Still point in the turning world

I skipped last week, because, well, this is my newsletter, and so I can. But I’m back now.

For a long time now, Tom and I have made a point of going to shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as often as we can. It’s the oldest continually-running performing arts venue in the US; it’s also pretty close to every home we’ve shared since we got married 15 years ago, all five of them, and so it makes for a particularly great place to spend an evening.

BAM’s programming tends to specialize in the experimental, things outside the box from around the world. More than once, we’ve seen puppet shows. We’ve seen an extraordinary amount of dance and the kind of theater that makes you go “well, huh” when it’s over. Plays that are nine hours long. We saw the Einstein on the Beach revival. Once we saw a trapeze troupe from the Czech Republic. You get the idea.

This year BAM is showcasing mostly New York-based performing arts groups — partly to support the community, and partly because of the logistical challenges the world presents at the moment — and last week we went to see Four Quartets, as choreographed by Pam Tanowitz.

Choreographed, because it was a dance performance set to music by Kaija Saariaho, with Kathleen Chalfant reading the entirety of T.S. Eliot’s famous poem of the same name, published in four parts between 1936 and 1942. Typically poems don’t get dances too (the old axiom about “dancing about architecture” springs to mind), but this is the twenty-first century and all the lines are blurring.

I am not here to tell you all about Eliot’s poem or review the dance performance, because all I did was soak it in. The poem is about time, about how it telescopes and compresses, how the places we have been overlap with the places we are and eternity can exist within an instant. It’s about how human history, moving through time, is a dance.

All I want to say is that I was in this room, the opera house at BAM, that I’ve been in dozens of times before to see movies and shows and performances of all kinds, listening to lines like “humankind cannot bear much reality” and

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

I studied Four Quartets in graduate school, and every time I re-encounter it a piece of me is there. And a piece of me is also in that opera house, that night, but also all the other times I’ve been there. I often think of my world as haunted by ghosts — not scary ghosts, just the ghosts of who I have been and, presumably, who I will be, and all those around me. And that was all I could think about that night.

This year is, thus far, a year of returning to the spaces and places and people and rituals that made me, after interruption. It is hard to know exactly what the still points in those turning worlds are, but a certain amount of overlap of present and past, future and always — that, I am learning, is where my centers are.

Been writing

• I wrote something very important to me, at least, about a new crop of documentaries that are actively combatting the global vogue for burying history and refusing to look at it.

• Otherwise, I’ve mostly been working on things coming soon, and also writing a lecture for one of my courses. (Most of those lectures have been pretty much settled for years, but every so often a tweak is necessary.)

Been reading and watching

• Not watching all that much, to be honest! Mostly Olympic skating.

• But I have read a bunch of books, perhaps most notably Joan Didion’s Salvador, which I’d never read. It’s very short, and as with all her work, it is (fundamentally) about how we use words to conceal and bend reality. Recommended.

Odds and ends

• On Friday night, out with Tom and some friends, we happened upon a Ham Bar. Its name is Ham Bar, and when you go in, it’s a little wine bar with like a dozen fancy hams on the menu. You pick a couple and they tell you where they came from and slice them thin and you eat them. Heaven. Ham heaven.