How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?

Last week, in my "Moral Adults: Moral Children" class, we read articles about adult development. One of the articles explained that adult development is characterized by an increasing ability to have a meta-awareness of yourself. It seemed that maturity was marked by the ability to step outside of yourself, to almost watch yourself as a third person, to see what your decisions meant and how they were related to the contexts in which you exist.

I suppose that does make sense, but it also bummed me out a bit. Because some of the best moments of our lives are when we aren't outside of ourselves, or aren't watching ourselves in any way. That's why it was so great to be a kid--because when you played make-believe, you really were what you were imagining. When I was in my backyard pretending to hit a ninth inning home run for the Chicago Cubs, I wasn't outside of myself observing how I was role-playing. Instead, I was in the stadium, hitting a baseball as the true hero of my beloved team.

This still happens, occasionally, even though we're now adults. It's those times when we are no longer ourselves, because we have merged with something. Artists know this feeling well--the transcendent moments when you are no longer aware that you're painting, but instead become part of the paints and the canvas. Or you are no longer playing an instrument in the symphony, you are the song. It's why Yeats wrote "[H]ow can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Or why Melville writes in Moby Dick, "[H]ow wonderful it is . . . except after explanation."

Or why Alan Watts says the biggest mistake a person can make is to think they're just a "skin encapsulated ego."

It happens when you see a great movie and forget you are in a theater, because you're livinginside the film. And then the lights come up and you have to look around and remind yourself that you actually exist in this world.

There's more. It's when you have a first kiss. Or when you play your stereo and dissolve into the sound waves. When you sit on top of a mountain and linear time falls away.

(And yes, it's what happens when we have an orgasm. I know you were wondering).

And athletes know this experience as well as anyone. That's why they say "be the ball" when you're shooting a free throw, as in "don't be yourself, merge with the game." Or when a player has an especially good night, the slang is to say he or she was "unconscious," meaning they reached the optimal, desirable state where they were no longer an individual with deliberate actions, but instead had let the game play them.

That's how I knew I loved poetry. In 1990 I was sitting in professor Jacobson's class at the University of Illinois as we worked through Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning." At some point I was no longer a student in a room at a desk with a professor and an American Lit anthology in front of me. Instead I crawled up inside the beautiful lines of that poem and rolled around in the words and forgot who I was.

So I wonder, as we get older and become more meta-aware of ourselves, can we still have the ability to lose ourselves in something? Can we move back and forth between the two? Because what we had when we were children was so good, I'd hate to think that magic is slowly leaking away.