tango: walk this way

In Tango you are told, as a follower, when you first start out and still later on, depending on who your teachers were and are, to “Wait”. “No! You must WAIT for your leader!”. Believe it or not, there is an inherent problem with this line of reasoning, this way of thinking, more so than you might imagine. Not in the new agey, sometimes fluffy, men must be more accepting and, and women must be more agressive sort of thing. No, not that at all. But more in structure of the thought itself. And by the end of this article, you’ll see why mere thought itself is an error, and why we want to replace not just the thought, but the whole concept and idea with something else entirely!

Let’s get to it, shall we ?

Waiting implies a control dynamic, a master/slave relationship, being told what to do, and when to do it.

Listening implies a conversation, a condition of questioning and looking for improvement, opening a dialogue.

Listening is what we want to have happen on both sides of the equation. Mind you, it doesn’t always happen that way, but its nice when it does happen. To be fair ‘Listening’ does not imply that the dance will in fact be any less physical, but it does imply at the very least that there will in fact be a conversation of sorts. And that is a starting point. Mind you Im not just talking about this from a following perspective, but from a leading perspective as well.

What’s the difference between ‘WAITING‘ and ‘LISTENING‘ ?

The difference between the two of them is like night and day, dark and light, on and off. They are complete polar opposites, and why should you care ? Because the whole point of this distinction is to literally change the way you think about…well…everything. You may think these are just words, when in fact, they go a little deeper than you might imagine. Ok, a LOT deeper than you can possibly imagine. As you’ll see, but first a few definitives:

Waiting is: You are being TOLD what to do, when to do it, and literally how to do it. You have been taught, assuming you didn’t start with me, to WAIT for the lead. This is akin to being told as a child to go clean up your room, wash the dishes, or “Do what you were told to do, and don’t ask questions! Just DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD TO DO when you are told to do it”. Waiting is essentially a control dynamic that disinfranchises the follower, and literally cuts her off from any level of creativity of her own. From a leading perspective, it doesn’t allow for any level of true interaction from the relationship, and thereby cuts off options and opportunities that may occur from the follower’s side of the equation that you hadn’t anticipated, saw, or could handle, thereby cutting off any chance of her actually making you look about 1000 times better (or worse) than you do right now!

Listening is: A CONVERSATION. It is a constant series of questions of WHERE would you like to go ? How can I lead you better ? How can I follow you better ? How can I improve my technique here ? What can do to add to the fabric of the conversation ? How can I help ? Mind you this is the IDEAL conversation, which is what we are always striving for. However it, again, doesn’t always work out that way, but its what we’re striving for…always, or should be in my opinion.

A Little Background

We use ‘words’ to describe things. ‘DUHHH Miles, that’s called LANGUAGE!’. Well yes it is and thank you so much for pointing that out to me! Now as I was saying….That’s the beauty and one the major failings of spoken and written language. Such precision and clarity of thought on one level, and soooo limiting on so many other levels. In short, the words that you use to describe something is what it is defined as, or what you describe a thing as, is what it becomes! How you call a thing is what it grows into. Think about it, remember a story that you’ve been relating to someone else, and how in the re-telling of the adventure you had with X, Y, and Z that the story either grows or diminishes in the retelling (see memory -> http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/) ? That’s the beauty of language, memory, and the fusion of the two for information storage. But its also its failing at the same time. Because that, description, is literally cemented into the fabric of our universe!

There are many examples of this in religion, word magic, many spiritual practices, and even modern physics. Modern physics ? Quantum Dynamics actually. The year is 1935, and I’m referring to a long running conversation that Erwin Shroedinger was having with his good friend Albert Einstein on the very nature of the universe itself. Shroedinger devised, as a result of these conversations and letters with Einstien (who vehemently disagreed with Shroedinger’s conclusions by the way), an experiment that tests the fabric of reality and how we perceive it. Actually theexperiment was devised as a way to resolve a question of an interpretation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation) concerning a paper that Einstein had written with Podolsky and Rosen that talked about the states of particles that are in state of ‘flux’, and that as the particles are observed or measured, the state of the particles literally collapses thereby changing what is being observed or measured, and the important part, AS its being observed or measured. So that as a direct result of this ‘experience’ of the measurement or observation you can never know what a particle’s true state is because you are observing or measuring it.

While that’s all fine and good, how does this relate, and what the f*ck does it mean ? I’m getting there. Bear with me on this one, there’s a pay off. Shroedinger devised a ‘thought’ experiment to illustrate that quantum mechanics and the math around it is about as clear as mud! But the implications from the experiment also point to some rather unsavory and unpredictabilities in modern quantum dynamics and the implications are very fantastical at worst, and literally damaging to the understanding of the foundation and nature of all Cosmology as we know it today!

The experiment was originally referred to as Shroedinger’s Cat. However, its modern interpretation is using a mouse.

Imagine the following:

You are walking down a hallway. You come to a door. You open the door. You turn on the light. You step into the room. You close the door behind you. In front of you is a table. You walk to the table and on the table is a box. The box has a sign on it that says, “open me”. You open it. And inside the box is a mouse under glass, a device under the glass with the mouse with timer attached to it and a wire running from the device outside the glass to a button. There is a note next to button. The note reads: This is a radioactive isotope. The isotope has a half life of 1 half hour. The isotope is very deadly to the mouse, but not to you. Please press the button, and that will release the timer and in turn the radioactive isotope. And then return 1 hour from now.” Being a diligent part of the experiment, you push the button. You close the lid of the box. You turn and walk to the door, you open the door, you turn off the light, you walk out of the room and as you do, you close the door and walk down the hallway. 1 hour and 1 minute later you return. You walk down the same hallway. You come to the same door. You open the door. You turn on the light. You step into the room. You close the door behind you. You walk to the table and the box. Before you open the box, you ask yourself one question. “Is the mouse Dead or Alive ?”.

The Interesting Part!

Logically, rationally, reasonably you would think that the mouse is dead. And we know this because the note inside the box said, “The isotope is very deadly to the mouse.”, And you would be wrong in thinking that! (there’s a reason for this, go with me on this one) Well then, you’d logically discern that if the mouse isn’t dead, then it must be alive…obviously, right ? And again, you’d be WRONG! Wait, how can the mouse not be dead and NOT be alive. It has to be ONE or the OTHER, right ? And this is the point of the thought experiment right here. Let’s back up a moment though, there’s something we’ve forgotton about, which is relevant to our predicament as tango dancers.

Ask yourself the following question: What color was the door to the room ? Further more what was the door made of ? Further still, can you describe the handle on the door for me ? How about this one: When you walked into the room, can you describe the table that the box is sitting on ? How about what kind of light is there in the room ?

Why ask these questions ? Again, go with me on this one. There’s a pay off. Seriously, stop here and ask yourself the questions, don’t keep reading…I’ll listen for you when you’re ready.

Ready ?

When I asked you to imagine the door, and now I’m asking you to describe the door to me, did I tell you what kind of door it was in the description above ? No, I didn’t. Your mind filled in the details of the door, the handle, what it was made of, what it felt like, and so on. The same thing is true of the table and the box. Your mind filled in from the word constructs that I gave you, a description of what the room was like. Now because of that description you’ve given that room certain properties. Non-linear properties that are bound to our world. The properties are what we’re after here, specfically, we all literally subscribe to a local shared reality. Constructs that mean something. Words that mean something. It gives our world depth, shape, mass, structure…etc. Meaning that when I say “TABLE”, we can all agree on what the function of a table is. However, what the table looks like, and what condition it is in space, and time, and what it is literally interacting with is a whole different ball of wax! Meaning that your TABLE and my TABLE are two different things entirely, and literally. You get to decide what that table looks like, but to a point how it operates in the world. Just like in the matrix we heard Morpheus say to Neo that “Some rules can be bent, Others can be broken”, well the same is true here. We decide how this reality functions to a certain degree. And that’s because this is a SHARED reality. Meaning that we all have to agree to those rules of reality. On some level we are conscious of those rules and on some level we are not. There’s also a tango analogy here which I’ll get into in a moment….

Now, back to the experiment, and the mouse, so what happened to the mouse ? The mouse exists in a state of POSSIBILITIES of what might happen. That’s because the moment at which we observe the mouse, or actually even conceive and understand what we’re looking at, the very fabric of the mouse’s disposition may change: It may be dead. It may be alive. It may have chewed its way of the box. It may have been wounded by the isotope but not killed and is in state of death or in a state of healing. The timer never went off. The isotope was mislabeled, and the one that was used wasn’t deadly at all. The mouse has a super-metabolism that prevents the effects of the isotope from harming it. The electrical components of the device failed due to proximity of the radioactivity and the isotope was never released. The isotope was inert by the time you got to it. The mouse was already dead from not eating anything until you decided to open the box again. Any of a thousand things could have happened. Any or all of these things could have happened, thereby affecting the outcome of the mouse’s disposition in the hour that has transpired. In layman’s terms, something could have gone wrong with reality!

The part of the experiment that we’re interested in is the part where just before you open the box…the first time! The first time ? Yes, the first time. Because in that moment you observed, and understood what was in the box, you literally decided how this physical reality is going to play out! Go back and re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that there’s a lot of room for interpretation of what could happen.

Ok, so that’s physics, how does that relate to TANGO Miles ????

It relates because of how you describe your experience of the dance, the word constructs that you use to describe it, is what it becomes. And in doing so you can either give over your power, or not. By describing something as “WAITING”, you are literally deciding to define your following or leading experience as a power dynamic not a conversation.

Capice ?

Now one more thing. The tango analogy I spoke of above refers to that because of local shared reality, there are limits to what you can and can’t do. Well the same thing is true in tango. Which is to say, for example, how you start the move and how you end the move is implied, how you excute it is up to you. Furthermore, or further still, still another constraint wouild be the musical constraints: If its not in the music, then its not on the floor! Which is to say, again, in the matrix, “there are rules that can be bent….and there are rules that can be broken”. There are limits to the lead/follow dynamic. Certain constraints that we imply within the construct of the dance. Those limitations, would in this case be musical in nature. Still another limitation is that we exist in a certain structure of movement and opportunities within the dance. And because of that, there are only a limited sub-set of options and opportunities that we can draw on. Which is a long winded way of saying that there are only 7 basic movements that we can play with, and because of that there only so many outcomes! However, within that structure there is seemingly almost infinite possibilities! Welcome to tango.