Except in my imagination, I don’t pretend to understand the permanent blackness of those who have lost their sight. Even less, those who were born without that faculty, and so have no access to even the memory of color: to sense red, they must feel red on their skin, the subtle variation in frequency from one hue to the next.

In the landscape of the never-sighted, I imagine certain words lose their texture, deprived as they are of connotation. When I say “red”, I see flowers; I see blood; I smell the perfume of a rose, or feel my pulse quicken with desire, or deflate in despair; I see a red balloon, recall a single frame from a French film; I smell the stink of post-War fear, I hear the ruffle of Chinese banners over some Premier’s visit to Harvard Square; I see her body where it blushes with life, and from that color, her scent.

Remove the color of sight, and certain memories are erased, others never made.

If the beauty of darkness is denied, however, then another dimension — one which the sighted rarely explore — can never be enjoyed. I am fortunate to have seen so many things of beauty; I am sad to have witnessed so much pain. I am graced with the ability to open my eyes as well as close them, and born with an adventurous spirit that lights up when an unexplored corner of life appears, intrigued by those obscure edges that flicker just out of sight, whose reflections catch at the corner of the eye.

So it is, I find: the sighted live on surfaces, while the blind see what those surfaces contain.

~

On Tuesday I practiced a form of dance — Contact Improvisation — that values other senses over seeing and, by disregarding dogma and predetermined “steps”, demands that its practitioners listen deeply, listen for what is present under the surface.

On these dance evenings we often begin with a circle, so that everyone might arrive. Community circles balance the energies of the people that comprise them: for those that travel far, the hum of the engine and the traffic’s aggression can seep out of the body and heart, while for those nearby, the complexities of family connections and the demands of the household are given time to dissipate. In a circle, you close your eyes and contribute what you are at the circumference (surface) to what you collectively are in the interior; as others bring their joys or struggles or excitement or ennui, the room takes a form no longer described by its four walls, but instead by what those walls contain.

That’s how you begin a dance: you bring yourself, you find others. Start with the hands or the shoulders, the back or the hips, with a glance or merely the sense that someone is nearby. As the minutes pass, the dancers change partners, and the evening takes the shape of these accumulated meetings, almost like a living creature, whose body is comprised of moving bodies, and who heart beats with all of the beating hearts. And what is given is received: the dancers begin to take their cues from the dance they themselves created.

~

Two-thirds of the way through the night, that night, I stepped out of the swirl to take a breath. I had been dancing vigorously (and vertically) in one of those acrobatic turns you often find when moving in the company of men; with that velocity and that aerial work, one’s focus gets wrapped up tightly. Imagine riding a mountain-bike quickly down a narrow forest path: your muscles become taut, your responses quick (or you find yourself wheels-skyward, and on your back), while your attention grabs the two meters in front of you in its fists. I stopped. I moved to the side to allow my awareness to widen again, and my body to feel the floor.

With eyes closed, the sounds of the dancers rushed toward me, as though suddenly given space to be heard. Here a couple spun past me, with the breath of their passing — the heat of their bodies, lungs puffing and laughing with their exertion and delight, the soft shuffle of their bare feet sliding along the wooden floor. Next, three or four in a group, working low toward the earth. I was a pool of stillness, and sounds made ripples in me that I could watch.

From the right, a body rumbled quickly up against me, wanting to impart some of its haste. It is difficult to rush a lake: all your bluster can do is create waves, and while they express energy they do not retain it. From the right, a splash that washed up on the left shore of me. The body in contact slowed. Another joined us. With the eyes closed, what I interpreted was not a context of colors, or motions of the hands, but the quality of intent, the desire of the heart, a physical conversation whose words are made instant-by-instant of sensation:

“HereIamHereIamHereHerehereherehere…”
“Yes. You are here.”
“Hereherehere… here… dance willyoudance willyoudance?”
“Not at that speed, no [the body says this]. Thank you for the invitation [the body says this, too]. I was alone, and now I am accompanied [the body].”
(rumbling, energetic) “Herehere I need (hereherehere) speed, I need…” (that body washes through yours, and moves westward with its wind)

It is a physical law that the slower you move, the more you perceive. If you are in haste, the sensations that come toward you are myriad, following one after another in such rapid succession… like the mountain-biker in the forest. While we can develop our skills of perception, there is a limit to what we can savor, and as velocity increases, a sweet drop of rain on the tongue becomes a cool shower of raindrops on the face, becomes a downpour that chills the body, becomes a wall of water that drowns the senses.

I stood unmoving, sightless and silent. Another dancer approached, a rather tall dancer (I later learned it was one person on another’s shoulders – what sight would have revealed to me) whose quality of touch was one of presence and curiosity (what sight would have hidden from me). Then, another dancer moved gracefully to my side. That adverb suggests visible grace, however this “gracefulness” was felt physically as a careful, quiet approach and invitation.

Here’s where making choices opens worlds. I could have turned around, and smiled to (what I discovered to be) a two-story dancer; and I could have looked for and taken the hand of the third, beginning a somewhat habitual dance: take her hand, draw in, ease away, spin, lift… Instead, I kept my eyes closed and, rather than identify the dancers by their facial features and what they were called, I let them tell me who they were.

So what would have become a series of movements in relationship to the surface of the earth, and the surface of my hands, and the surface that my dance partner presented to me, became the sense-surround of a deep-sea diver who intentionally swims away from the sun, toward interior spaces: where the water-weight and the currents are much more tangible than air, shifting this way and that. Down where there is no light, where the turn of the diver’s (did she want to go right? go left?) is replaced by the comforting pressure of the swimmer’s hand, shoulder or back, where contact leaves no doubt.

Ah, this is heady stuff. But only because I try to condense a hundred-thousand nuances into two thousand words.

Let’s try this: when you are looking with your proximate senses, instead of with your eyes, when your partner is listening intently and intentionally meeting you again and again through touch (so you know where he or she is), what might otherwise be a tentative shuffling in the dark becomes a reassured flying into light. Facial expressions that demanded interpretation dissolve, in their place a physical immediacy that requires no translation. You move where there is support, and when you are lifted off the floor (I was), you ride the earth directly through the bone and sinew of your dance partner. You don’t see the color of their dance attire, but the Color of their touch and the frequency of their being — just like a frequency of sunlight — layer upon layer upon layer of life, that would be missed were you to crack open your eyelids, allowing even the tiniest sliver of “surface” to impress itself upon your retina.

When you stop looking and start listening, time loses its edge. I can measure the length of my “blind” dance in movement, not in minutes, with certain astounding highlights standing out like holidays to a calendar: the sensation of free-fall, only to be caught or, acutely aware of where the earth was, to catch myself; or, with intimate awareness of my position and my partner’s position, graceful movement that avoided the visual and rational, and found instead something sensed and instinctual.

All in all, a dance that was more effortless and satisfying for being performed in the dark.

~

If there is freedom, it is a birthright: ours to enjoy when we dare to let go of what we see, to take hold of what we know.

“Night Dance” by Maartje @ deviantart.com

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