For a Man to Dance…
It doesn’t come naturally, or at least it didn’t to me. It may have to do with my Anglo-Irish heritage, but maintaining a rhythmic pulse was always associated with terror of the vilest pedigree until only recently. It was perhaps the fear of embarrassment or failure that instigated my phobic response, yet those were fears I was capable of overcoming in other outlets - say public speaking - at a much younger age. No, there is something different about dancing. It is raw. It oozes from the soul. If you try to fake it, well…for me at least, it shrivels the heart.
Alcohol of course came on to the scene at a certain point and it helped. I’ve flailed and spun like a Sudanese dervish at many a hedonistic affair, but it was never more than a taste from the higher chalace. I wanted to know the feeling I got when I watched ‘Billy Elliot’. The feeling I got when I played sports and didn’t suck. The feeling I got when Newcastle United almost won. Eventually I found it. I found honesty, a gateway drug in my dancing career. Honesty brewed in a pot of self-awareness, but not the suppressive type, but the type that puts you and your body in the same place and where past and future cease to exist. It can hurt to gaze at one’s eyes in the mirror and see a creature that knows so little about itself, but when those dancin’ shoes start whirling - the truth of the world brims over and will drown a man in its honey. This feeling can be found in many places, but to dance with aplomb tickles reality. It means connecting with humanity and embracing it.
Defining what it means to dance is full of pitfalls. I mean, apparently even bees dance, but where our words lack, the mind knows. I encourage every man to seek this light. Success and failure are irrelevant - the quest for enlightenment supersedes all else.
“Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eye are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye.”
oh, and I’m not a poof. -kerb
1 year ago