A time my soul felt aligned with my center of gravity: when I sat outside a meditation hall for hours with my knees to my chest, holding a crumpled piece of paper in my hand.
*
In his essay “On the marionette theatre,” Heinrich von Kleist describes having a conversation with an old friend.
The friend is a successful dancer, and tells von Kleist that dancers have a lot to learn from marionettes.
Compared to a human, the friend says, a puppet “would never be guilty of affectation.
“For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or moving force, appears at some point other than the center of gravity of the movement.”
The friend says that human dancers, despite their best efforts, can’t help but hold their souls in their elbows, for instance, or the smalls of their backs.
Marionettes’ souls are always aligned with their centers of gravity; their attached limbs are “just what they should be … lifeless, pure pendulums.”
*
On the first day of my puppetry class, the teacher asked why we were there.
I was there because I wanted my soul to align with my center of gravity.
A man, his face gentle but anxiously held, told us that, as a child, he watched his parents fight. He had a vision of his mother as a marionette, his father pulling the strings. He was still trying to understand it.
*
Our teacher asked about the role of control in our art practice.
I, certain I had the correct answer, said art is not about control but surrender.
The man who saw his mother as a marionette said he makes art because it’s the only area of his life where he has absolute control.
*
In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Cirque D’Hiver,” she describes, with great love and attention, an old wind-up toy.
The toy is a tin horse—“a little circus horse with real white hair”—who “bears a little dancer on his back.”
In her description, the toy seems perfect, constant, its two selves necessarily and always combined.
The toy is alive like a marionette.
*
Another time my soul felt aligned with my center of gravity: my first year of movement training, when I followed the sequences without thought, in motion as a mechanical toy is in motion, as a marionette is in motion. And then afterwards, sitting alone in the studio, feeling my body vibrating and waiting for its silent density to lift.
My teacher was outside. I trusted him.
If he came back into the studio and looked at me, I would say, “I’m trans.”
He didn’t; the words stayed in their container.
*
Dolls are models of people that exist to be filled with people’s longings for people. A physical metaphor.
The fact of children’s love for dolls suggests loneliness isn’t something to be corrected or dependent on circumstance—only, that it’s the nature of humans to yearn for something that doesn’t exist.
A child who loves a doll knows that love exchanged with other humans is risky, imperfect.
Children know their surest resource is inside themselves, that planting love in physical objects, creating a love field between self and world, sparks a process of seeming exchange that really is entirely self-generated, a way towards security.
*
Bishop’s dancer and horse are joined together with a pole.
It goes right through their bodies and their selves, which are the same substance: “He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back / along the little pole / that pierces both her body and her soul.”
*
The man in my puppetry class is wrong.
Marionettes aren’t helpless; they are self-possessed and dignified.
*
The first time I kissed Vi, outside the subway at 2 in the morning, she felt like a terrified, caught animal. If I was very gentle, I thought, and stood very still, perhaps she could come to trust me. Perhaps I would be able to hold that trust.
In that moment, I felt I held her.
I don’t know whether or not she felt held.
*
A marionette is dignified because it cannot regret.
Whatever comic or violent act it undertakes—commits murder, say, or drops its pants—once the action is done it is forgotten.
The marionette retains no trace. It is always unchanged, ready to murder again or to touch another marionette’s cheek.
*
Von Kleist’s friend corrects his notion that what puppeteers do is inherently removed, “rather spiritless,” controlling.
A puppeteer does not manipulate an inanimate thing to create an effect (this would be a betrayal).
For the puppet to come to life, the puppeteer must “enter the center of gravity of his marionette,” must become the puppet.
*
In Bishop’s poem, a moment of recognition occurs between her speaker and the mechanical horse.
They see each other; they face each other “rather desperately,” and say, “well, we have come this far.”
She beholds something. It beholds her.
In finding herself in the unliving object, she is found.
*
In his book about Bishop, Colm Tóibín compares “Cirque D’Hiver” to a nursery rhyme.
Bishop, in a letter, calls it a jingle.
In seeing bleakness in it, I feel as if my sense of balance is off kilter.
*
At a party, Dylan tells me I have an air of expecting disappointment, and I feel understood.
My body stings with alcohol and tiredness; the standing talking groups threaten. But for a few minutes Dylan and I take turns saying words that prompt each other to say other words.
A success!
I go home.
*
I find this expectation of disappointment in Bishop; she finds it in the horse.
Their moment of recognition, “Well, we have come this far,” understands the high cost and meager success of having arrived here. Also, the marvel of any success at all.
*
On the crumpled piece of paper, I had written “I don’t feel safe.”
——————
Eleanor Garran is an Australian writer living in Minneapolis. They have an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota, and their work appears in DIAGRAM, Hobart, Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, and New Orleans Review.