11
Skating
When we turn to ice skating, we find ourselves still in a world of twirling circuits, circles, figure eights, pivots, turns, arcs, and wheelings. We see Tolstoy’s Levin skate in effortless circles, moving like the rolling cauldrons of Hephaestus, as though by a mental nod alone:
Levin rose to his feet [we stretch the figure upward], took off his overcoat [the “Hands-on!” and “It’s only cloth!” instructions are combined] and, after a run over the rough ice round the hut [a rehearsal that permits the imaginer a crude practice for the virtuoso motion to come], glided on to the smooth surface of the rink and skated effortlessly, as it were by simple exercise of will quickening and slackening.
It is as though we hold a tiny magnet under the mental retina, effortlessly moving the skating figure on the glazed surface above. “Feeling a need of violent exercise … [Levin] started doing inside and outside turns at full speed.”1
Before Levin even rises to his feet to begin to skate, we have four times been told that he is one of the most expert skaters in all Russia, and—like the fourfold instruction to make a “smooth-running wagon” that comes before we actually see the wagon move—this announcement of Levin’s expertise gets us ready to picture a “smooth-skating man” before the moment comes when we must make the picture move in earnest. But the rink is full of skaters of varying ability, all of whom circle and turn, as when Kitty, like the orbiting sun, arcs into view from around the corner—
She was in a corner and, turning out her slender little feet in their high boots, obviously nervous, she skated towards him.
then comes into view once more—
When she had got round the turn she gave herself a push off with a springy foot and skated straight up to Shcherbatsky.
The springiness of Kitty’s foot has been achieved by a mental practice we know well—the “It’s only cloth!” instruction—so let us look at this same sentence again, now with the sentences just before and after it.
A muff suspended on a cord around her neck permits us not only to stretch and release her “springy” bodily figure but to carry out the same practice at the interior of her face, which breaks into a smile.
She was not skating very steadily. Drawing her hands out of the little muff, that hung on a cord round her neck, she held them ready for emergency and, looking towards Levin, whom she had recognized, she smiled at him and at her own apprehension. When she had got round the turn she gave herself a push off with a springy foot and skated straight up to Shcherbatsky. Clutching his arm, she nodded smilingly to Levin. She was lovelier than he had imagined.
She is lovelier than he had imagined because he can only imagine her without the smile, and it is here, while skating, that he will not only see her smile but learn how to make a mental picture of her smile when she is not physically present. Her smile comes forth several times in the mental pictures we make of her, each time helped by the continual small touches or pats she gives the material of her muff, handkerchief, or gloves:
“The tradition is kept up here that you are a superlative skater,” she said, with a small black-gloved hand brushing some needles of hoar-frost off her muff.
“Yes, once upon a time I used to skate with passion. I wanted to be perfect at it.”
“You seem to do everything with a passion,” she said with a smile. “I should so like to see you skate.”
It may seem that in shifting from the motion of skating to the motion of smiling, we have veered away from the subject of circles, but we have not, for when the face breaks into a smile, the mouth moves into a small upward opening arc. Often a smile seems to roll into view on a face, as in this conversation between the skating attendant and Levin:
“It’s a long while since we’ve seen you here, sir,” remarked the attendant, supporting Levin’s foot and screwing on the heel of the skate. “None of the other gentlemen can touch you. Is that all right?” he asked, tightening the strap.
“Fine, fine! Make haste, please,” replied Levin, barely able to restrain the smile of rapture which would spread over his face in spite of himself.
Like the supple strap under the foot of Hermes that helps him fly in our minds, the tightening of the strap and the shared conversation about its felt tightness will soon help us make Levin skate; but first they help us make the wide arcing smile that spreads over his face.
Skaters circle, turn, wheel, and smile, but they sometimes also fall or almost fall. What are Tolstoy’s instructions for picturing the moment on the skating rink when virtuosity and recklessness come so perilously close? (The more the virtuosity of the skating is destabilized, put at risk, and lost, the more the virtuosity of the picture-making must be flawlessly maintained.) A young skater rushes into view introduced by the words “Just then,” an instruction to brace oneself for the rapid composition of an entirely new picture.
Just then a young man, the best of the new generation of skaters, emerged from the coffee house on his skates, with a cigarette in his mouth. Taking a run, he started down, his skates clattering as he jumped from step to step. Without the least change in the easy way in which he held his arms, he flew down and skated away over the ice.
“Oh a new trick!” cried Levin …
And as Levin rushes to follow him, his friend Shcherbatsky shouts after him, “Don’t break your neck—it needs practice!”
We ourselves have been given a practice run by the motion picture we have just made of the anonymous skater, dyadically clattering down the steps, then held perfectly steady in one easy posture as the world rushes by him (as earlier the icy world scrolled by Kitty standing there, legs steady, arms held out for emergency). Now we recompose the sequence as Levin rushes to follow:
Levin climbed the steps, took a long run along the top as fast as he could, and then [echoing the “just then” instruction] dashed down, his arms poised to balance himself in this unusual movement. On the bottom step his foot caught and one hand almost touched the ice [an image we produce by rotating his body laterally and downward], but he made a violent effort [required of us as well], righted himself [we roll the image back up], and skated off laughing.
The turning, circuiting, smiling, arcing of the skaters has made us such expert mental spinners that we can—in Levin’s near-fall—roll his image down and back up; and if one tries this several times, one discovers that it can be done in one smooth downward, then upward roll or, under Tolstoy’s Brontë-like urgings, abruptly and forcefully. What is difficult is not the mental motion of rolling but the feat of starting, then suddenly reversing, the direction of the roll. It is literally a tour de force.
Tolstoy four times in Anna Karenin undertakes to place before our eyes a prolonged scene of sustained motion: first the motion of skating; then the motion of dancing; then the motion of racing horses; then the motion of mowing hay. Each of the four gives us practice for the ones to come; each requires that we see elegantly executed actions and then “a stumble.” When Levin stumbles in the skating scene, it seems that he has imperfectly followed the young “instructor” onto the ice; but desire is mimetic, and it is Kitty who has initially drawn him onto the rink and Kitty he now imperfectly mimes, for she herself has earlier “made a sort of stumble” on the ice. Tolstoy’s four monumental scenes of motion each entail the question of following an instructor out onto the shimmering floor; each is about what happens when we compose motions according to authorial direction. But we have so far only imperfectly understood why Tolstoy has placed the ice-skating scene first—why, like a flower, it is being used as a template for the three floors of motion that ride on top of it. We should stay a while with the skating, even if it delays the dance, the race, and the mowing of the grass.
Mental skating is easy, but why is it easy? Sometimes no rinks or rings are even required. Brontë’s elder and younger Catherines characteristically “glide” or “glide noiselessly” at Wuthering Heights where the inside floor is made of “smooth, white stone” and the outside moor floor of snow or black frost. Here even sitting persons slip or slide, as when Linton Heath-cliff “slid[es] off his chair,” a motion made easy by his rarity, his being a slip, “the worst-tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled into his teens.”2 When John Ashbery in “Ut Pictura Poesis” asks himself—
Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting …
he is presumably asking what can be easily imagined, so easily imagined that it can be pictured even when it is only briefly asserted in a list. He lists three things. The first is flowers: “Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.” The third is radiant ignitions: “Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?” And in between has come a second: “Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,”3 a line that, like flowers and skyrockets, prompts the beginning of picture-making even when unelaborated with description or attribution.
Levin’s near-fall may be a remarkable moment in Tolstoy’s skating scene but it may also be paradigmatic of all skating motion, for skating is like falling through the world, and sledding, too, is simply a controlled fall, a sustained spill. In skating and sledding we pour through the world—hence the magnificent opening sentence of Seamus Heaney’s sledding poem:
The ice was like a bottle. We lined up
Eager to re-enter the long slide
We were bringing to perfection, time after time
Running and readying and letting go
Into a sheerness that was its own reward:
A farewell to surefootedness, a pitch
Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves …4
As stumbling is the motion of all skating, so skating is the motion of all imagining: picturing requires “a pitch / Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.” When the sound of sledding or skating is given onomatopoetically, it is usually given as a hissing sound—“We hissed along the polished ice in games,” says Wordsworth—or a schushshshing sound, or swishshshshing, or wishshshing, which is to say that the word “wishing” is itself onomatopoetic for the quality of motion that happens in imagining, the motion of gliding without resistance. In wishing, all moving pictures move as though on ice, sliding and gliding, as though there were no resistance, as though the proper mode of all verbs were the passive one where the question of agency, of inside and outside, of composing and taking dictation, has fallen into irrelevance. So an originary genius, William Blake, can see himself as a Secretary reverentially following instructions, and towering John Milton forever sits on the schoolroom chair where, as a young child, he was given his first Latin word to conjugate, “Musa, Musae, Musam.”5
* * *
We find ourselves contemplating at once the compositional surface on which motion occurs and the things that move on that compositional surface because imagining motion requires us to blur the distinction between figure and ground, as when passengers sitting in a stationary train feel themselves begin to fall through space when another train passes by. What circling and skating have in common—to return to our starting point—is this sense of an object turning through a turning ground, like Homer’s wagon “rolling blithely on through the rushing night.” Or like Heaney’s sledders (going up and letting go), whose rotations both make, and move in relation to, the radiant circle:
It followed on itself like a ring of light
We knew we’d come through and kept sailing towards.
And so, too, it describes the relation of figure to ground in Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Eliza sprints across the Ohio River—“stumbling—leaping—slipping—springing upwards again!”—moving by dyadic pictures that (as in Brontë) are flung one after another into our minds by sheer authorial force. Eliza’s horizontal progress toward the Ohio shore all the while occurs across a swaying axis:
the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters.… [they] formed a great undulating raft.
And her upward vaulting arcs in the air complete the circle of the downward arcing ice cakes:
The huge green fragment of ice on which she alighted pitched and creaked as her weight came on it.6
The two together complete a rolling circuit of motion, sustained by continual recomposition, as her initial forceful spring goes through seven iterations, some of them by her watching friends whose hands fly up in the air in amazed mimesis of her leap and whose rolling laughter acoustically celebrates the virtuosity of her run to freedom.
Here is one last skater who, though he skates in complete isolation, would be greatly admired by Levin, Eliza, Kitty, and the childhood sledders if they were to come upon him in the evening light. (In fact, one of the sledders did once come upon him and when he grew up wrote about what it was like to watch William Wordsworth skate.7) We will see that in creating a figure turning over turning ground, Wordsworth engages us in almost every practice—radiant ignition, rarity, addition-subtraction, stretching—that we have rehearsed in earlier pages.
This book started by describing solidity, the importance of a solid wall or vertical floor in front of us before we become willing to pitch forward out over the edge of ourselves into the work of imagining. Since figure and ground are so destabilized in skating and sledding, special means must be sought to give us some substitute solidity. Wordsworth does it by centering:
I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games …8
He places the center of gravity in the picture-maker’s own heavy-footed body, not unlike what Homer does in telling us the wagon is “newly finished, balanced and bolted tight … they yoked the mules—/ stamping their sharp hoofs, trained for heavy loads—”9 or what Tolstoy does by assuring us four times that Levin is a crack skater before asking us to take him out onto the ice, or what Heaney does by providing a never-ending circle that loops back securely on itself so that the second time we read the sledding poem we will make the forward pitch that we probably refuse to do on first reading. “All shod in steel,” we are heavily weighted, hence ready for the forward lean: “We hissed along the polished ice in games.” The seventeen lines below follow one another in sequence.10
The sun sets, stars rise, and Wordsworth moves away from the games to skate alone.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng …
The instruction to slide his body sideways across the picture enlists the felt roll of our eyes as they slide sideways to begin a new line. Then the floor beneath him begins to move, outracing his own motions as radiant ignition and rarity are combined (not a star, not a shadow, but the shadow of a star) to magnify the litheness of the moving ground:
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the grassy plain.
He rolls over the ice, but the icy floor rolls ahead of him; he veers off to the side to reach a gleam, but the bright spot veers laterally too, staying beyond his reach. He merely skates but the ground flies.
Then, without telling us, he must have changed direction, for whereas the floor has so far been outrolling him in the very direction he is going, it now begins to slide past him going the other way:
and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion …
The rush of motion is accomplished with rarity and arcing (two dusky veils sweep rapidly toward and past), and the arcing and spinning tell us that the floor of the world is curved. And now, as the skater’s image tilts back on the mental retina, we somatically mime the motion by shifting our weight one hairsbreadth back—
then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short …
One hears this in the mental ear with exquisite precision, the hissing sound of skating over the polished ice suddenly swelling into “shchoosh” as the sound itself “stop[s] short.”11
And now the pivoting motion with which the scene began—“I wheeled about”—is completely taken over by the world’s floor:
yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!
—the earth’s rolling motion sustained by the mental practices of rarity and stretching as the skater turns to watch the rushing banks recede behind him:
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.
Gradually across this scene the floor itself has rotated from the horizontal to the vertical axis, as polished ice lifts slightly up to the tufted surface of grassy plain, then tilts further upward to shadowy banks, and finally stretches further upward to the wheeling cliffs.*
* * *
We have earlier seen the three principal ways in which flowers enter into the mental making of moving pictures—floral supposition, the rotation of ground from a horizontal to a vertical position, and the destabilization of figure and ground, so that motion transfers back and forth between the two or happens to both simultaneously. These postscripts on circles and on ice skating were offered as an elaboration of the third way: circles and ice are like drops of dew in a morning frost that freeze beneath the sweet face of a pansy, leaving the trembling blossom intact. But where is the blossom?
If as we follow one of the flower’s formal features, the flower itself seems to have slipped from view, it is only because it has been temporarily left out. Brontë’s glidings and slidings are inseparable from the heath-covered moor. Stowe prepares us for our mental composition of Eliza’s rolling sprint across the ice-filled river in the same way Eliza gets herself and her little boy to the edge of the river, by gazing at a rolling apple.* Ashbery’s “names of boys … and their sleds” appears right after the delphinium blossom. Heaney’s sledding poem is immediately preceded in a sequence of poems by a poem which has at its center his father’s stark advice to his sister: “Look for a man with an ash plant on the boat.” Advice to her about what? About how to keep one’s balance in the midst of flowing or flying: “Everything flows. Even a solid man, / … Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet.”12
Book I of The Prelude combs every inch of the valleys of Wordsworth’s childhood—“gathering as it seemed, / Through every hair-breadth in that field of light, / New pleasure like a bee among the flowers”—to create the surface on which the great scenes of boyhood motion—swimming, rowing, skating, kite-flying—are made. Although Wordsworth moves through all the seasons, he finds ways to keep the work table for his images green: “green fields,” “green shady place,” “sunshine on the grass,” “smooth green turf,” “no colours of green fields,” “all the green summer.”13 And, predictably, that green surface is as often vertical as it is horizontal, as often before his face and hands as it is at his feet:
Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock.
His long fall through the world will happen not here, suspended over a ravine, but in the skating scene. Still, lines such as these, where he hangs by “knots of grass” or “leap[s] through flowery groves / Of yellow ragwort,” are rehearsals for that rapturous fall. Flowers move throughout Book I and their motion is that of falling, as in the exquisite account of acorns dropping—
Thus long I mused,
Nor e’re lost sight of what I mused upon,
Save when, amid the stately grove of oaks,
Now here, now there, an acorn, from its cup
Dislodged, through sere leaves rustled, or at once
To the bare earth dropped with a startling sound …
or of a crocus breaking—
among the mountain-slopes
Frost, and the breath of frosty wind, had snapped
The last autumnal crocus …
or of snowdrops that, by their very name, seem in planting to drop from the hand—
Planting my snowdrops among winter snows …
or of blossoms that by their very weight seem ready to fall—
I could record with no reluctant voice
The woods of autumn, and their hazel bowers
With milk-white clusters hung.14
This is to say that Wordsworth’s own rapture-filled motion of falling in the skating scene is condensed and four times practiced on the surface of the vegetable world.*
In order to restore flowers to their proper location, and in order to bring this book to a close, we must go back to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, and to the four floors of motion Tolstoy builds one on top of the other: ice-skating rink, dance floor, race course, mowing field.