Carnal Knowledge

We couldn't understand why it was so hard, letting each other go. Somehow, this being goodbye refused to register. Goodbye, but just for now - the closing song of my beloved "Under Milk Wood". It felt... surreal, so we kept coming back to hug each other again and again. Prolong it.

Crazy to think two weeks previous, we would've passed one another as strangers.

The last 12 days or so, I've been participating in a very intense dance workshop/research project. It was crazy and beautiful and I'm still processing much of it. I'll probably keep coming back to it. If you go back through my posts during this time, a lot of them have been dance-related or inspired.

What am I doing here? I remember thinking the first morning, as I arrived. A flurry of misgiving, a dash of judging others. I'd ask that question again several times, even as the audience began filtering in last night for the closing performance. Two weeks after that first morning, my question had less to do with my misgivings as an amateur dancer, and more with my doubts as an amateur human being.

It takes something out of you, to maintain this open channel towards other human beings.

It's humbling, but also demands of you this constant vulnerability. In everything you love, there is the possibility (almost the guarantee) of loss and heartbreak. It's great courage to keep loving, to keep meeting new people.

See, you come in armed with reason. Logic. Sniggering, mean little judgment calls about people you've barely met. Haven't even met, I was talking with another dancer and we both agreed how absurd it was - to feel so deeply connected to a virtual stranger. For although the days were full of movement, we talked little. We know, still, so little of one another.

It's a different kind of knowledge, one we typically develop with romantic partners. Family members. Perhaps close friends. One where touch is not accidental but intentional. Meaningful and with no specific intent, at the same time. A brush here, a squeeze there. Before the performance, someone was saying to me how comfortable it was when we stood together, her toes on mine, forgetting who was who.

To love somebody's body is made rare and often fetishized in our culture.

To allow yourself to fall in love with the light in someone, not their words, but their looks, not their rational ideas, but with the ideas of their limbs, it's such a strange, terrifying and brilliant experience.

The two choreographers who led the workshop were studying the neuroscience of dance. What it is to be alive. How our body responds to the atoms that surround us. Because before we can respond to the great big world out there, the politics and the complex concepts, we must first respond to what is pressing against us, in our immediate vicinity, no?

Somehow, when you start looking with your body, not your mind, the world becomes much lovelier. People you'd otherwise write off over ideological differences or annoying quirks become much cherished.

The final performance was brief, only 30 minutes, but so beautiful to feel. It didn't feel like a performance, just being in a room where some of us were dancing and others were not. At the end, several people in the audience said they were, at times, tempted to join the dance. We, of course, asked why didn't you?

The thinking mind there, the part of your brain that goes on high alert and says don't. That recognizes a clear delimitation between you and "the performers". There are no performers, just people you could dance with.

I won't say my favorite moment (they all were), but perhaps the most visually beautiful moment of the performance was the spine moment. Where fifteen of us contracted, then spread out, taking on not just the shape, but the qualities of linked vertebrae. How do you relate to the space as an individual? That's one thing. But ask yourself how you relate to the surrounding world as part of a living organism. Then the room went all dark except for one circular lamp, this bright, warm ball, that passed from vertebra to vertebra.

There's a dance in the information your vertebrae pass from one to another. In retrospect, it's a wonderful metaphor for our workshop. For a brief minute, we created a beautiful, living organism together that, no matter how far spread out across the space, remained connected. That became, in the end, difficult to separate and feeling these strong, meaningful bonds to one another.

I was so happy to dance with you like this.

To know you like this. Even for a little while. It meant so much to become part of something temporarily. To meet another human being, several other human beings with this incredible openness. To just let yourself see them. Feel them. Read what they're saying to the world that maybe their conscious mind can't even put into consciousness, much less words. It was fantastic. It filled me with such joy at being.

There is, still, so much to unravel and process. I'll give myself time to see how this practice reverberates across into my writing. But for now, I take with me such a firm knowledge that there is beauty out there, even if it doesn't look like mine or isn't perhaps obvious to the naked eye or conscious mind. And where there can be such abundant beauty, perhaps there can also be hope.