He’d written: “??????”
To which the freedom fighter patiently replied: “You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.”
He could have been talking to me.
Wednesday was a good day. Sven had slept better and he woke up with no nausea. We ate cornflakes for breakfast and played footsies before he left for work. I actually succeeded in cutting out a whole extended endnote on the Vischer-Klamt system of movement notation.
But I couldn’t part with Laban. Not that I’m one of those die-hard devotees of his rules for movement analysis. But I just couldn’t excise this passage from Die Welt des Tänzers: “Like the ecstasies of terror and hatred, the ecstasies of joy and love point to the same contradictory signs. Murmuring and shouting, high and low tonalities combine. Cracked voices, stormy motivations, in which stutters and lofty poetics mix and merge, the motions of surrender and the gestures of pressing-on-the-thing-in-itself [An-sich-Pressen] are performed” (179, my translation).
This was another good one: “The solo dance is a duet between the dancer and her surroundings or the dancer and her inner world. In the first case subjectively real, in the second case subjectively ideal” (208).
Guess who that made me think of.
Late in the afternoon I went for a run in Tantolunden Park, and when I got back to the apartment, Sven had gotten home from work and he wanted to make dinner. He gave me a long kiss and said, “I have a chicken in the icebox and you’re eating it.”
That’s a line from Notorious.
On Thursday morning Sven woke up with bad stomach cramps. I don’t think it was the chicken. I felt fine. He called in sick and I went with him to Södersjukhuset. I sat in the waiting room while he spoke with his doctor. Södersjukhuset is extremely white. I mean that in terms of the architecture, and the décor. But it was true of the people in the waiting room as well. There was a middle-aged woman who came in with a limp, an elderly guy reading the paper with two pairs of glasses on, and a punk rocker who appeared to have dyed her blond hair black. She had nervous leg syndrome. I nodded at each of them and each one nodded back and said, “God morgon.”
When he came out Sven told me that his doctor was not particularly concerned. He’d given Sven an antacid. He thought the side effects would diminish with time. He’d raised the possibility again of experimenting with that FOTO option on the meds. When we got back to the apartment I asked Sven if he wanted to talk it over but he said no, sorry, and he wanted to lie down again for a while. He’d slept badly, with disturbing dreams. He was crying a little.
While he slept I went back on YouTube and did a search. I found a bald Australian guy talking very assertively about his drug regimen. He kept referring to it as a “cure.” There was also a travel agent from Minneapolis describing his side effects (quite graphically), which indeed seemed to diminish over time, as Sven’s doctor had suggested they might. In fact, the last video he’d posted was really optimistic. He talked for some time about the results of an IQ test he’d just taken. Apparently not only was his viral load undetectable – he was also smarter than he’d suspected. He didn’t give the precise figure, but he said, “It was kind of a surprise, because with the anxiety, sometimes I feel like maybe I’m not so intelligent, but when I got the results of the test, well, let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised.”
There was a slew of recent videos posted by a 24-year-old guy in San Antonio, Texas, talking about how he was handling the side effects of Atripla (brand name version of Sven’s Indian knock-off meds). He’d just recently been diagnosed. He also had anxiety and a stomachache, but he tried to remain upbeat.
This research was simultaneously reassuring and a little demoralizing. What else could I watch? The SpongeBob SquarePants dance? Something with cats? I ended up on falserebelmoth’s channel page. She’d put up a new video!
It was called “ipod samba.” The description read: “Breath – and I.” I clicked on it.
She was back in that same odd little domestic setting, though now evidently in the daylight. She was wearing vaguely athletic clothes, and had on Converse sneakers, which slapped the floor as she danced. In fact, this slapping of her feet against the floor constituted the entire soundtrack of the video, though she herself appeared to be listening to something on the titular iPod hanging around her neck.
Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling a little, with an expression of what you might call sensual abandon. I wondered if she were a little drunk. The slapping of her shoes created its own percussive pattern, broken sporadically by a pause, a moment’s hesitation, a hovering over the beat. And then she’d gamely grind her hips, and shuffle in a circle, that half-smile on her lips. The video was two minutes and twenty-four seconds long. At about 0:34, you began to hear her breathing. Her in- and exhalations were in time with the patter of her shoes. The sound of her lungs increased in volume and intensity until, at the very end, it was a positive cacophony of lungs and slapping feet, and then suddenly she popped back on her heels, opened her mouth in a broad smile, inhaled deeply, wiped the sweat off her brow, and abruptly walked out of the frame.
She seemed to be enjoying herself so much. Eyes closed, earbuds in her ears.
I watched it four more times.
That evening Sven didn’t feel much like having dinner, but I heated up some soup and brought it to him in bed, with knäckebröd. He had a little. He also didn’t feel like reading, or watching a movie. He apologized and I told him not to be silly.
At about 11:00 I brought him his meds and a glass of water. Viraday comes as one huge, salmon-colored tablet. It’s a little hard to swallow, but Sven didn’t bother breaking it in half. He looked at it in the palm of his hand before he put it in his mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of water. He grimaced and lay back on his pillow.
I smoothed the hair away from his eyes, and he reached up and touched my cheek. I remembered Cary Grant and the way he looked at Ingrid Bergman when he discovered that Claude Rains and his mother had been slowly killing her with poison.
:(
The next morning Sven felt pretty good. He even wanted to eat Kalles on his knäckebröd. Kalles is a kind of creamed cod roe sold in what resembles a toothpaste tube – it’s pretty gross. He took a shower and kissed me on the lips before he left for work, and it seemed like everything was just fine.
I put Sinatra on and did my barre exercises in Sven’s living room. Then I sat down with the Eve Sedgwick book. This was the one with those long citations from Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins said that even two “sociophilic,” i.e. perfectly nice, people could sometimes experience difficulties in their relations:… you may crave much body contact and silent communion and I wish to talk. You wish to stare deeply into my eyes, but I achieve intimacy only in the dark in sexual embrace. You wish to be fed and cared for, and I wish to exhibit myself and be looked at. You wish to be hugged and to have your skin rubbed, and I wish to reveal myself only by discussing my philosophy of life.
That was kind of sad. I refrained, however, from incorporating this into my academic manuscript. I thought, “Maybe if I write that novel…”
After a couple of hours of thwarted efforts at productivity, I caved in and went to falserebelmoth’s channel page. My excitement about her having posted a new dance was counterbalanced by some mild anxiety about the comments it might have elicited. It was up to eleven hits. And – no surprise – both the carper and the liberator had weighed in.
quothballetcarper declared: “Pretty good little lady! I can almost feel the breaze blowing in over Copacabana! Hatchathatcha! Hey, R U DRUNK???”
To which she answered: “Do we ‘get drunk’? Ask the jolly clovers!” This appeared to be some kind of special moth reference, tinged with her distinctive insouciance.
GoFreeVassals practically swooned: “Your breath falls around me like dew – your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears”
And she responded: “a Drum – Kept beating �
�� ”
I couldn’t help but notice there seemed to be some sort of sexual tension between the moth and the liberationist. This exchange was what you might call throbbing. Not threatening – but strangely intimate. I felt embarrassed to be looking in.
That night after a cuddle Sven had a panic attack. It was kind of frightening for me as well. He turned his back to me and hugged his knees to his chest. He was making very small wheezing sounds. I stroked his hair. It was so silky and golden between my fingers. I looked at the down on the back of his neck. I nestled up against his back and held him. I said softly, “Andas ut.” Breathe out.
It took a long time for us to fall asleep.
Saturday Sven texted me from work saying, “iran protest sergols torg wanna go?” You may remember – this was shortly after the clampdown on Iranian protesters, and there were sympathetic manifestations all over the world. I’d been following the news every day, but in a slightly distracted way, what with my more immediate concerns about Sven.
Still, I thought it was a pretty significant issue, and I was also curious about how the eminently civil Swedes would express themselves. And I found it encouraging that Sven seemed to care enough to want to go. On a lighter note, he told me that that “smokefest” for the legalization of cannabis had yielded about twenty-five hippies. He showed me the news coverage on YouTube. One of the spokespeople was a blond guy with dreadlocks stuffed into a knitted cap who sounded really reasonable and not at all stoned. Sven also pointed out a friend of his who was reclining with his arms over his head. He said his name was Filip. He gave Sven a joint. Joint in Swedish is “joint.”
Anyway, we agreed to meet later in the day at Sergols torg. The protest was much bigger than I’d anticipated. There were about a thousand people. The center-right politician Birgitta Ohlsson spoke. Her brand of neo-liberalism is not exactly my taste, nor Sven’s, but these kinds of situations sometimes make for strange political bedfellows. There were lots of Iranian flags, and some Swedish ones. There were signs in Persian, and Swedish, and English. Lots of people had big photographs of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who had been killed.
Sven stared at a poster with her face on it. He said, “She was so pretty. She was so young.” I thought he was going to cry.
That night we wanted to watch the news about the protest. There had been similar ones all over the world. Apparently the one in Stockholm had been among the largest. But the lead story was, in fact, something entirely different: a fire that had broken out in Rinkeby. A forty-two-year-old Somalian woman and her five daughters, aged one to sixteen, had been killed. It was the deadliest fire in Scandinavia in many years. The woman and her kids were apparently trapped in the elevator, and asphyxiated.
It was terrible. Sven and I watched the report and didn’t say anything.
Rinkeby is a suburb just west of Stockholm. It’s got a very large immigrant population. In fact, some people call a certain kind of immigrant dialect “Rinkebysvenska.” I realize dialect is a troublesome word. Swedes are pretty attentive to the politics of multiculturalism. It is more properly called a “multiethnolect” because it mixes Turkish, Arabic, Serbian, English, and Spanish. Some people call it “Shobresvenska” which is something like “Hey Bro Swedish,” the “hey bro” part, sho bre, coming from the Arabic.
There had been a lot of immigrants at the protest that day. One young guy had nodded at me and said, “Sho bre.”
We were so disturbed by the story about the fire neither of us felt like making love. We went to sleep just lying next to each other. Surprisingly, Sven slept pretty deeply that night, and he was able to eat all right in the morning. We were still melancholy. Even though there was something heartening about seeing everybody come out for the protest in Sergels torg, nobody was sure if it was going to come to anything. I’d felt strange clapping for Birgitta Ohlsson. The news coming out of Iran was still not good. I had my own misgivings about turning Neda Agha-Soltan into some kind of poster girl for the green revolution, but it’s true that it was difficult to keep looking at her face on those posters. And then there was the tragic story of that Somalian woman and her daughters.
We tried to put a good face on things for my last full day in Stockholm, but neither of us was very good at faking it.
And to cap it all off, the next day, while I was riding the train back to the airport, reading A Lover’s Discourse, my cell phone began to vibrate. Sven was texting me the news.
Merce Cunningham was dead.
I stared at my phone and a tear rolled down my cheek.
As Cary Grant so eloquently put it: I was a fatheaded guy, full of pain.
A RIGOROUS SADNESS
Omg merce är död :( ”
I was in Stockholm the day that Merce Cunningham died.
He was all I could think about on the flight home.
I’d taken some classes at the Cunningham studio – first years ago, with Merce himself, before my time in Sweden, and then a few times just for diversion since I’d been living in the Village. It was walking distance, and I liked to go over there sometimes on Saturdays, when it wasn’t just the competitive young dancers. The classes were taught by a company member. On the weekend, all kinds of kooks and old-timers would show up.
Sometimes you’d still see Merce himself getting pushed around in his wheelchair by one of his handsome, young assistants. He’d look right at you and smile. He had that whispy white halo of hair, and those impish eyebrows.
I’d taken Sven to see his company in Chicago, back when I was in graduate school. It was in October of 2007, and Sven was visiting that week. They performed eyeSpace, the piece in which audience members were all listening to iPods, so everybody had a different soundscape for the dance. They also performed an early piece, Crises. Originally Merce had danced it, with four women. When we saw it, Rashaun Mitchell danced Merce’s part. It’s funny, I typed “Merce’s role” and then changed it to “part” because with Merce you don’t generally think about theatrical personae. Things are so abstract. He was pretty explicit about that. But even he said that Crises was “dramatic,” despite the fact that it was non-narrative. You almost can’t help construing something about what this man feels toward these four women. The score to that one was for a player piano. It’s mildly comical, though disconcerting.
Now I just had a flashback to that uncomfortable little poke in the ribs Sven gave me about that line, “I’ve always been afraid of women.” Sven didn’t really mean women, of course. He just meant intimacy.
I took a taxi from Newark. I thought about taking the Path train but it seemed like too much of a hassle. Halfway home I got into a mild panic about how much ground transportation cost. It was nearly the end of the month, which was generally when my bank balance was hovering just above zero.
I got back to the apartment and dumped my bag on the couch. I took a quick shower, put on my underwear, and did some stretches to Abbey Lincoln with my eyes closed. When I was done I checked on the plants. Not only had Fang watered them – she’d also left a couple of small plastic deer embedded in the dirt. They seemed a little afraid, but only if you looked them in the eye. I guess that’s why they have that expression, “like a deer caught in the headlights.” Anyway, I thought this was very thoughtful of Fang.
Then I made myself some mint tea and sat down at the computer. It won’t surprise you to learn that the first thing I did was to look up Merce’s obituary in the Times. It was by Alastair Macaulay. For him, it was surprisingly tender (Macaulay can be pretty acerbic). He talked about what a remarkable dancer Merce had been, and he talked about his domestic relationship with John Cage, which had been an “open secret” for so many years. You usually hear people refer to Merce as the more serious one, and Cage as providing the comic relief. But Macaulay hinted that maybe Cage had been a bit “controlling” at home. He quoted Merce after Cage’s death in 1992: “On the one hand, I come home at the end of the day, and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home and John’s not there.�
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I actually found this very poignant, and it made me feel a little better about Merce’s passing. He seemed pretty Zen about death. When I read that quote, it seemed to me it was as though Cage had gone on vacation and Merce was getting a little break.
Of course Cage himself was pretty Zen. To say the least. The Walker Art Center had just posted an interview on YouTube with both Cage and Cunningham from 1981. They didn’t identify the woman asking the questions; it seems funny to even call her a woman – she looked so young. She gave you the impression that she was wearing braces, even though she wasn’t. In fact, she reminded me of Amanda Trugget. She seemed very bright – just young. She was interviewing them in a dance studio, and you could hear somebody in the background rustling some materials around.
True to form, Cunningham was the more staid one, and Cage kept giggling. If he weren’t sixty-nine, you might have assumed he was stoned. Well, I suppose he could have been. Anyway, there was this funny moment when Cage was talking about how people had become more accepting of their artistic shenanigans over the years, and he thought maybe it was because they were getting old: “Now that we’re more or less on our last legs the audience is beginning to sit up and enjoy itself.”
The phrase “last legs” seemed to make the young woman a little uncomfortable. She murmured nervously, “That’s great…”
Cage giggled and said, “Well, maybe it’ll continue for a little while…”
She mumbled, “Uh… hope so…”
He also said something about how critics started wondering when Merce would quit performing when he hit forty, but now that he was really old, people couldn’t get enough of him.
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