Stretching

19.5.10



Stretching out past the tendrils and nerve endings, the adjunct buds and finger pads. How to elongate, testing out give way points and the snapping shut and rebound. The knot of our bodies triangulated and folded and tied. Can we follow the thread? Leaning back in counter weight to the rope-end of a sinewy arm? A chest heaving. A belly tightening and softening under the impulse. An impulse sent through at the extremity- tied and loosened. Pressure is the same- never in and of itself as a localized affair- presence –absence a padding pulsation- on-off that opens the escape route, feeds back through- a remote probing through a tilt and swivel so that a two-handed treatment is always a making of gages- the playing out of intervals- impact and absence that occupies and vacates portions of space so that there is a conjoint spasm of filling and emptying in counterpoint. A push-me-pull-you making of accounts across distance- in the time it takes to respond.

So many people lie down on the mat. They are coming from down the hallway out of the main crèche area where mothers and toddlers fill a play-space. They have stories- half told- about racist neighbours, car-accidents, sudden jolts to the system that whiplash like lightening a certain disposition, a certain strain that does not go away. It is incarcerated in their bodies. They work around this stream-line. Shirk the contactability of this fault line that wobbles and stutters and rearticulates the body- a broken body. There is pain- soreness and angled jilted heads. Breath is high up in the chest. The solar plexus is hard like a drum. Ankles are in a state of continual torsion. Toes are hardened piercing the floor. There are others whose backs are smouldering with snake lines that harden, only to be deposited with more dust. Abdomens beat in, retracting into a disappearing centre. Necks are full, pulsing under the responsibility of carrying the head in a constant state of alert. Others who have bodies like war heroes- militarily primed for battle- worked up and worked out in the prediction of every kind of contingency. They want to know the meaning of the contact I am giving. Why it is like that and what it will achieve. I can’t tell from that point of questioning. But as the treatment goes on, an area of evasion comes to light. The body perfected around an isolated point of fear- of irritability – stubbornly refusing to melt into the suppleness of the idealised body. There is an absentee counterweight diagonally distanced yet joined like a conjoined twin around the perfect body and meeting at the centre of that the twinge of pain – of irritability that is a form of consciousness that is a human concern. It is all that is left to hold onto.

How to work in the intervals of opposing qualities?-a gage of spaciousness where one extreme begins to affect, inform and so pose questions to the other. In that dialogue issues come to the surface played out though the body and the pulsation of quivering muscles caught between sustainment and collapse, of breathing patterns caught between a fullness and a lapse, that begin to redistribute one another.

There is a third element a missing link between those extremes. Something that cannot be named outside of that interaction that has its own time-scale. A needling double- edged concern and repulsion as an environmental factor, coalesced into the figure of a certain person- an irritant and strong motivator- a person not known to me but to them left unnamed in this written medley.

Afterwards I sit in the park waiting for the rush-hour to drift away. On the way to the station my body is slowed down, quivering, vacant. My coordination is woven outside the texture of any immediate task. I am needy-hungry, but indecisive about what to eat. Restless but tired. Aware but streaming every action without being able to meet it wholly through my bodily response. The gage I suppose is wide – through the treatment process- so that I am waiting for affects that otherwise would be closed in perceptual or action based nuggets of information all sewed back up together. A man descends the stairway of the station carrying a see-through bag with rubbish. I see through to the items both as separate and as combined – how together they jostle and squeeze against one another punching out the sides of the bag. The bag in scrunched at the top by the hand of the man. He heaves one hip up slightly above the other as he descends the stairs so as to yank on the weight a little and clear it from the step.



He walks past me along the platform, then passes again still with the bag which is bulging ever more. He looks and half smiles but because my face does not respond immediately he grimaces, then let’s go that grimace before it completes and simply walks by. I cannot totally believe that it would have been better for me to have smiled back within the time frame allowed for that response. It is just the way that it is on that day.

I have a long journey home on the tube but at least I have missed the rush-hour having let pass several trains already.