The Tangle and the Tango
The tango is a fascinating dance. Two bodies moving as one. So close you can’t pass a moral code between them. So full of erotic smoke and fire that Engine Co. #5 can’t deal with it.
The tango represents many things. Some of them are publishable in a family magazine. But what I want to look at with the tango is the image of two becoming indistinguishable. We know there are two people involved in this dance but the fusion of motion creates an illusion. We see one. And not just in a romantic lilt like the waltz where the male leads and the female follows.
The tango is a dance of partners of equal power in a performance of bonding; an inevitable, cataclysmic melding.
With other polarities the identifying features of each are apparent and the dynamic dance between them is a clear interaction of two. Not so with the tango.
In a tango distinctions seem only superficial. Delineation drifts into blending. The magic of watching a tango is the illusion that the two have crossed into this “one” right before our eyes. This indistinguishability evokes the most intense eros of the old school kind. Not just the “certain urges” feature we find south of the belt line but operating on a cosmic scale, in the crossover between human and divine that Plato worked to describe.
But life more often resembles a tangle than a tango. We are a snarl of conflicting interests; to serve ourselves or to serve others, to exert or to relax, to fight or to submit, to interrupt or to interview, to analyze or to absorb. Some clearly conflicting political imperatives, like the need for order and stability versus the need for progress and reform, demand a facility from us that transcends a simple either/or.
I have a fascination with these images of “two become one”. They break down the operation of these bifurcation machines that normally pass for our brains. The sheer illogic and uncanny nature of these images house a potency and a evocative resonance. They shouldn’t exist but do. We get introduced to Janus. “Hi! How are you and you doing?”.
This same image can be described as “one becomes two”. The direction alone matters. In either case the mental process of apprehension is the same: our mind moves from assuming something to recognizing another. In this moment we become aware that we are in the presence of illusion. “I thought I saw one but it was really two.” Or, “I saw two become one.”
Paradoxically, this awareness of illusion becomes a gateway to a higher truth.
And so we call what is apparently a duality, one. Since identity is relational, e.g., we can’t know good without the presence of evil, what seems to be philosophical dualism becomes a qualified monism. As Eastern religions say, it’s a “non-duality”. There is a lovely phrase for this idea in Sanskrit: “Ekam sadvipra bahuda vedanti” (“All is one, sages call it by different names”). Just as soon as we sort it out the differentiation evaporates and the differences subsume. Inconsequential particulars. Multi-faceted unity.
We step back in scale and the blinding chaotic tangle becomes discernible pattern. The order of prime numbers (as recently demonstrated) changes from a purely random and unpredictable occurrence into a pattern found in the physical structure of crystals. Nothing is chaos. Nothing has order. All is change. All is permanent. Neither Heraclitus nor Parmenides can stand corrected. Neither but both are right. Together they are not wrong.
I watch the tango dancers cross the floor into dancer.
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