Equivocality

What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial classes is mostly suck. These are professional classes, the kind you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She seems thoroughly competent, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. The last time I went to school, I aced it. I’d like to say I was naturally brilliant, but it probably had more to do with the fact that I’d already been studying on my own for years, just out of curiosity. I didn’t understand my advantage then. There were always a few guys at the back of the class going, “what the hell?” but I was never one of them.

In circus school I definitely sit at the back of the class.

I can’t even hang straight. It’s just hanging, holding onto the trapeze bar, doing nothing. When I tried it I discovered that it hurt and I was bad at it. I hang crooked because I’m not the same on each side. My flexibility, strength and control are subtly but thoroughly asymmetric from years of surgery and injuries, and always eating, brushing my teeth, writing, driving, and masturbating with the same hand. So I grab the bar and wince at the pain in my hands and try to figure out which muscles I need to activate in my shoulders to put my body in line. There’s some thrashing involved.

I feel like I woke up one year and discovered my body, like a new sense coming on line, like suddenly seeing in color, like the way I once discovered music. Then I discovered how much I’d been missing. My body felt neglected and very far away. I’ve managed to reach it in a variety of ways since then, , and I’ve enjoyed every single one of them. Fire spinning. Dance. Hiking. But it comes slowly. It was years of dancing before I felt physically articulate for the first time.

It’s something I want more of, badly.

Except that I loathe the idea of being a hamster; I can’t go the gym. I don’t care about biceps and definition, I just want to be able to move. Anyway, there’s no honor in being a rat on a wheel. That’s why I enrolled in circus school. Sure they train professionals, but they’ll take anyone who can pass a good check. Turns out that money, talent, and intelligence are not kinesthetic sense. Sir Issac Newton was the first to describe the bank-shot mathematically, but I’m certain he was terrible at pool.

So I suck at this. I’m studying acrobatics but I’m no acrobat. I’m not even a clown (which they also teach.)

This is about intimidation. This about seeing all the others kids cart-wheeling down the mats, when I’d never done a cartwheel in my life. This is about a beautiful lithe woman sliding straight down into a split, hips squared, eyes straight ahead, chin up, while I twist over and wince with hamstring pain. This is about watching everyone else in the class make it look easy, make it look like they know already exactly what to do, while I limp confusedly back to my corner of the mats.

The instructor is giving instructions in a language I can’t understand: English, but with a mealy Chinese accent. He’s the real deal, grew up tumbling and balancing for the glory of the PRC, and expects me to interpret things such as “body loose, no can balance”, which is his sage advice for our handstand practice. It seems to work for everyone else. We pair up to spot each other, which really means “hold my ass up,” and he comes around saying small things and making adjustments to everyone’s inverted posture. The first day, he tells me not to arch my back. The second day, he merely nods as he goes by. After that, he doesn’t say anything at all to me.

And I’m on second 43 of a one-minute handstand, staring blankly between my outstretched fingers as I struggle to push the ground away with my pasty shoulders, my abs burning and my legs trembling, thinking, has he given up on me? What does he think of me? And the Russian, oh god the Russian, she’s even more inscrutable. I swear she’s from the KGB psychological section. Sometimes she helps me out as I suffer on the trapeeze. Sometimes she ignores me. She spends a lot of time with Clinton, who’s taking 11 classes this semester and is going to audition for the professional program in the fall. Me, just a few words of technical advice. That’s all I deserve.

I have to consider the possibility that she just hates me for being weak.

In the end it’s in the mind. My whole body is sore today but it’s my head that gets fucked. I’ve never been the worst in the class before. I don’t know how to do it. All that encouragement I thought I didn’t need in school, it’s because I could just look at everyone else and see that I was hot shit. Now I want so badly for someone to tell me that I’m doing great. Because I’m not. I can’t even hang straight!

And yet I’m slowly getting more flexible; I’m slowly getting stronger and my dive rolls are starting to have some grace to them. My splits are inching painfully down and my legs are inching up. I can do a smooth chin-up now. Once Xia even came by when I was in handstand and just said “good.”

And I so want the teacher to tell me I’m good at this. I want to see it for myself when I foolishly make comparisons with other students. Yeah, a great many of the exercises we do turn out to hurt. You end up with blisters and callouses and full-body aches, but that’s not the pain I’m fighting. I’m grappling with a part of myself that I didn’t even know existed. I want Elena’s beaming approval, but even more than that, I want my own. I know I’ll continue — the gym will always be for suckers, after all — but whether I’ll ever be any kind of good at circus skills comes down to a single question: how willing am I to keep sucking at this for a long, long time?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Blog-like, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.