Descalzo, Santiago, Chile 1962

Descalzo, Santiago, Chile 1962
Originally uploaded by Marcelo Montecino

Marcelo Montecino is a photographer whose work I greatly admire. I discovered him on Flickr a few years ago.

Daydreaming into Tango

A couple of things have been dawning on me, of late. The first is that I feel like I'm losing, or at least forgetting, my tango. Driving along these hill country roads, I daydream into the long rolling views, fleeting far off vistas, a canyon obscura dropping off to the right through the cedars, old full curl billy goats and longhorn steers and pink-nosed calves peripherally munching on the long brown grass.

Sometimes daydreaming into the bad architecture and short-sighted urban planning along the way. Daydreaming it better, daydreaming it smarter. Daydreaming it into energy-efficiency and sustainability. I daydream the coming shift into life-sustaining civilization. Hoping it into reality. Soon. Before my time comes to an end on this Earth. Perhaps. More likely in my daughter's time.

A creek comes along and I daydream up and downstream, quickly, before it is gone, behind me, wending its way down into the aquifer. Clear water, limestone bedrock, blue-greenish algae, herons long gone, no other signs of life. I daydream down into the aquifer, wondering how full it is today and then daydreaming into the coming rain.

Beautiful metamorphosing puffy white cotton balls of water vapor. Clouds coming in or headed east to join with more clouds and moisture-laden air, gathering up all their energy and resources for a storm. Mother Earth has called for rain, or snow. Somewhere. Out over the Atlantic, perhaps. Not here.

Sometimes I daydream into my own mind. Wondering why this thought, or that one. Why this feeling, why not that one? Deep thoughts into deep thoughts. Uh-oh. Better to back away from this one. My head is starting to spin. Probably from lack of coffee this early. It's ready now. Wrap it up, dude. It's coffee.

Interlaced in there with all the daydreaming and lucid workthought and practical lifethought and general stuffthought comes tango. Prying its way in there. Daydreaming into tango. Rolling it around in my head, looking at it from all angles. Remembering how it feels. Thinking of doing a certain thing - tango things. Daydreaming into tango, I remember something that I forgot. Some "thing". A thing like that twisty clockwise molinete coming off of an ocho cortado interruptus with an almost imperceptible sacada thrown in the middle and closing off with another cortada & back to a sweet cross. Twisty enough to be almost a 720, and induce some bilateral dizziness. I think.

I think I remember that. Is that it? I think I remember how to lead that...? Sometimes the forgotten tango things just hang back in the darkness. The dark corners. Crumbs of my tango in the dark corners. Not forgotten forgotten, but I remember that I have forgotten them. Lucid absence of a memory type of a thing. I try to strain real hard, squinting my eyes and brain tissue as best I can, and squeeze that forgotten memory out of the primordial ooze. It comes back to me, fuzzy and dark at first, coming into the light, emerging into the clarity of day. Most of the time. Okay, fifty percent of the time. Okay, forty. The others are lost for a time, at least until I dance them back into me.

And so, I remember it. A little something that I didn't want to forget.

The other thing that has been dawning on me of late? I forget. Uh. Hmmm. Grunt. There it is, that thing I forgot to remember from earlier. Two things actually. The best of the best musicality thing. And the other thing about never seeing what I feel. Notes to self, for another time.

Coffee now...