Californians

In the spring of 1974 I went to Adelaide, in Australia, to give a four-week seminar. I arrived several days late, and had to explain to Graham Nerlich that on my stop-over in California I had been with friends. I had missed my connecting flight, and had to rebook. Nerlich was very gracious about this. When in the next week, talking about local dance festivals, I mentioned that I knew a whole coven of belly-dancers in Santa Barbara, there was fleetingly a knowing smile. I wanted to say that whatever he was thinking, it was certainly wrong — but well, better not draw more attention ….

At that time belly-dancing was salient in women’s liberation, a rebellion against male chauvinist constraints on free expression. Driving north on the coastal highway I would pass long, low, soft hills, the eucalyptus trees at the bottom studded in places with broken hang-gliders. In Santa Barbara I would drive past the mission into the eastern hills where my friends lived, a place of hot tubs and hummingbirds.

The local belly-dance coven had a fluctuating number of dancers, varying from half a dozen to ten. One of the dancers had returned from a time in Britain to find that her partner had taken up with another woman. While he was at work she went out, bought paint and brushes, and spent the day copying deceitful sentences from his letters to her, on his living room walls. Less flamboyant in her personal life, the main dancer in the coven, Ariadne, was a rather large woman, exhibitingamazing, snake-like grace on stage. She would come out slowly, little bells on her ankles and wrists ringing a background music, and accelerate slowly into ever widening gyres.

In the evening we would all sit in the hot tub, drinking wine and practicing mindfulness, though Ariadne would tease her husband, an engineer, about engineer’s ways of thinking.

Native Californians often have an unconscious moral high tone, likely to sound somewhat self-righteous to others, reflecting a conviction that they already exemplify their new-age ideals. Looking back to that time I do not cease to admire the ideals, or the moral fervor exhibited by the Beats, the Hippies, the folksingers that everyone loved, … but I can also see that consciousness-raising was, by their own lights, at best gradual.

I was in Santa Barbara also in 1979, time of the ‘second’ oil crisis, when President Carter urged everyone to limit their energy consumption (he actually installed solar panels at the White House, which Reagan later removed). Ariadne’s husband, in practical engineer mode, said that if there was going to be gas and oil rationing, it would be like with the water: what they would allow you as normal usage was determined by your past usage. So the thing to do was to use a lot very liberally right now. No one responded with “But what about the earth? Our suffering environment?” The moral insight was already there, I am sure, but seemingly not yet entirely internalized. We enjoyed the extravagance of hot tubs, morally at peace.

The weeks in Adelaide passed peacefully also. There were no belly-dancers, but Graham and his family took me to a Saturday evening country dance and sing along. I sat in a corner and thought about elective affinities, feeling almost sure that I could discern affinities between those two cultures, where I could be present as a guest.