Tap

Shortly after I formally announced to the Human Resources and Academic Affairs offices my intention to retire at the end of the current academic year, or, more precisely, within an hour and a half—the rumors in the mill a small university churn with a velocity rivaling the speed of elementary particles in the Large Hadron Collider—folks began to drop by my office or stop me between classes to ask what I’d be doing once I had shuffled off this mortal coil of full-time teaching.  Wanting to be witty and avoid the usual responses—yard work, woodworking, some golf, travel, rereading  Middlemarch—I replied, “I’m going to take up tap dancing.”   I had never considered learning tap.  I simply wanted to be clever and get a reaction, and it just popped into my mind.   But here’s the thing: the more I said “I’m going to take up tap dancing,” the more I actually wanted to do it.

How tap dancing managed to buck and wing its way into my mind I don’t know.  Perhaps I had been subliminally conditioned by the animated film Happy Feet, which I had watched with my youngest granddaughter on DVD.  Perhaps a deeply-lodged memory pod burst to the surface, the one of me watching, spellbound, Bill Robinson and Gregory and Maurice Hines and Savion Glover make moves that outraged probability.   Perhaps it was nostalgia: over the years I have, for one reason or another, remembered when I was a kid purchasing taps, nailing them to the heels of my shoes, and taking great satisfaction in “that clinking, clanking sound” as I strode the sidewalks and school hallways.  Or maybe it was the Italian loafers I once purchased at a shoe discounter, shoes whose heels produced a resonant ring on hard surfaces and prodded me into my best version of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever strut.  Whatever the reason, and despite a periodically flaring case of sciatica in my right leg, the more I thought about learning to tap dance, the more it seemed a good thing to do, even a necessary thing to do.

At the very least, I found myself wanting to learn the basic moves--the brush and shuffles (side, back, straight) and  flap and wing and heel-step and step-heel—and how to combine them.  I wanted to transform motion to sound, to rhythmic patterns and precisely timed beats.  I wanted to do something that, as Hawthorne says in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” has no purpose but “purposes of grace.”  I wanted to make music with my feet.

Everything has its music, so why not such humble appendages as the feet?   Everything is entuned and melodied; everything has its pitch and timbre, its progression and harmony, its duration and anticipation.  Smiles, tragedies, sport, gardens, well-tuned engines, a well-chosen word, ritual, money, snowstorms, quantum mechanics, the blue endlessness of August afternoons, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the drumming fingers of a clerk as I write a check, the brush cymballed stir of conversing voices, coves and glades, the systole and diastole of the heart—everything has its music, everything allegro or adagio, everything the grandeur of a symphony or the intimacy of chamber music , everything the improvisational play of jazz, the jagged-edge of blues, the driving 4/4 beat of rock ‘n roll, the more languid ¾ meter of waltz.   And people—they have their music, too.  In his novel Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie mentions a guitar chord especially for Indians, a chord only they can play.  I think we all, every one of us, has a chord that, when strummed, announces us, sculpts us in sound, reveals us in a form far truer than the faces we keep in a jar by the door.

Tap dancing.  It seemed a good and necessary thing to do.   I wanted to yield myself to it; wanted to cast myself into the sheer exuberance of it; wanted the kinetic physicality of it; the enwinged corporeality of it; the unclamped, unthrottled, uncoiled experience of it.    I wanted its nerve-ending buzz, its blood-coursing jangle, its free-radical turbocharge, its seemingly frictionless movement, its disdain for the heavy weight of gravity.  I’m not sure why.  An age thing, likely, a beat I was not ready to dance to.  What I do know for certain is that, because tap dancing seems all dazzle and spontaneity, all syncopated and joyful noise, all pistoning feet and a radiant smile, all so happily immediate and inadvertent, so time-stoppingly beautifu, we forget the engineering involved, the close and calibrated planning, the hours of sweat-drenched practice, the cell-deep fatigue.  It is art hiding itself.   It is  cool.  And isn’t that, finally and ultimately, what all philosophy, from whatever age and culture, calls us to be?

 Cool.