The Missionary versus the Sweetheart position

St. Augustine of Hippo 354-430 AD cried out that  “too late have I loved thee” (his God).  There is a small temptation for me to say that about coming out, discovering dancing but I will not say that.  He also said “What is time?”.  Why did these things happen now compared to decades ago.  Who can tell.  I believe it was  Carlyle   who said blessed is the person who has found their life’s work.  How many of us find their calling very early on in life and run with  a  career for a half century?    Sexually we are supposed to be fixed, static from adulthood   until death.  Too bad for society,  humans are not quite so linear,  and rigid.

Last night I was  doing the Merengue and Hustle with a dance instructor and ended up in the “sweetheart” position.  Essentially side by side the dance partner,  arms  intertwined voluptuously as the 19th c. Times of London would saith.   The “joy of the actor” is what I felt and experienced yesterday evening.  I saw it  in the face of my teacher, not because I was Nureyev secundus  but because she wants to give back to students.  What a beautiful sentiment and way of living.

Below an image of Rudolf Nureyev I came across, dated 1961.   Reminds me so much of Marlon Brando and James Dean of  that era. Want to post something about him soon, having made an executive decision to claim him for the bi community.  A total gut feeling without any other basis, but am expecting to find more bi people in the dance world than in the general population. Last night when we were dancing as a class, being paired with hitherto total strangers the teacher said quite correctly, that it is awkward sometimes being so physically close to someone you had never met before, especially in the closed position. What is intimacy?  Why does dancing feel so fulfilling to me? Is it because the entire person is completely engaged in the exercise, that you summon all of your powers of focus, concentration, attention on the task at hand.  There is some kind of intersection of fun-play-creativity going on. There is this constant iteration of learning the new steps, making mistakes, mastering it, feeling a sense of triumph and it is amplified by the close contact with your partner, who is struggling-triumphing along with you.

The daily pentathlon  for my soul  and  psyche is to blog, read, play the piano, dance and run.  We shall see what happens.  Life sometimes gets in the way of living.  Or is it the other way around?  There was this extremely eccentric and idiosyncratic Canadian golfing legend Moe Norman who just for fun  would golf a hole completely backwards as in tee off with his putter and then on the green use his driver to putt.  Remember the film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ from 2008, loosely based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel of 1922, where the person ages in reverse?  I know two other bi people who have this sense that they are extremely young having just come out a short time ago.

In my stymied bid to find an image I liked illustrating the ‘sweetheart position’ in dancing, I came across this image of dolphins.  I have always liked dolphins (who doesn’t?) .  They always cheer me up and put a smile on my face.  To me they   convey a sense of play, fun, intelligence, altruism, mischief (in a good way) . After re-reading the post I realize how terribly disjointed it is.  Like our (sexual)  lives.  All I wanted to say is that for me everything is new and that things are NOT what they seem.  I never had as much fun as I thought I should-would-could have in bed (missionary position and otherwise).   A dance instructor asked me yesterday if dancing has been as much fun as I thought it would be?  Short answer is Yes.   Longer reply  is that it has far exceeded expectations,  by several orders of magnitude in so many realms.  It has been healing, fulfilling to a huge degree quite unexpectedly.    Sex-Romance-Relationships  have been a disaster  as an adult for whatever reason.  At this point I don’t care whose fault it was.  A black hole.  An exercise in entropy, futility, frustration.

Lastly, I want to write something soon  about the greatest male dancer of the early 20th c.  Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950,  photo above) who strikes me as   bi reading  about  him via wiki.   I  hope  to escape his  tragic fate.   He was “obsessed” by dance and then later succumbed to mental illness.

Just like everyone else, only moreso

I think it was Jackie Mason (the Jewish comic from the borscht belt) who quipped that “Jews are just like everyone else, only moreso.” When I went to my first bi social event I was understandably nervous but  at the end of it concluded “Bi people are just like everyone else, only moreso for me.” That is, identifying as one,  I felt  understood at a deep level and  that i understood them.  Have been reading some Ovid lately (sometimes in bed upon awaking, which makes me think of how Rene Descartes got a dispensation to study in bed from the authorities at the university, because he was afraid of the cold Swedish winters, which proved to be well founded as he did eventually catch a  cold and die, but I digress) and there are some wonderful stories in which a person is changed into an animal form  (for example  a cow or a horse) but retains human feelings but is not able to communicate with  people, their words come out as a  low or whinny.  It is all quite poignant and  powerful writing in the Metamorphoses.

When I came out I told some people that I was still the same person only better, improved.  What if I came out to myself but nobody else knew I was bi?   If i could not communicate who-what I am as in the characters  of  Ovid’s tale.  How dreadful!  What was so great about the good old days anyways in this regards?  My birth into this new-different-same-better existence was pretty much co-terminus with telling other people.  For me, I HAD to tell people to make it real, concrete, and not some mind-game I was playing inside my brain.

Above the story of Echo and Narcissus.  I love that story as told in Ovid.  It is related that both sexes were attracted to Narcissus making him some kind of potential bi hero. But he truly overdid it on the feeling good about yourself scale. In a way my old self, pre coming out era was akin to Echo, in that I reacted to people, events, situations instead of being more my own personal agent as it were.  And you can see how well that served her, very poorly!  Maybe my enemies might want to title my biography: From Echo to Narcissus in one  lifetime but personally I am very far from being an egomaniac in love with my own reflection.  A truly sublime merengue-hustle group class tonight at the dance studio with my instructor.  I keep pondering the body, eros, sensuality and   non verbal communication  in terms of sex and the act of dancing.  How are they the same, different, what overlap is there?   Used to joke with chums about golf vs sex, what would you rather do. We were like 19 th c. golf mad barristers in the city of London (England),  passionate about the links game.  Tonight learned the “sweetheart move/position’  in dance.

Below, watched Swan Lake from the Kirov on you tube and enjoyed it very much. Just under 2 hours.  As a kid I saw this performed, goal now is to see it again as an adult.

Shine!

Definition:   Popular in Latin dances such as mambo and cha cha, these are movements where the partners are not physically connected.  Often the partners dance similar patterns while disconnected or they act out a piece of music interpretation.

Yesterday I did my first “Shine” in dancing.  It was a lot of fun but also tough and challenging to learn so many choreographed moves in a short space of time, especially when played to music and done quickly.  Once we did the entire piece,  you  felt like you had truly done something.  A sense of accomplishment. Before we did the shine as a whole class, the teacher said “even if you screw up, never stop moving your feet”. What great advice for living!  After the first run through, she was especially pleased that no one (out of  15?) had stopped moving, nobody quit. Bravissimo!   She said the point was to have fun, and project attitude (as in confidence,  poise, assurance).  Later, during the practice party I asked one of the teachers what I should be paying attention to watching the other dancers  (who were all to a person far better than I, who am  a beginner). She said NOT to pay attention to their steps-moves but rather how graceful, silky smooth they are and how they project-carry themselves on the dance floor, and how they (the men) treat the ladies. That it was about believing in yourself.  It seems ridiculous to point out how this can so transfer itself into  daily living.  In the image below I particularly liked how the cityscape is worked in, as in life is throwing yourself into the polis because as Aristotle observed, we are social animals.

Talked to one person  who was new to one type of Latin dance but had done other Latin dances for years.  She had always been too intimidated to come to the practice parties, so this was her first one.  I  was thunderstruck!   She was a more than adequate dancer. Much more and was nervous  about attending this function, where she absolutely fit in.  I who was a trillion times (at least)  her inferior, was somehow there last night (had maybe 9 dances over 2 hours with different women) .  I must be more courageous than I realize or a holy fool too dumb to know I do not belong.  The teacher who knows my skill level had encouraged me, so I thought  if they  believe it is appropriate, than I shall come.

This is quite different for me from my previous self who would have so gingerly (if at all) moved on this issue. Now, I throw myself in and even if I fall flat on my face (which I did not)  the important thing is to participate.  I think of the scene towards the end of the film “Into the Wild” when the Emile Hirsch character (Christopher Johnson McCandless in real life I think), dying, discovers  that  just having an experience is not enough, no matter how grand, the crucial thing is to share it.  He was so obsessed by having  these pure solitary encounters with nature that he forgot about other people.  It took me forever in life to inculcate that lesson.

Saw my first “Casino Rueda” dancing yesterday, which was a  joy  to see.  Someone described it as a Cuban form of the country square dance to Latin music.   There was a lot of switching partners, and a leader calls out certain movements.  It looked like a lot of fun.  I have NO idea if there is an essay out there waiting to be penned about the evolution of dancing from the communal to the individual, as witnessed by the rise of the waltz in the early 19th century, if that reflects society’s  change from more communal to the individual.

Ever since coming out, my confidence has been spilling out into all manner of things.   Yesterday’s shine was as a group, but usually it is performed individually on the dance floor.  We are definitely not in Kansas any longer my friend, leaning against the wall trying to avoid the spotlight, attention. Far from it.  As Jason Walton said to the Baldwin sisters as they served him breakfast in bed, “it’s fun to be fussed over once in a while.” I need that . You need that. We all need that every so often in life.

Above, I have loved  french toast ever since I was a kid. Came across the picture and thought sure why not! How charming that something essentially so simple (eggs-milk-bread-butter) can taste so wonderful.

Loved all  the star-type images  in the post,  with their subtle change  of colours, the sense of movement, fluidity,  action.  The opposite of my previous static existence that was all too  monotone.

When I was looking at some images via Google of “shine” I came across this.  I know someone who could and should  shine in life but they do not.  Far from it. Their existence is in a downward spiral.  They are not like me with the ‘carpe diem’ attitude but are a stick-in-the-mud sort.  Part of it is being in a relationship that is a dead end that has had some physical abuse, but mainly verbal abuse  in it.

To end:  These colours below reminded me of the bi flag with the bright light of a sun-star in the middle.  It is our time to rise up and shine. A tall task given how invisible we are.

Mister 95%

Malcolm  X  (a  hero of mine) once in his stump speech would excoriate the black man who tried to “pass” (act) as white, stating that white people would still not accept them (because their skin was still  dark) and many people in the black community rejected those people (for totally different reasons).   He would carry on that “you can’t be white and you don’t want to be black, because you cannot accept yourself.  You are not this and you are not that. You are mister in-between and ain’t nobody want mr. in-between”

Minister Malcolm speaking to the inner city negro (as they were once called in polite society) of the day in Harlem is relevant right now in the queer community because if you don’t accept yourself,  good luck getting others to  put out the welcome mat for you. When I came out,  my levels of anger, wrath, rage immediately dropped dramatically.  I may never truly figure out why, and at present I do not care, just happy it happened. When I took up dancing, two weeks ago my levels of lust went down enormously overnight.  On that score,  I have a better handle.  There is something about engaging the whole person,  “movement with and around  other people” is a phrase I like.  Told this to a friend and he was shocked, expecting arousal levels to skyrocket.  My sense is that the eros within is being channeled and focused like never before.  It is not repressed or suppressed.    I  still  very much want to roll in the nuptial bed with both genders but that aside, I feel my sexuality being expressed in a good wholesome way.

Am much too new to dancing to be bumping, grinding it like some old pro.   Remember someone whom I respected a great deal state that lust is really an immature emotion.  All the seven deadly sins would fall under that rubric I suspect.   Wrote about a beautiful lady, that I would rather go dancing with her than make love to her.   That is a big evolution in feeling, thinking, longing shall we say.  Call it the joy of the actor.    In the presence of your beloved, what do you want to do?  Please, this is no manifesto to become a castradii, a eunuch. There is a time for everything under the sun.    I am so much into the fullness of life, the expansiveness of it. That is where I am at.  Which is why I picked these images overflowing with colours of every patina,  of people doing many steps, styles.  It makes sense how I have taken to dancing like a fish to water.  Things bubbling to the surface, now that they are allowed to.   I must have kept a lid on stuff before coming out.  Am not convinced “it gets better” as the slogan goes, but do feel a sense of “it is OK!” to be who-what you are.  I am not a vampire wanting everything.

Tomorrow a ginormous day of dancing;  salsa class,  a lesson and then practice party for 3 hours.

The Marseillaise of the heart. The forbidden dance celebrates it’s bicentenary this year.

I would NOT have guessed that Lord Byron would be against the Viennese Waltz, but he was. He  disliked  what he called the selfishness of the dance what hitherto had been a communal experience.  There was so much moral opprobrium originally attached to it.  That it was going to lead to the downfall of civilization, what with the “voluptuous intertwining of limbs”. The dance that was once the reserve of prostitutes and adulteresses was reaching the royal courts of Europe in the early 19th century.  Wiki weighs in on this subject:

This action also required the dancers’ bodies to be very close together and this closeness also attracted moral disparagement. Wolf published a pamphlet against the dance entitled “Proof that Waltzing is the Main Source of Weakness of the Body and Mind of our Generation” in 1797.

A lovely version for your edification.

To understand why Quirey says “The advent of the Waltz in polite society was quite simply the greatest change in dance form and dancing manners that has happened in our history”^[4] we need to realize that all European social dances before the waltz were communal sequence dances. Communal, because all the dancers on the floor took part in a pre-set pattern (often chosen by a Master of Ceremony). Dancers separately, and as couples, faced outwards to the spectators as much as they faced inwards. Thus all present took part as dancers or as onlookers. This was the way with the country dance and all previous popular dances. With the waltz, couples were independent of each other, and were turned towards each other (though not in close contact).

Above is more wiki. Usually I am pro-community and against the atomization of life.  In 2014 I do not think the waltz (in any of its variants) is considered edgy, radical,  the gateway dance to moral decay.  Perhaps bisexuality will go through a similar social acceptance as the waltz.

Played the piano today at the seniors’ home for the first time in a year.  I had been playing somewhat regularly when a dying man shut me down.  Not wanting to create a ruckus, I ceased and desisted pronto. . He died.  I am still alive and will resume playing.  One of the ironies of that situation,  is that when he died shortly afterwards he was lauded like a lion as a friend and patron of the artistic community, except when someone under his own nose wanted to bring some joy to the elderly.

Above love this abstract representation of the waltz.  Feel like I could write a book about change, fluidity, switching sides, the observer effect as it were in life. We so desperately want to nail down life, to have it all figured out neatly, wrapped up in a pretty bow when it is something we cannot control as much as we want to.  Our bodies, sexuality, mind, relationships all over the place are in flux. We simply have to embrace more dynamism, to trust it will work out for the best and not micromanage things into hysteria and bedlam.  What launched me onto this entire bi adventure was just one day casting fear to the wind and it started with a throwaway sentence.  How long have I been terrified, afraid of dancing? Ever since I was a teen? 4 plus decades of being petrified in that realm.

 

 

D stands for Dancing, Death and Deanna Durbin

Played the piano at the hospice today and my dog Abbey sat down on the carpet nearby for a while.  Had a dance lesson today which was fantastic downtown and I learned the waltz.  Instantly understood its appeal, allure, elegance.  So all day since then I have been thinking of the Blue Danube waltz by Strauss.  It is so graceful, sublime and beautiful. Just like my troika of female dance teachers at the studio.   It is astonishing but true I have been dancing for exactly two weeks and have learned (beginner level)  8  different dances.
The Foxtrot, Merengue, Bachata, Salsa,  Rhumba, Latin hustle, Waltz and Paso Doble (the bullfighter’s dance, which is only danced in competition,  not socially but is  considered a MUST at weddings in Venezuela, which means I am set  if I find myself in Caracas at  a wedding).

As you may remember, after I had my very first lesson I scooted to the palliative care unit to see my relative who was named after the famous actress Deanna Durbin ( a war time baby, when Ms. Durbin was at the height of her fame).

Today  I visited her first with my mother and then danced.  I will never have a more grateful and appreciative audience ever for my piano playing. I told my dance teachers, you will have better students  but not  someone  more grateful and appreciative than yours humbly.

Saw the film “HER” tonight and hated it.  I want my 2 hours back that I wasted watching this junk. One line I did enjoy was how we are all 13 billion years old  (age of the universe). Do not know why NOW, i feel time is running out, time’s a wastin’.  Why at this moment in time? Perhaps it is maturity. What it has galvanized me to do, is to live. That is a plus.   Socrates said that life was preparation for dying.

At the hospice played Fur Elise by Beethoven,  Franz  Schubert’s  Ave Maria and Greensleeves.  They are all  completely majestic  pieces of music. It was hard to keep a dry eye actually.  I did  not totally succeed that way.

I cannot figure out if dancing is cheap or expensive. What I have gotten out of it thus far has  been ginormous.   When I  run now,  find myself pondering the different steps, styles, beats,  of each dance.  The entire person feels engaged.

The poet Kahlil Gibran had a line about how death is in your bed when you are eating at your table.

I predict that dancing will be for me in my post coming out life, what running was for me over the last  3 plus decades. A passion, focus, enthusiasm.    From coming out (early August) until approximately Christmas I was cultivating the soil, preparing it, nurturing it  and now I am starting to see results,  growth.

Wanted to end this post with a cheerful lovely image with a riot of colours.  I want to  write something soon about the dance that was called “The Marseillaise of the Heart”.
How is that for a teaser, to keep the long suffering blog post reader returning.  Suffering, because it took me so long to figure out how to have proper spacing with paragraphs.

Beauty

What was the dance that was once known as the “Forbidden Dance”? What was the dance style once upon a time fit only for adulteresses and prostitutes?  Answer at end of post. ***

Alfred North Whitehead  (1861-1947) the great English mathematician-philosopher once mused that the purpose of life was to experience beauty in all its form.

Below, the ever useful wiki helps us out:

Rayonnant rose window in Notre Dame de Paris. In Gothic architecture, light was considered the most beautiful revelation of God.

A local church had a sign up I liked:   “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”

All great art is to educate, edify and entertain.  And so it is withmy blog posts (I have no illusions that I am succeeding, but it is  the goal, what I strive for)  Dante Alighieri would say why are you looking at the ground when you should be looking at the stars. Did a google search on ‘beauty’ and came up with a quadrillion pictures of women with a beautiful face  preening as if they were shilling for beauty products.  Amusing in a pathetic way. That is so incomplete, superficial,  as to be laughable. Right up there with a search for Homer and you get a billion images of Homer Simpson.

Once you accept yourself, then others will follow.  It is much more fun, pleasant and enjoyable to be around people at peace with themselves compared to people who go through life on a slow boil, a cauldron of seething anger buried just below the surface.

What would happen if being queer, any part of the LGBT spectrum was completely accepted by society? For starters I would have to pen posts on slightly different angles.

Above  the beautiful Grace Kelley in the film “Rear Window”.  A friend (F) and I play a game trying to decide who is the most beautiful actress of the 20th c. and after much deliberation we were unanimous  it was Grace. Other honourable mentions were Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman.  As an aside I once went to Monaco and drove the streets all twisty, narrow,  winding where she died in the early 1980s. I could appreciate the circumstances of the car accident. But I digress.  I have no idea if the Roman Catholic Church is going to canonize Ms. Kelley but the point is, she seemed like a genuinely decent human being underneath, from within. It showed. It glowed.

Above is Cupid and Psyche from ancient Greek mythology.  This work of art is simply stunning in its simplicity and elegance I think. It is too bad people are watching American Idol instead of reading about this stuff but it has been this way at least since the Roman playwright  Terence played to a mostly empty house in ancient Rome because there was a new trained bear act in town.   This sculpture reminds me of the ‘longed for kiss’ in the story of the adulterous lovers Paolo-Francesca in the Divine Comedy as is told in the Inferno, Canto V by Dante.

  Post coming out I am version 2.0 I suppose. Definitely new and improved. Not sure if there will be another “great leap forward”  (always loved that phrase from Mao by the way). You would expect me dear gentle sweet reader to pen something about the novel-film “The Picture of Dorian Gray” just about now would you  not? What I will say is you get the face you deserve by the age of 40. Why? As Mark Twain said, the lord may forgive us our sins but our nervous system never does. Stress on the inside manifests itself on the outside.  Hardly some insight but bears repeating. I know someone from the gym who is losing weight. I was completely oblivious to that, but what I had noticed is the very different countenance, disposition of the person recently. So much more cheerful, happy, upbeat. For too many decades I was a real Debbie Downer. Now I shall make amends.

Liv Tyler in this film is exquisite as is the cinematography of the Italian countryside in the summer. Certain aspects of the film overflow with life, especially the large family meals that are shared with an abundance of food. Beauty is to challenge oneself and not give in to the path of least resistance.  Even if you fall flat on your face (unlikely scenario) trying something outside of your comfort zone,  that   is better than sitting at home alone eating munchies watching dreck on the boob tube.

It is too bad on such a sublime subject I was not able to soar like the Lord of Highest song, perhaps the Muses were still asleep and my inspiration was substandard.

After almost three dozen blog posts I may have figured out how to have proper paragraphs with spacing.   Wondrous!  Thank you for your patience.

*** the Viennese waltz, which this year celebrates its bicentennial anniversary.  Yes my dear, it was once considered scandalous,  an ‘obscene display’  because of the ‘voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance…’  (so saith the  Times of London in 1816).    It was considered immoral and sinful because people touched one another compared to previous types of dances where people danced around each other.  Egadth!

Homo Erectus

What do running coaches, Ovid, Dante Alighieri  and the early Christians all have in common? They thought we should be “stand tall”.  Upright.   Faces to the sun.  Erect.

It is a litmus test   whether you see humans as flawed wicked beings or  not.

Is it  the  Willie Stark  template  in  the Robert Penn Warren novel “All the King’s Men” that “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption” that resonates with you?

And there was plenty of that in the history of the church. for 2,000 years in the Roman Catholic tradition and certain Protestant strains.  Do you think people have it too soft, easy, that they are guilty of thinking too well of themselves.  There was no kneeling in the early Christian church.  No grovelling was allowed.  Unhappily  the mass evolved into a heavily penitential rite full of so many mea culpas, mea maxima culpa, supplications galore, breast beating.   Christ confronts wicked, rotten behavior head on, he does not rationalize, make excuses, evade but essentially says stop that! Mend your ways, sin no more and now go.  There is catharsis,  liberation and not an eternal    time of wallowing in self pity.

What I have thought for so long is that the  bigger problem in the world is with self loathing, self hatred.

That to me, does much more harm, evil than the notion of excessive self-love.

I keep coming back to what a theology professor said about homosexuality (today he might have said ‘queer’).   Is it like being left handed (as opposed to being right handed, which most people are) or is it akin to having a crippled and withered left hand?

There is someone I know who has  a lot of self love,  is poised, confident, assured in life and also has a tremendous amount of love to give as they waltz through life.  I wonder if the two  are related.  How often is it said about someone that they hate others and then we conclude that they probably hate themselves most of all at the end of the day.   If constantly flagellating oneself produced positive results we would have had utopia on earth a long time ago and then we could have read Thomas More’s Utopia to see how close his conception was.  I enjoyed reading that book so much by the way.  Obviously no such thing has happened.  What I am all for is a truce, a peace with the inner voice tearing myself down, ripping into my being.    A friend said to me recently when i was in a great mood “Isn’t life great?” and I replied, “let’s not go crazy with optimism just yet.”  I am more than willing now to meet the universe half way.

Above,  saw Jake Bugg in concert once and he was great. Check him out. Amazing he has so much talent and so young.  The Bob Dylan of the midlands (England) is what the British press on Fleet street have christened him as.

My apologies kind and faithful reader for such a disjointed post.

Years ago I formulated the mantra that Life is movement. Movement is life.  Yesterday quite fittingly I added in people.  Movement with people is healing. I must learn more about dancing as a healing art, as therapeutic,  as a restorative act.  A big  part of the entire coming out process is owning your story, telling your narrative, admitting your history. Communication   to oneself and to others right?  I feel more whole and complete with each person I have told.  Filling in the jigsaw puzzle of life.  Aside, did a lot of those growing up with my pa, a rare happy childhood memory.  Dancing, especially  in the  learning process is such a  place  of being vulnerable  (as in making mistakes and feeling like a fool, then you realize it is not the end of the world)  overcoming them, mastering the movements,  feeling comfortable with it.   And with persistence, practice, dedication comes success and triumph.

“Success comes before work only in the dictionary.

In other words practice practice practice.”

A question well formulated is half answered. – William James

What do women want?

What does Quebec want?

What do I want?

I was in a Greek restaurant in Paris in the spring of 1982 and someone said life is all about goals. One must set them. What the hell did I know at that tender young age?

I was in university, I was asking questions, I was questioning authority.  Which seems like such a fabulist, fantastical  notion given today’s emphasis on fast tracking your career from kindergarten on.  I had a sibling who was forever saying she was not old enough to read Kafka (because I was reading the Castle, which I loved) in high school. I had the opposite issue going on,  of reading Plato etc. in university and opening up the proverbial  can of worms, a Pandora’s box (before Pandora became an internet  music sensation and no longer an ancient Greek myth).   Once the existentialist tube of toothpaste was squeezed out, I could never pretend to look at life the same way again. Once I came out, I was changed permanently.

Personally I think this is the way to go, a life well lived but then again, I have had lots of moments over the decades of trying to fit the square peg of my being into the round whole of society. It never worked!  A quadrillion iterations later I can fully attest to that.

I am like Don Vito Corleone in the garden (Marlon Brando) of the Godfather film, talking to his son Michael (Al Pacino) saying that he has lived his life and has no regrets because  he refused to be a fool, to be a puppet on a string, held by the big shots of the world  (the colourful Italian word pezzonovante is used, which translated means a 90 caliber,  that being a very large gun).

I do not try to dance better than anyone else, I only try to dance better than myself. -Mikhail Barysnikov. 

 

I got my dancing shoes  on and am ready  for life.  Bring it on.   I can handle anything that comes up because I fought the hardest battle already, which was against myself.

Saw that quote (in red above)  and loved it. That is me. That captures what I aspire to do, to be. Not just in dancing  but in all of life’s realms, spheres, dimensions.

The image and words below  made me smile when I saw it because it is so rich in allusion.    I mean, dancing has captivated and captured me on such a large scale,  yet the learning of it is broken down into the tiniest segments. I started off the blog post with the biggest questions (at the top).   The answer my friend might very well be broken down into the smallest parts of one’s life, that added up, cumulatively bring forth the answer.   It is fairly rare one gets the chance to run into a burning house to save someone or rescue a pet.  Life does provide an almost infinite number of interactions when you can choose to do the right thing or be a selfish prick about it.

Why why WHY must life be played out on the zero sum game axis so much? It is so juvenile, worthy of the sandbox when Johnny cries to mommy that someone else’s sand castle is bigger than his. Waah.  Stupid possessions that are as fleeting as a beautiful  white puffy cumulus cloud floating by in the beautiful blue sky, that is enjoyable to look at for perhaps 5 seconds.  And just about that real when you think about it.  Idiotic status symbols that separate us from ourselves, and one another.  Read once that life should be lived as if you are at the beach, going into the ocean to get a pail of water. More than enough to go around for everyone.  That which matters truly is not finite but infinite. There is a great inexhaustible well to draw upon  and from for the that  which is important.

Sex and dancing go out on a date together

What is the essence of dancing? I will not even bother to ask what is the essence of sex, because I might as well set off in search for the Holy Grail or ask what is the meaning of life. I am fascinated lately by the intersection, overlap,  of the two though. Last night as careful readers of this blog will recall your most faithful servant had the time of his life dancing, with 15-20 women he had never met before at a latin dance club. Suppose for the sake of our long deep thought experiment, I instead had an evening with just one person (and the gender doesn’t matter) and there was some romping in bed. One crucial difference I think is that dancing is fun, play, re-creation, an act of creating anew again whereas between the sheets there is performance anxiety. There is!  The mind is in overdrive on this subject: Am I happy, am I satisfying the other person and on and on and on. Exhaustingly so.

Personally I think sex should be a lot more like dancing. Spontaneous, improv, free flowing, now this, now that. Instead of the programmatic, linear,  the sexual syllogism,

IF p then q that Ludwig Wittgenstein might love.  How fatiguing just conjuring it up! Unless you overdosed on viagara your lovemaking won’t last 5 plus hours a la my dance outing yesterday. The only enjoyable lengthy sex I have ever had was necking on a sofa with a woman when we were both 20, in love and were extremely happy to do just that listening to music on those old fashioned turntables where you had to get up and chance the lp record because the needle got stuck. We did not care! There was such an innocence, charm, naivete almost to it.  That kind of spirit animated me last night on the dance floor, doing the salsa, merengue, bachata, rhumba for hours and hours.

Dancing pretty much requires the community, the commonweal, the common good whereas sex is a very private matter, unless of course you live in a fascist area of the world where religious zealots wan to impose their sense of morality onto your union in bed. I do not think anyone feels dirty, ashamed, guilty for dancing where sex breeds a quadrillion psychological neuroses.  Saw the film “Philomena” tonight and the same kind of insane fanatical religious impulses at work in fearful nuns a half century ago are what motivate other religious maniacs to condemn dancing.

The fear of intimacy strikes again!

From wiki on the advent of the Waltz in Vienna in the early 19 th c:

The dancers would lift their dresses and hold them high like cloaks and this would bring both their bodies under one cover.

This action also required the dancers’ bodies to be very close together and this closeness also attracted moral disparagement.

Wolf published a pamphlet against the dance entitled

“Proof that Waltzing is the Main Source of Weakness of the Body and Mind of our Generation” in 1797.

But even when faced with all this negativity, it became very popular in Vienna.

Plus ca change and all that…