They used to tell me that life is like a dance. You sway and shimmy to the music of life and artfully make your way through to the other side. Grace, passion and beautiful expression your answer to the darkness that threatens.
Old is this darkness. The fear sailors must have felt on the shores of Ithaca on the eve of another journey in the days before they knew the world. Can you imagine coming home with Odyseus after twenty years of war, sorcery, monsters and hardship? Can you imagine how, having survived the unknown, that you must venture forth again at the request of your master and king?
Yes, the darkness is all around us still. Ignorance, aggresion, re-education, genocide, mountains of skulls, hunger, thirst, apathy, injustice everywhere. Evil haunts us still and we must sail familiar waters in order to guarantee our own small survival.
And you are supposed to dance. You are supposed to look to your art for the light that will show you the path through the haunted woods.
I can't do it anymore. Life is not a dance. Art is not how I shall save myself from the grasp of evil and temptation. Sorry everybody. I have tried. But it is now clear to me that the only answer to some problems is to kick it in the crotch.
Yup. I'm going to have to fight sometimes. You can keep dancing if you want to. I can't hear the music. I shall wrestle what I need from life. If I have to, I will bloody noses and break bones. I am not above hitting someone in the throat if I have to.
Play time is over.
2 comments:
Just a thought: is dancing is always escapism? Have you tried dancing the tango or the rite of spring?
I think dancing can be a grim assertion of the way it is.
I knew a man once who was in college in the 1950s. He was a dancer, which in the 1950s, meant he caught even more grief for being "one of those" and limp wristed and wussy and pathetic and less-than than happens down here today. Until one night, he was walking home from rehearsal when he saw a woman being attacked at her car. His athleticism, dance training, and physical strength gave him the skills he needed to ward off the woman's attacker (and scare the ever living s&%* out of him) and save the day.
Sometimes dancing is the training we need to go kick some ass.
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