Invisible

About ten minutes into a Carlos Saura movie, Fado, I shut it off.  Saura has created other movies about dance forms, including one about Flamenco, and one about Tango.  Naturally in the early phase of tango learning I watched that one about a dozen times.  Searching, searching past the subject, to the background, to the faces of those extras who lend their air of the authentic to the lie.


I love the sounds of Fado, but know very little about it. It seems likely that authentic Fado is not translated well outside of it's native habitat.  I imagine a place near the water, a dark bar or room somewhere, the people who live and work and have the kind of look you get from living.  There is much that we cannot and will not ever know other than the goosebumps we feel from knowing that something is happening and you don't know what it is.  You cannot watch this from the outside, because it is un-seeable.  But sound is not un-seeable.  It is for everyone within earshot, for everyone with a computer and itunes.  Still absent is the air of the barrio, the poetry of life there, the eyes across the room, the feeling of the hands on the worn instruments, the weather, land, the food, the smell, the history which belongs to someone else.  The idea of these things will be marketed to those hungry for some soulfulness.  They come, they buy, they go away hungry.  Someone can make a colorful movie about something, but it won't really be Fado.  Or Flamenco, or Tango. 


Everyone goes through a series of predictable stages in tango.  I've noticed that some of my favorite fellow bloggers have stopped finding new things to say.  And my truly favorite blogger are actual writers, and go on to *books, to find deeper meaning, to say something about their own lives and.or the culture, music, or psychology of the dance, or find other passions to write about.   Or to just go on with life with tango as a piece of a (hopefully) larger life.  At a certain point the realization comes that what is going on in tango is invisible from the outside.  The best tango is felt and known, and has no words.  


It is pretty easy to write about what tango isn't.  But impossible to write about what it is.  We talk all around it.  All the time.  Because it is a mystery, it is about something you cannot peg.  Much arguing and disgust about this and that.  Many try to live their sexuality and to justify predatory behavior, to show off, to live out the stuff they haven't worked out yet for themselves. Phases.  Tests.  Places to fall off the map, or places to get it straight.  Eventually, the love of tango can save you, or drive you crazy. The night when you know, those nights have a something else.  You feel the breath, the hairs on his arm  brush against yours as you take the embrace, and there go all the tango steps you ever learned going out with the trash, all the movies, all the ideas, all the workshops.  Those things that inspired you were just magic tricks that you were ready to de-code. And still.....there was magic.  You crossed all those rivers of fire, all the things that could go wrong.  And now you have no other place to go.  Just a space to be in.


You can't see the secret. The secret is revealed only to those who search, and wait, and pay their dues.  Each persons dues are different, and each person will find their own way.  Or not.  Plenty of people moving their bodies around all night every night, but still wandering in the desert.  


The only people who know what tango is in any moment, are those two people finding one pulse in two bodies, finding the gift of music beat and heartbeat together, spinning in timeless world not reachable by your story or mine.  


Because we are so moved, I am going to continue to write about this deep influence in our lives. I am not so foolish as to believe that anyone has ever said anything about it, or made a movie about it, that approaches that space.


*NOTE:  I have read every tango book I can find, with a few exceptions for some I could not get through.  My personal favorite is a book about a life leading to tango, where tango actually does save someone. That is the new memoir by Cherie Magnus, The Church of Tango.  Links can be found on her blog for kindle readers or real book readers.