You dancin'? You askin'?

https://jeremygilbertwriting.wordpress.com/2020/11/24/a-god-that-knows-how-to-dance/

As the late, great Phil Collins sang: "I can't dance"

Or I shouldn't. Or other people think I shouldn't. Or I think that other people think I shouldn't.

And so another dance. Of pre-emptive embarrassment and shame. A dance of not dancing.

Standing against the wall. Waiting to be invited.

A dance implies a body. And movement. From being in one place to being in another. And another. A God who dances is necessarily not fixed. And therefore imperfect - because why would perfection move? An unmoved mover who moves. Therefore Nietzsche only believes in a God who cannot exist - which is presumably fine with him. There are repetitions. Eternal returns. There are repetitions.

Dancing is undertheorized. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your views on dance and theory.

The first movement.

There is the dance of the single body, alone. A dance with itself. And perhaps something unseen. But heard. Felt. Salto ergo sum. You lose yourself. Which is perhaps why it has been under theorized. The point of writing is to find, to locate the self. Dancers alone do and do not know themselves. You dance to know yourself and to become alien to yourself. This is the ecstatic dance. It just is.

The second movement.

You dance alone in front of others. You dance being seen, sometimes to be seen. You dance with music and eyes. The invitation is there but never taken (in some places unable to be taken). They eyes might laugh. The eyes might applaud. The eyes might desire. But you dance with the eyes there. You are seen - with the joy of recognition and the terror of judgment.

The third movement.

You dance with another. You might see them, hear them, touch them. You move and they respond. They move and you respond. Those responses may be tightly legislated or frighteningly unpredictable. An offer is made. An offer is accepted, rejected or transformed. The point is them. And, for a moment, their point is you.

The fourth movement.

You are a body among many bodies. They might keep their distance. They might glance against you. They might slam into you with force. The rules are the rules and by being on the floor you must both make and submit to the rules. Like molecules in a gas. Stochastic. The bodies move away from you and you are alone again. Back where you started.

We could talk about skill. The routines learned in dance schools. Surveiller et plier. These focus on precise geometry. And there is value in these routines. We make machines of our bodies. And then there are fleshy dances. Unco. Dances that ooze across space or flail like weather.

Sometimes we might be dancing or fighting. Action movies are movies with song and dance routines replaced with fight scenes. It is a tragedy that we never got to see Fred Astaire and Donnie Yen duet. If only John Boyd had spent more time on the dancefloor than in the cockpit.

Our bodies dance, possessed by ourselves.