Julliard

So in the living room of an unconditioned home we twirl and twirl and spin in tiny circles as I choreograph our very own special dance involving a beautiful 2 year old and her voracious 4 year old brother. I spin Mayerelli right and I spin Teo left. I marvel at what this must look like from a birds-eye-view and start to create elaborate costumes in my mind. Mayerelli will of course wear something pink that twirls & bares her little calves & pretty sparkly shoes. Teo will need something masculine and dark colored. Perhaps a feather will be involved. . . I am humming and la-la-la-ing the song that will one day be available for ringtone. We gallop together to the right, the left, and toward the footlights where future fans will applaude and bravo! at us. We are giggling and our hands are clammy and stuck together by sweat. I imagine what the tenants downstairs must think as we clunk-clunk-clunk across their ceilings. I instruct each of us to fall gracefully to the floor only to jump up and twirl again. "We'll have to enroll in Julliard for next fall," I tell them, breathless & wiping sweat from my forhead. They look at me and blink blankly. "Twirl," Mayerelli responds and so we continue. Clunk-clunk-twirl.

"In the museum we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet rays would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, "futuristic"- a strange word which suggests, accurately, that these colors had something of the world to come about them. Of course there wasn't any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.

Imagine illness as that light: demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we spectulate that death is what makes love possible. Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are. Could we really know anything that wasn't transient, not becoming more itself in the strange, unearthly light of dying? The button pushed, the stones shine, all mystery and beauty, implacable, fierce, austere."
-Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast