Divine love

9^th August

But for all my last entry was very miserable, I can’t pretend that there haven’t been – that there aren’t – very beautiful things, too. Beauty has a way of arriving when you are very miserable, quite doggedly. Some instances: my beautiful friend hosts a farewell picnic to London where I bring cherries in mezcal and a chocolate cake and an expensive bottle of dry muscat, which I proceed to drink almost single-handedly. She’s perfect and so is everyone else there, and I feel heartened to see her. I drink a paloma on a coach back from Sussex and experience something similar to what Julian of Norwich presumably did in her Revelations of Divine Love: the knowledge that some miracles, however good, still have an expiry date; that I am grateful for the ability to discern which pains are from good things ending and which from horrorshows. I learn to play Anything by Adrianne Lenker on the guitar pretty much in the space of a single morning – it’s the song which made me want to learn the guitar in the first place. And my favourite dancer in the world comes to the Sunday night milonga.

I’m starting glamming up for Sunday nights because I’ve been having an unbelievably shit time in almost every other area of my life, and sticking an emerald hoop through one ear and slipping an elastane dress on are surprisingly cheering for an evening. It’s very hot, and as I walk over to the milonga I think about the South Korean couple who turned up a few months ago. I’ve written about them before. One thing I didn’t write about is watching them dance salsa in one of the cortinas, between tandas. Salsa happens sometimes. Between tandas, the DJ will play some other tune while dancers find their seats or get water or start eyeing up someone new; often enough they’ll play salsa, and sometimes dancers on the floor who know salsa will dance to it. The salsa I‘m used to seeing in these circumstances is sweet, often competent, relaxed and maybe anodyne – it’s very by the books. But then I watch this Korean couple get up and dance. I know them to be phenomenal dancers in general because that’s what I experience when I dance with him. Their salsa is much less safe than the others; it’s big and experimental and messy and completely, riotously joyful. I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re not doing it for anyone but each other and the joy of dancing. It feels almost like a lesson everyone on the floor should be paying extremely close attention to: this is what dancing should be like. This is how it should make you feel, and this is what it looks like when you feel like that.

This is what I’m thinking of when I walk over, and then, as if by magic, there they are, on one of their biannual visits. It’s strange to realise, as I dance with him, that he is probably my favourite dancer in the world – someone from the other side of the planet, who I have only danced with on three evenings in my life, who I can barely hold a conversation with. I’ve explained before what it’s like to dance with him – that sense of just being moved, of not having to do anything. Whenever I dance with anyone after him I have to really re-learn not only how to move myself, or move differently, but also – I notice – re-remember how to take on a kind of musical agency and guidance that, with him, is completely intuitive between the two of us. At some points it occurs to me that it almost wouldn’t matter if I didn’t even have feet at the end of my legs; we’d still dance just as well. Many of the dancers I regularly dance with on Sunday are highly skilled, and yet they don’t have the qualities he has – particularly, I realise, of creating a dance in which it is incredibly easy for me to move at the upper edge of my technique and with my best alignment. It’s not even that he seems to encourage this, or anything so conscious – in the dance it just happens. My hips are in the right place. We dance three tandas – some Troilo, I think; that vals that always reminds me of the Shostakvich jazz waltzes. By the end of the night my hip flexors feel like they are made of molten glass, dense and liquid, open and flexible and gravitational.

Just before our last dance, I ask him whether he’s a teacher. He laughs and admits he is. I almost regret asking; that ability, to bring out the best in my technique, to follow me wherever I go, to know exactly which leg I’m on before or even regardless of whether I know – makes a little more prosaic sense. But the connection and the joy is still there – when I shrug my shoulders to the song and make him laugh, when he hugs me and kisses my cheek with gladness and affection after each tanda ends. They’re going to be back in January, he says. I won’t miss a Sunday then.