By Lavinia Plonka
A few days ago, a word popped into my head. Dithyramb. From nowhere. No NPR story. No romance novel. No scholarly treatise in recent memory had included that word. In fact, I had no idea what it meant, although at my age, that could simply mean I don’t remember. I shrugged and went on with my day. And then, every day, there it was, dithyramb. Like an earworm, you know, a song that goes on and on in your head and you can’t get rid of it. I recently battled Frank Sinatra’s anthem, “That’s Life” for a few days, thought I had conquered it, only to have my husband Ron sing it to me after the overloaded food processor spewed pureed beets all over my white linen shirt.
“Dithyramb,” said my brain as I dug up my bumper crop of Jerusalem artichoke. (Did you know Jerusalem artichokes are good for your gut bacteria? What to do with ten pounds of inulin rich tubers?) “Dithyramb,” it whispered as I attempted parallel parking on Haywood Rd. during rush hour. The multiple folds of my gray matter vibrated and echoed. Of course, lots of other words and ideas pop into our heads on a regular basis, like old songs, names of people I went to high school with, lists of various types of heirloom string beans. But they are polite, perhaps arriving unbidden, but leaving gracefully.
I could have just looked it up. But you know how it is. Like the friend you keep remembering you were supposed to call, except it’s 11PM, or you’re in the shower, or you misplaced your cell phone. And then you forget. So I would muse as I drove, or piloted my shopping cart through Trader Joe’s. Was it some kind of ancient Greek musical instrument? Maybe a tool for divination? A mathematical term? Forget the why, at this point it was all about the what.
Finally I looked it up, slightly apprehensive that it might not even be a word. Or that it might be some inappropriate type of sex toy. Perhaps it was a word from another reality, another dimension,
and had no meaning here at all. But there it was. Dithyramb.
• A wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus.
• A passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing.
While I’ve done some wild dancing in my time, often influenced by the gifts of Dionysus, I have definitely never sung a wild choral hymn. Passionate or inflated speech however is another story. I have spent a good deal of my life either being told to shut up, or telling myself to button it. I even spent 25 years as a mime, perhaps because while expressing my passion usually ended up with my foot firmly in my mouth, the crafting of a mime piece actually required reasoned thought, choreography, and practice.
I worried that heeding the call of Dithyramb was the first symptom of “voices in my head.” What was my brain going to tell me next? And would it be Dithyrambic? “Go, Lavinia, stand in Pack Place and declaim your passion for the construction of a monorail above Merrimon Avenue!” “You must now invent a new recipe combining lichen and wild persimmon!” “This is the time to pull out those fishnet stockings from your 80’s punk period! Seize the moment!” Can you shut off your brain? Do Zen practitioners have dithyrambic interventions?
Every day, scientists are finding more stuff out about how our brains work. There is the brain’s glymphatic system flushing our brains every night. Glial cells, originally thought to be just “stuff” in our heads turn out to be key players in our neuronal health. They’ve even found the part of the brain responsible for earworms and that earworms can boost our mood, if they don’t drive us crazy.
What if the call to Dithyramb was some higher force trying to communicate with me, that I need to tune into some yet unidentified passion? How can I lean in, listen more deeply for what the ether is trying to tell me? Or perhaps it’s simply that in my past life I was one of the mythical Eleusinian mimes (OK, a mime for all time!) who apparently were instrumental in these dithyrambic revels. For sure it’s a word that needs to re-enter our lexicon.
We need more wild choral hymns, more passionate speeches. Dionysus is calling.
Body language expert, Lavinia Plonka has taught The Feldenkrais Method for over 25 years.
For more information, visit her at laviniaplonka.com