Transport System

29.3.10


On the bus today. Rolled up futon in the blue holder I got made up at my local launderette after buying the jean material from Dalston Market. I got the bag I borrowed for a week from the Clinic, cloned in this way. Between Thursday treatments- from one week to another. Now the new bag has come into its own. There it is up front, in the baggage rack- a ridiculously elongated bag, tipping over the end of the rack, nearly into the lap of the woman in the adjacent seat. I am terrified I will forget it so I concentrate on aligning myself to the blue expanse as if it were a living body; the way I would align myself to the breathing pulse of a body in a treatment adjusting the distance according to this living accommodation; between the two of us. Remaining connected through my own breath-in my chest, my throat sensitizing, opening.

I am tired because of the hour change. We pass along the Marylebone road. A trail of waiting people queuing to get into Madame Tussauds wax museum, wrapped around the building and doubled up in folds. Then under the labyrinth of Junctions, tunnels and underpasses into the Harrow Road. A figure emerges diagonally across the paving stones, short cutting the long way round over the over-pass, before our bus tears off again at the change of the lights.

In this drifting state of journeying and the pulsing. Of this on/off traffic, the circulation systems of blood vessels and valves, breath expended and inhaled again in the limited space of the bus, my eyes stop actively joining up the short takes of attention into a waking person's on-going commentary. Instead they just fixate at one spot until the blur intensifies and deepens like a taste in the mouth that builds from one aspect to another and through no effort of mine, things come to pass. Through that flavor, an action or event suddenly manifests. A boy running with a skateboard under his arm. A baby in pink in a pram staring out. A certain jump in an even motion as a stick lowers a stiffened hip on one side of a walking step, a hand pressing around the top-most part of that stick. There are many glints like this rushing through the haze that summon up a presence. Rushes of life. That kind of hazed distributed attention, in which something then walks in and just occurs as a kind of seizure or flicker or a ripple of the flesh that begins somewhere and just pans out. That is also what it is to give a treatment where the story starts to unfold itself between a gage held in an almost disinterested way and the eventual disruption of that gage as it flickers on somewhere else. It is like a place- the garden for instance- where not much is done, just drinking tea, soft eyes following the light fragments. The fractions of a ruffled sound; a slight turn of the head. A faint sweet smell wafting past on the thud of an electric digger in a far-off street. Where a distant and un-introduced alignment just walks right in and through the bodies and the space and out again like a cat that can pass through fences.

That can occur in any venue. Even the basement sports hall with the white lines and circles taped and zigzagging across the wooden struts where today’s' Event takes place. I unroll the futon on to this surface, roll up the bag that it was in and place it at one end as a head rest. I am next to another practitioner who works with a group of people sitting on fold-up chairs around a round plastic table. At first they look almost unreal because they are so still, seated together and unspeaking. Then to look closer one can detect the slight glimmer of the metal acupuncture needles protruding at angles out of the thin almost translucent flesh of their ears. They are blissfully mellow in that cold basement. Meanwhile I have my two palms face down on the back of a person, finding out the curiosities of a portion of spine and the indentations and moving pulse that can never be spoken of outside of these almost fossilized ridges. Different ages are brought together in one life showing themselves in counter-point between the hard and the soft.

Later I will reverse the trip along the Harrow road down Marleybone road, past Madame Taussauds and then the park- Regents park, which I turn around awkwardly in my bus-seat to glance at.