YESTERDAY

 10.5.10



Yesterday I felt inert. Those floaters on the eye that fuzz everything over resting on a wad of jelly. Or was that me? No movement takes possession. Knees collapse. Sweat on the brow. Hard to know where to place oneself, lurching from corner to corner, grappling with the edges. The light is blinding today. Luckily it is cold which adds one frontier with a real affront to work against. My breathing is heavy, heaving to get going. Flesh slipping on the floor. I`m tired. The plastic bin-bags have been torn open again by the foxes. Food scattering on the ground. There is a fish head on the wall of my neighbours, eye-less. The top of the vertebra is still attached, white and exposed. In the park the colours levitated and distributed on the trees seize through one another, tempering and re-arranging on my hesitant step. I stop and start the way I have seen the old people do so in this park. There is a heron on the water still and upright its grey pulsing and quivering-a concentration in the body mass- arching out over the small pond, waiting. It’ eyes are the last to see. The fountain is running. A few people on the main lawn, colours jostling, bracing in the wind. A man calls a dog to heel. It continues running in the other direction away from the path across the lawn into the circle of friends.


On the bus a girl says to another girl sitting in the seat in front, “Hold your head still, I want to get something out of your hair”. The girl next to me freezes. The girl behind does something. Then she says, “It’s a leaf” The girl sitting next to me says. “You wanted me to keep my head still to remove a leaf? I`m going to slap you. I thought it was a bug”. I can’t help falling into the passersby on the road down below. Their situations of liveliness create a positive charge which quickly infects me. I feel the space under my ribs grow. My shoulders loosen and I sit back more in my seat. I am relieved to be out in the swirl. Where the bus parks up for a while there are a number of people facing inwards towards a shop notice board. Some have pens poised over notepads as they stare past one another’s back to make sense of the tiny scripts on the individual white cards. A large girl-child with Asian eyes is hemmed into a sitting pram. Her clear wide features look into the street. Like her mother whose back is to her but who keeps half turning silently to check on her, she wears a pink shawl with a bright green shirt underneath. This double-take captures my attention as I swing between mother and child. The colours are absorbent. They filter through in this double entendre. A reverb that is not allowed to drain off. Each time one does, its double feeds back into the thread building up the intensity. Thinking about it now, the colour is still having its affect on me.


There is a jamming up of traffic in congestion further along form the top of Manor Park all the way down towards Finsbury Park. I get off the bus and go into a small coffee shop where there is only room to stand with my back to the counter. As I drink my coffee a man comes in and tells the woman that there has been a murder in Finsbury Park. They are looking for the murder weapon which is believed to be a knife and have cordoned off an area. That and the fact that there is a match on at the Arsenal Stadium is the reason for the traffic build-up. I cross into the park taking my coffee which anyway is in a take-out paper container, with me. There is a small community garden at the side of the main park. It is overgrown but thoughtfully arranged with hanging trellises, a small platform over a tiny pond, even a pagoda. However everything is in miniature so that it is hard to walk around or even sit. The seating ledge around the small tree is narrow and too tightly against the surface of the tree to offer accommodation. It is choked and partially inundated with ivy from above and from the long-growing grass and nettles from below. Because of the traffic jam and the lessening of engine power, it is quite quiet in this garden which- in this position at the edge of a busy junction would usually be untenable for me.


In the drumming group down at the Arts Hut, my hands find the surface of the drum with relief. Everything else unwinds from there bolstering one another up, coursing through one another and attaching different kinds of significance to this emphasis and delay- the moving into place and holding back so that other elements carry on, re-collect, intensify. Meetings are orchestrated or put on hold, shaping this thing- a space of value or letting slip through other moments of impropriety. Each meeting comes into its own in a certain aptness, then is done with, but the question of putting this value into first this and then that articulation becomes an on-going endeavour. Where it cannot happen it does not happen.


A ball is kicked across the lawn that I traverse on my way toward a path that runs alongside the train-track. A couple walk along that path and though they are in grasping range of the ball they choose to hunker down and do not repair it back to the field. The man has to run over, and I look away distantly over at the passing train away from this lost opportunity that I am suddenly caught up in; the embarrassment of a matter that is not dealt with. We cannot linger in these lost accords, but simply fall into a connection where it is possible and circulates back around into a glancing articulation that in a broader sweep involves all that was certainly left behind in the rawness of the occasion that went un-acted on. So the occasion pushed down, resurfaces somewhere else.

The values sounded out and hit into place over and over in the Arts Hut carry the same nature of thinking on the edges- positing quality in the intersection where avoidances and lost occasions finally re-situate and meet the next time around on the in-breath or out-breath in reverse of where they were expected to be. Value is cobbled together in these provisional settings. Homemade holdings where rest and rebound create a double setting for reversed meanings that nevertheless live up close upon one another. Where touch and affinity should be unthinkable in the usual aggravation of every competing incident they are tethered together and harmonised in the spaciousness of the off-beat.


Articulations come through because the time of delay and hesitation is cheated by this double-take where every move has a twinned occupancy either projected or inverted as the bolstered support. Threads are played into repetitions where they are the coursing nerve pulsations- the liquid rush of continued circulation rather than a voice in a given story. Other threads in their very prevention create a firm boundary in that praecipe halt wavering where the cliff meets the sea; that releases the undercurrent charge in their halting absence. Voice emerges in counter-point to all that is done. It then lends itself to the swirl and is carried into the under-beat. The belly that quivers and rests, collecting and mingling- seizing ground- hunkering down. A low level brew of fermentation and untold smells. Contagion and desire building here. Not something that exists in its own right to be held in checks and balances or allowed out the bag. But those qualities are actually made in the small calibrated stops and starts in which meanings are contested- put underground- taken out from the pile of stuff that bury one another in stylistic options none of which matter on their own. The body of the thing is derived from all these exponents- the clothing-they are riddled through and through with intertwining threads that pierce into the depths of the body and spiral out like speeded up plant systems into the atmosphere surrounding. Tracing out holdings, wavering. Curling around themselves- around one another- redistributing on every touch. Spasming into counter-intuitive repulsions and desires.


Gradually speeds are brought up because the slow apportioned blocks of contrasting phases angle and superimpose. Day and night swing back and forth on one another. Eventually the many cuts are constantly and fractionally re-allocated and those tiny adjustments of cut affect the blocks of colour that filter through one another at an entirely different speed- so slow so as to be permanent composures- characterizations touched upon in widely differing circumstances, widely different material conditions to conflate the same feeling - a value permanence that is built up anew and differently between the rapid and the slow; these cross currents that sustain and interpolate one another; hold all in place in something so obvious that the slightest twitch becomes meaningful in the full room that simply redistributes and edges into a new configuration with each new insertion or absentee guest, equating the wholeness -a cohesion- out of whatever is to hand.


So our movements take on a certainty of deliverance- the gages between one emphasis and another play out a configuration of possible events- the hands follow the implications of these modules of feeling that are set up in twinned gages- a network of contrasts that become an over- exposure and an underexposure; an absolute tangible realm that is felt out in the affects it brings forth- that rebounds into brief exposure and continued undercurrent- that brings now my hands and limbs- my body and thought into some kind of an exposition, bolstered up and edged into precision and relevance by all that operates around and through and off of and because of each chance of placement, becoming so. A guidance system that is more than mere information or learning or of teaching. That is the physical impasse and concession- the push and pull according to which one knows the limit of that particular engagement- knows also –as a bat knows the physical environment by the time it takes for a voicing to rebound off nearby surfaces- how far to go with something before curtailing, letting go, dropping off, abstaining.


A definite attack and fade comes into coherence and forms build around these contested attributes- attributes or qualities that work in tandem with one another to define another dimension- one only known through the on-going affects that outline from one moment to the next, capabilities- unities- movement and pause.


My body comes into accordance with the sounds, and the gesturing organizes itself pooling into a unity of left and right- a forging through like running over the ground. There is a centrality of intent- a fixture of value that is derived out of the dissipative elements of all the soundings made into the room- a collectivity that becomes this community of music. Co-ordination arrives- voicing is situated- there is a face in which to face one another. Emotion rises up through this integration worked up in the off beats and the mismatches. A problem or question of unravelling posited and worked through in the aesthetic of the act- the technique and mechanics of the drumming rhythm- and what exactly that can mean- how it can be passed around back and forth from foreground to background, from one emphasis to another. The joy and euphoria of articulation- what was lost is re-applied- forged together – held in place in the cross current of this tensile system- a system of mutual and self-organizing traction that distributes affect and pools it into moments of intensity -of cohesion–of value- The event. Easily we sit with one another.