Becoming Power Through Dance
by Duygun Erim, The Open University
Social scientific research is a world-making process (Mol 1999, Law 2004). We have options in choosing between which reality to enact from a variety of versions (Mol 1999: 74). So what we need to ask for, are the whereabouts of these options in terms of their situatedness and what are the forces that bring us to decide between the other alternatives (ibid). This notion of choice brings in an actively choosing actor who potentially may not be disentangled to how s/he is enacted (ibid). The ancient magical incantation abracadabra is derived from the Aramaic word meaning ‘I create as I speak’ therefore in choosing what we are going to talk about, we are also creating which version of realities to enact:
Working on the ways in which we are situated in various culturally and materially specific ways of thinking, feeling and doing opens up possibilities of transformation, of insight and political action: not in order that we in any absolute way can escape being acted upon by external forces, but in order that we may find more freedom of choice in just what external forces we would like to be expressed in our embodied perceptive actions (Marcussen 2006: 294).
Feeling is a way of apprehending the world (see Ahmed 2004 and Marcussen 2006). During my ethnographic research on dance I experimented with dancing in the middle as a way of knowing. I was constantly ‘experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting’ with actuality, therefore the matters of process, affect and sensation, what is new, coming into being, taking shape in movement and transition, rhythm, creativity, imagination, vitality became practical and therefore theoretical centers in my research (Deleuze 1995: 106). As a result while translating and representing the ‘reality’ of dance in writing, I tried hard to resist to fixing and reducing dance to ‘culture’, ‘economy’, ‘gender’, ‘class, ‘race’, ‘power’, because it is ‘apart’ of and ‘a part’ of all these aspects and it is between and beyond them too (Cooper 1998: 120). It is beyond them because in its play it has a potential to create another ‘reality’ in itself and this is precisely why it is so interesting. I tried to avoid imposing a conceptual framework that will frame dance within power relations (race, class, gender and so on) or as spatiality across (transgressive, resisting, counter-movements and so). Rather, I tried to dive into the spatiality of this middleness (of rhythm, of dance, of time, of space, of body and of reality).
Reality is multiple, and it is ‘culturally, historically and materially located’ (Mol 1999: 75). The metaphors that Mol uses to define the character of multiplicity of realities are ‘intervention and performance’ and through them it is implied that “reality is done and enacted rather then observed” (Mol 1999: 77). I am overfilled with joy in dance and that is why I choose to bring in dance in relation to joy, rather than race or gender. I choose to enact this reality of dance, rather than the others and it is a political choice. I choose to speak about the things in the ways in which I was affected and which may indeed be ‘absent’ rather than ‘present’. Because speaking about them, is a way of creating them and making them real.
In movement, the closed and rigid modes of thinking and ideas as well as feelings that derive from past experiences are dissolving and changing shape, they become liquefied. In that sense ‘dance’ is a force of transformation and when enacted as a way of looking at the world (a method of realizing), it may have a similar effects on our ways of understanding what is in and around us. “Working on our affective stance (including both the feeling state of our bodies and the ideas or thoughts we have of that stance) is thus a process that enables us to transcend that stance, so that we may better perceive the complexity of realities we are researching.” (Marcussen 2006: 299). From this perspective, I aim to think on power and resistance in context of playful dance in everyday life in this article. I suggest going back to Baruch Spinoza in considering the power question in relation to dance. Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s ethics involves a ‘philosophical nomadism’ (Braidotti 2006: 146) and draws it as politics of resistance (Deleuze 1978, 1988). This theoretical framework will give me insights to rethinking the particular role that dance may enact in terms of politics of everyday life. Overall, I will offer to situate dance as a power that may create a joyful energy, therefore an ethically empowering option in Spinozian terms. The joy of dance may generate in us a power that operates as a force of life, and therefore that dance could enact as the power of acting.
Dance and Power
Conventionally we conceptualize and imagine ‘power’ through a framework that builds itself under the weight of negativity as an obstructive force or kind of hindering process. More clearly, we imagine a process in which we are being subjected to ‘power’ and precisely this is the moment in which we build the negative sense of power and this imagination derives from our habits of thinking through binary oppositions which in this case appears as the self is opposed to socio-political mechanisms (see Braidotti 2006). However, power is multiple and heterogeneous and poststructuralists bring this into question through generating power in its positive sense of ‘enabling’ as well as its negative sense of ‘hindering’ (Braidotti 2006: 85-86).
The analyzes on dance in relation to politics come from different perspectives, such as: a form of transgression or resistance (Jackson 1989, Hall and Jefferson 1993, McRobbie 1994, Redhead 1993, Reynolds 1998, Rietveld 1998, Gilbert and Pearson 2002, Wilson 2002); an infusive negotiator of power relations (Saldanha 2002, 2005, 2007); as a play that ‘eludes’ power (Thrift 1997) or; a possible generating force of a resistance to ‘micro power’ that operates within us (Malbon 1999). Overall, there is more emphasis on power as a hindering force that is external and imposed upon us or infused in us, in all these representations of dance in the literature. In that context power is seen as a force that needs to be escaped from or be opposed to or to resist against. Dance is best analyzed as the bringer of ‘escape’, however the potentials in it for generating power (of enabling kind) widely escapes from all of these imaginations.
For example, in an analysis of the party scene in Goa, dance and music are seen as forces that create a feeling of belonging to an “escapist, psychotropic nowhere” (Saldanha 2002: 59, 60). Dance is elaborated as a temporary illusion that has no use and, “it is precisely the potential for escape that can turn [...] into [...] a narcissistic revolution changing nothing to overall systems of domination” (Saldanha 2002: 59, 60). Since we are all a part of the world and continuously enact and therefore make it through our existence and becomings, we have an effect in making the world as process. Playing with the world through dance can not be reduced to a ‘narcissistic’ aspect only. Although narcissism may be involved in it, it is not the sum of it. Dance or party scene in Goa for example could be infused and located within the networks of power and exploitation (of cheap local labour) and re-establishing the relations of domination and racism in overall (Saldanha 2002, 2005, 2007). However, the more we (researchers and social scientists) choose to see and emphasize ‘systems of domination’ only as the main determining character; indeed we are re-establishing and re-making them (even more strongly) through our writings. This is of course not to suggest that we should keep our eyes closed to them or simply ignore them, but to suggest a more detailed look to the event of dance from the middle of it and maybe to see the spatio-temporal potentials of disruption or possibility of momentous freedom and the feature of change within the larger mess. The enjoyment of the dancing space maybe constructed ‘on top of other people’s suffering’, as the cheap labor of cleaners (Saldanha 2002: 17), that is undeniable; however it does not reduce the significance of the emancipatory possibilities that may occur in there. Otherwise, we may be freezing and fixing things in the field of ‘existing systems of domination’ on and on and may end up in making ‘moralistic judgments’ in interpreting the world. There may be a moment in which the cleaner may join dance for example, or a dancer and a ‘chai mama’ (ibid) can share a moment in which they become united in a productive way through playful dance. Such a moment is indeed significant in terms of our relations to networks of power and how we enact the reality, the world making process and this possibility is what I am particularly interested in.
The world and its relations are complex and we are all a part of this complexity. Because we are all indeed parts and actors, we make this world and affect one another. In arguing this, I am situating my arguments in a ‘baroque’ way of understanding complexity (Kwa 2002). We are in need of enacting a ‘baroque’ complexity in social science by looking at minuscule mundane swarming instants, state of affairs and affects. More clearly, when someone steps on my feet on purpose in the dance floor or when another one wants to share her gum with me and takes it out of her mouth, these all matter, because: the ways in which these “epiphenomena of corporeal causal interactions” affect “the responses and actions of agents” (Patton 1997: 2). The change in a body’s relations or its status during its encounter to other bodies and the body’s subjection to a new account through this encounter, more clearly the ‘incorporeal transformations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) that bodies continuously enact, matters. In that context enactment of social scientific research is one of the ways in which we enact realities and therefore how we describe and elaborate events matters in determining what kind of worlds that we are going to live in (Mol 1999, Law 2004). Baroque complexity draws on Leibniz and looks down to “mundane, crawling and swarming of matter” (Kwa 2002: 26):
Every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each drop of its bodily fluids, is also such a garden or such a pond (Leibniz 1986 in Kwa 2002: 26).
The unity of his (Leibniz’s) “body is political in form”; it is a body of a “free republic of monads”. Thus it is “the direction of looking” that matters (ibid):
First, historic baroque has a strong phenomenological realness, a sensuous materiality. Second this materiality is not locked within a simple individual, but flows in many directions, blurs the distinction between individual and environment (ibid).
Which means that whatever I do in here and you do over there affects and touches each other in many ways and from many directions. A smile we give to a stranger in the street, or a bad look matters for the making of the world in every moment passing. What we write, what we eat, how we interact, they all matter. There are possibilities of inventiveness in baroque, “the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a limited set of elements (ibid). However:
Individual monads are not linked at all, they don’t even communicate. But they are connected in the sense that, in the material aspect, they affect each other. If one individual had not existed the whole universe would have been different (Kwa 2002: 26).
Therefore, we (things, wind, people, landscape, fashion and everything) are a part and apart of all that is around and affect each other in complex ways. Someone dancing here, another one joking there, you now are reading this article all these matter in affecting and making life and reality. It is all (life, word and reality) in a process and it may move in several ways and directions in each passing minute, through ‘inventive abilities’ internal to us and life within this kind of complexity. Therefore matters of everyday life and our ontological politics in living is the spatiality that we need to consider in looking at issues of power and resistance or thinking on how to change the world.
Joy and sadness
All that is frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities. Fear is the extreme expressing of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter. Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984: 51)
Joy is an inextricable element in play which moves between frivolity and ecstasy (Huizinga 1980: 21). Spinoza thinks that we are ‘spiritual automata’ that are left to the chance of encounters (Deleuze 1978: 5). As spiritual automata we have a continuous state of good or bad encounters that increase or diminish our power of acting and most of us live all our lives like this; left to the consequences of random encounters with ideas (Deleuze 1978: 4):
As such spiritual automata, within us there is the whole time of ideas which succeed one another, and in according with this succession of ideas, our power of acting or force of existing is increased or diminished in a continuous manner, on a continuous line, and this is what we call affectus, it’s what we call existing. Affectus is thus the continuous variation of someone’s force of existing, insofar as this variation is determined by the ideas that s/he has…it increases my power of acting or on the contrary diminishes it in relation to the idea that I had at the time, and it’s not a question of comparison, it’s a question of a kind of slide, a fall or rise in the power of acting (ibid: 5).
In here, ‘affectus’ refers to affect in English as determined by Deleuze and it is different to ‘affectio’, which he translates as ‘affection’. The difference between them is that affect refers to ‘continuous variation’ as he determines above, whereas affection is the condition of a body when it is acted upon by another body (the condition of our body when it is subject to cigarette or a lover etc.). More clearly:
…it’s a state of a body insofar as it is subject to the action of another body. What does this mean? “I feel the sun on me,” or else “A ray of sunlight falls upon you”; it’s an affection of your body. What is an affection of your body? Not the sun, but the action of the sun or the effect of the sun on you. In other words an effect, or the action that one body produces on another, once it’s noted that Spinoza, on the basis of reasons from his Physics, does not believe in action at a distance, action always implies a contact, and is even a mixture of bodies. Affectio is a mixture of two bodies, one body which is said to act on another, and the other receives the trace of the first. Every mixture of bodies will be termed affection (ibid).
Spinoza formulates idea as a mode of thought that represents something, a representational mode of thought whereas an affect (affectus) is any mode of thought that does not represent anything, a pain, a love, a sorrow are non-representational (Deleuze 1978: 1). Every mode of thought that is non-representational is termed as affect in Spinoza and thus he concludes that the idea is primary to affect; “in order to love it’s necessary to have an idea, however confused it may be, however indeterminate it may be, of what is loved” (ibid: 1-2). Ideas constantly chase and replace each other and we are a sort of ‘spiritual automata’ in which these ideas are affirmed. Deleuze calls this ‘a regime of variation’ which means that during the succession of two ideas, a perpetual variation operates in us, which determines our ‘force of existing’ or ‘the power of acting’ and this non-stop operating variation is “what it means to exist”(ibid: 3). In other words “there is a continuous variation in the form of an increase-diminution-increase-diminution of the power of acting or the force of existing of someone according to the ideas which s/he has” (ibid: 4). This passage in-between affects is determined by ideas (that constitutes them) (ibid). And there are two basic passions according to Spinoza which are ‘joy’ and ‘sadness’. All other affects that operates in us derive from these two passions of joy and sadness as a source (ibid). When we encounter things we get affected by joy or sadness and we do not usually recognize what happens, we just have an increase or decrease in our power of acting, more clearly we live the results of our encounters (as becoming weak or becoming powerful in acting) and we mostly do not realize or consider the reasons behind. Deleuze gives the following example for our existence in daily life and explains it as follows:
In the street I run into Pierre, for whom I feel hostility, I pass by and say hello to Pierre, or perhaps I am afraid of him, and then I suddenly see Paul who is very charming, and I say hello to Paul reassuredly and contentedly… When I pass from the idea of Pierre to the idea of Paul, I say that my power of acting is increased; when I pass from the idea of Paul to the idea of Pierre, I say that my power of acting is diminished. Which comes down to saying that when I see Pierre, I am affected with sadness; when I see Paul, I am affected with joy. And on this melodic line of continuous variation constituted by the affect, Spinoza will assign two poles: joy-sadness, which for him will be the fundamental passions. Sadness will be any passion whatsoever which involves a diminution of my power of acting, and joy will be any passion involving an increase in my power of acting...What is important is that you see how, according to Spinoza, we are fabricated as such spiritual automata. As such spiritual automata, within us there is the whole time of ideas which succeed one another, and in according with this succession of ideas, our power of acting or force of existing is increased or diminished in a continuous manner, on a continuous line, and this is what we call affectus, it’s what we call existing (ibid: 4-5).
The dance floor is obviously a space in which these two main passions are in a continuous coexistence and are being transferred from person to person in a contingent manner. Let’s assume, I find a little place to dance and I see two people there who start dancing and this affects me with joy, then someone comes and offers me her/his beer and right after that takes my space in return of this favour. I loose my space, I am affected by sadness and my dance diminishes, I change my space and so on. When I change my place, I indeed, enter into having an ‘adequate idea’ in Spinozian terms (ibid 14). We are affected with the consequences of our encounters, rather than their reasons and these are just ‘inadequate ideas’ (ibid). Spinoza argues that we need to develop levels of awareness and the first level of awareness is passing from ‘inadequate ideas’ to ‘adequate ideas’ by realising what gives us joy, and by organizing good encounters for ourselves we enter into the spatiality of ethics. Thinking through the example above, when my body is affected with this unpleasant encounter, I perceive the affect of it on me rather than the reason or the content of this idea as a decrease in my power of acting. But if I realize that dance and music gives me joy and I stick with it, and look for some good encounters with the sounds that will combine with my elements in a good way and eventually increase my joy and power of acting. By doing this, I enter in the sphere of having an ‘adequate idea’ according to Spinoza:
You undergo a joy, you feel that this joy concerns you, that it concerns something important regarding your principal relations, your characteristic relations. Here then it must serve you as a springboard, you from the notion-idea: In what do the body which affects me and my own body agree? In what do the soul which affects me and my own soul agree, from the point of view of the composition of their relations, and no longer from the point of view of their chance encounters...You leave joyful passions, the increase in the power of acting; you make use of them to form common notions of a first type, the notion of what there was in common between the body which affected me with joy and my own body, you open up to a maximum your living common notions and you descend once again toward sadness, this time with common notions that you form in order to comprehend in what way such a body disagrees with your own, such a soul disagrees with your own. At this moment you can already say that you are within the adequate idea since, in effect, you have passed into the knowledge of causes. You can say that you are within philosophy (ibid: 14).
In this context, the ‘adequate idea’ for me would be (since I am affected with joy when I dance), is to run towards, dancing and combining my elements with the elements of music. In this ‘partially located’ and ‘situated’ case, dance might become a power of a different kind or of another order (Law 2004, Haraway 1991).
To dance could be to live and not submitting yourself to sadness. Dance could enact in us the power of acting, the joy, and make us able to laugh at ourselves and the world. However, dance enacts in heterogeneous forms too, only the joyful, playful, vital dance could be a force, a power of life. Space enacts as a sum of all our relations and connections and it is continuously being made, all the encounters create affects and contribute to making of the event and the space (Lefebvre 1991, Thrift 1996, Massey 2005). Those encounters could be friendly or antagonistic. However, some people may derive their joys from the sadness of others, but these are ‘compensatory’, ‘indirect’ joys, in Spinozian terms, they are the poisoned joys of hate (Deleuze 1978: 9). Instead of doing that we need to take a local point of joy for a departure and try to increase it by opening it up and putting our labour in it by organizing pleasant encounters for ourselves.
Dance space is not homogenous, there are contestations of affects in there and sadness and joy are encountered through the bodies of people, music and other effects. In those encounters via dance there may be a possibility of submission to sadness rather then joy by summing up the effects that make us feel weak and make us afraid. Passions of a different kind of joy and sadness, of love and hate enact a simultaneous coexistence and they are affirmed in us in multiplicity or plurality of ways in this space of encounter. This is where we come into play with others, and the ‘Other’. This process is ultimately under construction; it is never closed or fixed for there are always further permutations of relations amongst the multiple players. So a space and the happenings in there is more about what we make of it, bodies are in a continuous world making process and they are open to all options within the limits of their own possibilities of conditions. Space and politics are inter-dependent shared imaginaries founded on relations (see Lefebvre 1991, Thrift 1996, Massey 2005). Submission to sadness in that sense will decrease dance in us through decreasing our power of acting. There may always be killjoys in a dance space and they may affect us with sadness which in a way will contribute to their exercise of power (that hinders) on us, whereas the more we enact ethics and organize good encounters (with people, objects, music etc.) and enact a labour of movement in dance the more we are likely to be filled with joy and therefore become more powerful.
Conclusion: Dance is a power
Dance could enact as a form of play, as an undetermined creative force, it could enact by itself and for itself as a transformative force and a form of power that is of a differing kind, as the power of acting. In that context identifying dance as ‘elusive’ (Thrift 1997) and the characterization of it as a resistance to ‘micro power’ (Malbon 1999) will avoid seeing the possibilities that may occur in dance as a transformative force. Indeed these identifications derive from a hierarchical understanding in which the ‘real’ world is more seriously ‘real’ than the ‘reality’ of playful dance and as long as we think in those terms, we enact this as the ‘reality’ in social science and life at general. Then, this is not about dance as externally engaged with transgression or escape. Rather, I suggest placing it elsewhere as a force of departure that has an effect of a different kind as well as another power that enacts elsewhere and that is equally important. This is about imagining another universe as a possibility and enacting the play of the world, in there we indeed can play with the killjoy effects.
Imagining is a way of enacting the world; therefore I argue that we need to enact a more positive imagination. We need to sum our joys rather than sadness and therefore increase them and this will be a way of enacting a better world within and out of us. Only then we may realize that stupid serious sadness is about fears and it may indeed disappear through enactment of joy in ourselves. In arguing this, Spinozian vocabulary gives a base, to see how power (or authority) needs sadness of people in order to enact, because when people are sad they are indeed weak (diminished in their power of acting) and therefore it is easier to control them (Deleuze 1978). Thus power needs the sadness of people in order to operate. If we increase our joy inside, we increase the joy of the world, and we do this through our writings, chats, arguments, dances, music, friendships and all our enactments in general, which all matter in creating affections, thus the mundane matters (Kwa 2002).
How we live (the reality that we enact) is about, how we imagine, dream and enact our stories. Cemtan, for example (a music and dance lover) is someone who has extended those imaginations and moments (of dance and joy) as his ontological politics in overall to his everyday life. He is Peter Pan from ‘Neverland’. He was looking for ways in which to build a tree-house in central Istanbul to live in. He always has some interesting projects through which he performs and transforms the world and our lives in general. He started ‘şuur 6 (subconscious) LimiSeD company’ that takes action in the parks by inviting the young men of the neighbourhood (who usually play cards in coffee houses all day, attend football events or join nationalist movement party’s youth clubs) to play drum and percussion circles. He was once on an acid trip and he encountered big trouble in the street, with five angry men. I don’t know how it started, but he really looks like ‘Peter Pan’, even his appearance can be a target to reflect upon the accumulated sadness of a group of men from a certain social economic political and cultural backgrounds (imagine some neo-Nazi’s attacking a gay or a dark coloured person in a narrow street somewhere in England for example). In this event they beat him and then threw him in a big garbage container. He was lying in garbage with one arm and leg out, after sometime he hears a rhythm. He raises one arm and joins the rhythm and slowly pulls himself out of the container by holding to and following the rhythm. He starts dancing and marching towards the club or bar, enters inside and dances the pain. This is a good example how rhythm may pull us towards life. The way Cemtan perceives dance is as such:
CEMTAN: ...dance err it raptures from within you really, I mean something born from inside you...like joy...yeah you give birth to it and spread it to the universe...like err... the things that we do here...our movements, the words that we say, the music that you do, somehow, err... well when you move your arm like this, it goes, it expands around the world and when it expands it widens and spreads and gets even bigger in waves, for example you do like this in here, when it goes 100 km it becomes... buoooaahh... a movement, a bigger one...so to say when you dance the energy that expands from your movement travels around the world...err...think of it in this way, you are sending a wonderful thing to the world...a beautiful energy and a power yes... err... how should I say, there are bad energies...yes you send your joyous power aside to the black hole energies, which again derive from people. I don’t know why, but usually black hole energies derive from people, and you... yes you send a very big energy of joy against them, not against in fact, aside to them... It is all spontaneous...and it is pure...yeah you send a primarily spontaneous and a good and really beautiful energy...well to dance is, yes...it is to war...in that sense...to dance is to war... Because in all of these things, for example you dance in here and someone else dances in Africa, and another one dances in America, and all these dance séances that these people do…it has a network...you know what I mean...these energies they know, recognize each other and of course they like and sympathize each other...well man... the dance wave in there and the dance wave in here recognize and love each other in wave length/dimension ....that energy has its own network and they recognize each other...yeah it is Love...you got it?
Cemtan relates dance first to joy and then to power. Related to that he situates this ‘beautiful energy’ and ‘power’ not ‘against’, but ‘aside’ in relation to the dark forces of sadness. This is a critical distinction and a crucial moment. The way in which Cemtan visualizes and maps those affects of life and death as networks of joy and sadness in a simultaneous coexistence, gives me a key and it indeed illustrates my argument in establishing dance as a power to act. In that context, dance is not about eluding power it is about creating and becoming another power. And the first kind of power indeed feels threatened by the kind of power that dance generates, because it increases our power of acting and therefore the first kind can not operate in us.
When and if we are overfilled with joy we see how ridiculous is the conventional modes of ordering and how stupid seriousness can be. We may become elsewhere in another form that is no longer controllable and weak. This is possible by or is a matter of passing from ‘inadequate ideas’ to ‘adequate ideas’ (Deleuze 1978). Spinoza assigns a fundamental political and ethical problem to power. He asks “how does it happen that people, who have power (pouvoir), in whatever domain, need to affect us in a sad way?” (Deleuze 1978: 4). When we feel weak, our power of acting diminishes and therefore we are potentially controllable. Sad passions are necessary for the exercise of power (ibid: 4-12). Thus, we need to increase our joy by all means. However, there is no golden standard we need to search and find what or which bodies combines well with our principal relations. This means that dance gives me joy, something else will give joy to you, what matters is to realize what it is that body that combines well with your elements and increases your power of acting. In doing that we need to be careful about the character of joy, it should not be a poisoned or mistaken one that derives from sadness, however that kind is ‘compensatory’ and ‘indirect’ (ibid: 9). When we are sure that it is not such a joy and it truly concerns us, we need to take this local point for departure and try to open it up by putting labour in it and increase it locally. It will no longer be a ‘regime of variation’, but rather a ‘bell curve’ and we need to apply it to sadness too by eliminating our common notions with ‘bodies that disagrees with our own’ (ibid: 14). This simply is about the labour of life, enacting vitality from within and therefore in world in general. Dance, here is a way in which I and possibly some others may enact as a source of joy, it can not be generalized to all, however it will be some other form of play for others. The last words I bring in-here will be from Cemtan again:
This is not about ‘dancing’ or ‘not-dancing’, as an actual situation and as two different conditions. Let me put it in this way, you also dance in your mother’s grave, when you are burying her. There is indeed no difference between your dance in a party and in your mother’s grave, but there is a bond. There are differences between ‘here’ and ‘there’, but what matters is the states of affairs. Being aware of the phenomena itself is an affair of ‘being there’. Then every single breath that you take becomes a dance in that dimension that you do not perceive the phenomena of death as pain.
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