Danced If We Do, Danced If We Don't

"Danced If We Do, Danced If We Don't"

Martin Buber: All real living is meeting. John Auer: All real meeting is relationship. All real relationship is power. All real power is dance! Emma Goldman: If I cannot dance, I cannot join your revolution. John Auer: Damn right! No dance, no dice! For I am a Place in the Dance.

COSMIC DANCE-CARD ALERT: "Astronomers Find Oldest, Most Distant Planet!" Of course, Who Made It always knew right where it was, our latest gadgets lagging behind, Oldest of Secrets, thirteen billion years, Most Distant Surprises, fifty-six hundred light years away, just finding out here, just finding out now, new stars being born as we speak! New species appearing, no help from us -- nor any help from us for disappearing! COME, COSMIC DANCERS!

Danced if we do, danced if we don't, life dancing, death dancing, dancing to consecrate, dancing to desecrate, dancing conducive to public interests, dancing condemning to private interests, dancing to circulate, give life again and again, dancing to consummate, snuff life once and for all.

Dancing Jacob's Ladder, like Herod: narrowly-gaited, autocratic, expedient, self-serving, room only for one at the top; dancing Sarah's Circle, like David: broadly-strident, equal, mutual, each beside other, room always to take one more in. Dances of princes apt to achieve against own inclinations? Herod drawn personally to John, respecting, even protecting him, up to a popular point; then saving face -- other parts? -- from looking weak in eyes of rank Roman powers behind every throne; glibly, gladly abandoning John -- How much can any one prophet be worth?

More danced upon than dancing - Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, Fred, JFK, RFK, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Biko, Sandino, Harvey Milk, Mendez, Stang, Romero, Allende, Aquino, North American Religious Women, Jesuit Priests and their Household -- disappeared, detained, damned to death -- "When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body and laid him in a tomb;" "They buried my body, and they thought I'd gone, but I Am the Dance, and I still go on . . ."

My life about learning to dance falling down, literally self meeting ground, coming down to earth, standing where and with whom I can, heart-beating to drumming of all, Jon Carroll once dubbing me, "Pope," of The Church of the Falling Down.

Coming-out dancing, bringing-in dancing -- fast, slow, ballroom, ballet, belly, hula, folk, square, taxi, marathon, fancy, calypso, gandy, liturgical, disco, sun, rain, fire, ghost, Holy Ghost, Irish, Latin, mambo, samba, go-go, circle, line, table, clog, tap, break, jazz, modern, postmodern, trance, hokey-pokey, bunny-hop, and with wolves. As many dances unnamed as dancers to name them!

Western Wall, Wailing Wall, Great Wall, Walled Cities (Diyarbakir, Quebec), Hadrian's Wall, Berlin Wall, Wall of Respect, Wall of Respect, Israel/Palestine, US/Mexico Walls of Fiasco, Walls of the Torreadors . . . Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall: We, veterans of Peace Corps during the war, veterans of every contingency, spending lives since that war, trying to tell its truths, about it and us, names of its (limited) dead reflecting in yet-living, yet-changing faces, in preciousness, passingness, of one and other.

Veterans killed there, veterans who fought without dying, families, friends of them living and dead, Vietnamese, South and North, armed and not, underage and above it, veterans of EveryWar, EveryNation's latest best cause -- selfless, self-lost, coexistence only in death? Wolves, lambs, leopards, goats, children, adders -- "no longer strangers and aliens," "dwelling places for God," one house, many rooms, one tune, many dances -- dead interchangeably human?

From one killed in action there -- If you are able, save for them a place inside you, save one backward glance when you are leaving for places they can no longer go. Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own. And in that time when all decide and feel safe to call war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind. (Michael Davis O'Connell)