As I am leaving the kitchen I grab a fluorescent green tape-measure lying on the Formica and stuff it into one of the side pockets of my bag. I`d been trying to measure the dimensions of the kitchen for a new fit but had only got so far.
In the room the radiator is on full blast. Outside it has thawed to above average temperatures but the thermostat doesn't know that. I nearly burn my hand grappling hopelessly behind the radiator where a cupboard has been jammed up against it; turning the dial one way and another to try and reduce the heat then getting into a state and never waiting long enough to feel the impact of any re-setting but swinging it furiously the other way. Until I am overheating from my activity alone. I swing open the window. Get grease on my hand from the outer rim that I have pushed to it's furthest extreme. Wipe that on the floor. Sit down and wait.
In the room next door they are singing Good Morning. They sing another song about the days of the week. I mentally tick off the days so far. It's not Monday, it's not Tuesday , it's not Wednesday, it's Thursday. The sequence that has done with what has gone before and cues us all for this day which is just squeezing past the mid-point, relaxes me. But then it goes on and on and on, re cursing on itself 'till we jump the inevitable closure of the current setting and begin to whizz around the possibilities madly scanning back and forward into other time-scapes. There's a mis-match or slur - the slightness of a drunken haze even affecting me through the wall sitting on a plastic chair in that baking room with the swing strung up in the centre space from the ceiling tipping gently this way and that where I have brushed it in walking past.
I get up, go back out into the corridor, knock on the door, poke my face round the corner. The kids are all in a semi-circle in the darkness around the CD player which is propped up on another chair. There are coloured lights strung up on the wall adjacent with pin-points of elevated red, blue, yellow and green piercing the air. They prick my eye-balls. Teachers glance up at me in between claps. I nod and exit. Go back next door and sit on my chair.
Later that morning L. walks in and sits on the floor. She's interested in the boy who is stuffing pieces of felt into a plastic box and covering his head with transparent yellow chiffon. Her orange mass of spiralling hair dips under it too. For a moment they are together. I think about delaying the departure of the boy; extending the conditions of this impromptu alignment. This shaft of calmness cossetted between countless unforeseen events as if the surrounding buzz and madness allowed this pocket or plateau to gently smooth out the ruffles as it falls on us like the slow descending chiffon that staggers to outline the bodies below. When I signal for his "Learning assistant" to stop putting on his calipers and shoes he swings around and jerks back out from the cloth, back into hyper-alertness where the details and arrangements of his stuffing and unstuffing of containers becomes paramount. So I ask her to carry on putting on the calipers and shoes but to do it in slow motion drawing out the process for as long as possible. In the interim between staying and going- on the way out but nevertheless there; there but nevertheless on the way out, the boy is folded two ways and a condition of ease rests in the lull between states of activity where Goodbyes are nearly indefinite; a poignant hesitation that his emotional antennae picks up on.
By this time I have taken the swing down and we sit in the centre-space. The boy goes out. L stays. I give her the tape-measure which she turns over in her hands. Then with the object remaining in her palms I pull out the measure on the end of its metallic rim and walk away from her backing one step at a time until I reach the door. She looks at me and as she does so I let go. The tape tremors back into the tunnel of its casing streaming across the open space like a locomotive travelling home. It disappears into the fold of her hand where the plastic fluorescent casing is held like a jewel box. I begin to go here and there at each angle stopping and waiting for her glance and releasing the shaft of action navigated always back to where she sits, disappearing into an explosiveness that leaves no trace apart from the clatter of sound like the thunder that pervades after lightning, echoing in our ear drums even after the event of that storm. I stand on a chair and let it recoil back down like water running down a plug-hole to where L. holds like a precision instrument the dial that will eat up distance. I give the metallic end to her "Learning Assistant" who is sitting on a chair opposite so that the directive of the eating machine orientates from out of a different oaring. I begin to measure aspects of L. from her head to the ground, or from shoulder to shoulder until she begins to get this thing of distance of two chosen points being an interval of relative timing that can be snapped shut into a closure at any moment or there again extended and pulled out into duration, anticipation; a waiting game.
It's not a pre-set measurement between two points in space that concern us. It is the time it takes for that line we have made between us to snap shut and the hit of the sound that marks the trail of its own extinction that we are promoting and executing. Her glance closes the distance on each occasion. Yet the pause before that glance comes grows in significance. Breath defying suspension like riding turbulence into smoothness by staying with the instant before the tumult; the silence of the pause; the tensile traction of a held state of apartness through which remotely we feel out a specific moment of readiness in the minute pull and release of our angling held and fine-tuned through the rein of that ticker tape. It's got to be mediated and extended through our bodies in muscle groupings that assemble into vaults of containment or unravel into filliated strands of an out-reaching. Between the in folding and the out folding is the pulsar breath that pulls like the tape itself suckering up like sherbet the distances of the room only to exhale out again like the long throw-away ribbon of that dissipating line. It's a trailer on the end of my hand that is made to matter only against the relative refusal of the other end to tally.
She sits tight as a rock on the end of a piece of string thrust into the water coursing down. Finding this weight of permanence out of the flight of my own diminishment pre-sets a resolve that is deepening. I am a speck in the distance. She a solid rock and place of home-coming. She follows the distract-ability of my hyped up angling but gets the feel of that buzzing by sitting tight. She knows this - feels it in her body- in her own resistance. The runaway line is redistributed across our two bodies. I enact the volatile she the anchor that as such can measure the volatility- get a hit out of the manickness. If she did not sit tight the volatility would be a disappearing speck erased from memory.
What is a measuring tape? Only the pre-setting of a beginning held like a plumb line so as to feel against that motionlessness the rush of the the wind as the train hammers back through the tunnel. For someone who loves speed; who dwells in turbulence what better way than having that impact run and seize itself into existence through the body like a shaft of lightening in which spontaneous movement ricochets ones' very frame. Only by sitting tight for long enough to feel the impact of our own shaken frame is that possible.
This is a girl who likes to fall off surfaces. To launch herself over precipices. To jerk her body into impossible angles in which the head plummets to the ground in a near vertical nose-dive. She likes the rush of unabated turbulence that grows out of the rocking motion of any action repeated and repeated into its own intricate derailment of fault lines and deletions. She is a connoisseur of the mis-match that catches her body between the swing and pull of mis-directed interactions in which meeting meets its mirror image and turns outward as if paper curling back on itself in the heat turning crisp and multi-dimensional. She is a crafts-person making forms out of paper thinness. An origami entrepreneur endeavouring to scale up worlds by misconstruing attraction and repulsion. At the moment of contact her body rewinds- undoes its directive- as in a seizure of fickle splintering. Then there is the magnetism of bodily stuckness so that a surface that would be a bounce or springboard to the traction of a bodily command renegades on itself to become a dampener. Body motions as with sounds, are eaten up into the space of an expanding body that begins now to push against the walls from either side; to butt the ceiling whilst pressing against the floor; to re-shape that space cocoon-like, from the inside, as the worm bursts its cocoon suspended up in the branch of a tree and only half makes it into a winged creature as it feathers downwards still with the bulbous centre of the worm. She is half and half. Half in flight and half in fall and the peculiar project that she sets herself is to rearrange her form at the moment of contact so that a pre-setting of flights suddenly packs a weight that can not remain air-borne just as the wormery of her crawling manoeuvres high up on a precipice suddenly launches into butterfly mode as it tips itself over the edge of its own mooring.
Form can not be anticipated in advance. It shimmers from one state to another through the passing of events. There is a crashing slur of modes of operation as an almost permanent state. The condition of trauma as wired in with this need to surprise and so wake up the senses is the practice played out between waking and sleeping. Like the story of the sleeping giant there's a near constant rattling of keys as footsteps approach and then recoil from that grudging keeper of exits and entrances. She is disturbed but outside the moment of action; of interaction. Disgruntled from lack of sleep. Sleeping through a continual half light of wakefulness. She is on the alert but with nowhere to go.
What if bodily traction and release is a way through? A way into a more calibrated version of these two extremes between exertion and exhaustion? As in Sotai - a Japanese bodily manipulation technique-a practitioner executes a compression or torsion in one specific place until there is a bite of engagement and the body extends through that lever of use into a ricocheting jet of stretching and angling, arching and curving through torso to limbs into the furthest extreme of comfort. There is a pleasure seeking logic to that journey. Then it reaches a point- a certain given threshold of joint mobility and muscle relaxation and even then it is streaming beyond that point flowing beyond the borders of the skin which is stretching and widening it's pores into the atmosphere beyond; drawing f
rom this suddenly non-directive expanse that is a tonic of distributed nurture, until at the furthest extreme of reach where the limitations of reach reach still further there is a lull. A hesitation. A near Zero Point arrives as if many diffuse filaments kept on gathering and collecting filling and breaking away like lost relatives from far off corners of the globe suddenly brought closer only to re-ignite lost intrigues or find and emote new ones. There is a re-shuffling of their organisation back in and through one another into a composite re-wiring that is automatic; catapultic. It's a nervous revolt, a revolution against all that is held in, not said, not done, not rejoiced, not mourned. And the consequences of this collision is the vanishing point of a near complete usurpation. An in-breath; that impossible weakness of a need that at any moment could burst. Then at the penultimate point of this near complete inertia it reverses into an unstoppable filling. The vacuum sucks in the world in a single shot levelling planes, shoring up mountains, carving rivers; a wave of contact as the gulf is filled in the most direct route possible. An associative linkage or measure is made and in that very moment of experiencing itself it snaps into invisibility like the ticker tape again finding its way into recoil. The referencing that is enacted in every interval and at every scale becomes a simple inclination; the minimal tendency of a simple bearing played out in countless directives in ceremony whilst for the most part held in domestic quietude just before or just beyond, as potential.
Perhaps L's wavering antics of falls and jerks are the beginnings in this ceremonial process of enactment; her tilting swarming mass of reflex conurbations the mapping process of a single body throughout it's lifetime trying out every angle of environmental encounter. Yet when each instant is sucked right away into a disappearing dot because there is no point of reference; no initial traction, it is a merciless and relentless task to map or even stay with it like writing accounts in the air, scrawling names in white ink. That endeavour will send anyone that follows it for long mad with worry. They will be blind before they have a chance to glance up.
There is a set of indications through traction and release that plays with bodily-environmental assemblage making of encounters a levered device. This goes so far and then relaxes into the spin that takes it into its opposite. A Sotai encounter could begin with a slight traction to the foot- becoming a surrogate floor to push against. Alternately a hand on hand infuses a torsion riveting through constant but slight derailment through the inner working thought of the body as it moves and adjusts. And between the comfort of one stretching mass into the spasm of its reversed twin something between these points of view is harboured. Not a still form nor a perfect body symmetry but as an angling and continual re-setting above and below any given base-line.
The glance or encounter occurs at precisely that indeterminate place between the winding and re-winding. The dialogue or exchange is this shifting paradigm of intervals and re-augmented gages that is held in between tensile extension and sudden recoil.
Like tuning up an instrument by going from Flat to Sharpe in order to hear the difference by bringing it up. It is this comparative playing up of minuscule levels of disparity that allows for the feeling of how to hold in association dissonant spectrum's until through multiple playings it becomes compelled into a near unstoppable resonance on an entirely different and un-foretold plane of integrity. How then to re figure associative bindings even through the relaxation or complete laxness of separation that plays out different variations on the theme of centre/periphery? These are never pre-given placements but are relative terms based on re-formatted intervals that always exist within one mode of operation or another. Our certainties of pitch and tone, distance and relatedness are sets of practices worked up in the distribution of the markers of any given frame however sporadic; an encounter captured as environment that exists for us only in so far as we are implicated in its going over, tweaking, forgetting, revising, reinterpreting, ignoring, inflating, toning down. We play it into action like the switching of dials on a radio until mini sections of voice-overs, melody, guttural evocations, white noise, loss of signal, rhythmic glitches are produced by the listener who becomes a make-shift D.J slurring together cooking programmes, bird sounds, new bulletins, foreign voices, House music, potent pauses, jingles and coughs in an ad hoc mix in which a personal sense of value, rightness, aptness and connectivity is at the centre of all this instantaneous decision making.
Interaction then could be this twinning of a complex scalar network of meshing practices, intervals, intensification's and emotive spaces as they begin to bring into relief one another constructing multi-level universes that hold to account many operations. Angling and embedding some into enclaves of tractability whilst letting go of others into rinsing jets of dissipation .
There's this intensification with L. Bodily her falls and launches are met with my own cut as I underpin a fall with a bodily rising as in a wave pre-empting a surfer hovering almost mid-air so as to scoop up a virtual fall and congeal it into a new binary meeting of forces that turns over and later descends in a different place cossetted by that perpetual turning. That goes on over and over again into an ever-more splintering of what exactly something can be. A fall becomes an embrace. A wobble becomes a spin. Jerkiness becomes the anticipation of a given pause or the sounding of a whistle where the air rush warbles than strengthens and courses down the narrow escape. Counting interrupts itself into a compression which acts as pause as my outstretched palms rest and steady an upwardly mobile body bouncing and jigging on top of an air-filled ball. The body is stilled. A pressure chamber that builds and can endure for only so long. But when the vault is opened; a co-ordinated usurpation of forces as a recursion form one body to another; when my hands come up that pressure constriction instantly released becomes an upward surge in her body. So energy is manufactured in the holding of restrictions. Than utilized in the briefest of moments until entropy slows and wavers a directive and another beautiful clashing of forces makes use of a half sought after accident somewhere down the line.
A pulse begins to take shape between this stopping and starting. Fragments of tunes play in and out of one another. Separation and closure are re-done in countless dynamics at varying speed . Anticipation is kept in a readiness of alert whilst various ceremonies of encounter hover on the horizon as possible end-lines to as yet virtual compositions. How exactly it will fall can never be choreographied in advance. It becomes the quality of an encounter-a special kind of interaction or co-action that enables many things to be held in the balance before just one is put to use. That occurs according to the micro details of how the collectivity of muscles configure as a working pump; the exact point in time at which an intake of breath somersaults around on itself to become a usable force; an outpouring that sends a certain interest or collectivity of attentions through and past any body limit into lines of association, possibilities of living presence.
Towards the end riding on the lines of all that has been done, there is this lull of quiet absorption. An aerated fragile and attentive state even as nothing in particular is done and even when what is done is done so only in a haphazard on-the-fly kind of way. Fragments of song, meandering footsteps running out into silence. A space that is now infused with air pockets, bubbled up like honey comb between the compressions of admixing bodies; a battery charger of intensity and voice-overs and the slow yawning of widening bodily and timed intervals. She gets on with this and I with that. She is somewhere over in the corner looking at wooden painted animals from out of a bag. We've been playing with them earlier journeying them from out of a red dish, around the rim of a basket, over and around the outline of her body and finally resting them on her belly. I am leaning back glancing out the window at the white sky with the shadowed tree in the forefront at the other end of the room. But there is a still tempo of sifting, abbreviating and extending pulses out of our very distractions that operate together as one. There is this elastic stretching of space and gestures over duration. A throw-away glance, gesture or rush of sudden air like a half-whistle that exactly reconfigures these bendy dimensions through which we spontaneously adapt. That is the point where air becomes music.
