Wisdom of the Heart

Frankl sees conscience as the call beyond the self, as the "Wisdom of the Heart".  I saw it yesterday.

I noticed her walking with a kind of regal air from the dance floor, her simple black dress and gray hair, her lithe, ageless nobility.  She seemed to look into the distance, as if she were in a realm of her own, the rest of us somehow merely mortal.  Kathy and I were finding our way onto that dance floor, enjoying the too-rare opportunity to dance to a real band, and soon we were among our smiling contemporaries, most of us retired, here to celebrate another year as “newcomers” to northern Michigan.  It was as if all of us were back in college, recognizing in each other dance steps that younger people did not know.  A couple of fast dances and then we’d returned to our table, waiting for a slow dance.  Slow dances were always a chance to hold a girl close, to feel the mysterious curves of her body, to smell her perfume, to long for her to put her head against the side of your face, to close the distance of politeness and caution.  On the dance floor again, Kathy did those things and our steps became shorter, and we remembered how this kind of dancing was really just an excuse, in an inhibited society, to hold each other close. 

It was in that slowly turning circular movement that I noticed the tallest man on the dance floor, a full head above his partner, the woman with the regal bearing.  Her face was resting on his chest, her eyes closed, her face relaxed and expressionless.  Then as I watched, they stopped moving, stopped taking little steps to the rhythm of the music.  He did not change his expression.  He simple continued looking out, though his eyes seemed to be unseeing, his mind absorbed in their contact.  Then she opened her eyes, and began, while holding his hand, bobbing her own to a kind of beat, a bit faster than the tempo the band was playing, and then she stepped into that beat in her head, and he picked up her tempo, gently and smoothly leaning back and forth, back and forth, to the music in her head.  As Kathy and I turned in our own dancing, I would lose sight of them and regain it, and I began to suspect  that she was in a kind of twilight, Alzheimer’s, perhaps, or some similar presence in some other place.  Tears came to my eyes as I watched her gallant partner, the tallest man on the floor, stopping when she stopped, waiting calmly and peacefully,  resuming to her beat when she heard it, focused on the the familiar curves of her body, and the smell of her perfume, and her face on his chest, on his beating heart.

His heart.  Perhaps that was the tempo that called her back from her silence, a bit faster than the music the rest of us were slowly turning to.