Dancing bears

Having dispensed with religion in my previous post, let's move on to the really important stuff, namely, dancing. In the Melyvn Bragg documentary, and in the acknowledgments for The Amber Spyglass, Pullman credits On the Marionette Theatre, an essay by Heinrich von Kleist. In it, you'll find the origin of the scene in Northern Lights in which Lyra fences with Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear. There are also echoes of Pullman's attitude to growing up: Lyra loses the natural grace to read the aleitheometer as she becomes self-conscious, but is told she'll get it back if she works at it for many years.

I don't agree with Kliest's opinion that a marionette could be a better dancer than a person because a puppet is not self-conscious. If some dancers have their souls in the elbows, they at least have souls, unlike puppets. Watching a dance done well, I'm impressed partly because I recognise it's a human achievement to make it look good, not merely impressed by the fact that it does look good. It's hard to feel such a connection with a puppet.

Perhaps's Kliest's talk about self-consciousness applies more to doing a dance. There are times when you can lose yourself in it and become unselfconscious. Those are the good times. There are similar experiences in other fields. Programmers talk about the mental state known as flow, where they become immersed in the code, and find themselves looking up after a few minutes and realising hours have passed.

Why is this state so satisfying? Perhaps because the mind's usual background chatter is silenced. Unlike armoured bears, humans can't live in that state all the time, but that sort of break helps us keep our mental balance, as I'm sure any nearby Buddhists would tell you.