Although a century has passed since Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950) danced in his prime, his artistic energy flows forward in time, crashing on the Four Season Centre’s stage in a wild wave of visionary brilliance. In fact, the stage holds but cannot fully contain John Neumeier’s Nijinksy, for I still carry the performance with me two days after I saw it.
When I think about the ballet, I am most haunted by the scene set in a Swiss hotel’s ballroom in 1919. There, the title character improvises a solo that turns out to be his final public appearance before symptoms of schizophrenia end his dance career (“John Neumeier’s Nijinsky,” by Michael Crabb, Performance Program, page 8).
In the hotel scene, Nijinsky stands holding one hand outstretched overhead, fingers spread wide, his body tense. Slowly, the hand turns into a fist. He drives the fist into his mouth, and as his arm continues to push down, the force of this movement pushes him all the way to the floor. He lies there with his fist still in his mouth, stunned by this primal act of self-harm.
When my eyes follow the trajectory of that cruel driving fist, I witness a moment of pain so raw and private that I shouldn’t be watching it because the anguish and despair feel real. The fist’s repression hints at a buried scream that it is desperate to silence. Inner struggle literally brings the dancer low, an artist known for his spellbinding leaps now slapping the floor with futile hands.
The second scene that I cannot forget arrives in the second act. Asylum inmates in dove-gray ballet costumes hoist a Broken Boy from their midst. He stands on the shoulders of two male inmates, and each member of the group that encircles him raises one arm straight up in the air, their palms the face of prayer.
When soldiers dressed in green jackets and undershorts storm the asylum, the Broken Boy gets crushed as they stomp around him in unison, their aggressive dance not softened by the presence of a woman with long hair in a body stocking. The Broken Boy tries to run but gets stuck. He is bent over, one of his hands steadying him on the floor while the other flies up. His jacket flops over his head as his legs spin in useless circles, going nowhere.
Looming over the turmoil are two large illuminated circles that tilt oppressively, and the choreography mirrors their shape in a pattern that Nijinsky follows as he twirls with his arms overhead in a perfect circle. At one point, an anonymous dancer circles the still figure of Nijinsky as if he is a Maypole. And during the Scheherazade dance, lines of dancers break off into circles like arcing beads of earth magnets as Nijinsky swoops lyrically, his body and arms creating symmetrical half-circles of constant movement.
The heartbreaking beauty of Nijinsky communicates what human disconnection feels like (hands and arms that undulate in proximity but rarely touch) and the suffering of a person crashing on the rocks of isolation and pain. Nijinsky’s psychological struggle reveals itself in unforgettable images: the fist in the mouth, the Harlequin kicking the stage wall, the Golden Slave with his arms crossed overhead as if bound by a rope, the man in the straightjacket rolling across the floor, and the long lengths of red and black velvet that twine around Nijinsky’s limbs in the final scene.
As a grateful viewer of this powerful ballet, I’d like to thank John Neumeier and the National Ballet of Canada for expanding my understanding of Nijinsky and teaching me through dance what no psychology or history textbook could express with such visceral impact.
Inner Map (Non-Political), Encaustic Painting by Catherine Raine, 2010
I’m fresh home from an afternoon devoted to poetry! Facilitated by spoken word artist, Andrea Thompson, the workshop combined a writing exercise, performance, and discussion. Ms. Thompson had a warm, engaging presence that put me at ease, and I appreciated her genuine passion for poetry.
To give us the flavor of her work, Andrea performed three of her pieces, transforming our group of twelve into a fascinated audience. I especially loved the way she sang some of the words when she felt called to sing. She brought a melodic and dramatic quality to her poems that made a big impact on me.
After we introduced ourselves, Andrea invited us to write a four-line poem based on a simple exercise. Each line was to start with the line “I am from” and then fill in the lyrical blanks with the name of a food (line one), a family or cultural tradition (line two), a snapshot of a location (line three), and something about the climate (line four).
I enjoyed listening to the poems that my fellow participants created, and many of their words have stayed with me: sandalwood, honey, dinner at five a.m., stars, land of Buddha, sound of flowers, and the promised land. To our amazement, the writer of a beautiful poem about grief said, “This is the first poem I have ever written.”
When my turn came, I noticed some constriction in my breathing, but I was able to read the following lines to the group:
I am from pecan pie, treacle sweet, tasting of Midwestern corn syrup and warm Southern trees.
I am from total immersion baptism by the old pastor in his Brooks Brothers suit.
I am from Liberty, Missouri, the buckled up Bible belt, green and friendly, with undercurrents of despair.
I am from tornadoes, sirens that shoo us to the cellar, staring at the cold rust on the freezer.
As I write on a slightly rickety table beside the snack cart, I’m enjoying the shade and moving shadows of a tall tree. The same waving branches that are making patterns on these pages recently hosted a rock pigeon, but it has flown away.
I’m taking a rest after almost two hours of desert trail-walking. Funny how the landscape didn’t really reach me at first, but before long I lost my heart to its wildflowers, lizards, hummingbirds, and flowering cathedral cacti.
As I made my way along the Desert Wildflower trail, the Desert Discovery Loop, and the Steele Herb Garden, fragments of lectures and conversations shimmered briefly, the fluttering of unseen wings in the leaves.
Tap Root.
Burrow.
Nest.
Lizard!! Lizard!!
“Would you like a picture of this cactus for your power point presentation?” (Father to his young son)
In the Desert Garden, I saw a multitude of memorials on benches, chairs, fountains, trees, and walls. There were even memorial drinking fountains (a lovely idea). However, I was looking for a special one, a plaque in memory of a Toronto friend’s beloved parents. And when I finally found it, I felt connected to my friend’s family and their shared memories of the Garden. It didn’t seem to matter that I never met them. They had walked these paths before and enjoyed the beauty that I was seeing.
I studied the plaque for a long time, growing sad and thoughtful. But the more I reflected on the inevitability of loss, the more I felt strangely comforted at the thought of all the people who will visit this gorgeous sanctuary long after I have had my mortal turn. The Desert Garden is an embodiment of faith, for in this place, love, memories, and the creative earth continue to flower and flower, tapping deep roots of Beauty that do not die.
My grandmother Mary Raine (1911-2008), a practical woman from a small Missouri town, would have classed the practice of guided visualization as “a little different.” Nevertheless, Grandma was present in the meditation room of an Ontario spa last spring when a mindfulness coach asked me to close my eyes and descend deep into the earth, deep within deep, down to the cave of the grandmothers.
Shine, Catherine Raine, 2012
Drawn by the firelight and the chance to see Grandma Raine again, I went into the cave. Grandma gave me a heavy object wrapped in a gray cloth. Resting inside the cloth was a stained glass ornament that once dangled from a curtain rod above her apartment’s east window. When it caught the bright Missouri sunlight, it released streams of green, lavender, red, and blue. I used to love looking at those ribbons of light, and when my niece Emma saw them as a baby, she loved them too.
I took the gift reverently and gave thanks for its rainbow message, the loving command to let myself shine. It called for translucence and generation, allowing light to both pass through me and radiate from within. It called from a cave as deep as the grandmother’s mythical one, but just as real and powerful.
The gift was a verb. Shine. Be the stained glass. Transform clear light into personal pigment. Manifest the light into words, art, kindnesses, movement, and love. Don’t be opaque. Be clearly colorful, openly bright, unabashedly shiny, embody the light.
The visionary gift and its invocation have arrived at the perfect time to fight grief shadows that shroud, inhibit, and dim. Grandmother Raine’s heirloom bathes mind, body, and soul in its light and invites the living to surrender to radiance. It bids us to shine, shine, shine, and shine.
After more than six years of service, I recently resigned from an organization that helps survivors of torture and war. It was a tough decision, and I’m going to miss my students a lot.
I’d like to dedicate the following poem to them. I wrote it in 2007, and it was published in the Winter 2009 edition of First Light Journal: Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture.
Recorded by Sean McDermott at Offaly Road Studio, 2022. Read by the author.
Trauma lives in your skin
an invisible twin,
a script of scars that freeze
silent horror scenes on replay
The demons that stalk you evade photographs
and only you can say where they keep the keys to your cell.
But an attentive friend can apprehend,
around the corners of conversations,
pale threads of the shroud that veils your suffering.
Your shadow reveals his choices
when you sit where you can check who enters the room,
when the words loss, lost, have lost
and death, dead, have died
pitch you into a private hell.
A tragedy we read in The Toronto Star
sets the ghosts to whispering “Remember, remember!”
what you want with all your strength to forget.
Quick to take offense,
your pain flashes out in bitter responses
that the sensible call extreme
but the sensitive know
arise from the depths of your rage
at the cruelty of dogmatists, thugs, criminals in uniform.
During a memorial service for my childhood friend, Jenny Smith Carr (1969-2010), I gave her eulogy with this meadow image projected on a screen behind me. I found the Swiss meadow photo in the Picture Collection of the Toronto Public Library, but there wasn’t any reference to the photographer who took this calendar picture.
Eulogy for Jenny Smith Carr: Jenny’s Purple Meadow
Several months before she died, Jenny asked me if her cancer made me think about my own mortality. “Sure it does,” I replied. “You’re a part of me.” She will always be a part of me, a precious patch of Jenny-ness that inspires and sustains me.
When I visualize the color and texture of this Jenny-patch in my soul, I see three translucent paddles in primary colors. Jenny is the red paddle. I’m the blue paddle. And the purple place where we overlap is the part of Jenny I get to keep, a purple meadow of shared memories, experiences, values, and giggles. Jenny’s meadow is a clearing in my mind, a sunny expanse of wildflowers surrounded by an ancient forest.
My hope for all of us who were blessed to love Jenny is to visit our clearings often, for they are sacred sites of Jenny’s spirit that death cannot destroy. This afternoon, I’m taking you with me to Jenny’s purple meadow, where stories flower beside a purple stream, among irises and daisies, and in the hollows of warm stones.
Take this wildflower over here. It’s a story set in the late nineteen seventies. Jenny and I are trick-or-treating along Mill Street in Liberty, Missouri. As radical young questioners of gender roles, we have disguised ourselves as housewives. We have put pink curlers in our hair and wrapped ourselves in padded polyester bathrobes. Fuzzy slippers pull the satirical outfit together. At one fateful house on Mill Street, the woman who answers our knock is dressed exactly like us, down to the last curler. She gives us a few pieces of candy but no compliments on our cute costumes.
More Jenny memories come from Camp Oakledge in Warsaw, Missouri, where I spent two summers sharing a canvas tent on a wooden platform with Jenny and other Girl Scouts. One afternoon, Jenny and I canoed for three miles across the Lake of the Ozarks to a hamburger shack perched on a dock. I still remember how good that burger tasted because we had powered ourselves across the waters, earning our lunch with our oars.
On February weekend in 1982, Jenny and I went camping in Dearborn, Missouri. We shivered together in a tent that we had placed on the slope of a hill. When camp leaders organized a midnight hike, Jenny opted to stay in the tent, but I walked to the edge of a clearing in the woods and drank in the vast bowl-shaped meadow all blanketed in deep snow. The dark ring of trees circling all that open space was a visual prayer. When I think of Jenny, I remember this winter meadow. Like her, it is spiritually refreshing and elegant.
The starry sky of the night hike also calls to mind a special star-gazing event that Jenny’s close friends planned for the purpose of sending out beams of love to our dying friend. At exactly 10 pm (EST), wind chimes, lightning, singing locusts, clear skies and cloudy ones greeted us from Arizona, Missouri, Ohio, Connecticut, and Ontario. As I studied the opaque heavens, I thought of my love for Jenny, and the memory of her telling me how much the biopsy needles hurt her made me cry.
Jenny is beyond the needles now, beyond pain, beyond fear. She’s a gorgeous bird of paradise that flies between drops of rain that bless us. And she’s in every compassionate thing we do. Her purple meadow is alive with sensitivity, laughter, and thousands of witty words. We protect it when we share stories of our beautiful Jenny.
Not long ago I read a passage from a 1989 journal which covered the summer before I went to Durham, England for a year. I was working in a local potato chip factory, an experience which inspired the following poem dated August 11:
