Tango as Pathway to Bliss
“The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.” ––Joseph Campbell
The main text of this posting actually follows Machado’s proverbs on pathways. But I would like to introduce part of the background and inspiration, which comes from Joseph Campbell:
The knights of King Arthur’s court were seated at table and Arthur would not let the meal be served until an adventure had occurred. And, indeed, an adventure did occur. The Grail itself appeared, carried by angelic miracle, covered, however, by a cloth. Everyone was in rapture and then it withdrew. Arthur’s nephew Gawain stood up and said, ‘I propose a vow. I propose that we should all go in pursuit of this Grail to behold it unveiled.’
And so it was that they agreed. There comes a line that, when I read it, burned itself into my mind: ‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at that point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’
No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. The romantic quality of the West derives from an unprecedented yearning, a yearning for something that has never been seen in this world. What can it be that has never yet been seen? What has never yet been seen is your own unprecedented life fulfilled. Your life is what has yet to be brought into being.
Let’s first set the record straight. Or at least argue for some kind of balance. Maybe Campbell sketches out some accurate cultural impressions. But we are getting the portraits in profile only. The East is full of mavericks, and the wisdom traditions of the East are very specific about ways and paths. To take one example, Lao-tzu tells us, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” This first line contains enough connotation in the original that translators have a hard time choosing how to bring it out: “The way that can be weighed is not the eternal Way,” or “A way that can be walked is not The Way.” If you can walk it, it’s not the Way. The path emerges in the walking. The path is the HOW of the walking. It is the answer to, WHO is walking? None of this can be said. The path is everywhere, just “go to the places that scare you.”
This sets the tone for what we can consider if we consider Tango as Way. No one has to be a “dancer” to consider Dance as metaphor, especially if we begin to see that we are all Dancers, even if we aren’t dancers.
Considering Tango as pathway to Bliss, we can learn a thing or two from Campbell’s retelling of this critical moment in the Arthurian Romance. One is that we must make sure we conscientiously and compassionately confront the dark places within. Tango takes us there. We can repress that stuff, and still learn how to dance. You can have great technique, and even fairly decent expressiveness without becoming a Dancer. There is a difference between dancer and Dancer. To become a Dancer, you have to go to the places that scare you. You have to confront the dark forests of your soul and of humanity. There is a big difference between learning how to dance on the one hand, and taking up Tango as Way on the other.
When we take up Tango as Way, we have to keep our eyes open to a big danger: instead of Pathway to Bliss, Tango can easily become Pathway to Spiritual Materialism. We easily fall into wanting things from tango: intimacy, romance, sacred partnerships, deep friendships, confidence, calm, poise, grace, beauty, charisma, spiritual insight. While all these things are possible, they are more likely to come if we aren’t attached to them. On the other hand, becoming attached to them creates all sorts of trouble.
This is part of what keeps Tango our own path. Consider that dark forest to which Campbell refers. If everyone is entering at the darkest place, how do they still end up entering on their own path? Because each of us has our own set of dark places. Our dark places share lots of commonalities, but our culture, genes, family life, and more make the forest appear different to each of us, and what is a terrifyingly dark place to one person is almost bright and sunny to another. Tango becomes more and more OUR path as we confront the fears and desires specific to our ego, including its spiritually materialistic impulses. As a result, we end up dancing more and more like ourselves. Tango becomes our path of unique growth AND unique expression. No one can Dance Tango like you. The secret is to let your expression come through without DOING it. To dance without any ideas of dancing. To BE the Dance. That is a totally unique phenomenon in the universe. Just as we can all recognize the voice of Elvis Presley, so too can we all recognize your Tango Walk. It contains the whole of you, including your intimate understanding of Life. The more we confront those dark places, the more our unique Tango shines.
Let’s consider Tango as Pathway to Bliss by receiving the insights Antonio Machado passes to us through his “Proverbs and Song-Verse.” This piece comes in ten parts, numbered with Roman numerals and set in italics. The commentary after each section can only be thought grossly inadequate. Because it might hint or provoke, one hopes such commentary can be excused. The main thing is to get out there and Dance.
I.
Why give the name of roads
to the furrows of chance? . . .
Anyone journeying walks
like Jesus on the sea.
Tango, the walking dance . . . how could we ever name its path? Call it the most living dance, the most fertile dance, the dance of those who desire more than anything to bear witness to this life. What impossible synchronicities brought you to Tango? What are the odds of finding such a dance in the far-flung Cosmos? You and Tango found each other. Count your blessings. Then walk the rich soil of an Earth graced by Tango, sow the seeds of rhythm, walk out onto the waters leaving behind the shore you know so well, the shore you thought you loved. Cross over to Love unimagined, Mad Love, Mad Living, Mad Walking, Mad Dancing: “When Jesus’ family heard what he was doing, they thought he was crazy and went to get him under control;” “And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.” Beside oneself, with no self besides. Jesus was Dancing and they though him insane. And you, Sweet Magdalen, I have seen that red dress on so many women at the milongas---you inspire their every step! Ask any martyr, ask any true apostle: Tango is ecstasy!
II.
Sing along with me: what we know is nothing;
we’ve come from an arcane sea, to an unknown sea we’re bound . . .
And these two mysteries hold a deep enigma between,
three chests locked with an unknown key.
Light illumines nothing, the wise have nothing to teach.
What has the word to say? Or the water in the rocks?
Ikkyu, the Red Thread Dancer, says the same: “I’d love to give you something/but what would help?” What has the word to say? “What d’you expect a mouth to say? What can it tell you?” cries Zorba the Tanguero, Zorba the Buddha, Zorba the wild dancing heart of the Cosmos. I’ll just hold up this lotus and wait for someone to smile; I’ll just embrace this beautiful being and wait for the world to sigh in relief; I’ll just enter these waters and let the moon move my inner tides. We were always wise. We were always happy. We were always in love. We were always within Love, and it was always within. Tango came to remind us.
III.
Teresa, fiery soul!
John of the Cross, flaming spirit!
It’s very cold hereabouts, good saints;
our sacred little hearts of Jesus need lighting.
How can we find our true Beloved? We have to burn. How can we burn? We have to move in stillness. The compass of the heart is a compass of fire. It guides each step to fall in the right direction. When each step falls in the right direction the Dance finds its way to the hidden kingdom and brings its treasures into the field of time for all to see. I stood body to body with a woman glowing Red, and something inside me began to blaze. The whole world glimmered in the light of our sacred little Tango, our sacred dancing hearts.
IV.
Last night I dreamed I saw
God, and was talking to God;
and I dreamed that God was listening . . .
And then I dreamed I was dreaming.
Last night . . . I cannot explain this, but I took God in my arms, and She Danced with me. It was a moving conversation. What do you say to God? We spoke only of the most profound things. I said, “Now I am breathing in, now I am breathing out; now I am falling here, now I am falling there; this step, this step; just this, just this.” What does God say in return? She says many things which I cannot put into human speech, so limited is my understanding of Her. Many things She says are sublime, but She has two terrifying questions: “Where are you?” and “Who are you?” When She asks these, you are no longer allowed to use words.
You cannot imagine the feeling of Dancing with God, of asking Her to Dance, shyly admiring her black dress with its high slit and her red shoes with their high heels. My arms reached out, but She was already within the reaching. She was not inside the embrace, She was the embrace itself. She was not led around in the dancing, but she was the Leading and Following. She was everything revealed in the light of this two minute Tango. But I WAS leading God. I was. And She followed. Yet I received the Leading from Her. She Lead THROUGH me. I never found this in a church. Then, out of nowhere, I wondered how She could be there in my arms. And She went beyond what I thought I could ever understand: She showed me that She was inside my heart. Inside my heart! But I have always tried to Dance my heart’s wisdom. I have always tried to dance the joy and pain it feels. What AM I? Am I a human being dreaming God lives in his heart, or am I God dreaming of living in a human heart?
V.
Every man has two
battles to wage:
in dreams he wrestles with God;
awake with the sea.
There is a scene in The Tango Lesson . . . the character Pablo and the character Sally stand in front of a painting of Jacob wrestling with an angel. In the dreamworld of Tango, we wrestle with gods and goddesses, with angels and devils. We embrace the other as a co-conspirator in the con-game of opposites, precious companion in the Work to unify them. We become not only Jacob, but also Job. We become not only Dancer, but also Acolyte. Not only Acolyte, but also Alchemist. Not only Alchemist, but Alchemy itself. Dear Job, please don’t cry that you are a piece of lead! I am too! Our lives are the stuff of alchemy, our dance is the dance of alchemy. The dance is the vessel, the Divine is the fire.
The Tango Cambalache (The Bazaar) goes like this:
There always have been thieves,
traitors and victims of fraud,
happy and bitter people,
valuables and imitations . . .
. . . Mixed with Stavinsky, you have Don Bosco . . .
. . . Like in the disrespectful window
of the bazaars,
life is mixed up,
and wounded by a sword without rivets
you can see a Bible crying
next to a water heater . . .
Take an almost random counterpoint . . . listen to Trungpa Rinpoche, giant Tanguero of Tibet:
Samsara and Nirvana
A crow is black
Because the lotus is white.
Ants run fast
Because the elephant is slow.
Buddha was profound;
Sentient beings are confused.
Which is the dream? Samsara or Nirvana? Go on and ask, What is it? Go on and ask, Do I dare? Yes, you dare! That is the thing to do in the dreamworld of the Tango, in its moonlight, in its utter darkness when that moon becomes New. Waking from this dream, more daring than ever, we walk the ocean of our lives, embracing the storms, the hard rocks along the shore, the ebb and flow of tides. The music puts courage in the blood: courage to leave the shore of the known; courage to stand at the masthead, undaunted when the Sirens sing; courage to sacrifice what we think is the best part of us so we can pass through the ordeal of Scylla and Charybdis; courage to LOOK, deeply into the wine-dark abyss, deeply into the nature of water and wave. Oh, you beautiful waves, why do you wrestle with the sea?
VI.
Wayfarer, the only way
is your footsteps, there is no other.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
you make the way as you go.
As you go, you make the way
and stopping to look behind,
you see the path that your feet
will never travel again.
Wayfarer, there is no way––
only foam trails in the sea.
Stopping and looking . . . stopping and looking even in the midst of the fastest dancing to accept my life, to embrace my life in its endless motion. Stopping and looking behind me, under me, right now, the footsteps reveal: Was I there? THAT MOMENT. Gone. Was I there, or at some imagined end? HERE I AM. I AM THIS. Stopping and looking behind, I can say, there I have been, without trying to say where or for how long . . . not to try to PLACE it in time, because it is nothing but foam trails in the sea. Can we compare the structure of the world to a bubble? What will I do if the world is a bubble, if my life is foam on an empty sea? I will go directly to the ballroom floor of enlightenment and dance there for the benefit of all beings, all shapes of sentience, every hovering butterfly: how delicate, how ephemeral, drinking from flowers, feeding off of the sun, crossing oceans like kings, migrating through every state of being to the state of inspiration. The fear states that make us miserable vanish into the melodies, the grasping states that make us suffer get rubbed away by rhythm. There is no way to the Way! Just dances coming and going.
VII.
Oh, faith born of meditation!
Oh, faith succeeding thought!
If one heart comes into the world,
man’s glass brims over and swells the sea.
I sit every morning under the cool leaves of the bodhi tree to prepare myself for the onslaught from Tango’s loving bow: flaming arrows aimed at the heart and the mind . . . or will they be lotuses? I stand for an hour on a terrifying pair of wooden planks to ready myself for Tango’s strict judgement . . . or will it be forgiveness? I hang upside down from a thick branch to steady myself for Tango’s blinding light . . . or will I be given new vision? What happens when the thoughts stop for a minute, for a measure, for a single beat? Oh, that fabulous being in my arms . . . she didn’t think, just for a moment she didn’t think, and that silence pried open my chest, gently yet unstoppably, and suddenly my heart entered the world, fully, for that moment. I am still drunk from it. The ocean keeps rising. Socrates, you hard drinker and wild lover! You only wanted to learn Tango! Why all those foolish concepts? Why those abstract questions? Rhythmic contractions of the Mother give birth to every virgin soul; every loving heart enters the world on waves of music.
VIII
Two forms consciousness takes:
one is light, the other is patience.
One means shining a beam
a certain way down in the sea;
the other is holding out
with a pole or a line in the hope
of a fish, as fishermen do.
Tell me now: which one is better?
The consciousness of the seer,
watching in the aquarian deep
live fish flashing by,
fish he can never haul out,
or this accursed chore
of throwing up on the sand,
dead, the fish of the sea?
You offer to make me a fisher of men? I know what you really want: to make me a Dancer of Men––and Women. I accept. I will become a Dancer of Life. What shall we choose: to have or to be? What shall we have: what we want or what we have? Do we want to be right, or do we want to be present? Do we really need to live in the known? When you throw the fish onto the shore, you can cut it open and analyze all you want. But where has the wild swimming gone? How’s the analysis? Do you smell the rot? I’m asking because I’m not paying attention to that. I just saw a dolphin leap into the sunlight, spinning like a galaxy, shimmering with life, wet with freedom and destiny. My gaze followed him forty feet down, and there he let me look through his oceanic eyes. Go ahead, play with your corpse. I only want to know who drags mine around the dance floor. I only want to die HERE, on my feet with music playing, long before I die, long before some great fisherman throws me onto the final shore.
IX
All passes and all remains;
but our lot is to pass,
to pass making roads,
making roads in the sea.
We can dance an ever shifting nostalgia, or we can dance the endless rivers of joy and pain. What passes? Nothing was ever here. The dance never moves. The floor moves under our stillness. A mandala of sound and motion, shifting sand ground from the laughtears of a goddess dancing in her slinky dress, her secrets and memories crystalized to refract every perfect color. Rolling time-wheels make stirring wind, and the Tango blows away. More fleeting than any blossom, we become fragrant in its blooming. Deities come to pick these flowers, to gaze at the colored sands. Five on every side of the dance floor, one above, one below, and seven hundred more roaming among the dancers. They listen to heartbeats speeding and slowing. They listen to neurons firing inside the bodies and brains of the dancers. They listen to breathing passing in and out, passing from the follower to her leader and back again, and then to another couple, and eventually to a shy man in a far away café who looks into the steam of his coffee and unconsciously dreams of dancing. They listen to the sounds of the planets spinning and orbiting. They listen to the sounds of birth and death. They listen to the footsteps of my sadness.
Sengai, who danced the Tango with a brush and ink, painted a rice cake, three generations before that dreamy dancer Magritte ever set eyes on a pipe, and beside the rice cake he painted the words: “Eat this and have a cup of tea.” How many Buddha’s have nourished themselves on that beautiful rice cake? Even as I tell you about it, somewhere in your heart you want to dance. A Tango? Will someone see you and say, Look at that! Embrace that! What passes? What remains?
A beautiful being leaned her body into mine one night, and it opened me in a way that still reverberates. Not an echo I try to grasp. No, it lives in me. It lives in the whole universe. She made roads in the cosmic ocean, and the ripples went out in every direction, as if she were a divine butterfly innocently making storms in far away planes of existence. That leaning . . . it was not an act of romance or sensuality. Or maybe it was. That is irrelevant. First and foremost it was an act of Love. Mad Love. Divine Love. Ah, that leaning . . . it did not make my body buoyant, it made every body buoyant . . . it gave buoyancy to the whole of the cosmos.
Today a sadness that has tracked my scent for days struck me like dark black jaguar. Dazed, I stood frozen as it licked away my soul through the wound. Suddenly I felt the mysterious body of a woman still leaning into me, and once again it reminded me of what I am. My legs became more free. I could move through my life again. Still sad, but now dancing the sadness, even noticing its beauty: not a dark body, but an iridescent one, deeply glimmering with tones of red and blue. I know this tanda will soon come to an end. Another partner already awaits me. Thank you for leaning into me that night, dancing martyr, dancing bodhisattva, dancing dervish who danced me into a barrel of wine so I could stay just a little drunk for the rest of my life. Again! Again! I am nowhere near drunk enough!
X.
Think of it: a Spaniard
wanting to live, starting in
with a Spain on one side of him dying
and a Spain all yawns on the other.
Young Spaniard entering the world,
may God preserve you.
One of these two Spains
will make your blood run cold.
Imagine: a dancer wanting to dance, a lover wanting to love. On one side, a Life dying every moment; on the other side, a life asleep. Young lover, young dancer taking your first steps . . . may the gods and goddesses bless you, may the dakinis kiss your forehead and keep it floating in the sky, may angels and devils take your shoulders and keep them wide, may the earth Mother bear witness to your every step. One of these two lives will make your blood run cold. Ikkyu, our Red Thread Dancer, tells you which one: “self other right wrong wasting your life arguing/you’re happy really you are happy.” Does that make your blood run cold: to imagine that you really are happy? Not the happiness of the life asleep, but happiness in the midst of the Life that burns itself away, Life that dances joy and pain in full transcendence of every concept. Let’s take Ikkyu in our arms . . . we can dance his own words back to him, improvising on his wisdom: no more philosophies dance one beautiful step/like a needle piercing a sore spot in your heart. We don’t become fully ourselves until our heart lays itself bare. It can happen any time, even during a two minute Tango:
Muchacho
que no sabes el encanto
de haber derramado llanto
sobre un pecho de mujer . . .
(Boy
that you do not know the enchantment
of having spilled tears
on a woman’s chest . . .)
Cry your tears on a man’s or a woman’s chest, let an arm wrap around your waist like a serpent that asks: Do you want to KNOW? WHAT do you want to know? Does the thought of asking, really asking, make your blood run cold? Nothing sets your heart ablaze like Tango, but only if you know why you dance. Every tango dancer can leave the floor with blood that tingles. Only a few will have hearts of fire. We dance to save all sentient beings. We dance as the mirror the Beloved holds up to gaze at Herself. We dance so that spring will come. We dance so that roses will remain red and clouds white. We dance to do nothing else but dance. We stand body to body with the present moment, and the universe becomes an intimate love affair.
Forget the books and speeches truth’s a razor
each moment dancing here you and I being here
Bliss.