Chase

We can go so far. Then seem to stop. Or at least reach an impasse. But it isn't really this. Just a binding. Like a ball hitting a wall that turns around because the stoppage at high speed packs energy into the occurrence. We can not mentally configure that speed of events. But systematically build up to it in anticipations and precedents where we face the consequences of that wall met at high speed or avert and deflect- become a shock absorber -go into- fold and split into a thousand different trails and rivulets that probe into the depth of that wall- the flesh made porous- a flaying apart of pixels- the quality of a lung tissue that branches off and off of itself like the chaos equation that never gets done with but merely jumps scale in a presentation of the same as met differently.

Bodies are that- a mind bend that we configure in  the reactivity of our flesh- the nervous seizure and suppuration of this going into and coming out of. Where do we nudge the fibres apart- where bind tight to become an elasticated re-bound? Winding and reverse winding. Recoil and dissipation in the breath splintering into a thousand trillion water traces. A thin mist carried by the wind till it meets a cold front and collapses into droplets that fall to earth. Perhaps the wall- the impasse- is only this, the meeting of atmospheric temperature fronts that clash and bring out into the open the capacity of a tendency once distributed and now condensed. An arctic front warped by the Mediterranean warm stream in order to by-pass some countries and target others. Compression where sudden meetings are forged. Intervals of varying depth. As of two hands squashing together at speed. Fractionally the gage alters at every instance. How many of these possible "Takes" do we monitor, do we bring into occurance? What is our apparatus for gaging and where exactly is it situated? Is it ever an internal device or is it simply our process of engagement; happening somewhere between here and there in the very space of that operation.

The air goes pop and if those hands should remain together through duration, heat would simply swell out of the folds and creases of our unique signatures. Sweat would begin to form in the folds. We wave our hands in the air rinsing them  in the cool breeze. The water  evaporates cooling the skin. The crystalline remains of a salt residue build in one episode after another which could be in the bottom of an ancient forgotten sea. Water lifted or licked up by a continuing relentless heatwave. An excess of salt floating our casual bodies on the rim of the dead sea.We are so relaxed we almost nod off to sleep.

I press the buzzer of the Resource Centre  on the Holloway Road. No answer. It is raining. I have my futon in a long jean bag I got made up from material that I bought in the market in Ridley Road. It's a great long sausage bag made in dark denim blue. But it's raining this evening and no one's answering the door. I go into Waitrose next door, plonk the sausage bag in a metallic shopping trolley and call K. on my mobile. "Where are you?" No-one's answering and there's no sign on the door to say that the Clinic is here". K says,"I'm coming down just hold on". I give it a few minutes not wanting to go back out and wait in the rain. When I turn the corner again the door is open and K is putting a notice "Mobile Clinic" on the outside of the door. When we get inside the building the young receptionist is flustered. She's gone to the loo and missed the buzzer. K and I set up trying to co-ordinate our movements in heaving the heavy desks that occupy the centre of the space in the conference room to the edge. We then occupy this area uncurling our mats.

A landscape of variously formed terrain. The movement seeming to still and harden. Areas a little back. Areas a little forward. An intensity and the reverse eruptive statement of a vanishing point. Between the two something pulling asunder- a continuous tear that is warding off all approaches.I touch whilst thinking about going in the other direction. Or I think about going forward whilst coming off. The push-me-pull-you distilled into a mere prophecy- the imaginings of a state before its pronouncements. A wavering till the breath that is sustained mid-sentence flickers like bubbling beneath my finger tips-I wait- to really feel it come up abit- play with the spaciousness pocketed as it is. The hard aversion of a muscle group momentarily collapses, becomes a flicker of tenderisation like a rippling or darting fish. It catches in somewhere else. It out-runs my lingering attention. For I am angling exactly where my hands are, my body a turning of circling momentum chewing on the spot into a slow forwarding of wading ever onwards to stay still in the slipping mud that warms and separates. But even with this casual bodily treading here on the spot there is a pitching out with the long-distance senses to disparate areas where the flecks and darts of swarming masses take refuge in the ramparts and high places of  ridged upper glades and shoulder promontories. I gaze at the heights churning like a breaking wave stuck on itself, from the lowlands of the lower back; the crease at the reverse side of the knee; the soft part between the archilles tendon and the ankle bone; the shallow places between each rib-bone, the belly that I sense is absorbing into the mat below even as I cannot see or feel it directly. Even the tiny spaces between the hard bone under the left ear and the side of the neck is a place to linger.

These sort of soft refuges multiply or perhaps I simply notice them and the potential of them the more I stay. Perhaps this person too shows me more and more where it is possible to go- like a confidante or a gradually persuaded host creating nesting areas in an unworldly expanse. Sometimes it is as if there is a hair's breath of difference that separates the uninhabitable from the habitable. Together we fine-tune this navigational labyrinth, jumping scale until the harness of bone gives way to the relative elastic centre of muscle, the hardness of muscle to the relative softness of flesh, the hardness of flesh to the evaporating lightning speed of the breath. And it's this breathing that pouts out or holds in, in intermittent detail of jarring holds and sudden releases interpenetrating into wavering lapses between two states. What it is that something can be and what it is that it is made to be.That depends on the split second of angling of a certain contact. The hard and the soft. These are not varifiable states. They are felt out barely fixable configuarations of questions that multiply into ever more questions. There is everything to play for. That's the challenge found in any intelligent board game. It's a lesson in pause that is put there to show up the slightest breeze of a movement. A lesson too in movement put there to monitor the slightest evocation of something as yet to occur; something to be anticipated that in that delay becomes a constitution on the verge.

Everything is beginning now to speed up and change rapidly. But i am running backwards more and more slowly and so is she. Out of speed comes this lingering hesitancy that drifts on and on. What is this thing we call change? Only this micro-timing where this becomes that within the in-folding and out-folding journeying that arranges every point of exposure turning it into a seam-line between two hands, two minds, two bodies that gradually percolate through one another in an arena of micro-adjustments that flash on and off like a pin-ball machine. Every direction exists at once. These are collecting and darting, turning and stalling, hovering and dispersing on the verge of something we never know for sure. There is a slight shimmer that perhaps is real perhaps is not bending on the air like a heat distortion.

But change first occurs on the lever of an intractability that gives a single point of friction. It collects around a certain attention to force so that body and the thought of that body go together and at that very moment of awareness spits and breaks apart that integrity into a fine spray of possibility that is like nonsense and lucidity all at once. Suddenly then out of the impasse there is this re-shufflement not just at one place but everywhere simultaneously and just then as the body comes apart so hangs together the idea of a co-dependency; of parts to a whole that do not have a border. This spirals out in combinations of alignment and regroups back in,  right in each newly forged interior. That's communication. The signal getting through. Worked up in th etime it takes. Presuure and release. The heat between the hands and the cooling of these separate hands open to the air become one and the same. Categories ar enot coined. They are de-commisioned one after the other.

The woman uses the word "Empowered" after the treatment using it in the way that a speaker in a Black Power meeting might voice it in a gathering in 70's New York, leaning back into an endless space and prodding the foreground with the voice alone.  I also feel I can communicate more freely than before. That is because communication is never a single or localised event. It is spawned between the catcher and the snare that animates a pattern somewhere between entrapment and letting go so that the very consequences of these terms never fully play out but affect by interrupting one another. In this swirl of changing roles a pattern  collects where the tracking becomes a value all of its own. The voice rises and falls.The draught below is always changing. Imprints in the snow are made and read in that co-action.

We sit around the table with K. drinking tea and talking about the changes that are happening in Dalston with the building of the Train Link for the 2012 Olympics in Stratford. How the area is changing and front-line drug hives such as those run along the Sandringham Road are making way for Yuppy restaurants and trinket shops- through we suppose both businesses are still running only at different levels of exposure.The woman who grew up in the area says they`ll never get rid of the fruit and veg market in Ridley Road because some of the stall holders have been there for generations and don't take No for an answer. We talk  about remedies for cold; how crushing garlic into yogurt allows you to take the medication without recoiling from it; about cooking, the fine balance between burning fat by running and  the joy of eating. Then we talk about how to insure against people cancelling at the last minute before a Clinic- as three people have done today. The woman I have just treated proves to be particularly savvy at coming up with constructive ways of ensuring that people pay their due and don't pull a fast one at the last minute. She would have us sign up to Paypal. Perhaps we can take her on as a business advisor since me and K are hopeless in this regard.