Dancing In The Moonlight
An alternate reality envisioned from a hospital bed
I am standing barefoot in front of a mirror after taking two hits of a sativa live resin infused pre-roll. I am spending time with my body. Sure, it’s old on the outside, but on the inside it keeps getting younger, as I learn to escape the tyranny of other people, in confederacy with a couple of friends.
I move to the music by using imagination, not memory of how to dance. How I used to dance was more like Trump than Jon Batiste. One night I dreamed I was crossing a river on a bridge, and there was a black man sitting on it, and he was laughing. “You don’t know how to play that guitar,” he said. This carried with it the suggestion that he does know how to play a guitar. A black man in a dream is the shadow, what has been repressed in order to develop a defining ego. I needed to integrate him if I had any hope of playing a guitar at fifty, with no training, no voice.
Now I am laughing as I imitate Trump trying to dance, and I say to the mirror, “Like this, Don John.” And I shift right to left. The movement becomes slow and fluid, because there is no dance already there, and if one begins it is a fleeting thing, dissolving into the immediacy of focus into the body. I have done this in front of somebody else but only when I want to be seen. So not that often. The ego is a mask, and I have slipped it off.
Last night I asked Siri to play some swing, and it was all big band, which wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t know how to describe what I wanted. But today I found it by playing a cut from Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on my phone, then transferring to the four room speakers. I got what I wanted, which was a mood in which I wished to immerse myself. I move my attention at the same pace as the unconscious moves. I know the rate. It’s the rate at which an arm levitates. It used to be in the shadow of the one who speaks stupidly, for example, “He who knows does not speak.” But does that shut him up? Nothing shuts him up. I have to just leave, as two wives did.
The song I am most into as I move is, “Dancing In The Moonlight,” and I try to remember who recorded it. My guess is Van Morrison, but when I looked it up, the song was written by a man named Sherman Kelly, in 1969, while he was recovering from a vicious beating by a gang in St. Croix.
“I suffered multiple facial fractures and wounds and was left for dead,” he wrote. “While I was recovering, I wrote ‘Dancing in the Moonlight,’ in which I envisioned an alternate reality, the dream of a peaceful and joyful celebration of life.”
That’s the world most of us want, I think, but we can’t find it among those who speak from the ego. The speaking has to shift to being in service to the body, because it is the only place to which we can escape to a peaceful and joyful celebration of being alive. I can’t be there all the time because most activity is patterned. But I can remember myself as a body — the subtle one, not the husk it leaves behind — and remember that the ego is a mask with surprising transparency. It should not be taken seriously unless it is in service to what does not speak, but knows.
“The mouth lies. It doesn’t know that it lies, but it lies.” (Dr. Brugh Joy)
“Hell is other people.” (Sartre)