A drum-beat is so simple, and yet it is so close to our own heartbeats that the pulse sneaks its way into our blood and causes us to shake our asses. Music, though invisible, is nonetheless deeply physical.
Last Thursday, at the Villager Mall on South Park Street for the Celebrate South Madison Festival, drums played and dancers danced. They wore all manner of clothing, from pants covered in multicolored cloth strips that flapped in the wind to silver crowns and red harlequin masks.
The drums stayed simple, increasing a little in tempo from time to time. The dancers jumped around, letting the beat flow through their bodies.
As I cried into my coffee while thinking about the expressiveness of the human body, the director of Slow Food flung herself across my lap, in order to get a better angle for photographing the dancers. It was serendipitous.
I agree with Freud about some things, such as his naming the life-force the ""libido."" All motivation and inspiration originates in deep reservoirs of an ""erotic"" power, some mysterious force that causes life to feel so interesting. Writing and other creative acts (even designing an ergonomic keyboard) all give expression to this primal energy.
Long ago, at a coffee shop, a stranger left his number behind for me. We met up shortly afterward. I found out he had graduated with a philosophy degree and was currently working some boring-as-hell paper-pushing job and reading Nietzsche in his spare time. Of reading Nietzsche, he said, ""You're going to think this is repulsive and that I'm some kind of libertine [man-slut] for saying this, but when I read, I have an erotic relationship with the text.""
I was not repulsed. Rather, I was empathetic.
Just last week, I sat down at my dining room table and wrote out an outline for a story for my creative writing class. Then I found myself getting distracted by other assignments. I thought, ""Why am I not itching to write this story?""
""Because it's not sexy,"" I answered back.
Then I thought, ""Sexy?""
After I returned home from the South Madison Festival on Thursday, I sat down at my computer to write about drums and dancing. I didn't get one word down before my roommate invited me out to the Vintage for ""one drink.""
She did indeed have one drink, and then she went to bed. I, on the other hand, decided I wanted to go dancing, and ended up dragging another one of my friends to Plan B, where we stayed until they turned the lights on us.
The thing about clubs is that yes, they do express the libido, but it seems to take the ingestion of so many chemicals to get to the level of comfort necessary to act like that in public. Social anxiety causes difficulty in accessing one's true nature.
For instance, my friend shouted the following at me: ""No one wants to dance with a girl who has a sweatshirt tied around her waist!"" (She was that girl.)
At the time, I was too distracted to analyze the truth of her statement. Upon further review, I have come to the conclusion that feeling sexy is more important than looking sexy. If no one wants to dance with you because you have a sweatshirt around your waist, and you feel sexy anyway, then you are in a better place than the majority of people.
What do drumming, reading, dancing, writing and sex have in common? Their potential for pleasure. In philosophy, we talk about pleasure in terms of the ""hedonic index."" Picture a yardstick with ""literally dying"" at one end and ""ecstasy"" at the other. All of the activities I have illustrated in this article tend to register on or very near the ""ecstasy"" end.
Do you often philosophize over drumbeats, sexiness and the like? You should totally get coffee or whatever with Angelica and email her at aengel2@wisc.edu.
