The swirl of a thin flounced skirt in motion like the Earth. The delicate line of the trapezius, rolling like a cord (a masculine note in a most feminine body) from the thrown back head, to the ample, muscular bottom, an equator of humming energy. Who knows what a painter’s eyes see? Degas sits in the second floor room, in the dark, watching the dancers.

What does he like better? The moments in the beginning when, preparing for the harsh eye of Madame LaSalle, each dancer tunes her own bodily instrument, en pointe to jete, the soft shadows of the studio outlining each one as a figure alone, brave in the contravention of space. Or, after, when the Madame snaps her fan, and twelve chins point up, and one leg, and twenty four arms raise in twelve arches, the circle of heaven. Does he like one, or the scene, the event?

Or not even that? Is he imagining the gala opening: in the box, eyes fixed on stage, while the chatter of educated Frenchfolk washes around like a thin gruel. And then—the lights, cutting the voices to whispers, the whispers to silence, and the soft red curtain like the flounce of a giant skirt budges, it slides. Sometimes you can tell how rickety the castings are, the way the curtain jerks and shivers as it moves, the threadbare signs, to him, of an impoverished popular aesthetic imagination, holding the mouth of its coinpurse tighter and tighter. But usually, no—usually it happens instead, the chill up the spine, the curtain parting smoothly like soft pink flesh, like the peel of an orange because it is not what you see it is what you feel, then, that renders it. So, impressionisme.

Or does he, because he is a painter, see it all? The first charcoal touches, the hints of figuring on a white canvas, here before the Madame appears. Color turns to shape with the rise of the fan, and shape emerges with all its vitality, the unstilled freedom of the brush. Stop, stop, a misstep. The irritated scrubbing out, here, the nuts and bolts of it, and the freedom is gone. The dedication to make the light in your head a visible image takes the form, always, of a sudden light, and then, the wherewithal to continue when the misstep reveals the hideous machinery behind the thing. The hours in the studio. The pounding of the muscles as a turn is executed again, and again, and again, because it is not perfect, because it must be made perfect. Shapes looming in the darkness of the mind wrought out, first by light, then, then by unimaginable work.

And at last, after untellable hours which still must maintain the illusion of ease, after blood has been shed to make a limping human thing a goddess, the light in the foam of the sea the outstretched finger of Poseidon, yes, the painting and the dancer the same, the human form straining with so much more than it has–after tears and pain and oui, oui, non,  NON, oui— the curtain moves at last, and—voici, L’art