Moving With: A Review of Scivias Choreomaniae

by Georg Trakl via Lake Angela

Were Lake Angela to walk through the marketplace and encounter the severed head of a calf hanging upon a black wall, I trust this poet to recognize the face of our savior. This is not a leap from the wall of knowing to the borders of insanity but a trust in those like us, those who are less and more than human. Scivias Choreomaniae gives the reader the most breathtaking ledge from which to leap. As the translation of the Latin title would suggest, centrally important to the collection is movement. The three parts of the book—“Choreomania,” “Asylums,” and “Three Kinds of Madness”—unite with three time periods—the present, the Middle Ages, and the early age of lunatic asylums—and three different real-life asylums—two hospitals in which the poet was incarcerated and the one in rural Kansas where she worked as a dance therapist—to give us the “ways of the dancing madness” across space and time, a way of knowing to which readers might also aspire.

Before unfolding the ways of the choreomania, Scivias Choreomaniae sets the skene (the ancient Greek stage) with our cultural narratives stemming from the same ancient theatre, in which stillness is Good and Unchanging, and steadily begins to incinerate it. For those who would worship with the fluid movement of tears, Lake reveals the “hummingbird nailed to the rafters” in the poem “Deliverance,” her head bowed with the weight of the crown woven from thornbush limbs, her tears touching us as a new kind of stigmata. The poet-speaker offers her own blood, which will be taken regardless—in the early deaths of her young in part I as in the forceful taking of blood in the asylum of part III. The benefit is that when given as a gift, she can reverse the need for the sacrifice of one who can be called a savior: “that by my blood it becomes clear/ sins have not existed.”

Lake Angela writes of all who look on, tortured by the human, the men who follow in the steps of their forefathers by standing stagnant on a rotting stair, hoping to rise as in the poems “Patriarcha” and “Bloodlines.” In contrast, those who are kept prisoners are those able to move with meaning. In the asylum, behind triple panes of glass and quadruple sets of locked doors, the prisoners move as birds to continue on, with making meaning of living: “they jiggle to measure the weight/ of their bellies and test the possibility now of flying off—/ through the highest window, triple-paned, soundproof,/ and untouchable.” (“Dance Therapy for the Patients at the Asylum”) 

In a parallel way, the medieval girls who are prisoners to bearded men admire the bird who “moves in vast monuments” and continue through their dancing madness. They “struggle to prolong their dancing sickness,” so important is the language of movement (“Buttercups in a Bag Around the Neck”). The others, the deer, the hawk, and more, are all able to move. Savior hawk watches all along the wire, soothing with her feathers. “My hawk continues/ to watch over us, repeating herself every few meters. She is perfect// though exposed to freezing memories, though she stands alone/ in the open minds…”(“Hawk Reprise”). The contrast is in the doctors and medical professionals who sit protected from the patients behind glass shields, as in the poem “The Nurses”: “The doctor sits behind a closed door guarded by nurses./ The nurses sit behind plexiglass shields that deter blows/ and block patients’ moans.” The same doctors inject with sedatives those who dance with too much fervor for the doctors to control in the dance therapy group (“The Innocent”); they also seek control of the patients’ movements by bolting their furniture to the floor and locking them in narrow, secluded spaces for punishment:

Opaque rooms fall in line behind four pairs of metal doors
and twice the number of locks and keys. From the stale gray
cloud appears the imposing iron chair with weighted leather
straps for head, neck, wrists, waist, ankles, and two solitary feet.
                                                                                                    (“Restraint”)

The same poem concludes with another confirmation of the doctors’ methods, of the control enforced by drugs that restrain cognitive movement just as the body is contained in the restraining room: “…punishment is devoid of movement,/ is, in fact, the lack thereof—the promise of perpetual stillness.”

Our philosophical heritage teaches that the ability to remain still and speak from a unified point of authority is the measure of power, but in such poems as “Patriarcha,” it is proven that this is a position that our patriarchy has claimed as power. Those who speak by movement according to their own dancing mania are able to speak in defiance of their forced imprisonment and maltreatment. The dancing madness is a personal language that moves through the universal, as wilding streams join the course of the world’s bodies of water. It is not a spectacle but a language that requires no audience to be meaningful, since like water that blesses or a medieval bouquet of herbs and incantation, it enacts mystical unions among human beings who are treated as nonhuman but embrace this power. We proclaim we are also composed of droplets of water, bacteria, parasites, clouds (of knowing and unknowing also).

In this very vein, the old woman who is a child locked in the asylum in part II moves through the rain and trees beyond the sealed panes in the poem “The Rain.” One can see that the poem senses clearly the language of rain, the language of water moving through us:

                                                                   Let’s rain, I respond, and we spill
from our bodies, soaking our skin, wet seeping from sockets, swaying
from sacra, sobs sleeting over noses, spiraling from fingertips. We rain
and we rain and we find we are walking in air, stepping across raindrops,
through rain and made of rain. (“The Rain”)

Another woman whose heart is loved by the cockroach though despised by humans inherits her own wisdom when she moves. The poet-speaker says, “Let’s get your brain back; it is yours,” and the woman incarcerated as patient finds she is able to live for the time she is dancing:  with “…the rhythm/ of your blood-water, your exhaustive sacrifice, and all/ the way down to your feet you reanimate/ your life. The dance that warms through you caresses/ you into impossible flowers.” (“Dance Therapy”)

Finally, both the final and first parts of Scivias Choreomaniae are composed from true language: not words to note and preserve but words to create. This is a language known within the blue caves of childhood, within the sister, the mother, the winding along the stairs, the horizontal shooting of stars. Readers might come to the poems hungry for logic to incite their compassionate human feelings and connect with other human experience, but Scivias Choreomaniae gives us the alogical magic of true language, of com-passion with nonhuman ways of being as with water, as with the birds who become trapped in the hospital rafters and continue to fly. It is a generous being-with to learn from the dancing madness, a moving with. Here, dear reader, please take this gift—a text from which to decipher birdsign for those who do not know these soaring languages yet:

Haruspex *Δ↭*

The haruspex *Δ↭* is summoned
to read my entrail’s omens,
the crows given a chance to translate

before the last sacrifice. >)))) >)))) >)))) A foreign
spark ^^^ ignites heaven’s embassy windows.{0}{0}
Carrier pigeons (<>) blink in delight.

Fierce and terrorized, half »« dead
and holy ° inside my suppurating ““ wound. : > —
An errant wind whistles, cold flung along

stripped corridors \\ , spent nebula fingers ~~~~~
grasp nothing. A great cat ↨↨↨↨ shoots past: 
all my memories thrash weakly ↜¦°↯⨈↝

in the vice {⨞⁅⨞⁆⨞} of his jaws. Terrible green ⨝
stillness, a silence I cannot decipher. <(((( <(((( <((((
The inchpin wound (⨌) around the child’s neck

puts my dreams to rest. ↜ ⨀ ↝ Soon all will be
abolished: this whole world >))))
has been expressed.