Dance and the Imagination

I have many conversations with my cousin about the misguided nature of
science, or of many scientists, who regard the materialist world –that is the
measurable physical world - as the only reality.

 We were chatting about it this morning after I’d read his blog post – see Nigeness – De La Mere, Gray, Sheldrake - about the philosopher scientist John Grey who spoke on Radio 4 yesterday morning. We talked about how often the imagination is altogether forgotten in materialist science, and yet it is the imagination of the writer that dreamed realities beyond this material world before quantum physics even emerged. The imagination that can create a world and then shift to perceive it from an entirely new angle – imagination that is ever fluid and flexible and far-reaching.

I watch my cat moving around the garden in her cat world that I can only guess at. Often there’s an interface between our worlds – she likes to follow me around, I love to watch her, but as far as I know I must be as much a mystery to her as she is to me. She is stuck with cat-ness and me with human-ness. Here I am defined and limited within a human body mostly to what I can perceive with five senses – but with the gift of the imagination.

Somehow dance for me enables a kind of humility, a sense of both the wonder and the limitation of living in a human body. There is enough to experience and explore in human existence, in movement itself, whilst ever aware there are worlds and universes beyond. A distant, half heard music.