A Beach Side Dance

The night is cloudy but the air is crisp. It’s a typical mild June night. The ships at Queen's Quay are gently sailing across the water. Their red and green disco lights glimmer in the darkness. Caribbean music reverberates with the energy of staccato beats and the occasional hollers. A group called “Jazz Cubano” is playing at the floating stage just beside HTO park. There must be at least 10 members on the stage, and all of them brandish warm smiles and big instruments. They start out slowly with a big sound, but soon the crowds of people are up and dancing. I get lost in the crowd and see a dog sitting by his lonesome in the midst of the dancing couples. I bend forward to allow the dog to sniff my hand. His wet nose gently touches my fingers, and I gently stroke his head. For a moment, I feel a kind of connection with the dog that I could not feel with the dancing strangers.

Why did I come here tonight? What was my motivation? It was certainly not to dance. Dancing is not the thing that I enjoy. I suppose I came here to relax and to observe. I reflect on the total situation. I am practicing not attaching to any particular situation or scene. I don’t really wish to engage. But I am asking this question: for countless millennia, we engage in this sort of dance. The partners meet, they laugh, they caress, and they disappear. Sometimes they come home together, and sometimes they part ways afterward. I feel my steps gently sinking into the sand beside the boardwalk. Why do they do it? Why dance? What does it mean for people to synchronize their motions for a brief period, and then disappear back into the crowd?

 A child is sitting alone there, making a sandcastle. She smooths her palms across a speckled plateau of sand.

Dancing represents, for me, the way in which the mind creates its object and zeroes in on it, only to find that the mind is really discovering itself. It is not really anything new. It is a part of its own nature. We create this dance continually. We keep pushing to see how close we really are to nature, to people, and to the universe. But when the dance dissolves, we are left to realize that it is a creation of mind. We spin, we project, we romanticize, but what is the romance about? What is it about our partner that is fundamentally missing in ourselves? We strive to fill that supposed void. But soon we look deeply and wonder: what is the cause of all this commotion? Life is a balance between allure and resignation. We are called out from ourselves, then discover we are more than we think is ourselves, and then become disillusioned that the other is not permanent. The other is a wave in the ocean. And this allure keeps going and going endlessly, until we become aware that the other simply calls us to our own fundamental being. The other invites us to step outside of the shell of defenses and see something that is just being, and has nothing to do with status, concepts, and tight deadlines. Though it appears that the other is inviting us to merge with them, in reality the result is a greater realization of ‘just being’.

This morning, I was reading an essay by Aldous Huxley, in an anthology called Do What You Will, called “The One and the Many”. The essay talks about how Western cultures have tended to gravitate around this notion of monotheism, and has, in doing so, rejected the diversity of experience, passions and emotions. There is an interesting tension that Huxley describes. On the one hand, modern civilization could not have existed without the structured sense of time and rationality that monotheistic cultures tend to lean toward. On the other hand, dogmatically adhering to one way of being ends of alienating and repressing other ways of being, including the sensuous aspects. Huxley argues that people lose the basic connection with their being if they only stick with conditioned ways of thinking and relating to the world.

While I agree with what Huxley is suggesting, I think that the problem stems from the fact that Western cultures sometimes don’t know how to approach desires. From a psychoanalytic perspective, desires often represent disowned, ‘dammed’ energies. Instead of lingering to figure out what kind of space a desire invites into the mind, the tendency is to simply funnel off the energy of desires into diversions. One way of looking at it is to be mindful and ask, what is the unity that desire points to? Right now, I crave that object as though it were separate from me and had a quality that I want to embody. But what happens if I simply refrain from trying to capture that object (or devour it) and see what the desire is trying to tell me? What if I befriend the desire itself and the sense of lack that it signifies, instead of trying to satiate the desire to get rid of it? This friendly relation to desire might open up areas of me that I never realized I had before. Perhaps it could mean a greater tolerance for frustration, a deeper observation of suffering, or being able to empathize with the desired person , for example, rather than trying to possess that person. In this way, one needn’t fear passions or emotions. One can perhaps stay with them long enough to become acquainted with their unique styles and energies. Doing so might transform these desires by aligning them with a broader perspective on my interrelation with others. For example, feeling anger, I might be able to be more patient with the complex reactions I might harbor toward a person, rather than desiring that these energies be somehow different. In addition, those energies no longer appear to be different from the rigid self I uphold.

References

Huxley, Aldous (1929), Do What You Will.  London: Chatto and Windus.