The prudent thing to do

On dubstep and birdsong

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There are chess players at Americano Lounge who have had the audacity to just play chess for over two hours now. I don’t even think they’re doing it as a means to an end to anything. People keep coming and going and they’re just there: playing their game with something absurd, like…? Reckless abandon? Engrossed self-forgetfulness?

Three weeks ago, on Keats Island in British Columbia, forty strangers — myself among them — danced together in a room the way these guys are forgetting all else, now. We started out insecure, walking in circles as Hillary shaped this composition — “quicker… and backwards… half-steps… slow down… okay, now: as though you’re in a hurry… skipping… pause… invite someone to join you… let them… reject them… choose…” — avoiding eye contact (like who wants that?) but by the end?

Flailing and spinning and laughing as though none of the others of us was there at all. Observer included. Which is to say: if transcendence is anything, it’s immanence. We all showed up so hard that we got to disappear. Life lost is life found.

I hardcore danced my teenage-boy’s heart out, closed my eyes and leapt and bowed, and opened them and found everyone wholly enraptured, sweating and transformed by the very act of casting their dignified chokehold to the wind. Out went all judgement and preoccupation with the next spin. Arm straight up to the sky like a signature pose. Booty bump. “No, no, no.” White-guy-wiggle.

I went to a house show last night. A DJ played both her board and violin, and I decided it’s not worth not dancing anymore, and why didn’t I do this sooner? And danced the question and its grief-pangs into the hardwood floor. I found a beat to stomp to and stomped, boy. I took my dog, and everyone I’d never met before told me that he’s a human. I know, I know. “It’s in the eyes!” Yes, yes, he gets that a lot. And then he sits there like these people, playing chess: tail wagging.

The birds sing this way, in the mornings. I lay in bed too long, sometimes, listening to them chirp the sun up. In Canada, I found out that when some birds have lost their ability to believe in that new mercy, rising, others will be the voice they can’t find with a song that covers their fatigue, like: when you can’t sing, I’ll hold you. He’ll come up again. One of them, man… its got shotgun lungs. Could have sampled itself into yesterday’s dubstep. A whole orchestra walks the electrical wire over my neighbor’s apartment, and lately, a Cardinal as red as his truck has been showing up and scuttling along the rain gutters. I’ve been opening the trunk of my car and sitting beneath its umbrella, watching him (it’s a him) glow against the grey backdrop sky this week. Should not have bought that rolling tobacco, but here I am, thinking of being asked to ask someone to dance, and them being told to say no. Thinking of choices, and collections of them.

How much unsaidness remains? I’ve always been slow to speak. Temitope observes this in me over seafood and mezcal. I’d love to say the reason is something cute, like wisdom, but the truth is that things take a long time to steep in me before I have any idea what to do with or say about them (or at least: until I believe that I do), and I sometimes worry that what some might call prudence is just a life on autopilot, passing me by.

In that case, I suppose the most prudent thing I can think to do, now, is to dance more often, like these chess players.