What Was and Wasn’t
Claudia La Rocco

Sometimes I think, do I dream these things?
But it’s palpable, I have it, and I remember it very, very well.
—Werner Herzog

One day after school Cora handed me a VHS tape. The silent footage was fuzzy, off-kilter, the garish colors riven with tracking lines. Who were these inscrutable sentries in their frumpy red outfits, positioned between metal railings and brick chimneys? What were they trying to communicate with their limbs alternately ramrod and undulating, their torsos arching and hunching?

Cora didn’t say what it was, only that we had to learn it, which we did, to the extent that high school girls with no understanding of what they’re looking at can learn something. Four of us rehearsed in her basement; we called ourselves the anti-cheerleaders and joked we would hijack the halftime routine at the next game. But we only ever performed once, stationed on basalt and granite slabs along the jutting curve of Schoodic Point.

Schoodic was our after-school spot, a neighborhood hangout for bored teenagers that just happened to be the majestic promontory of Acadia National Park. Cora didn’t explain why there, at least not to me. But I can’t think where else on our peninsula of sparse buildings and dense evergreens we would have done it. What year would this have been? Let’s say 1994. It was spring, still cold, the wind blowing ferociously, whipping our hair and cobbled-together reds and making our eyes tear. Gulls wheeled screaming overhead. The late-afternoon sun was incandescent as we began, backlit by the Atlantic Ocean, Sylvia Plath’s “great space”

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

 

I didn’t grow up with any meaningful exposure to dance—there wasn’t much to be had in Downeast Maine. I watched the Nutcracker on PBS; I caught rides to The Bounty, a dance club in Bangor, a down-and-out city an hour away, where I pretended to be old enough to move the way I was moving with men who didn’t know, or didn’t mind, my jailbait status.

Did I categorize the Schoodic event as dance? I doubt it. I remember feeling foolish and excited, like we were doing something illicit, which we sort of were: it was only a decade later, learning about the choreographer Trisha Brown as a newly minted dance critic, that I realized I’d been in an unsanctioned restaging of her 1971 Roof Piece, in which dancers transmitted movement across sweeping lower Manhattan vistas (we’d totally misunderstood the idea of transmission, performing all of the moves in unison). How did Cora even get a tape of Brown’s work? Babette Mangolte filmed Roof Piece in 1973; it wasn’t recorded again in New York for another forty years.

I’ve never written about this experience, which I certainly didn’t share with my New York colleagues. Honestly, I sort of forgot about it. But several weeks ago, I attended a community art event at a church in Deer Isle, complete with a twenty-first-century spaghetti dinner of gluten-free penne, where I saw a short video by Heather Lyon. The artist stands on a rocky ledge facing out to a foggy sea; we see her only from the back. Gentle swells curl in, the world roars just as Plath described, and Lyon’s outstretched arms cycle through slow, sure movements, each fist grasping a black-and-orange flag. The video is from the series Semaphore Love Letters, in which Lyon transmits declarations “of love and lament” to the sea: “I am calling to you, my beloved, across these sublime spaces . . .”

Of course I thought of Cora. Cora Deacon. I wonder how far a distance I would have to traverse to reach her now.

Earlier this fall I visited the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s storage facility to see Katherine Bradford’s Fear of Dark. The painting is large, eighty by sixty inches, and due to the nature of museum storage facilities, I was afforded very little distance from it. I could imagine myself a fourth figure to the three stacked one atop another like nesting chairs, pressed together under a sky both dark and luminous. The figures are rendered in hot but heatless pigments; they are like winter sunsets, bleeding out fast and early on the horizon. The painting is from 2020; do I project isolation on them, despite their proximity? Maybe they are visions of the self, past, present, and future. Maybe all past. In Semaphore Love Letters, Lyon wears a short, hooded mylar poncho. It flutters behind her like an uncertain ghost. “Though useful against cold and heat,” she notes, the garment “does nothing to protect us from emotional catastrophe.”

These days, I often dream of tsunamis, unsettling not-quite-nightmares in which the waters of familiar coves grow wild. The earliest bad dream I remember involves water. It still appears quite vividly in my mind, an imagist poem: I am once again at Schoodic (where Lyon has also offered her love letter), and I’ve been swept from the rocks into the big waves, as happens periodically to heedless tourists. I’m so small. The words “this is it” reverberate; I think they come from me. The waters off Schoodic are tumultuous, but under the surface my body in its fetal position is cocooned in stillness and silence. It’s a dream not of death, I think, but loneliness.

Eighteen months ago I returned to my hometown after twenty-five years in large coastal cities; my partner and I bought a house on a small rise, a house I’d driven and walked past on countless occasions. Some days it’s so quiet all I hear is my blood rushing. At other times the wind engulfs us like a giant wave, tumbling and tumbling. On winter nights especially, the sound assumes spatial dimensions. I imagine our home as a lobster boat chugging through storm-tossed waters. For a time, Cora’s dad took care of a summer family’s motorboat, and one glorious afternoon her mom took us out. We lay on the glossy white bow, hands gripping the curving metal cleats, bodies tossing and sprawling as it rose and plunged.

That day feels like another life—actually, any summer day does once the brief, shimmering season has passed. Winters here are beautiful, too, but long, and merciless, especially for those without adequate protection. I think of lying on a childhood friend’s waterbed, pushing out the walls of her trailer with my feet like it was a plastic wading pool. I think of the lone homeless person I knew as a child, his frightening eyes staring out from behind thick ropes of hair, seeming always to bore into mine when we drove past him on the narrow roads. He always stood so close to the edge. We knew him as Crazy Bob, then Cosmic Bob, and finally Robert Speranza, learned from his obituary in 1994. He was struck and killed by a truck that January. It was during a blizzard, if I remember right, when all the world was whipped white.

And sometimes now the wind makes me think of a sea dragon, perhaps the dragon the audience collectively became at the beginning of the Deer Isle event, when we stood and moved together, our bodies curling, sinking, and rising as best they could. I borrowed the dragon for another group improvisation I did later that night, or maybe she borrowed me.

And now she lets herself in, curving sinuously through the storm.

Sometimes she thinks she can see the tip of her tail

But only sometimes

You know how that is

The dragon returned to her nest to find it had somehow changed.

Note: Mia Kanazawa conjured the Deer Isle dragon; the second group improvisation was with the dancers Meg Wolfe and Dani Robbins and the bassoonist Leslie Ross.

Photographs courtesy the author, except where noted.