I can’t remember the first time I saw a picture of Gandhi, but I’m certain it wasn’t a picture of Gandhi dancing. I feel a little uncomfortable looking at the image, but at the same time, I can’t turn away from it. I come from a long line of English Puritans and Anglican blue souls so I prefer the Gandhi of the popular press: devout, committed, stern, ascetic, celibate, overly disciplined. I’ve seen many pictures of Gandhi smiling, of course, but they only served as a foil. His human smile only sharpened for me his inhuman discipline.
Besides, my people don’t do well with emotion, and we certainly don’t dance. Media Gandhi is my Gandhi—I take my icons straight, after all. Neat, with no emotion.
But here I’m looking at a different Gandhi, and I suspect this is the Gandhi that ultimately convinced the British to leave India. This is the man who handed India its independence. Because here we see a man who is willing to break form, to question the power of his own self-constructed image. Dancing Gandhi understands the power of spontaneity, and if you understand spontaneity and know how to marshall its power, as Gandhi obviously did, you will then have your way with an imperial bureaucracy. Why? Because bureaucracies will mistake spontaneity for volatility, and volatility threatens the core of every oppressive government. This mistaken perception, in turn, will cause these governments to misbehave in ways that no one will tolerate—and they will dissolve.
But Gandhi’s spirit is not a volatile spirit. Gandhi’s spirit is an organic spirit, and far more dangerous from the British perspective because his spirit felt comfortable with impermanence and the constantly changing demands of an impermanent world. The truly bureaucratic spirit cannot do that; bureaucracies exist to impose order, and when that order becomes oppressive, spontaneity is what we need. Spontaneity disrupts order and confuses the ordered.
So I look again at dancing Gandhi, and I feel that now is the time to dance; or cry; or laugh—the spontaneous spirit I believe, by the way, that motivates the Occupy Wall Street movement. Deep within Gandhi, of course, I feel an inner stability that recognizes how all these affairs of the world pass, and that each must be endured, enjoyed, understood, analyzed, comprehended, shared, parlayed—whatever the moment demands—as they manifest. And only as they manifest.
And when their season is over, the only wise thing to do is recognize their ending as prelude to all those things that are newly arising. Dancing Gandhi, whirling spontaneously around his deliberate convictions, embodies this balance for me.
