Dance harder, dance more

Why I write about personal things in these dark times

There’s a photo I took at a bar in Washington D.C. from November 2016.

Just days after the election.

My friend is in the foreground dancing. A packed dance floor behind him. Flags from around the world hanging on the wall. Nothing but passion, joy, commitment to the moment. I posted it to IG at the time with a caption: what do we do in dark times? Dance harder, dance more.

Dancing at Lucky Bar in 2016

Almost a decade later, I found myself in a similar moment, with the same friend, dancing salsa in the immediate aftermath of a terrible election.

I wrote about it last month in The Sadness of Always Leaving:

Last night my friend and I danced salsa on a makeshift dancefloor on the edge of the beach under a full moon. Salseros from around the world hugging and kissing on the cheeks, sharing a beer, dancing close to bachata, twirling around to salsa, each one of us basking in the gratitude of a beautiful February night of music and friendship and (for some) simmering romance.

The piece was about this and how sad it made me to continually be leaving communities that I had grown to love.

I got a lot of nice responses to that piece. Everything from “I can totally relate,” and “This hit home,” to my favorite, “You are my spirit animal.”

But one woman, apparently hoping for a respite from doom-scrolling bad news, said she had hoped the piece would be a “distraction from the chaos in the US”—unfortunately, she thought the whole thing was an “out of touch” indulgence.

It got me thinking.¹

What should be our response to a world that is seemingly falling apart at the seams? We each must have our own answer. I for one take the question quite seriously.

As did Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, a book I’ve quoted before:

We had to learn ourselves, and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Frankl lived through the Holocaust. And as someone whose grandfather escaped just in time, I have read and watched a lot about what the meaning of that event might be.

Take some of my favorite movies.

For example, in the last few minutes of Jo Jo Rabbit, Thomasin McKenzie’s Elsa Korr emerges onto the street. Elsa has been hiding from the Nazis in a crawl space for years. Roman Griffin’s character, Jo Jo, has just seen his mom hung in the town square for cooperating with the resistance. The war is over. People are rejoicing, but the full toll is yet unknown. Elsa surveys the scene.

And what do they both decide to do in this moment? The thing Elsa said she has been waiting to do this entire time.

Dance.

[If you’re reading on email, now might be a good time to switch over to the app/web to watch all the videos I’m about to post].

There are a lot of films on this theme, with the Nazis often serving as the enemy of all that is good and joyful in the world. Movies like Swing Kids, which, despite its faults, holds a special place in my nostalgic heart:

Moments later the Nazi SS shuts down the party—and it’s left to our teenager protagonists to protect the joy and subversiveness of music and dancing from the conformist forces of impending fascism.

Then there is that beautiful scene in The Shawshank Redemption, where Tim Robbins risks physical violence and solitary confinement to hear just a few minutes from The Marriage of Figaro.

One of my favorite movies of all time, Dr. Zhivago, is entirely about the efforts of a fascist regime to stamp out what is good and human in us—“Feelings, insights, affections, it’s… suddenly trivial now,” remarks Pasha Antipov, the young man turned Soviet commander. “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.”

It is left to Zhivago, the poet, to protect the personal, namely his love for Lara. But to write poetry about something so frivolous as romantic love—that is not acceptable for a regime whose only goal is to propagate the aims of the revolution. Indeed, it is a grave threat for individuals to carve out meaning apart from the aims of the state.

To be honest, it reminds me a lot of what’s been going on in the U.S. of late.

The new regime in the U.S. understands that politics is downstream from culture. Activists on the left understand this as well and act accordingly. Both have at times been guilty of trying to police the words we say, the books we read, the movies we make, and the performances we give.

I can only assume that writing poetry about romantic love (or more specifically trans love) would be as antithetical to the new regime’s political ends as it was to those of Pasha Antipov.

And so we must do it.

I wrote the day after the election that there was No Time to Despair. That the answer is to do culture. Consider this piece a follow to that one.

I can and should write about personal matters in these dark times because to protect the personal is to protect what is most human and individual in each of us. The personal is political—but it is important to insist with our writing and poetry, our music and movies, our painting, sculpture, plays, our stand-up comedy—it is important to insist with all of our heart and souls that it is we individuals who determine the course of politics, and not the other way around.

My favorite movie of all time is about a writer who tries to be a revolutionary. Not surprisingly, it is also about the Russian Revolution, an epochal historical event in which questions of the personal and political became most urgent.

Here is Warren Beatty’s Jack Reed at the pivotal moment, realizing that the Soviet regime has been rewriting his writing to suit their political goals:²

When you purge what is individual, you purge dissent.

It’s a sentiment I think every activist trying to win a war of ideas, left or right, would do well to remember.

Thus, for me, writing about feelings, insights, and affections IS my response to the world. When I am questioned by life, as Frankl would say, I answer with this newsletter.

Often I am writing about a difficult life question I don’t know the answer to. I bring my history and philosophy degrees and my life experience and whatever thoughtfulness and skill as a writer I have to the question. And then try to walk through it, carefully, deliberately, in a way that others might find helpful.

If you’re not into it, you can do what I suggested to the woman who told me I was being indulgent: unsubscribe. By all means, go back to doom-scrolling the rest of the Internet, or doing whatever else you think is called for as the world questions you.

For my part: I am doing a renovation, writing a newsletter, running a consulting company, climbing rocks, kitesurfing oceans, and trying to be the best father, partner, son, brother, and friend I know how for those who I love.

And I am dancing.

I’m not trying to forget about or subsume the unique things that make me an individual—rather I’m protecting and nourishing them. I think it’s the most important thing I can do right now.

1. As a former newspaper reporter, I was trained to never read the comments section. And in three years of covering politics for New Mexico’s largest daily newspaper, having published around 500 stories, I never did read a comment. But on Substack, I do make it a point to read and respond. Times have changed.

2. I couldn’t find this clip online so I had to upload it myself.