A Tendency

A Tendency



He's wheeled in and left at the door. His carer disappears called to another duty.

I unstrap him. As each strap comes off the limbs begin to waver. His hand reaches towards his mouth. He stuffs it in and bites down. I lift him out of the body-hugging padded chair. Close to my body I swing around so that our body mass becomes one. I crease my lower limbs and he is carried to the floor through the drop of our joint gravitational weight, succumbing to gravity in one full sweep. As his small body touches the mat, it inevitably sends small shocks through his alert nervous system. The difference in temperature between the flat mat and his over-worked arching body is enough to register small shock waves of affront. it is this affront that I begin immediately to work off, warming form the belly a contact that through duration could not be called exactly touch- something with connotations of suddenness and a certain level of external infringement- but is more a sense of enfoldment which is as much an attentional zone as a skin contact. Through outstretched hands- as if warming and adjusting so as to create an even sense of heat through tiny tilts and realignments that then send down further, than come up by degrees, there is an accommodation- like moving into a room- working out the co-ordinates- registering body motility, arm expansion, and even such uncertainties as emotional timbre, gestural inflexion that becomes possible in the space given. This space is not a finite bounded object. It is the body as re-vamping of impulses, motivations and micro affects-responses that are always twinned affiliations- always relational tones cobbled together in real time and the ongoing and interlacing composure of context. The context is quite literally the time it takes to take a breath in and expel it again; it is the small manoeuvres that float boundary constrictions to create push-me pull-you alignments across bodies. I am a Braille reader or a pianist waiting for the indentions to sound out and resonate as articulations through the palms and pads of my hands and fingers before they ever reach outwardly audible sound, language or expression. Or perhaps he is the pianist playing me into different composures by the slightest of breathes. Yet both ways together we intend and set up an expectancy/potential that plays out in tendencies that to all intents and purposes, have a life of their own.


The warming is a belly to belly contact- of deep guttural motivations- wells and ponds that in raising their temperature even minutely begin to stir and pattern in an entirely different way. The hands are an intermediary- simply a prosthetic outreach that is both there at the point of contact but is also all the way through in this shared anatomical abdomen that is then a capacity to move forward- to tilt, to adjust as I in fact do every time that M breathes in and breathes out, spasms and relaxes, condenses and dissipates an area of emphasis so that the point of contact is maintained through this joint co-regulation that is on both sides of the machine a derivation of one another- a continual re-shaping so as to stay with an easy contact that is so light at times that it seems to hover on an air current and even when the contact sinks deeper into the fascia it is because it is let in and it is as if there is space made between the muscle groups, the blood, the bone- a gaseous exchange in the heart of solid matter.


This porosity at the centre of flesh is material and dispersive- a parting of the waves- an effortless journey so that the most interior of places become expansive- a wealth of tributaries and pathways that make/find themselves and become known to themselves on this slightest of aggravation- the touch slowed into duration until it becomes a permanent feature- the sand particle that disturbs the current around which another form perhaps coalesces for a certain period of time. These interruptions that than lead to further dispersals begin then to create a diagrammatic map that is a circulation network and a record of visitation- low level intrusions that become useable- the point at which something begins to turn- a spin- a capacity to re-orientate- to envelope and to diversify out from these whirlpools of intensity.


The child uses the touch sensibly and together there is a playing off of one tendency as if a levy breaks and is them shored up differently in the very process of it pouring away. This levying creates a makeshift lever in which a point of constriction becomes an opportunity to push against- to internally feel the organs, muscles, swelling and sinking in these waves of on-off pressure. It's the variable that works on every count- the subtle contrast that creates this variegated texture that is made as if in a workshop or artists studio- out of bits and pieces and what actually comes to hand in the moment of looking and assembling. More and more of the child's body is implicated until the one sticking point- the jammed up foot and ankle; the crooked neck; the grinding teeth; the mitten hand thrust into the mouth becomes the last moment of release once all the other circulations through abdomen, hip , pelvis, sacrum, ribs, chest, back bone, cranium, cheek, forehead, thigh, knee have been articulated in a natural furling and unfurling that is an on-going process of flourishing that can at no instance be divorced from receptivity, relational admixture, the tilting realignment of my body in relation to each small impulse. So that the tendency to spasm itself becomes a useable trail and the leg taken into the spasm and then woven back through in the opposite direction becomes an opportunity for a stretch. Similarly the abrupt cautioning of a loose falling away held in an uncompleted suspended state begins to re-work its own outcome and to feedback/flow-back into muscle intelligence in which counter-directives hold together as tonality. Simply this levitation mid-point- as a slight pause in an on-going affect- becomes a point of reflectivity in which the body in space begins to think itself- in the details of blood flow, valve opening and closing, breath expenditure from core vital organs to the ever more refined tributaries and cell formations that create this labyrinth of gathering and dissipating formations.


Neither is ever done with and so the boy lying there becomes an intensively multiplying multi scalar figuration which begins at a certain point to read back these minute pulses. The practitioner sends through these pulses before they disappear beyond the range of the known body back into the body reading map until wider and wider circuits of involvement become possible. Form and movement in which form is renewed hinges around these diverse articulations that span out beyond the extremity of limbs into a reach ability that is an attentional zone. This is where focus, perception and recognition become expressive compositions within an ecology of co-existing influences. And yet there is so much before that drives in small tendencies that either play out or are re-implicated into a parallel flow an another admixture so that every expression is the buoyant flotsam on this sea of turning.

Such turning configuration is relational but not initially in the social-mind-cognition-intention sense but in the direct sense that hot affects cold, hard, soft, liquid affects dry, gaseous, material. These are real qualities that determine one another and inter-relate to forge countless subtleties of material-imaginative-movement possibilities further down the line.


Contraction and expansion is the coupled tendency out of which a child in constant spasm gradually organises a pulse into rhythmic and a-rhythmic expectancy and innovation that is than played with, reattributed and becomes further down the line- as a secondary affect- according to the appropriateness s of the situation, a grasp, a smile, a sustained look that is quite different from the wavering head and swimming wooden limbs of before. This totally still point whether in a state of momentary internal calmness, or in a certain humanly recognizable expressive state or sound; perhaps even a yawn, is a moment that becomes useable and deeply ingrained in human experience/body memory. But it is never a social, cognitive goal to be mapped out in advance in a compartmentalized and sought-out manner. Rather it is the end point of an emergence out of the many beats, pulsations, disturbances and inflexions that drives resolution as a continual harmonic resonance in a co-environmental field.