Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Marina Lee
Hey, well I know how to dance from the heart,
and I write from the heart, but I'm still learning
how to public speak from the heart, so, bear with me.
There was a girl who fished with a straight hook, others laughed.
"Why are you fishing with a straight hook, foolish girl?"
She kept on fishing that way.
She fished her whole life with a straight hook.
Eventually she was old and had white hair,
still fishing with a straight hook.
In a faraway land, a prince heard of this old woman
who wasted her life fishing with a straight hook.
He was curious and he wanted to meet her.
So, he had his servants prepare for the long journey.
He found her one morning casting her straight hook.
"Excuse me, madam," he said,
"Can you tell me what is it you hope to catch with a straight hook?"
The old, white-haired woman turned to the prince,
her face sweet, all-knowing, smiled and said, "You, my prince."
(Laughter)
Let me tell you about the part of the story I've left out.
Let's say we're all that girl.
Let's say the straight hook is our personal way
of fishing for happiness.
At some point in our lives,
we realize we're not catching the fish
that all Americans, most Americans, consider their blood right:
great marriages, great kids, loads of money, lots of possessions.
No matter how much the conventional curved-hook people,
the Mad Men, the cultural know-it-alls, the politicians, laughed,
I'd become used to fishing with my straight hook.
And then one day the prince showed up,
not in the form of an actual man.
Unlike the woman in the story
I didn't recognize that this prince was what I'd waited for my whole life.
What the tale leaves out
is the perfect storm that the girl-woman has to undergo
before she can recognize the prince.
You know, full catastrophe living,
the archetypal fall from grace.
My perfect storm was pretty mundane.
I left my cushy magazine editor job of many years,
lost my partner of many years
because I was out taking tango lessons every single night,
proceeded to pull the other woman's hair,
packed my bags, left town, went to South America.
August 27, 2006,
with blood in my eye and hair under my fingernail,
I arrived in Buenos Aires.
Along with three suitcases,
I had brought my shame, broken heart,
and adequate tango skills.
Despite my tango obsession,
I hated the dance for how it had wrecked my life.
"Tango is poison," I told a friend.
"Tango will save your life," he said. "It's also your medicine."
Before I left town,
one of my Zen teachers, Reb Anderson, had given a lecture,
in which he said that a crisis is a challenge and an opportunity,
that the Chinese character for crisis integrates both those attributes.
To my surprise Reb and his wife ran my first tango classes in San Francisco.
Reb said he had agreed to take tango with his wife,
because, quote, "We need to train in anxiety and darkness."
Anxiety and darkness --
those words fully described my life outside the dance circle.
I had intended to stay in Argentina 2.5 months,
but after day in, day out dancing tango,
a dance that elevates the common hug to an art form,
I canceled my return ticket.
I stayed a year and a half then.
I didn't just feel good dancing tango,
I began to notice the euphoric effects I had long sought elsewhere,
fishing with my straight hook as it were.
I began to recognize what my "prince" referred to --
not a darkly handsome Argentine.
The vulnerability of giving yourself over to stranger after stranger
seemed to work like a homeopathic remedy.
I had entered the tango realm only half-interested,
but when it took over my life,
I felt so at home with it,
as if it were a long-lost relative.
I began to recognize that my "prince" referred to the joy within,
the joy I was always capable of knowing.
What is it about tango that can do this to a person?
Tango won't make you rich,
it won't promise you anything.
Certainly, most partner dances induce a flow of endorphins,
a cozy feeling of intimacy, shared energy,
and the beauty of having music move you.
Argentine Tango is a dance of improvisation.
It's likened to a language
in that it has a simple basic vocabulary of steps:
walking, turns, figure eights, pivots,
pretty crosses of the feet.
The difficulty of dancing tango is legendary.
It takes a lifetime and a half to learn tango,
so keep up with it, Todd.
The Argentines say the intimacy of tango is like that of no other dance.
You enter a warm envelope, torso to torso,
I should say heart to heart,
and create a three minute fairy tale.
You share a nervous system, a good friend told me.
Because if it's improv nature, I now tell my students
that you learn tango from the feet up, but you dance it from the heart down.
I tell them that everyone finds their own tango,
that every body has got tango,
that they will find their secret about the dance.
What is my secret?
In tango, the leaders, usually men, but not strictly,
are told that they are the prime movers,
that they must clearly communicate their intentions,
if anything goes wrong, they're 100% at fault.
The followers are told to wait for the lead,
to not anticipate, to not think, to remain present --
in essence, to hang out.
It took me more than a year to believe that tango rapture was that simple.
What actually happens in tango is that the leader starts to dance,
then follows the follower.
Leaders too must hang out,
not anticipate, remain present,
embrace what is offered.
In short, to paraphrase my Zen teacher, Reb:
When people stop being leaders and followers,
there is just a dance.
This leads to my deepest secret.
My secret is what I call 'the hover zone' or 'the gap',
that which you do not do in tango,
that which is the negative space of tango.
So much of tango was about unlearning to think, to know, to anticipate.
To engage with tango,
you have to be vulnerable and open to your soft, ripe center.
So, in tango I found the secret, little, unnameable, ungraspable,
Cheshire-grin of a place, ever-shifting, never fixed,
I call it the hover zone, in which I wait physically and mentally.
It takes muscle.
In that zone nothing happens until the leader invites me;
there is no thought, yet I'm fully engaged.
Clock time, I should say chronos time, is gone;
I think of the hover zone as real time or kairos time.
The sensation is exactly what I had sought
for two decades of sitting silent meditation.
When we put emphasis on the gap,
the boundless empty space of any human enterprise or endeavor,
we get a 360 degree, panoramic, unobstructed view
of Earth, the Moon, and everything fits perfectly just as it is --
that's the "prince".
That was and still is my tango secret.
We have a word, "psychosomatic," that describes how mind affects body.
I think we need the reverse word too, "somatic psyche" say,
that describes how body opens and instructs the mind.
This, in essence, is what happens in tango.
That spaciousness of body and mind followed me off the dance floor,
and that is the "prince".
Whether you play marbles, race cars,
raise children or run a country,
the prince is available to all of us,
we all have to breathe.
In tango as in yoga,
we learn to prepare on the inhalation, to execute on the exhalation.
Between the in and the out breath lies the gap, the hover zone.
No matter what you are doing,
find that sweet spot, find your tango, whatever it is.
My eight-fold path:
1. Try, fail, try again.
2. Remain present, there is this muscle called "waiting".
3. Surrender ego.
Surrender means you leave it at the door,
you get it back, like your gun, when you leave the club.
(Laughter)
4. Clear your mind.
Actively let thoughts arise and go,
a cinch when your body is pressing into another.
5. Hone strengths.
Only you can know what those are.
If it's fishing with a straight hook,
don't let anyone or their laughter sideline you.
6. Embrace obstacles.
This might mean embracing others' laughter
or your own failures and especially your own vulnerability.
If you get this far, you know there's really only one obstacle,
yourself.
7. Transform failure or obstacles.
You do this by dancing with them.
You have the power to turn your "oops!" into an "ah!".
8. Know happiness.
A.K.A. the prince,
be at home with it, go to sleep with it,
wake up with it, know it
for the long-lost relative or homeplace
that has always been there for you.
So, as you can see, the prince is a movable feast,
and my prince of the moment is Dante Polichetti,
a New York tango dancer and teacher.
And as soon as they take this mic off,
we will dance a tango for you.
(Applause)
(Tango "Nido Gaucho" starts)
(Tango ends)