Nov. 12, ’98 – All I did was go to a candle party. This means an upper scale Tupperware party where the sales-lady is selling quality candles and candle props. Thomas arrived with his girlfriend at the candle party. What a surprise. Oh, Hi, Thomas.
Hi! He’s as surprised as I am; we had no idea we had a mutual acquaintance. That’s Victoria for you. Sooner or later . . .
So, let me tell you about how I met Thomas, so I may convey the significance of this moment. I wrote about it because it pertained to some key moral issues I intended to address with someone else, related to the whole Dancing question, and it’s high time that model got put on record somewhere as well.
Thomas is a charismatic rather suave looking vamp, and he’d be happy I described him thus. I seem to have inclinations for tall lank men with dark to black hair who dress and carry themselves well. How they walk is important. I’m not sure the eyes matter too much, but Thomas’s, indeed, are a gray-blue.
This happened approximately a two years ago, on a night when I had the singular privilege of dancing on the speaker by myself because the other dancer ditched. The crowd that night was sparse. I still hadn’t resolved the moral questions I had with dancing but this evening probably contributed.
I had observed Thomas and his girlfriend in the club before, and I had decided he was the best man in there, aside from the one I considered aesthetically ideal, who from an appearance standpoint was nigh impossible to beat. His partner, too, was a very attractive auburn brunette, of the most perfect proportions I have ever had the privilege of observing. They were the toast couple, as far as I was concerned, the best looking couple to ever go there, and this too was attributed to their sense of style.
Anyway, on this night Thomas came out onto the dance floor on his own and he was dancing facing me five feet above him on the speaker, for two or three songs multiple times, which I found intriguing. I had this sense from him that this was personal not coincidental, and that he was unifying with me, which did not concern me at first; I entered without qualm. Later I sensed a threshold where I would not go, for I would not enter the girlfriend’s territory, nor would I go there anyway, and in my head I responded very strongly, mentally, No, I will not go there with you. Not, at the very least, unless it’s OK with your girlfriend. I know it can be said this was all in my head but I don’t think so, especially not now. I believe in the sense beyond the physical plane where the same actions or thoughts may be entered upon or performed. What Thomas was toying with, to me, was the difference between creative dance and the mate dance, and while this was in no way visible in his mien or overt body language, or our respective positions apart, I felt he had drawn me in; I had unified with him. But there is a limit to where I will go. The only reason I was drawn in by Thomas in the first place was because I found him very attractive.
I will assert that what Thomas was exuding was sensed by more than just me, though not necessarily in the conscious mind. Gradually he was surrounded by a ring of about six to eight different women, simultaneously dancing around him on the dance floor. Think about it. (Actually this happened to me once in Dublin in 2000; I ended up dancing surrounded by eight men who were all dancing with me, and if you can believe it, this didn't get awkward. Quite a balance.)
From the vantage of my speaker this was plainly obvious. I could sense the crowd beginning to get edgy. Thomas was committing 'polygamy' on the dance floor and that made some people uncomfortable. Then he was joined by his girlfriend, and the two of them cut loose.
On my dance break I went down and danced with the two of them at once. I normally never joined people. So I committed the act of joining myself with them both, (on the dance floor, anyway), and I was pleased with this because it had been fine by all and I had in no way entered something that was excluding or threatening to his girlfriend; we were all together. I also met Thomas and we introduced ourselves. When the break was over I went back up on the speaker and that was when things got dicey.
Thomas and his girlfriend started the mate dance. No other way to describe it, thought it was no way nearly as overtly lewd as it could have been. I guess it’s in the attitude. As I said Thomas exuded it with little apparent in his mien. This circumstance was extremely uncomfortable for me, because as I said, I had joined with them, and I had very definitive ideas about the mate dance. Then Thomas went back to dancing on his own, facing me, and there was a definite repeat in his address. It was at this point I responded by telling him no. I actually said it aloud.
When I finally resolved my questions around dancing it was in uniting two completely conflicting paradigms into one model. I visualized them each as paths that opened, like a funnel, from a single point. I thought of each of these patterns separately in debate and saw no relation. Eventually I realized that what I thought about it sometimes, and what I thought of it other times, was in complete conflict and that neither concept could exist with the other, so what was going on? Then over the first Christmas holidays between terms (1996), when I was bedridden for ten days with a feverish cold, I saw them graft together in my head and I went Oh, that’s how it works! The whole mess was neatly resolved and I knew that the reason it had confused me so much was because I fluttered around the nexus of potential most of the time, which explained why I was subject to both opposing trains of thought.
These were the two patterns: creative dance and the mate dance. What I see the majority of people imitating, rather lamely, is some watered down derivative of the mate dance. They’re using it to get together. This can mean that the whole point is to dance ineptly, so that no one feels self-conscious and you are not deterring or embarrassing anyone by being too “good” for them to consider. It’s a form of protectionism that everyone’s involved in without realizing it. The reason I used to stick out like a sore thumb was because I was involving myself in creative dance. Creative dance is the attempt to create beauty in motion, attuned to rhythm, so males tend to get their wires crossed on you anyway. I think that because dance is based in rhythm it tends to be inherently sexual no matter what, and this is going to be amplified if you’re actually any good at it. So my quandary was whether it was ethical for me to perform in a way that was inherently going to be sensed as sexual, how much I was obliged to sanitize it, and how I was affecting other people. At the same time I saw merit in the mate dance as a social vector that does not have to be used unhealthily, though as far as I’m concerned that's not what is going on most of the time, it’s being used as a quick fix for sex.
Because of the inherent sexuality in dancing I thought it was nearly impossible to avoid the mate dance, though I did not want to go there. The scene before me tends to revolt me. However I could also see, in terms of the mate dance, that what I, or Phil, who was my phenomenal gay dance partner, (we danced on separate speakers but were paired in shifts more often than not) -maybe what we were performing was actually an evolutionary dead end, because we were dancing without purpose. We were dispensing with an incredible amount of energy that wasn’t being channeled into anything valuable in terms of any form of production. (In a sense four plus hours of a being a dervish dispensing with enough joules that could have spent say, harvesting a field for a day, in other words, -energy as conspicuous consumption -? A mere by-product of our times that would have otherwise been unaffordable?) Outside of being 'conspicuous', the upshot was we were not using it to get hitched, which was the existing background intention of the majority, which felt like background static. We would never end up going home with anyone at the end of the night because of what we did. We were on those speakers to be on those speakers; we were there to dance. In a sense maybe we were going no where, and seeing it this way used to give me the creeps, like being socially dysfunctional and thinking that was somehow cool.
Conversely the only way I thought the mate dance was cool, was if the people involved in it were serious about each other, either each other, or, the dance.
From the alternate perspective, that of the creative dance, the mate dance is a joke, it’s a pathetic terminus for something that could be beautiful. The tango et al, these are among the most beautiful coordinated expressions of unity. Being in a club is sometimes like watching the unconscious expression of the lowest common denominator, where everything is watered down in its race to the bottom; it wants to be inept to equalize 'the field'. There is no interest in expression of beauty when people are just there 'grinding' their way to what they view as 'success'; get to the point. The means to an end becomes its own means. Bald expression.
This was my quandary; how sexuality in creative dance was tenable, and what was I actually involved in. Experiencing Thomas proved to me that my boundaries were solidly in place, and that while I would unify with someone there were limits to what I would condone, and I refused to touch the mate-dance.
[I was fully conscious of being an anachronism then and far more conscious of it now, inevitable.]
The other issue Thomas plays with is what forms of conscious unity should be interpreted or rendered sexually and public display, which was a big issue for entirely different reasons. Thomas’ behavior was playing with the borders, if he was not concerned about doing the mate dance with his girlfriend and/or drawing me into it. That's one level, swingers, but that's on the level of consenting adults. The second level, that of of sex utilized as art form or public display, is perhaps even bigger; the combination is opening a Pandorean box. I know he is diametrically the opposite of me; this is sensory intuitive, felt. That he was consciously at play in these sorts of combined concepts and applying them in a personal experiment with me to find out my boundaries may have seemed like reading way too much into it at the time. Well, read on.
That night with Thomas and Ivy put me on the hot seat. The whole “audience” in the club was drawing their collective breath, and I was the only other person dancing because that was my job. I had never had a stronger desire to get down off the speaker. I was awed to feel a palpable sense that this was on a fast track to hell. I thought that the only way Thomas and Ivy could be right in what they were doing was if they were serious about each other to the point that they intended to get married, which gives you an indication of the severity of the moral strictures in which I operate, not to mention their intensity, which wasn't just sensed by me. The irony was hearing two beer-drinking males behind me declare, within moments, that these people were going to hell. No Shit.
It did reach a point of tension that I could no longer tolerate and I looked up at the ceiling and asked what I should do, because I really couldn’t stand it any more. At that moment Thomas stopped and took his girlfriend Ivy off the floor. Whenever I came close to this state of tension, which was three times, Thomas stopped and took Ivy off the floor.
When I was sick over the winter, I saw both paradigms merge into a singular pattern, which was easily visualized as two semi-circles that touched at one point. Where they went from there was not too much of a concern, the interest was in that one nexus point, and in the idea that while at first there was a minute area between the semi-circles where there was space, that space opened in a near exponential fashion so that at the edge of their respective arcs, all there was, was space. The two openings from the nexus were how I conceptualized the potentials that lay in the mate dance and creative dance, respectively. The left side was the mate dance, and the right side was creative dance. There is a small rectangle around the nexus where I believed most of the derivative behaviors involving these two dance patterns was located. I saw the area within the two semi-circles as the region where a mish-mash, or behavioral dead ends, were continually spinning off and end up no where. Not to say that it's supposed to, it's more a matter of distilling patterns. All that useless, watered down, and otherwise terminal behavior, where the dance forms are abused by the users. Conversely it used to be that one could waltz and engage in these patterns and the purpose was an enjoyable evening. There was not near so prominent a pressure for an 'outcome' as there is now, and if you look at it that way, the semi-circle areas are blessed not to care; it's where you want to be. Naturally in that small rectangle around the nexus, the vast majority of the space is consumed in the void areas of the two semi-circles.
The point of contact was the nexus point, the point of potential where one could go either direction, entering into the mate, or the creative dance. This point is unique because it is only at this point that you can see both full potentials, and have the option of participating in either one, but the moment you enter into either one you are no longer at the nexus. So while the nexus is the only space where you have the capacity of totally realizing both potentials, in being in that space you are not actually realizing either of them, you are frozen in total potential, but really going no where. I realized that this was why I was in such an extreme conflict when it came to dancing, I operated around the nexus, and I felt precisely this way, that I was somehow frozen, not going anywhere. (This was a very handy concept to discover because I realized awareness of this difficulty could be applied in my spiritual existence as well.) One, you could think about getting out of it, and two, you could realize that the space was in a way, blessed rather than wondering if it was cursed.With this model I saw that sexuality was safely and fully integrated within creative dance, because creative dance can be interpretive of everything real in the same way that theater or painting is. Therefore, you can render sexuality within interpretive creative dance without entering into the mate dance at all. You’re not messing with anything, it’s artistic rendering. The vector that is creative dance opens to infinite creativity, because in dance, especially innovative, even if you have a formula of motions that you keep as a basis, you will never repeat exactly the same motion in the same space twice. Infinite creativity with an infinite range of interpretive expression. This is what creative dance opens, and this is the vast space at the right side of the semi-circles.
The mate-dance opens into something in the same way, but this requires a little more background, starting with the nature of Christian marriage. Marriage in the Christian context reflects on something much deeper, the final unification typified as that of the Lamb and the Church. Christ called himself the Bridegroom in reflecting on this union which is to come in the Last Days. Marriage has also typified the relation of God with his chosen people since the inception of the Covenant on Mt. Sinai. In most of the prophets they berate the Israeli nation as an adulterous wife to her husband, God the Father. This was the failed version, but it hearkens to what shall be accomplished in the fullest sense, in the future. Marriage between two individuals, in this context, is a form of training ground, a dip into the commitment that must be learned in accomplishing a final, perfect union of love with God, in the body of the Holy Church, which is what the church attempts to emulate now.
So with this context in mind, consider that what is being approached upon, in the context of a perfectly accomplished mate dance, is a perfect union, which in turn reflects on the perfect union we must yet accomplish altogether, which is that of perfect and eternal Love. So in this sense, this narrow path or potentiality accesses the wide-open and infinite potential of perfect Love. That is the left side of the semi-circles. Again viewing it this way is like viewing the narrowest sense or possibility of what the potential outcome might be, as in its probability is microcosmic. It's simply an existing potentiality, but the potentiality is in a sense accessible just by existing, like an infinitesimally remote access that nonetheless exists. The dance is a form of unity to express unity, implying or expressing sexual unity. So is anything emulating the mate dance heading anywhere in that direction? Is it compelled to be expressed by people who are engaged in unity, where everything without intention is a form of falsity?
This was why I took the advent of Thomas so seriously. That is why I practically invoked their engagement on the spot. The expression has to be pretty strong if it's leading to remarks by male bar patrons that the pair are going to hell, as opposed to taking it all in.
About two months later Thomas and Ivy entered the club again while I was getting down from the speaker on my break. As I was walking past them Ivy accosted me with great familiarity and introduced herself. Oh it’s you! It’s so nice to meet you. What’s your name? We started talking quite intimately and then she turned and reached for Thomas, who was well aware of me from the start. Here, I want you to meet Thomas. We’ve met. Really? She situates him in front of me so that they have enclosed me on either side and they’re holding hands across my bare stomach. (I had dressed harem style). Thomas and I are engaged, we’re going to get married. We are going to spawn and we are going to have a daughter. We will name her Saffron, because that is more precious than gold. Then they tongue kissed each other inches in front of my nose.
Some nights at the club were pretty d***ed interesting. To me it was curiously fulfilling to have felt that strongly about them and see them arrive there themselves. From my perspective it was simply the truth of their state, they were being true to it, and that was a good feeling. And Ivy was conscious yet unconscious; how could she be so unconscious of Thomas and I first speaking to each other on an evening like that where we'd all danced, or miss how thorough a meeting it was, where he'd basically modulated a whole night of dance, not to mention the environment, in sussing me out? Maybe it was just forms. "We've Met" - what an understatement that. She was eager to meet me so obviously she remembered a good deal.
So with all that behind us, let me mention that it didn’t pan out that way, and while I have no first hand knowledge I know that Ivy ended up bailing on the commitment when she became a hostess in Japan and then a stripper and acquired a lesbian lover. I heard that Thomas was devastated, went on a total cocaine binge and blew all their savings. I also heard that it was Thomas who had persuaded her to go be a hostess in the first place.
I saw Ivy after all this had transpired while she was having a fling with one of my best friends.
I passed Thomas once this summer at a bus stop and while we recognized each other we did not speak.
So, now you know why it was a big deal to run into Thomas at the Candle Party. Back to the Candle Party, or what happened after.
Conversation at the candle party, and the party party after, was not too large. Mainly involved casually getting familiar and it was a long time before “Tom” was involved at all. But we did arrange for him to try out for a dancing job where I work. Talked about theory, talked Envr Techy with Dean, a former classmate. We are at Dean and Denise’s apartment; Denise is a Tech grad. It’s down to them, Tom and his girlfriend Laura, and me, and we’re going out. Dean’s driving. Because both of the prospective nightclubs we considered attending were running at 6.00 a head, the notion was dropped. So we went to Tom’s apartment downtown in London Flats, which turned out to be not such a bad idea.
I knew Tom had a mirror-ball if I had ruminated about it, he had told me about his light show the first time we talked, with Ivy. So yes, he has a mirror-ball, and a black light theme show and glow in the dark stars, so I am in my cultural milieu. Incidentally Dean and Denise had the same stars, and these were a large variety, double the size or more of the old ones. Dean and Denise had done constellations. Last night I was a Jewels’ for her 26th Birthday and Jewels had the same stars, and had done a fantastic job.
This takes more tying in than you might think. It’s very funny to walk into Tom’s having been drinking because for me it is a heavy dose of nostalgia.
When the family did its first trip together in 1990 it was in our living room which Dad had prepared for nearly a year. It had a Christmas light theme that had four major design factors: A sun/moon decal at the centre of the ceiling that shot out to all corners with red and yellow rays (when the sun was on); it became a yellow moon with two blue bands depending on the random blinkers; six designer strands on different blinkers. There was a tie and a cross and a circuit around the ceiling and one around the walls. That was the first light show. There was also the black light theme with neon mandalas in the windows and neon string art on the ceiling and the walls (the sun was at the centre of a giant spider’s web) with various neon knick-knacks, including a green tree, plus the black light charged up a whole glow in the dark theme. Then there was a flashing red and blue theme and the oak outside was included in this theme, with red and blue spotlights. You could see our light from Mt. Tolmie. So nothing beats my Dad’s, and you see all these derivative like spin-off’s. Me I just get nostalgic, I actually mentioned it. I always knew that nothing was going to beat my Dad’s when it came to “setting”, that was one of my problems, knowing that it was only downhill from there.
Thomas is a painter with work currently up in two places, including Urge, which is the short name of a tattoo parlour. So his work in on most of the walls. I already knew he was a painter so I am interested in checking this out. His pictures all sort have a modernistic dark side. I don't mean that it's modern art; it’s conceptual fantasy scant on identifiers, nothing to do with abstraction-ism. His view is modern in that it has a modernist dark side. His major theme is sort of a unique among the masses of happy cookie cuts but his creature has a twist. He shows a field of daisies, where a beautiful flower that bears almost no relation to the smiling daisies (except colour) has risen from the field and is flying with a purpose and identity but the flower looks like a predator with many tiny long teeth. His main theme is a female in a modern bent with fashionable platform boots, a fantastic body, blank eyes and interlocking metallic teeth that would be 4 cm long in real life.
I noticed that the smaller parchment paintings of the girl had excerpts of the creation from Genesis painstakingly painted as script above her figure. The largest paintings in the room were of this creature and one showed her taking a bath with cuts on her body and gave a call number. The number of course had 666 in the middle. There was large blue neon writing above that and I asked Thomas what it was. He responded that it was Japanese, Ivy had showed him it, and turned to me and said that he thought it meant “Hello There”. (Oh Hi to you too.) On one of the scripted Bible verse depictions, the girl is put beside the number 777. I had to laugh at that point. I did not want to make any sense of this creature; having a strong belief in the opposite I am opposed to the opposite existing, or the implication of her existence being false, and could not integrate it with my own perception in a way that satisfied me until I recalled a dream I had when I got home, which I will include as a postscript to the evening as it belongs, perhaps, as my own personal counterpoint. I laughed when I saw the next painting and knew that what Thomas was asserting was her existing duality as both the sacred and the profane, for that is another Pandorean box argument. I question why the portrayal of something evolving has a predatory/post-industrial connotation, that the evolution is feminine, I take for granted.The odd one out was a painting of a sun with a sad face and a tear coming out of its eyes. It was being consumed by an intergalactic demon.
Thomas and his girlfriend had just won a costume contest at The Limit last Hallowe’en, which is the club across their street, the one I hung at when Rumors moved there three nights a week. Thomas designed his own costume; he went as his demon. Denise and Dean asked him what the mask was, it was over three feet long and it was red with many teeth. Thomas responded that he didn’t know exactly, that it was a consuming demon of some sort. I already knew that. Oh, you made the costume? I already knew that too. His girlfriend dresses as Lalu (Lāloo). In case you don’t know the thematic implications of this, let me mention the Lalu is the central character in the movie Fifth Element, she is the fifth integrating element, a perfect being. Fifth Element is an amusing action glam comic book of a movie starring Bruce Willis, but it was written by a sixteen year old and it has a rather pure and simple fundamental plot attuned to that age , which heightens its impact beyond its surface values of an action/comedy/comic. The club knew and they were all chanting her name.
Lalu is the protagonist who must save that known universe from an all-consuming dark entity that is the inverse to existence but has consciousness, and has re-arisen. It leaves in its wake nothing. Lalu has been specifically designed to destroy it, but she must arrive at a specific conjunction at a specific site on earth. Before she does, and after various misadventures, she absorbs earth history and undergoes a profound crisis as to whether it is justifiable to save “life”, seeing has the history of life has included a long string of horrible suffering. So at the last minute Lalu is prepared to pull the plug, until the action hero comes out of the blue, because she is questioning, why do it when there is no love, there is no love, I cannot love, and he tells her he loves her. And so the universe is saved. You may not know enough to understand it, but I went through precisely this crisis; in a sense I feel is it somewhat universal to our generation or any to follow. We are the first forced to examine the sum of humanity and be forced to question its sum of brutality and whether it is best identified as no more than a cancerous growth upon the face of the earth that serves no other overriding purpose other than to pollute its own existence and exterminate its own life source. In our time this is omnipresent-ly literal.
For me the implications are ready made in my head as I go along. I do not have to process them like this.
Thomas is integrated in his expression; it is coherent in every aspect of his art; I know what he is expressing from my own arch-typical experience, not the broader arch-types themselves, accessing a greater mystery...and it is contestable whether he is identifying it in a deformed way, or whether it is the way that has been deformed, or whether he will argue the rightness in it all. His intent behind the work was something I could not have addressed then; it was not far enough in the rear view for me to feel safe, and he was precisely where I should have felt unsafe. (Not uncommon.)
Other facets of the night included a computerized trivia game that was highly amusing which I got to win. I had $9000 (of course) and Dean and Denise were in debt. I even gave two answers away. That and getting frightened by The Jerry Springer Show, which Tom and Laura watch regularly for amusement.
Car ride home: I find out Thomas is a year older than I am, whereas Laura is eighteen I also learn that his last art show included him and Laura having sex on stage as the climax for the evening. With that postscript everything I had ever sensed in what he was trying to form as art via the dance, and attempted to involve me in, was borne out. It really was where he was and what he was trying to do.There’s a reason why when I encounter him he’s always hitched, and he is honorable about it, contrary to what one might expect. He turned down the dance job when we found out the only way he'd get one was if he danced with me.
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