Recently, a good friend and I attended an unusual dance performance entitled “WEAVE.” The choreographer, Rosy Simas, Native American of the Seneca, Heron Clan, worked with a handful of mostly Native dancers to give us an intense exploration of movement drawn from some depths inside the dancers. In the program notes, composed by the poet Heid Erdrich, we were told about how Ms. Simas had asked her performers to “dig within themselves” as they listened to the music provided rather than having her prescribe what they were to execute on stage.  So, instead of providing them with the template for the performance, she drew them into the creation as well as the enactment of that performance.  Similarly, the “music” they danced to was not what we usually think of when we hear that word. What provided the frame for the dancers were sounds–waves breaking against rocks, crickets chirping in a woods, water lapping on some imagined lake short, the primordial beats I imagined accompanied the creation of the world. Erdrich invited the audience to LISTEN, just as Simas had instructed her performers.  

The result was extraordinary. The dancers moved so slowly as to make me wonder if we’d simply come to the end of something. Finally, I relaxed and stopped waiting for “something to happen.” I sank into the moment and began really to listen to the sound effects, to let them penetrate past my cortex and move toward my heart.  Then I began watching expressions on the faces of the dancers.  Our seats were second row center, so at times we could almost touch a dancer.  But they were on a different plane; we didn’t exist as they moved fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, torsos, legs, feet .  Their faces became at times luminescent, as if they were channeling something much older and more significant that they or we could ever hope to be.  And, though there were pairings and threesomes, there was only one moment when two dancers actually touched.  Yet I felt they were entirely connected with each other.  We are learning these days from serious arborists that trees actually can communicate through root systems.  As I watched  intently as the dancers “spoke” to each other without physical contact, I thought about those old trees.

As we talked about what we’d just witnessed, my friend pointed out that all that repetition had taken us to a meditative place rather than to a cognitive one. And that place demanded something other than concentration or created something other than drama. We wondered it not having any plot line had erased or at least muted the audience’s more familiar intellectual concentration on what we were watching. Meditation depends on internal focus, erasing ideas that can clutter our brain and keep us “busy.” I thought of an ancient form of prayer my church often has the congregation do–taize prayer where we just chant the same few words or phrases over and over. As this happens, I am able to give myself to the practice so that a remarkable thing occurs. I feel like the words actually enter my body or that I meld with them in the sound space we all make as we chant. Then I pictured Allen Ginsberg, cross-legged and eyes closed, intoning sounds, sometimes under the influence of various drugs but still connecting with something that wasn’t logic or ratiocination.

Before the formal part of the performance began, as we were milling about in the lobby, my friend directed my attention to hands we saw being raised a ways off from where we stood.  Eventually, the owner of those hands came into view, and we watched as several performers moved slowly and sinuously to the sound of those crickets who would reappear once we were all seated and the lights had been dimmed.  Very slowly the dancers moved among us toward the admittance doors.  Once they entered, we were allowed to follow and take our seats.  At the end of the program, those same dancers left the stage as slowly as they had gone to it and danced upon it.  We all sat, craning our necks to watch as they measured their exit.  Only then did we know to applaud as the exhausted dancers dashed onto the stage to receive our standing ovation.  My friend remarked later that having them in the lobby before suggested another way in which the choreographer was expanding our definition of what makes up a performance.  So having them exit formally once again stretched the confines of the evening beyond the familiarly designated “space” of the proscenium stage.  

I am deeply grateful to Rosy Simas and her powerful group of dancers.  They have opened new doors in my thinking about dance as a cultural expression.  And they have given me a glimpse into a space not governed by formal rules, a space shaped simply but profoundly by asking all of us–dancers, choreographer, and audience members–to slow way down, go way inside, listen carefully,  and see what we find.

One of the best-known Greek stories is of Daedalus and Icarus.  Daedalus was a master carpenter who had made a great labyrinth under the court of King Minos of Crete where the dread Minotaur lived.  Taking issue with Daedalus, Minos had imprisoned him and his son, Icarus, in that very maze.  Surely they would be attacked by the Minotaur (half human and half bull) if they couldn’t devise some means of escape.  Daedalus constructed two pairs of great wings made of feathers and wax, and they were able to fly away to safety.  Before taking off, the caring father admonished his son not to fly either too low or too high, but to take the “middle path.”  Flying too low would mean seawater would clog the wings; flying too high would mean the sun’s extreme heat would melt the wings.  Daedalus followed his own advice and reached safety, but Icarus became giddy about being a bird and so he  went too close to the sun.  The delicate wings melted fast and Icarus plunged to his death by drowning in a body of water now known as the Icarian Sea which surrounds the Island of Icari, southwest of Samos.  Clearly this is a story about impatience and hubris .

As I try to manage the almost daily evidence of politicians and cabinet members in Washington, D.C. and many state governments who refuse to stand by their own values when doing so might jeopardize their own advancement in the halls of power, I find myself thinking of a more modern system of belief in which a powerful force called Fortuna or Dame Fortune explained the rise and fall of politicians in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and England.  This theory held that once a person put his or her foot on the Wheel of Fortune, s/he might have a glorious rise to the top of the wheel or circle.  They might even pause a while at the zenith and wield major power for a little while.  But wheels don’t stay stationary, so that same person would soon find themself tumbling head first towards some hard landing, ending up exactly where they had started.  In a lively conversation recently with an old friend, we lapsed into the inevitable lament over words and actions of the occupants of the White House and the U.S. Congress.  At one point, as we were discussing our feelings about Elizabeth Warren, my friend commented that Warren had been “born to form and head up that agency to protect us from big banks,” but she couldn’t celebrate that because she was like Icarus and was probably “flying too close to the sun.” 

In the days since our talk, I’ve decided the Icarus myth applies better to today’s political aspirants than does the theory in which Fortuna reigns.  So, since our conversation, I’ve carried that image of the young and beautiful aspirant catapulting arms akimbo and face terrified.  I find a growing list of women and men I can name off easily, all of whom qualify for that hubristic giddiness that beset the young Icarus.  So I went back to W. H. Auden’s powerful poem, “Le Musee des Beaux Artes” in which he describes the actual fall, based on his having seen the painting by Bruegel that hangs in the title museum in Brussels, Belgium.  Bruegel’s visual point, echoed by Auden’s verbal recital, is that no one is even looking as the dead body plunges into the sea.  Instead a farmer continues plowing his field, a shepherd herbs his little white sheep away from the cliff overlooking the water, and a couple of full-masted ships continue on their route to wherever they are going.  In Auden’s own words, “the dogs go on with their doggy life.”  I wonder if we don’t treat some of our present-day political Icaruses the same way, i.e., when their flying too high ruins their beautiful wings and they crash, do we even stop to mark what is being lost, had they been able to occupy the space they best occupy instead of soaring to some next level?

Now I find myself thinking hard and sadly about this possibility:  What if there are Icaruses who fly too close to the melting heat of the sun and crash, but do not die.  Somehow they are able to swim to some shore and be expected to get on with their lives, to move on, to “find closure,” that ridiculous present day outcome sought by so many.  Not surprisingly in my case, the first face that flashed into my mind’s eye was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s.  After being a fine First Lady and a superb Senator from New York, Hillary ran for the presidency.  Her wings were not made of feathers and wax; they were constructed of decades of public service at virtually every level of American social and political life.  They were burnished by an intellect of considerable range and depth.  And they were finished off by a very large heart that could feel empathy with those having less privilege than she enjoys.   No wonder many of us believed she’d remain aloft and even wind up occupying the highest political “nest” America has to offer.  That didn’t happen, of course.  And Hillary Rodham Clinton today, two years after the wings melted in the course of a few hours, seems unable to recover firm footing after her meteoric rise and meteoric fall.  Having flown so very close to that political “sun,” she seems unable to let go of the flight plan; she seems off kilter and hanging on to a dream that those considerable wings were supposed to make come true.

If I ponder about present day politicians who don’t follow Daedalus’ advice to his son about not flying too low where seawater and high humidity would clog his feathers, the list is too long even to consider listing.  It’s virtually every Republican in office who knows they do not agree policies tweeted by the person serving as president, or sanction much of his rhetoric and behavior, but who is too afraid of losing the high office currently occupied should he (or she, though these days there are a only handful of women serving in positions worth protecting) speak truth to power or even carry out the duties to which elected or appointed. These people are simple moral cowards.  And for Democrats, the powerful temptation is to try and maintain the high ground, to “hover” while beating current wings to exhaustion, to refuse any humble compromises that might slow down their perceived chance to soar to the upper ethers.   

So, the old Greek story obtains all too clearly in my world today, and I can only hope that some of the fresh new faces in government might listen to their political “fathers” and “mothers” and try for a flight pattern that can last and that can carry them safely from port to port.  Maybe somebody could show them the Breugel painting or read them the Auden poem or just argue for modesty and moderation, those old and steady emotional states.

One of the most vexatious and controversial aspects of Christianity is the idea behind current observances of Christmas, i.e., that an invisible force, called by Hebrews “Jahweh” or “the Lord God,” chose to become incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Terminology used by theologians and historians down through the ages includes the doctrinal idea that Jesus is “consubstantial” with God, i.e., he and God are of the same substance or essential nature.  Another common way to explain this phenomenon is to speak of a “triune” God, composed of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, thought by some biblical historians to be a way for monotheism to expand itself into something closer to earlier Egyptian/Greek/Roman religions founded on the idea of many gods to whom people prayed for specific things.

How much to emphasize the humanity of Jesus has been hotly contested for centuries and continues to divide Christians today.  Those who play down his life as carpenter accent that period between his first time to preach in a synagogue, when all the priests recognized an extraordinary prophet, until his crucifixion at the hands of Romans who feared the effect this man’s words were having on a populace they needed to control utterly.  Others find in his human development and mundane practices a profound connection to our own struggles and joys, so stress is laid on the extent of the invisible God’s love for us humans shown by being willing to experience what ordinary mortals experience.  I belong to this latter group, so I much prefer the Apostle’s to the Nicene Creed because in the shorter and older creed, we find this crucial phrase:  “he suffered death and was buried; he descended into Hell.”  Whenever I say that phrase, I am struck again by how precise the framers of this creed were in wanting humans to realize that an all-knowing being was willing to experience even the worst possible fate, albeit only for supposedly three days between Good Friday and Easter.  To me this signals that whatever “God” is to me has tasted the fiercest distance from godliness, so the God of my understanding can identify with and render solace to me in my lowest and worst moments of doubt and despair.

So I love it when we sing at my church a carol that speaks of Jesus as an infant and then a little child, laughing and feeling sad just like I did when I was little; who is hungry and tired but loves to play and run around just like I did.  And it is a particular song, sung each Christmas Eve at the late night vigil that moves into Christmas mass, that catches the ineffable essence of what I think happened in that manger where Mary and Joseph, immigrants traveling to register as legal residents, were allowed to stop because Mary was going into labor and no respectable .inn would take them in as guests since they were not “proper” citizens. 

It’s entitled “Mirabile Mysterium.”    Mirabile means “wondrous to behold,” while mysterium is an alchemical term for unknown elements thought to make up new matter or a substance seen as an elemental or pure form of something else.  In other words, the perfect phrase for “the birth of the baby Jesus.”  Though the original text for this piece was written by Jacobus Gallus, the version I hear was commissioned for the choir at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.  The occasion was the installation of the tower bells and its composer, Anne Kistofte, incorporated the pitches of our bells which are the flat keys of the piano.  People playing hand bells ring these pitches as the choir sings the original Latin words, while the huge bronze bells are ringing outside.  I’m told by Teri Larson, the choir director, that the doors of the huge Basilica were flung open at the inaugural ringing–surely a highly metaphysical moment for those in the congregation.  The piece always moves me to deep tears because the clear and unusual chording touches parts of me not usually accessible, the way music can do.  I listen to the Latin and sense what is being said by how it sounds and how my body reacts to those pure sounds.  Then when I get home, I read what the words mean in English and I drop all skepticism about the “logic” behind my belief that somehow an invisible presence is taking on human form in order for me, a human, to feel closer to an invisible presence.

Here are those translated words that I have no need to try and parse into logic.  Instead I let them help me feel part of something incredibly bigger than my quotidian life in this terribly flawed world: 

An innovation is made upon nature; God is made man;
that which he was, he remains,
and that which he was not, he takes on,
suffering neither commixture nor division.