Only One of You

Martha Graham’s words to her friend Agnes de Mille have been passed hand to hand among artists for decades. They speak to a fear that precedes any algorithm: the fear that our work might not matter, that what we have to offer could just as easily come from someone else.

But Graham locates something in the body, in the singular fact of your particular existence in time. Not because you are special, necessarily, but because you are specific. The “vitality” she describes isn’t talent or genius. It’s the life force that moves through you, shaped by your history, your breath, your particular way of being in the world.

When she warns “if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium,” she’s not making a mystical claim. She’s stating something plain: no one else occupies your coordinates. No one else has lived your hours, read with your eyes, failed in your particular ways. Whatever comes through you carries that mark.

This isn’t quite reassurance. It’s closer to responsibility, or perhaps an invitation to stop waiting for permission. Machines can make many things. Graham is pointing elsewhere: toward whatever is trying to move through you that hasn’t yet found its way out.