First Steps

Movement as pressure. Something jams. Joint compression as a leg first lengthens searching into a ground that gives. Then finds a stopping point. Fixes. Condenses. There is a thickening. A fitting of composite sheathes that meld- invade one another. Act as one. Hardness of the leg, it's bendability gone.
The iron of a rod. Locking, smashing into the hip that allows for this wedging then dips down, falls fractionally. A slippage like tectonic plates but the falling the sliding is modulated, eased into near smoothness as the fractional jumps slot into one another crossing these intervals- of no-man's land. The jump in associative binding. The gulf in which portions of the body dislocate, fly into one another from out of a clear divide. Touchability stressed, stretched, coming apart and sewn back together in the certain speed of it all. That at any other rate- if slowed down- would be a catastrophic dissonance. The dissonance is there. It is not in fact resolved but it is taken up in the speed of the push and pull of this traction that juggles arrangements. This is the shock absorber, this going in. But the shock is still there. Used in the violent propulsion of the turn that without that traction would be a rebuttal; an escape.

This catching and letting go. It's articulated in a slight containment and pouting out of the fascia of the abdomen. A release and aeration between the ribs- a lengthening up the sides of the body. A lessening of resistance through the arms- a tendril lightness in the finger tips. A widening of the chest; of the space between the shoulder blades. Fleshinness in the flanks falling in on itself foreshortening. And the body turns on the pivot of the drill-like holding of the foot burrowing through the mat into the hardness below where directions stop one another, fix and bounce apart.

A step. Crease of the limb. The knee bending as the weight of the body goes down storing energy springlike; waiting.The extension interrupted as bounce or recoil that becomes this turn. This jiggling of levels as they are happening. Planes on any given  measure, along a certain sequence of understood gradations now disappearing, melding into one another, creasing the straight line into a curve, a swivel. The buckling crease-like pile of laundry that suddenly swerves to a point of interest. Propulsion automatic- a twinge or jolt just like that. So effortless. This widening and lightening  and flaying apart in the ribs, the chest, the head and arms. Expanding where the lower body contracts, stabilises, sets in as a continuation with the floor. Diagonally there is a cross streaming between ground and arm, foot and sky that pushes down and pulls up in one pulsation, drawing the knot tight from oppositional directions. These work in tandem.There's a consistency of torsion working out from them even as they seem to be struggling to come apart. Siblings with a common parentage despite the bickering. It's the bickering which is the energiser.

A boy who stands up suddenly, takes a step or two, becomes aware of what he is doing and falls. He is too sure of what is going to happen. There is no uncertainty to ply against. No counter-weight. The shock of it jolts his body into a thrusting forward. Chest is high reaching upwards, doubting the ground. Arms that flounder, hands grasping at anything that comes their way. They grab hold of your hand any hand, that becomes a clasp which is treated as a life saver so that the body is let off the hook, turning into liquid and slipping away. Only the constant yanking of the hand against this overhead anchor reinvigorates the clasp drawing up this toppling usurped counter that never goes so far as to press into the floor. Never reaches that jamming point of a locked position. Continues then to escalate forward so that the body never collects in such a way so as to thrust back. Never even touches back to feel the inflexion of its own resistance. The interest of the shock goes unloaded; an interest carried over past any possibility of its own accumulated weight. So that falling out of its own leverage the body mass is carried into the flight of constant advance. It becomes an angel with no shoes on. There is no stop-over on this flight. No landing point.

How to articulate a landing? a binding? The glue of an ad hoc form is to be made there on the spot by the streamlined additive of weight and counter weight. This forms pockets or holdings. Enclaves which are uni-directional settings, focusing the joint, making it bounce or pop out of this ready-made socket. It is a touch-base that builds through the constraint into an elastic recoil of its own tendency- a tendency to go on and on unmediated that now comes up against something in which it meets its' own match. It's there in the settlement of that lock. The usability of that frustration. It's the shock of a resistance that makes us stand. That out of the sheer inertia that must come sooner or later, makes us punch out of that standing into walking, near falling. Somewhere between flight and collision;somewhere between the two; catching and falling.


So to envisage working up this lock by forging it out of the meeting of body parts:

The boy is on a low swing. His foot is cradled in your hand that wraps around it like a tight sock that gives in places. With his knee now bent and relaxed you align yourself through the coursing that runs through his hips into the thigh so that the gradually unflexing knee becomes the propellant of the push of surface to surface where the pale of his foot extends further into the palm of your hands. The palm is set rigid- a point of resistance- a stand-in for the hardened point sought out through the floor. The knee held with the other hand is set now with ever greater precision as the push increases into a unit of alignment in which the line of the body as it outstretches, acts as one. So that with the continuing pressure it does not flay out to crease at the hip joint and dissipate the force into a collapsing and subsequent bending at the waist but summons up that pressure right through the foot push, into the lower back and abdomen that gather and hold and flourishing up through the chest to create a single coursing and lengthening through the body against a point of immovable resistance.To push he must search out this running thread pushing through this entire ligament that his body has become.

And so it happens. And as it happens and he does push, the swing goes back you following and keeping to this engagement to follow the contactability of foot into hand right up into the highest angle of the backwards tilting swing. His leg lengthening becomes one continuous thread with your hand, like a rod that you balance  between you by putting your bodies in synchronous alignment with one another. So even in the swaying tilting movement of the swing- indeed because of it- your bodies are tracking, probing searching and running into various creases and extensions out into the extremities of the room with the high up window, the tree outside, the music flowing over from the classroom next door.

Then as the momentum of the swing pulls him back down the knee automatically folds. Again on reaching that point of resistance in your hand, it pushes back out lengthening against this immovable stoppage, following that resistance back into the high tilting of the swing that you and the boy keep up there in that impossible placement. By constant modulation you together are lingering on the duration of that hold that keeps that intractable line through your body and his body jamming the swing up there into place until again it is let slip and the resistance folds with your hand following back through the swift bend of a knee and the downward tumult of the swing. Keeping hand to foot, foot to hand the glue bond is now thin like a stretched out transparency about to burst but maintained. But only just. And so the boy is walking.

_____

Later play with rocking. Falling forward and backwards together. A human seesaw, rocking machine. His back pressing into your front, then that being ejected and rolling forward as you both come up from this fall. This upwards, downwards seesaw that now begins to swivel too as it changes speed.

Then on a rolling sausage cushion, his stomach and chest rolling like dough over the cushion, his arms outstretched so that his hands collect into the running motion of the floor that he travels above than reverses over, taking his arms upwards and off the mat. As you help this rolling by shifting him forward at his hips he also times it by the impact of his hands on the mat; how they thump down to slow him, rise out to increase the speed. Now you lift his hips off from the rolling cushion altogether so that it is his chest pressing down and his hips are swivelling as you create gradations of lift and drop, gradually lengthening out and taking hold of his thighs, his legs his feet so that he is now swivelling, snake-like through his body over the cushion, driving and fine tuning it with his hands on the floor but creating the contactability through the body weight in his chest, trunk and hips.That will create a sense of lightness in the upper body that is reliant upon this downward weight of the hips and sacrum that keep an ongoing contact over the rolling cushion that gradually plies him forward and backward like a wave turning over itself.

When again he is on the swing pushing against your hands through one foot and then the other, the bend and thrust is strong coming from a strong centre that he is feeling and modulating against the restrictions that you play out. Constraint is the enclave for the torsion and traction right through bodies, surfaces, objects running through them like fault lines that are unstoppable; that are sketches that have a life of their own. We are combined through these fault lines, our bodies only taking shape, acquiring momentary solidity around these tendencies of direction, resistance and push-back that become irresistible. Out of which the very idea of doing and so of holding oneself erect whilst allowing oneself to partially fold in, arise. A composite is something evolving that cannot be taken apart.

____

Therefore you do not work a pattern of movement by bending and lengthening a leg in order to practice the right motions necessary for walking. For walking is more than this. It is the specific local dealings with questions and difficulties of direction, stoppage, continuity and shock. You create an enclave of resistance, than wait for the impulse to counter that resistance in a lengthening that then patterns itself into a fold and bend in order to search back out that intrigue of lock and resistance.We are dealing then with conundrums that come out of and are dealt back through practical situations. Not holy or moral laws.

Bodies assemble and work into endless potentials of lengthening, foreshortening, and swivelling. They do that through intrigue, expectation, delay, disappointment, reconstitution, invasion, turn around. You do not work  on sequences that lead to preformed shapes and ideal patterns. You work on the shock points and fault lines that make one tendency reverse into another. Only that can build up patterns and feedback out of specific affects that lead to dilemmas that are only ever partially and momentarily resolved. Activation and rest becomes the pulsation that challenge nerve endings, bones, flesh and sinews, to compose on and off one another as stand ins for and in conjunction with objects, surfaces, textures of hardness and softness. It is the conditions for these affects that must be sought out and in novel ways, and bolted together in ad hoc but workable jointings. This is play. Quite different from the serious obligations of patterning advanced in regimes of body techniques and exercises tailored to deliver particular functions. That is more a form of body control and dictatorship and can never be generated out of the changing circumstances of our own modulating interest and attention that is co-dependant on everything that constitutes us and so keeps us reconstituting one another in a wider and more intensive admixture than is ever just you or me.

Stance

Old man in the middle of the lawn. Angling and twisiting himself around the crux of a stick in order to face front-ways the dog that scatters and barks and wines it's way this way and that around the pond, over the lawn, across paths, veering in towards other dogs, rebuffing out again and pouncing back in. The man is some way off from the dog- it's many enticements, meanderings, fabulations; it's antics. These are not for the old man to know or even care about. He simply tweaks his alignment this way and that way like twiddling the knob of a safe through his body composure so as to ensure safe and consistant passage from his open chest to the tail, belly or rump of the dog. They are mutually entwined in this way. Not so much an affect as an instantaneous torsion that spans the distance; the space in between as if each levered the other; a remote sensing that cuts out motivation, incentive, call and response and unstead operates a single device of atunement through which the resetting of a dial is met and in that attitude the park opens up, trails away and cradles them in it's pulsating  and reshaping pocket. The detailed precision of this chiming together, the resonance that sets the wind spiralling on this sunny late autunm day is compelling, never the same, on going, pre-figured anew out of each redistribution. People pass, stop, sit down, continue on their way, in the throes of this tuning device- an instrument  that is being updated as I speak. Made to work again in the silent rushes; the flows and seizures that become evident in each particular stance.

African drumming

African drumming. A cacophany of progressions. Nudging and pressing each other. Damming up letting a directive spin arond on itself, balloon off the interuption, deepen. Then let fly out again. I imagine air bubbles all bolstering up one another, pressed and josstling through the water that they press into. The seals of these bubbles do not know detachement- could not sense a free-floatingness of maybe this and maybe that directive. There is no choice. Only an acting out through these invasions and introversions held in check. They flatten and pulsate into one another demarcating in multiple cuts the area surface of contact. There is a many sidedness. Each breath and gasp becomes a pulsation that transpires through the miriad. All tiny unsettlements become at once accomodations or are pressed down upon remotely like something barely apprehended that influences and involves. Just the tail end, corner, wisp of something long gone.
The fractional details of each involvement at the interface sends out radars that are sent back simultaneously. There is this fit and match to every reapplication. There is no target to reach. There is no return to sender. But this slow emanation has the immediacy of something concieved.  In the intersperses affects take hold.
A slight angling or swivel- the grainniness of a sudden reversal that makes the smooth affinity of surfaces that almost share a membrane suddenly bristle, recoil become rampant for an instance- like an intense  impossible scratch dealt with from all sides by the many handedness of drumming inflections pooling as if into a single impossible point of attraction. Then again sliding back into transparency, invisibility. Wetness and dryness pervade one another suckering free rides or soumersaulting out of a sudden stuckness to launch and break into an excess speed. There is no movement from place to place. All the space is accounted for in the thick recursiveness of beating. Only these wave-like rolls that iradicate and smooth back down again one another like the whip-lash of a tail flaying at the end form its own constant use. There are inconvinenances, checkpoints, a running on the spot so as not to lose the memory of a pulse and be exhumed from it; thrown out and left derelict.It's important to keep the consistancy. Once it's gone the raggedness can never recoil. So that the idea of each fittingness begins to stretch and give. Bubble after bubble pops. The memory arisen out of  this co-existance thins and leaks like oil on the surface of water. Colours dissipate and are sliding over one another before becoming a feint impress glimmered in snatches of light on the way home. No, there in the midst of it a kind of leverage is forever gripping making something out of nothing as bubbles invade, press into a haphazard mesh that locks and bolts slowing the melt down to become this immaculate device of pulsation that conjointly sways. The dance. Something that could never be concieved but is felt and acted upon  in the immediacy of a many sidedness. The dip and rise become the fashioning at the seal where the air pushes out the water, the water hunkering down and presses back against this colony of air pockets.
It's there at the seal that minute inflections ricochet into an impact that is everywhere and nowhere. Because again and again it is replicated into this compound body, this compound eye, this compund ear. And out of the body of each unit reflective and doubling in and over one another there is this continuously morphing aspect; this shaping. It is this nudge and push in the thresholds of finer and finer discrepancies that has become an indicator of all that is felt. This feeling of following and investing is renewed out of this shifting of attentions. There are so many attentions that operate as one now coming apart and coming together again like the viscous fibres of a single muscle. This muscle is everything we are and everything we are not. The hard and the soft as it shapes and drains away.

critical twisting

Series of 9 pics on movements website

(Blog list)

Look under heading, Critical Twist

Disappearing boy

There’s a sense of him slipping away. Diminishing and recoiling back into a start point that is never reached. This cauterisation of every outer extremity. A tucking in the edges of all flaying parts. It is this incredible politeness that is killing him. The silence of unutterable lips. Coldness in the hands that writhe or lay discarded by the sides of his body but do not touch. Do not touch back. His chest is prominent a rising hill around a collapsing landscape. There are landslides in every direction. Only the sudden startle response and the pulling and torsion of the neck, ankles and wrists supplicate an antagonism to entropy. Otherwise this hermetically sealed package remains where it is. Providing no input and no reason to delay an errand or interrupt an on-going thought or procedure that the casual passer by may harbour. It is hard to look at such a reversal. Growth turned into a deforestation. A collecting into the essentials of shrinking inner organs. All else white skin- a mere covering, stretched in parts, blackened in places like under the eye. The brow of a young boy, wrinkled, the smooth new hair wispy and dry, floating over his face by the rustle of life that is all around.

There’s a sense of needing to literally plug in. To affect a fuselage connectivity not at the surface that is cold but at the next layer or the layer behind that delving through the rice-paper thinness of these multiple layers, questing for a fickle warmth that rumbles like a distant indigestion that is only the ghost of a meal recurring on itself. It’s important not to chase away this warmth- not to harden out the fickle movements that are the only internal combustion system to hand. It is incredibly delicate- at a knife edge of response and breakdown. How does such a body read touch? Is it invasion? An impossible speed of approach bearing down on the relative tranquillity in a body that is approaching stillness, approaching absolute balance. This touch needs to interpolate, warming into the next layer before fractionally moving there. There is this idea of contact that is sewn out through the atmosphere of a never complete arrival. A mimicking and gesturing into the folds of this stillness that seal the boy in the last barricade to complete dissolution. So touch also needs to dissolve and fix, then dissolve and fix again, melding the extremes of interface and projection beyond that stopping point.

What is a barrier? Only something felt as an inhibition where two planes swivel into an impasse. The parallel sheeting from a differently placed equation pivoted around itself. A point of very slight resistance. The very first breeze of a leverage. The heat of a response that is the involuntary gasp of one surface cleanly wrapped around another, spreading into the grooves and ripples of that front-line, then evicting itself-reconfiguring as if now propelled or distracted so that there is a rush of air, a vacuum suddenly acquiring proportions- the negative space of a vessel suddenly becoming apparent in the contrast of temperatures that a hand placed, lingering, remaining, deepening and then removed, brings. A very slight invigoration in this going down and coming back up. Still a gasp- a long way from being a grasp of any kind. Yet this pulse of a deposit- a slow inhabitation- even the virus contagion of a warmth that spreads from one unit of life to another gives into and creates through repetition, the beginnings of the harmonics of responsiveness. It is a gage in non-consciousness that becomes crowded with variables in moments of delay, anticipation, filling and emptying- the breath squeezed at one instance by the downward motion of the hand, then pushing back at another instance, ejecting that hand. The chest, the tummy, the feint pulse in the wrist, in the neck, under the knee at the Achilles tendon, at the lower back, between the shoulder blades, at the root of the cranium. The muscular ripple between the individual rib-bones that all begin to operate as feint points of leverage- of drawing in and pouting out again. The discordant nature of these multiple throbbings which is beginning to play into a cacophony and that dialogue spreading and darting over the entire surface of the body reaching out from the layers of fascia that are warming and cooling into on–going reliefs and shadows of one another. The circularity of a body begins to evolve-a spherical looping of affects that are the negative indications of a furthering into environment.


The interface of hand on body- almost like a hovercraft that hoovers up just above the area surface creating a warm buffer of air in-between that then invades the very restlessness of the body, warms and lets stay this body in its constant adjustment.

The armour must be taken off. In the case of the boy this is a very literal armour; metal laced arm pads and leg straps that incarcerate his body, beetle-like into a mould of positionality roughly equivalent to the stable straightened aspect of a human body. Like this he is propped up to resemble the position of a standing boy and the folding, unfolding of his arms and legs are frozen into the lengthened bone structure of straightened and immobile limbs. The support, insect-like, is wrapped around his outer body as if all the jell of his inner disappearance were simply bypassed, boiled down to a regulated synchronous liquid substance and poured in this mould. But this was never going to work because this hermetically sealed boy could never feel nor anticipate the impending nature of an address that might call for a matched response and for the collecting and resistance of opposed forces that would call for a true stand.


At first the touch response is a dream. It is all the boy’s experience of the pulsating of organs against flesh. The liquid run and set of systems that keep percolating around one another; holding one another up in jams and enclaves then redistributing as the dam breaks. Yet this viscosity in the disappearing boy needs to be got going through the contactibility of body to body- of human to human. The boy learns to live with these interventions- to not immediately dispel them, throw them out as foreign matter- but to use them as a point of friction, of invigoration, of warmth. His body calls out of that warmth. So he uses whatever surface comes his way. The dialogue and minute adjustment ensues even as the boy receives them and engulfs them more as a part of his own internal organisation. Yet they are a series of affects, of internal perturbations and re-accommodations. That is the point.


In a walking, seeing child, every surface- the ground their feet press in and out of, the walls, the smooth-roughness of shelves, seats, carpet, cushions, wood, metal fixtures, the bounce of light off of reflective windows, the shimmer of it in-between leaves or its sudden displacement as figures approach mid-centre and play off in constant rebound upon the meshing faces of the child that learn to manoeuvre around this mobile flesh as a party game and a deep yielding into this eruptive compelling permanence. They learn to push off of bodies, lean into them, absorb and bounce out of various meetings. They learn to touch and touch back. And this is not only a perceptual thing that they do, not the social alone. It is shored up on the physical working of points of interface- of surfaces on surfaces at every level of their meeting. It is the warming of the body, the breath and circulation, the food intake and excretion. It is digestion and it is the mediating of what and how things are received and reattributed. The boy is disappearing because without this feedback he does not remember to take in another breath, to continue with the peristalsis of food breakdown, to push out all that is wastage from the anus. The body is a system of massaging parts that warm and invigorate one another resetting by way of their interruption with other organs, with other systems of travelling viscera that are embracing and coming apart all of the time.


The conversation with the boy is about insinuating into this level of visceral interface. The hand must become another organ, pulsating and jostling in the midst of what it is not- what it is constantly wrapped around. What it then, by way of affinity, becomes. In these folds, systems of affordance come into being, then dissipate only to take hold in other fleeting capacitates. So peristalsis ensues, ripple-like, and then one time out of the blue the boy maybe will or maybe will not, with only the slightest of indications- more a continuance of staying with a warmth than anything resembling a gesture- touch back, unless he already has done this, without our even noticing.


____

Note* I have begun working with this boy as a Shiatsu Interaction therapist. I have never before worked with a child who appears so fragile and weak. It is important to add that I was so concerned about this child that I insisted on full medical transparency between all those involved in the boy's care.


____

Following Unease

(Written after a Women's Eid Festival in Stoke Newington, London 16th Sept.
Many fast treatments- many people with physical pains.


Treatment- two handed Shiatsu. Inhabiting two disparate areas with contrasting feelings of going in, bouncing out. Residing there. Letting the affects of these differences mix as the hands stream back through the arms back into your one body. Even as they remain outstretched on the body of someone else. A momentary feeling of oppression. Like a tightness at the chest. Than a series of shifts that come to be felt as different qualities of emphasis. A continually re-grafted depth reading. Calibrated between two bodies.

An expansiveness in the chest and throat that travels out from the disruption in all directions whilst allowing one to stay put. The sense of driving or walking through a space so that the hands operate together as a push-me pull-you pressure and release. Honing in - like a remote probe or sensor- with one hand deepening and the other lessening off. Following the settlement /unsettlement of this breathing that becomes one in recipient and you. Their chest, your chest, rising and falling. Your hands slack off as the belly expands. Accomodating it. This breathing could be the body forwarding, turning, reversing, pausing as it has many times before and now even as it lies there it goes about these calibrations. Certainly they are of a temperament of a body in anguish, joy, fear, relief, contemplation, dreaming and waking. Interspersing one with the other to build into the fine nuances of expression, response. An engaged affect as an on-going state of changing.

Twist and torsion of your own body the steering wheel of fractional adjustments in your hands relating to the bulk of a body turning, aligning, aggregating with the redistributed circulation- of flows and stoppage. Utilizing these oppositions as the differentials of a moving system. Making this vehicle between you. That being operated in the slight pull and twist between chest, rib-cage and the flesh just below the umbilical. A slight resistance like the prizing apart of a too rigidly knitted form. Tenderizing it. The seperation and coming apart of the two hands in this slow twist and torsion of an opening. The dropping of stitches and the pulling of certain single threads that span the body and tighten at the mid-point as the body pulls away in two directions, to be a reinvigorated breath.

So the oppression  in the chest becomes the guide for a recalibration and a re-tunement of the way in which you configure your own body in relation to the recipient. The way their breathing alters. How this relates again to your placement. And so it goes on.This placement the tweaking of a dial which to begin with is the certain angling of your whole body in relation to the recipient. An opening like a valve is constructed - a gateway between a certain address that becomes a workable device- a way through. Until another seizure of pain or constriction; of all too sudden release or a thought about situation suddenly dawns and a reconfiguration is pending as another area becomes emotive like a sudden giveway point that then drains away and floods into another remote place. As the thing gets going the recipient becomes the active force, the breathing punching in and out your hand from which your whole body is attached. Recipient is a moment of reception not a fixed role, an actual person. It is the logging in the pulse of the blood, the holding together of flesh, the letting go of air, of a body's responsivenes. A spasm and flickering with each minute in-take and out-take of breath. Then firming into place certain exposures, certain pauses that put on hold, detour and make into an accumulated response, the drama. It is their body. Their drama. Their contours. But it is happening also in your body catching into it as the rapid darting of a messaging going back and forward. The messaging is not unwrapped. Can not be interpreted because it is building and breaking in upon itself on the spot. It is pure affect forcefully there and equally subverted on to something else shaping what it can be according to the responses held in the balance and tipped this way and that way over and over again by everyone present on the day.

Addressing the specific is a way to create these lines of association that run through from head to toe, from body to body. There's this compulsion in chasing the aggravation- like a mouse set loose and on the rampage- areas of pain, emergant bumps and dips that ripple over the body in order to course through admixtures where these assaults finally cancel one another out. The mouse is not destroyed it is brought into the light. It panics and darts for cover. But there is none. Then moments of calmness begin to build out of these very distractions and the rapid coursing back and forward of opposing tendencies at last begin to relate. So a dialogue that is sporadic and can not be kept in one place ensues. That dialogue being nothing more than this attention to unease spread out between the two or more bodies and conjoined at the interface and the multi-directional fine tuning it aggravates in order to ride that unease into various air-passages, parallel lines of reserve, a certain ease about and in the situation. That state exists right on the verge of a catastrophe that is touched in and out of and is tentatively let be. It is dramatized with remote but not disengaged attention. So the dialogue is about states of awareness that are arrived at through bodies constantly distilling out of each other's frissure. Another name for that could be environment.

Stretch Pic

Go to Movement Blog -1st on Blog list- for more

Look under Dislocate

An open question

Something about the tilt and pour of a gesturing body under inclination and going further. Somewhere in the mid-space into a set of patterns that are built into the grip and dissolution of muscle tone. A viscosity that is continuing on its way through the air we are entering. The shouting out into this mid-space, the throwing back into our apparent place. Where is it we are at? Never entirely of the body or out the body. A probable threshold that we are wavering through. On the brink, this tilt-point like an axle that grinds a bearing along a plum-line coursing down and simultaneously throws us into a near flight. Perception is that travelling. The surface to surface activation that acts like a springboard. The grit and gristle that gets the thing going. It is also our breathing, our digestion, our circulation.

So with the child in the therapy room- gripping my hands to pull himself up-that action can just as easily loop down into a reversal of those muscle groupings- that pressing down to go up winding to some degree back on itself - so that there is a lessening of pressure to go down- like a neutralization of the process. This double entendre is how we come to experience our selves enmeshed in a collective of activations that are all influencing and tweaking constantly the outcomes of a recipe of admixture. Patterns on patterns on patterns. We are compositions of and also in the process of composing through this constant involvement and that is how miniscully we hold together or come apart.

The leverage- point of leverage- becomes the play of outcomes- thrashing around one another and induced into predictions or the oppositions of those predictions. This becomes play- the beginnings of dialogue which is a viscous and tenable interlocking that is not a flat pack but keeps turning around one another- a multi-dimensional quest of surface on surfaces so that a turn, an angle a, holding, a falling and catching in begins to shore up upon one another and to forge point of impact, compression, affect and period of flow, travel- a vacuumm to which the potential of the body as dispersal is drawn . Form as movement follows.

Playing with the expectation of grasping to pull up which if it goes unmediated intensifies into a thrusting forward- a fast forwarding and explosiveness/ excitability of the chest, the breath, that sends the boy plummetting forward. So that unstead it is tempered by an inversion of the very usability of this grip. A lessening off so that the grip catches and then folds in on itself sending the body back down and through his own centre weight- through the sacrum and hips and the belly weight into the legs. So that there is a minute contraction of the muscles in the thigh, the leg, a small accommodation in the knee and ankle bones. A pulsing of the toes into the carpet- some kind of landing there where you are. The boy lingers. He wobbles. Then out of this letting go comes another stabilisation; a concretisation. Hardening into the grasp of the body; pushing down through the legs into the ground beyond its evident surface and pulsing up through that constraint. The arm jammed into place so that the bones of the wrist are set and configured for a moment- trapped- as the flat of the hand pushes against your palm- a driving force of right angles. A leverage. A levelling between falling down and pulling back up, the interuption into one another becoming a firm stand. So between the two fixed and unequivocal directives- of grasping and letting go, there is this balancing brink- this wavering lull of suspension that is a pause-gap - a hushed moment. A thought.

It becomes a holding together in this elastic space between getting somewhere and resting here that is neither completely one or the other. That is a kind of rapid and mediated coursing back and forward. A fast pulse that contains also within it, slowness. There's a moment of motionlessness. It is filled with potential because it is made up from so many counter-indications; emotive tendencies like colours that are never set into ultimate discrepancies but play on one another cancelling into white light.

That is the beginnings of dialogue. A dialogue with the environment- with the surface to surface of material and human interfaces. Interactions that compose out of one another. Conjoined phrases that become our living environments that are constantly flowing through one another- cautioning and letting pass impulses that are jointed and newly worked up even as we breath and think and present ourselves as varying images to one another. A continuing pronouncement through which we engage.

Instrument

Just before I write there is this buzzing of elements in the environment. Then they begin to slow and settle. To take on significance in relation to one another. The angle at which they are set becomes exacting, crucially binding them in an array that little by little can no longer be taken apart.

I go around tweaking corners off-setting the minute flecks of expression that make up this new tuning fork. For it is the circulation of light and shadows as they absorb and rebound. The filaments of dust, the morsels as they come and go. The tread and shuffle of itinerant animals, birds, strangers and passer-bys. The hurrying steps, the lulled recurrence of a back treading footstep. The side glances and taxied journeying of synchronised feet, dogs and insects. The worms burrowing. The wind seeking passage taking with it dirt and fluff, seeds, smells, germs, a cool breeze on the skin, weaving in and out of the heat of the sun, creating patches of hot and coolness that pass over one’s seated body or propel one into momentary wanderings- out into the middle of the grass, the wasteland, and back again- that makes this place useable.

It is the place for the recording of events. Events that would not happen unless all these preset signatures bound up against one another.

There is this rising and falling. This growing up and this crashing down that maybe should be in different passages, different time-frames, altogether different events. In stories that never meet. But here they do cascading into one another. Interlacing like fingers seeking out the backs of one another’s hands. But it is the same body somewhere down the line. At some further point less diversified, more integral to the root of the thing. A person walking on the land sitting on a bench. Passers by nodding or avoiding. A dog pre-empting the moves that are made, insulting or enticing.

I am looking out over the thicket and the waning yellow flowers mostly turned to bristle these days. The slip of wire from a telegraph pole looped from building to building then across one of those metal braces that rise like a lost child’s bracelet next to stations and works and other industrial developments. Superimposed over this are other poles; industrial stalagmites that push up through the vacancy of a toothless smile filling in here and there a small section of emptiness- aligning with the top-most loop of this empty cage, the rigid bracelet thrust over a portion of land.

Figures are weaving their way in and out of the thicket, secluded here and there by bushes, trees, unruly growth only to reappear through the covering zigzagging but remaining before my eyes like corn flowers that are growing and dying so that the progress is the progress of a genotype not of a single flower. I am the same fazing in and out of credibility. Swimming and sinking in amidst this buzzing landscape.

Yet there is the moment when these elements- the metal against metal- the wire drooping and ascending again like a script in the sky; that single scant yellow flower, that straw cemented growth. The beetle coloured luminance of a discarded blue beer can. When they all take hold and root firmly into one another. That is when I too become like a tattoo burnt into the bench where I sit.

When I look out across the area there is no distance to cover. Just this resounding thrill of significance interlocking and exposing one another glistening in the shock of a torsion. A bustling traction that runs through everything as the workability of a vibration comes through in the midst of staying put resting and flowing on the wind.
___


Someone walks past looking down. I am eating a banana. Nothing happens. There is a gradual coming into a smile somewhere in the mid-space between chewing and walking, where the rhythms merge.