Lambent Literacy

 

 

Dancing…A Metaphor for Language

 

The older I get, the more I value each day, each moment. Do I spend it judiciously? I know a significant part of my life--time, money, angst and ultimately great joy and satisfaction, is tied up in writing. This past June I published a novel, my first after writing three nonfiction books, one of which was actually a collection of plays based on five Shakespeare comedies. Lambent Literacy, this blog that seeks to draw readers' attention to words that I confess are relevant and important to me, must include, in my humble opinion, a nod to what is possibly the greatest metaphor for language, dancing.

What follows is an edited portion of a chapter of my first book that explains this metaphor, Dance of Language. I pulled out several old copies recently to work with three of my grandchildren on their writing. Each had decided to write a short story, and a chapter on writing short fiction is included in the book, so I turned to the introduction while they were typing away on their laptops. The book was published fourteen years ago, but some things never change. Technology certainly has, but tips on good writing--well, not so much. After all Shakespeare wrote in the seventeenth century and he's still the greatest writer the language has ever known. My point here is this: Language comes as close to yielding a ritualistic and symbolic life, blurring the lines between past, present, and future, as you can ever hope to find. And folks, what a gift! 

So, Chapter 1 and the metaphor.       

The announcement of a school dance is generally enough to pique the interest of students to start planning to be there. There’s a nervous twitter when the day arrives.  I enjoy being there, too.  Just watching on the sidelines of that dance can be illuminating—the joy, the energy, the reckless abandon!

Maybe you remember dancing when you were a child.  Perhaps you celebrated the arrival of spring by weaving colorful ribbons and dancing around a Maypole.  The steps weren’t difficult, but sometimes the dancers forgot who they were—under or over?—and the result was usually laughter and slightly bulging ribbons unevenly woven around the pole.  In pieces of literature rich with imagery and symbolism, the concept of dancing is often dominant because its elements have so strong a resemblance to the elements that make up our lives—the diverse steps in choreography, the partners, the moods, the missteps, the reasons for the dance.

            Dancing in a circle, for example, encourages a kind of magic that seems to strengthen and protect whatever it encloses.  As a significant part of world mythology, the meaning of dancing in any shape or form has grown in complexity while other symbols—hands, feet, the heavens, and thread, for example—connect with it and enhance its powerful image.  The dance, as both symbol and metaphor, provides an ancient instrument by which we can understand and know ourselves.  It is little wonder then that dancing has become an expression of emotions—the dance of love, of anger, of joy and thanksgiving; the dance of entreaty; the rain dance, the fertility dance; and the dance of imitation, the dance of creation, the dance of the planets, and the dance of angels around the throne of God.

          Dancing has thus come to be a manifestation of human growth and maturation that, as Jung reminds us, leads to individuation, or becoming the people we were meant to be.

             The contents of our language are impossible to organize in sequential order.  Unlike some kinds of dances that require strict choreography, our language demands that we know and use many skills concurrently.  The skills and knowledge for critical analysis build on each other and prepare us for reading and writing and thinking..

            Serious students of dance must understand not only the inner workings of the body and the bones and muscles that allow the body to move but also the importance of maintaining balance and conditioning.  How similar to the student of language who must also comprehend the different ways in which words, phrases, and sentences are selected and combined to form the framework that allows our language to move gracefully and to move us—to inform, to persuade, to entertain, to touch our hearts and minds.   

       Classic ideas tend to support each other and form cohesive patterns.  We find the words of Aristotle, Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Freud and Jung, and the Roman and Greek poets, philosophers, and statesmen have left us with the marvelous gifts of the foundation of our thinking and of our language.

           In order to proceed in our pursuit of higher levels and more sophisticated dances, we must aim ever so high in choosing to read.  I tend to lean toward the proverbial “just read everything you can get your hands on” philosophy.  According to the Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac, book title output for all categories numbered 149,859 (516).  Try to imagine, if you can, what that means in terms of available choices for reading material.  Now, there has to be something printed or digital that interests you.  Remember, good readers make good writers.

            Finally, my handbook that I titled Dance of Language includes actual dance steps.  The literature in this course begins with the American Renaissance and ends with the English Renaissance.  Included in both studies are the steps for two popular English circle dances of the seventeenth century.  These dances offer readers a sensory, kinesthetic approach to complement and encourage their learning, as well as immerse them in the culture of a people for whom dancing was literally an essential part of life.  You will also take a peek into the dance movements that lifted up a people through depression and war and into their own heritage and culture, and continue to do just that today.  Ira Gershwin wrote many Tin Pan Alley tunes in the 1920s and ’30s to convince people who were down and out that dancing was the cure.  

In “The Dance of Life,” 1923, essayist Havelock Ellis concludes that dancing is the most beautiful of the arts because it not only reflects life; it is life.  Dancers, as well as those who simply have a keen understanding of Ellis’s statement, have expressed their feelings about dancing and used its perfect metaphoric quality to communicate their ideas.   

            Art, perhaps the earliest of storytellers, has a unique dance that lends its steps to my own path in life.  In October of 1872, French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) traveled from France to New York and boarded a train for a long journey to New Orleans, Louisiana.  His subjects for the next year would focus on his family and life in this cultural city.  Degas’s mother, Celestine Musson, was the daughter of Germain Musson and Marie Celeste Rillieux—my matriarchal family name.  Marie Celeste and Marie Antoinette Rillieux were sisters, both born in New Orleans to a prominent old French family.  Their parents, Vincent Rillieux and Marie Tronquette, the respected matriarch of New Orleans, were also my maternal grandmother’s great-great grandparents.  Georgine Susan White Hill, my grandmother, who was also born in New Orleans, and Degas’s mother were cousins.  Georgine’s mother, Jeanne Felicie Mercier (granddaughter of Marie Antoinette Rillieux) married Denis Prieur White and at the age of twenty-seven moved in the same New Orleans society as her cousin Edgar Degas during the short time he lived and painted in New Orleans.

            A copy of Degas’s Blue Dancers hangs in my family room as a reminder, not only of the metaphor of dance, that archetypal rhythm of the universe, but also of the great need for the stories that connect our lives.

More than ever, my own classroom structures included ritual, another kind of dance that depends on language to keep it fueled and connected to meaning and purpose.  The opening ritual  included a routine of coming into the room and warming up with grammar and writing or looking at the day’s agenda and getting prepared for the class.  This daily task not only taught my students what to expect; it also showed them what organization looked like and how it could be rehearsed and eventually achieved.

Ordinary days need to be recognized, too, in a way that is as meaningful as the more celebrated events in life.  Although it’s fun to try new ways of approaching learning, I much prefer the heightened sense of awareness provided by doing activities that have stood the test of time in generating creativity in our lives.  Each year my students engaged in the particular activities that students before them had. I hoped this sampling of rituals in my classroom would develop pride and continuity and closeness between all the members of the class.  My desire was to help students share in a fuller experience through rites that help us connect and live well.  I wanted students who came into my class not only to know what to expect but also to look forward to the program of events planned for them.  Teenagers today have so much pressure and uncertainty growing up.  Research shows that predictable outcomes and meaningful rituals produce healthier people.  When all is said and done, what we do now, the choices we make today about how well we live, will have an effect on what happens to us tomorrow. I cared deeply then, and I care now. Ritual is key, friends, and the metaphor of dancing provided the steps for my forty-six years in the classroom, and it still can today.