A Mantis Carol by Laurens Van Der Post

Author:Laurens Van Der Post [Laurens van der Post]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1989-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Dance of the Great Hunger

‘OF COURSE, I must and will,’ she began, her voice for the first time harsh and almost matter-of-fact, because of stricture of her own recollected sadness of what had to come, and knowing exactly how it could get in the way of words again. ‘But in order to do so properly you must please tell me what dancing would have meant to Hans Taaibosch, because it was very important at the end and I’d like to know the answer if possible before I go on. You did say at Pendle Hill that they were great dancers, didn’t you?’

‘It meant almost as much as their stories and even painting,’ I told her quickly, anxious to take advantage of the opportunity the change of tone her voice suggested we now had of overcoming our inner hesitations and returning to the reality of the present, however brutal it might be. Indeed I found an unexpected ally in that I had not realized until then how I had longed to escape from this brooding, sullen atmosphere not only of Bushman history but of what we suspected Hans Taaibosch’s life had been before he appeared so strangely in this skyscraper world, and to re-emerge in some fresh and new conclusion. It was almost as if all the atmospheric detail of human imperfection and tragedy implicit in Hans Taaibosch’s life and the history of his people extracted in those long conversations between us since we had first met and talked in the lamp-lit doorway on the edge of the night at Pendle Hill were gathered together around us there like the clouds of a great storm, depressive and heavy upon us and in need now of some lightning thrust of fact to shake them with thunder and make the rain fall at last, as the Bushmen themselves would have had it in one of their greatest images of meaning.

‘Yes, they loved dancing so much that they had a dance for everything. Where their words, stories and paintings failed them, their dancing took over. It was almost as if they knew how the great unknown and imponderables of their lives had to be acted out, to be lived fully to the end in a way for which the dancing was sponsor, before it could be known and another great fragment of universal mystery transformed into living wonder. So they danced as perhaps only the stars and Shiva danced at the heart of the stillness of the darkness to shake it into light. Of course it was not the dancing you see at the Bolshoi, Covent Garden or the City Ballet of New York, but for me, who has seen dancing at all those places, it was far more moving. He would dance, for instance, the story of man’s search for fire and his sense of liberation, gratitude and reverence when with the help of mantis he found his fire at last. He would dance his joy at the birth of a child and his anguish at the death of a friend.

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