the elements of style, or: my meditation

There are many things people do to calm down. Some people take a walk, others count to ten, very practiced serene people meditate. I've tried all of the above, but none work as well as my own personal favorite: editing.

When I was younger, I read Strunk & White's famous guide to American English writing, The Elements of Style. The book outlines eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," and "a few matters of form." William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White also provide a list of forty-nine commonly misused words and expressions, as well as a record of fifty-seven words often misspelled. It's not a perfect guide, and in fact has received criticism on both sides of the pond, but for my elementary school self, there was something beautiful and calming about the simplicity and purity of grammar laid out within its pages. In its first edition (1918), William Strunk wrote: "Make every word tell." I fell in love with this, and with the idea that the free, fluid art of writing did have structure and a set of rules. (I also believe that this sentence is the reason I very rarely use Internet short-hand. Acronyms do not have the same look or tell as properly written words.)

I have not read The Elements of Style in years, but the basic principles have stuck with me. And while some people can't stand a slightly crooked painting on a wall, or grow faint at the sight of one unlit bulb in a string of lights, my OCD centers around spelling and grammar. Give me a written paper, a red pen, and some time, and I am happy as a clam. There is something extremely soothing about correcting spelling mistakes, fixing punctuation, improving word order and the flow of writing, and amending errors in grammar. Once everything is in order, when every word of every sentence serves a purpose in an aesthetically pleasing and correct way, I can literally sleep better.

I do not often have the opportunity to edit. To be sure, I edit my own writing; most often, my biggest problem is following E.B. White's recommendation: "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." I have had a couple of chances to hack away at others' papers with a beloved red pen. But sometimes, when I am very tense (or extremely bored), I will take an old pamphlet laying around or one of the magazines shipped over to me by my parents, and flip through, quietly putting the page--and my mind--in order.

Ελλάδα

The Royal Danish Ballet's 2011/2012 season begins on Tuesday, and while I am ready and excited to begin work again, I cannot help but look back on the wonderful summer holiday. After a month-long return to the motherland United States, an extra week with my one-of-a-kind family in New York, and a quick stopover back in good ol' CPH, I took a trip with my very best friend to a little place called Greece and escaped the real world for two whole magical weeks.

Forget the sun, the beach, the food, the drinks. There's something about Greece, something that I don't think I will ever have the vocabulary to adequately describe. The people are as warm as the summer weather; the language is as beautiful to listen to as the island waters are to look at. In the face of national economic uncertainty, the Greeks showed no fear, only a love of food, fun, and each other. As someone who has never had an easy time relaxing, and who spent the first two days feeling frantic for not having mastered a very foreign language before arrival, I left Greece with a face full of freckles, significantly tighter jeans, and a strong urge to 'accidentally' miss my flight.

There's "big city" beauty--the nonstop, neon allure of New York or Paris. I always considered myself a true, blue, concrete-loving city girl. I have lived in New York and Miami Beach, and spent summers in San Francisco. I have never met a neon light or a skyscraper I couldn't get along with. I spend most of my time indoors in studios, and my pale skin reflects this affinity for artificial lighting. I have never been camping. I get cold if it dips below summer temperatures, and I can tolerate sweltering temperatures in 10-minute increments in a sauna. I don't pee unless it involves four walls, a door, and proper indoor plumbing. I don't consider bugs to be a satisfactory source of protein, and unless it's one of the approximately eight spiders a year involuntarily swallowed by the average human being, I really try to keep a more-than-safe distance from most insects. In short: I am nobody's nature girl.

But Greece is different. To be sure, we saw big cities. Athens is massive, Thessaloniki and Larissa are true cities as well. But for the most part, I was confronted with a completely different kind of beauty, one with mountains and sand and swamps and stretches of nothingness. I saw dragonflies in shades I never expected, spiders the size of gum balls, more shades of green and blue than I could ever imagine. Each day, I awoke to a clear view of Mt. Olympus and a schedule filled with hours and hours of relaxation. At first, I admit, it freaked me out. I cannot ever just do nothing. And in Greece, the daily schedule read something like: wake up, breakfast, beach, two-hour lunch, nap, beach, snack, do nothing, two-hour dinner, sleep. My stomach was not built for this schedule. The letters weren't letters, and because I love languages (and am a very nosy individual who likes to understand what people are saying and writing) I found my inability to understand or communicate frustrating. I mean, in Greek, my boyfriend's name started with what appeared to be a triangle. That's a shape. Also, I am not a person who does well at the beach; my skin simply can't take the heat (literally) and my mind can't take the lack of activity. I wear contact lenses, so I don't enjoy saltwater, and after an unpleasant childhood encounter with a rabid jellyfish, I'm not keen on swimming too far out. Plus there's the whole existential freakout I have whenever I find myself looking out over a large expanse of water; it's a situation that goes on in my mind something like: "Saltwater oceans are 71% of Earth's total surface, there are over 6 billion people on the planet, Earth is one of nine planets in our solar system, which is part of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of galaxies in space, which means I am very small indeed..."

A couple of days in, however, and I was hooked. By the end of the vacation, I was expressing a desire to "just bring a tent and camp on the beach" next time we visited the islands. The sun was my best friend; the saltwater brought my skin and feet back to childhood softness; my stomach learned to not only accept but thoroughly enjoy the seemingly endless plates of food involved in daily meals. The ancient ruins nestled among modern villages and cities, the freshest food I have ever tasted, the unbreakable sense of fun everyone I met seemed to have, the addictive sound and look of the language, I love all of it. And the daily small adventures made the trip that much more perfect. My first lesson in the art of drinking raki; the small but Olympic-fast turtle we adopted (until he escaped); running up to the Acropolis with just ten minutes before the last visitors were admitted; tooling around the hillsides of Santorini on an ATV; the small island whose one ATM ran out of cash, resulting in a 1am race onto a visiting ferry for cash; water fights at lunch--I miss the indescribable mix of whirlwind amid hours of leisure. It was infectious. I wanted to be like this, all the time. There was a sense of frantic humor in almost every situation, and I could not get enough.

Vacation cannot last forever. This is why, like Christmas and birthdays and any other favorite time, they are so special. Greece was something I will never forget, and something I hope to repeat very soon. Because for the first time in my life, I spent over an hour in the sun, on the beach of a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and I didn't feel the urge to do anything or go anywhere. I didn't think. I didn't worry about fitting into skinny jeans, I wasn't nauseous about the releve section in Etudes, I had soft skin and healed feet and no sore muscles. I found my happy place.

After I had a bike accident on a tiny island, I was sitting by the side of the road crying and bleeding while disinfecting supplies were fetched. A total stranger passing by stopped and said, "Why are you crying?" I held up my bloody hands and stuck out my swollen, bleeding and bruised left leg as an answer. He smiled and said, "It's ok, don't worry! Look around. You're in paradise." And so, with another long, busy season ahead, I look forward to it being a great one, with new opportunities and challenges. But in the back of my mind, I will try so very hard to keep that feeling of real, honest-to-god bliss I achieved this summer. ευχαριστώ, Ελλάδα. You taught this neurotic mess to turn off her brain and just enjoy life (and a whole lot of food).

rubber balls are time machines

Today, I smelled a rubber ball (being used as a prop in a friend's rehearsal), and suddenly I was six years old again. The powdery, uniquely rubbery odor sent me tumbling backwards in time, coming completely out of the blue. Everyone in the studio who smelled the ball had the same reaction: "It reminds me of childhood..." Maybe we all recalled different specific things, but of one thing we were sure. This seemingly unremarkable ball brought everybody to the same place.

It's funny how smells can do that. To me, this ball smelled exactly like the seemingly infinite collection of My Little Pony figures I had when I was little. (This was before the case of head lice that spread like wildfire throughout my kindergarten class, and resulted in all toys in with 'hair' being quarantined in garbage bags. Forever.) Others said the scent reminded them of pool floaties, or action figures. But for me, it was My Little Pony. I loved those stupid horses so much. I will forever hate head lice--not only because head lice is disgusting to think about, but because those revolting hair bugs meant the death of my Ponies.

The thing is, I hadn't thought about My Little Pony in years. (Anybody who knows about my affinity for unicorn culture might find this surprising, but it's true. The rainbow-colored little horses hadn't entered my mind in a very long time.) This ordinary rubber ball knocked me backwards into memories so far back, I can't even be sure I really remember them. In the middle of Det Kongelige Teater, I was suddenly a six-year-old playing with small, overpriced plastic ponies in our living room in Brooklyn. I didn't have a care in the world, except for figuring out which of these ponies, given the very girly pastel color scheme, could possibly be a boy. My Pink Little Pony needed a boyfriend.

Once I snapped out of my reverie, I realized why this orange ball had made me so happy and so sad all at once. When you're living out your elementary years, you don't recognize these smells as anything other than a faint odor accompanying a new plaything. The scent that escapes when clapping together chalkboard erasers, the distinct odor of Elmer's Glue, the fragrance of Play-Doh, that 'new notebook' aroma--you don't realize that one day, catching a whiff of any of these will become something special. You don't appreciate in the moment that one day, years from now, you will bring to your nose an apparently everyday rubber ball and be transported to another time and place. When you're six, nostalgia isn't really in your vocabulary--but when it is, you long for the times when you didn't know what the word meant.

It's not that I wish I was six years old again. Granted, there are things about being a six-year-old girl that I would love to recapture: the sense of innocence, of carelessness, of genuine everyday happiness, of having your biggest problem be fixing up two of your My Little Ponies. But I am well aware that a good chunk of the beauty in life comes from growing up and adding layers to one's childhood self. This being said, I do wish I could go back in time and tell the young me to love every small thing, to inhale every stupid odor, because one day a rubber ball will make you realize how wonderful all the smallest things are--and how difficult that feeling of being so very young can be to capture again.

are we human?

Very recently, I attended the birthday party of a wonderful acquaintance of mine, and had a fantastic opportunity to engage in a lively debate with a stranger. In the beautiful hours of a classic late Copenhagen sunset, this well spoken, Oxford-educated man tried to convince me that we, as human beings, could be reduced to basically nothing more than a series of well-oiled biochemical processes. As a decidedly nonreligious person who's only very warily, very recently (very reluctantly, very skeptically, very slowly, etc.) adopted certain practical principles of Buddhism, the logical side of me--the openly nonromantic, factual girl who grew up loving math for its lack of a grey area and who watches Bones in unhealthy quantities--understood the science behind his arguments. But the secret romantic within, the girl who loves to reread Fitzgerald and Bronte novels on a quasi-regular basis and cries at Kleenex commercials, refused to believe that all of humanity could be boiled down to just epidermis and bodily functions, with bodies ruled by science, lacking free will and that stunning unpredictability that makes living worthwhile. Despite the indisputable scientific evidence presented to me over the course of the evening, despite my logical self comprehending and realizing the facts laid out before me...I would not have it.

There is scientific evidence that our brains actually make decisions before we know about them. Researchers have done studies that show our brains prepare decisions up to seven seconds before we ourselves realize we have made choices. In the seven seconds before test subjects chose to push a button, making a decision, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, an area of sensory integration in the brain. These shifting neural patterns were monitored using a functional MRI machine. Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand: a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. This study means that for those used to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis of other brain functions. However, caveats remain, holding open the door for free will--the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions. Furthermore, the predictions were not completely accurate. There is a possibility that free will enters at the very last moment, letting a person override a chemically based, subconscious decision. The co-author of the study, John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute, said. "We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," but he admits he doesn't believe it's plausible.

This implausibility doesn't disturb Haynes, though. He says, "It's not like you're a machine. Your brain activity is the physiological substance in which your personality and wishes and desires operate." And National Institutes of Health neuroscientist Mark Hallett says that the discomfort people feel by the possible impossibility of free will originates from a misconception of self as separate from the brain: "That's the same notion as the mind being separate from the body--and I don't think anyone really believes that. A different way of thinking about it is that your consciousness is only aware of some of the things your brain is doing."

Forget the everyday decisions we are forced to make: What should I get for lunch? What should I wear today? Should I punch this person in the face? If those choices are, in fact, predetermined by biological processes occurring in the grey matter filling the space between our ears, I can totally live with that. But as a closet romantic, and against all logical evidence and better judgment, I refuse to believe that bigger choices, especially regarding definitively personal, undefined areas of our lives, are made by a series of neurons firing. I can't swallow the notion that my father's creative anniversary surprise to my mother a couple of years back was nothing more than a result of science; I hate the notion that some of my favorite fictional heroes were borne from some author's neurons firing a certain way; I refuse to believe that most great art of this and past centuries had its foundation in someone's physiological brain, and not something infinitely more undefinable. Perhaps this is idealistic thinking, perhaps this is a starry-eyed view of how we as human beings function. But while I believe there are, of course, certain undeniable sequences that occur in our brains and bodies every second of every day, I would very much love to believe we are so much more than that. Because can we boil down to simple science great music, beautiful art, even who we choose to love? I certainly hope not.