I love to dance, though I’m picky about the music. I’m also shy. At a friend’s wedding in Long Branch on Friday night, my dance partner of 30 years, my wife, was not with me.
All the beautiful women on the dance floor, and there were many, were spoken for. So I watched, quite entranced, and of course took pictures. On the drive home, I remembered this Updike essay, collected in "More Matter."
"Though he is supposed to lead," Updike writes, "a man dancing is a guest of his female partner, welcomed into her province. Girls take to dancing with a mysterious ease and keenness. Lacking a male partner, they will dance with each other….The fondness for conjoined rhythmic motion relates, perhaps, to a gender trait–a female somatic unity, a sense of the entire body as an expressive and erotic means."
A few paragraphs later, he observes, "The twist was, for women, one of the most ungainly dances ever devised, and yet they did it, as if knowing that in a year or two it would yield to the frug, at which they could show themselves to subtler advantage. In all of the myriad non-contactual dances that have followed rock-and-roll on its proliferating course, the woman becomes alone with her bliss. When happy, little boys jump and start hitting things with sticks; little girls do a dance."
I would disagree with the great writer only a little bit: Women are most entrancing not when dancing alone with their bliss but when expressing it in the presence of their beloved, completing a protective loop that enables the public expression of an exquisite private joy.
Updike concludes the essay with these famous lines of W. B. Yeats:
"O body swayed to music,
O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
To which Updike responds,
"Well, we can’t, and that is the beauty of it."