"it's the dancing that kept them going"
Maintaining joy in your life as an act of resistance is the kind of motto more on the Left should embrace. "...joy serves as a healing balm that sustains both the people and the struggles inherent in revolutionary times."
In the words of Audre Lorde from her 1978 piece 'The Uses of the Erotic': "In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.”
In other words, fight the good fight but don't omit having fun in the process. That's not being glib. You have to remind yourself what you're fighting for while providing for yourself (and the ones you love) the "energy" necessary "for change."
It's a sentiment found in the work of the anarchist Emma Goldman, an expression that has been reduced to a paraphrase, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." She wrote in her autobiography 'Living My Life' about an incident where she was pulled aside and chastised for dancing:
"At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he was about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant, that I did not want it.
'I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.' Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world - prisons, persecutions, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal."
Back to Lorde, "In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife."
....
"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial."
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jacobvanloon
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theartofmadeline
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