The Quickening

“...a quickening that is translated through you into action.”

— Martha Graham, in a letter to Agnes de Mille

The Letter

I have known Martha Graham’s words about the quickening for most of my life.

Long before I understood them, they hung framed on the wall of my childhood bedroom.

My sister gave me the quotation when she was my dance instructor. At the time, it was simply part of the landscape of becoming a dancer — alongside tights and costumes, sore feet, counts running through my head after rehearsal, and the peculiar intimacy of having my sister also be one of the people teaching my body how to move.

The words were there.

I read them.

I knew them.

Or I thought I did.

Decades later, I am realizing that perhaps I have spent much of my life understanding something that was placed in front of me before I had language for what it meant.

And that feels almost suspiciously appropriate.

Because the insight at the center of Graham’s words is that sometimes the movement comes before the knowing.

Sometime in the 1940s, Agnes de Mille — freshly celebrated, privately doubting — confessed to Martha Graham that she could not tell whether her work was any good. Graham’s answer would become one of the most enduring statements about the creative life. She told de Mille, in essence, that it was not her business to determine the value of the work while making it. There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that moves through each person into action. Because there has only ever been one of you, the expression that passes through you cannot pass through anyone else in exactly the same way. Your responsibility is to keep the channel open.

I have carried this letter in my body for most of my dancing life. Dancers and teachers pass it among one another the way other traditions hand down scripture, and I have come to believe that is almost what it became for me — scripture from the tradition I was actually raised in, the one whose sanctuary has mirrors and a sprung floor.

But it took me thirty years to hear the word at the center of it.

Quickening.

Graham did not say inspiration. She did not say talent, creativity, genius, or even spirit. She reached past the familiar vocabulary of art and pulled out an old bodily word.

Quickening: the traditional term for the first time a pregnant woman feels the child move.

Before a face has been seen. Before the child has been held. Before the movement can be explained.

A flutter. Something moved.

The body registers an event before language has completely organized what the event means.

That is the word Graham chose for what moves through an artist.

And then another thing became obvious to me.

Of course, a dancer said it.

Before the Name

A dancer spends a lifetime practicing a peculiar order of knowing.

We move before we completely understand. Anyone who has learned choreography knows this.

A teacher gives you a phrase. At first it is almost meaningless: weight here, arm there, turn, suspend, fall, recover. Your conscious mind scrambles behind the movement trying to organize it. You count. You imitate. You get it wrong.

Then you do it again. And again. Eventually something changes.

The phrase stops being a sequence of instructions and becomes intelligible from inside the body.

You understand where the weight needs to go because you have felt where it cannot go. You understand suspension because you have fallen out of it. You understand rhythm because you have rushed it. You understand balance partly because you have lost it.

The understanding did not entirely precede the movement. Some of the understanding was generated by moving.

You danced it into knowing.

This is why Graham’s choice of quickening now strikes me as so precise.

She spent her life inside an art form where knowledge is repeatedly produced through encounter. A dancer learns gravity by negotiating with it. She learns time by arriving too early and too late. She learns space by crossing it. She learns relationship through proximity, distance, counterweight, resistance, touch.

She learns movement by moving.

And when Agnes de Mille came to Graham with what sounded like a problem of judgment — How do I know whether what I am making is good? — Graham answered from the epistemology of a dancer.

She described a movement. Something quickens. Something passes through. Something is translated. Something becomes action.

I have written elsewhere that when the noun “God” collapsed for me, what became visible underneath was not nothing. What remained was activity: coherence, relation, attraction, participation, the strange capacity of separate things to organize into something larger without ceasing to be themselves.

I began thinking about verbs because nouns kept seeming to arrive too late.

They were snapshots of processes that had already happened. The quickening is where those questions were heading all along.

Because the quickening names the moment before the snapshot.

Motion felt before it is fully understood. First the stirring. Then the recognition.

Then, perhaps, the name.

Something similar may happen in religious experience.

Not because every theology reverses some original pure encounter, and not because names themselves are the problem. We need names. Names allow experience to be remembered, shared, examined, carried across generations.

But sometimes a name that originally followed an encounter begins to precede it.

Instead of language recording what someone experienced, our inherited language begins telling our body what it ought to experience.

The map starts instructing the traveler what must be found.

My own encounters with what I would call sacred have usually moved in the other direction.

The familiar feeling in my chest when something true lands. The widening of perception when something I hear meets something I have quietly suspected. The unmistakable sense of something emerging in a room when people are attending together.

First the stirring.

Then the recognition.

Only afterward, the name.

And perhaps this is why I have never grieved when writing about the death of God.

There was nothing missing to grieve.

The knowing never wavered. The love never withdrew. The orientation toward what felt true and right went on operating the whole time, even when there was no functioning symbol above it.

What failed was the match.

The symbol no longer fit the meaning.

And when a symbol dies while the meaning it once carried remains alive, perhaps mourning is not what follows.

Perhaps what follows is the difficult work of naming again—more carefully this time, knowing that the name is not the thing.

Graham’s language stays remarkably close to the encounter.

She does not explain where the vitality comes from.

She does not say God gives it. She does not say the muse delivers it.

She says that something moves, that it is translated through you into action, and that your responsibility is to remain available to that translation.

She stands where the mother stands at the first flutter: certain of the movement, silent about the source.

Translated Through You

There is a second precision in Graham’s language that I missed for years.

The quickening is translated through you into action.

Not simply received. Not possessed.

Translated.

Translation is what a body does in any encounter.

Gravity becomes legible through falling, leaning, balancing, orbiting. Music becomes legible through a particular body moving inside its rhythm. An idea passing through two different lives does not emerge unchanged, because each life carries a different history of memory, training, injury, attachment, desire, loss.

Whatever the source of the quickening, its translation through a particular person is unrepeatable.

I do not need to know whether there is literally some universal force moving through us in order to recognize the phenomenon Graham was pointing toward: we repeatedly experience something arising before conscious authorship has finished explaining it.

An image. A phrase. An impulse toward movement. A question that will not leave. A sudden recognition.

Something asks to be followed. Then a particular body gives it form.

This gesture. This essay. This way of being. This way of teaching.

The capacity to be moved may be universal. The translation is not. There has only ever been one instrument tuned exactly this way.

This also offers a third perspective between two familiar accounts of meaning.

One says meaning is already written somewhere, and our job is to discover it. Another says there is no given meaning, and our job is to invent it.

But translation suggests something else.

Something is encountered. Someone is moved by the encounter. And something new becomes possible because of the contact between.

Meaning is neither simply found nor simply made.

It is carried between us.

And nothing is carried without being changed by the one who carries it. Maybe that is the translation after all.

Keeping the Channel Alive

For years I heard Graham’s instruction exactly as she gave it:

Keep the channel open. But my body complicates what that openness means. We do not survive by remaining permanently exposed. The body opens and closes, receives and filters, approaches and withdraws. Perhaps openness is not a state we sustain, but a capacity we preserve—the ability to become available again.

Graham herself built an entire movement language around contraction and release.

Contract.

Release.

Gather.

Open.

Return.

Contraction is not the failure of movement. It is movement.

So perhaps the practice is not keeping the channel permanently open.

Perhaps it is keeping the channel alive.

Responsive enough to contract. Responsive enough to release. Responsive enough to notice the faint stirring when it comes.

That changes what I once thought being “blocked” means. A channel can close without becoming blocked. Blockedness begins when the movement between closing and opening becomes difficult—when contraction stops being responsive and becomes fixed.

Judgment can close the channel when it arrives too early and silences the expression while it is still becoming intelligible.

Comparison can close it by turning the unrepeatable into a ranking.

Hurry can close it because hurry cannot tolerate the space before knowing. It cannot wait for the flutter, so it manufactures motion instead.

And identity itself can close it — the finished idea of who I am, what I believe, what my work is, held so tightly that nothing unfamiliar is permitted to stir beneath it.

But closing is not always a failure.

Sometimes a body closes because it needs protection. Sometimes it pauses because something has not yet been metabolized. Sometimes the interval is part of the movement.

The question becomes subtler than Am I open?

It becomes:

Am I still responsive?

Can I feel contraction when it happens?

Can I tell protection from paralysis?

Can I release when the conditions change?

Can I recognize movement before I have an explanation for it?

This is what thirty years in studios has actually been teaching me.

Breath.

Attention.

Weight.

Timing.

The willingness to move before completely understanding.

Not because the body is infallible. Bodies can misread. Bodies can become conditioned. Bodies anticipate dangers that have passed and sometimes miss dangers that are present.

“Trust your body” is too simple.

The deeper claim is that we generate information through participation.

Sometimes we cannot know what something is from outside the encounter because entering the encounter produces part of the knowing.

The phrase is not always understood first and danced second.

Sometimes it is danced into understanding.

The Quickening

And now I return to the little girl with Martha Graham’s words hanging on her bedroom wall.

I keep wanting to say that she did not understand them.

But I am no longer sure that is true.

Maybe understanding is larger than explanation. Maybe she was already learning those words with the instrument she had.

She went to class. She listened for the count. She moved. She got it wrong. She tried again. She contracted. She released.

She learned gravity by giving it her weight. She learned rhythm by inhabiting time. She learned relationship by moving beside other bodies.

And night after night, she slept beneath a sentence telling her that something would quicken, that it would be translated through her into action, and that her responsibility was to remain available to it.

The quotation did not change.

The instrument reading it did.

Maybe this is what some knowledge does.

It arrives before we are ready to explain it.

Then we live.

We lose things. Make things. Love people. Misunderstand. Begin again. The body accumulates experience around the words until one day we return to them and they are no longer the same words.

Except they are.

We are the ones who have changed.

I think that is why I am less interested now in finding the perfect name.

A name can help me recognize what I have encountered. It can help me return to it. It can help me carry something toward another person.

But then I have to look again.

Because the next encounter may ask something different of the name.

Maybe that is the movement.

Encounter.

Recognition.

Naming.

And then back into the world.

Not a straight line.

Something closer to a spiral.

Each time around, I arrive with a different body.

There may be a quickening.

It may be faint.

I may not yet know what it means.

Maybe I do not need to.

Not yet.

Sometimes movement expresses something I already know.

And sometimes I move first—and discover, somewhere inside the movement,

what I had been trying to know.

• • •

This is a working draft intended for exploration and dialogue.

Comments, challenges, and collaborations are welcome.