1st of September 2013.

Read in About  1st of September 2013:  Acknowledgments & research.

Song of a Wayfarer.

How a dance influenced forty two years of a lifetime.

Dear Guy,

You are seventeen now and we are at the end of an average summer. The train ride brings you back from the seaside to Gent. Seated opposed to the driving direction you see the coastline getting smaller till it disappears totally as if it was a delusion. You don't realize the scene is a metaphor for what is really going on; the farewell to your youth, wherein youth differs from innocence, a rare commodity you had renounced long ago.

Your thoughts are now behind that fading out border... The girl who washed the dishes in the brasserie was at least five years older. The words of Michel Delpech's  song "Pour un flirt", the latest summer hit, are scrambled with Mungo Jerry's "in the Summer time", the previous year's top chart. Your last coins ended in the juke box.  It all looks a bit like a road movie.

A few hours later you are in the Gent Opera House. It's not Maurice Béjart's  'Rite of Spring' that impresses you the most; John Neumeier's version,  a few weeks later will affect you a lot more, but what leaves you flabbergasted at least for weeks if not for months or years, is  that mind blowing dance between two of the best classical dancers at that moment, Nureyev and Bortoluzzi.

Even now, when asked,  I'm telling that this is the best dance I have ever seen in my life and "The two blue eyes of my darling", the last part of Mahler's 'Songs of a Wayfarer' are etched forever in my brains. 

At that time, you did not know why it affected you so much neither that it will take you years to find out. Apart from a highest level dance performance on both technical and emotional level it had all the ingredients of your personality that has developed your further life till what it is nowadays.    

May I remind you, for a good knowledge, the dance shows the two or more personalities of a human being. That dualism in each of us is expressed by two human bodies e.g. two dancers.

So this is you! Or is it me? It was and it is both of us. It is you at twelve p.m. and me twenty four hours later. It is you trying to express your doubts with my body; it is me writing with your voice. It is my despair against your hopes. It is my resignation as a counterbalance for your restlessness. It shows us,  taking care of the others while not capable to look for ourselves or let me rephrase, it is me wanting to protect my beloved ones but desperately in need for their concern. It is the power of knowledge confronted to the powerlessness to execute. Above all it is the need to express the paradoxes within ourselves and trying to understand the struggle of the individual confronted with his environment. It is me against the 'hostile'-world. It was you thinking the year Two Thousand was ages away while now it is far behind me. It is again me, facing unfinished business before quitting for a final destination.  It is the eternal nomad wandering in our fantasies, now and then, uneasily troubled.

You see, Guy, I didn't betray you till now and that will never happen as this is the essence of my existence.

Guy, I do not know if you feel uncomfortable now, as I feel a bit guilty about this confrontation of your future and my past. If so, I apologize for harassing you with something that once will be described as my life. As a reader of this you should know that probably tomorrow I will feel uneasy but the wayfarer in me will continue to wander packed with my acts and feelings till Terpsichore comes to invite me for the last dance.

Eternally yours,

Guy.

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