Reflection as creative non-fiction: March 2nd Workshop in Toronto with Michelle Selagy

By Any Other Name

By: Nathan Stretch

March 2nd 2019 was the 1st anniversary of the death of my father-in-law. That morning I watched my four-year-old daughter perform in her first dance recital.  We sat on the linoleum tiled floor of the local community centre.  My mother-in-law attended. My daughter – Charlie – beamed; she twirled and skipped under the fluorescent lights.  It was a relief to focus on her – she wanted our focus, and she focused on us: often maintaining intense eye contact.  Afterwards, at home, tugging at my running tights and basketball shorts, she squinted and chortled as I described to her the dance class I was about to attend.

Absurd.

Little girls in pink tutus take dance classes.

Absurd indeed. I was desperately pleased with her reaction. Hopeful even.  A life deemed absurd is surely better than one that vacillates wildly between extremes: good and bad, pain and pleasure, embodiment and disembodiment.

I often think

that the spinning of my mind

or the welling of emotion

must fill the space that certainty leaves behind

in the wake of change

– from one thing to another.

My wife was stoic.  She can be stoic, and the anniversary of her father’s death was a perfectly good excuse for stoicism: the tragedy was no longer immediate, but the significance had not waned.  She told me that it felt like a very long time since her father had died: 

Ages.

We have been married for ten years. Does the tragedy of her father’s death reach back that far?

I arrived early for dance class. I drove in to Toronto with my classmate Luke.  He can be very stoic.  I am tall and thin.  Luke is taller and thinner.  Luke almost certainly wears a toupee.  On Facebook – where we are friends – I can see pictures of Luke as a bald man.  He is bald in the manner that George Costanza is bald – in the manner that Larry David is bald: “hair is lost from the crown and frontal region.” I am pregnant with questions.

Luke was in the bathroom when the instructor arrived.  She was dressed in loose fitting, black clothing from wrist to ankle.  Her grey hair was stapled severely to the back of her head with small barrettes: there was no discernable bun or ponytail. I tried to imagine what her hair might look like if she let it down, but I could not. She seemed pleased that I had arrived early – she found me wandering the studio, admiring the ancient radiators: they hung eight feet in the air from exposed brick walls.  She shook my hand, made intentional eye contact, and said:

Michelle.

My name is Nathan.

Good. Good.

Michelle asked us to focus; she asked us not to talk between exercises. She was expert and hospitable and I lost myself in the rhythm of her instruction.  I participated without subtext – without metanarrative.  I was the main text, and the text had meaning all on its own. I was the word made flesh – meaning and message collapsed into fluid form.  I was singular in myself: one thing in one time.

Luke and I danced a duet. We rehearsed intensely.  Michelle encouraged us. She paused to consider our emergent choreography, before directing a brief comment toward me:

Excellent choice Nicholas

Luke and I had settled on the floor opposite each other. We sat very close, our crossed legs nearly touching. We stared into each other’s eyes while caressing the space around our bodies with mirrored, intentional gesture: an intimate orbiting. We leaned in close, and breathed together in the shared space: measured, excited, anticipatory. Something new, together.

Collapsed circle, unfocused eyes, hands reaching out. In the centre of the circle, our classmate leads us in small movements that we then mime.  We bend at the waist and flow like kelp in an undersea forest. Beneath the hanging radiators, a solitary drummer coaxes soft signatures from a djembe.  Michelle speaks in meter, offering small suggestions to the group – murmuring her little encouragements.

              Wonderful choice Andrew.

              Luke.

We murmur back to her in unison.

              Really feel the pulse Andrew.

              Luke.

We say, more insistent now, in rhythmic time with one another.

A wider circle: this is the end.  We are academic in truth and must wring meaning from our bodies, to feel it well up in our mouths, it dribbles down our chins – concentrated, viscous.

I am immediate, I am fully formed, I am integral. 

I am party to success.

I raise my hand:

Yes, Mason.

She calls on me -

And I am gone.