How I Came to Know Tanztraums — Part II.
II. A Fleeting Portrait of a Man, Told Fleetingly; January All Aflame and Janus as a Boy (not the Bjork Song, that’s ‘Venus as a Boy’)
As he continued talking the sky began to catch fire. This had happened before a couple of times, but never this suddenly. He carried on and later finished without once looking me in the eyes.
“It was a miracle of country midwifery. He was born, or, as his family, unashamedly of a rural and crudely pagan — is there any other sort? — predilection phrased it, he entered again into the world — under difficult circumstances, even by the uninviting standards of the time.
“The poor man — for even as a babe he contained all the ingredients necessary for greatness, yes pregnant with an adult greatness even as child — was ensnared by his own umbilical cord. Azure blue in his azure blue face thanks to its constraining and constricted (corded and coiled), looped presence around his neck. Gentle creature.
“I must explain, briefly — ”
I smirked at his use of the word ‘briefly’ but it went unnoticed. As I glanced down at the table I could see the 4-inch wide strips of wood each begin to curl up slowly. My vision was incredible, every little splinter looked like a jagged spine. Something to impale yourself on. I looked at the splinters throb and undulate.
“ — that the paganism which Mr. Tantztraum’s family subscribed and adhered to was more a dated hangover from harvest and fertility rites. Far removed from a modern, blacker, and therefore incomplete, understanding of paganism. In fact, the existence of these beliefs withinhis community is not surprising given the isolation of the community itself. Those Satanic familiars were not familiar — haha! — if you grasp my meaning.”
I didn’t.
“Once free (though not fully) from those interiors and comfortable clefts offered by his mother the midwives snipped and unraveled and began to begin restoring (or just storing?) some air into the fragile Tantztraum’s passages. Of course, the medical instruments and methodology would shock you or I were we to witness now. But, the midwives, robust and cocksure in their own way navigated — in an unexceptional, crude, but ultimately efficacious (for things are always of this nature in the provincial farmland of semi-antiquity) — the difficulties of this birth, or rather, the moments shortly thereafter the birth, or, rather, a moment that although technically ‘birth’ was part of a cyclical process in which birth had forever been present and so should it remain.”
I honed in on a patch of the splinters. Things became rich and exotic and looked razor-sharp. My first thought was coral. Then two weighty cod eyes appeared convex at each side of the table. They looked outwards but gradually both moved around to the front of the table and then looked directly at me. A large gormless and thick-lipped mouth opened and closed once.
“Eventually he sucked in air and trust me, my friend, let a good deal out too. His hues hovered among that spectrum for a short while and then he became pink and bright and rosy.”
It was quite difficult to focus on anything but I squinted at the stranger’s face. It was like an air of ease washed over him at this point. He exhaled and closed his eyes, orgasm-like, and in that cliché way smackheads do in films. I can’t say this change in him was unwelcome. At a more relaxed pace, he continued speaking.
“Despite the rough landing, Mr. Tantztraum — though, apparently in his later life, freckled with some degree of trauma — had, on the day in question, a disposition both unusually (relative, naturally) animate and jovial. The dichotomy so plainly manifest between the stress of the room’s occupants on the one hand and the infantile sanguinity, indefatigable energy, and rejuvenating sprightliness of this baby on the other led his attendant parents to think — simultaneously — of a small and energetic local stream which ran (and I hope still does run) through their townstead. This stream was called the ‘Tanztraum’.”
“Mhm.” I mhmed. A lightbulb flicked on and whispered that it liked my lipstick. I tried to ignore it’s advances to begin with. Quickly it became more violently sexual. I barked back in binary 01110111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01101111 01100110 01100110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100101!
“You shall be pardoned if one has zero knowledge of the specific, contextual meaning of this phrase. In the atypically coarse and countrified German dialect of his birthplace ‘Tantztraum’ translates as ‘Dance Dream’ (the name, please believe me, is less ridiculous within the context of the appropriate community, than what you might suppose). As was custom (again, please, view through the lens of the environment) the child would only go by this single name. Surnames were deemed unnecessary among a people who, to phrase it delicately, did not let traditional family dynamics (nor sexual modesty) hold too great a sway. So there he was, their little Dance Dream with frolicking soul to match and align.
“And by dancing, since the moments of his (biological) birth, in those liminal spaces between existence and its negation Mr. Tantztraum had always invoked a distinct sense of presence — not a presence found commanding or by default intimidating, more a literal one, of being there. If there was any command issued it was a command to appreciate the realism of his being. He really did things, he didn’t act upon symbolism (or through it), nor did he inflate his worth to others, it was self-evident. Magnanimity was a fruit he enjoyed for breakfast. Only from him did I truly become aware of mine own littleness.”
He hadn’t noticed my silence. I wondered what it would be like to be a tourniquet, just holding on.
“Yes, you guessed correctly, it did humour me that his — HIS — name resembled the English word ‘tantrum’, something which, with all the forceful and explosive connotations of childhood frustration and cuckoldish rage, ran completely counter to Mr. Tantztraum’s actual demeanour — and who can blame him for such a disposition, the world he occupied, and the world he invited me into, was, both internally and externally, studded with wild flowers.”
I leant over to the bar adjacent and took a small half-finished tumbler of sparkling water. After resting my left elbow on my table I let my hand hang briefly. I decided to dip my fingers into the water. I watched it fizz and hiss in response. This couldn’t have made a noise but I felt like everybody responded to it. He continued:
“The word ‘tantrum’ itself is somewhat difficult to trace in its origins, although its arrival into the English lexicon proper can be dated to the beginnings of the 1700s and it is, I believe, undoubtedly latinate. Though by no means formally trained in philology (nor etymology) I personally enjoy the fantasy — and it is just that, a fantasy, but aren’t we allowed a little fun now and then! — that ‘tantrum’ shares a semantic root with the Sanskrit word (deriving from texts of a shared, and therefore corollary name) ‘tantra’, and all the ritual, evocations, and meditative practices that accompany.
“Perhaps tantra and tantrum are conjoined in my mind because, in this ‘modern’ society, one seems to follow from the other — they are related if not in continuity then by phenomenological contiguity.”
I noticed that I was salivating slightly. That’s probably the wrong word. It implies desire. I was dribbling, not salivating.
“We’ve substituted (consciously or not, the end remains the same) the original notion of endurance — that is, one which finds stimulation in repetition, that allows unending cyclicality to, in a sense, germinate something new — for repetition which is, no doubt, a ritual, but infinitely less fulfilling; one of labour and exertion or a rhythm which is barely audible, only chore. Now the ashes in the mouth of the modern are an anchoring to the mundane with no Nirvana — nothing to overcome, or transcend — in sight.
“One of the features of this shift which plagues me most is that we, despite the obviousness of our routines and aversion of the new, have nurtured a perpetual fear of that which is repeated without purpose, a fear of slow recurrence forever at the same pace and forever directionless, but it is this which we ordered from the menu, and now we wish not only to shirk the paying of the bill but to leave the restaurant before our eyes can see what is owed!”
My mouth was empty but I had the sensation of trying to swallow matted hair. Dog hair. Jenson, is that you? I wretched twice to the extent where I could feel my bottom ribs. In the background I could hear the windscreen wiper on a car moving consistently. A loud rubber sound. Eyyee eyyor eyyee eyyor. Stretching on unending. Now that’s what I call tantric.
“Lassitude, experiential deprivation, burnout — and, if there is even enough for the back of the camel to give, that is when the adult (and arguably more serious) tantrum occurs, a tantrum in response to a misplaced and self-defeating tantra. There is the fantastical link.”
For pretty much the first time since he’d sat down I had clocked his internal logic. I can’t say with absolute certainty that I followed his reasoning along the way, but at the conclusion it all looked to be sound enough. I was almost disappointed.
“I know what troubles you, however. You are wondering how such a man could become embroiled in the world of finance. From a dancing dream with Sylvan cousins for company to a world of quantity and quantifying? How could he grow into something that was serious and motivated by something so uninspiring? Yes, I understand why you are perplexed.
“I too have toiled with these questions. The unavoidable fact is that industry and toil — his toil — were things he willingly threw himself into. A lot of his actions seemed to be in response to the unfettered liberties and superstitions of his earlier life. A move towards carving a slice of the earth for his enjoyment, rather than offering up a portion of himself as tribute to said earth. A casting off of the skeins of an old world in favour of a new — brave frontiersman!”
“It is possible, as I have thought once or twice, that the semi-ethereal nature of capital, the seemingly sentient and whimsical, untamed and unbroken spirit of open markets, was something that had an initial and maybe even supernatural appeal to someone born under signs equally mythical. Perhaps these concepts, both concealed and mystic, were an easy segue from one existence to another.”
I thought about someone I knew who always salted her water before boiling an egg. It doesn’t season anything through the shell, does it? Habit.
“His son, though. So little introspection — he was just animal. Dancing yes, dancing like his father, but only in response to bells and prods (should have been kicks!), no, no, not even an animal, not even that, some form of mollusc, something that moves yes, but nothing more than an expression of mindless-stimuli-response, perhaps nothing quite that fancy haha!
“Moves as one thing, one nameless, voiceless, feelingless thing that forms a raft with others of his kind (for there is no short supply! and they poison others you know! crop-dusters of ubiquity!), a basic example of causality, a tangle of things that looked like feelings cast in pallid skin of a boy.”
Vinegar dreams.
“But… I loved that man, Mr. Tantztraum, and so, by a proudness of principle which I do on occasion only humanly resent, had to love his son, Paul; that vaguest of simulations. But Mr. Tantztraum comes back to me now and then, for the briefest of moments. And he cleaves through the dust that coats the carapace of his son, that is his son. In virtue of loving him, Mr. Tantztraum, I too will become stamped in time, and as the word is said, whenever it is said, I will steer my ship home into the agony of a bright, unyielding star.”
And it actually was like someone did say ‘the word’ right then. The stranger steadied his hands on the table but only now with more purpose. He fanned his fingers, stood up, and walked away, taking the dog hair and burning sky with him.
