A Danse Macabre

What does it mean to be invited to dance by death?

This weekend just gone, I spent my Saturday in A Write & a Pint workshop here in London, run by Sean Bennett.

It was an enchanting day.

We gathered on the theme The Unknown: Spirit and Chaos, exploring and discussing different authors’ writing, different thinkers’ views on the nature of existence, and our own beliefs through writing.

The space helped me finish a poem on love that I’d serendipitously begun the night before, at home. I wrote a piece where a human reincarnates as a blue tit. Freewriting, too, in response to Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’, which revealed to me thoughts and feelings of what remains in his wake. All pieces perhaps to be shared another day.

The piece I find myself coming back to now, though, is one I wrote in response to Leonora Carrington’s The Skeleton’s Holiday.

Carrington’s work captured me as I glanced through it – in its language, in its spirit and chaos, inviting us to dance with uncertainty, with the unknown. I felt a glee that I resisted examining or analysing, and just surrendered to.

After it was read out, and discussed – heatedly! – Sean invited us to write a journey that the titular skeleton was to take us on.

And he hit ‘play’ on the piece of classical music, Danse Macabre, Op.40 by Camille Saint-Saëns.

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The invitation to dance with death in these times feels, of itself, macabre. Monstrous.

I’m currently shielding myself from headlines, as countries of my own maternal lineage go to war, the complexity of the region and particularly of Iran often flattened into simple language.

But to dance is to move with. To be in the body. To express. To feel.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A history of collective joy is a reminder of how not just dance but collective dance, collective movement, is a deeply intrinsic character of the human experience, present throughout our history. And one that has was suppressed by European colonisers, the legacies of which we still experience today.

I held a circle on Sunday night on ‘Am I Nature?’, where amongst other themes, the question of anger, rage, emerged. How do we invite our rage as sacred? As generative? How do we dance with it?

One participant who was there joined my weekly quiet writing circle last night, and shared that he had been dancing in the intervening days.

And so.

How do we allow ourselves to dance with our rage, with our grief, with our death, to compost, to decay, to surrender, to fall and then rise again?

How do we dance with the unknown, the spirits, the chaos, that engulfs us?

How do we relinquish control, if only for a moment, to allow ourselves to feel – perhaps even become – the decay?

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Below is what emerged for me in response to The Skeleton’s Holiday, followed up by a piece I also wrote last year in another A Write & a Pint workshop, this time on the theme of the gothic, and led by Dark Artisan.

My own danse macabre.

In response to Leonora Carrington’s The Skeleton’s Holiday

The damned skeleton with his herb-dressed bones and bag of imitation turds took me by the hand, urging me to flay my flesh, and dance with him.

Yanking me this way and that, he ran zig zag through the halls, knocking on doors, cockadoodling, rattling radiators as xylophones with his femurs.

I resisted, horrified at the monstrous sight, his iced ivory pressed deep into my sallowed palm.

And he pulled me harder still, chattering his teeth maracas, his ribs plucked harps, his heels tap danced on the black and white checked tiles.

He gripped me to his frame, dancing the waltz, leading me and then allowing himself to be led.

And as the diabolical percussion of his bones crescendoed, tempo and pace becoming unbearable, I could not resist anymore.

Spinning, spinning, spinning my teeth maracaed in unison, and the flesh fell from my self.

We tapped together, flicking light switches on off on off. Threw imitation turds through open doors, and recited shit poetry at the tops of our death rattled voices.

We fell to the ground, in fits of hysteria, our bones entangled.

And we embraced, in heady abandon.

Down the hall, my flesh became a welcome banquet.

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From prompts related to the gothic.

The temperature, so invitingly warm when I first stepped into the woods, seems to plummet as my next footstep meets the spongey earth.

The dense canopy that encloses this land shelters me from Sun.

But the goosebumps prickling my flesh message it must be nearing its slumbered horizon.

I’ve mistimed my exit back into the peopled world, too enchanted.

The trees and leaves and birds and life and I had been playmates all day.

But they now warped into a more angular, spiky biome in response to my skins’ vigilance.

The sweet birdsong that had been the music to our play echoes in its silence, recognising a blooming presence beyond my understanding.

As I quicken my pace along foot- and paw-hardened path, the risk of being caught past sundown curdles at me.

A ribbon of breeze that had playfully stalked me now catches up. But rather than lovingly combing my hair, it pulls taught around my throat, squeezing a gasp from my chest.

I gulp an inhale as it releases its hold just as quickly as it’s grasped, but the flowing air isn’t finished with me.

The putrid perfume of rotting is its next gift.

And yet, even as my self convulses, my body shudders in pleasure, remembering a long-lost knowing.

The breeze quickens faster now, urgently pawing at me, feeding the scent of decay to my twittering nostrils and mouth.

A dry tickle scratches against the soft jellied pink of my tonsils and the word ‘spore’ whispers at me as the wind and its passengers probe into my lungs.

A conscious terror stabs but my body disagrees, thirsty with untameable glee, wanting more, more, more as it awakens and recalls something olden, something primordial, something that has nothing to do with me as I know myself and all to do with some deeply ancient consciousness I can’t even begin to fathom.

My body feasts on the viscous banquet on offer, air’s fidgeting quiver strengthening in its confidence, as the woods continue their descent towards dusk’s cold.

But here.

A peculiar tingle in my fingertips.

I raise a hand aloft for examination.

And here.

My flesh is no longer of human but of something more alien, something sponged and fungal, a texture beginning to salaciously consume my arm as my head trembles in disbelief

but now blink

My own flesh returned.

A trick of the dying light, I reason with myself.

Except an urgency now splutters from somewhere monstrous within and my lungs heave drinking deeper and deeper seeking to imbibe the woods in our their entirety.

I fight to endure afloat but now am drowning amongst the tangs of decomposing, spores and mycelium and the alchemists of death seeking to root and sink more fully within, returning kind to kind.

I become bystander to my body’s fiendish desires.

An exhaustion of eons shrouds me, pleading with me to relinquish.

And with a final whoosh of exhale, mind and body reunite as a single, pulsating, organic mass.

The breeze matures to gale, gloopy with death and with life and, sensing a shift, pounces, sinking itself into each forgiving pore, pulling me deeper into its embrace.

Flesh, bone, tissue, nerve, tissue, muscle, cell all now became as mulch through the wood’s macabre dance with me and, as a final groan drips from my lips, all is let go and I disintegrate, scattering seed, returning earth to earth.

Sun, wishing to see no more through the veil of leaves and branches, shutters their eyes, surrendering land to Moon’s gaze.

Air falls still.

And Robin sings his final wistful lullaby good night.