power

Pursuing something I have long been interested in, I went to observe a belly dance class at a studio near my work. I wanted to see if I liked the way the teacher moved, and how she interacted with the students. The class assembled, some in standard dance practice attire and others with bejeweled skirts and extravagantly long hair. Women from the advanced class were already warming up, an hour early, lazily rolling on the floor with swords balanced on their heads.

The music was mostly what I had expected, Arabic pop music of the kind that is often played at my ex-boyfriend’s coffee shop. The teacher started to move, showing how to isolate muscles in the back to move the chest forward and out without a corresponding jerk of the shoulders. She demonstrated very exaggerated hand gestures followed by a more liquid motion of the same kind. It was beautiful, and the exaggeration made some of the surreal fluidity I associate with belly dance a little more understandable. Isolating each joint and then moving them, the teacher transformed what seemed a simple set of gestures into a boneless wave.

This is a dance you can’t watch without thinking about sex, even if it isn’t in a pornographic way. The gestures and movements are so profoundly, archetypically female.

Sometime toward the end of the class, the teacher was demonstrating a hip drop, one of the fundamental movements in belly dance. Locking her eyes on the mirror she advanced slowly, the whole class following behind her, torso and hips undulating and head and shoulders strangely still, the fixed eyes hypnotic.

And I don’t know what it was, the music or that crowd of stares, the confidence and unabashed sexiness of what those women were doing, but I began to feel rage. Female power is so often achieved through men. Where they have been the actors in history, we were reduced to these bodies, objects of desire, the rocks they wreck themselves on. Watching those women I wanted that power for myself, wanted to be Helen of Troy, to have beauty that is terrifying. And at the same time, I felt ashamed by the smallness of that desire.

As Mary Wollstonecraft said: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

convers(at)ion

The Yemenis who work at the convenience store I pass by every day want to convert me. I’m not sure why it is that a Christian making this attempt creeps me out so much, but when Muslims try it just seems kind of sweet. I guess coming from any person who knows you, an attempt to convert is a kind of compliment, a way of saying: Come join us.

Maybe it’s because Christians tend to practice an indiscriminate, pamphleteering kind of outreach that makes it clear that they’re doing it to anyone unlucky enough to stumble across them, whereas Muslims in this country are much more low key. On the other hand, my Coptic Christian friends experienced a very different Islam in Egypt, which turned them very ardently against it. In fact, as far as I can tell, every religion seems to do better (by which I mean it doesn’t make so much trouble) when it in the minority: just part of the larger mix. I guess with the possible exception of Tibetan Buddhists, whom I’ve never heard anything particularly gory about.

It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to imagine the trouble Quakers would get up to if we ever constituted a politically powerful majority… the only government we ever had control of, in Pennsylvania, didn’t last long. Perhaps our small numbers are a blessing.

delight (monday)

Spent the day in glorious anticipation of putting on my Halloween costume. I don’t really have a favorite holiday, but something about changing persona for a day is really appealing. In the elevator on the way home I was excitedly telling a Japanese coworker a story about assembling pieces of my costume (which included packets of squid ink).

When I told her that the black paper I purchased would be cut into a crown, I mispronounced the word: okan instead of ookan. Still Halloween appropriate, since okan means “coffin.” As she and I parted ways in the lobby I realized the source of the confusion and called after her to explain.

When I turned away, I noticed a well dressed Asian-American woman, looking rather confused, standing right behind me. I composed my face into a “can I help?” expression, but before I could say anything she spoke: “Do you speak English?” Gotta love a city where it’s a possibility that a white woman could speak only Japanese.

Oh, yes. Here is the costume, for the curious:

delight (saturday)

On Friday I left work later than usual, and the door to the north of the building was already locked. I reluctantly went to the south door instead. It was a cold night, not the air but the speed of the wind. Looking down as I left the building, I saw what looked like a small brown leaf. When I walked toward it, it ran away from me. It was a bird little larger than the size of a silver dollar, fully fledged but for some reason unable to fly.

There are no trees near that door, and no visible nest it could have fallen from. It seemed confused and I was scared that someone would step on it, so I picked it up. It’s remarkably easy to catch a running bird. It perched on one finger and I closed my other hand around it, leaving an opening for its head. It peered out, shook itself slightly until its feathers puffed up, then tucked its head under its wing and slept.

Faced with this, a bird that sleeps in the hand, I couldn’t help myself. I walked carefully up the block and a half to the cigar store that I always hang out in during breaks, and asked one of the Yemenis who works there to give me a box. He and his coworker took a look at the bird and said “we used to eat those in Yemen.” But they agreed that this one was too small to eat and gave me a box, lined with crumpled paper towels. The bird went into the box without complaint and immediately went back to sleep.

A friend looked up a wildlife rehabilitation expert online and I called for advice. Going to sleep immediately is not a good sign, he said. “Birds under stress drown easily, so you shouldn’t give it any water. Don’t feed it, either. Just leave it in the box, because a cage would hurt its wings if it becomes agitated, and keep it someplace warm until tomorrow.” So I took the bird into the subway, where it ignored the squealing of the wheels and announcements and pinging, a little ball of brown and gray fluff with tiny fractal patterns on its neck where the feathers shifted over each other, head tucked firmly under wing.

When I got back to the house, after a little dinner, I took the bird to my room. I felt exhausted but strangely content, knowing that there was a wild animal sharing that warm, dark space with me. I slept very early.

In the early morning the lightening sky woke me. It was 6:30. The light reminded me that this is the hour that the birds begin singing. The cigar box on the floor by the radiator was silent. But when I opened it a pair of brilliant eyes, like marbles, like drops of black oil, were staring up at me. I closed the box quickly and carried it up to the roof.

Outside the air was much warmer than it had been on Friday. I lifted the lid again and the bird hopped out of the box onto my hand. It sat on my finger, looking at me, for a long moment; not more than five seconds, but enough for me to feel a sharp sting of regret that I could not keep it one more day, one more second.

And then it flew away into the blue dawn sky.







I think it was a winter wren.