Ars Saltandi

We assume dancing begins as the music does, but so often it begins here: with the erupting, unbridled sound of a woman laughing too loudly outside the bar, her joy escaping her before she can decide whether to be embarrassed by it. Or maybe over there, with the smiling stranger who holds the door open for your friend as though he has always known her, or upstairs where the old man twangs an old guitar. Isn't it wonderful to witness the impossible mathematics of solitary lives discovering a common pulse? And tonight, my blue-eyed girl, you arrived carrying yourself like a sealed envelope, so convinced your history was written in an ink no one else could read, but here I am reading you, writing you and all it took was the first bass note, the first reckless grin I shot at you, for your body to remember its truth of how to pour, dissolve, and spin.

For many centuries before this evening together, the philosophers searched for truth in marble halls, the saints in silence, the poets in the moon, but perhaps they neglected the dance floor, where truth appears uninvited, flushed with sweat and cheap perfume, where accountants become conductors, surgeons become children, lovers become planets circling one another for the length of a chorus before drifting back into the anonymous constellations from which they came. Here, nobody possesses anybody, not completely, for every encounter is gloriously incomplete as we borrow each other's bodies like melodies, swinging too and fro.

Watch carefully now as each figure melts across the room like a flurry of paint down a canvas. You wouldn't believe what they're holding. The woman somehow doing the worm has survived a heartbreak so severe she thought she'd die, the man whose feet seem incapable of keeping still has almost certainly stood motionless beside a hospital bed and the friends singing off-key together and holding hands have buried people, disappointed people, been disappointed themselves. Each body in the room is carrying such almighty weight, and still we dance, we dance, we dance.

If hope has a physical form, surely it is this: not happiness untouched by sorrow, but sorrow persuaded, if only for three miraculous minutes, to keep time with the drums. And isn't it holy, this collective movement against the world's broken impulse to atomise? Though you must remember that birds have always known this movement, taking flight in their shimmering formations hundreds-of-thousands strong, and the fish too, move like tiny irridescent scales of a larger body throughout the ocean. Even trees, rooted as they are, spend their lives practising the choreography of the wind. We alone insist on calling ourselves separate, until music reminds us that rhythm is older than identity, that before we were citizens or lovers or failures or successes, we were simply creatures with hearts capable of synchronising.

Children too require no instruction in dancing, no thought in knowing to answer with delight upon hearing it. Yet somewhere along the years we mistake self-consciousness for wisdom, restraint for dignity, and composure for adulthood. Then one night, after enough wine or enough courage or enough living, someone reaches for our hand and the years fall away like a coat shrugged onto the back of a chair.

Of course, the songs end, as all songs must, chairs are stacked and taxi doors slam shut beneath indifferent stars. Tomorrow we will return to calendars and inboxes and the quiet musings of our separate lives. Yet something stubborn follows us home. Not the melody itself, but the permission it offered: to inhabit our bodies without apology, to laugh before understanding the joke, to be transformed by people whose names we will forget but whose presence will linger inexplicably in the muscles, as though memory were not housed in the mind at all, but in the feet.

Perhaps this is all human life has ever asked of us: not that we remain, but that we meet; not that we own one another, but that we collide brilliantly for an evening, altering eachothers trajectories by degrees too small to measure and too beautiful to deny. We spend so much of our lives believing meaning must be monumental that we overlook its favourite disguise: a stranger's smile, a chorus sung badly, a room full of ordinary people surrendering, together, to the ancient and extravagant fact that they are alive.