by Genesis Lung on Friday, September 17, 2010 at 2:48pm
In the same vein of thought of the great nihilist and skeptic philosophers, there is nothing in our universe that compels us to find a purpose. We can sit through our lives and never choose to devote ourselves to a religion or cause, die, and it will never matter. But every one of these skeptics and nihilists were great artists, and the greater half were dancers. As an unknown author recalled, "Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected."

We gravitate towards beauty. We see beauty in design, in music, in motion. It is not the purpose of life to create beauty, but we have a natural inclination to the arrival at the arts. Visual design sparks our curiousity. Music causes our hearts to beat to a rhythm, and we are inclined to create motions to it, motions with design, with the purpose to express. It is when we dance that our bodies are truly on fire and at times we begin to feel as if we have found a purpose in this world that offers none. All the other arts revolve around dance. Much of the time for visual design artists, it's not the finished work that they enjoy the most, but the act of creation, the dance of the brush. For writer is is the dance of the pen, and for musicians the dance of the bow or the fingers. Nietzche had it right when he claimed that "dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?"

Music's effect on us strips our skeptic minds and our logic to our animalistic, bestial cores. We stop analyzing and simply respond to our surroundings. Our senses are overwhelmed by the music, colors become more vivid, and our kinesthesis is enhanced. With a steady, repetitious beat and melody we instinctively anticipate the arrival of the next note, and feel safe in our knowledge and power, because we can act on it by moving to the next sound. Dancing can induce such feelings of passion that we lose track of time, lose our fatigue, and fall in love in the span of a four minute song (DJ Got Us Falling In Love, anyone?). Without dance, music has no feeling. "Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music," remarks William Stafford. And it is true: "Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance," furthers Ezra Pound.

Dance is something that is nonsensical. We don't understand why we are compelled to do it, but we love and enjoy it, because it carries a magical, almost spiritual experience. As Edwin Denby confessed, "there is a little bit of insanity in dancing that does everyone a great deal of good." Even the Japanese have a proverb that says "we're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." Dance is one of the most powerful drugs which is almost a disease. Eddie Uehara calls his talent an "infection", because it is unstoppable. We simply cannot bear not to dance. Dance is ecstacy, the only thing that will always bring happiness. "Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain." - Unknown

"I see dance being used as communication between body and soul," said Ruth St. Denis, "to express what is too deep to find for words." "Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!" Shouts Constanze. It feels as if the heavens open up, and we have become one with our world, developing a synergy of sorts. We are literally laid open like a book, establishing an unspoken trust to the people we dance with. Agnes de Mille writes that "the truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music.  Bodies never lie," supported by Martha Graham, who continues, saying that "movement never lies.  It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it." "We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive... and part of the living, incarnate cosmos," ends D.H. Lawrence.

"I would only believe in a God who knows how to dance," sums up Nietzche. "I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal."

I truly believe the only philosophy in this world worth my time to follow is dance.
Now it's time to stop writing and just DANCE MY HEART OUT!

Form causes a gut reaction, instinctive appreciation for form.