Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or ‘duende’. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no one moves. The fact is that she has destroyed us all.

Why do I dwell on this dancer? I dwell on her because she represents for me the courage to go beyond ourselves. While she danced she became the dream of the freest and most creative people we had always wanted to be, in whatever it is we do. She was the sea we never ran away to, the spirit of wordless self-overcoming we never quite embrace. She destroyed us because we knew in our hearts that rarely do we rise to the higher challenges in our lives, or our work, or our hum

Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater.

Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom.

I touched her thigh and death smiled

Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.

She loved the games men played with death,
Where death must win

She would not be
silent and still.
She would live,
arrogantly,
having wrestled
her death
and won.

And her joy was nearly like sorrow.

She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.

She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul.

She was trying to feel philosophical about dying, not managing it, trying not to be frightened, and not managing that, either.

He nestled in her arms, and she knew she would rather die than let them be parted and face that sadness again; it would send her mad with grief and terror.

The idea of death, blurted out in despair between a couple of kisses, returned implacable and keen.