Tango

... Then she stood there, hands on hips, waiting. A tango, with its blood-beat fatality. She began to dance. She didn't look at me, but her choices of where to advance and step, acknowledged my presence.

Tangos are made up of scraps of life, which have happened to survive. Scraps, rags, gathered together into the zigzag of the legs, continually obedient to flowing blood, spilt or unspilt.

John Berger, From A to X

One dance book later, several blogged confessions about dance lessons gone awry, and I have not yet said with clarity how elusive dancing is, how bound up with magic. Or how much I love dance but can't withstand dance, want to keep going, want to quit, am desperate to get it right, never do get it right, want to explain it, can't find the words—always competing thoughts in my head that make dance what? A pain? A pleasure? The beauty that is dance is nearly unattainable in all ways, except: Look at Iryna, here. And look what Berger has done with words to capture the raw "blood beat" of tango.