NAKED TO THE WIND

Preludum

Slow opening of the dark
Inward advance
Forging a hesitant connection
Soft, never clarified gestures
Thinking of who is gone, the difficulty of being-with
What is it to be touched as someone vital
if only parts of us are touching parts of others
does tangency admitted degrees, does opacity?
pain is the result of not being first for someone else
It's not, I long for you, it's you bereave me
It's not, I miss you, it's you are missing from me
I had to remind myself, "my world is worth returning to"
That nothing that is complete still breathes
but to live, was it not necessary to receive another’s, an other, heart?

Tango that I have seen danced
Against a yellow sunset
By those who were capable
Of another dance, that of the knife.
(Alguien le dice al tango, Jorge Luis Borges)

My life-work is about the body, about what it means to afford intimacy in the hold of the other, yet had I ever, in real terms, afforded intimacy?

And had I ever, sincerely, been in my own body? My contact with my body had been severed long ago, the grave cost of living a life of the mind.

At twenty-seven, just over one year after returning to live in Israel, I attended my first lesson in tango.

The music of tango is as close to me as if I had been dancing my entire life. I grew up on Piazolla, Ginastera, replicating the sensuality of the dance on piano and cello. But self-disclosure to an instrument is still an unfulfilling endeavor for a pained inner life that is unexpressed physically.

I have spent my intellectual life longing for intimacy, a longing I express through poetry and philosophy. The vocabulary for intimacy is rich, but had I ever allowed myself to be held? It is a truism that language impoverishes the lived experience. When I came to tango, a single touch echoed in me tenfold.

Before touch, there is, first of all, the encounter with yourself, with your body, through the prism of unfolding mirrors and the eyes of others.

Then there is the other. Tango (from tangere, to touch) is the work of walking with your partner to music. A story told by bodies with music. Need I point out the identification with life? One of life's most earnest difficulties may be described as trying to walk with another. Or finding another, finding the right person with whom to walk. One walks in tango as one walks in life. The curve of the body paints along the curve of life. Lines of connection, invisible threads gently tethering us together.

Choosing and being chosen are critical elements of the dance. But not every love can be returned. Some will leave you behind.

This is not intellectual. The work of tango is raw. A feeling from the heart extending up through the shoulder and down into the arm toward the chest of the other. Time lives its mark in the embrace.

In tango, the confrontation with the other is immediate, yet the discovery is gradual. There is a very real problem of sense, of smell, of weight. Each body has its own rhythm, its history; each body moves differently. What does it mean to touch someone you don't know and actually reach their heart? To go with them in their suffering? In order to move together, one person must slow down, or another speed up. Both must change, support each other in their irreducible singularity. Both must hear the music of the other. Absolutist that I am, I did not want to share a dance with anyone whose heart I could not touch.

At my first milonga, one of my partners suggested, "Close your eyes."

I will admit my selectivity in being held, my selectivity in "closing my eyes" with just anyone. I will admit the extent to which my selectivity verges on arrogance, on an experience of misrecognition which has dominated my life.

So much is withheld. One asks by saying nothing at all. Yet in one glance, there is a demand for recognition with all the being. Across us, and between, we must have enough of a difference, a seam for a movement to occur. Tango demands a genuine sensitivity within, a rigor of composure without. It reveals our relation to the unknown. You do, by being undone, by saying nothing with your mouth and everything, subtly, with your body. My body, for so long shackled, had to be reminded how to breathe and to receive.

My partner took my hand and drew my body up to his, chest to chest. I felt this to be a premature infringement. "Trust me," as we began to move, softly, hesitantly with a constant gentle pressure upon one another. What is it to yield? Aliveness to the space between us forces us to rest in the unknown. Falling open, struggling openly, leading with the heart. One is naked to the wind.

There is a dignity in the way of holding, a formal reserve, as you fasten to the other. Joining force and tenderness, as if something is touched from within. Sometimes it is.

At the milonga, I wondered, what does it mean to share a dance with many people, a dance that has an end? How can something end and still have been true?

Betrayal and a desire for truth have lingered with me since childhood. I found it painful to share touch with partners who would go on to touch many more after me, but to feel intimacy with almost none.

I have not taken many lessons, but enough to know: in tango, there is no genuine solo, there is always a duet. I have also taken enough lessons to experience what feels like deep loneliness with so many partners, what feels like two solos deaf to one another.

I wonder what it means to be found by a partner who will go the distance, the person with whom the dance will never end.

Liza Michaeli is a Jerusalem-borne Russian poet and philosopher. She writes in the poetic and religious register, writing meant to be vocalized by the pained tenderness of the human voice. Her work is a poetic evocation of the existential challenges of a meaningful life. She is interested in what it means to touch life and live it, in its physical struggle, honestly. Her first book, Recovering the pain, considers what it means to say "yes" to life, physically, what it takes, that is, to be human, and her second, How we are with one another, considers what it takes to be human with one another. She is completing a doctorate in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and is presently a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.