anything to dance like water

In response to this.


I find it a frustrating when people say, "I took a dance class, but I'm not any good." We wouldn't expect to have decent handwriting after studying it a couple hours a week for a year, but somehow dance is supposed to be different.


I have a theory about why this is.

Grace is when you belong in your body--when the conscious you and the physical you--all of it, not just brain and eyes and hands--are one. It lives in our breath, which acts on whole body movement, reflective of emotion and subject to conscious control.

So we can all Feel grace--feel how it's supposed to be, in our own breath and bones. When we hear that music on the street, our lungs and hearts are already responding, sending messages out about that Supposed To Be, but somehow the limbs and shoulders and hips have been left behind. . . because we've taught them how to sit still in class, but never how to move again. Busy with our brains and hands, we never taught our bodies how to write.


If you are serious about grace, start with two years of yoga and ballet, focusing on technique and breath. At maybe six months in, add hip hop or African, and movement analysis--focusing on Head-tail.

After two years you will have begun. :)


A favorite dancer, of late: here.
Photo is from here.

control freak

I don't think of myself as the kind of person who constantly wastes herself on petty arguments, but possibly I am. This comes up because I often hurt people badly without understanding how or why. Lately, attempting to approach such an insoluble problem, I've noticed a definite common thread: boundaries.

Of course, basically everything about human interaction can be boiled down to boundaries if we aim for it. These are the questions that try everyone; what's mine and what's yours? What do we have the right to do to each other? Perhaps most essentially, what is the just way to negotiate the grey overlap of our conflicting interests?*

I was mulling over this problem in the library today--trying, as I often do, to find something relevant from somebody else who had already thought it over. Since I was looking for a personal psychological level (instead of, say, just war theory), the best I could find was an unexceptional self-help book called "The control freak." Browsing, I came upon this: someone is a control freak whenever they care about the topic at hand more than anybody else involved does.

There's an important insight here, but I have to disagree with the formulation. Of course differing values have to be factored into the equation--but the way in which one asserts a greater attachment to a given outcome can be right or wrong. Perhaps, ultimately, whoever wants it more will win--but we don't all have the same threshold of desire that will push us into some invasive, obnoxious, or questionably ethical realm of tactics.

In the realm of personal relationships, there's always got to be some agreement about what's fair--about what actions are called for by given circumstances, by given levels of desire. For whatever reason, it seems that I'm blind to any number of these social agreements which make things possible.

I want rules to be fair; I want language to be precise; I want authority figures (and others, but especially anyone with power over me) to understand me, respect me, and make sense. These are not usually separate problems. In general, people do not care very much that language be precise, and as long as they are not effected personally very much, they are willing to accept rules that are not fair.

From my end, I often don't understand what is supposed to be embarrassing. I often don't understand the nuances of social grace, that protector of boundaries which keeps people safe, and I really don't understand people's deep attachment to the status quo.


All there is to do, really, is keep watching, reading, trying to figure out where everybody stands. . . and maybe it's more important that I understand the rules than it is for most people--because ultimately, in almost all situations, I'm going to be the one at the table who cares more than anybody else.




*Or put differently, the entire question of ethics is a question of boundaries.

Streetcorner ballerina

Today was an altogether new job experience; I started work as a Sign Holder.

I'd thought that this would be a straightforward matter of selling my body to the market in a whole new way, but no; not at all. There's much more to it. Perhaps this wouldn't be so if I weren't such a perfectionist, but here we are.

You see, there are people in all those cars. People who are bored, hurried, tired, stuck. Waiting, at the light. Captive people, who will expect a fake and tired smile, half hearted sign wiggling, whole hearted efforts to avoid eye contact. They will watch me count the minutes. We could all be zombies together, I supposed, and I would still get paid. . . But I am not a fan of Terrible.

So it goes something like this. I walk; sign held aside, arms moving adagio, third and fourth. I am listening to well tempered clavier on guitar without an ipod, feet pointed, tracing, articulating; torso lifted, ever so subtle the epaulement. I am open, projecting, concert hall virtuoso making sparkling eye contact with every passing car. At the change of the light I return to the corner and hold the sign out like a barre, doing a few rounds of exercises while the audience returns again.

And they watch; they more than watch. My favorite expression is on the faces of the ones so clearly delighted it can barely be contained.

After an hour I can't hack the precision for ballet. I try African, ballroom; general overplayed goofiness. They stop watching; some give the ultimate insult, too cool to make contact, eyes resolutely ahead. I am tired. I wonder why the coffee shop doesn't put just their advertising money into sponsoring community events in the arts, and then remember--this is not expected of me. We are all used to be zombies.

It seems a little elegance and calm, warm-wrapped in irony, has clearly been the order of the day.

The little isolation that could

As a matter of resolution, I'm announcing the finish of what I started, and giving a bit of update on the "I'm isolating myself" announcement I made awhile back.

It was: useful, and not very secluded. I learned some important things about the relationships in my life. . . figured out some important things about myself. Was not very isolated, really--ended up being chalk full of exceptions till I gave up--but it all came out in the wash. :)

In case you were wondering. . .

Should I believe in God? Does this matter? I somehow need to return to my previous ethical core in so far as the God question is concerned; the only thing is to live in a way that, God or not, you can die unashamed.

How much other Marx is there that supports my idea that a re-conceptualization of the working class is one of the fundamental problems—maybe the fundamental problem—of modern Marxist theory? Also, what exactly does Marx mean by intercourse? And is this idea of self-activity explored in detail anywhere else? And how does this relate to Nietzsche?

Are the pre-socratics simply full of bullshit, or am I unable to appreciate them due to my lack of perspective? Also, is there some radical insight about the human brain to be had from the fact that they, like modern physics, consider the universe to be composed of a single changeable thing? Maybe this is just a misreading of modern physics? From my interactions with physicists, they do seem to have a much clearer understanding that everything they do is a guess than everybody else does. . . (by “the pre-socratics” I mean Thales, and maybe Anaximander. . I have just started.) I am wary of Occam's razor. . .

What things should I value? If I can answer this from myself it will then conveniently cover the question of “which things do I value?” as well, of course. . . I can tell you which things I like, but—and this grows out of a lot of recent conversations with Greg—if you just chase what you like, what you want, you are nothing but hunger. It is only by will and consciousness that we might become more than pure figments of nature. If I behaved in a way to make the things I like generally easier to get, it would certainly look ethical, but ultimately it's just self-interest. Maybe I'm ranging towards hedonism. Maybe that's ok.

Relatedly--

How does one place appropriate value on other people without getting screwed over by them?

There's a distinction that a lot of people will make, but few with any kind of clarity, between different kinds of pleasure. John Stewart Mill points out that people happiness is better than pig happiness, but nowhere that I'm aware of does he discuss, in detail, exactly why. What I'm even more interested in is the difference—if there is one—between the satisfaction that comes from satisfying a basic hunger (food, books, sex) and an ethical one (say. . . justice. For people who aren't you.) If you want justice more than you want food, you aren't giving anything up by devoting your life to justice. In this context is the pursuit of justice any different from hedonism?

Unrelatedly, I just have to say this; Marx is amazing. More on that later.


Anyway. . . so it's lonely in here, but not too unstable. The main thing I've been feeling for the first little bit is this tremendous sense of control over my time. . . and also a sort of faint underlaying current of terror.

What an excellent start. :)