A Brutal Dance - Topic of my 3Quarks Column Monday

If I can get it finished to my satisfaction I will post a piece on Monday from my memoir written using the framework of momentous or embarrassing dancing incidents, of which I have had very many.  A snippet here: I will link it up to 3qd on Monday morning

From my autobiography in progress “My Life in Dance – a Motional History of my Body”

I wish to set out here my own experiences with dance as honestly as good taste will permit.  I have a body, one that is a little succulent and that moistly disinclines when bidden to perform arts of great strenuousness.  It is not a body apt to move all that prettily.  For all of that, I have tried to bend it to my will, commanding it often enough to skitter across the floor in a rhythmic and frolicsome fashion and I have witnessed its failure with displeasure.  Though I can leap and skip and jump and hop, the sum of these gyrations don’t seem to add up to dance.  However, in perverse inverse to my skill, dancing has been a component of several of my more arresting developmental moments.  I relate one here.

Home is born in motion

(I wrote this a while ago, but was getting nostalgic for it...so reproducing it here)

Leaving home is a violent act, because walking is a violent act. Walking violates a stationary calm and announces, "this place does not satisfy my needs anymore", or, "having served its purpose once, this place now bores me". Walking derives, anciently – phylogenetically – from motile carnivory. It is rooted in impatience – the primordial impatience with waiting for morsels to waft on by. Motility is the ancestral condition. Life was born on the move. Flagellated, ciliated – gliding, and lashing – permanently unsatisfied and desirous. Motility is the characteristic act of animality. In their evolutionary procession, animals squirmed, wriggled, pulsated, swam, slithered, and later, lurched, crawled, leapt, hopped, flapped, flew, swarmed, brachiated, knuckle-shuffled and then most recently arose and walked away. Not the chosen option: repose is abandoned. A singular spot is forsaken. Beasts leave home to prowl and stalk, to kill and dine. Pursuing other options, bathed in the sunlight, were animals enduring cousins in the kingdom of plants. Left behind also: sessile brothers, animals hedging their bets by fiercely equipping with lures and tackle and macerating jaws.

A fragment on José Martí: indirect reflections on action

In the hierarchy of José Martí’s values, action comes first.  In his notebook he writes: “Before assembling a collection of my poems I would like to assemble a collection of my actions.”[1]  Movement is a favorite term for him; “movement” he claims “is contagious”[2] If much of the action of his life is occupied with revolutionary agitation, political organization, and in the end, armed struggle to achieve a democratic Cuba, little of this action is directly reflected in his verse.  In fact, Roberto González Echevarría notes the near absence of politics and love in his poetry[3].  This is an odd claim, however.  Stanzas drawn randomly for any Martí volume are in fact fully flavored with love and politics and violence. “Yesterday, at the art show,/I saw her, and yesterday/My heart from me flew/After that woman to follow.”[4]  Though the section then takes a darker turn [“On the grim earth for the weary/Grow neither violet nor thorn”] it is clear nevertheless that Martí, the somewhat notorious lover, is writing as himself, not in the name of someone else.  The poems have a visionary tone; the stanza that follows on the one just quoted is the one in which he predicts his death. (“Don’t in darkness let me lie/With traitors to come undone:/I am good and as the good die/I will die face to the sun.”[5])  Marti is a man of movement, and in his verse the movement is crystallized, and in that crystal the action is reflected upon.

[1]  Allen, Esther, ed. Jose Marti: Selected Writings. New York: Penguin, 2002, Notebook 5 73

[2] Ibid., Notebook 5 73

[3]  Ibid.,  pxxiv

[4]  Marti, Vesos Sencillos Translated by Manuel A Tellechea [1997] XXI, 71

[5] Ibid.