Though I’m not immediately drawn to Pinard’s voice, I appreciate how she depicts her own reticence about expressing her secret passion. The piece opens with her five-year old self’s unabashed awe at the flying trapeze artist and turns to examine how that passion would fail to express itself throughout her life: “But it would be over forty years before I ever said it out loud to anyone, or gave it a try.” The questions guiding my reading experience form as: Why is she so moved by the image of the flying woman and why does she keep it a secret?
At first, her factual segments about the art of trapeze, while informative and interesting enough for their own sake, seem to be her method of intellectualizing her passion, as a method of maintaining distance. Offsetting this objective research, she recalls imagining herself as a bird in childhood, “that first image I created of myself as a flyer: it took shape as a small but sturdy reddish-feathered bird, not much taller than my five-year old self, and with a compact suitcase packed with a few provisions and hooked under the flexible tip of my right wing.” Yet, as her piece reveals more layers of family loss and struggles to adapt to and accept those losses, this balance between physical reality and subjective imagination and emotions depicts trapeze art as a clearly transcendent manner of coping with loss and emptiness (which she can even support by more objective research).
Altogether, her unwillingness to believe her mother is gone, her reliance on imagination to cope with that loss, and her “youthful determination to keep most things that I considered important to myself” suggest how writing becomes its own “act of flying,” a release of compressed/repressed emotions that don’t have outlet in the physical reality of cold facts. And while writing plays with the liminality of the imagination and memory, especially to cope with loss, trapeze tests the liminality of the body and of the hard reality where said loss occurs.
