THAT BREATHLESS PIROUETTE

“Why was I born?” Billie Holliday sings in a 1937 recording of a song written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. It was written for Sweet Adeline, a Broadway musical that appropriately premiered in 1929, a year perhaps comparable with our current one in terms of despair generation. “Why am I livin’?” Hammerstein goes on to ask. “”What do I get?/ What am I givin'?” Many a sufferer, posed with the question of the purpose of her existence, might answer, “I didn’t ask for this.” But the poet Rae Armantrout, in “Buy In,” a lightly turned lyric published in this month’s New York Review of Books, suggests that, incredibly, some of us may indeed have asked to be born.

To make that outlandish case, the poet spins a little myth. In her first lines, she comes right out and says, “Yes, we did/ask to be born.” But in Armantrout’s pre-birth world, not every soul (or essence, intelligence, or spirit) was given the choice to be born. Or there might have been some that, given the choice, didn’t choose to pop out of the womb. Nevertheless, some bodiless pioneers, presented with the deal, bought in: “Not all of us, of course,/only the first few.”

What were these chosen few—ancestors of we the living, presumably—buying into? An endless cycle of trouble and woe, certainly, “this round robin/duress://the gasp,//the gnawing hunger[.]” But there was something else that drove them: the possibility that being born into a body offered something splendid. They bought in because they envisioned that they’d experience such joys as the ecstasy of preparing for a performance. In this case, it’s dressing up for a ballet: “the way we’d put on//a corset or toe shoes/one night//and feel fabulous.”

More fabulous, though, is the performance itself—the joy of being inseparable from what one is doing, a moment of pure being Armantrout calls, finally, “that breathless/pirouette[.]”