“Would you give your niece a ballet class when she comes to visit you?” my brother asked.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.” I made sure not to hesitate. I would sort out the tumult in my mind later.
My niece is a beginning ballet student so how hard could giving her a ballet class be? A little bit hard, I thought. It would at least require some digging into the recesses of my mind. When was the last time I took a full ballet class? A proper ballet class that was not modified and popularized in some way as a “workout” for the masses? 35 years ago. 35.
I remembered my own first ballet class when I was six years old. I didn’t even have ballet shoes yet or know how to sew on the elastics for them, so I stood in an awkward first position in my white socks, holding onto the top of a couch for balance. We were in the apartment of a childhood friend of my father’s who was a professional dancer with Alvin Ailey. He showed me how to do a few positions, pliés and tendus along with accompanying porte bras.
I could feel my father, and the man who I adored as an uncle, watching me. I knew that this was somehow a rite of passage, but what kind I didn’t know. I just know that it meant something to them. Something like hope, and something passed from them to me. I had been given a small candle that I would carry within me into the future, tending the small flame carefully to make sure it didn’t die.
My brother, someone who had also taken ballet classes as a child but for whom it never became an all-consuming passion as it had for me, wasn’t just asking me to perform a chore or to help his daughter with her turn spotting. It mattered that the person who gave her this class was me. Giving my niece a ballet class weaved and connected her into the childhood my brother and I had shared, one steeped in a deep love for the arts.
This ballet class was a curating of a childhood for my niece that included me. I was gratified to realize that this meant that my little brother saw me as someone who had magic to convey and a valuable world to show. Someone who could open the back of the wardrobe into Narnia.
It’s the vision into a new world, you see, that is what matters. A new world that is limitless in its possibilities, both for glory and for terror. Once you are through to the other side, there is no real way to return to a pre-enlightened world.
One’s first real ballet class, with a well-qualified guide, is not a banishment from Eden, from a place where faithful ignorance is cherished and rewarded. Instead, it is the emerging from Plato’s Cave, one where there are shadows on the walls but no sunlight. Today, perhaps, the Cave is a pre-teen’s bedroom, the mere glimmer of light coming from the reflected banality of a cellphone screen.