Dancing with the Heart

Bruce Bassi
English 110-39
Berger – Formal Paper
October 29, 2002

Dancing With the Heart

Fourteen years ago I was making Halloween masks in preschool. We would play in a fenced park in the secluded farm country of Bethany, with crisp autumn breezes blowing our paints and paper off the wooden tables. I had never worn a mask and I was entranced; I wore my beloved mask for the day. Around noon, mothers began arriving to pick up their children, and as soon as I saw my mother walking toward the class, I stood perched and waved to her. She stopped just inside the door, searching for me. I thought she did not know who I was, and I began to cry, terrified. All her efforts to soothe me and explain why she had not recognized me failed to comfort me. I knew who I was with the mask on, so why hadn’t she? Too often do we use a surface trait to identify other people.

Most of us still wear masks. We may have worn them so long that our mask seems to be our true personality. People identify and categorize others according to different features on their mask. It may portray skin color, physical attractiveness or any other behavior. These opaque masks of superficiality prevent us from discovering our soul. Our culture demands that we wear these masks so that we obey rules and conform. But when not in public, we are able to act freely and truly. When we begin to live with our true companion we begin to shed our masks. Relationships between couples often seem to change because as time passes, the mask we once used to identify our mate is being opened to reveal our true selves. The attractive mask we first meet may precede a beautiful angel or conversely, an evil monster.

We naturally make our first impression from the sight of a mask. As long as we are allowed to see, we will judge another’s character by the first visual appearance. People who are greatly influenced by superficial qualities may reject a possible soul mate on the basis of an unattractive mask. Those who are blind to just the surface and look at what they cannot see are those who will experience the most eternal bliss according to Edvard Munch’s painting Dance of Life. In one breathless whirl, Munch captures a social gathering with several couples dancing in a wild, rhythmic sway. Our attention is helplessly drawn to the couple in the center, figuratively clasped by the heart. As the two soul mates dance in the center, masked couples dance in the background. Munch contrasts superficial couples dancing completely guided by the mask of their mate with a couple which dances in spiritual content in the center.

When a couple meets for the first time and begins to dance, surface masks begin to disintegrate. Masks are shed at different rates for different people; some couples may change completely after “knowing” each other for years, while others remain content until death. The people who accept each other at first sight are not fazed by a mask; superficial qualities have no bearing on their relationship. This type of couple is dancing in the center of Dance of Life.

Visual appearances are unimportant to the center couple. Both close their eyes and imagine the warmth of their sexual closure as they clasp hands and rock gently. Not distracted by the sense of sight, the couple’s senses of touch are enhanced. As one, the couple forms a ladder of eternal happiness. The man acts as the left post of a ladder, poised and erect. The man’s legs and the couple’s arms reach out to each other, helping one another stand tall, proud and happy, just as pegs would connect the two posts of the ladder. The woman completes the ladder; supported by the man she can reach her full potential height. The two strengthen each other to form a complete, blissful ladder. Without each other, each ladder post will fall violently and remain lifeless and lonely.
If the man had not been dancing with the woman, he would look lonesome and incomplete. The fully clothed, prim haired man strongly resembles a priest who by nature had lived a long time without a partner. His leathery face shows signs of wear as he had led a depressed and stressful life. The priest was forbidden to engage in any sexual activity, but now he looks as if he had finally found his love. His deep love for this woman is so strong that the priest is now questioning his religious obligation to stay pure. His heart’s desire is entranced by the magnetic ruby dress; not in uniform with the black and white apparel.

The woman in the fiery red robe swallows the man in the black jacket. The incinerating red sweeps the man off his feet in one broad motion. The man acts puppet-like in his blind acceptance of her warm desire; he is surrounded by pulsating red contours of the all-embracing dress. Her hot red passion and desire bleeds from her heart and colors her entire dress red. Alone, the woman is a normal woman wearing red, but since everyone else is wearing either black or white, she stands out from the others.

Obviously, one is supposed to dress formally in the dance, either wearing black or white. The red dressed woman does not follow the common trend of clothing which reveals part of her personality. She communicates open minded, liberalist views and an anxiety to explore a different world. The black clothed “priest” challenges his own faith by accepting his desire to love another being. Both characters leave their originally fearful life to boldly present themselves in a new world where true emotions and desires drive their lives.

The two women flanking the center couple mar the consistency of black apparel for men and white for women. The blonde woman in the white is the pureness of religious chastity. The beautiful woman quivers with the innocent spring flowers that grow beside her. As if hypnotized, she extends her arm toward the center couple. In blatant polarity stands a woman dressed in black, the color common to men in this picture. Stereotypically, men’s sexual promiscuity was ignored while women were socially punished for indulging in sexual desires. Her black image makes her seem sexually equal with men. Women can have inner desires just as men have. But the couple in the center is not dancing for a one time sexual indulgence, but for a life long commitment. The woman in black mindlessly gazes at the red and black magic whirling before her. A bitter frown grows over her face as she knows that the center couple will experience a sense of eternal bliss that she will never feel. The united center couple separates the sexually filthy couples in the background from the innocent and pure and the foreground.
A horizon of blue rises up among faceless figures circling in the distance. Their faces are covered by a mask which covers their true features. One chauvinist male in the mid-ground is distastefully hunched over a fragile, delicate woman; the couple lacks the tenderness of the couple in the foreground. The brute man swivels with his eyes wide open in order to feed his superficial desires of being with a pretty woman. The faceless women behind him are masked with a socially appealing surface to attract their “ideal” wide-eyed male such as the one hunched over the woman to the right. The men and woman in the background dance in an air of sexual lust and filth. They dance for the pleasure of the moment—not thinking toward the future. These dancers must take off their masks in order to achieve self-fulfillment like the couple in the center.

We instinctively strive to live with our soul at ease. Life may be stressful at times and we then indulge in a temporary fix for temporary satisfaction, such as the man in the painting who halfheartedly dances with a woman, completely ignorant of her feelings. It is difficult to differentiate a true love (for a person or even a hobby) from a masked fraud which was not meant for us. We will feel from our heart what or who our passion is. Only when we have finally discovered our passion will we embark on the “dance of life;” an ephemeral, intimate journey with the love of our life.

Fulfillment of lifelong goals leads to happiness in our heart, not in our eyes. Yet our vision is our means of travel on the road to eternal bliss. Often we are disillusioned along the overgrown path by false appearances and temporary personalities. John Berger recognizes the role of deception in visual appearances in his book, Ways of Seeing. Berger stresses the cliché “things are not always what they appear.” Something may appear to give a particular impression because of how it is presented in context. But in actuality, the original meaning of an image may be something entirely different than what we perceive. One glance at an object will not give us a true impression.

In order to fully understand what something means, we must not only know some history of the object, but we must study it profusely. When Berger gives his interpretations of two pieces of art, he provides us with a background of the painter along with a detailed description of the painting. Berger expects that we interpret the art with a neutral background of assumptions on the piece of art (108). But to try to feel the emotions of the painting, we must situate ourselves in it’s setting. This method allows us to relate our background to the painting in hope of a better understanding. Unfortunately, we think we know the true meaning of a painting because it makes sense in our mind.

Seeing an object does not give precedence to knowing an object. “The relation to what we see and what we know is never settled” (Berger 105). In Dance of Life, the chauvinist man in the mid-ground may see a beautiful lady, but he may not know that she is maybe a criminal and a psychologically disabled woman. The only way he will begin to know the woman is if he spends time with her and removes the mask covering the surface of what may be a different human being.

In contrast to the superficial man in the mid-ground, the united couple in the center closes their eyes and dance. Their love for each other is something so great that I cannot understand. “When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate” (Berger 106). I have attempted to describe that which cannot be described completely. The two lovers in Dance of Life can only feel complete when dancing, an image of the other will not fill this sense of completeness. We can only imagine what the man and woman are thinking: an eternal happiness which not even the most beautiful mask can match. The couple must not be dancing, for Berger will feel they are not truly complete. Munch portrays the couple so intimately, that they must be making love. Then and only then will they feel complete.

Words and images cannot yield the same love as love making because the former are open to mystery. Most things we look at are foreign, and that which we do not understand makes us afraid. To feel safe we try to interpret and understand what we see. When we do so, we risk the possibility of a misinterpretation. We will believe this false idea as long as it makes sense in our mind and makes us feel safe. When I looked at Dance of Life it did not make any sense, but I formulated an idea, an interpretation, which relates to my own experience. My new interpretation makes sense in my mind and I feel that I may know this painting, but in actuality I may not. Edvard Munch could have intended something different, but as an artist he knows that his work will be subject to any interpretation. Since I have my own personal belief of Dance of Life it feels less foreign and threatening because my interpretation makes sense to me.

We often generalize and hypothesize (as I am doing now) to try to understand life around us. Inherently we tend to believe that everything has some relation to us, or it is meant for our existence. When something pleasing happens we believe that it was intended by God to establish our faith. Then when a tragedy occurs in our lives, we think that it is intended to reveal our fate. We hardly have a means to prove God exists, but so we do not feel alone in the universe, we believe in this faithful, divine being. The idea that humans exist for the sake of existing (not because someone put us here) may be a very unpleasant idea. We want to believe that everything revolves around us, and that we can relate to everything we see. That which we do not see is beyond our breadth of understanding, conversely, “What we see is brought within our reach” (106). Our reach quantifies our realm of understanding—that which we can reach is that which we can understand. Berger speaks of reach in the literal sense, “To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it” (106). When we touch something learn where we are, who we are and what we are by the feel of the object because we put ourselves in relation to it. Since “what we see is brought within our reach” we now relate ourselves to what we see because we relate ourselves to what we touch.

If we cannot see something we must not be able to understand it, because we try to relate to what we see. If we do not attempt to look at something, we will not understand it because “We only see what we look at” (106). What we see in Dance in Life is just as important to what we do not see. As the background fades into the sexual promiscuity and impurity of the dance, we become frightened because we cannot see nor understand these dancers. These dancers fade into the distance and our understanding fades proportionally. In Berger’s “The Calling of St. Matthew,” Berger calls to our attention the opaque window which tells us there is more to the painting which Caravaggio had not included. We cannot understand, nor relate to what is happening outside of the room; “Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is bound to be threatening” (132). We can only imagine what exists beyond the window. Since we can see what is in the room, we can relate ourselves to it and make sense of it. But that which the window blocks is terrifying, the window blocks it for a good reason—it spares the viewers’ innocence from a brutal deterioration. Both Caravaggio and Munch effectively hide the face of the ugly. Munch blocks sexual promiscuity by a pure, innocent love, and Caravaggio hides the “worst news” behind an opaque window (132). By using imagination, even the darkest of all fears can shine through an opaque mask only covering the surface.

Hypocritically, I have advised you not to take your first impression of a person seriously. I then analyzed Dance of Life without any research on the history of neither Edvard Munch nor the painting. If I want to know what Dance of Life truly means, I must investigate its past. As I learn more about the painting, more of its mask will be uncovered, revealing a new meaning. However Munch probably intended for us to believe our first impression. Does the innocent, framed criminal intend for law enforcement to believe its first impression? People should not be paintings open to free interpretation, yet we live our life as if it is a museum, thinking that our first impression of a person is the “correct” one.

Works Cited
Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing.” Ways of Reading. Ed. Bartholomae and Petrasky. Boston: Bedford St Martins, 2002. 105-107.