I like to think about how it started, but I always like to think about how something starts. It’s not how some people imagine, one toppling domino that strikes another and then another and soon a cascade of events is occurring. When something starts (and by something I mean some phenomenon, like for example, the medieval dancing sickness) I think it’s more helpful to imagine the way gases will begin to come together quite randomly, eventually reaching an accumulated mass whose gravity will suffice to result in fusion processes occurring. But sometimes, surely, that mass is not reached; we do not hear of nor see the stars that did not form.

I have a deep and abiding love for things that almost happen; I see their shadows everywhere, in the spaces between the things which did. One day I am going to write to you about that shadow world which is populated by star vacancies and other absences, where everything is lacunae.

Back to accumulation. Eventually there is enough — the trousers that fasten with buttons, not a zipper, a wedding anniversary, the motorcade through the city, a head of security who takes most but not all precautions, and on and on — and fusion begins, the accretion of mass gives way to sudden light, and heat.

So I think about how it began, the dancing sickness. Did the steady hush of the wind drawn through the long grasses in the fields like fingers raked through long unspooling hair become a kind of music that could not be resisted? I tried just now to dance in the silence of my house, a silence punctured only intermittently by faraway traffic and of course, birds. I think of the commitment it must have taken to maintain it — I have read somewhere that they would dance until they had heart attacks, strokes, until collapse. I imagine prone limbs twitching to a shadow rhythm on a road, the other dancers continuing over a hill and into mystery.

What compelled them to keep going in the face of certain bodily peril? Is it the same thing that sometimes compels me?

I also think about how they stopped, what the stopping looked like, how it must have been a slow unravelling of the compulsion until no one was doing it anymore; there was something else, tulips, or plunder perhaps to get exercised about instead.

There is always something else.

I know a fairy tale about a young girl who acquires some magical red shoes, and she dances in them until her feet are bloody. In one version she begs for her feet to be cut off: once on, the shoes cannot come off in any other way, and when the axe falls and the feet are severed they carry on dancing in the red shoes, disappearing down the road as they do, over the far horizon and into mystery. I knew the story as a child, and it was the story I thought of when I saw a pair of red patent leather mary janes in a girls’ shoe section. The shine of them — I could see my own small face staring back at me and how I wanted them.

What I am telling you is that as soon as I saw them I thought of the story, and I wanted the red patent shoes anyway.

I wanted them anyway, maybe because.