I used to do gymnastics, but I had forgotten — or never been able to see — its true weirdness. The unnatural sinew on the prepubescent girls, their equine musculature, their grim faces. It is a cruel sport painted with the brush of world politics, always projecting international conflicts onto tumbling female bodies; the Russians are boycotting, the Chinese are forging. In a world of nationless terrorism and oozing oil, gymnastics remains quaintly nationalistic, warm-up suits proclaiming countries’ names in foreign alphabets, coaches defecting, turning over the secrets of their launches and landings.
As I watched, I was struck by the gymnasts’ military precision and consequent lack of artistry. Gymnasts are foremost athletes and therefore terrible dancers. The flourishes of their hands and extensions of their legs are perfunctory, their motions far more dutiful than beautiful.
The very best ones express the least of all. They perform but they do not emote. They quite literally go though the motions, ticking them off an invisible mental checklist. The harder they set their jaws and the less they show they feel the higher their scores from the equally impassive judges. Like simple projectiles, they go from point A to point B. The awesome quality of their feats is conferred by the fact that a human body is not naturally a projectile and even more rarely a self-propelled one. Sometimes, when they land, if they stick it in a way that inspires their coach to exult in some guttural language, they show for a moment a flicker of joy indiscernible from relief.
I thought about how your parents would watch you in gymnastics class, when they waited behind the glass, arms crossed, to pick you up. And you would ask if they’d seen you as they bundled you into your snowboots, and they would say, “Yes, I saw, very good, it was very good.” I felt an almost parental heartbreak for these girls, for the sincerity of their efforts, for the premature hardening of their bodies and the truncation of their youth.
– from an essay, Noise by Emily Meg Weinstein (Mar 31, 2009) in Identity Theory
Those few paragraphs seem to have stirred up a great load of mucky sediment in my memory. Stuff from many decades ago has been set to seething again — distilled through many previous seethings.
The problem is conformity versus nonconformity or more precisely, those two urges in children — where they are trying to do both at the same time. It’s about how, when, and where athletic, social and/or educational authorities or teachers or parents equate obedience and conformity with all things good. Conformity is equated with joy (which is, of course, nonsense; they aren’t of the same category). In their juvenile dependence, children naturally derive joy from pleasing grown-ups. This is often an indiscriminate desire to please (indiscriminate in means, not in to whom it is directed), to show-off, to get attention. The development of a child’s ability to innovate, to be creative, to make independent decisions is or can be stunted or grossly distorted or even exterminated. Or not, depending on his/her teachers.
Conformity, rules, training are necessary and frequently good things but they should not be rewarded or encouraged as if they were ends in themselves.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against gymnastics. I am not and have never been a gymnast. I like watching the sport on TV.
-Julie
