FROM THE BOUNDARY - Saying ‘YES’ – Part three

As some of you will know, I claim to be the oldest, white, male ballet dancer in Barbados. It doesn’t mean much. I’m not Nijinsky, nor Nureyev – just one old fella in tights and the will to dance, to chase my great love, Tamara Toumanova, in my dreams and without compromising my two left feet. I’ve been a ‘beginner’ now for seven years. My body still leaps but I’ve totally given up on chaines turns and waltz instead, and my memory is as wayward as a mad cow.

Yesterday, I decided that all that was simply not enough and that perhaps beloved Tamara thought maybe I was a little old for her. So I followed ‘beginners’ with ‘modern dance’ and treated my body to two hours of leaps, stretches, bends and incompetent cavortings. I felt safe. First, a feline competent said she’d always admired me for the way, at my age, I tried. She then asked how old I was. I gave her the standard response: “Old guys rule – and don’t tell.’ And then again, one of the girls is an undertaker so I’m in good hands. When I got into the car afterwards, I felt a deep sense of achievement. You see, however geriatric, I’d done it – two hours of it; and if I didn’t exactly love every minute, the fact is my body had still said ‘yes’.

Then it happened, the phoenix moment – the CD in the car sound system. Schubert: Fischer-Dieskau, the great Lieder singer, with Gerald Moore at the piano. Oh, it was ecstatic, a moment of bliss. My sweaty-still body felt as if it danced on water vapour. I became pure spirit and, in the innocence of doves, exhaled joy with every breath. I was Adam readmitted to the Garden of Eden. Dance, poetry, music, song meshed to become an anthem to the divine – from behind the wheel of a Suzuki!

Have you had feelings like that? I’m sure you have. They’re to be treasured and stored in the vaults of memory, these out-of-body moments rooted in the life affirmations of our truest selves.

Sadly, there are those who haven’t, I suppose. Some imprison their bodies behind legions of prohibitions – parental, societal and, worst of all, churchy prohibitions which we call ‘divine commands’ or ‘God’s Word’, or, in a secular sense, in the name of discipline, self-control and respect. Some even think that in their dreary gloom-world they’re imitating Christ. Yet isn’t it Jesus who was labelled a drunkard and a glutton, and isn’t there explicit evidence that he ‘loved’ a man and, implicitly, that he had an uncanny effect on women?

Now doubtless the kill-joys will say that my sensations of joy and bliss were really just about pleasure and fun, and sure there’s a qualitative difference between them. Joy lies in the awareness of that which truly fulfils us, and to get there we have to penetrate through what merely seems to be, illusion, to what truly is. Pleasure relieves boredom. Joy overarches life itself. The pursuit of pleasure arises from our feelings of emptiness, our lack of relatedness to things, persons, life itself and, without more, makes us shallow, greedy people, devoid of passion and unwilling to take risks in the name of love and life. How do you find joy in that?

I’m not saying that joy and pleasure are mutually exclusive. There’s no virtue in rejecting pleasure for virtue’s sake. Playing and dancing, singing, walking on the beach, the ecstasy of love and touching, even chilling and a million other things, may help us understand that our personhood, striving for life, is real and that joy’s embrace is there for us. Maybe we should ask whether pleasure is just for pleasure’s sake – in a vacuum – or whether it arises in the context of something else, like an act of love, or supporting a team, or playing a game, or gasping at the new moon, or listening to the sea surge. In any event, it’s no especially religious thing to reject pleasure and fun if what we reject is something meaningful about ourselves.

Yet joy is more than pleasure. It has something eternal about it. It goes to the centre of things. Pleasure doesn’t do that. It’s more like stop lights, surface signs, staccato semi-quavers which are here and then gone. The eternal dimension in joy we call blessedness, the consciousness of being touched by the divine. It’s not a joy rooted in wishful-thinking about some after-life but, rather, in the eternal NOW and even if we don’t feel it all the time. We simply know it’s there. If we stand back from ourselves and what’s going on in our lives, maybe we’ll begin to understand that it has the power to transform all our sorrows and provide the foundation for everything that’s good, sanctifying happiness and pleasure. It’s the song of the heart and of love, you see, and so also the song of creation and the divine. Isn’t that wonderful?

By the way, do you know Beethoven’s ninth symphony? The final movement is called the ‘Ode to Joy’ and it’s sublime. If you’ve a mind, check it out on YouTube.
Go safely, then – until the next time.

Looking out from the boundary: “Create legions of prayers to the YES-God and stop whining. He’s created a universe but you’ve made Him so small” (‘The Love Within’ – forthcoming).