rigging

my new schedule seems to be 11-3 : @ 3 i woke after a dream of teaching : it was, after the dream, the first time i had thought about teaching for at least a year : i stood with impeccable posture, & traveled to the classroom in a boat : & the classroom wasn’t quite a classroom, but something more akin to the space in Raphael’s The School of Athens : it seems that for once, i didn’t have much to say, but when i did speak, it was without hubris and with abandon : my students were older than normal & they looked at me like they were students : both those rapt & feckless until i made my exit in a series of several consecutive grand jete (accent aigu and perhaps an “s”?) :

the rest of the morning was spent in bed performing more than 20 tours en l’air : i began with Fitzcarraldo & his single-mindedness : & then i thought about dancing & where, exactly, my interest is situated : after spending periods of time caught in certain tunnels of thought, patterns sometimes push their notice : the last time this particular cloud took me i began reading every book i could find on antarctic exploration : i’ve since moved the only way i could through time & have spent the last few weeks with Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast & even Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way : there are videos of Moitessier on the internet : gaunt, tanned, and musing to himself : never giving a reason why it was necessary to never complete the Golden Globe race, though he would have surely won, & instead, turning his boat south, less than 1,000 miles from home, towards the Cape of Good Hope for another 46,000 miles around the globe : alone : he had a family that he loved, of course :

but closer to dance: there is Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s 9^th Ending : Glenn Gould performing anything by Bach : you can hear his dissonant counterpoint even in the recordings : he breathes out alien notes : & the point i am trying to make here has to do with commitment : even a dancer who hasn’t danced for years is scarred in both mind & body : maybe in the mind more than anywhere else because, as a dancer, much of the operation & maintenance of the body is a matter of fact & necessity : the mind works with a different machinery : its paths are not always linear : i can not think of another act which requires one to give so much of themselves, so as to risk everything : mind & body : no different & perhaps more dangerous than Moitessier’s obsession with the work of negotiating wind & water alone: & so what keeps us from thinking that Nureyev or Nijinsky is any less mad than a man like Fitzcarraldo : though perhaps an error in judgment mentioning poor Nijinsky here : but he can also be used as an example and proof for the case of total commitment : i think that there was one day, one particular day, when words did the same thing for me : Roald Amundsen spent 3 years on ice in a different sort of performance : i’d like to have more than a little taste of all of this : it is as necessary to me right now as a taste of all the boys on Bowery was to Nureyev :

at the right hour i can hear both the cargo ships & the trains : if i’m lucky their sounds will shake the slats beneath my mattress : this morning i took a walk to get a closer look : more vessels were moored than usual : before the cars arrive on the street i am able to hear the water from all the way up on the hill : it sounds like stepping into a burn in Montana : maybe a year or two after the fire : all the trees are dead-standing & black : a bed of green and yellow mosses covers the ground :