Skip to main content

Dance of Life



(Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin)

We dance through our lives. Ever been to a waltz where partner changes from every turn of the back, every swirl of the body? I was once in a waltz, where happened to be my most eventful, I found myself pursuing in coincidence by two women in their prime. Despite my visible discomfort away I danced with the more striking one of the two, leaving the other grimly jilted. Her palpable sadness I can still recall- two eyes stared straightly to the front while the shadows of dancers skidding before her higgledy-piggledy. What belied those eyes was fire of jealousy that simmered, whose tongue lashed over across my back. Flicker of fire that itched me.

Not only in love but we also dance through all aspects of life. That was how I once waltzed pass a fair, where a troupe of children with hobby horses on their heads frolicked about. How I was seized with a sudden panic when those hobby horses surrounded me so, as if I was the sole target of their feast, a bevy of unflappable bees. They raced their dances around me until my eyes could no longer discern an individual out of a throng, like a stream of variegated banner in advance. The ruler on a balcony above the crowd raises his hand to appease the unruliness. He commands to reorder the unorderly, “I commanded a play not a mayhem,” he said. A thousand voices, though barely-audibly squeaky, shrieked back: “We are playing.”

“Yes we sure are playing,” came my rejoinder. I mingled into the throng and together we hastily organized an order. However, the cues we could hardly follow and we shoved off each other, vying for a position that was already occupied by another. The ruler was clearly enraged by what he witnessed. “Take to me your leader,” he bellowed. A thousand hobby horses raised their props in response to him.

I was thus swept away from the fair, deep into the unknown I ventured. Tapping our shoes we danced to the imaginary sounds that awakened the vicious, but never the dead. We did stumble upon a few graves, whose names we could hardly assume through their mounting snow. Snow smoothed our ragged gaits and we danced, never before were we that wildest. We wrote the names with the tilted tip of our shoes. The snow eventually melted and revealed, the names we wrote and those who were there, but all were forgotten, that and that and that, all gone.

It was not until we took off the hobby horses, did it dawn on us that we were still in the fair. You gaped at us from above, us in the ring, faces smeared with paints and tears, still baying above the loudest. “This joke and game is no fun,” I finally sobbed.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...
2 comments
Read more

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are ...
Post a Comment
Read more