Every dancer knows how much their partner matters. More than the rhythm, more than the song, more than the pattern of a dance itself, there is the one with whom you're dancing.
Without the dancer, the rest is doesn't matter. And what matters, to each dancer, isn't themselves. It's the dancer with whom they dance.
The dancer dances to dance with dancers. Each dancer dances the other dancers' dances. And every dancer knows that what they bring to the table isn't their dancing—because their dancing will mutate and shift with the rhythms and songs and patterns of every other person. What they bring is the part of them that inspires rhythm and song and pattern. Their intent is to be a dancer—but their nature is a dance.
What do you mean, where does the music come from? Where does the music ever come from? The guy says to the girl Something is on my mind and the girl says Really, what is it? and somebody in the orchestra hits a note and they sing. That’s where the music comes from.
— Morrie Ryskind
I studied flamenco dancing for a year when I was twenty, and it changed the way I see myself more than the (brilliant) course I took on existentialism the same year. What changed me wasn't the dancing, wasn't the music, wasn't the sensation of my body as more than just a burden I had to bear. It was the realization I had one day, when I lined up with half my class to face the other half of my class, and each of us looked a single person in the eye. We danced, we shifted over to someone new, we danced again.
Every time, the patterns and movements stayed the same—and every time, the dance was different. Because what mattered was the pair of eyes. Our bodies moved, but our bodies were only saying what we saw. Without words, without improvisations, we were saying something about each other, and about ourselves. The rest was just a way of setting aside the formalities, the onerous duties of language and custom, knowing when to approach someone and what to say and when to do what. All of that was taken away. What was left was a silent connection, each of us noticing the way that the same old steps, the same familiar song, turned into something new, not because of anything we did, but because of the person we were with.
And it struck me all at once: this was a dance that distilled everything difficult about meeting other people into a simple, profound act. There was no swiping right, no buying drinks, no pick-up lines, no long conversations about life and the future where the real game becomes the subtext of figuring out what's appropriate to say and what isn't. All those things I'd assumed were just essential burdensome parts of making sense of other people... well... weren't.
There was nothing intimidating about dancing, no fear that I might say something inappropriate, or that anything I said might come across the wrong way. The music we danced to was fun and sexy; if our dance was a fun dance, that was good, and if our dance was sexy, that was good too, and if each of us wound up expressing something different, that was just as good. Whatever I put out was fine, just as nothing anybody else did felt inappropriate to me. We never spoke and never touched. When there was longing, there was tension, and the tension was delicious, and the deliciousness became the dance. Either way, we kept on moving. We found new partners, and we danced all over again.
Yes, my life was nearly ruined
till I saw what you were doing.
Now I strive to keep on serving you.
Life is good, but I am better,
for I feel at last I let her go,
because I finally found the truth.
Sadly now, I see the answer:
all her life, she was a dancer,
but no one ever played the song she knew.
— The Residents, "Loss of a Loved One"
Do people struggle with anything more than they struggle with boundaries?
It's more than just the violations of time and space and dignity. Sure, there are people who don't know when they hurt others, or when they're taking up so much room that others are suffocating. There are people who define "self-expression" so indulgently that it amounts to saying: I am free to use and play with and dispose of you however I'd like, because the fact that I CAN do that, and WANT to do that, is an important part of "who I am."
On the flip side, however, you have people who are so afraid of crossing over boundaries, so afraid of their ability to have an impact on other people, that the prospect of being noticed feels to them like they've committed a major crime. I was this person, growing up: the prospect of looking at other people felt to me like I was being inappropriate, and if I said even a couple of words to somebody I had a crush on, I'd panic as if I'd committed some major violence.
I still know people to this day who feel like this, who worry over every possible way that something they might say or do could go wrong. My heart goes out to these people, because I understand that anxiety dearly. I watch people take the timidest steps towards allowing themselves to be in a room, and I watch them curl up in a ball for a week after: I unbuttoned the top button of my shirt! People could see my THROAT! Oh god, what have I done? It's hard to tell them that, not only was the thing they did okay, but they are still only about a hundredth of the way towards the first thing that could be remotely described as a "grey area", towards that place where they might at last want to proceed, not even with caution, but with a little bit of awareness.
When people talk about romance—particularly the Disney sort or the filthy kinky sort, and I mention the two because neither the Disney people nor the filthy kinky people realize they're looking for the literal same thing—I think they're looking, more than anything, for the person who will step into their security bubble and lift them out of it: the one who will do everything that they themselves are scared to do, see everything that they are frightened to admit, and permit them to do each and every one of the things they have always longed to do but never dreamt of really doing. Sometimes, they imagine being the savior rather than the one being saved—I will find someone who's perfect and I will get to tell them how perfect they are!—but the longing is the same: finally, who I am will no longer be a curse. Finally, someone will save me from myself.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
[...]
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
— T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (emphasis my own)
Existence shouldn't feel like a curse.
When it does, it's because we dimly realize that we are our own jailkeepers, our own manacles. We say that we hate our inability to do things, but of course we're able to. What we really mean is that we hate that we feel unable to do them. But we do, because, on some level, we are convinced that we shouldn't be able to. We hate our own convictions. But even deeper down, we are convinced, which means that we genuinely believe what we believe. We believe that this is true: that it would be wrong for us to do what we dearly long to do.
Yet we see other people doing those things all the time. And we don't go: Ah, these things are permissible after all! We go: Oh, so it's okay for OTHER people to do these things, but for some reason it's not okay for ME. We conclude that we're just fundamentally not allowed to do the things that other people do.
So existence is a curse. Because the only possible escape would be to tell ourselves that we were wrong, and that we are allowed to do that thing we're so afraid of doing. And who are we to dare think we get to permit such things of ourselves? Who gave us the right to decide such things? What inconceivable arrogance, to imagine we might decide for ourselves that certain things are okay?
The irony: we feel more comfortable authorizing ourselves to be prison wardens than authorizing ourselves to be reasonable or free.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes, this means that people are comfortable imprisoning each other, dictating rules, telling other people with unshakeable certainty that what those people are doing is Bad. That might come from a place of resentment, but not always: sometimes, we are simply convinced of the rules we have forced ourselves to live by. We worship them. They are our dogma.
A spiritual thinker I love asks: do you believe what you believe quietly and calmly? Or do you believe loudly, and grow angry when people challenge your beliefs? Do you smile at blasphemy, or do you seek to annihilate it? If your faith is thin-skinned, you don't have faith, you have dogma. If you cannot believe in what you believe without the world believing in it too, what you're really proving is that you don't believe.
But when some people reject their own rules, they reject them violently. They reject the idea of rules, or even the idea that whatever rules they'd grown to believe might have contained some seeds, some kernels, of truth. People who once passionately embraced some religion lose their faith and go on to become furious atheists. Or, amusingly, they switch faiths without once losing their fury.
People who were afraid of themselves "break free" by refusing to consider their own actions. They consider themselves liberated and changed. But what they fail to realize is that aggressive self-suppression and aggressive disregard for others are one and the same. Both come from an unchallenged conviction that you are more important than others, and an unwillingness to regard other people as significant. If you fear others so much that your fear makes it impossible for you to think of them as equals, you're not really prioritizing other people over yourself. You're prioritizing your judgment of them over who they really are. And in many, many cases, your "judgment" of them began long before you met them, or knew that they existed.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
— Ice-T, as appropriated by pick-up artists and the "seduction community"
The thing is, there's no such thing as "getting away" from rules or patterns or systems. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum.
In the early 70s, the feminist Jo Freeman wrote about the equality movements she belonged to, and about how they destroyed themselves from within. They hated hierarchy, hated elitism, and wanted to create a society where nobody was superior to anybody else. What she discovered, however, was that abuse and cruelty didn't magically go away when people claimed not to seek power. Instead, people came to power in new ways, manipulating the unspoken rules of the system, and became more untouchable than they'd have ever been if they openly claimed power, because now only a select few knew who was powerful and who wasn't.
Destroy the rules, and you've only opened up space for new rules to exist. And in the meantime, you've destroyed whatever order, whatever security, whatever comfort used to exist. What will people replace it with? The more chilling question is: who will care the most about replacing it, and what will their intentions be? Because usually the people who care about that the most are people whose motives are, to put it mildly, suspect.
Simple certainty is dangerous, because very few certain things are simple. There's a reason why scientists make for less compelling speakers than cult leaders, why evolutionary biologists don't have followings as vast as "evolutionary biologists." There's a reason we like the Disney version of the fairy tale. We want an answer that's easier than the answer, because the lack of an answer is terrifying. We are pattern-collectors. We need rules. And when we say we're looking for the truth, we rarely mean it. What we really want is something that sounds plausibly enough like it could be truth that we don't have to think about it anymore. For the sake of that pseudo-truth, we'll give up astonishing amounts of freedom, of possibility. We would rather be certain and miserable than risk uncertainty with a chance of happiness. And we will permit ourselves to hurt each other, when the strange and complex and uncertain person in front of us gets in the way of our simple would-be truth.
We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
— Alfred Jarry
The nature of any game is uncertainty. It is what distinguishes play from everything unplayful. Every game is a canvas; its paints are possibilities. And when we tell ourselves that the goal of a game is winning, we miss the point—because winning is only interesting when there's a chance of it not happening. The best games are the ones that make winning interesting, because loss itself is interesting and worthy too.
In the very best games, there are so many different definitions of winning that it's hard to tell who's won or lost. In those games, interpretation matters as much as playing; deciding for yourself what qualifies as "victory" becomes part of the fun.
If existence isn't a curse, then it must be this kind of game. The sort that everyone plays, but plays differently. The sort where the real game is deciding for yourself what game you are hoping to play.
You are free, not to define the game for others, but to define it for yourself—and the more you know that you're both describing your own and playing others', the easier it becomes to let yourself imagine that you're free to admit to the game you want to play, and to decide which other people have games that you'd care to join in on. There's no tension between one and the other. You are perfectly free, as they are perfectly free, and between those two freedoms, something unexpected and new starts to emerge.
I danced with people who felt something for me that I didn't feel back. I danced with people who I felt something for, and I could tell that it was one-sided. Neither mattered; both were wonderful. I let them know that I liked seeing what I brought out in them, and gave them freedom to express it, while also letting them know my own more-limited feelings back. And when it was time for me to yearn, I yearned freely and soaringly and clumsily and messily, and they smiled because yearning is beautiful and ridiculous all at the same time, and I smiled back because I was feeling bashful and excited and relieved and grateful all at once, and neither of us ever had to speak a word.
What a person has in their head is of course rather more than nine-tenths of life. Everything comes to the brain to be sorted out: sensory input, adding and multiplying figures, how to write that memo, and the need to do something about Smith's behavior. All these things pile in at once, together with the crisis on the news, so that it might truly be said that most persons have most of the world in their heads anyway. In order to deal with all these things coming in, the mind has to have the capacity to say, "What if I do so-and-so? Would that solve this problem?" Luckily it has. It has survival value. At a fairly low level it will say, "What if I turn this wretched tap this way? Will that make water run?" And this capacity, running right through to the very highest levels of speculation, is imagination. But you can see that from the point of view of survival value it would help enormously if this capacity is exercised with a lot of pleasure and in great hope. This way, the "what ifs" proceed with verve and look forward to a happy solution of the problem. Luckily tihs is true too. There is—or should be—always a strong element of play connected with the use of the imagination. People "play with ideas" in order to get them sorted out, and when the solution comes, it is often accompanied with wonder and delight. Eureka!
The irresponsibility of those writers who claim that imagination drives you mad is twofold. First, they wish to cut off the "what if" process at around the level of turning on the tap; and, second they are concerned to make it almost wholly joyless—this regardless of the fact that children are above all people who play, particularly with ideas. And I invite you to think of the kind of person who goes in terror of speculation, and then add to that a horror of delight and excitement. At the best, it is a hideously limited person; at the worst, since the capacity is in us all and has to go somewhere, it is someone who gets excitement from "What if I rape this woman? Kill this child? Trundle this whole race to the gas chambers?"
— Diana Wynne Jones, “Writing for Children: A Matter of Responsibility"
The problem with binary thinking—with either/or, good and bad, yes and no, strong and weak—is that it encourages us to choose sides. It pushes us towards a mindset where we must either virulently reject something or enthusiastically embrace it. That which rubs us wrong becomes repulsive. That which sparks anything good in us must eventually become a source of cultish, feverish love. It is not a healthy way to operate, unless you are a computer—and it is this habit of computers that drives computer programmers up the fucking wall.
At some point, when I was young and prepubescent, bacon became a meme. It was no longer a thin strip of salted meat—it was the stuff of legends, the stuff of kings, the stuff of men. Surprise fortunes were made by men who were willing to scream while they ate preposterous quantities of bacon. The ironic worship of bacon intermingled with the sincere worship of bacon, until it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. And, because this love of bacon went hand-in-hand with several hundred other memes that vaguely wrapped themselves in "ironic" ideas about masculinity and manliness that wound up being taken true, these days there is a non-trivial group of people in my country whose two favorite things in life appear to be bacon and being a Nazi, in approximately that order.
Do you think that bacon is good or bad? Do you love bacon or do you hate it? Do you feel so strongly about bacon that you are clearly powerful and strong and subscribe to my exact flavor of racist ideology, or are you weak and powerless and unworthy? The silliest binary, pushed a little bit too hard for a little bit too long, wound up being surprisingly destructive.
We have a similar binary when it comes to passive and active, object or agent.We are taught to define ourselves by our agency, to think of ourselves in terms of what we are capable of doing and what we allow to define or control us. These are important things to keep in mind! But these, too, get pushed to an extreme: to the point where anything that might impose a duty or responsibility on us, anybody who might see or think about us in any particular way, is somehow imposing themselves upon us, removing our right to be who we "really, truly" are.
Push that hard enough and it collapses—and people revert, as they always do, not to a reasonable middle but to the polar opposite, fetishizing dependence and powerlessness and loss of control. Just as those people in turn send to seek out such a fierce independence that it amounts to loneliness, isolation, and a refusal to anyone else matter in the slightest.
Sociopaths think of themselves as purely active agents, as "players" in a world that exists to be played with. They might think of themselves as objective in some way, "following the rules," failing to see the megalomaniacal way in which they alone permit themselves to interpret what those rules are, writing the game according to their own whims.
In video games, you truly do act alone, working your way through a world that exists independent from you and defines every last one of your possibilities and rights. In video games, it is not only possible but permissible to exploit those rules—and if the game's creators didn't want you doing what you do, the fault lies with them, for failing to restrict you. You, the player, are powerless to define the game, and that powerlessness, paradoxically, excuses anything and everything you manage to get away with.
An upsetting number of people think this way about real life, too, to the extent that a number of institutions and cultures are more-or-less defined by this ethos: war and politics, economies and businesses, sex and love. If all you care about is personal empowerment, then at some point, your worldview—no matter how well-intentioned—will collapse into a muddle of narcissism and outright psychopathy. At some point, you need to acknowledge that power consists, not merely of exploiting the rules, but of defining them—that you don't just play the game, you create it.
You dance the dance, but you are more than just a dancer. You are a dance unto yourself. You define how others will dance—and even when you dance the dance of others, it is the way that you join in that defines the original dance, your gravity swirling around all the others to create orbits, currents, rhythms, swaying, connection, intoxication, life.
Dancing needs no justification—and the concept of "justifying" a dance itself runs contradictory to the meaning of a dance itself. Dancing is ordered to remove tensions, not create them. It's a permission, not a test.
You move because you want to move. You dance for the music, for the people, for yourself. You dance because you can dance, because dancing never asks for a reason, because there is no reason not to dance.
When we are frightened to act, how much of that fear is rooted in the worry that what we do will define how others think of us and see us? And when we are too careless in our actions, how much do we permit our carelessness because it matters more that we "be ourselves" than that we consider others?
But identity itself is a dance: constantly shifting, half-considered, half-impulsive. When you dance, you don't worry about who you are. You make sure not to plow into anybody, not to step on too many toes, but beyond that everything happens too quickly to be worth overanalyzing. Whatever happens will change, and change again. Where you are and who you're with matters more than who you are, and both these things will shift, and you will shift along with them. You don't have to worry about yourself, or about what it means that you are dancing, or about what your dance "is." Everyone who dances with you will know your dance, and that's enough—just as you will know things about their dances that they may never know about themselves. All you need to do is dance, and to lean into others' dances, and trust that the rest will work itself out on its own.