Some critics wrote that there were too many children in it.
The ballerina who danced the part of the Sugar Plum Fairy was called “a cow.”
Tchaikovsky himself had reservations.
He wrote in a letter, “The Nutcracker was staged quite well: it was lavishly produced and everything went off perfectly, but nevertheless, it seemed to me that the public did not like it. They were bored.”
16.
The Nutcracker, as a ballet, may be a considered a piece of high art, but it is often dismissed as anti-intellectual.
It’s merely decorative.
It’s not serious;
it’s not tragic.
A mouse death is not tragic, people.
A mouse death happens on the floor, under your feet.
Don’t look down.
Just don’t look down.
Don’t go into that world.
Maybe people dismiss The Nutcracker because they don’t see it fully.
Maybe people see The Nutcracker with that black plastic lollipop over one eye.
Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic for the Washington Post, wrote this in 2009:
The tyranny of The Nutcracker is emblematic of how dull and risk-averse American ballet has become. . . . There were moments throughout the 20th century when ballet was brave. When it threw bold punches at its own conventions. . . . Where are this century’s provocations? Has ballet become so entwined with its “Nutcracker” image, so fearfully wedded to unthreatening offerings, that it has forgotten how eye-opening and ultimately nourishing creative destruction can be?
Maybe The Nutcracker is not fighting.
Maybe The Nutcracker should throw more punches.
Come over here, Nutcracker, I need to talk to you.
Come over here to this corner of the ring.
We need to have a serious talk.
According to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, Tchaikovsky’s music was “lacking in elevated thought.”
I guess that’s what happens when you try to do two term papers at once, Tchaikovsky.
I guess that’s what happens when you try to finish your dance and opera homework at the same time there, sir.
You’re in too many worlds, Tchaikovsky.
But maybe the problem is not with The Nutcracker.
Maybe the problem is that we don’t see The Nutcracker clearly.
Maybe the problem is that The Nutcracker is a dance poem about consciousness, and consciousness is boring.
Maybe the problem is that The Nutcracker is a dance poem about enlightenment, and enlightenment is boring.
It’s not fighting,
it’s sitting under a tree.
Enough with trees and sitting under them, for Chrissake.
Enough with presence under a tree.
Fighting is more fun.
Fighting is more fun unless you’re really tired.
I am going to pray right now to the Shiva of coffee.
I am going to pray right now for a double macchiato to appear by my desk,
and then I am going to drink it,
and then if Santa Claus comes down my chimney I am going to punch him.
That guy, putting presents on my floor, on my area rugs, on my carpeting, creating a carnival underfoot.
What’s he doing?
Probably can’t drive very well, either.
17.
My mother is in the circle of light.
The ham-sandwich magician is Tchaikovsky.
The nutcracker became a prince;
the ham-sandwich magician becomes Tchaikovsky.
That’s how things work around here.
That’s how things progress in this drama.
Tchaikovsky is going to work on the box with my mother in it.
He can do this, no problem.
The box with my mother in it is like his piano.
It is the black box on wheels where he keeps his grief.
It is the black Steinway where he keeps his grief over all the people who have ever been cut in half,
over all the people who have ever been cut off,
who have been in jails and hospitals and mental institutions, the places where people with drug and alcohol problems often end up.
He has his shiny saw hovering in the air like a star over all that.
He is opening and closing the mouth of his expensive black Steinway puppet to say something about that.
He is opening and closing the mouth of himself, speaking his full truth in sounds.
He is opening and closing the mouth of his puppet-self that is not speaking in words, just in a pattern of sounds.
Sounds can be choreographed.
Two mice can screw in a light bulb.
Magicians can appear and disappear.
Everything can be awake.
Author and curator Eric Kjellgren notes in the Journal of Museum Ethnography
that Tin Mweleun, the master carver who made the slit gong on display
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
“employed magic” to do his work.
Before he carved the slit gong, he drank a powerful concoction of leaves and coconut water.
My guess is there was some fermentation in there.
He also applied leaves to his eyes to make his vision “clear.”
To see clearly you have to obscure your vision;
the Talking Heads said as much in Stop Making Sense.
18.
Sometimes when I am with my kids I pretend I am a mouse in The Nutcracker.
This is actually not so difficult to do.
I will tell you how to do it.
I will be a magician who breaks the magician rule,
a magician who explains my tricks.
O.K., here’s how it goes:
Take your two hands and put them together under your chin so your knuckles are against your jawline.
Wiggle your fingers energetically, as if you have a wiggly finger-beard.
Do this while hunched over,
running across your living room in tiny steps.
There—you are a mouse.
There—you are dancing.
And now maybe you are dancing on the bar.
And now maybe you are dancing to cowbells, triangles, and glockenspiels.
And the ancestors are speaking as you dance.
And the ancestors are saying, Wow, you are drunk;
you better go home now.
You better get in a yellow cab.
Tchaikovsky is done sawing my mother.
He is holding the saw out in his right hand, and his female assistant comes and takes it.
He does not look behind him for the assistant; he just holds it out and she takes it away.
He withholds his glance from her and yet expects her to see him.
He expects her to see the saw, and she does.
She is not seen by him, but she sees the saw.
It’s amazing how assistants can do that,
how mothers can do that with trays of snacks.
Tchaikovsky sawed my mother in half.
He sawed her, and then he split apart the hinged box to prove it.
The hinged box of my mother opens differently than the hinged box of his piano.
The hinges are in different places.
Tchaikovsky opened the box so the sawed parts of my mother faced him.
He sawed her like she had never been sawed before, and we all saw it.
My mother is lying there with her eyes closed, smiling.
Only Tchaikovsky can see the sawed parts of her.
He doesn’t seem alarmed by what he is seeing.
He is waving his arms around in the air.
It is all very dramatic.
I wish my doctor’s appointments were this exciting.
Instead I sit on the table, cold in my robe, while the doctor intones about cholesterol.
Once you have a body, you’re screwdrivered.
Let’s look at that for a second.
Let’s look down into that world and contemplate that.
Let’s not pretend that world doesn’t exist.
Presumably Tchaikovsky is going to mend my mother now.
She is broken and now he will fix her.
I wonder what he sees inside my mother?
Maybe there is nothing to see.
Maybe my mother is hollow.
Maybe she is hollow like a hollowed-out breadfruit tree.
Maybe she is hollowed out like a slit gong.
Maybe she was eaten on the inside by mice.
Maybe she was nibbled by her desire to be an artist.
Maybe it was that she never went to college.
Never went to art school.
She grew up on a dairy farm and left home as soon as she could.
Her forays into art were taken as seriously as they could be for a housewife without a fine-art background making ceramics and quilts.
The Cleveland Museum of Art once exhibited one of her quilts in a group show.
It was one of the highlights of her artistic life.
I recently found out that her ceramics were featured in a national show with Peter Voulkos.
That was before I was born.
Tchaikovsky is waving his arms over the hinged box with my mother.
He is waving his arms to music.
When you think about it, that’s what pianists do:
they wave their arms to music over hinged boxes.
Did I ever tell you the one about the two mice who walked into a bar?
You’d think one of them would have seen it.
19.
My mother was a ceramist when I was very young, but then she moved on to making quilts.
She would show me the quilts she was working on when
I came home from college.
I remember one of them stood upright.
It was twenty-one inches tall and shaped like a four-sided pyramid.
The pyramid was on casters; it was like a little car.
Its four sides did not meet at the top.
She placed a little flap that opened and closed there, like the top of a tank.
It was a car/tank/quilt.
She titled it Construction, which was pretty safe, I’d say.
She exhibited it in several group shows in Ohio.
It never made the cut for the big national quilt show in Kentucky.
One of her pieces did, but not this one.
A quilt on wheels was a little out-there for the national show.
It was a little too free-form for that crowd.
There was no salon des refusés for the national quilt show.
You have to be at a certain level of art-making to even have a salon des refusés.
But if there were one, I’d say Construction would have been in there.
Should have been, anyway.
Coulda been a contender.
20.
Tchaikovsky closed up the box of my mother.
But right before he was done, he took out her gallbladder.
That thing was inflamed, the assistant told my mother later.
It was inflamed with grief and frustration, she said.
My mother had never had an organ removed before.
She wondered where her gallbladder was taken.
She didn’t ask the assistant, but she wondered about it.
She came up with an idea, I am sure.
I know what happened, and I’ll tell you:
The drunken cockroach has it.
He is driving the gallbladder-car now.
He doesn’t want to be seen on his scooter in case someone wrote down his license plate number after the accident.
He doesn’t want to be charged with a hit-and-run, so he is driving the gallbladder-car.
It’s fast like a hot rod.
The cockroach is still drinking and driving, so I am not sure how long the car will last him.
Be careful, drunken cockroach.
You don’t want to end up like E. T. A. Hoffmann.
That man had a tough time of it.
“Forever a part of his life, heavy drinking and overworking made Hoffmann’s living hard.
He contracted digestive difficulties, degeneration of the
liver, and neural ailments,
the treatment for which was applying red-hot pokers to the spine,”
reads the North Carolina Academy of Dance Arts’s online history of The Nutcracker.
I can understand why a man with digestive difficulties would write a story about dancing candy.
I can understand why he would write a story with a magic uncle in it while he was in bed with a wand hovering over him.
It was a black metal wand with a fiery red end.
Who held that wand over him? I wonder.
Hoffmann reportedly based the Uncle Drosselmeier character on himself.
Maybe he himself applied the red-hot poker to his body.
He just kept going, poor guy.
He just kept cooking with gas.
He just kept walking through gas with his fire wand.
I wish he could have come to the diner with my daughter and me.
I think he would have applauded the pancakes.
The bandaged mice are out for a drive now.
They are healing up quite nicely.
They are driving with my mother in her Construction.
They can park the Construction and close the lid and take naps and eat cheese in there.
It’s more protected than the convertible; plus, the engine starts the first time.
All in all, it’s an upgrade.
My mother and the mice are going to the beach.
Mouse Two has their arm in a cast.
Mouse One has many stitches and a bandage on their head.
My mother is completely healed.
She is driving them all in her quilt-tank.
She is driving them all to Louse Point for a picnic.
She is experiencing postsurgery euphoria.
She is filled with gratitude for her life.
Tall and benevolent trees line the road.
The cockroach is also going to Louse Point, but he is an hour or so behind them.
The gallbladder-car doesn’t get such good mileage.
He has to stop at the gas station.
He walks through a puddle of gasoline on his way to the pump.
He is not smoking a cigarette.
It’s not a tragedy or an almost-tragedy.
It’s filling up the car; that’s it.
He fills up and he goes.
He also buys some candy for the road.
III.
It must be nice to put your fingers on a keyboard and make music.
It must be nice to put your fingers on a keyboard and make sounds that are beautiful,
sounds that are musical,
sounds that do not sound like drunken cockroaches reciting limericks,
sounds that do not sound like drunken cockroaches stuttering, Kafka, Kafka, Kafka.
I try to find something lyrical
when I make these hammered sounds with my hands.
And I wish this extraordinarily odd activity weren’t off in its own world.
I wish words written and arranged by women were valued as much as words written and arranged by men.
Written words are interesting in that they come from both brains and hands.
They live between two worlds that way;
they are tricky.
If you are a writer at a keyboard, you have to be a magician.
You have to wave your arms around over your very particular choices.
You have to make sure not to use abracadabra when you mean annihilation.
Or you have to be sure of all annihilation’s meanings, since, according to the dictionary, there are two.
The first one you know already.
The second is from physics, and i
t is “To convert (a subatomic particle) into radiant energy.”
I like that second definition.
I want some radiant energy, let me tell you.
I want that all the time when I am trying to do things in the material world with my hands,
like write or hollow out a breadfruit tree.
I have never hollowed out a breadfruit tree.
I have no idea how Tin Mweleun, master carver, could hollow out a fourteen-foot-tall breadfruit tree.
But I can’t imagine how people’s hands do most things.
My hands are like two nibbles of fat, dancing.
The physical world is a constant challenge for them.
I star in my own magician/clown routine every day.
My routine includes spilling stuff all over myself, spraying food out of my mouth, and dropping and breaking things constantly:
it’s just endless accidents followed by endless cleaning up.
It’s like I should just get dressed every day in a roll of paper towels.
I should just get up and make myself a toga out of paper towels.
I should put on my paper-towel toga and walk into a bar.
I should just wear a big white suit like the one David Byrne wore in Stop Making Sense,
except made out of paper towels.
I should just be prepared for spills like that.
Thank God I live in a city where I don’t have to drive.
Thank God I am responsible only for standing more or less calmly on the sidewalk portion of a street corner where there is only a small risk that some driver or bicyclist will jump the curb and take me out.
You can hear the cockroaches singing their gratitude right now.
You can hear them singing praises of my screwing in light bulbs.
I tell my husband all the time that burned-out light bulbs are my bête noire.
We live in an apartment with many light bulbs,
and every time a light bulb goes out it feels like an emergency to me.
It’s like a young, drunk person has passed out in my guest bed.
It makes me very anxious, like I need some white baby bunnies immediately.
And invariably I am home alone with this problem, and the passed-out light bulb is too high for me to reach.
And I have to make some sort of structure out of chairs,
which I then have to stand on,
in order to reach the blacked-out bulb, and my chair structures are always unsound.
And I myself am always a baby bunny in these moments, so I can’t climb stacks of chairs very well.
They didn’t teach me about stacking chairs in EMT school.
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