Just Dance It

There is a scene in Heretics of Dune in which Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade is seated in a big bay window overlooking the Great Square of Arrakeen while she awaits the arrival of the girl Sheeana - she who controls ShaiHulud.

In the dusty heat of the desert planet, five naked men link arms and start to dance. As the dance progresses - and after it devolves, as always, into massive crowd violence - Odrade realises that what she has been watching is a language, composed of dancers, dance, crowd, and environment. A language she doesn't speak.

Thorn Coyle has also been discussing dance; the same form of dance I briefly mentioned in my last post, moshing! I think I can thank all the gods that the bakkie wasn't actually moshing along the road, or we'd be hip-deep in insurance suits by now, but when I touched the inside of the passenger door I felt the energetic vibrations thrumming all along the metal contraption, resonated there by loud Punk Rock.

The mosh pit may be a more firmly material language than, say, a minuet, but it's still a language. Some of its speakers seem to be saying things like get outta my way or don't push me around or just life! life!.
You see, you have to speak the language to be able to interpret it - and I don't speak mosh too fluently. Yet.

But there are indeed all sorts of languages out there which I can speak: the Waltz.Swing.Jazz dance.And of course, that dance which Jackson Browne reckons we'll do alone in the end.

I'm becoming quite fluent in that one.

May it, as Sister Hecate says, be so for you.