The Poetry of the Dancing Bee

Andre: ... You see, I keep thinking that we need a new language, a language of the heart ... some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language we're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking-glass into another kind of perception, in which you have that sense of being united to all things, and suddenly you understand everything.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory's 1981 film (My Dinner With Andre) is, in my view, one of the finest products of American cinema in the late 20th century. The script reads wonderfully as a play--indeed, as American literature.

Since first seeing the film around the time of its release, I have periodically screened it for myself, my friends and family and loved ones. I never tire of it. Nor have I ever stopped learning from it. Anyone who sees the film and says, "Boring," or "I don't get it" is a true Philistine.

Andre's musings on the need for "a new language" send one back to Tolstoy's Olenin in the stag's lair, to Thoreau's "ecstatic witness" at Walden Pond, and farther back in time to the adepts of Muslim pietism and, indeed, to many of the world's mystical or religious traditions.

What Mr. Gregory sensed about American life in the late 1970's-early 1980's--the emptiness of our consumer-driven culture and of lives lived without a sense of connection to the broader human community and, just as importantly, lives lived without any genuine focus upon the "small things" made available to experience when one finally learns to tune out the noise of government and media-driven fear and greed and to live deliberately and in touch with one's deepest intentions--is as true today as it was when the film was made.

As Thoreau understood, the "new language" we need will not be fashioned out of whole cloth; it is in fact resident in our very old languages: the "classical" languages in which visionaries composed what Thoreau called "the heroic books"--books that, "even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times." He therefore admonished us that "it is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations" [Thoreau, Walden, Everyman's Library edition, 89].

The "heroic books" present us with heroic figures, individuals Wallace Stevens named "figures of capable imagination." They are visionary poets capable of seeing beyond the status quo and dream a different world.

Once again, we seem to have traveled full circle: to Peter L. Berger's "ecstatics"; to William Blake's "apocalyptic humanism."