Living as Dancing

            Like Nehamas, Milan Kundera invokes Anna Karenina as a literary character exemplifying deep, and therefore often unrecog­nized, features of the human condition.   And although Kundera does not explicitly refer, in this connection, to Nietzsche, his discussion utilizes a second Nietzschean metaphor, one that is, in my view, more ap­propriate to Nietzsche's affirmative position than is Nehamas's "life as literature":

            Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious cir­cumstances:  they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train.  At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself un­der a train.   This symmetrical composition -- the same motif ap­pears at the beginning and at the end -- may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condi­tion that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic."  Be­cause human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

            They are composed like music.  Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a per­manent place in the composition of the individual's life.  Anna could have chosen another way to take her life.  But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty.  Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

            It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life.  For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty. (Unbearable Lightness, 52)

 

            Whereas Nehamas emphasizes the constraints placed on Anna -- she had to leave her husband, had to love her son as she did, etc. -- Kundera acknowledges the variety of the paths open to her.  Whereas Nehamas gives us a series of rhetorical questions -- "could Anna have done other than she did?" -- Kundera asserts flatly, "Anna could have chosen another way to take her life."

            Our lives are composed, Kundera tells us, not like litera­ture but rather like music.  A literary work is an artifact:  it outlives not only the act of its production, but also the life of its producer.  It provides, thereby, a semblance of immortality.  Not surprisingly, I think, the literary work has precisely this status for Marcel, the fictional narrator of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past -- a character whose narrative, according to Nehamas, "is the best possible model for the eternal recurrence" (168; see also 188).   As Marcel begins, at the end of his narra­tive of his life, to recognize the form that must be taken by the narrative he is to write -- the narrative the reader is near com­pleting -- Marcel remarks, "the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffer­ing, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l'herbe" (III:1095).  This passage echoes an earlier reflec­tion, from the occasion of the death of the author Bergotte:  "they buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection" (III:186).

            Marcel, in writing, seeks a vicarious permanence in the memory of others -- an eternal life not for himself as artist, but rather for his "true work of art."  Kundera speaks of a dif­ferent sort of permanence, the permanence of a "place in the com­position of the individual's life."  Kundera's permanence is a permanence in memory, perhaps, but the relevant memory is, in the first instance, that of the individual.  The "dimension of beauty" present in the "mysterious coincidences" that enter into the compositions of our lives is a dimension open to us if we avoid "being blind to such coincidences"; we need not write about them.

            According to Nehamas, "Writing [...] always remains both the main model and the main object of Nietzsche's thinking" (Nehamas, 32).  Yet at the very least Nietzsche, like Kundera, invokes musi­cal metaphors in addition to literary ones.  At times, he inter­twines them:  "perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music; certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its preconditions" (EHIX:1).  And it is wholly to the point to note that Zarathustra, the ideal character Nietzsche himself creates, never writes.  He never writes, but he speaks, he walks, he laughs, he sings, and he dances.  We learn from the sixth of his seven seals that his virtue is "a dancer's virtue," that he often leaps "with both feet in golden-emerald rapture"  and that his "alpha and omega" is, in part, "that every body shall become a dancer" (III:16.6; 290.18-26).

            Speeches, like dances, are instances of art without ar­tifact:  within the speech or the dance, creator coincides with creation -- both with creative act and with created product.  The dance is created, but it does not outlive the act of its crea­tion, save perhaps in memory.  One dances in order to dance, and perhaps in order to be seen dancing; similarly, according to the perspective I have been developing, which I have presented as Nietzschean, it is possible for us to live in order to live, and perhaps in order to be seen living.  One writes, on the other hand, in order to be read. 

            It is possible to view life as literature, but it is also possible to view living as dancing.  Viewed as a dance, my life may be clumsy, or it may be graceful; it may be coherent, or it may be chaotic.   It may influence others, and it may do so by in­spiring them or appalling them or boring them.  But the influence is, necessarily, reciprocal:  those who witness my dance are them­selves dancers, dancers, and our shared steps and missteps are among the occur­rences, fortuitous or intentional, that compose our distinct but connected dances (see HHI:27).

            Our dances, if they are beautiful, exhibit an eternal return; they are circle dances, not because they repeat the same steps, but rather because, in Kundera's words, they transform for­tuitous occurrences into motifs that then assume permanent places in the compositions of our lives.  To be sure, for occurrences to be transformed they must first be remembered; but as they are remembered, they are also transformed. 

            In an age of film and videotape, some dance, perhaps, in or­der to be recorded; before this age, perhaps, some have danced in order to be paid.  Many have lived, and continue to live, for just these reasons:   I may view my life as a job, as a curse, as a duty, or as a punishment.  Like Nehamas, I find in Nietzsche an insistence that it is also possible for me to view my life as my work of art; but the artwork that is my life is, it seems to me, more a dance inseparable from its dancing than a novel for others to read.  And I deem it important, as I take Nietzsche to deem it important, that we recognize that just as some may dance simply in order to dance, it is possible to live simply in order to live -- not in order to produce, to repay, to expiate, or to earn.  If there is a Nietzschean imperative, an appropriate formulation for it might be, "you have but one life to dance; dance it beautifully."

            A beautiful dance, in the terms I have elaborated as Nietzschean, is one that is affirmed by its dancer; to suggest that there are strict criteria all beautiful dances must meet is to revert to the dogmatic perspective of slave moralities.   Zarathustra's minotaur, the spirit of gravity, insists, "Good for all, evil for all" (ZIII:11.2; 243.26-27); in response to my Nietzschean imperative, he would no doubt proclaim, "beautiful for all," and would seek to force all our dances into the uniform strides of a goose-step.  What is not good for all, this minotaur contends, cannot be good for any; what is not beautiful for all cannot be beautiful for any.  The minotaur is silenced -- never slain -- by those who insist, "Good for me, evil for me," and also, I suggest, "beautiful for me."

            Many of us, often, judge ourselves ugly; many of us, often, wish we were otherwise.  "If only I had been born rich (or poor), female (or male), if only I had gone to Harvard (or to Southwest Schenectedy State), then..."  Then what, Nietzsche asks?  Then I'd be happy?   Then I'd be successful?  Then my life would be worth living?  So I might think; Nietzsche wants to convince me that I would be wrong.   I would be wrong not because the course my life has followed has been better, in some absolute sense, than one of the alternative courses I might imagine having fol­lowed, or having been able to follow if circumstances had been otherwise.  I would be wrong, instead, because if "my" life had followed a different course, it would not be mine.  "I" would not, in that case, be someone else; I would not be at all.

            Nietzsche encourages us to focus our attention not on the past, but on the future.  Not that I should forget my past -- on the contrary, he insists, I am my past.  But my past is, in one Nietzschean for­mulation, a brute fact that remains meaningless until it is inter­preted.  And the way I interpret my past is by placing it the con­text of my future. 

            In encouraging us to view our pasts within the contexts of our futures, to view our lives as wholes, Nietzsche places a weight on our individual acts and decisions; in our epoch, the weight may not be a burden.  Things were different in the epoch preceding the death of God; then, the weight of individual acts and decisions could be crushing, because any one act could, in principle, doom its agent to eternal damnation.  Following the death of God, acts and decisions have lost that weight; the danger has arisen that they take on what Kundera calls an "unbearable lightness."  Why should I think about what I am to do?  Why care about it?  One hundred years from now, I'll cer­tainly be dead, the entire planet may well be a nuclear waste dump.  Why should I try to produce or to create, why should I be decent, or even polite? 

            Instead of answering these questions, Nietzsche transforms them.   Given that the life I am now living is my eternal life -- the only one I will ever live, the one I will live as long as I live -- given that what makes me me are my words and deeds and experiences, and not some immutable soul, given that even if what I do may make no difference to the course the universe for the next few millennia or even for the next few years, it neverthe­less makes all the difference to me, because it makes me.  Given that this is how life is, I ask not, which way through my life am I obliged to follow?  I ask instead, which way am I to make my own?  How am I to make my life beautiful, that is, a life I can deem worth living, as I continue to live it?

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