04 June 1007
The Dance
Stress did it, maybe. I am partly paralyzed still, shooting pains radiating down the right side of my neck and into my shoulder. That and the change of season, and being outside and in the water. But how could the joyful, rhythmic motion through the chlorinated water, weightless, have caused this?
It is counter-intuitive. Motion is good. This result is bad.
I made the coffee and tried swinging various appendages. Everything works below the waterline of my shoulders, feeling pretty good down there, just a hard kink and turning torso to the right.
When something so elementary goes wrong it casts the world in new perspective. It makes me realize how smug it all is, hurtling down our self-constructed channels like the ancient marble-roller that fascinated me as a kid.
Dad would bring it down from the attic, a toy that was old when he was a boy. Green wood with a groove down the middle that sloped gently to another that accepted the marble and permitted it to roll it back to the left, continuing down and back on five levels until the marble rolled out into a little collection box at the bottom.
Sometimes we would orchestrate a train of the marbles in the grooves, one of assigned to scoop them up from the bottom and feed them in at the top. Sometimes we would block the channel, waiting for the collision that would send the marble off the track, and shooting across the floor.
There were limited possibilities with the marble roller, and it usually wound up back in the attic after a few days. It took absence for gravity to to re-acquire novelty.
There is little novelty in the orderly flow of the week, into the shower and down to the car and out into the traffic. Sometimes, though, something small in the channel precludes the orderly descent of the day. A kink in the neck, for example, or an idea.
Sometimes and idea hits me right between the eyes. It does not happen often, which is why the impact is so profound. One of those moments occurred when I read one of Laura Kipness' little books. One of the chapters in “The Female Thing” dealt with the medical art, and the means of relieving something called “Female Hysteria,” which was the term of art that emerged from the cloak of the Latin the veiled the mysteries.
It is an antique phrase, and if I could turn my neck I would be looking for someone over my shoulder to give me a whack for using it. These days, it seems patronizing and insensitive. But the account gave me one of those minor epiphanies when Laura contended that the digital stimulation of a woman's private parts was regarded strictly as a medical procedure since the time of Hippocrates until the turn of the last century, when it abruptly was banned from the Doctor's office.
This intimate massage female patients was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians in the treatment of "hysteria," an ailment considered both common and chronic in women. Doctors loathed this time-consuming procedure and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the efficiency of mechanical devices, including the electric vibrator, which was invented in the 1880s.
I was stunned. As a male, I naturally have a blind spot about the workings of other peoples bodies, but the whole ethos about sex, in all its manifestations, from intimacy to legal concept is predicated on The Act, as I understood it. It appeared that the concept was fatally flawed, and that is not at all, or at least not even most, of the most fundamental interchange in our species.
The myth of the frigid woman, or the female that cannot be satisfied, at once was demolished. One of the things that drives everything in life was not at all what I had been taught, and that I could have been so deluded for so long, even in these late days of unblushing communication, left me a bit dizzy.
Freud's question about “what do women want?' suddenly was illuminated as part of a gigantic social conspiracy to deny something so basic that its truth must have been evident from the moment we leapt down from the trees. Yet the simple truth became cloaked in taboo, enshrined in religion and law and social conduct until the very nature of the species was a cruel charade.
I wandered around for a day or two in the wake of the epiphany. How could such a state have come to be? It was a means of separating women from the functions of their own bodies, sometimes imposed by cruel surgical means, and of the denial of desire by the greater society. That was a revelation that was so far beyond the mildly prurient place it started that it provided a spotlight into the miscommunication and oppression of half the species.
I had another one when I read Barbara Ehrenriech's account of the suppression of dance in New York City in the Times on Sunday.
Apparently the town fathers severely restricted the right to dance publicly in the 1930s, when the clubs of Harlem began to pump out that pulsating beat to mixed audiences. There was the possibility that blacks would begin to dance with whites, which naturally had to be strictly suppressed.
She followed with accounts of how dancing had been suppressed in cultures down through the ages, in Ancient Rome, for example, and by Islam and the Church in Europe, and of course by the Puritans and their ilk right here.
There was a movie about dance in a Baptist college town a few years ago that I thought was a little bizarre. But when I finished Barbara's column, I realized it was something else. Another one of those small epiphanies buried in the paper. An astonishingly simple thing that illuminates a corner of society and smacks me directly between the eyes, unable to turn my head to avoid it.
Something as simple and human as dance must be ruthlessly controlled. It accounts for the thundering prophets and the religious police. We must be controlled, and we must deny what we are. We cannot be permitted to start acting human.
Is it any wonder that there is such misery in the world, if we are in constant denial of what we are?
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com