Left and leaving

1^st October

I have those Wallace Stevens lines, from ‘The Dwarf’ in my head again: ‘Now it is September and the web is woven. / The web is woven and you have to wear it’; except, of course, it is October, spookier season. How do you get on with it, and the finality of the months moving? Listen to the three-and-three-quarter hour special edition of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album; get a piercing or maybe two; start reading William T. Vollmann’s treatise on justifiable violence.

But this month brings with it a specific finality: at the end of it one of my friends is leaving, going back home to Singapore. He lost his job in the Spring and never found a new one, and now he has to leave the country. Hence my title, taken from The Weakerthans song of the same name, with its quiet, ambiguous contractions (who is left, who has left, who was left). Tango, especially as it exists in big, busy cities like London, is very international; this is one of its best pleasures, and also, quite often, its sadnesses, as people leave communities permanently and take their lives elsewhere. People are always leaving, it’s true; it’s the first time, however, someone I know very well is doing so. I will really miss dancing with my friend. He is frequently exhausting to dance with; much bigger and stronger than me, and demanding, with sometimes questionable technique which has made me bow my back too far inwards on occasion (though this is my own faulty technique, too) – and I have to give practically everything up when I dance with him and concentrate as hard as I can. Sometimes, and especially over the last year when my energy levels have been significantly lower, never having really recovered to where they seemed to be before I got very ill last winter, I’ve quietly dodged him at milongas. But there was no one else like him; with all very good connections you have in tango, there never is anyone like anyone else. His commitment, and joy, and musicality, and ferocious (even inflexible) passion for good dancing was such a privilege to dance with. Learning to dance with him in a way that was sustainable to my form and energy taught me a lot about how to manage my own alignment, my own resistance as a follower, and my own acquiescences, too. And another friend, my main dance partner, is away, too, for an unspecified amount of time (he said a month or so; I don’t believe him), so I really will be left slightly at a loss for people to dance with, possibly for a while.

I’ve just got back from a few days near Areopoli, on the Mani peninsula, where I survived mostly on honey, yoghurt, bougatsa, cappuccino freddos and pints of Campari spritz. I thought a lot, there, about relaxing, and what relaxing means, remembering my lesson from the other day, and the visiting teacher’s hands, smoothing across my shoulders, back and neck like you would pacify an agitated dog – how difficult it can actually be to make the body relax. I realise, actually, that sometimes in order to relax muscle you must first articulate or engage it, encouraging it to align correctly, visiting it where it is and checking to see how it lies.

Last week I went to practice with my friend at his house, for the first time in months and months. It’s such a joy, and he looks after me very well; it makes me hopeful for further practice and improvement. We talk about the community we dance in and its widening cracks, and when we dance it’s fairly effortless, in that we dance together frequently and make life easy for one another in the way our dances co-operate. At the end he says something about how he wished practicing with me could be more challenging, but I just get it too quickly, am so simple to direct, too light for my own good It’s very sweet. Well, my teachers are back soon – then, I’m sure, we can come up with futher complications.