We began with fire.
Before courts, or temples,
before anyone thought to write down
what the body was doing,
we were already doing —
turning in smoke,
answering something
nameless yet
but lived in the chest
like a second heartbeat,
insisting.
The room was dark, and harder
The audience, indifferent.
The stars did not lean in.
We danced anyway.
We always danced anyway.
That is tragic?
or the whole point.
The poem is not yet sure
Louis XIV understood the body
a political instrument —
the spine a declaration,
the hand's arc a loyalty oath,
the missed step in a courante
a confession of treason
the court would not forget.
In the mirrored halls of Versailles
every gesture was surveilled,
every posture petitioned,
the self reduced
to its most legible surface,
approved or destroyed
by the King's passing gaze.
The silk slipper fit
That was cruel —
the cage bespoke,
measured to the foot,
comfortable enough
to forget it was a cage,
until you tried
to walk somewhere
the choreography
had not approved.
In the temple courtyard
the logic reversed.
The anklets spoke to the floor
and the floor answered —
not the king,
not the court,
not the cold consensus
of the watching faces —
the floor,
the breath,
the blood
through the body
like weather,
like grief,
like the specific joy
that has no object
because its object
is everything.
Shiva dances
not for an audience
but as the universe
practicing its own
creation and destruction,
the Tandava neither
performance nor meditation
but both,
the distinction
dissolved in movement
itself.
The dancer learns this slowly:
the ultimate achievement
is not the room's approval
but the moment the room
ceases to exist —
when ego thins
to transparency
and what moves
is no longer
the careful self
but something inwards,
larger,
briefly borrowed.
The anklet fits differently
than the silk slipper.
But it is still
an instrument of transformation.
The question is
what you are transforming
towards
Nietzsche said
he would believe only
in a god who could dance,
which is another way of saying
he would believe only
in a god who understood
that existence is not
a problem to be solved
but a rhythm
to be entered,
that the philosopher
on his mountain
and the woman
on the dance floor
are doing the same thing —
moving through the unbearable
with as much style
as the body can manage,
which is sometimes considerable,
which is sometimes
barely enough,
which is always,
always
more than the universe
required of us
and less than we
required of ourselves.
You see Sisyphus
and see a dancer.
Not the rock.
Not the hill.
The style of the pushing —
the particular angle of the shoulder,
the specific rhythm
the feet found
on the long way down,
the face
that decided
somewhere on the slope
that the absurd
did not get
the last word.
One must imagine Sisyphus
in anklets
in silk slippers,
in sweat-slicked trainers
on the floor of a Paris club
at four in the morning,
the DJ indifferent,
the strobe light
making everyone
a series of still frames,
everyone briefly
a painting,
briefly
a prayer.
The woman on the floor
is not waiting for the room.
She has stopped waiting
some time ago —
you can see it
in the spine,
in the arm's extension,
in the expression
that crossed over
from performance
into something
the French court
never authorized
and the temple
always knew:
the face of someone
who has found
the interior tempo,
the one that runs
beneath the DJ's beat,
beneath the algorithm's
recommendation,
beneath the room's
restless hunger
for the next louder thing —
the oldest rhythm,
the one the fire knew,
the one the temple floor
knew,
the one the body
has always known
and keeps forgetting
and keeps
remembering.
The phones glow.
The room moves on.
Somewhere a louder song
begins its campaign
for the available attention.
She completes the phrase.
Not for them.
Not despite them.
Only because
the movement
asked to be finished
and she was
the one who knew
how.
This is not transcendence.
This is not tragedy.
This is the human
in its most characteristic
posture —
upright,
in motion,
neither fully seen
nor alone,
dancing in the gap
between the court's demand
and the temple's silence,
between Louis's appraising eye
and Shiva's closed one,
between the need
to be witnessed
and the deeper need
to move truly
regardless —
mastering, step by difficult step,
the choreography of existing
in a room
that has mostly
looked away, or turned
a whiter shade of pale
and finding there,
in that unlooked-at
corner of the floor,
not defeat,
but the only freedom
the dance
was ever offering.
