids 
heads covered   bodies god-filled    I too have been overtaken  
flung lovingly upward     

Trauma culture arrives from the menacing side    how words and film revel
in our darkness now that Hell’s no threat   Have we made these urban
underworlds to feed us   blood and bone?    

You can dance death   skulls    strife     you can hip-hop drugs   guns
Anna how do you bear it?   not all dance    not all dance that brings release   
embraces life


                       

The Memory of Light

 

        Egypt. Another Uprising! Another nation of people fed up with with their immovable dictator. On January 15th the President of Tunisia had done what deposed dictators did - he’d fled the country - as the news sources say.  Who knows if Egypt’s 30 year dictator will finally step down or create heavier reprisals, using thugs loyal to Mubarak.  Today I read Thousands including families with children flowed over bridges across the Nile into Tahrir Square, a sign that they were not intimidated after the protesters fended off everything thrown at them by pro-Mubarak attackers . Many of us have cheered the protesters on, signed petitions, and joined virtual and actual demonstrations in support. And we resuscitate hope.
        In June 2009 Iranians marched against an illegally elected president. Do you remember the beautiful young university student?  “Her name was ندا Neda. It means voice or call in Farsi. She is the voice of the people, a call for freedom”.  She became the martyr of the revolution when we saw her fall to the ground, shot, and watched her die on video, some of us so privileged we’d only seen

people die of a bullet wound on-screen. Her death by thugs loyal to Ahmadinejad signaled the abuses of power and repression that would follow. Many of us had cheered the protestors on, signed petitions, and joined virtual and actual demonstrations in support.  And we resuscitated hope. 
     And we remember the 10 foot Spirit of Democracy, erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when there were 10,000 demonstrators, and how that spirit, (That Spirit!), created 300,000 more demonstrators in the following days. And millions of us saw the tank that pushed Her over - how  the torch struck the ground first, breaking off - as thousands were injured, and thousands died. Months later, without a single life lost, the symbol of all that was divided , the Berlin Wall, came down.
     The Berlin Wall had become synonymous with the Iron Curtain of my childhood, which I imagined as barbed wire suspended from metal rods like those that held up my mother’s drapes -but thousands of miles long. Behind the Iron Curtain, I imagined millions of people like Millet’s Reapers, who were permanently bent over in a rococo frame in my grandparents‘ home. These poor people labored in darkness,  and could never leave. We, on the other hand,  were Free, and heirs of a successful revolutionary war, (though when I was a child, revolutionaries were called Commies.)

      I have been reading The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch. In it, Lucifer has recruited Francis Bacon, founder of the scientific method. Ultimately, technologized humans turn away from God’s laws, and develop the tools that make pollution, mass slaughter and the Holocaust possible. Like a discarded fiancé, God wants the tablets He gave to Moses returned.  Satan has won the final round of the bet that he originally made with God over Job.
     I did not like the Book of Job as a child. God allowed suffering and loss to befall Job, betting Satan that Job would not turn away from Him. When Job questions God, He answers by citing all the wonders of His Creation, all that He has accomplished, all the Powers He can call upon. What mere human could comprehend Him? But I couldn’t find evidence of Mercy or Compassion, and I had been taught that  those were His qualities. It was just God and Satan in a struggle for power -  just like Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear - and Job was the pawn. Yes But, you say - it is a struggle between Good and Evil. But what amorality and cruelty does Good resort to in its attempt to defeat Evil? What justifications?
     How many billions of us are still pawns of Power? Whenever there is an uprising, it seems as though some new light is shining in the world, and all the media turn toward this potential light and if it fails, there is dejection. The next uprising we cheer them on, sign petitions, and attend virtual and actual demonstrations in support. And we resuscitate hope. How do we hold the memory of light?
  
The Memory of Light

How rare when joy enters history
like fireworks  
and lasting about
as long

How rare when joy enters history
It used to arrive at war’s end -
I was maybe 3   parading
hitting a pot with a big spoon  all us kids and
The War Was Over and even if you
didn’t understood it was so good
to be banging that pot
but wars don’t end now

How rare when joy enters history:
November 4 2008   as soon as
the announcement came horns were honking 
strangers were hugging   we cried and
yelled   the young ones jumped up and down
a year later   anger   bitterness   fear

How do we hold the memory of light?

"Extinct Birds"

                                  

           Our annual New Year’s brunch at the Station House Café.
No hike since it was a greyfog rainfall day. I saw the year’s
first snowy egret, my adopted totem,in the mudflats along Hiway 1.
There were one, two, three, and more egrets, Great and Snowy,
plus willets and sandpipers, kingfishers and a blue heron.

Shorebirds  living on the border between
land and sea   inhabiting all three   
air and water  and earth 
Brancusi birds   slim scuptures of flight

I had been reading Janet Frame’s Toward Another Summer, where she discovers that she is a migratory bird,  a godwit perhaps, and knows she will return to her home in New Zealand, when I saw this headline:

                                                               “ Good godwit!
                                                     Bird flies 6,000 miles nonstop
                                                 for eight days to set new record”
                                                                       Minneapolis Star Tribune

No water   no food  nonstop Alaska to New Zealand 
Was it god’s wit to give
this pretty redfeathered waterfowl a bill that long           
appended like the beak on a carnevale mask

Godwit
I thought I would write
endlessly about that word
My new poems speak of
motherdark   seabreath
madchatter
Why say more?

“Extinct Birds”

       
        by Walter Rothschild
        illustrated by J. G. Keulemans
             1907
           
The violet macaw is beautiful
but the sounds of ‘spectacled cormorant’
the hard ‘c’s’ and rounded rhyming o’s
(say it slowly   c-o-r-m-o-r-a-n-t)
launch me into language
but
on every page

“No known specimen” 

I’m grounded  

trying to find the alphabet

of lost flight

“No known specimen”

The Great Auk and the Madagascar Hawk

The last ones 

                                                  died of indifference                                                    

Now the mere rumor of a remote

sighting would thrill us

                                                                       

                            
If we didn’t ignore
                                                 all but our own music                                                   
would the Carolina parrot
still be singing?

 The lyrebird  
can mimic any sound   perfectly
The call of kookaburra  currawong   
the fall of a branch  the click of a camera
Listen: his latest sound

a chain saw

 

                                                                                                                                  

Heenayni

I was an undergraduate when I began studying medieval France. I re-read the Romances of the 12th century, re-encountering Merlin and Gawain and Arthur - the Court I had escaped to as a child.

But the 12th century was much more complex than that: Greek learning was slowly arriving in France from Al-Andalus - Arab Spain - preserved by the same intellectual adventurers who invented Al-jibra and practiced Al-kimia. How my 1960s rebel soul adored the fact that the Renaissance did not spring sudden and full-blown out of the “Western mind”! But the center of the French world was still the Cathedral of Chartres and its School - a center for the New Learning.

Chartres. What images first come to you of that Cathedral? When I visited Chartres in the midst of my studies, I could not stand still, moving window to window, tracing the wooden sculptured screens with my fingers, wanting to take it all in like a great meal set before the starved. I understood that mid-century America, with all its affluence, had been a cultural wasteland for me. Not that I was alone. Others turned to Asia, or the new bards Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder and Dylan, or they took drugs for illumination. (Eventually I would try them all.)

Chartres had been such a powerful illuminator. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the literacy rate was .05% Books were still primarily manuscripts copied by monks, and rare as the jewels in the crown of a countess. The sculpture and stained glass of the Gothic cathedrals introduced all the characters, all the stories, the Church wanted to tell. Even Aristotle, the Greek liberal arts, and the signs of the zodiac were displayed.

On Christmas Eve this year, Bill and I went to the new Oakland Cathedral of Christ the Light for the musical offering that precedes Midnight Mass. Outside the cathedral is something the 12th century Church would never have acknowledged or created: A Garden of Healing for those who have suffered priestly abuse. I imagined a new age of pilgrimage to that garden. But as I stood outside the cathedral, I had the same thought I had visiting Chartres decades earlier: What if the extraordinary expense had gone to the poor?

The latest technology was developed for Gothic cathedrals: the pointed arch, the cross-ribbed vault, the flying buttress, stained glass. Christ the Light also uses the latest technology. The previous cathedral was destroyed by the earthquake of 1989, so this building is protected by “a steel friction pendulum seismic base-isolation system”. What does that mean? I find the rest of the specs equally confounding.

I do learn that the mathematics and geometry of the intersecting circles that form The Fish, the symbolic shape of the building, are based on the first numbers of the Fibonacci series - the square roots of 2, 3, and 5. These are the square roots of nature, of the universe. That I can understand.

There is no Royal Portal, no exterior sculpture on the facade of Christ the Light. You enter into a low space centered by a baptismal font, and then you continue into the nave and the Great Soaring, and in front of you, rising 55 feet, is the image in light of the figure of Christ from the Royal Portal of Chartres. The towering walls are unadorned wooden slats that modulate light. Light! Above is the oculus, another source of illumination. The only color is found in a few paintings in the side chapels of the Reliquary Wall that supports the Soaring. And yet, both of us, non-Catholics, experienced the awe that transcends mere amazement at the new.

Cathedrals were always created as a means to draw people in. They are a spiritual seduction, appealing to the senses. The Cathedral of Chartres was loaded with visual information in the absence of literacy and general knowledge. We are overloaded with information, our “sin” may be the continual craving for it, so the new Cathedral is quiescent. It offers rest and relief, not stimulation. It is a meditation, offering solace, spiritual renewal and respite from the secular world. A Cathedral for the 21st century.

Heenayni

I enter the bare chapel
that appeared in my dream
sit down in one of the pews
and cover my eyes not to avoid
the absence of art but to pray
as the old ones prayed

Heenayni I am here
here in this world as it is
here in the chime of silence
as though a clamor of bells
had just ended
and I lean into
the great empty silence

"The End of Abundance" (from After The Jug Was Broken)

If I quote my own poem, (below), and talk about the end of abundance, my friend Connie gets annoyed. I say that our post-war generation was probably the most affluent in history. Connie says she doesn't like nostalgia. I say that I speak as a cultural historian, not as someone who looks back fondly at Father Knows Best. (He didn't. Believe me.)

Connie says there is still abundance. Since she is a biochemist, I assume she means more than galaxies of information. Perhaps there are plans and processes and resources and promises I am not aware of. It's strange, I know, to talk about the end of what was plentiful during the holiday season. Certainly, if you are American, a quick trip to Costco will display a warehouse of jingle-bell-plenty beyond what is even imagined by most the people I have met in the far world. But I've just come back from visiting the kids, and who knows what their climate-changed future will be like, especially if we continue not-acting.

I have actually been feeling so wealthy this year. It's the abundance of loving, caring, wonderful people in our life that does it. I need to remember that even if our grandkids must live with diminished resources, there is no reason why they cannot have the sparkling net of connection that we do. Maybe in a world of diminished material means and global disturbance relationships will become even more significant - and more essential. Maybe community will enlarge and engage - and people will truly commune with each other.
Oh, may it be so.

The End of Abundance


Dear grandchildren
born into global warming
accelerating generations
separate us
what I know of ice and snow seasons
the depth of water all we counted on
this knowledge will not be yours


I was born into war
sacrifice rationing
you arrived at the end
of abundance


But who would rather remain unborn
then enter a desperate age?


Little dear ones
time is a rope twirled
by invisible twin girls
we jump in
and skip
for as long as we can

After the Jug Was Broken by Leah Shelleda: Press Release

December 15, 2010

il piccolo editions is pleased to present 

After the Jug Was Broken
Poems by Leah Shelleda
ISBN 9781926715469, 80pp, Paperback

The poetry of Leah Shelleda inhabits a realm of magic and marvels. The poet is a shape-shifter. Meet the Lamia, those "Madonna-faced/serpent below the waist" creatures, whose songs Shelleda sings. Meet Kitsune, the Spirit Fox, who is nine hundred ninety nine years old—about to grow nine tails. Meet Asherah, the Hebrew Goddess, her graven image shaped in bread—about to be eaten.

Shelleda's poems play at the edge of the wild and the forbidden; they dive down to the depths, bringing up treasure from the collective unconscious and the wisdom traditions; they enchant, seduce and bless; they transport us in the four directions and into the three worlds; they touch all the chakras. Leah Shelleda gathers the shards of our broken world and gives us sacred space. —Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Sister From Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way 

* * * * *

Leah Shelleda, "gatherer of shards", sings the world and psyche into wholeness. Whether she is speaking in the voice of a character in myth, or speaking in her own heartfelt voice of the places she has visited, she re-members for us that Myth, Place, Experience, and Spirit are One. Shelleda’s After the Jug Was Broken, an incantation of healing, begs to be read aloud. Through the fruit of suffering, and transformation through beauty, "where spirit spins cosmic webs", the reader is forever changed. – Patricia Damery, author of Farming Soul

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Leah Shelleda is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the College of Marin. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her chapbook, A Flash of Angel, won the Blue Light Press prize. She is a weaver of wall hangings as well as words, and an ardent gardener.

il piccolo editions is an imprint of Fisher King Press, publisher of an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives, Cutting Edge Fiction, and a growing list of alternative titles. Learn more at www.fisherkingpress.com

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