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.


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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.


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