The Art of Finishing
Why are we all so bad at endings?
What do I mean when I talk about finishing?
In my opinion, the art of finishing is a factor we must consider from the most everyday of circumstances to the grandest of life’s trials.
It can be as inconsequential as how you say goodbye to your work colleagues at the end of the day. Do you nod, bow, kiss on each cheek, give a quick cheery wave, a hug, a hand on shoulder? Or after a night out with friends, do you end with a large embrace, promising to meet again soon, or slip out unnoticed into the night?
At the end of a performance, does a performer bask in the glory of their applause, do they bow humbly to the audience, or raise their arm up in thanks to the other players, technicians and participants, even perhaps to some divine being? Do the endings of articles or stories tie everything together in a neat package, or do they leave the reader hanging, forcing them to make their own conclusions?
Finishing, at its most painful, includes the ending of friendships, which for some reason aren’t considered severe enough to cause heartbreak. They must be endured with a stiff upper lip and a painful dry nod on sighting each other, with the knowledge of all you have shared together. The end of romantic relationships are unanimously described as earth-shattering, and furnish the lyrics of poems and songs since time immemorial. Romantic heartbreak, along with death, is the most obvious and easily-identifiable pain that we as humans bond over.
I’m crap at endings.
I think we all are. On the milder side of the scale I have been guilty of leaving gatherings without saying goodbye. On the moderate, the leaving of countries and schools without an adieu because I couldn’t face the awkwardness, or pain of what that would entail. I am the stiff-hand-wave-as-I-leave-the-room guy, the saying-something-unrefined-and-ridiculous-as-I-depart person. Some find this cute, even charming. Others, not so much.
On the serious side of the scale of awful goodbyes, I broke up with my first serious boyfriend by email after six years together (there is a long complicated reason for this, but I should have done better). Worse, I was mentally absent during my grandad’s final months on this earth, because I was heartbroken over a ridiculous man (I was only seventeen, and yet…). And the worst of all worst, that my last words to someone who was about to die by suicide (unbeknownst to me) were, “you’re dead to me”. I still baulk at that. I struggle to forgive myself for these last three instances. But perhaps in my search for better endings and more graceful finishes, I will get closer to self-redemption.
I often wonder why I moved to Jerez de Frontera, the small, rather traditional town I live in. Technically it’s a city, but really, it is a town. People often ask me why I am here. I can never find a suitable way to answer. Coming here meant that I left behind any chance of a career or “making money”. I came because I wanted to study flamenco, or perhaps just “live” the flamenco lifestyle.
Ultimately neither of those things happened. The flamenco lifestyle is very intense and involves a lot of competition, hero worship, one-up-man-ship and boozing. Also, the best way I can describe how people study flamenco here in Jerez, is comparing it to how I imagine people would study neuroscience. To have a basic understanding of the art and its subtleties, which vary from town to town, village to village, the irregular off-beat rhythms and the fifty odd styles that are played, an incredible amount of time and focus is required. Not to mention a huge stash of cash to pay for all the classes and studio time necessary for rehearsal.
I have settled, for now, with the mere breathing in of the air of flamenco, hoping that it permeates through me by osmosis. The flamenco style I am most enamoured by is Bulerías, which I have written about in great detail here:
Specifically I want to learn the Bulerías of the “fin de fiesta” (end of party). Why? Because it teaches every single human who has the fortune to learn the dance to leave a room with dignity. During the fin de fiesta one dances their way off the stage triumphantly, adding their own particular flourish or personality.
The gestures are often grand (particularly in the feminine presentation of the dance) and sometimes subtle. The gestures say “I was here, I made my presence known, and now I am leaving, with my self-love and pride intact”. But it is neither arrogant, nor self-serving, because as well as celebrating one’s own presence, the dance allows the performer to connect with others. The performer and its public are working together within a mutually-appreciative framework. And a pataíta (the details of the fin de fiesta dance) done well, can be a thorough expression of the dancer’s personality.
A case study: how dancing flamenco prepares you to leave a stage meaningfully
To demonstrate this, I will share the notes I typed up after a night watching a dance showcase. It was a showcase of Manuela Carpio’s flamenco school. It took place in the Peña Tío José de Paula, a flamenco concert hall that is both grandiose and neighbourly in proportions and style. It has marble staircases, a humble, barrio-style bar, and the walls are adorned with photos portraying flamenco greats over the years.
A peña is an association of members which donate money to a venue so that it can present regular cycles of flamenco concerts. This means that it is free for all to attend. Manuela Carpio is a highly-respected, warm and jocular flamenco dancer from the famous Carpio flamenco family. She is adored and praised by the students who pass through the doors of her unintentionally kitsch, coral-pink dance studio in the south of Jerez.
At the end of the showcase, her youngest students, all girls and young women, gathered together onstage to dance the fin de fiesta Bulerías. They clapped and shouted encouragement to each member of the group entering to dance their fin de fiesta. They were all very young, yet highly skilled. It was evident that they had grown up with the rhythm of Bulerías pumping through their blood, as no one missed a beat. Many of them had been studying for years under Manuela Carpio.
Watching the way that they moved with such confidence and proficiency was jaw-dropping. They had learnt a method to express what existed within them fully and artfully. Watching it, I realised what a precious gift these kids had been given from a tender age, and it was one that I’d missed out on.
The notes I took that night are as follows:
A young girl enters the centre of the stage to perform her “pataíta”, screwing up her face, jaw thrust out, displaying a mask-like gruesome enjoyment of the dance, following her long thin arms which spin and flourish in the air. I remember being told off for having a face like that, for thrusting my chest out towards the world. I was taught it was better to hunch over and keep my frame as small as possible.
Another girl, rounded and large, with a rapturous face and lively dancing eyes I can see from the back of the hall, fills the space with herself. I can hear her laughter just from the way she dances. Her soul bounds and gambles through her spine, escaping like magic from her palms. Her face and dance is proud and generous.
The next young girl that steps up has an aquiline profile offset by a rounded moon face, austere but also plentiful. A face that you immediately recognise as being from Jerez. She dances with the grace of a swallow. She is incredibly beautiful, moving with the typical grace of a dancer, but is not afraid to be ugly. Squishing her face so far into her neck, creating multiple chins, which is a classic flamenco gesture. It is a look of ecstatic displease, as if one was smelling shit under one's nose. In flamenco, girls are taught to thrust their groin towards the floor, knees askance as if staking and rooting themselves to the ground. I find this incredibly liberating to watch.
Another girl, imperious and also dancerly, moves like a swan fighting with itself. She is yin and yang, the devil and angel. She thrusts her hands into the air, showman like, but then her artfully twisting and swirling wrists fight against her. She is worshipping the sun and casting out the devil. She has refined the art of the rapid side-to-side head movement that is a hallmark of flamenco dance, left-to-right, right-to-left, surveying her surroundings, always alert. Moving from dark to light, light to dark. When she dances she is searching inward. Her eyes are not in the room, they are thrashing inside her soul, it is from there that she gathers her power.
Something that I notice about the Bulerías of Jerez in particular is the unique way the dancers build up to a frenzy. They work themselves all the way up there, and then, just as it seems they are about to pop, blow up, and give all of the energy to the audience, they pause. They stop, and discard it to the floor, like it’s nothing.
They commence to the next part of the dance, or begin their exit dance. It’s as if they are saying, “nah, I don’t need it anymore.” It’s as if they have an endless source of this energy. That they know a secret place where they can get more of it. No bother, they’ll pick it up again later. I can imagine a British person dropping to their knees and picking up the shattered bits that had been so carelessly discarded to the ground, so as not to lose their preciousness.
They never quite reach the crescendo, and they don’t need to. They hold all of the power in their hands. I have observed this self-possession in children from Jerez, barely toddlers, interacting with other adults and their peers. It's as if they have this delicious secret, and it’s the funniest, or indeed most profound piece of knowledge in the world.
And you know that you will never truly KNOW what that moment is. The ability to have all that power in one’s hands, teasing ones public with the promise of giving them everything, until–BAM!— it is dropped to the ground. They don’t need any of it. Because they’ve got themselves and of course, their flamenco family and blood family, and hundreds of years of tradition, mixed with Roma blood and its winding trail back to the Moors and Sephardic Jews.
You realise that only you can create your own ending, and it will look exactly like it’s supposed to. It will look exactly like you. The imprint you made on the earth without ever knowing it. And that’s the secret of the art. That is your inheritance. And those of us from Northern European countries (with some exceptions) have lost our link and connection to it. Centuries of greed, exploitation and erasure of our nature and customs have done that. The noisiness of the world we were catapulted into dins the scream of our ancestors.
.jpg){kind=link}
It is a Herculean effort to find the tools which decrease the volume of the persistent societal messages that tell us: “work!”; “keep productive!” as you are not good for much else. They drown out the bellows of our soul that want us to rest, notice the changing of the seasons or begin to identify the plants and species in our local habitat. We cannot grow up if we don’t root down, they gasp up at us from inside, but we drown them out chomping popcorn, or with the hoover, the telly.
We have to understand ourselves fully to have the ending we truly want, they say. Because that’s the most magical part. And that’s what the Bulerías fin de fiesta teaches us.
And when my heart hurts because I see a friend who no longer talks to me glance at me from beneath his hat whilst he waits in the queue at the bank, I pause. I think, he has no idea how to do endings either. He wasn’t taught, or perhaps he didn’t want to be taught. He has not accepted endings, nor the rough edges of human experience. Many of us stick to the smooth grooves of human existence, hoping we will be carried off the edge of the universe and glide gracefully to our final end. We hope that we will reach a deeper sense of wisdom with age and experience.
But what if it’s just the opposite? What if wisdom can only be retrieved by crawling back into our infantile selves? Wasn’t the state of babyhood the time when we got to know ourselves most honestly and truly? Our basic needs? What made us feel uncomfortable or what made us happy? What amount or type of nutrition made us sick, and what didn’t?
The conclusion of concluding
An ending is not so much about the panache and style in which we end, but the unfaltering and messy hard stare into our own being, which helps us do the ending well. The panache comes from honesty, the fact that one has found the answer to their inner soul secrets, and has been able to channel that to their exterior shell.
We can never fully escape the truth of ourselves, so why bother to, even partially? I believe that we cannot locate an authentic ending if we don’t submerge ourselves wholly into our true nature. And when we do it will be like gliding into a crystalline sea on a hot day, the purification of the salt water gently liberating us from the dust and sweat of living.
But preparing oneself for an honest ending is hard work. For those of us far-removed from our indigenous roots it is a lifetime of work, a purgatory. It is almost impossible to ignore modern life’s distractions. We invite in the worst kind of terror in seeking who we actually are, beneath the image of ourselves that Instagram and modern capitalism has continuously encouraged us to construct. And I’m not sure what to suggest, because it is a frightening process.
But I’m going to continue studying endings as I believe they are part of a collective knowledge. I am willing to hear and listen to what you, my readers, and any other signs from the universe, have to say about it.
P.s. I was quite happy with the way I finished this piece on the whole. I’d rather not end asking for a tip, but getting support from readers helps me write material that is more genuine, less vulnerable to clickbait titles and writing “on trend” topics. How nice it will be one day to look back at what I have written and think, yes, I was writing exactly what I wanted to write.