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I Went to the Ballet for No Reason at All

By Sarah Stodola

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During college, I went through a years-long phase during which I preached that everyone's life should be ruled by reason. Emotion only got in the way. Emotion was there to trick us out of applying reason. Just one interesting outcome of this is that I would break up with boyfriends based on this assumption, breaking my own heart along the way, with full awareness of what I was doing.

It doesn't make any sense to me now, even though I was so convinced of it then (I have a few short stories written on the topic that no one but me will ever have the misfortune of reading). Because eventually I grew up and I went to grad school and I learned a bit more about the realities of the world. I became, for one example, intimately acquainted with the theory that leading up to and during WWII, Germany and Hitler were the epitome of the dominance of reason. Strict rationality. They created a society that was completely structured, completely organized, completely heartless. Who needs a heart, after all, when you've got that kind of rational intelligence.

I think this is a slight exaggeration. Hitler's hate for Jews was surely rooted in something non-rational, after all. If the Nazis were being wholly rational, they would have dismissed only the Jews who were not productive elements of society and kept the scientists and successful businessmen around. If they were being completely rational they would have gotten rid of everyone who was not a contributor to progress, regardless of ethnicity. But the fact remains that after the decision to rid the world of the Jewish race was made, the ensuing plans were carried out with impressive rationale. Reason dominated Germany in the 1930s, which turned out to be a very bad thing, indeed.

These days I see that I only dismissed emotion because I didn't understand it, and anything I didn't understand I felt was something that shouldn't be relied on. If you couldn't decipher something, you definitely couldn't trust it. And so I didn't trust emotion, or give it much credence.

The funny thing about emotion, though, is that you can't send it away. Your reason can tell you one thing, but you feel a completely other thing. Tried as I did, emotions stuck around, and they seemed to only grow stronger as I grew older. My rationale on rationale wasn't working, if you will.

The tension between reason and emotion is nothing new. It is one of the oldest sources of philosophic contemplation around. The Enlightenment grew up in the 1700s around the notion that through the application of reason, progress could be made that would benefit all people. The Enlightenment, though, gave way to Romanticism, which gave way to Realism, which gave way to Modernism and Postmodernism (These are fuzzy lines, of course), or some such timeline of thought. It seems, in fact, that in a way Postmodernism is the final renunciation of the struggle between reason and emotion. People have been trying to solve the riddle for centuries, to no avail, so they finally decided that such efforts are passé.

Its also seems that the people who are most successful in this world are the ones who find a balance between reason and emotion. That balance is not the same for everyone, which is why there is no simple solution to the dilemma. Some people thrive on emotion. Some can’t handle it. Some don’t like to overthink things. Some people can’t stand a life without order. I don’t know which of these categories I fit into. It used to be one, I suppose, and now it’s another.

I saw The American Ballet Theater perform Swan Lake last week at the Met, and it was one of the most sublimely beautiful things I have ever seen. And it occurred to me that this is final proof that reason alone is not the only thing that matters in the world. The reason I know this is that there is absolutely nothing rational about ballet, and I would despise the person who tries to remove it from the world. The stories in ballets are not only hopelessly dreamy, they are also absolutely secondary to the performance. For the most part, there is no story, which for the record doesn't seem very rational. There's music without words, so in a way the aural part of the performance can't appeal to reason, but only to our sense of what simply sounds beautiful. And then there’s the visual aspect, which is similar to the music because the dancers aren’t saying anything with their movement, they are only conveying emotion. One might be able to make an argument that the ballet’s marriage of sound and movement and synchronicity appeals in some way to the sense of reason and order. But I don’t think that could ever explain why anyone likes the ballet (or anything else which is sublime without reason - Swan Lake is just a personal example). I don’t know why people like the ballet. I don’t know why that particular sort of movement is beautiful and other sorts are unsightly.

It something that I don’t understand, but that I know is a good thing. It’s a leap of faith I probably wouldn’t have taken five years ago.

Reason is still important, of course. But what good would it be without its better half?

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three