The Tango Eros

I’ve been trying to write a blog post “Power, Trust, Grace” in the last few days, but found myself unable to. True tango power comes from the stamina to reduce external flamboyance and to feel, internally, one’s own axis of existence. I am not there yet. Not quite. So instead, let me talk about the Tango Eros.

Hollywood has successfully sensationalized the erotic image of tango. Little black bonnets, hot red lips, cigar smoke, naked backs and legs, and, of course, that unexplainable, eternal stem of rose, its ownership changing from clenched white teeth to clenched white teeth. Even spicier when it comes with guns and espionage! (Think of True Lies [1994] and Mr. and Mrs. Smith [2005].) The genuine connection in no-movement no one cares. The audience enjoys a vertical love-making. In Shall We Dance (2004), Jennifer Lopez’s breasts rose and fell like a sucking cub from a lady-lead tango dance with the married handsome Richard Gere. Their bodies, glistening in a fine membrane of sweat, were wrapped in the soft-glow of golden lights. They chuckled a little in the end like exhausted lovers do.

True tango dancers avert tango shows – at least not the type targeting the general public. In no other dance there exists such a huge gap between the tonsured and the laity. For us monks in the monastery of tango, the Tango Eros is not erotic. It’s a hungry spirit.

At times I find myself longing for the embrace of some ones with whom I shared particularly beautiful tandas with. The dizzy feeling of moving in perfect symphony to the music, marking syncopation with little freezes, ornamenting a string of rapid notes with small steps that stirred ripples on the surface of a lake, and waltzing across the floor like two flying cranes in an intricately entangled courting ritual. The embrace does not break between numbers and we hold each other in stillness after the music stops.

Eros flies where there is this constant yearning for beauty, unity, and perfection. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates retold a story of Eros that he heard from a woman, Diotima. His mother is Need, his father is Source. As a result Eros was born as a beggarly and cunning daemon, commuting between heaven and earth, forever seeking the Beauty. Yearning breeds infliction and pain. Its desire cannot be satiated. Its ultimate end lies just beyond reach. The Tango Eros, thus understood, symbolizes an eternal hunger.

The Dancing Foreigners

 (photo: on the New York Harbor deck below the Brooklyn Bridge)

Yes, I have long been a foreigner. But perhaps it is more precise to call myself an étrangère – a “stranger.” A “foreigner” implies a perspective of the “locals” or “natives”; a “stranger,” however, is someone “estranged” from one’s native habitat, by force or by choice. One can be a stranger on one’s fatherland. Les étrangers are people dreaming of and seeking a hearth. There are those dancing few who find it in tango.

On the tango floors of New York, many foreigners dance: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Germans, Russians, Romanians, Turks, Columbians, Venezuelans, and of course, Argentinians too. Many Argentinians I knew there began to dance tango only when they were in the US of A, since it reminded them of a familiar scene at home, where papa and mama clutch each other and move to the outdated beats from the last century. For the alien inhabitants in a monstrous metropolitan, tango provides a pseudo sense of intimacy. You hold a fellow stranger so closely that you can even hear her heartbeat; you move with such harmony that she follows like an echo or a shadow of your thoughts – with the sure certainty that at the end of the dance each safely parts and disappears. They gather and dissipate like swirling, fallen flower petals carried by a gust of wind.

Perhaps it was because of New York, that sense of rootlessness and unbelongingness is in my mind deeply associated with this dance. Whenever I say “tango,” the word conjures up a magic image of a people wandering, meandering, waltzing, endlessly and solemnly toward twilight, in each other’s arms.

Tango is their gypsy ballet.

Fear, Shame, Doubt

Internet offers a virtual confession booth, which is a well-studied fact. What we feel hard to tell to close friends, we confide to perfect strangers in chat-rooms and on blogs. Being an atheist (I believe in atheism, though agnosticism would be more logical), I have no priest to tell. So here I am, ready to part with the fear, shame, and doubt on and by the tango floor pent up in the last few years.

I have ugly legs, as my long-legged mother always said. Ever since I was a child she dressed me in long skirts and wide pants, so as to cover up my natural deficiency. When I was twelve, I had a golden skirt so pretty that I occasionally dared it despite its knee-length. It was a bit worn two years later and mother gave it to a countryside cousin. In college I began to keep long hair. And long dresses. I walked through the season of blossom like a phantom of melancholy. I locked myself up in the boudoir of romantic novels and classical poetry.

When I started to learn tango in the brightly lit Carls A Field Center, the biggest fear was about my legs. Should I wear dresses above the knees? I eventually did, and braved skinny jeans in my daily life too. Then my teachers began to tell me that I too often stepped on the outer sides of my feet and my knees didn’t close. I nodded but thought: oh it’s because my legs are not straight. I overcorrected. I stepped on the extreme inside of my feet and kept my knees extended so as to minimize their distance as much as possible, and tried to remain in control. Then I was criticized for being stiff and not using my whole feet. I insisted my overcorrection. Too often beautiful people don’t know the extent a person with natural deficiency needs to go!

And of course there were those necessary harassments, monkey tricks, and rejections a beginner went through. When you outgrew some ancient leaders who love young meat, you must resign to vegetate in frustration by the floor, watching fantastic people dancing too. And when you did dance, you worked your legs so hard that, even when you were laughing, at the back of your head you knew that you were making a fool of yourself. Superior dancers were looking in amusement and in disapproval. You thought in desperation: but that’s my limit! Maybe I should just give up tango. A monastery is where I belong.

Even though I did begin to dance better and to receive compliments, such feelings never went away. Worse: the deeper I sink into the habit of tango, the more I doubt if such time and effort should be better spent on worthier projects, such as an overdue article, a novel, reading Kant, or, let’s say, learning piano. I realize that it’s the typical struggle of an addict.

Yet I live in small epiphanies, one at a time. And 2013 is a year of small epiphanies.

The first came in Budapest, New Year. I begged to have a private lesson with Mariana and Dimitri, right before their performance in the milonga. They gracefully agreed. When Mariana, a ballerina with slender limbs, told me to close my knees, I blurted out: but I don’t have straight legs! Somehow they started laughing. Dimitri pulled up his pants and showed me his legs: he’s bowlegged! And he was the champion of Latin dance in Greece! So astonished, I laughed too. Somehow all these years of anxiety on my body-type evaporated. It’s not about the body-type. It’s all about the technique. And yes, it’s high time to relax, baby.

Mariana taught me to think of the extension of my legs from the diaphragm, put my heels on the floor, and walk like a proud ballerina. It was the beginning of my departure from the tanguera complex of negativity. The following enlightenments on technicality in Buenos Aires I need not tell. In Salon Canning, I even mastered the art of cabeceo – a deep look into another person’s eyes to show your interest in dancing with him, an exercise that demands brazen confidence. It was not natural to me. But when I finally conquered the fear of a rejection to do so, a miracle happened: that wonderful leader leaning on the bar grinned and nodded back.

Another epiphany was the moment I finally told my “folks” that I danced tango. Tango had been a secret that I kept from my professional circle for years. The sexually overcharged image of tango doesn’t fit into the puritanical academia. I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I let people know my moonlighting as a tanguera. Yet on my way to Argentina I visited my alma mater and was obliged to tell the purpose of this journey with stamina. My professors who so far had only known me as an earnest student of poetry and philosophy were surprised – but with pleasant curiosity, not with the condemnation or disapproval that I had feared. For a brief moment I felt liberated: the two halves of me finally joined.

I still separate two facebook groups and make sure that tango-related content is only viewable by “the tango people.” We are a secret cult, with shibboleth and a set of elaborated liturgy. Only people in our church shall know that tango is about breaking boundaries – regional, cultural, and physical. (Oh yes, and that’s why dancers who only dance with people from their community amuse and annoy me.) Perhaps I will never become a Zen-master in tango, wearing an air of superior wisdom. Nor do I want to. But I will try to let go: trust the person dancing with me; trust my body to be its tranquil and graceful self.

P.S. This blog seems to have incurred some misunderstanding among my friends. But you don’t have ugly legs, they protested. Perhaps. Maybe. But this blog is about self-perception, not about the “truth” – which is relative. I also always consider myself a medium-size woman of medium height, though scientific measuring always tells me wrong.

I developed that complex of physical inferiority since when I was a teenager mother had been hard trying to cover up my legs with her fashion choice. Of course she didn’t mean to shame me. She would be mortified if she could read this blog. It’s just the way Chinese women dress: they cover up their sub-ideal body parts. Swimming suits sold in China are mostly one-piece with layers of ruffles. My mom still covers her collar bones because they are too bare and her upper arms because they are too thick. Neither is true. When I first came to America, I was shocked to see girls sporting tight T-shirts and skinny jeans that, to put it mildly, reveal their sizes. Yet what confidence! And it was beautiful. I began to embrace my body. Nowadays I wear bikini in pool only. I still don’t consider my legs to be pretty but they are how they are, and it’s just the truth of me. The fact that I can say it aloud means that I have already – if not completely, then largely – put the baggage of fear, shame, and doubt behind. And this blog is really about liberation – a keynote that somehow gets lost in translation. I will proceed in my next blog to discuss “power, trust, and grace.”

Tango Soteriology

I struck upon this term one sunny afternoon of May, sitting by my sterile university office desk, reading a conference anthology on Buddhist soteriology. The previous midnight I just came back from an intensive tango weekend in Berlin, dancing every night till dawn for three days. With all those exotic, mysterious Sanskrit words parading through my half-numb brain, suddenly, I realized that tango was my mārga – path to liberation.

I am a tango pilgrim. I meditate in extreme mobility. As the benevolent Buddha grants it, humans, being limited, cannot take the leap from the world of illusion to the world of truth without the help of some temporary, convenient, and skillful means. These means, or ūpaya, shall be sloughed like cicada skins once one is liberated. Yet before that, they are necessary to help tranquilize our easily impressible and swayable minds. Concentrated practice such as gardening, flower-setting, and even martial arts are all skillful means through which we meditate. Each one finds one’s own ūpaya. And mine is Argentinian tango.

A new friend in Berlin terms that state of bliss in tango “pure being.” All the lonely hours of practice in front of the mirror are crystalized into those unthinking and perfectly coordinated, rhythmic movements in a porteño song from the early 20^th century, the “Golden Age” of tango when it conquered the broad world from Paris to Shanghai. A man reacts instinctively to the music, his confident movements adjusted to the springy presence of the woman whose body becomes a conduit through which the energy flows from his right arm into his left palm, now covered by a light layer of excited sweat. The woman closes her often too widely alert eyes, feeling only the pressure on the breasts, on her palm, and from his warm, cupped hand on her back. Below the stable corner of a triangle formed by their lovingly touched heads and breasts their waists and legs are set free. They are lightning rods that conduct the energy of the earth into divine electrons in the low-hanging sky.

This lovely sight vindicates all romantic fantasies. Yet when the music stops, they disappear into different crowds not so much with a polite nodding of heads. They remain free. Love, jealousy, hatred, and sorrow are but fleeting emotions to be felt truly but to be left behind, together with the dim memory of joy last night, every night. Like the Zen master said: “The clouds are in the blue sky; the water in the vase.”