Mizpah’s Dance BY Dr Lester Simon
1. She went to Sunday School. She taught at Sunday School. She was baptized in the church with holy water. She walked for confirmation and was confirmed in the church. The church was her life, her food and drink; her everything. Then she took the carnival dessert. And all hell broke loose.
2. Dance. There she was. Away from the crowd. Near enough to be seen but far away to be singular. She danced between the edges of the land light and the arc of the shadows of the moon.
3. The rhythm asked and then gently escorted her from her seat. Parts of her body received invitations. Each invitation came with specific, special instruction. Separately, it looked pointless; but together, the points added and became one, making sense.
4. The instructions were clear and simple in the offering. Each joint has its own type and range of movement. Explore the angles and geometrical shapes, from reflex to obtuse, from triangle to hexagon to parallelogram. There is only one exception in this carnival of the animals. Do not wink up!
5. She dances for her heart, beating in time with the rhythm of the music. Her hands embrace. Her hands separate. They flow in all directions like avenues of blood cruising on a highway. She comes back home via roads that make her entire body jump, and backroads that almost cause one arm to crash into the other. She goes back out, starting all over again, stopping here and there. One limb travels along different routes, seeking shortcuts, while the other limbs pretend to be drivers or pedestrians. Her limbs obey the few working traffic lights. Sometimes the left hand stops as if giving way to the right hand at a roundabout, but like some absent-minded drivers, her entire body goes round and round the roundabout ignoring the rules, the traffic police and the unnecessary siren announcing someone of high import being driven on roads unfit for purpose. She tries with little success to stay in her lane. The lady is in a dancing mood.
6. She dances for balance. Oftentimes she has to multitask at work and at church, looking after children. She’s aware some workers multitask as a pretense for not doing anything. She is not like that. The communion of her hands from the back of her shoulder to her fingertips and her lower limbs from knees to ankles and hidden toes reminds her hips that they must obey the no-wink-up rule. Trouble is, she has genetic hips that can carry buckets of water without a drop dropping. And so, without any active attempts to break the rule, her entire body is in marvelous, wanton motion sans winking up. Indeed, if she were to winkup deliberately, it would take away from the flowing artistry and tapestry she is weaving and waving. The lady dances like David.
7. She dances for her emotional and mental well-being. Someone shouts that the devil got to her and that she is mad as a hatter. She laughs and dances and looks at the person whose mouth is decorated, filled with fillings, causing her to wonder if his fillings had mercury. She had read Alice in Wonderland and knew that centuries ago hat makers used toxic mercury to turn animal fur into felt in making hats and that the mercury reportedly damaged their brains and made them addle. She simply takes her hat off and bows when called mad as a hatter. Then again, those who are genuinely and seriously mentally challenged do get some satisfaction from dancing. The rhythm of the music sets off the release of chemicals in the brain called dopamine and endorphins. These chemicals relieve stress, anxiety and depression. Bob Marley was right. One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain. The lady dances in anesthesia.
8. She dances for her brain. She has to have good timing and memory. What if she decides to repeat what she just did and make a variation of her dancing theme, like rhapsody on the theme of Paganini? It must flow in a logical pattern, but even if seemingly illogical, there is a method behind her waywardness. Dancing stimulates the brain and demands cognition, the mental processes through which the brain acquires, stores, retrieves, and processes information. Dancing pushes and pulls our thinking, learning, memory, reasoning, and decision-making. Yes, dancing can do all these things. Research shows the benefits of dancing and the brain in lowering the risk of dementia. The lady dances to live a good life in old age.
9. She dances for societal well-being. Especially at carnival, she must dance and dance and dance again to echo our cultural values and historical struggles. It cannot be all about winking up. Concentration on winking up will reregister and underscore the sexual depravities visited on our people during slavery. Again, Bob Marley: Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, as we dance away from the vile, vulgar darkness of our hips in public to the blazing morning light of the mind through the freedom of the rest of our abandoned anatomy. So too must we highlight our cultural values and seek the best we can be together, especially in this divided land of red and blue and indifferent, clueless, colorless. Dance can heal. Dance can mend. Dance can lend our best to each other in a cavalcade of communal motion that seeks to transform this deeply fractured land.
10. Dance Mizpah. Dance. The lady dances for all of us.
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