CLINIC DAY PART ONE

Clapton, North East London 24. 3.2010



I go to the Clinic where I have a session with M. booked in for 11.am. C, the Manager, is setting up a new sound system in the therapy room. Blue lights flash when it is operational. She talks me through the options on the menu and shows me how that corresponds to the panel on the small remote control device, presumably so that you can change track whilst in the middle of a treatment without walking away from the person you are with. None of this really matters to me because M. hums his own songs and I need the slight changes in the pace and thickness of his breath as an indication that will guide the way the treatment goes. There is a direct feed-in from these humanly made sounds-the vibrations of the breath in the chest and diaphragm and when these are sent over the larynx into hums and so forth and the pressure-release of what becomes contactable; the space intuited through that process. Without that direct feed-in, the linkage to the feedback is interrupted and there is no way of describing these jointly held shapings. There is really no place for the mechanical rotary of the sound-system. We would be forever second guessing it, accommodating our pulse to it rather than creatively making that pulse between us.

When I work with tightness in M. I work with this daily aggravation of the loop that lingers on in quietude – in the still forms that that liquid quelling takes. They are the staggered holding onto place that is a protestation and the yanked enforcements past these bracings so that stuckness leads then to a loping fall out of place driven by an outside factor- the impatience of a hand- the need to get somewhere or other according to a time-tabling Rota not exactly of that body or that place.

I am working detective-style into the patterns of his every day life, between one staff Rota and the next, and the hand-over that is the handing over of M from one person to the next. Some staff members have time on their hands and they pass on that sense of spaciousness to M with the briefest of contacts. Others are hard-pressed before they arrive- through the conditions of their work- the sense they have of themselves living a life on the margins embroiled together with those on the margins. Their resentment of this fact and their perceived near invisibility causes them to expend too much energy against a growing resistance; to stagger and then force a current of movement that they negotiate distractedly between a hand-held mobile phone and the arrival of a taxi. M is just an adjunct caught on the end of their free hand. He resists and so do they. M uses his arm to hit himself at such times. Consequently, when there is the slightest jolt to his metabolism in the rush of on-going sound or action or touch pressure or verbal cross-messaging it is seized by him as assault in a breath that is not expired so that events and motions seem to flow around him - almost missing him- and he remains where he is. His arm remains stuck then to his side when it is not an active weapon against his own inertia, and so that arm becomes an added bulk to his side; a kind of swelling jamming shut his arm-pit and loading up the constriction in his back and chest that captures and crushes the nerves in his lower back and whip-lashes them into a neck jolt permanently askew. He is falling away and buckling between shoulder and ankle. His hips carry that continuous resistance by becoming immoveable. Consequently any movement becomes a jolt to that frame, ricocheting down the spine, damaging the nerves further. Wind is caught in that swollen buffering up against things happening to him. He bashes himself to expire that wind, or it escapes in gasps and burps. The fingers of his hands kneed into the palms of his hands indenting the flesh, turning and grinding around themselves, flexing and un-flexing the sinews up his arms. His wrist bends back and forward on itself. His shoulder is raised almost to his ear, the sounds from that left ear dulled and muffled.

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That is one way of describing M. It is not everything there is to know about him. It is the conditions of his life that has a tendency to build into certain muscle compulsions, certain ligament frames of reference, certain breathing tendencies. That starts to become M- what he is about, what is to be expected of him. A certain resistance against the day's occurrence. A certain stubbornness of nature. A bracing against those who are there to bring about the day’s sequence of events within the time allocated to these individual events. M gets in the way of the logical and systematic deliverance of the details of his own life the completion of which now becomes the responsibility of countless sessional staff. They are constantly working against the grain. Pulling into the future, a body holding back with the present, straining to catch them in the past. Holding out against them. That is how, over time the issue of how to get M to live his life gets personal and turns into one body against another. In this sense M becomes a distorted body, bent into a curvature of the back until he is less than a third of his true height. His hips are no longer accommodating the uneven surfaces of the ill-kept paving stones and tarmac that stretches from the car to the Clinic so that his joints- his knee joints, calf muscles and ankle tendons, lock and harden to stop his frame from collapsing on every imperfection in the surface he goes over, jamming him into the tarmac here and there that he is sent over with a tug from the arm that leads him on. He is constantly outside of his own momentum- outside of his own centre of gravity. Soon, bone, muscle and sinew have coalesced into one hard bumpy mass; the site of continuous crash collisions, breakages and further layers of adjunct cartilage that build hickeldy pickeldly covering one event with the next. M appears to be a person armored against the conditions of his on-going life trauma. Broken and hastily re-glued time after time.