Understanding Dancing in the Flames

A review by D. Brady, June 6, 2000

Every intelligent being seeks to understand. The most difficult matter of all to understand is the mysterious dynamic of relationships. A person can never fully understand one’s place in our complex universe; nor can one ever fully grasp one’s unique relationship with the Supreme Being. The latter is accepted on Faith; the former is accepted in a series of approximations, inferences and theoretical projections proffered by scientists and prophets alike. But the most pressing puzzle of all is the riddle of human interpersonal relationships, an issue most immediate to daily living and most exasperating because of its potential in ones life for pleasure and for pain.

To understand this puzzle, this paradox, this mystery is to grasp a host of half-truths in myriad shadowy forms of thoughts and feelings which surface in our dreams, our nightmares, our day-time fantasies and in those rare eureka moments of lucid, intellectual rational being. The best that one can hope to achieve is a steady pulsing ride in a river of consciousness, in a stream of half-light where veiled visions are mirrored to us through shimmering shades and blinding bursts of overwhelming insight.

Human knowing occurs best through a grasp of integrated feeling and thought. This unified field of being and becoming is most aptly conveyed through relationships which serve as models of simultaneous, symphonic integration in the heart, the head, the gut and the genitals. The Dance is one such model; the dancing flame is another. Combined, they can reveal those elusive, ineluctable encounters between one’s conscious and unconscious worlds where a human’s ontological urge for infinity drives an insatiable need to know what is ultimately understood as destination X, the unknown and the unknowable.

Dancing In The Flames is an attempt by two Canadian authors to lead the reader on a merry dance up a spiral staircase of mythologies and mysticism to a mantra which hums on the tuning fork of interiority vs. extroversion, of past vs. present, of indocta ignorantia vs. docta ignorantia. (Medieval educators defined education as a movement through “unlearned to learned ignorance”.) The map of these authors’ collective mind requires the serious student to overlook no clues during the orienteering ordeal of self-discovery and soul enlightenment.

This is a serious academic effort to guide the seeker along the ladyrinthine runways of personal history through transpersonal tunnels of “old time” to a new “now time”, in one’s search for the mythic meanings of dream-worlds and the mysteries of life in illo tempore which are revealed only in one’s “myth of eternal return”. (Mercea Elliade’s work is alluded to here). To begin is to die; to die is to be reborn; to be born is to die. Life is a ceaseless ring of fire where Eros lives only to be consumed by Thanatos.

The thoughtful reader will find much food for thought here. There is fruit for the spirit, nectar for the soul, meat for the mind. It is difficult to drink from the cup of eternal life without being consumed by an unquenchable fire. It is difficult to dance as a divine dervish in the darkness and the light. It is devilishly dangerous to be a moth seeking to become a bright butterfly. To become free to be the lord of one’s own dance, one must dare all, or fall back into the black abyss of oblivion.

Along with Ms. Woodman and Ms. Dickson, I say: “Let’s Dance.”