May 25, 2004

• I used to dance…

  I am not dancing today.  I woke this morning thinking about
  dancing.  Yesterday, walking was problematic.  By
  midafternoon every muscle I used was spasming each time I used
  it.  If I lifted a water jug the arms and shoulders would go rock
  hard and
  unresponsive.  If I took a step, the calf or thigh or both would
  seize up.  I gave up on keyboarding and the PS2 controller after
  making a series of spastic mistakes and earning myself a persistent
  burning sensation through hands and arms, across shoulders and the back
  of my neck.  I crawled in bed with a book
  and gave up early on page turning, just went to sleep. 

  There are neural sensations associated with the spasms.  Most
  people would call it “pain”.  That’s judgmental and defeatist, so
  I just call it a sensation, tell my body I got the message, massage
  away the sensation (yesterday, the massage would create new sensations
  in cascades) and go on.  But I resist all temptation to dance.

  I used to dance through life.  A decade ago, I’d clip my Walkman
  onto my belt and dance while working in the garden.  I didn’t
  plant a garden this year, nor the last, nor the one before that…. A
  lot of the time now, I stumble and fumble through life, but at least
  I’m alive.  It sure beats the alternative.  The body balks
  and fumbles, and the mind is not always as sharp as it once was, but
  there is still some function there.  Life goes on.

  In my twenties and early thirties I danced for a living.  I
  hesitate to say I was a professional dancer because that brings to mind
  (my mind, at least) a theater, a chorus line, or corps de ballet. 
  In one of my past lives I did work in a corps de ballet, but not this
  time around.    I danced topless in tittie bars.  I
  bared my breasts in California in the ‘sixties, in a bikini bottom and
  white go go boots.  My stage was a narrow box next to the
  jukebox.  After I got out of prison in the ‘seventies I worked a
  couple of bars in Oklahoma City, where bare nipples are taboo and I had
  to wear pasties.  Obscene things, those, unnatural, uncomfortable,
  uncool.

  
  I could never have been a great success at that work.  For one
  thing, as with my writing and my living in general, I dance for myself
  primarily, not my audience.  My boobs
  are not big enough to make me a “great” topless dancer (cosmetic surgery? NEVER!), and my style of
  dance was never
  really suited to the milieu.  Oh, I can and do bump and grind when
  the urge strikes me (and a song like Led Zep’s “Black Dog”, can really
  bring that out), but my dancing style is like Isadora Duncan’s: 
  natural, flowing, not pole-humping.  This pic I found online is
  Lori Belilove, of the Isadora Duncan Foundation for Contemporary Dance, doing The Spirit of Isadora.  When my body is being cooperative, that’s how I like to move.

  The body is being only minimally cooperative today, so I’m writing
  about dancing, and not dancing.  I came over here from my bed to
  vent a bit of physical frustration, and found a crop of comments to my
  “Heresy” blog to respond to.

  Greyfox
  was home for a brief visit yesterday.  He did his laundry and mine
  and spent a little time at the computer.  His comment, in part:

  “On the sexism issue, I was taught that it goes back to pre-history. I
  mean, back then, when any normal person bled, they tended to die. And
  here are these weird soft men, bleeding every damn month, and not
  dying. And as if that weren’t bad enough–every so often–for NO
  apparent reason–they would swell up and this small person would come
  out. No wonder men hated and feared them.  Then there’s the circumcision issue.”

  I honestly don’t know where circumcision fits in that whole business,
  and I’m not going to pursue it.  Genital mutilation is one of my
  husband’s obsessions, for some reason.

  Ren said, again in part:

  …well well, I’m hurt   I asked you to blog on religion a year ago and you wouldn’t. 

  I definitely like that Pelagius dude…and have long, long believed
  that Yeshua’s message has been bastardized by the church. I also don’t
  believe that most of the “quotes” of Jesus, [same same], bear much
  resemblance to his real words.  Again, just more man-made crap. Legends
  and parables, just as any “religion” or culture have used to explain
  the unexplainable since the beginning of time….I don’t like St
  Paul…not one bit.

  As a slightly different slant, I don’t believe that Jesus suffered
  on the cross either.  That is not to say that I don’t believe that he
  was executed, I do.  But I don’t believe that he felt pain or that he
  suffered [this, from recently reading an article on “The Passion of The
  Christ,” because he “got it”…he knew that we aren’t bodies….and had
  no guilt. I’m fairly convinced that without guilt, there can be no
  pain.

  Shit!  You had to go and remind me.  Insofar as I have
  any religion at all beyond my gnostic awareness of divine guidance (and, pointedly, not Gnostic with
  a capital G–just as Greyfox and I practice shamanism, not Shamanism), I follow some of the tenets
  of the Urantia Book. 
  It teaches against proselytizing and says we should not attack
  another’s faith, not say anything to take away from, but only add to,
  someone’s faith.  I know I’m skating dangerously close to
  sophistry when I differentiate between faith and belief and go on to
  attack beliefs.  I always make an effort to do it on the basis of
  knowledge, not opposing one set of beliefs against another. 

  I must disagree with the contention about pain and guilt.  I
  see no causal connection between guilt and physical sensation, and
  suspect that there is some magical thinking or other superstition
  behind that contention.  Suffering, on the other hand, also has no
  real, inextricable connection to “pain”.  Buddha said that pain is
  part of life, but suffering is optional.  Having freed myself of
  guilt, and being well along on the way to transcending suffering (two
  different things but both connected to “enlightenment” and the practice
  of universal unconditional love), pain
  is still part of life, though now only a fleeting sensation, a physical
  warning to beware
  whatever’s causing it.  As the unnamed physiology prof of one of
  my correspondents said, “Pain is a negative response to a positive
  stimulus.”

  What the Urantia Book says about the crucifixion
  
  might interest you, Ren.  In part, it says that the
  quotation, “…why hast thou forsaken me?” was not as often
  interpreted, an expression of the Master’s despair, but rather his
  recitation of Judaic scriptures as a distraction and diversion from the
  pain.  If I recall correctly, that one was from Job.

  In her unique, inimitable way, Melody managed to ridicule and confirm St. Ambrose’s contentions about women, all at once:

  *low
  maniacal chuckling* So basically, we women are just so damn sexy that
  we MUST be evil. The part of my mind that is flattered by this notion
  is the “lead” that I’m trying to purify in my experiments. WHOO…and
  all that talk of bondage and flagellation is makin’ me horny.

  At least pipsqueak (“A little in the deep end today…”) didn’t say off the deep end.

  My own quest to transcend belief entirely is still in
  progress.  I have made some progress, enough that it can be
  irritating or discomfiting to have someone who has not begun such a
  quest either state his opinion as fact or characterize my
  knowledge as belief.  No one who has not done it can understand
  the process of questioning every one of one’s own thoughts, examining
  their origins, eliminating denial and delusion….  I no longer
  kid myself.  When I want to
  believe that something is true, it is in those terms that I think of it
  and talk of it, if at all, and usually I just recognize such a desire
  as bullshit and drop the whole thing.

  …and I shall dance again, I think.

  As recently as a few months ago, I spent some of my scant and
  precious physical energy on a bit of dancing around my living
  room.  Once last summer, during my latest remission, I went to a
  community dance and boogied myself all sweaty and out of breath. 
  The course of this disease has always been up and down, off and on,
  relapsing and remitting.  I have good cause to think that there
  will come another time when I can dance.  I know that if it comes,
  I will twirl and kick up my heels.
  

   

  • 5:04 pm
  • 7 Comments