Star for a Day

After writing yesterday about looking on the bright side of things, I watched a documentary on Rudolph Nureyev and fell into an existential hole. I laid awake for an hour last night, hearing Sam breathing next to me, while I tried to get the documentary images out of my mind. It hit close to home for many reasons.

Nureyev began ballet at age eight--considered a very late start for anyone who wished to have a career in ballet. For his whole life, Rudolph rehearsed and worked constantly, trying to make up for what supposed lack he began with. In 1963 he defected to France, while in the Paris airport, rushing into a crowd of French police shouting, "I want to be free!" I vaguely remember hearing about this when I was a child. It was at the height of the Cold War, and the fact that he was stalked by the KGB for years afterward, was brought home to us more than once. Communists could not be trusted. But that's a story for another day.

In France, Nureyev began dancing almost immediately and crowds went wild. He was a sensation. No one had ever seen anyone do the dance moves he did or have the stamina he had. It was unbelieveable. People were crazed in their adulation of him.

Watching this lengthy documentary, there were three things that struck me. First, this was a man who lost everything in the pursuit of his career. His father never accepted the fact that he was interested in ballet and eventually disowned him after he defected. When he left Russia he left his mother behind, who had always supported him. Even though he was able to speak with her on the phone, when he finally did go back to Russia it was too late. She was dying. After Nureyev defected, all his friends in the Leningrad ballet were questioned. One of them was forbidden from taking her final university exams and wasn't granted a diploma. The KGB went to Paris for one of his first performances, and whistled, threw money on the stage (to make him lose his footing), and yelled threats at him from the audience. He was terrified. They went back to Russia and published notices in the newspapers that Nureyev had been booed at his Paris debut. Then all information about him was suppressed, especially after he began doing so well on the world scene. So he lost all credibility and value in his own homeland. When he was allowed into the country in the 90s, he was dying, so it was all a goodbye. He left 7 million dollars to the establishment of a school of dance and not a penny to his family. He was a man without a country, a family, a God. And a man without inner peace. Tragic losses, all.

The other thing that stood out for me in Nureyev's story was the fact that he seemed to have very little in the way of a moral compass in his life. In my travels abroad, I have noticed that many people living in Eastern Europe during communist control, do not seem to have a moral code that I understand. Because religion was suppressed, there are not values about doing or not doing things because of God's claims on a person, or even fear of Divine retribution, or concerns for the spiritual wellbeing of the recipient of one's acts. It is a more strictly secular society than any I've seen in any group whatever. This was evident last night in Nureyev's story. He lived for some time with Pushkin and his wife in Leningrad. Pushkin was his mentor. But he didn't know that his wife slept with Nureyev one night, becoming pregnant by him. She had an abortion so her husband wouldn't know. Her comment about what had happened was that she wanted Nureyev to know what it was to feel like a man so that when he danced, it would be with more power and sensuality. This tangle of alley cat morals is distressing. Because I had always thought highly of this man's creativity and performances. I didn't know the seamy underside of his life and his fall from being on a pedestal, is thunderous.

Finally, there is the issue of Nureyev's life being cut down far too early. He had AIDS and not even his extreme discipline or physical prowess could keep him alive. I can't imagine what it would be like to try to live with this devastating disease and watch yourself slowly lose ability to perform and manage your life. Especially on top of all the other losses and insecurities that this man had to face in his life.
Nureyev was gay--a painful reminder of a man whom I once dated who had active AIDS and kept it from me. He died nine months after I broke up with him. I remember seeing him perform in an orchestra a couple weeks before his death. His respiratory rate was about 60 breaths per minute--evidence that his lungs had lost the ability to oxygenate his body properly. It was such a senseless death. So aside from my personal history with gay men, what really pained me was the fact that there was no reason for these men to die young and leave the world without their creative input. Both were gifted, neurotic, affectionate. There is a dance school that Nureyev established. There is a chamber music series named after my former boyfriend. But that is all that exists of them to this day.

This is not a diatribe about homosexuality. It is a morose reflection on lives that start out aiming high, but for whatever reason, flounder and end without a sense of satisfaction or completion. This is the existential hole for me: There are many people whose lives emerge for a short while and then fade away--for a variety of reasons: poverty, war, birth defects, mental illness, tragic accidents, suicide. What did their life mean in the wider context of life? In God's eyes? How does God judge these people? Was their joy of life for nothing? Why have they been born if this is what was to happen to them?
I realize that even in the saying of this, my assumption is that my life is on track, is satisfying, is God-directed and has a moral compass. It may just be a differing view, because maybe the lives of these performers did feel on track and satisfying.

The prayer that came to my lips last night, over and over, was, "Thank you Lord, that I never had a professional music career. I was simply not emotionally prepared for anything like the professional music world. I don't know what would have become of me." Perhaps my life would have become one endless round of performances, travel, meaninglessness, emptiness. What I do now is satisfying and feels solid. Respectable. Purposeful. Impactful. Thank God.

Perhaps some of our creative artists do make significant impacts, too. They are to look at, to humor us, to lift our spirits. So they reel onto the stage of our lives for brief periods and give us respite from the nitty-gritty of life. Then they disappear as though they were never there and we are left to wonder after the beauty they imparted for the moment that we saw them.

In the sadness of our collective losses of these shiny ones, it's a call to make my life count for something.

For what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?