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© copyright Michael Autrey 2010
In an influential opinion the Supreme Court justice Potter Stuart wrote: "what is obscene I shall not attempt today further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it" [italics added]. I prefer the camerawoman's quip about photographing the nude in the early Mel Gibson vehicle The Year of Living Dangerously: "If it's in focus, its pornography, if it's out of focus, it's art." Neither epigram, if I can dignify them with that name, is all that different than the oft-overheard response to abstract art, "My five-year-old could paint that." All remind us that ignorance may not be bliss, but it has a big mouth.
Whatever we think of Larry Flynt or Ruth Bernhard or Mark Rothko, porn is not an art form and abstract art is not immune to criticism. Nothing is immune, which is not the same as asserting nothing is sacred. Folks are entitled to their opinions; remembering shoot-first is dangerous foreign policy, and shoot-from-the-hip a naive critical strategy. Given their current status - seductive visuals; worldwide popularity - yoga and tango are big targets. Yoga is reduced to exercise, or a pretext for exotic sexual positions. Tango is flirtation, a prelude to the horizontal mambo. The more esoteric the yoga practice, the more likely it is to be stereotyped. Take tantrism, an exotic word that evokes great sex in candle-lit caverns. It is not sexual, nor confined to caves. It's difficult to accept a practice that in rare instances involves intercourse is not sexual. Such assertions have the whiff of hypocrisy. American examples feature too many 'mystic marriages' between child brides and adult male cult leaders. So too a milonga, a gathering where tango is danced, is easy to get wrong: a low-lit room packed with people pressed chest-to-chest to the uninitiated looks like a fire sale at a slaughterhouse. But yoga is not mere fitness and a milonga is not a meat market. They are the refreshing opposites of porn: you don't know them when you see them.
Yoga is a non-denominational devotional practice. "Asana means holding the body in a particular posture with the bhavana or the thought that God is within. The asana has to be held firm, or 'sthira' so as not to shake that Divinity." The advanced yogi experiences heightened states of consciousness. These experiences are described at length, in hundreds of texts. T0 the uninitiated they sound like ravings, or nonsense. The New Yorker has a whole genre of cartoons starring a bearded man sitting on a mountaintop in his underpants: the typical picture of ascetic yoga practice. Of course it doesn't tell us about the yogi's experience or the significance of his choices.
When it comes to tango and yoga, a picture - or video - is not worth a thousand words. Quite the opposite. Advanced asana practice looks like contortionism. Tango becomes what Al Pacino does with that starlet in Scent of a Woman, Antonio Banderas throwing around what's-her-name in Take the Lead. Close-embrace social tango does not make for telling images; nor does meditation. Why?
The principal sense organ for tango and yoga is the skin. The principal sense is touch. (The skin is the largest organ, not just the largest organ of sense.) Dancing one is 'in touch' with the floor, one's partner, the music: the whole, greater than the sum of its parts, is touching in every sense of the word. In yoga the condition of the skin indicates a great deal about the comfort and steadiness of the asana. Advanced yogis recruit the skin: the skin on the feet becomes active in a different way, and moves in a different direction than the skin of the ankles; the taut skin that covers the bone of the shin so different than the skin over the heavily muscled thigh. There are no shortcuts, and no substitute for diligent practice.
They have more in common than you think. Both are humanistic disciplines, passed from teacher to student, through close, sweaty, frustrating work in group or one-on-one lessons. As is the case with all movement arts, they have a specialized vocabulary, further limiting their accessibility. The steps and the asanas have names. Youtube is the tango dancer's encyclopedia and dictionary, mined for inspired sequences. An improvised social dance, designed for a crowded floor, tango is beautiful to watch. But observing social dance in low light is not the same as watching a choreographed form like ballet, that calls for a darkened hall and a single viewing angle. A yoga demonstration might elicit gasps from non-yogis, but gasps are reactions not thoughtful responses. (A product of instinct, a gasp is the opposite of a thought.)
Neither can be faked. If yoga doesn't change your life than you are not practicing it as it means to be practiced. No matter how good it looks, if the dance isn't comfortable and musical, it isn't tango. Of course you can do yoga for exercise and dance tango for fun. Yoga makes you fit and tango is fun. But it is not only those things, and it is too common to confuse 'fit' with 'health' and 'fun' with 'pleasure.' They are not synonyms.
People get serious about yoga and tango for the same reasons: to connect. Tango and yoga provide an unrepeatable experience without equivalents or substitutes that for lack of a better word I call authentic. Admittedly, connection is a vague term. I believe people stick with tango for the same reasons physicists build Super Colliders. In colliders particles are accelerated, then smashed into each other or into 'fixed target' (a block of tungsten, a chunk of uranium), producing a huge release of energy, and insight into life's great mysteries. The only difference? At a milonga the people are the particles. The yogi (yogini is the feminine form of the noun) smacks himself into his own resistance, finding and surpassing the mind's limits via the body's intransigence.
The term is elusive. All we can be certain of are the preconditions for connection. One of the foundational texts of yoga is The Yoga Sutra(s) of Patanjali, dated by some as early as the 3rd century B.C. Of 195 sutras, just three contain instructions regarding the asanas. Sutras 2:46, 47 and 48: "The posture of yoga is steady and easy. It is realized by relaxing one's effort and resting like the cosmic serpent on the waters of infinity. Then one is unconstrained by opposing dualities." All apply to tango as well. The tango embrace must be steady, and easy in the sense of comfortable. As with the asanas, we achieve the embrace through relaxation. And a "tango trance" does feel like a melting of the duality of self and other. So what about the cosmic serpent resting on the waters of infinity?
Even those of us who are devoted to it are unlikely to confuse tango with a devotional practice. (It feels more like an addiction.) To those not willing to work at it, who take a cursory look or go out just a couple of nights, it feels uncomfortable or vaguely sexual, which may amount to the same feeling, depending upon how attracted we are to the people who agree to dance with you. Like the guy who grabbed my arm at a milonga, asking in a loud voice: "Is this hard, because those girls are hot!" "Yes" I replied, letting him guess whether I was answering his question or agreeing with his statement.
I have not met a dancer who evokes a cosmic serpent resting on the waters of infinity to describe a tango trance. On occasion I hear such talk from yogis. There is something magical and indescribable about tango; and the fruits of yoga practice, if it is described at all, call for evocative metaphoric speech. And that's the crux of it: the best definition of a tango and yoga is as unsatisfying as Stewart's definition of porn: "you know it when you feel it."
From his seat on the bench Stewart had the status of an oracle. Whatever you think about his judgments, he earned the right to shoot his mouth off. (It comes with the territory. Oral arguments before the Supreme Court are the verbal equivalents of firefights, with dire consequences for the losers.) What I want to call Stewart's maneuver is a variation of a classic rhetorical trope, the appeal to the emotions. What's different is the appeal to emotions you are yet to have, and when you have them you will struggle to share them. But I don't want to deploy rhetoric as a means of persuasion. I don't mean to emote, but to discuss how we talk about what means the most to us.
In tango the crucial element, the second person, the other in the clichˇ about how many it takes to do this dance, is what makes this a story so difficult to write straight. Kant wrote: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." Tango cannot be told without lumbering it with at least two warped boards, and a milonga is as crowded as a softwood plantation.
The other in a yoga practice is god, God, GOD or G*D. Whether or not we are believers, we do not begrudge others' their loves, so how can we begrudge them their belief-systems? Think how many beautiful, memorable texts and objects are the products of faiths we neither understand nor care to. We pack our museums with the fragments of dead civilizations, and cherish those fragments as art without ever understanding their original ritual purpose. (Bobblehead Buddha on the dashboard; chrome Buddha in the foyer of the disco.) Esoteric texts from a whole variety of religions speak directly to us: Rumi for instance. Now examine this gem: " 'the soul fetches its prayer,' as the body fetches its breath." Or this nugget from E.M. Cioran that amounts to a viable definition of what we seek in wordless arts like tango and yoga: "paradise is life without commentary."
I feel obliged to conclude with an apology for evoking the Potter Stewart maneuver, the tautology that makes long experience a necessary part of the definition of what makes the experience worthwhile in the first place. We are suspicious of it in others, but most of us use Stewart's rhetorical maneuver all the time. As we are the authors of our experience, so we are authorities on them, allegedly the most qualified to narrate, explain and comment. This is the same apology that writers of love stories never offer, and never have to. Because the metaphorical counting of the ways we feel about the beloved has been established since the Song of Solomon at least. And I mention the Song of Solomon advisedly: an ancient canonical text where the love of God is voiced in erotic language. Whether or not you are a believer the details are eyeglass-fogging. Filmed in focus it might look, to some, pornographic.
References
Yoga: A Gem for Women, Geeta Iyengar, Timeless Books, Canada, 2002, pg 26.
"We are missing the gold if we do asanas as a physical practice only."
Yoga: A Gem for Women, Geeta Iyengar, Timeless Books, Canada, 2002, frontispiece.
Yoga, Discipline of Freedom: The Yoga Sutra Attributed to Patanjali, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, Bantam Books, New York, 1998, pg 56.
Quoted in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, Isaiah Berlin, and ed. by Henry Hardy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990, frontispiece. The original quote is from 1784.
The Knox Brothers, Penelope Fitzgerald, Counterpoint, Washington, 2000 pg 262.
About the Author
A freelance writer, Michael Autrey has practiced the Iynegar style of hatha yoga for twelve years. He dances and djs in Portland Oregon. His first book, From The Genre of Silence, appeared in August of 2008. He can be contacted at