Why Did I Write The Dormant Age?

***WARNING: SPOILERS***

I essentially wrote The Dormant Age as a way to praise and commemorate my lifelong hobby as well as a critique on modern ballet and its destructive ways.

Madame Roberts is clearly the good foil to the bad Madame Angulaire. She teaches her students not only ballet but how to live with grace throughout life—from youth (Dawn) to old age (Natalie).

The main launching point for the conflict came from a college course (of course) called, Meaning and Purpose of the Arts, where I was introduced for the first time to Martha Graham’s work. I will never forget the day when I watched that video of her thrusting herself to and fro in that ridiculous and ugly purple tube of fabric to the choppy, sporadic sounds of the piano (Lamentation, 1930). Ballet requires music, otherwise it is just pantomime or without movement it is no longer dance. But even the music deteriorated into irrational bits, screeching out with no rhyme or reason. The whole scene felt like some sick charade. I wanted to scream in the middle of class I was so angry. My body shook as if I had been slapped violently across the face, or as if my professor had spit on me for daring to believe that classical ballet was beautiful, something above the rest, when I should be wriggling in the ground like a worm.

The way I knew ballet was as a set of purposeful movements aimed at ennobling Man. Dance was not meant to show him ugly and weak and utterly irrational. Yet, here before me was a dancer trying to turn the art I knew and loved and honored into garbage.

So, I wrote about how our “modern art” movement is destroying the simple line. There is nothing wrong with this line. People just want to be different and get their doctorates based off of lies. The post-modern movement in art means doing the exact opposite of anything classical. It is upholding death over life.

Already being a staunch Objectivist, I could feel the evil in that classroom that day. The book idea was clear to me then, only earning my degree and then earning enough money pushed back the writing work until recently.

Classical ballet is all about growing up learning to refine one’s movements, to take hold of the subtle changes in the body. A child has minor control over their mind and body, but an adult controls both. The ideal Man has grace and poise—utter control—over his entire being. (Remember Tolstoy’s line about how bad families are equivalent to how many bad philosophies there are out there versus the few good ones). Classical ballet upholds a good, rational culture, while modern ballet seeks to destroy it and leaves nothing in its place.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.

On the Writer

I wrote in my “To Readers” blog post what my mission statement is as a writer: “I write to inspire readers to cherish the most meaningful moments found in daily life.” Now, that may sound like I am only writing slice-of-life pieces that rely heavily on realism. However, I find that the only way to enhance one’s view of life is to romanticize it. Thanks to Ayn Rand, I now have a philosophical framework by which to live—Objectivism. I have a clear picture of the “ideal man” (which is what Rand had set out to define in her own work), and I’m looking to get the most out of an objective world now.

But in order to “taste life twice,” I find that I must write. Rand brought together the previous romantic and realism eras in art to create “romantic realism,” which can literally be seen as (ought/romantic) to (be/realism). But I can only write when there is a desperate passion, an urgent force behind the idea. And the urgency comes easily to an atheist who does not want to miss a single moment of life. As Rilke states: “A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.” This can be felt by the reader too. My soul should be wholly invested in my work, even if my audience remains small and silent. I am only writing to those who share my values and pleading with them to hear my cries through the written word. 

My pleas are always about happiness and the various paths toward and away from its heart. Tolstoy often gets brought up when he says, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I tend to agree that there is a more specific path needed to attain happiness, while it is much easier to fall into unhappiness in any number of ways, which is why I show stories that end tragically due to unresolved errors and happily when errors are corrected. But my end goal is always to teach my readers how to be happier in their own lives by learning what to be wary of and what to enjoy in life. This desire stems from who I was as a young reader.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.

On the Reader

I grew up with sensitive parents who each dealt with their own set of mental health difficulties. While I felt their love and affection during my key years of development, by seven, divorce shook my family to its core, and by eleven, death had riven it asunder. I would never be the same again and I was forced early on into the philosophical conundrum of asking “why?” Why did my mother have to die so young? Why do I deserve this suffering? Why can’t my family get along? Why is life so difficult?

Books became my way of searching for the “why” to life. It was the only way I knew how to do research. My parents both read and wrote, and so I became familiar early on with the concept of reading and escaping and learning and knowing through the page. I learned that reading and writing were my strengths throughout school as well.

That is why surface-level stories have not interested me since elementary school, when every book on the shelf felt like a gift or a piece of candy. But today, especially with so much out there, I do not have time for stories that are simply meant to entertain—not that there is anything immoral about them. But I have always wanted to learn how to be happy. I have always read literature with a purpose in mind, which is why I take it so seriously. How do I find happiness? I took the good and bad stories as a guide for what I should and should not do in order to be happy. And to do that, I had to judge.

I have learned so much more about humanity through literary fiction than any therapy session or movie or lecture in school. By asking myself why does the character behave that way, I can have a dialogue with the writer through their story. I can walk in those proverbial shoes of another human being to discover new things about myself and my own life story.

So there has always been this fire in my belly to know—to read and then compare that created world of the authors to my personal experience. Nothing will get you further in life than being honest with yourself first and foremost, and that it what I love the most about my parents. For I think they were each brutally honest with themselves and the world they lived in. I learned to never stray from taking an honest look at myself, which is what a writer must be: brutally honest with themselves and the world they live in.

Therefore, I hope that it has become clearer to you why I do not feel I have the time to read “genre fiction” but only “literary fiction.” It is not because I am being snobbish; it is because I need answers to live. If I didn’t have access to all the classics I have read thus far, then I may have suffocated a long time ago. For, you see, as a child who had no control over my external circumstances, something had to be under my control and I needed to know that life would get better and that I could make it so.

My reading and searching and effort paid off when I found the philosophy for living a happy life on earth, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. It gave me the secular kind of morality that I was searching for and the control I craved to steer my newfound adult life into the light. She saved me from the gut-wrenching feeling I had whenever I left my humanities classes in high school but could never explain clearly. I was suffering from a public school system that rapidly became less about learning how this world works and more about how guilty I should feel for even breathing. The message of guilt only heightened in degree in college until I had to find more of a concrete link to Objectivism through the Ayn Rand Institute and all they had to offer.

High school and college life made me feel like that out-of-control child, where life was determined and I had to succumb to a fate where life was “nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes). I have felt existential dread before, but it was due to an entire educational system that, overall, refused to integrate. My supply of air was thinning out, and the anxiety beast inside of me rose up and fought to take over my life. After lots of therapy and medication and building up my adult life away from the school system, I am finally starting to feel like I am on stable ground again.

To me, good literature reveals truths about who we are as humans—from the best in us to the worst. In that sense, I agree with John Gardner who wrote On Moral Fiction. We need more moral fiction, not in the religious sense, but in the way that it can inspire and guide people toward virtue and against vice in order to attain happiness. Again, we have come to an age that no longer needs religion, but it most certainly still needs a moral code. Ayn Rand gave us a philosophical framework to live by such values but now, I believe, people need to see a barrage of examples of secular-based morality.

Sadly, people still believe that morality is inextricably linked to Judeo-Christian beliefs. But people must live according to the laws of reality or else they will die. And, again, going back to the Tolstoyan idea, there are essentially so many ways to die and only one way to live. Maybe that’s why reading books with tragic endings raises the hairs on our heads, because we are learning how to avoid death. At least, that is how seriously I take my reading and writing endeavors, and I hope you will too.

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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.