CLINIC DAY PART 2. QUESTIONS

24.3.2010




What is the pattern-forming-pattern of a useable feedback playing back on itself and furthering the implications of that pattern? It is of a different nature to the breaks and mends described above. It never goes so far in either direction to call itself catastrophe or to call itself a resolution. It is of the nature of an enquiry. A question posited and held open in suspension without the urgency of closure in sight. It is a frame of mind. An attitude of posture that runs in counter-point to the points of resistance and imperative. It is the idea of something that is distracted and yet of itself. An idea of a distributed presence in many places at once. It is the affect of a circulation system. An Idea posited by M. held in his motioning, his briefest reflexes; the counter-weight of a re-alignment and exactly what that comes to mean for me/for him- a simple messaging that affects the whole structure of his body and mine- a kind of falling back off and on a line of enquiry and its slight scuppering. A playing with the qualities of resistance and imperative without at any time completely becoming either. It is the telling of a story that could be this way or that- of a body frame that could go tight and hit back on itself or could go loose and unfold outwards. A kind of body that at every move is both these extremes simultaneously- that finds humor in this splitting of ways- the winding and re-winding of a catapult release and retraction that encircles a rotational core. A core around which every direction of implementation whether it becomes actual or not is playing. Experimenting with what does become actual and what remains a tendency grasped and let go of before the moment of its deliverance is a way to play through the buffering delays of resistance and the time it takes for a felt affect to mean something.

All in all the only way for that to occur is in actual bodily sensitivities and the fractional re-anglings of bodily position that move on that sensation from one area to the next. Over time this begins to describe a pattern in relief of what is actually being done. In that sense I am not working or journeying over the body of M in a Shiatsu treatment. He is re-angling my point of impact as if his body were a bat and my hand the ball. He is bouncing that hand into different points of connection, letting that connection linger and deepen or throwing it almost instantaneously off into a different realm. He becomes skilled in this way and I get used to picking up these slight signals of absorption and rebuff. For instance it might be that I am addressing areas of his neck and head with the palm of my hand. He begins to use a series of short turns to bounce off my hand and have it land somewhere fractionally different. Alternately there are places where he organizes the lingering of that hand, leaning into it to deepen the contact. Gradually the head-hand begin to move as one, describing a series of contact pause gaps in this on-going relay that operates on more and more slender arrivals and departures between a capacity for absorption and reflection on and off a surface or interface of contact. Time is played out in this staggering and multiplication of affects and plays out into a consciousness of warmth and coolness as the contact generates heat or its rebound circulates more air and organizes the conditions for movement in both the head and the hand as they come away from the mutual site of cohesion.

Something else begins to be described in the mechanics of these altering arrangements. A kind of pictograph that is felt out in the rhythm of its stops and starts like some kind of Morse code that unfolds itself and in some ways knows itself apart from either him or me- my mind or his mind and the intentions of a compulsion to do something or to resist that specific goal. There are no goals or action plans. Simply this conglomerate addition according to the digits of on-off. Out of simplicity something quite complex begins to emerge. That addition is something totally taken up in this interaction, working at the interface where that interface is sensitized into an assembled intelligence of pressure-release that comes to mean movement, stillness, hot, cold, spatiality, constriction, rapidity, slowness, expansion, locality, - a whole Itinerary of gages that are never realized in total but are always worked up into contingencies that promote and then re-direct tendencies so as to shape complex multi-dimensional capacities. This is the way things come together, meet, filter though one another and create brief containments. In these brief containments a certain pause in a tempo holds me in regard to what this man becomes and holds him in regard to what I become. So a kind of knowledge of what we are each about in that association becomes possible. A mobile sculpture that becomes the condensation of a tendency towards a certain organization. Together we become simultaneously active and responsive and are only known- can only be "seen" through that interactional feedback fold.

Than something begins to happen out of all those derivatives as if a certain plateau had been reached in the topology of pressures and releases, stops and starts. He starts to generate a whole schema of sounds and textures with a buzzing between the lips and a deep guttural sound from the chest and diaphragm and he is playing with these vibrations much as we had been playing with small differentials of pressure and release with the hand against the head. He is experimenting with sound sources and how they change in this generative contingent state between intentions, moods, humors, emotions- a kind of sound palette that he is mixing and churning creatively, endlessly as they evolve. They begin to affect his sitting stature. The knottiness in his back and chest, through into his hands, wrists, ankles, tendons are breaking apart, redistributing, dissipating. It happens all on its own. In the turns and complexes of those combinations I get a sense of a thinking tempo in the resonances that this throws up. These do not have a specific symbolic meaning- they are the texture or atmosphere of the build up of all the turns and twists that have gone before. A level of collation through which other affects will react in turn, on and off in an on-going and continual feedback. Yet I believe until this level of complexity is arrived at nothing can really get started. It is the pre-conditions for all subsequent recognitions- for a common ground of inter-subjectivity. These chattering, burbling, buzzing sounds are the start of something precious we begin to recognize in one another. We cannot help but do so. That in turn affects the forms we come to see in one another, and so affects the actual forms we are able to take up in our on-going responsiveness to mutual accommodations.

Even the following day and many days later when I think of M, it is not the image of him tugging against a hauling conflicting arm that I see. It is the resonant sound of that buzzing churning experimentation full of life, open to possibility, that I am immediately immersed in and that actually lifts my mood even by the thought of it. Some kind of sensibility that he has transmitted to me without even trying to communicate anything. Because when engaged attentively we can not help but create these joint and mutual holdings that are not traps; positional holding devices, but are circulation junctures we are immersed in.

We think about them easily because we insert our bodies into a place of affect within these assemblies in order to think about ourselves too. We take our place as associates of these junctures in order to adhere to, to complete or alter in countless ways those possibilities of aligning. Out of these alignments naturally flows pattern common to us all. We are all derivatives of such patterning between the simple and the complex. They become our chosen moments of combined attention between holding and letting go and for that reason are precious to us.