Lit Up | Poetry

The Solitary Chassé

A Poem inspired by Annie Lennox’ ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’

We began with fire.

Before courts, or temples, before anyone thought to write down what the body was doing, we were already doing — turning in smoke, answering something nameless yet but lived in the chest like a second heartbeat, insisting.

Credit: Willy Ronis, 1938, Creative Commons

The room was dark, and harder The audience, indifferent. The stars did not lean in.

We danced anyway. We always danced anyway. That is tragic? or the whole point. The poem is not yet sure

Louis XIV understood the body a political instrument — the spine a declaration, the hand’s arc a loyalty oath, the missed step in a courante a confession of treason the court would not forget.

In the mirrored halls of Versailles every gesture was surveilled, every posture petitioned, the self reduced to its most legible surface, approved or destroyed by the King’s passing gaze.

The silk slipper fit That was cruel — the cage bespoke, measured to the foot, comfortable enough to forget it was a cage, until you tried to walk somewhere the choreography had not approved.

In the temple courtyard the logic reversed.

The anklets spoke to the floor and the floor answered — not the king, not the court, not the cold consensus of the watching faces — the floor, the breath, the blood through the body like weather, like grief, like the specific joy that has no object because its object is everything.

Shiva dances not for an audience but as the universe practicing its own creation and destruction, the Tandava neither performance nor meditation but both, the distinction dissolved in movement itself.

The dancer learns this slowly: the ultimate achievement is not the room’s approval but the moment the room ceases to exist — when ego thins to transparency and what moves is no longer the careful self but something inwards, larger, briefly borrowed.

The anklet fits differently than the silk slipper. But it is still an instrument of transformation. The question is what you are transforming towards

Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who could dance, which is another way of saying he would believe only in a god who understood that existence is not a problem to be solved but a rhythm to be entered,

that the philosopher on his mountain and the woman on the dance floor are doing the same thing — moving through the unbearable with as much style as the body can manage,

which is sometimes considerable, which is sometimes barely enough, which is always, always more than the universe required of us and less than we required of ourselves.

You see Sisyphus and see a dancer.

Not the rock. Not the hill. The style of the pushing — the particular angle of the shoulder, the specific rhythm the feet found on the long way down, the face that decided somewhere on the slope that the absurd did not get the last word.

One must imagine Sisyphus in anklets in silk slippers, in sweat-slicked trainers on the floor of a Paris club at four in the morning, the DJ indifferent, the strobe light making everyone a series of still frames, everyone briefly a painting, briefly a prayer.

The woman on the floor is not waiting for the room.

She has stopped waiting some time ago — you can see it in the spine, in the arm’s extension, in the expression that crossed over from performance into something the French court never authorized and the temple always knew:

the face of someone who has found the interior tempo, the one that runs beneath the DJ’s beat, beneath the algorithm’s recommendation, beneath the room’s restless hunger for the next louder thing —

the oldest rhythm, the one the fire knew, the one the temple floor knew, the one the body has always known and keeps forgetting and keeps remembering.

The phones glow. The room moves on. Somewhere a louder song begins its campaign for the available attention.

She completes the phrase.

Not for them. Not despite them. Only because the movement asked to be finished and she was the one who knew how.

This is not transcendence. This is not tragedy.

This is the human in its most characteristic posture —

upright, in motion, neither fully seen nor alone,

dancing in the gap between the court’s demand and the temple’s silence,

between Louis’s appraising eye and Shiva’s closed one,

between the need to be witnessed and the deeper need to move truly regardless —

mastering, step by difficult step, the choreography of existing in a room that has mostly looked away, or turned a whiter shade of pale

and finding there, in that unlooked-at corner of the floor,

not defeat,

but the only freedom the dance was ever offering.