Dance of Language

Dancing…A Metaphor

            The announcement of a school dance is generally enough to pique the interest of students to start planning to be there. There’s a nervous twitter when the day arrives.  I enjoy being there, too.  Just watching on the sidelines of that dance can be illuminating—the joy, the energy, the reckless abandon!

Maybe you remember dancing when you were a child.  Perhaps you celebrated the arrival of spring by weaving colorful ribbons and dancing around a Maypole.  The steps weren’t difficult, but sometimes the dancers forgot who they were—under or over?—and the result was usually laughter and slightly bulging ribbons unevenly woven around the pole.  In pieces of literature rich with imagery and symbolism, the concept of dancing is often dominant because its elements have so strong a resemblance to the elements that make up our lives—the diverse steps in choreography, the partners, the moods, the missteps, the reasons for the dance.

            Dancing in a circle, for example, encourages a kind of magic that seems to strengthen and protect whatever it encloses.  As a significant part of world mythology, the meaning of dancing in any shape or form has grown in complexity while other symbols—hands, feet, the heavens, and thread, for example—connect with it and enhance its powerful image.  The dance, as both symbol and metaphor, provides an ancient instrument by which we can understand and know ourselves.  It is little wonder then that dancing has become an expression of emotions—the dance of love, of anger, of joy and thanksgiving; the dance of entreaty; the rain dance, the fertility dance; and the dance of imitation, the dance of creation, the dance of the planets, and the dance of angels around the throne of God.

            Dancing has thus come to be a manifestation of human growth and maturation that, as Jung reminds us, leads to individuation, or becoming the people we were meant to be.

            In this handbook, you will see the steps that we will follow as we move through the dance of language.  Though not always graceful in the beginning, you will become more adept and feel more at ease as you increase your knowledge, step by step, of how the language works and how it can work for you.

            The contents of this book, just like the contents of our language, are impossible to organize in sequential order.  Unlike some kinds of dances that require strict choreography, our language demands that we know and use many skills concurrently.  The order of the literature study here is, however, sequential because the skills and knowledge for critical analysis in this book build on each other and prepare students for reading and writing and thinking about the pieces that follow.

            Because writing contests, which usually begin early in the fall semester, give students opportunities to be rewarded for their creativity and effort, I have placed the section on fiction writing at the beginning of the book.  Right from the start, students should see themselves as authors as well as critics.

            Serious students of dance must understand not only the inner workings of the body and the bones and muscles that allow the body to move but also the importance of maintaining balance and conditioning.  How similar to the student of language who must also comprehend the different ways in which words, phrases, and sentences are selected and combined to form the framework that allows our language to move gracefully and to move us—to inform, to persuade, to entertain, to touch our hearts and minds.  This handbook, therefore, includes tools for maintaining strength in studying many aspects of language.

            If you’re in a classroom, your teacher may choose to do only selected activities from this book.  Because the ideas included here support a core curriculum in the humanities, most of the units and even individual activities can be isolated easily from the body and used to enhance other areas of study.  Classic ideas tend to support each other and form cohesive patterns. Some of the people you will read about include Aristotle, Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Freud and Jung, and the Roman and Greek poets, philosophers, and statesmen—those who have left us with the marvelous gifts of the foundation of our thinking and of our language.

            No handbook on language would be complete without a literary reading list as well as a list of sources for enriched study.  In order to proceed in our pursuit of higher levels and more sophisticated dances, we must aim ever so high in choosing to read.  I tend to lean toward the proverbial “just read everything you can get your hands on” philosophy, and so these lists are only a place to begin.  Browse and add your own titles.  According to the Bowker Annual Library and Book Trade Almanac 2006, book title output for all categories numbered 149,859 (516).  Try to imagine, if you can, what that means in terms of available c