Dancing Tiresias

I've been swing dancing for about a year now, and from time to time I'll take classes as a follow - partially to learn the other side of the dance, and partially because we've had too many leads and I don't like standing around (btw, if any women or gender-role-dashing men want to come out and learn an awesome social dance, let me know). Because I've been on both sides of the swing-out, I started to notice something: the dance by and large doesn't come from the dancers.

When you look and see a really cool turn, you might think that the dancers are doing most of the work. But really, a lot of what is going on in dance class is learning to stop doing certain things - stop moving so much in a Lindy circle, stop cranking the follow's arm around, and so on. When I lead and I want my follow to do a certain turn, I simply lift their hand in a certain way. I thought that the follow was still doing most of the work. But then I tried following, and it felt like the lead was doing most of the work - I just followed a relatively simple direction, turned when I had to because of momentum, and kept my arm bent properly so as to keep both of us from getting injured.

So who was doing the work? No one, really. The lead gives a couple signals, the follow interprets a couple signals, both add in a couple things to keep the dance floor safe, but they aren't aware of most of what is going on in the dance. It happens. They are blind to the specific spins and twirls turning around them. A hand goes up, a foot goes forward, and there was a turn. They circle around, the hand supporting the back is removed, and the two are at opposite ends of a rubber band.

Momentum and music and the real dancers.

When we try to see what is going on, we miss it. It's already happening - we just need to know a few key touches to enter into the action. When we dance blindly, we see.

Metaphors and Particulars

What are particulars? I was thinking that the notion of a metaphor shares some similarities. What makes a metaphor, a metaphor? It is a word being used in a non-literal sense: that is, there is (1) the literal sense (the general rules and semantics of the language), (2) the current situational context, and (3) the interaction between them. A metaphor, qua metaphor, is the interaction and is not either of the interactors.

Similarly, a particular thing seems to be something existing between two different levels. Take a fire burning in front of me. On the one hand, it is a bunch of universal physical laws - it is an instantiation of heat, motion, release of energy, and so on. (Of course, this is tendentious, but I think that there are good reasons for assuming the reality of at least linguistic rules.) On this level, though, where is the particular? Everything is universal. There is also the situation: the fire is part of a context, warming a room, boiling water for tea, and so on. Yet again, however, we don't have a particular, since it all gets subsumed under the situation. The particular is something liminal, something appearing only as the general laws (like the overall language and its typical meaning) interact with the completely concrete situation (like the current paragraph, piece, or poem). Like metaphors, particulars have meaning as a real interaction, but are not some object existing outside of that.

Maybe, in addition, the interaction itself is produced by us - we mix things together. We take sights, sounds, smells, and tastes with a touch of reason and spin them together. So the problem of particulars arises because we exist on different levels and navigate them simultaneously, so we need some way in which they hold together for pragmatics.