Renewing a Living Beat

John Boyd, Argonauts Rowing Club Junior eight-man boat ca. 1925. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. When back in the fifties, Louse Bogan “asked a group of students, recently, to name some definite bodily rhythm which might illustrate mankind’s sense of time, and with which a definite pleasure might be said to be connected, they could think only of dance.” That response, she said, “shows how many rhythmic habits and rhythmic effects have become rare either as observed phenomena, or as direct experience, with the advent of the machine.” Bogan wagers that, had she asked her question to nineteenth-century students, she would have been offered examples of rhythm-suffused human activities such as walking and rowing, the beat that accompanies housework or harvesting, a march or “a religious procession,” a number of daily or occasional activities that would highlight “the pleasure to be found in bodily rhythm as such.”1 I had to pause at that point in her essay: it was one of those…