Friday
Of the many stories in the 2021 Olympics, perhaps none caught the attention of American audiences more than that of Simone Biles. The incomparable gymnast who was expected to sweep the gold medals found herself beset by the “twisties,” a condition where a gymnast loses air awareness during a routine. Although a shadow of her former self, however, Biles was still able to come back and win a bronze medal on the balance beam.
The final line from Robert Frost’s poem “The Oven-Bird” comes to mind: What are we to make of a diminished thing?
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Yes, Simone Biles 2021 is to Simone Biles 2016 (and Simone Biles 2017, 18, 19, and 20) as mid-summer is to spring. One to ten, to use Frost’s scoring system. The highway dust is over all.
Or as Frost puts it in another poem that makes reference to Adam and Eve’s fall,
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
In this case, gold sank to bronze.
Yet there is something deeply moving about the oven-bird as he reminds us of our mortality. Percy Shelley writes, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” and as Biles fell and stumbled, she somehow became more real. I therefore found myself thinking also about Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea tetralogy, where she grapples with falls from perfection.
First I thought of Ged, the apprentice wizard in Wizard of Earthsea. Recognized early as a wizard with much potential, Ged is enrolled in a wizarding school. While there, however, he is baited into a dangerous wizarding contest—he opens a portal to the world of the dead—and almost dies. The chief wizard of the school sacrifices his own life to give Ged his, but afterwards the wizardry that came so easily and naturally to Ged must be learned the hard way.
I thought of Ged’s labored progress as I saw Biles struggle to win a bronze medal, foregoing the fabled dismount that bears her name for a safer move. For his part, when Ged finally returns to his classes, he is no longer the star:
The boys he had led and lorded over were all ahead of him now, because of the months he had lost, and that spring and summer he studied with lads younger than himself. Nor did he shine among them, for the words of any spell, even the simplest illusion-charm, came halting from his tongue, and his hands faltered at their craft.
Eventually Ged does regain some of his powers—and an Olympic bronze medal is nothing to be sneezed at—but it’s not the same:
Thenceforth he studied the high arts and enchantments, passing beyond arts of illusion to the works of real magery, learning what he must know to earn his wizard’s staff. The trouble he had had in speaking spells wore off over the months, and skill returned into his hands: yet he was never so quick to learn as he had been, having learned a long hard lesson from fear.
The darkness that Ged has unleashed into the world is his own shadow side, and I wonder if Biles has been striving for ever new heights of excellence to keep her own darkness at bay. Biles hinted at the scars left by the sexual abuse of the gymnastics medical coordinator Larry Nassar, now in prison. Ged, fleeing from his darkness, is able to come to terms with it only when he faces up to it and calls it by its name, which is his own. At that moment it loses its power over him. Perhaps Biles needs to do the same.
As to what exactly this would entail, perhaps Tenar in the next book of the tetralogy offers a model. In Tombs of Atuan Tenar, not unlike some gymnasts, is taken from her family at an early age and brought up to be the high priestess of an ancient religion known as the Powers of the Earth. Yet even as she is worshipped, she is the virtual puppet of the priestesses who, like USA Gymnastics, run the show. If Tenar is to be her own person and live her own life, she must break free of them, which she does with the help of Ged.
Which means that she is longer a worshipped princess. To be sure, she could live an aristocratic life in the port city of Havnor, but she instead chooses to go into the country, where she marries a farmer and has children. Her life there is simple but she achieves a depth that would not have been possible as a princess.
I’m not saying that Biles should do exactly the same although some kind of retreat seems advisable. But as with both Ged and Tenar, we see new potential in her as a result of her travails. Like tennis player Naomi Osaka, she is learning to speak to issues of mental health, which run rampant within the athletic community. She is holding USA Gymnastics to account so that future gymnasts will not be subjected to abuse, and she proved to be a good teammate, getting out of her teammates’ way so that they could shine on their own.
There are other ways to be a wizard and a priestess. What initially seemed to be a diminished thing can still dazzle.
