"The Pleasure of The Dance"

About ten years ago, I had a dream that was so real that it stayed with me since then. I was driving in my car and going on some city streets and I noticed that I was going down the same streets over and over again. I noticed it because the same houses and churches were appearing. Since there were no other cars, I stopped in front of this church. I walked to it and its door was on the second story. I walked up the steps. Just as I opened the door I saw someone standing there who seemed very attractive and interesting. I was standing in the loft of a choir. He came up to me and started to teach me to dance. It was wonderful.

I was in a difficult time in my life then. I started to see a therapist in order to deal with a bad work site. Being a good Freudian psychologist, she interpreted my dream that I was looking for someone to have a relationship with. I knew she was wrong. I did not know the meaning of that dream but it wasn't that. I soon stopped seeing her and solved the problems on the work site. I did not find a meaningful relationship although I did make some friends. The meaning still escaped me, but I knew it was important.

Then something changed in my life this year. I had retired and felt lost. All of my life, I had looked forward to retirement but had not planned beyond that. Now that retirement was here, I was watching my life disappearing and I had no idea what I needed to do about it. Then I came to work as a visiting professor at a national university in Korea. What changed in my life was discovering the meaning of that dream and my suspicion that it was important was correct.

Being in Korea meant not being able to read what I wanted to. Getting books in English is very difficult. There is also the space problem. I live in a very small studio apartment and have to make due with few possessions. I found a book in the English library of the university where I teach. It was "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is the only novel of a great poet and it includes his poetic vision and his experiences in Paris and so much more. The prose flows and is rich with the details, stories as well as the fears and joys of Rilke. It is a remarkable book.

Then in rapid succession, I read W. Somerset Maugham's novel, "The Moon and Sixpence". I had read this book as a teenager and then forgot it. It is about Charles Strickland who left his dull, bourgeois life and devoted the rest of his short life to painting. It was supposedly inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin.

One might question what these two books have to do with my dream and dancing. A lot really. When I was in the throes of that miserable situation at my government job, I was trying to survive. I concentrated on breathing, walking by placing one foot in front of the other. I had forgot the pleasures of the poetic dance.

Coming to Korea has given this back to me because I no longer am distracted by television and other things and I know that there is no chance whatsoever of running into the people I worked with on my last work site. I am in a country where I can't speak the language and I have to pay attention to the few books I can find and most importantly, write. My writer's block is totally gone.

The poet, Billy Collins, in his essay "Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader" calls poetry the pleasure of the dance. We circle and walk around a poem looking for a way in and when we do, it becomes the pleasure of the dance as we read it. It becomes the music that lets us slow down the pace of our thoughts so we can enjoy the rhythm. We join together as lovers entwined as we dance "somewhere else" and enjoy the sensations we would never have felt without the poem.

The novel, the painting takes each of us to unknown places and enriches our lives in ways we did not think possible before. The sculpture in an art gallery or one of the temporary sculptures that are done in the park using people or a Buddhist Tibetan sand painting are just a few examples of this artistic vision.

This was what I had forgot but remembered now. The artistic music that I used to dance with so many years ago had been forgotten. It drove Rilke to write his novel so he could understand his fears of death and loneliness. It drove Strickland to abandon his middle class life and family so he could paint.

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press and ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Poetry along with other forms of artistic expression gives us pleasures. It is light, feathery and gets our feet to move so we can enjoy the dance of life. Too often, we are tied to a chair and tortured when instead we need to skate across the surface of a poem and just enjoy it or in my case to dance and feel our selves unite so we can soar into the heavens.