Something Good #99: Possessed
What brings things to life?
I’ve been taking dance lessons (modern dance, if you must know) for a few months now. One day I realized I missed the joy of moving my body expressively and so I signed up for adult classes at the local studio where my daughter goes.
I was nervous at first, but it was for the most part just me and a handful of women around my age, who all seemed amused by, and very supportive of, my presence. Good, because my body, withered by the demands of parenthood, by pandemic inactivity, and by months of difficult chronic pain, was not ready for any of this. Still: I was determined to push through, and now I’m faced with the daunting prospect of a public recital next week (to which you are not invited).
I have learned a lot. The experience of dancing choreographically, as opposed to the wild flailing of nights past, suits my creative self, which enjoys operating within constraints. Being given a specific sequence of movements to perform feels amazing, like following LEGO instructions for my body.
There was a moment when it clicked for me. It was the second class or so, and our instructor, Léa, led us through a basic choreography a few times. Her movements were precise, graceful; mine, less so. Once she was satisfied that we had learned the steps, she asked to run through it again, but, in her words, “Now, really put your self into it this time.”
She then showed us what she meant, and it was startling: the same choreography, but now somehow alive now, her personality now visible in every move. At that moment I thought, ahh, I think I understand what dancing is now.
All the performing arts are like this in some way, whether it be an actor playing a centuries-old role or an oboist in an orchestra. There is technique, and then there is the extra step beyond perfection. When art is inhabited and brought to life in this way, it’s almost a form of possession. But who is possessing whom?
There’s a scene from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive that’s always haunted me, and it expresses that mysterious possessive force better than anything else I’ve ever seen. Betty, played by Naomi Watts, is an aspiring actor newly arrived in Los Angeles. In one scene, we see her running lines for an upcoming audition; her performance is stiff, amateurish and pretty terrible.
Then we see the audition itself, in a small room packed with disgusting Hollywood types: a slimy producer and somehow slimier actor, a powerless director, and various other sycophants. Betty, nervous, starts to run the scene with the actor, and… suddenly she’s possessed. Her performance now is nothing like the rehearsal: it’s riveting, dangerous, sexy, and the corny TV-movie scene the two are playing suddenly feels like it comes from a forgotten film noir. It’s close to magic.
You can watch it here:
This is what I mean by possession.
I also want to talk about a poem. I found it in a book of verse for kids which I bought at an antiquarian book fair (Canada’s smallest, the website proudly declares). In 1937, W.H. Auden wrote a radio play called Hadrian’s Wall, with music by his frequent collaborator Benjamin Britten. There we find “Roman Wall Blues,” told from the point of view of a lonely soldier on the very edge of the empire:
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.
Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
I’ve not been able to shake these lines since reading them. I’m not ashamed to say I’m a sucker for simple rhyme schemes and like, stuff set on the frontiers of dissolute empires. But more than just appealing to my sensibilities, the poem achieves that simple-seeming trick of doing something transcendent in its final couplet that somehow doesn’t negate the humour and even goofiness of the preceding lines, but renders them poignant and human.
So yes, it lives in my head as a sort of sing-songy chant. But, as every obnoxious English major will tell you, poetry was originally a spoken form, passed down orally, not written to be read silently. And as it turns out, “Roman Wall Blues” was originally set to music by Britten. As was the case with these early broadcasts, though, it was never recorded and the music thought lost.
However, as Charlotte Higgins wrote for The Guardian in 2013, film John Mapplebeck discovered that a 99-year-old bank clerk he was friends with (!) had kept a copy of the written score from the original session. A recording was made with singer Mary Carewe, and while the original download isn’t available, you can listen to it on YouTube here:
This is nothing, nothing, nothing like how I hear the poem in my head. But I love it. It’s possessed.
Karen’s book is finally out! An adaptation of her thesis, it is a wonderful thing. Smart people are already praising it to the heavens:
This book is a unique exploration of workspace. It draws from a wide variety of philosophies, theories, and concepts to provide a thoughtful, nuanced, and fresh perspective on contemporary workspace and working practices. Throughout the book, Karen Messer asks all the right questions and encourages us to tune in and notice how our material environments can impact our sensory, emotional, and subjective experiences. This book will be a fascinating read for those working in interdisciplinary academic fields, designers of space, and anyone interested in the relationship between human behaviour and space.
- Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at UWE Bristol
Academic books are notoriously expensive, so if this interests you but is out of your budget, I highly recommend you request it at your local library, school-affiliated or otherwise. (Chapters can also be purchased individually for course packs or just your own reading.) And I also highly recommend you check out Karen’s new website if you’re looking for help organizing your own space.
Bonus track (to which I may or not be performing at the above-mentioned recital):
Every once in a while I’ll send you Something Good. Have you ever been possessed? What does it mean to you? I am personally very, very far away from being able to achieve that in dance form, but one can hope.
Over at Barely a Book Club, we recently finished Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. In our last dispatch, I email an ancient tavern in Heidelberg and get a delightful response. All these entries are meant to be read with or without having read the book in question, so I encourage you to take a look if the titles are at all interesting to you. Next book is probably Dervla Murphy’s cycling memoir Full Tilt. More on that soon. Until then, if you don’t subscribe to this newsletter, you can do so right… here:
