letting go of making sense

dance, non-linear thinking, & softening the logic brain

Pushing a baby grand piano across the studio floor, I tell a story of my first piano teacher, her erect posture and perfectly drawn eyebrows, the discipline of learning classical music, how I never practiced enough. Through her, I got my first official job as a teenager, teaching ballet to five year olds on Saturday mornings. It was also the first job I was fired from. I talk about the new piano teacher I started studying with, a passionate Ukrainian woman who wears animal print and introduced me to Chopin. I remember her talking about his life. I remember her perfume and the eastern European pastries she would bring to every recital. 

The piano finds its way to the middle of the studio with my effort. Feet pressed into the floor, my pelvis leaning into its shiny smooth black surface. I’m a little out of breath between all the pushing and talking. I sit down to play Chopin’s Prelude in E minor. It strikes me as funny that I loved such a melancholy song as a teenager. I still love this song. I practiced for a couple weeks before playing it here, now. I had never touched the piano in the studio before this. Sits bones tethered to the bench, right foot presses and releases the pedal. The spine sways as the gaze floats between sheet music and piano keys. There’s a part in the music that’s hard for me, intense and climatic, and so so satisfying when my fingers land on the right keys. There’s release when I get to the other side. A pause. The fingers linger in the last three chords. It’s soft.  

I get up from the piano and turn on the stereo system. A few years ago I stumbled upon a bossa nova jazz version of Prelude in E minor. The rhythm immediately goes to my spine and hips. Following sequentially my head moves. Weighted, thick serpentine movement. There’s a rhythm here, still a sort of melancholy but it’s held in a groove that moves me in a delicious way. 

I start talking again. Have you ever held or looked at a baby and said, you’re so cute I could eat you!!  I learn that there’s something that goes on the brain when we feel strong positive feelings of attraction, cuteness, and goodness. Something that can bring up feelings of anger and hunger.¹ I like to think of these emotions, these feelings that we often think of as very different from each other– one more positive and the other negative, as living really close to each other in the brain.² Our brains are a concoction of chemicals and hormones that are continually trying to balance themselves. We feel one thing, the body reacts to keep us balanced, alive, moving forward. 

I continue moving in the diagonal trajectory that I started with the piano push. Twisting and rotating my body, my guts are rung out, in that way that feels so good, detoxifying. I think of my yoga teachers. Chopin’s prelude now is in my body in a new way as I hum the melody.  Spotify took over and starts DJ-ing over my voice. Not what I planned, but I let the unfinished, draftiness of this performance be what it is. Complete but never finished. Satisfied, for now, and still moving. Committed to iterating. 

Why attempt to capture this performance onto digital paper? How can I not flatten the movement, the body into description, into a two dimensional image or a singular audio wave?  How can writing about the ephemeral be a sort of seed, a sign, or a glimmer of another world? How does the performance live on outside of my own memory, or those who witnessed it live? When does writing feel like a performance in and of itself? 

You had to be there, but also here’s a thread I’ll toss you from the body in another space/time. 

I want to tell you that I learned something through my dance, through the body. I want to tell you that memory is creative and evolving. I want to tell you that non-linear thinking is a gift, a way. I want to tell you that I’m leaning in, and I’d like you to come with me. I want to tell you that I am a researcher. I want to tell you that struggle is so close to pleasure, and I want to be brave enough to remember this and wrestle with it my whole damn life. I want to tell you that I am braver when you are brave. I want to tell you that this matters. 

Something about letting go of trying to make sense, allowed for some kind of coherence to emerge. Something about this dance made sense, felt right, constellated knowledge into my body brain.

It might not make sense to you, or it might be a sense that’s different from mine and that’s okay. That’s really cool actually. I am interested in sense-making that allows us to meet and find each other in our commonness and uniqueness. I want to see where these meandering, non-linear paths might take us.

with a push and yield,

em

1. “Authors hypothesize that “cute aggression” may serve as a bottom-up mechanism for regulating overwhelming positive emotions.” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00300/full 

2. throw back to an early DEEP SHIFT dispatch 🍊