Dance of Knowledge

Knowing follows the “dynamic of dance,” writes Esther Lightcap Meek (A Little Manual for Knowing, 79).

The knower and the reality to be known are partners, each one off balance at a particular moment but sustaining “an ongoing, overall balance” (80), engaged in a personal etiquette of overture and response, an asymmetry of gift and counter-gift. In the dance of knowledge “we can grow artistry in our knowing ventures” (83).

We dance among the clues as we imagine the focal pattern in which the clues are integrated: “We can also apply the dance metaphor to the way we spiral, in our coming to know, from one sector of clues to another and back again. In our knowing we put together clues from our felt body sense, from the normative maxims of authoritative guides, from the situation. We can see the process as situating ourselves first in one sector to view the others, and then in another, and then in the third. We navigate our way toward an intersection of the three. We indwell the guidance we receive, seeking to align our felt body sense to it, and seeing how it makes sense of the world. We need the world to bring three-dimensionality to the guidance, the way roads make a map three-dimensional. We grow our felt body sense as we bring both within us in our felt sense. Each sector helps shed light on the others, and more each time around” (87).

And so we dance the night away, dancing toward communion in knowing.