Graywolf Lab

Lena Moses-Schmitt

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In the early mornings before work, I look up photos of ice skaters falling and spend long, slow minutes drawing them without lifting my pen or looking down at what I’m drawing. This is contour drawing, one of the first drawing exercises I ever learned, probably around the same time I started ice skating when I was ten. I’ve always thought of it as a game one plays with oneself, to test how accurately one can draw within these limitations. 

At first it’s awkward. Suspense builds in the moments before I can let my eyes fall to the page. I have to force myself to slow down, to take a long time drawing an experience that happens in the blink of an eye. 

If as a skater I was taught to develop a sense of where my body was in space as I fell, then in these drawings I’m also trying to develop a sense of where my hand is on the paper.

At early morning practice sessions, my friends and I used to play a game. After the Zamboni mopped the ice clean, we would lap the rink, gaining speed. When someone yelled GO! we’d all fall to the ice and slide down the slick surface as far as we could go, staining our tights with cold water. Who could slide the farthest? It was fun, but it was also a way to reclaim authority. If we could make falling into a game, it had less power over us.

I think that is what I am doing with these drawings. I draw these falling bodies again and again, until falling is normal, commonplace.

When I fell, when I was in pain or disoriented, my experience of my body resembled these drawings—jumbled, inflated or deflated limbs, as if I were sliding apart at the joints. My body stopped making sense. And because I fell on jumps more often than I landed them—I was not an amazing skater, no matter how much I practiced—my body rarely made sense.

And yet, one continuous line still held me together. The body, my hand, still has an intelligence, even if I once felt, when colliding with the ice, that all life had vacated my body.

Drawing these falling skaters so slowly, so carefully, spending a long time on the intricate positions of hands and fingers and elbows and legs, reminds me of how strange and smart the body is, even—especially—as it falls.

The mornings I draw these bodies takes place during a month that feels especially stressful. I have too many projects at work, too much going on in my personal life. My focus is constantly splintered; multitasking makes me feel I am not in possession of my mind or my personality. 

Making these restores me to sanity. The slower I draw, the better I feel. 

I want my pen to feel tactile, as if it’s actually touching the body it’s drawing, the way I used to rub my legs to warm them up before getting on the ice. It helps if I only think about one tiny part at a time, and forget what I think a body looks like. I’m not drawing a body, I’m drawing a knee. I’m not drawing a knee, I’m drawing this curve.

My father used to make me angry by saying ice skating was not a sport. He’d calmly tick off his reasonings: there’s no referee, it’s not a game played for points, it’s not objective. 

I’d volley back at him: the pure athleticism required made it a sport; the scoring system technically made it a game played for points; it’s still as competitive as basketball or hockey. I’d ask him: what’s the difference between a referee and a judge?

I sensed that him calling it “not a sport” was meant to demean it, take it down a notch from the realm of the masculine (action; objectivity) to the feminine (emotion; subjectivity) but even at the time I didn’t completely believe figure skating was a sport either. It’s not that it was less than a sport, but more than a sport. It was also an art. 

Ice skating was not just one thing; it changed and shifted and kept dodging the way I understood it. What was it that I saw? Why did I love ice skating so much when I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, make myself into a great ice skater?

Contour drawing does away with the categories of “right” and “wrong” altogether, allowing something Contour drawing does away with the categories of “right” and “wrong” altogether, allowing something surprising to occur. Accuracy—drawing the body “correctly” or beautifully—isn’t the point. I have no choice but to relinquish control, the kind of control I used to tell myself was necessary for landing a jump. 

And in the process of losing control, I might discover something about myself and how I see the world. Maybe this kind of drawing will teach me how to be myself instead of whoever I think I should be. The point isn’t perfection or even precision but seeing, touching, experiencing. 

When I realize this, it feels, thrillingly, for one fleeting moment, as if I have escaped the confines of the game.

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Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection True Mistakes was selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Her work appears in Best New Poets, 32 Poems, The Believer, Ecotone, The Rumpus, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.