On Everythingness and OK

"Dance has no denotations. You have to deal with it from a place of open imagery and multiplicitous thought. ... It's like saying to people: 'Everythingness is very valid. And to locate a single thought is idiotic and unrealistic. So if you're convinced that that's something you'd like to do, maybe you'd like to reconsider.'" - Tere O'Connor, Dance Europe

I really thought I believed in this, for the same reasons I clung to Socio/Anth theories of multiplicity, of the value of heterogeneity, of going post-modern, going past the subject-object, self-and-other dichotomies that rule our chocolate-vanilla universe. It's OK to be you, it's OK for me to be me, to be he, she, inter-, intra-, super-, -suffix, hyphen, bi-, tri-, mixed. Yet I realize that it's too easy to be lost in that lack of definition -- as Swarthmore Poli Sci professor James Kurth frightened us with (absent the performance aid of a fistful of all-purpose flour and an open window): "The ability to be anything is the ability to be nothing."

I have taken these sombre words deep to heart. It's been almost two years since. No longer everyday, but occassionally still (at the very least once a month, due to what I attribute to hormonal imbalance) I wake up trying to find some escape from thinking myself into oblivion with musings on the meaninglessness of everything or from eating myself similarly to extremes. I have embraced this busy city with double the population of my entire country because I have sought to forget myself, only to be reminded through the uprooting that I am once again alone, and stupidly so.

Then I relax, watch people, and feel better. I realize that I like being alone. That this is the only way I get around to writing, because when I am with people I talk all these thoughts out and promptly forget them, and their authenticity. I realize that I like writing. I realize that a writer, much more so than the lawyer and the pedagogue, must embrace everythingness, and that my self-diatribes are the conflict I have placed for myself by aspiring for the social sciences whilst intrinsically valuing the humanities.

I like discovering things about strangers. Upon seeing the familiar thickness and standard mahogany of your typical law textbook, I asked my neighbour at this cafe (OK, OK: it's Starbucks), yellow highlight in hand, if my intuition was right. Indeed: it is a Sport Law textbook -- "the home ec of the law curriculum" -- and he is taking his bar in New York come June, finishing up at American University in Washington, D.C. He is $175,000 in debt. He recommends his school if I want to pursue public interest or international law. He warns me that this would yet be impossible if I had the same debt buden coming out of school. After divulging an unintentional smidgen of my dance manifesto, he says I should write. (I still haven't been able to tell whether people tell me this because I really have something valuable to say, or because I have withdrawn from conversation and have started going off into my Itinerant Didact mode. Yet I still recall Abena Mainoo over the candlelight of our Swarthmore International Orientation's crum ceremony suggesting that I do write down all the advice I was then as a wizened if not bitter junior giving. Hi Abena -- I'm finally getting around to it.)

So law? Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm at the point where I miss studying, because it was something structured that I unquestionably had to do.
American Law? Yeah, I'm thinking about it. Above-mentioned guy tells me the NY bar is recognized in the EU. Ok!

Lastly, for this one very meandering entry -- back to dancing and to Tere O'Connor and to what I am learning of American modern dance. In what context is everythingness OK? Does the process of democratization necessarily entail the progression to accepting everythingness (the more there is, the more variety there is, the more you have to accept that anything is allowable, in this case, as art -- as good art)?

Behind these convuluted questions are my observations that (a) Tere O'Connor is no longer a highly physical dancer (using standard definitions of contemporary dance training of the body); (b) his movement sequences still take your breath away (i.e. are physically demanding), as there is a lot going on mentally because it is illogical (does not obey laws of fluidity or causality) -- so I can't complain about doing them, because they weren't facile; (c) such haphazardness nevertheless feels indulgent, if not illicit to me. How is it that I and my comrades here -- all 25 of them -- are each paying $22 per two-hour session for this relaxed, non-intensive, non-personalized, random expulsion of valuable energy? If it was simply to be exposed to this man's eccentricity, that would maybe be OK (what does "OK" stand for?), if there was some philosophy behind it all, some intention, rather than "I'm going to move any way in the hell I like, with no rootedness, no sense, no explication. Take it or leave it." Well, shit. Without rules of the game, there is no game. There is only chaos.


And about the origin of "OK"? From Cecil Adams, of The Straight Dope (.com): The etymology of OK was masterfully explained by the distinguished Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. The letters, not to keep you guessing, stand for "oll korrect." They're the result of a fad for comical abbreviations that flourished in the late 1830s and 1840s. Read buttressed his arguments with hundreds of citations from newspapers and other documents of the period. As far as I know his work has never been successfully challenged.The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 and spread to New York and New Orleans in 1839. The Boston newspapers began referring satirically to the local swells as OFM, "our first men," and used expressions like NG, "no go," GT, "gone to Texas," and SP, "small potatoes." Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright," and there was also KY, "know yuse," KG, "know go," and NS, "nuff said."Most of these acronyms enjoyed only a brief popularity. But OK was an exception, no doubt because it came in so handy. It first found its way into print in Boston in March of 1839 and soon became widespread among the hipper element. It didn't really enter the language at large, however, until 1840. That's when Democratic supporters of Martin Van Buren adopted it as the name of their political club, giving OK a double meaning. ("Old Kinderhook" was a native of Kinderhook, New York.)
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_250