Bodily listening

My body continues to amaze me. Not its physical state, of course, which continues to be radically different from how I want it to be (and to a certain extent, that will always be true)... my muscles are coming along nicely, but I seem not to be able to shift an ounce of fat...

But further to my recent difficulties, my body has now invaded my listening life. I can now work with music on, something I couldn't do for years, a skill I lost sometime in my first year at University... It's a skill I've trained myself into again, on the basis that while working is the only chance I get to listen to much in the way of new music (although my gym-time is another opportunity, but the kind of music has to be different...). Anyway, while I was training myself to be able to do this, a few months ago, I had a conversation with a friend, a fairly dedicated tanguera, about it. I had found myself very able to listen to tango while working (alongside fado, flamenco, chanson, and other rather lovely non-Anglotripe stuff), and asked her if she didn't feel the same... At first, she said, she agreed, but very soon she found herself unable to work with it on. Huh, interesting, I thought, given how much she liked dancing to it...

But since the difficulties of which I speak are in fact dance-related, I now understand this entirely, fully, completely, in my very bones. Logical thinking ought to have explained it to me at the time, but it is quite incredible to feel it totally. Of course she could not work with that music on; it is dance music. For me, it was not dance music, it was just music. And now, having taken up a form of dance myself (about which, no more for now), I have an entire genre of music more or less denied to me as work music... music that becomes dance-music cannot be work-music. I feel the music course through my veins as I think, even after only a couple of weeks of dancing. As time goes by, if I continue to dance, it will become more and more this way and I suspect I will only be able to dance to it.

As I say, logic can lead us to this conclusion, and yet I feel it. My body is listening. The vibrations of this voice that sings the tune of my dance move through me now not as waves but as steps and postures and moves and as an attitude. It is an enhanced relationship, I think... my listening time and space has been restricted, but my listening experience is beautifully improved.