Man with a grey-black beard

Sunday I go to the drumming hut. Despite or maybe because of the uneasiness of restrictive attitudes there; limitations and closures; un-sustained displays and re-butts, something comes through. The hitting of the drum helps. Plasters on the fingers to stop blood appearing on the drum surface. The blood flows on through the veins. It cannot escape. Run for cover. There is a staying with the situation. This caucus of addictive tendencies that break into something else. A gesture or inclination- subsumed under the noise of another display. One on another jutting in. Impossible mostly to look one in the eye. But you can look between- sounding on and off between the crash of beats- a necessary closure. How to soften it up- tenderize it without spoiling it?

A man walks in. He wears Arabic clothing and has a grey-black beard. He has some weight on his body. He is quiet, careful, good-mannered. His playing is like a delicate labyrinth of cross-stitching. It is a shuffling kind of edging into place. Then as it grows, a growing back down. A diminishment that seems to be as much about evolution as the one before.

What arrests and engages me is his listening. Not just a placing of hands in front of him because it has been done before into a procedure of pattern, but this shifting emphasis engaging in all surrounding. His ears monitor his hands that voice out something. There is belief. It is not an easy conversation. There is nothing known about it. It slips and slides and converts mid-way between many directions, none of which are entirely given up. There are tangents that sprout up and are drawn back in, like throwing out a net in the water- what fish pass through- what gets stuck? Tracing out moves according to how each new configuration is read- tea leaves the rhythm of the water one set in motion. The stopping. The pouring out. The remains. A call to action. Any action. A decision. But it could have been otherwise and just as valid. Just as valued. To cherish what occurs. To put oneself into it. Let it catch on to something else. Then is the time to leave the room. To return as if discovering a wind cycle by looking at a tree one has come across. Re-implementing a place back in amongst that pattern, that by chance one has come across and that is stirred up again in a different way. Coaxing out the tendencies set up in small independent reactions to specific beats as they affect one. Splintering further and further these summations. Impossible equations that one rides as long as it lasts before they become wholly untenable. Something shatters. The lull of a waltz building back through out of the meter-mover of a regular beat. Angles and circles that are never entirely angles or circles but approximations, playing on and off just before and beyond the arrival of any set measure.

There is a soft spokenness to the man though I have not heard him talk. Yet his arrival and exit is timed to build on what is there and to let settle back down what is mounting beyond anything plausible in the experience of this grouping. There is a feeling out of something. The beat becomes more and more a quality of felt impressions. An exposure coming through more or less clearly, playing with the hiddenness as much as the clarity- creating gages of depth that become the emphasis of this articulation. A vocal range through the hands- a scope on the breath. A holding and tying together in the abdomen.

The clenching into competitive beats all the way over that tires the body and makes the nerve endings ache is loosened into this more back-seat approach of coming through now and again. Playing with the relief of different levels of proximity. A depth that is a multi-dimensional holding space. Human relief. Joy and sadness.

I go home past the enclosure of the circus. A white canopy that allows in and shuts out. Wild animals are inside. Tamed with treats.

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In the park my vision is agonizingly wide open. I cannot discern an order of relevance. All is apparent. A wide unblinking panoramic view sweeping the back steps of Kent where the city gives way here and there. Trains rattle through crisscrossing and deviating through one another- going up or down so in affect they do not meet.

Only in the distant gaze do they appear to mingle in each other’s company. But perspective is always a falsification bringing together traits that do not associate. Yet maybe this associative neighborhood all in a glance is valid, brought up as it now has been by the intricacies and labyrinth stitch-work of the drumming session. It has been played out. The myth told. Now in the view it simply holds together out of that score. It is the result of human endeavor, worked up out of tangible associations. The relationships have been earnt and here they stand. But now the view in that single grasp is untouchable. It brings sadness before I can stop it. I know the disability of this wide open view that slams into mis-encounters when brought up close again. And in that is speechlessness, because the co-ordination cannot be re-visited in this extended medium. It’s the intensity of pressure-release that jumps out the scope and that there on the spot is then immediately useable in language and gesture as a kind of reverberation of this intensity bounced back out in extension. Then the song inherent in the pattern jumps out the necessary meter of the procedure that bursts out from this single spot. But in the extension without this on-going pressure contact, the pattern soon fades. There is either a restrictive narrowing of vision in line with the narrowing of the contact feedback or the pattern lingers un-rooted like an encumbrance- a dream or vision that feels like a gaping hole. That becomes something voiceless but brimming with a consciousness not angled by on-going questions. That becomes an autistic state. Using this wide vision that comes from interaction and feeding it into a continuous traction of positing questions and augmenting results is the educational work in languaging perception. This is a question of nuance, emphasis and continual contrast so that the limitation becomes the point of interest, worked up differently each time, and not the boundary of awareness- something fixed that will necessarily shrink as one plane of reference taken in isolation eventually extinguishes because it is not enlivened with any point of active concern.