Seeing through the leaves

I worked with M again today at the Jewish school. I Left the school at the end of last term when the funding stopped. I mourned the disconnect of this abrupt ending and did a series of small colour pictures of faces changing expression as colours melding through one another like a dim light flushing between layers of cloth caught and held in suspension. The faces only come together at a certain angle of glance, then disappear again through the intensity of gaze.

Out of the blue I got to work with M after a local man died and left some money. So the mourning and the continuation of life somehow began to work through one another without cancelling one another out.

After work today I walked up the hill and I could hear the voices of the children through the leaves that were dislodging on every blow of the wind so that those that remained seemed to stand out in midair in spherical formations through which the thick bark of the trunk was clearly visible yet somehow set apart. Black birds were rising through the leaves as if pulled magnetically up to a certain height, then dropping back down through the cascading leaves to balance momentarily on invisible branches then fall away again.

I have began working at the school again with G as well. He was non-verbal when I last worked with him and into the rushes of sound that streamlined or cut diagonally his actions he would put "whoosh" and "wheee" which are now filled out into story-lines. Words now punctuate the push and pull of careful operations such as the hoisting and lowering of a stuffed animal on the end of a piece of string. This was a child who when wordless was immersed in process and now with his on-going word commentary, he still is.

M is a different kind of child. He is wracked with spasm, blotchy around the eyes, his chest heaving in gravelly shifts that stop and start at uneven gaps. Today I could see that his pupils were dilated and his eyes rolling back as he was coming and going into different states of consciousness. There was this slight pulsation around the black pupil; a thick band of gold flecked blue which was turning this way and that like a combination lock working on a code all by itself. Several staff peered deeply into the black and blue depth. Each one saw something different.

After calling his parents on a mobile phone we discovered that he had had an epileptic fit the night before. No one had told us. It was agreed that I should still go ahead with the treatment. I would need to keep aware of his eyes because there was the possibility that if things took a turn for the worse we had to phone an ambulance. But as it turned out we didn't need to do this.

Since re-starting work with M, I have found it hard to write standard case studies about him.
It seems that there is this cascading of events where the problem areas and their shift into a wider circulation are so much beckoning in on one another that the "positive" and "negative" almost give a reason for the other to exist. There are layers of affect in warmth, muscle tone and breath that come and go and that begins to organise how I make contact with M and how he beckons me into this contact or fills out into a spaciousness that we are both in. There are so many things streaming through one another- different temperature gradients of  hot/cold, rigidity and movement and even in the stuckness there is a certain clustering and a mounting up of intensity and then the forging of many new routes of connection that escalate out, then die away. These are not given by me but are gone into by his awareness as he interprets and unlocks the potential of a mute touch which starts to animate through his body as a living dialogue almost with a life of its own. It is enough for both me and him to witness this. 

There are points that work to relieve spasm just behind the ear and on the bridge of the foot. I am drawn also to the right side of his diaphragm that seems cold and unusually inflated and suggests a stress on the liver. But my hands simply pad to areas that lend themselves to be touched here and here and then there so that no point is active or useful outside of the living resonance of a wider pattern. Affects spill into one another and the pattern makes itself out of these emergent floodgates that are opening and are time specific and that then spill and superimpose one upon another. Touch becomes this sensing of varying depths drawn and re-configured around responsiveness; of going into and bouncing out at the level of subtle variation and co-adaptation. This is forged there and then like a pulsatory beat captured into an echo through the conditions of a wider space. This wider context only becomes visible through the foregrounding of immediate affects.Yes there is a tendency to bring the rising of heat and conscious busyness of excess activity away from the head and to follow a trickle-down descent through the neck, shoulders, diaphragm and remaining on the belly for some time. Ther eis also attention to supporting the junctions in the wrists, elbows, knees and ankles where there can be a build up of tension through blockage with the resultant unevenness of hot/cold throughout the body.

But no area of contact or attention makes any sense if it is not feeding through the visioning of the eyes and the patterning of the body-mind that is looking inwards and tracking these re-circulations. By following these spontaneous response patterns forged through the breath, through muscle tone, digestive and excretory sphincters, skeletal shifts in alignment, heat variance in the blood flow and neurological tilts of emphasis in the minute changes of light, touch and sound, these affects begin to organise like a melody that gradually comes through. In the physical torsion of yawning and stretching the voice begins to come through. It breaks into a moan that is sustained and carried thickening into a chord with many flavours. I chime in and out catching on the tail-end then extending past his ending only to stop as M chimes back in so that in relays there is a continuous sounding through which we than begin to cut away. Silence mounts up or shines through out of the excess that is falling away revealing frames through frames which are transparent and shimmering in the same view.

The concreteness of definite touch, definite utterance or steady eye contact is built up through the pulsatory and flickering quality of there/not thereness. This playing of presence and absence hones a sensitivity of touch-responsiveness by using touch to make space in the "off" touch and using sound to make silence in the interval. Negative space becomes imbued with significance. It's only when there is this spaciousness that there is the proper distance and right timing necessary in which to articulate contact. Gradually the voice becomes clear and resonant and M's grip around my fingers becomes a nuanced touch. I feel him coming through in these layers of on/off contact and the clear and unclear becomes one. Wherever there is an explicit connection it rises up through layers that are more porous than our idea of material existance and that in the practice, convolute together into a pulsatory whole. Contact then is not something overwhelming or harsh like a bright light or a high speed collision of muted impact. At every moment it is tenderised and nuanced but fullt present like the flickering light between autumn leaves. The base can settle and find alignment out of this play of continual dissolvement. There is something regenerative in this because it is on-going.

Even the harsh thrashings of spasm in an epileptic seizure carry the possibility of this re-tuning into circulation. And I have often found with young children who are epileptic that the day after having a fit they are open to radical reorganisation. A dramatic re-circulation of structural, emotional and psychological creativity becomes accessible on the surface and through the rippling affects at many depths of contact when that contact is open-ended. There is this merging of the distraught discomfort of the body as a rigidly held structure and the utter fatigue of successive waves of fitting that is a kind of giving way to movement and this creates the conditions for a possibility of clearance. In the blotchiness of the skin and the wavering of the eyes there are the beginnings of both symptom and the passing of a certain phase of blockage. This may come through little by little into a deep calm that is momentary but undeniably there. There is an occasion of meeting and it cannot be refuted. But it is on the edge between destructiveness and re-emergence and it must be held with great care and love by both practitioner and child.

Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore

Introduction:

In the Underscore there is the possibility of bringing into reflection a practise as we are doing it. It is a movement meditation; a practise of non-attachment to every state whether perceived as favourable or un-favourable. It becomes the movement of states rather than a pre-figured ideal state that drives the dance as it cares for the dancers. This enquiry that is non-localised and takes on different positions of enfoldment and expansiveness as a streaming consciousness, generates the life-force that flows so naturally in Contact Improvisation.

...........

Last night we danced Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore. We did not enter it as a guided road map talked through in advance. Rather we created our own focused attention within the possibilities of the score which we shared in quick thoughts beforehand and then in the practise itself. There is the part lying on the ground where time seems to slow down and there is both this vacancy/absence and the beginnings of a possible opening. This is not given in the immediate mirrored responses of others but is more a melting through that seems suddenly, as if entering a certain current, to stretch out indefinitely. The room itself begins to animate that elastic quality and vision follows the minutiae of fall and lift like the fine-tune balancing of sound experienced in the inner ear as differences in pressure gradient that fluctuate and equalise.

The body is not made up completely on its own; there are gaps in the contour. Nor is vision thrown out beyond a self-made body like a hook flung out on the end of a rope. In the underscore perception is taken apart back into its living state and thread by thread unravelled into the space. The body becomes movement; the movement of fleeting ideas and the movement of the body beyond any fixed state.

The first touch connection can feel strange after the slow and quiet investigation with the floor. It can be a shock after lying there on the ground in the skinesphere to suddenly be formulated and called into response by another. So there begins a practise of modulation about how we form on one another's incompletion and the shifts this implies. This changes the focus away from dutiful obligation or knowing the rules of the dance to simply turning up in each moment. The hospitality is the open space. There is a silence here that can sometimes feel like being thrown onto the wide sea as a kind of loneliness. But in time this becomes the practise itself. It is an open invitation to manifest in many different ways over and over again. In this careful or cared-for attention an open gauge can be many things at once. The dance space is part of the "care" which allows for right touch at the right time.

At first it is enough to feel the quality of warmth from the flesh that is not self generating but comes from another body. But soon this idea of self and other is non-applicable within the practise. There is a steaming through so that the heat gradually equalises and seems to emanate from no particular direction or source but to spread with a life of its own. This needs open availability without codifying this back into the familiar resoluteness of the dance with its supposed moves tumbling out of each other like a pack of cards. Rather there is staying with the contact without bringing it too completely into movement and remaining with that movement through the space without formulating it into a meeting with beginning middle and end. The elastic stretching yawn encounter becomes a contagion between many bodies that are formulating and reformulating at the threshold of exposure. There is a temperature gradient like a light shift or the disassembly out of a vertigo spin suddenly caught and reorganised. There is the heaviness of imploding organs suddenly released. The interface is everywhere within and between bodies in these overlapping kinespheres. Wherever there is a quality shift in experience and in the perception of experience there is the rush of contrast that becomes the continuance of the dance. The small dance and the greater dance are one pervading gesture lending themselves to one another.

There is a circulation that links floor to wall to window to body through a tumbling reorientation of contact and into a new compass point which explodes back out into the space. This is the geometry of the felt space. Movement runs its course out of a build up of heat that suddenly frees itself out into the dissolving space. There is that running and opening through the chest, arms spread out to what before had been a near implosion where impact literally took the breath away. A trapped shape born from repetition resolves itself and finds the simplest escape routes. Lines and curves cut through the air propelled out of a questioning ground. Forms cannot help it; they must flip inside out on the briefest of touches living and dying, riding and shaping off of their own limits.

The tempo is not immediately given. It builds out of the bodily sensations that build and escalate as shape on shape, layer on layer. Staying with these long enough allows an open frame of attention to be set. Micro and gross levels of change can be witnessed and modulated simultaneously as they are performed out of this open frame. There is an investigation or probing into levels of detailed focus and then an interest and staying with the distractions which are spin-offs from this. There's a planting down into a stable and unwavering mind from out of which the body can be flung this way and that acting through each connotation and the lived implications of this.  There are these run-ins with excess activity and then a deepening stillness where the tempo remains held delicately in active but quiet suspension. There is a pulsation that is felt like the blood rushing through the body; a precision in the heightened attention to every mode of amplification or diminshment. In this there is the endless re-versioning until the compact and absolute boundedness of bodies begins to melt in the practise of bodies coursing through one another. What was impossible becomes possible. Certain flights of the body and the rolling and tumbling shaping and sounding in the tenderness of contact contradict pre-set personalities. The rigid choreography of our set social standings breaks apart in the dance, whatever may happen later in the day.

We are swiftly drawn markers running across an absent space and intoning it into substance. We have evoked make-believe surfaces in order to play. The hard line which can be used as a point of bounce is a moment later coming apart. The dissolving line still captures our attention like a feint echo. Held loosely we begin to ride on the waves of sound/not sound and to link into this quality of engagement continually perpetuated on the edge of movement in parallel dances.

The diagram of pulsation is sometimes manifesting violently and with force or delicately as a tender embrace. The movement that catches against hard contact is openly softening into a wider sense of spaciousness against the on-off piercing of a brass clarinet that fades out into the catatonic silence we still inhabit. In this torsion there is a double move; both pushing into and spreading apart. This two-way traction courses through ligaments and muscles, veins and sinews, air cavities deep in the diaphragm and the glutinous texture of our digestive liquids. There is the melodious flow of blood coursing through arteries and veins running into and out of the heart and lung. These organs are shaped and re-formed out of the passing of substances that are never stable. The body is the nodal point that opens back through the spherical space of the dance. It continues to flow out into the sounds and colloidal lights of the city that are streaming through the air and that carry on through us into our day to day gestures and the consequences of life. 
   
We are in the particularity of this one moment at this one time in this one dance and yet meshed into this interweaving of tendencies that reach a breaking point on the cusp of every encounter. There are no independent dancers because at every awakening idea of a movement or gesturing into a learnt engagement, there is this interruption that breaks like a wave into a new dance.

...........

Voice

There was the sweet smell of fertiliser being dumped out of a wheel barrow on to the pavement directly in front of the church. Yes this is London. Steam was rising from deep within its belly because of the heat being produced from out of the slow process of decomposition. It was rich and dark like crumbling chocolate but there were small pieces of straw and sticks poking out from within it that couldn't be broken down. It smelt of animals- the rich smell of animal hide and what comes out of the back of them and is steaming from being incubated within the digestive tract running from mouth to anus inside their warm animal bodies. The digestion was carrying on now out on the pavement amongst the sodden yellow leaves. Soon the fertiliser would be scooped up and spread onto the dying flower beds to either side of the pavement where small gated public squares looked stark in the half-light.

_______

The man on stage had a guitar like the time I had seen him on TV when his voice had soared unexpectedly from his quiet frame. He was lit up today in a warm purple light against the background of the pulpit carved out of soap stone with a space underneath that could have doubled up as a child's den. The stained glass windows captured the dispersed and dank light of the outside and brought it in, creating a channelled aura in figures of biblical scenes. The small electric heaters glowed orange at alternate intervals along the upper most pews bringing the people corralled below into one single entity.

There would be no singing today because the singer had woken up without his voice. The man announcing him said that this was the bad news but the good news was that he would be playing some acoustic music for about half an hour. There was a visible rustle. A restlessness set in. The woman in front leaned forward to her friend and there was whispering. Several people checked their blackberries lighting up the fronts with the push of a button.

The music started. The man worked his vocal range between chest and forefinger without opening his mouth. Within this looped sounding eye and ear created between them first precision of focus and then reverb. Sound on sound tumbled out in each delicate placement like setting colours free each one allowed to fly into the spaciousness or nullified and dampened by the turning wheel of the meter and the melody that kept coming, an attack so sweet it was relentless. A body moving forward delicately but insistently.

Voice is not only a quality of the vocal tract. It is anywhere that our attention is put full-heatedly and with courage; where a loop is made between unwavering attention and the free play of movement. I remembered than a small girl whom I`d known. Her wide eyes scanning, like moving across a new terrain, the features of the children and adults before her. She would pick up objects one in each hand and then gazing at them with outstretched arms run with them for a distance before replacing one object with another as if refuelling for the next part of the journey. She had no words but it became obvious that she was patterning her sing-songy breath-like sighs to this stop/start lullaby drawn out of her movements like a waltz sweeping so far then lingering as if in a dip only to be seized by another impulse and carried on by the wave. Then she had began to drum caught up in the drumming and tapping of others and acutely entering into these stops and starts with her own two hands. She began putting the objects onto the skin surface of the drum to watch them jump and dance as she beat out her rhythm. I would hum around this rhythm and then lift her up in one sweeping motion to carry her through the air than land her back down as the song continued to sweep up and around and down again. Perhaps there might be a gap- a silence and a listening into the breath which is coming and going. Then again I might tap back into the rhythm or she would as if it had simply journeyed underground for some time and is now re-emerging on the surface with the flow unbroken and recognised by all.

I`d seen the singer with no voice doing this same thing here in the desanctified church catching in through the hesitancy of a silence which becomes an interval loaded with expression because the tune had been caught back into with the same consistency and tenderness as before. No one is watching their blackberries now. No one is whispering. All are deeply settled in the journey sitting as one.

This common meter is what gives the voice whether sounded through tapping or moving or humming or story-telling, a vibrancy and clarity. There is a warmth to this like the digesting compost that is carried further into each consistency where it lingers on the airwaves and in the delicate fibres of our nostrils that flare slightly as we draw closer.

Open Field

I`m beginning to feel a sense of an open field in which the particulars of attention come and go. There's such a wide panorama and it seems at times unfathomable. Only that at each particular moment it is very specific- a precise involvement in just this way or that way. Yet at times we may get hooked into these particulars and forget the dissolving presence of that which holds it. I'd rather call this hold an embrace because it wells up all around like mist enveloping. It's almost like a temperature gauge yet perhaps perceived as colour. Colour seems to have definite boundaries- red or blue, green or purple, yellow or pink. Yet these hues come up and pervade just as song and melody do, lingering as an atmosphere before they ever get fixed into a word-meaning.
Word-meanings are limited yet not so much when they bubble up rising and dipping on a far deeper conundrum.

Children burble before they say separate words, streaming the sounds together as they wobble and tilt, slip and re-group their bodies. They are tendrils enveloping in and through the environment. This may sound strange or wistful but it is the actuality of the world being inhabited. At the Children's Centre where I work I see these tendencies like a yearning. There is maybe a false start, a re-tuning midway, a partial collapse and then a bringing back through not in body mechanics but through this shifting involvement that ebbs and flows as it leans into brief associations and then bounces apart again. But this On-Off pulsar pull of involvement and disassociation is not two opposed or antagonistic impulses. Both impulses lend themselves into one another energised into this mutual pump of contraction and expansion. It's a pattern subject to small on-going shifts of adaptation that envelope and embrace like layers of cloud or thick smoke tumbling in upon one another. There's a fascination with this in the child and the pattern is as much a thought meander as the physical gait and gestural stops and starts of a child in a play-setting.

It is the same with the dance. The dance erupts on its own tail-ends petering out only to gather into another colloidal axis where contact spins and flips back on itself into a two-way tangent of volition. Whether moving through touching, streaming through spacial intervals or engaging in movement which becomes so subtle and finely co-ordinated that it seems to be the stillness of one, these micro shifts are physical thoughts moulded through time and space by bodies. This is a craft thta is crafting itself out if its own interruption within and through the open field. We know the field only by the brief and sporadic impact of our broken gait, a questioning glance, a falling and extended slide. In these exaggerations that live to the fullness of their limit and then just beyond, there is a flickering filtration all the way through the body. This tensile-like awareness is activated in communual realignment- a stretch, a yawn, a torsion-like twist, the bunching and release of the spine and how this impacts and translates through many bodies that become one. And in all these ripples there is the in and the out breath, and the quivering of nostrils and lips on the verge of song or utterance yet in this interum silence of the dance.

Sound and utterance wells up out of this body-environment in which silence is the larger field. We snap into place all at once and all as one by vacating what we have once filled over and over again; by giving up position. It's a dance of omission that gathers so gradually to well up into the possibility of movement, of touch, and of this halting pulsation between moving and stopping. There is the feeling of lightness and the feeling of mass. We interpret that at a certain point as "Up" and "Down" and so the words fix what is complex and never the same. It's really at this visceral level of bones and muscle, organs and blood, air passage and temperature gauges that the pulse is set in one particular vein after another. These layer up on one another to create complex possibilities of volition and near total suspension and these occur as sound and shape formations morphing in and out of our experience in this wide open field. Word utterances rise out of an already activated slant with the air pressure in our bodies matching or teasing apart the other pressure forces so that we pucker our lips, extend our nostrils and widen our pores reaching out beyond the body that is ours and leaning heavily or lightly into our own arrival and our staggered fall. There are vortices's, channels, causeways and dams that are intensities that lend into and fathom out from one another. The dance is the spin of difference enveloped together yet held a hair's breadth apart and that is always pulsing on one level but unwavering on another level. We are birthed out of this becoming, these brief displays caught before being offered up in voice and gesture on every fall and rise on the threshold of many vectors. We are humming songs, shaping pressure gradients between us before they ever hit the airwaves and become audible . That is how we face one another. Talking is implicated out of the total field arising out of silence. Like people and objects and days of the week talking can never be taken away and exist on its own simply as the idea or the wish-fulfillment of perfect speech by someone who has already taken speech for granted. Speech can never be taken for granted. It is a practice of devotion. Children who do not speak or who are on the verge of utterance remind us of this.

Creating individual programs of therapy that hone in on function and the problems of expression and that try to remediate these as if balancing the books implies that there is a book to balance. There is no such book. We learn to come into being through our bodies and in our particular gait in correspondence to a wider field that is emerging in the same instance as we are. How we manage the moments of this wavering step by step in the flickering spectrum of colours that splinter against white lightand re-group continuosly is how we ultimately stabilise into the continuity of uprightness, of an unwavering tone and of a word so simple as to mean Up or Down. But we need the tempestuous field of life in order to live life as it is experienced. 

Utterance cannot be taken out of the mouth of a child and offered back up to her like a rare and precious gift that she is not quite able to match in her body. Speech is situational and inhabited.
It rises up effortlessly without plan or intent just like a dance. Can we remember the broken-off parts of the dance after it is over? Is there any relevance in this memory? Can we remember the melody of our last conversation with a friend? What is the feeling-tone of our friendship?: can it every be summoned up in one episode? It wells up through the cracks and spaces we allow to exist. We cobble it together out of the stops and starts of one another. We are continually atuning to one another by filling and emptying space and time, creating loose and often improbable signifiers as our play-things and then letting them go. We make this pump out of whatever is to hand. It is a make-shift affair. When it works it is because we don't take it too seriously. But we hold it carefully in practice.

Children are not an itinery of "good" and "bad" qualities. Even their defictis are essential to their learning. So by giving weight to portions of the child as "bad" this only creates a heavy compactness that blocks the free flow of curiosity that we all share as potential. Things need to play out in their own way as valued moments of connection which are felt and are fully occupied by child and adult without judgement or prejudice. This does not mean that there are not issues at a physical and psycho-social level to be addressed in a child at times. But these will play out and work themselves through with more exuberance and clarity from out of an open and shared ground than from out of a divisive and problem-seeking mind-set. We all need the space and time to engage in free play and deep exploration before a foreclosure about who we are fixes a tone and a particular attitude of self and other is concretized. A child will show their engagement in the most apt way possible at that time according to a co-involvement that is made byt the occasion. And a dance will dance itself in the particular way that that dance has of dancing. The life is in the practice itself which is rising and falling out of an open field. As for us, we are simply adjusting the lighting between shows.

PASSING

 

Through the disparate form that keeps unlocking, loosening its grip and falling away. It is there/not there and all of a day in the half light it rides on this kind of misty fragrance. Dissolving it becomes vapour stuck to momentary hard lines like the frail cobwebs that ache from stretching across window panes steaming up from the inside. A cooking pot that is slowly discretely emptying out its contents implicated now as the touch on our skin, the wiping away of a thread of hair now compliant in the sweat of this living air. This living/dying that we are all made up on, how it escalates to such a pitch as this and this and then winds it's way down like the smoke from a single chimney that heaps back onto itself. All thickness is this, this tumbling upwards and downwards simultaneously. Only when the upwards is cut off- a sudden cessation of the necessity to keep displaying, does the envelope loop of these bundles of rising and falling gradually stretch out breaking the threads and letting loose the vapour that continues to travel  unhindered. Without the constant patterning of habit onto habit locking down the frame, there is no trace left- No information given except in the many practises that renew onto unlikely material- the script in the sky written on the brow of a speechless child.

On Kishi's Passing:

Akinobu Kishi was the founder of Seiki, a way of being with others quietly and non verbally through touch sensitivity and global clear observation and acceptance. He developed this out of his own life situation and an urgency of addressing mind and body in the same instant through effortless action that was also a way of keeping still. He was trained initially in Shiatsu but transformed through his own personal experience- including episodes of crisis- this doing practise into a non-doing- and an embrace of all the struggles and momentary findings between life and death. In his direct method of demonstration and treatment he taught us not to be frightened of these passing states but to open and trust to what was occurring.

He himself died on 23rd October 2012 in the company of his wife, Kyoko, at his home in Maebashi, Japan. He taught frequently and commitedly in Europe preferring to go from home to home of his long-term students in the various European countries; Germany, Austria, England, Italy, Greece and Scotland living amongst, not apart from those he addressed in a simple and straight-forward, at times humorous way. In his treatments and way of being he showed non-attachment; simply residing in the moment very lightly but whole-heatedly and then moving on. Even as he approached death, this was his teaching; for people to find their own way and to move lightly and freely with the situation as it presented itself- not to stay heavily with any moment or feeling and to give it too much weight.
He called touching someone in the right place at the right time, "Happy Hands". This developed naturally according to a two-way involvement and through the opening of an awareness that was not contained in any single life form but was an attentiveness of careful connection. Kishi left us with these "Happy Hands".

LISTEN

I reach for the buzzer than suspend the move glancing to the building next door. There is building work going on. There's sand and stone heaped up outside in the street and wooden slats going over a pit in the pavement and into the open-fronted space that is going to be the room next door. I ask a builder, "Is that going to be a sandwich bar?" He says "Yes, but we're going to remove that sign that says "sandwich bar" and replace it with another one."

The fountain in the courtyard of the children's centre is working. It's been plugged in and frothy water tips from one metallic cup into another. This water is lit up in each cup by an underwater light. It catches on to the froth making it white and shiny. As I get closer to the water I can smell Indian food. I start to salivate but when my fingers become immersed in the lighted water the smell disappears.

Once in the building I sign in with my name and the time. It is 1.15pm. I take the lift up to the second floor which is the top floor and cross through the Occupational Therapy Room that has been booked this afternoon by another therapist. There's the ball-pool with red, blue, yellow and green plastic balls. These balls are hollow and some of them are crushed. Some of the children like to crunch down on them, using their jaws like heavy industrial cranes that implode and dismantle them like buildings. The room has a slightly contained and stuffy atmosphere. It is padded with blue mats, a swing tilting back and forth gently as if a child had only that instant, vanished.

Next door the floor has been taken up. All the furniture is heaped into a corner and the bare bones of  the wooden support slats starts to reveal a symmetrical pattern like the criss-cross map of a chess board. There are indents between the slats stuffed with the soft insulation that is normally invisible under the floor covering. This covering usually offers a level surface for crossing from here to there and back again and this is usually done without too much thought. Because some of the floor has been removed I need to step carefully along the narrow lines of wood in order not to slip into the immediate give of this softness that is rising and enlarging.

Carefully I make it over to the other side of the room and go down the metallic stairway which is pinned onto the outside wall of the building. I reach the ground floor in this way by a different route.

The building is silent. I put my knuckle to a door but instead of knocking I listen.
There's a low level hum like the sound of a tractor or a tank and it's getting nearer. It stops and starts, stops and starts and it soon becomes evident that it is moving in the same cadence as Standard English. Soon it drowns out the silence and even in the gaps between it's advance, I sense this hidden form looming and preparing itself on the other side of the wood door. I fling the door wide open and a small child with its head pressed sideways against the concrete floor is gazing with wide eyes into a red plastic bus. He is looking through the back end where the back panel has been wrenched off or has fallen away. He is making engine-like noises and they reverberate around the empty room as if divorced from the throat and diaphragm of their original source.

Sway

The sway creates a pendulum precision that goes so far then reverses. It's a visitation more or less here and then a return more or less there. It sets up a meter like a pulsation that knows itself not in the places it ends up but in the pulsar squeeze and release through which this momentum regenerates,  passing so swiftly, almost unheeded across the razor-thin threshold of the centre-line. What is this threshold that is a moment's suspension interior to and beyond any directive? It is not a thought, not an intention. It's a wavering; a shimmering that doubles and redoubles the pulsar swoop with it's visible aspects and clear tick-tock to become a revolution unseen. But it gets inside our bodies- is our bodies to become the silent keep-sake and unheard promoter of all that is to follow. Movements, words, gestures and song. This unravelling is endless, though it turns or seems to turn on its own heel going so far, then reversing. In the sway there seems to be more of the same thing- endless repetition means not moving at all. But it is a grid; not a mapping past oneself with deeds and acts, thoughts and plans superimposing on this handy device in which memory is simply the clicking into place of this and that as it slows into one of the extremities and so draws a firmer placement. More it is this shimmering or shudder it sets into motion and out of which we solidify or seem to be here and nowhere else; really here. Presence is ambiguous. It erases it's location in these deviations between the upstart and the regress. But the ticking holds no smell or fragrance to it. It is not a balmy summer's day nor a freezing winter morning. It's a preemptive fold that is in permanent retreat and out of which all else unfolds.We do not have to and cannot even if we wished to, know or map the conditionality of this sway- triangulate it's far corners and multiply the potential for a spontaneous outpouring of language, manners and good deeds. Because we are alive only within this matrix and we are becoming out of it and not a special case scenario with a sky view. We are in it- in the middle of it and what it becomes- the melodies fixated out of this elasticated torsion of pulsar beats- is simply a matter of emphasis here and subsequent absence there. We play with the reversibility of this pattern in endless modifications that redraft the proposal so that what is plus becomes a minus and what is merely the background absorption for a loud clang or the dark and matted humus to a vibrant colour is turned inside out chiming outloud and putting into shadow the gesture that a moment before was the centre-ground.

What is a voice, an enunciation, a descriptive contour, a thing possessed?  What is it's absence? A loss, the slipping away of faculties or their never-to-be-grasped-in-the-first-place nature?

There is a teenage boy in the cafe where I am waiting for my tuna and mayonnaise baked potato. My hands wrap around a cup of tea, the first time I have made use of this complimentary warmer as Autumn sets in and a tendency to retract and solidify like the fruit on a tree sets in; a need to contain and make opportunistic moves to enhance the warmth within.

The teenager is swaying and making sounds into his hand as another man reassures him by putting his face very close to that of the teenager and smiling broadly without inhibition. The teenager leans forward and backwards and his face glows. It's the noise of multiple conversations that have raised their level suddenly as a group of elderly women who recognise the teenager from when he was a boy come in and settle at the adjacent table that momentarily invokes a wider stream of movements and mannerisms in the boy. The teenager has a colourful soft velvet toy. It isn't a figure or even a representation of an animal. It is just a series of sponge-like malleable shapes with each protrusion sewn in a different colour. He brings the softness to his lips, part-covers his face and eyes with it then lets his hand fall back down gradually so that the softness, smell and aftermath of  an intense rush of colouration becomes the camouflage that absorbs and mixes the variously pulling tangents of sound and rushed proximity generated from the people tumbling into and out of this small cafe.

I used to have a garden project up the road made on a piece of disused land belonging to a National Charity. Autistic children would run and stop, looking at this or that, swooping up handfuls of green-brown leaves in the Autumn and throwing them on the fire that responded by streaming black smoke. The gestures and mannerisms would multiply as each child followed these patterns into the space, tracing their dispersal as the intervals between them increased and the dance ensued. It is now nearing completion as a new building development, a series of tall streamlined and elegant-looking constructions with the first prospective buyers viewing the properties they may soon call their home.

The Mental Health Housing and Work Training Facility on the other side of the wall is still there; exactly the same run down and make-shift array of buildings with a series of improvised shelters branching from one structure to the next linking into some kind of unity what used to be discreet stables and workshops in a previous era.  I went into the cafe and asked for Jenny who used to work there but I was told she left several months ago. I went in because I still use the hairdresser on the opposite side of the street from the days where I was regularly at this site. Something pulled me in for the first time in three years since the garden closed. Possibly because the new building is nearly complete so the erasure, all the but the nut tree at the far end that the new buildings must carefully work around because of a preservation order, is nearly complete. All the new kitchen staff wear white hygiene caps and that is certainly a new feature, although I recognise a few of the old regulars who still eat there. From what I can see the food is more fried and processed than in the days of Jenny who prided herself on vegetarian creations but at a glance this is probably an unfair comment.

Later I go down to the Arts Hut in Finsbury Park where on a Sunday I do drumming. Reza is there, a continuous if not at times strained smile on his face as he encourages the group en masse and one at a time to join in. They arrive for the session in a white bus from their Care-Home once a week. Suddenly there is a new influx of people and it is getting to be so many people that some are standing, some dancing in the middle. The enthusiasm starts to become a bit strained and it's clear some of the autistic members are finding the sound levels hard to stay with, covering their ears with their hands and looking down. There's a point at which enthusiasm no longer cuts it and simply increases the impossible demands for participation that people are straining under. Others though really do enthuse at this party atmosphere on a Friday afternoon, rocking and swaying back and forward with a good sense of time for the music.

I sit next to a woman who seems quite rigid and whose eyes are far back inside herself.  However she indicates very effectively that she is cold to me by putting her hood up and tugging at her open coat, then glancing behind her at the open door and back at me. I get it and close the door. I am beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by all the sound and movement in this small room on a day that Reza had told me, was "A quiet day". It later becomes clear that two groups have clashed coming simultaneously on the same day and at the same time. I do what I do at the Sunday drumming which is to use the drumming as a practical act to cut diagonally across the rapidity of the rhythm and break into a slower sense of portioning like a lethargic sway, out of which gradually as the repetition accumulates as a sculptural shape over the doubling and redoubling of other beats, it takes on a simplicity that I can settle into. I "forget" the sense of being overwhelmed and find myself back in the middle of it rippling through without too much thought. Out of this simplicity that arches into a torsion like a spider's web curving away and back into an expanse of surface, a certain leaning or emphasis takes hold in my body and I do not so much hear a melody as lean into this sway that offers very real opportunities for rest and then propulsion. It is a feeling of inhabiting a spherical space and moving around, changing my shape in order to discover this or that area of emphasis. Yet these areas of emphasis are also the internal states of my own pulsar movement and pause; of compression and expansion in the viscosity, bones and sinews of my altering frame; of the sense of air coursing through me, beyond me and back into me.  So I am before I know it altering to the beat by setting out tangents that lend themselves to this beat without merging or running parallel to the actual sound. This is where the interior meter becomes charged- at the brink of what is heard or percieved and what is felt or implicated as an underscore and there is this wave-like surfacing and giving way. Right timing becomes all important. The woman sitting next to me wants to hold my hand. I continue with one hand on the drum and the other still going up and down with her hand in mine. Soon it is not me raising and lowering my hand but her and this silent beat is in perfect counter-rhythm to the sound being made which in turn is informed and slanted throguh the spaciousness of the off-beat. The sound is articulated beyond itself. I see in the woman that her eyes are clear, sensitive and mobile. She is not simply tolerating sounds imposed on her. She is shaping them in this co-emergence. I realise I am as Autistic as her- as the teenager in the cafe earlier. We are all just trying to move into the simple shapes we feel and see that are partially lent by, partially occluded by the fragmentation of sound, gesture and movement all around. The continual remix is the basis of disruption, of new flushes of creativity and of integration. They are not opposed. They are streaming through one another all the time.

Bodies that move anyway

The tilting sway and catching in of bodies that are made and unmade on the roll is not as hazardous as it may appear. Not even something to be eradicated with the proper kind of interventions and encouragement. It's the questioning and curiosity of our envelopment in a wider mass that is all pervasive and is a co-shaping. Not just these bodies here and there in their immaculate and stationary uprightness- a near picture perfect representation of all that is worthy and eager to be counted. That is false. We need to slip from this; to generate all the uncertainty and muddle in order to orientate first in this catchment and then in that. there is no correct positioning for all time. What works here is too forward or too hesitant, too much of a lurching leftwards or rightwards in the next instance. It's a working leverage that settles down in order to simultaneously spread and lighten and that this is only a feeling sense of give and resistance in which each juncture draws out the act according to what is possible out of this meshing. Every slight mediation in absorption or propulsion never stands alone but is layered one on top of another yet it is only the surface as it is met at each moment that fashions that precise level of experience. These tilts and sways of perturbation are a rolling cycle that is self correcting only out of the turbulence it exists within. We cannot do away with this turbulence; pretty it up and air-brush the imperfections of inappropriate swaying in the Autist, spasm and shudder in the one with cerebral palsy. Every sway is a patterning and description out from an invisible mid-line. Does this mid-line exist? This perfect ridgepole of exactitude and human uprightness and stabilisation of body, mind and emotion? It only exists in relief as the abstraction of all the lurching this way and that; the executive mismanagement and organisational blips whether in bodies, neighbourhoods or countries through which ideals are extracted like an elixir that is left after the boiling process practicaly removes all liquid and all signs of life. This will leave us thirsty- but it is an archaeological dream come true- the perfect human who on the touch will implode into dust. Looking and admiring from afar is possibly the best vantage point for seeing this totalising aspect of mankind.

In Education, Therapy and the day to day trials of doing the shopping, getting on a bus and making a meal, the perspective has a way of constantly shifting. What is this aggravation that seems to well up within us and outside us as we come into contact with this or that kind of physical or social terrain? It is us- in relation to this or that. Because we only come into that particular being in relation to soemthing. That can never be got away from. Modulation or adaptation therefore is not a "making do" or a civilising consequence of learning the right rules and a set of good manners. It's this turning and inflecting in relation to a certain call for inflection drawn out of the conditions of the ground or context as it is met. Safety is going with the flow because wherever we are drawn is the right place to be if we remain in tune to the particular soundings we are entering. Noise or irritation is only where this sounding is resisted and we stand cocooned in our own immaculate uprightness. We are actually mostly clumsy, making do, shuffling, stumbling, correcting and losing the thread only to catch in again here or there on the fly as if a bird were circling in a such a wide orbit that it periodically diapered and reappeared and it was only through faith alone that we tied in this beautiful patterning as integrated field rather than as moments of gain and loss.

The more we stumble the more flashes of thought and image flare up and then die away again. This can create a rumbling stream of stuff and it is impossible to catch on to every passing one because as we chase  the one, more keep coming. It;s then that the stumbling becomes relentless as we try to catch up with a sense of the immaculate ridgepole through which clarity of the whole field is supposedly possible. But this vantage point does not  seem to be forthcoming so it remains as the mummified body, destroyed on the touch.

People with physical mobilities or neurological mobilities beyond the spectrum that is supposed to be normative, are both at risk of stumbling on and on in this search for a sound bearing, but are also  in a position where then many reorientations in their swaying bodily and perceptual fields, throws up countless images and these kaleidoscopic flares of light and colour, shape and sound that are a result of physical turbulence and the need to constantly reset the balance, can become a way to practise remaining very alert within this stream of becoming. because there is no possibility of halting it and it will anyway keep coming, there is the possibility of transcribing it onto the realm of a background context; the wider orbit in which the incessant flapping of wings of the circling bird comes and goes.  The very changes in perceptual and body spectrum's of engagement, creates a relativity in which turbulence is naturally the state in which everything comes and goes. Without that turbulence there would be no way of noticing the itinerant nature of these moments. There is a feeling then that people whose bodies and neurology's are not anyway aiming for  an outside map of stream-lined repetition, are drawn by necessity to rely on and act on the emerging situation that presents itself.  (Perhaps we all anyway are part of this contingency though some more than others may strategise that maps actually work).

We ourselves are nothing but the meeting into this presentation- or the turning up for an event however fragile, lurching or upside down this may seem when given as an account from an outside perspective. But really there is no valid second-order perspective. We are either in it and getting on with it or we are nowhere to be seen.

Stairway

I have began working in a new place with very young children who are said to have communication difficulties. I climb many many stairs with them from the ground floor level up into the skies where the metallic staircase actually flips to the outside of the building and becomes nothing much more than a slightly more ornate fire escape with railings and wooden slats to stop either therapist or child from taking a sky-dive.  There are added elements apart from the sheer excess of energy for very tiny bodies who at some point either earlier or later I will usually need to hoist  into my arms and make the final laps as one condensed body hip to hip. There are the elements of rain, sunshine, wind and the pervading sounds of the voices and traffic from way down below along the busy Euston Rd. The children begin to brighten and even their body mass becomes lighter and more buoyont on about the third lap of landings. They sense the spaciousness of unconstrained air that plays freely over their skin and the light becomes a tactile stroking of faint warmth in the early Autumn. The wind pushes us gently from behind or creates a buffer through which we plough forward by descending our weight in the lower body and pressing into the rivetted and patterned metal steps  immersing ourselves more only to be levitated out with chest widening. But as fatigue sets in this bounce outwards becomes saturated like wet cloth and each step seems to pull us back down and into its level surface as if we might slip through it. The rain is the best, dropping lightly like a mist or in heavy globules from high up above us. It invigorates and we lean into it madly tasting it through our pores and through open mouth. Eyes and ears are also more widely open and the many reflectivee surfaces of windows, metallic vents and chimneys draws the child upwards and outwards until they are tasting the view and smilingly sounding out this circulation of space. Finally we get to the therapy room, a converted office space..and it is nearly time to go down.

After Sei-ki

Scotland and the boy in London

I go down the track. There are some new houses built. It seems there is no way through. Then I notice something familiar; the shape of the garden on the edge of a non-descript bungalow. It is filled now with rubble, pieces of wood and the part-disassembled contents of the bungalow’s furnishings. It’s a clue. And I know to hook around this protrusion- then to follow the green fence up to the gate at the foot of the woods. The path seems endlessly long and I keep wondering if I am already there on each new refraction of light in a puddle or an un-drained swamp. But no. This is not what I am heading for. With no map there is nothing definite to aim for. Nevertheless I am there and my chest expands at this lake covered over with the fur of living grass. I am at the foot of the mountain and over at the far end is the broken tree. Then I know that the stream trickles on up to the double stone, parted to reveal a slit of light through which I always pass through. It is windy. I stay at the far side making it onto the thick moss that filters the water and is dry on top. I sit down facing the small green tree that is sprouting up from the middle of the lake where earth has accumulated and the water is stilled. I can hear the wind. It does not reach me in the valley but it rushes above.

_______

Later, I am back at the school. I am in London on the edge of Walthamstow marshes at this tiny make-shift Special Needs School in a room that would have been an outhouse tagged on the edge of the 70’s playground that was here before it.

The boy is on the red mat.  I have just lifted him onto the mat from the other room where I began working with him through the drowsiness of half-sleep.  He relaxed and breathed deeply- a breath that ripples out unwinding his limbs and softening his lips and throat. Now in his raised consciousness he taughtens. But not too much. I hold his body close to mine and bend down with him to the mat then come back up to sitting. He remains lying on the mat.

His stomach muscles flex and he tries to pass wind or pass a stool. It is hard and blocked and he writhes with the effort. His lower back flexes off the mat and he stuffs his right fist deep into his mouth stifling a gargle as if plugging himself. My hands land on his abdomen then separate out so that one is on his upper chest near to his left shoulder and neck. The treatment begins and I breathe into the contact expiring and then coming off as I breathe in through my nose. His breathing is erratic. Sometimes it correlates sometimes it falls out of sync. My eyes observe his face and I work with the pads of my finger tips on his neck. At first my hands feel separate from one another but soon they begin to work as one, made coherent by the pattern of this living boy at the centre and my own life in that same centre. Out of disturbance a great joy seems to well up. I notice it in the flicker-like shadows and light crossing the boys face rapid and unstoppable as his attention reflects the patterns of on-off pulsar contact over his body.

The texture of this enquiry comes through not in relative distance but in variable depths that are reconfiguring on and off of one another. There is always this time-frame that hold sameness and variation in a meaningful account.. Through this duration there is an understanding of presence- a presence that is not an image- a snap-shot- but a gradual development through complexity and sometimes through contradiction. So that the writhing and spasmic end ligaments of creased legs and fisted hands is altogether smooth and elongated as an idea of contact that is taking place at the same time.

Gradually this idea like a wave ripples deep below the surface eruption and, not through inhibition but through setting up a counter-flow, it begins to account for a different feeling. This is literally a felt sensation and it occurs through my body and his simultaneously at certain points where a ripple drifts out form centre to extremity, then back in again.

This completion of a circle is so swift encompassing not only two bodies but a wider sense of the room, the class-rooms adjoining and the park and marshes, streets and traffic beyond that- that it is not useful to give a location- a start and a finish. It is a distributed exchange back and forth in awareness that is not only in human life but courses through all life. This exchange is reflectively whole. The joy is in the double loop of movement and pause. It is an embrace come full circle. A simple smile that is there and then dissipated beyond the limits of any single face. Yet the situation of the boy- his historical bearing is always in view; the mother’s shame of his condition. The bereftment; a denial of contact as a physical merging that can then lead to full separation.
But there is the idea of that contact that can be emoted or welcomed and that wells up out of its physical equivalent in considered contact. The mother is always already there deep in the boy triggered through touch.

Just them the no-contact of this historical boy and the contact of a deeper recognition play out simultaneously.This creates great empathy not only between me and the boy but in relation to the boy and the situation of his life and of life on general. There is soft crying in the room next door, rhythmic and insistent, low and sorrowful. I look up while continuing with my hand contact and the boy pauses and makes space in his breathing to include that sound at just the same moment. As one we notice this together, embrace it and make a wider contact.

I see this freedom in generosity shining out behind the cracked and reddened eye-lids opf this child. His blue eyes become deep, calm and unending. They capture light and send it back through then radiate it out again. His fist slips out of his mouth and unfolds.

Everything is in dynamic relation to everything else questioning and adapting back and forth in relays that begin to quietly whisper to one another. The muscle groups, the breath, the sinews and even the spittle and bowel movements begin to correspond and play off one another. I see the blotchiness of the child’s face visibly clear. I feel my heart opening and as his mouth frees up and begins to burble and make sounds that rise up as deep guttural throat sounds I am magnetically transported into this realm of sound as well and I begin to hum and sing. His voice becomes stronger, louder, more insistent. His fingers play out entwined in my fingers. His grip grows confident and explorative. I stroke his forefinger and his abdomen settles like water disappearing down a plug-hole. His face follows this enquiry in the creases at the edge of his eyes and in his moving lips. Now the sounding comes loud and clear. There is anguish, outrage, discomfort, life-force, joy and engagement in his voice. It plays out in tandem with the rumbling of his belly.

Something shifts abruptly- very slight like a minute tilt- then repositions.  The alignment from head through to feet is activated and drawn through the sacrum and lower abdomen that are alive and engaged as one.

I remain with the boy even when my hands are no longer touching his body.  The engagement continues to create a very slight tension like a low level buzz. We breathe as one through an atmosphere which gradually melts back into the ground. We separate.

The session ends.

I address him by his name.

_____

* This was written after the last Seiki workshop in Scotland March 2012 with Kishi and Kyoko.
Since this time Kishi has become critically ill. He will never teach again though at the time of writing I didn't know this.

I continue to work with this child.

(Added Oct 2012)

Seiki is in the interstices.

 ........


Seiki is the particualar kind of body-work that Akinobu Kishi has develooped out of Shiatsu. It works with two way  heart to heart touch and is adaptive in the moment linking closely to the rhythm of breathing and attentive to right timing and right distance known in Japanese as Ma-ai.

It has greatly affected the way I treat people and my understanding of how to be with others in general. I think it applies to much more than just touch treatments. It is the basis of how I work to create living adaptive environments with children with complex needs. Without this approach, I would not have come to understand the non-verbal dialogue of such children as being so rich and vast.

This piece was written in 2010 after returning from a workshop in Scotland. It  is also an entry in the recent book Se-Ki, Life in Resonance, by Akinobu Kishi and Alice Whieldon, Singing Dragon where students give accounts of Seiki in their own words. I have been following Seiki since 2004.

______

Seiki is in the Interstices:

It is in the gap between what we come up against and that which melts away on the touch.

It is cutting meat when the timing makes the flesh part on the slightest of touches. The knife does not come down hard. It does not push. It glides. 

It is the heat between the hands in Gyoki. The hands come together. Sweat forms in the fold. It expands and dissipates into the graininess of the atmosphere. This is environment. A canopy that holds together as one. A body connection that becomes a movement unfolding from a hidden point into a bearing. 

It is automatic like a catapult. A spontaneous evolution like a leaf unfurling. This time of when to go and the going with it in a total commitment brings responsibility. It brings two- directional response. It leads to change. Because a certain phase in the way things are- a situation that one is in- the ripple of the flesh; it bunching up and slipping away again, has been noticed.

The eyes follow through from the alignment of the body that moves as one like a single snake vertebrae- from sacrum to occiput- through the pores of the skin opening out-

The smell, the breath- the small muscular groupings- the clenching of the anus- the Hara, the throat, the valves of the heart, the lung, tendons in the knees, the muscle calves, the ankle and wrist tendons, the scapula jointing. All are orifices that open and close as a gage to a wider association.

They work in conjunction with one another. They are echoes of one another. A voicing. 

In that way we also course and filter though one another- through a reverberation of tendencies that work like a pump. The on-off of contact is this. It is Gyoko or breathing between the hands. Building up the heat of proximity in the out-breath then allowing it to unfurl in the off touch; the in-breath.

The intervals. Seiki lives in these intervals creating a space of possibility. The space between cells.

To feel a constraint, go with it into its wringing turn like a spring tightening. To go with the disease or aggravation until at its extremity the re-wind catches in.

This is automatic release when the body moves and the conscious human association follow. This is thought-tendencies through and through with feeling response at every minute level of interest.

There is an intermingling and a conjoint intelligence which comes through. A deep compassion lasting.

There is a gathering and spreading simultaneously. A filtering system that nourishes every cell as each turns and jostles around another. The body breaks and is re-made. Not only once in a single trauma and cure but endlessly.

Life and death meet in the moment. In this gap is every different human possibility. A story is told.

Tilt

Malki's Enquiry

 ..........


With Malki who is blind there is this slow affinity like bleeding and absorbing into forms and objects. This is because there is no distance of aperception where one collates different viewpoints with the occular eye and scratches them together into three-dimesional wholeness. Rather that wholeness is given from the first encounter; lent into and tested for give, bounce, collapse that is only ever known according to discrete involvements that build up in the layers of volume as ones body impacts against another volume. It is a practice of resonance or chiming together whilst pulling back in disonance at the same time- like a push-me-pull-you set of running tensions and give-way points that pulsate in the object, in the body, through various sets of accomodations and counter intuitive reversals. There is a definite withdrawal, yes, but also a familiarity that is durational- about resting in the embrace of this all-encompasing enfoldment and then leaning  in more or less, breathing in and out more or less andconstricting/expanding more or less. These are not absolutes- not polar opposites but are the pump of enquiry that is in the girl and the objects that she sets in motion as they set her in motion in the inward and outward enfoldment and through their morphed involvement.

This manner of enquiry gives to Malki an attitude of softness that is like a pervading forwarding through tiny manoevres of shufflement and re-organisation. Gradual almost imperceptable intensifications of pressure and than sudden distilations at various interfaces- opens up a depth that is no more dealing at the contour of surface visual outlines but in the the actual fibre and knit of the object and body as it plays with coherance and unravelling- a constant wind-unwind in which air and object permeate. It's the intervals between the knitted texture that is being performed- not their movement in space as discrete objects surrounded by absenses but in the way they are drummed, flicked and burrowed into in a gradual softening and hardening that is known as ease.

Malki is now sophisticated enough in her navigation as a 9 year old girl that she does not need to use just her hands outstretched before her as she crawls over the floor surface to bang and tap out the existance of what lies before her. This may indeed be an initial rough guide- but then she hones in on these depths- moves into their inner labrynth - refines her testing by easing her body around the hard cushions, the carpettd swing, the drum lying on its side. She is lingering longer- residing in the affectivity of these surfaces that are now acting  through their very own withdrawal, into volumes thta also meet her withdrawal. These are volummes that her body synchronises with and so she takes a ride tummy down on the swing, than flips off at a certain speed using the volition  and spin of this abrupt speed cauterization to fall on to her knees, then lean back intot he L shaped cushion that she had tapped into existance earlier in her initial rough draught. She enfolds back into its negative shape, then lets her body pour over the right-angle extension and simply adds one degree at a time, increasing pressure in her tipping fall that acts not like pressure at all but more like an intensified presencing that jams together running out all sense of seperation until at a very precise moment the cataclysmic buckling of the cushion fibre sqaushes in upon itself and she falls into the folds of its own collapse. This altered shape is only known, felt, experienced because her body takes a ride into the moment where the volume resistence gives way and her body too gives way into this partial collapse.Her practice is to be able to work the moment of that collapse and so stay completely present and alert within this shift.

So Malki is learning to take a ride into the depths of a volume's undoing. This is never just the decimation or resistance of an object but is always necessarily twinned with her own body decimation and resistance.

Movement and rest is composed through  this kind of slow motion embrace into the pulverisation of forms.
Malki smiles at these moments of optimal coherance thresholds that then give way in tthe impossible resistance and torsion of a stretched or provoked encounter, that  then suddenly, dramatically buckles. This is the event- Similar to the quantuum idea of an Event Horizen where - as if going over the brink of a waterfall, one reaches the point of no-return. All the laws and norms alter in this area of pulverised meshing.

There is another practice that Malki is mastering- related to this waterful analogy. She is learning a technique of jetting out very fine vapours of spit between the gaps in her teeth that she then catches on her fingers as if it were an alien substance- not of her at all. In a sense this is correct for she has mastered a way of transforming her inside spit into this fine spun web that almost lingers in the air, suspended and hovering until she discovers it anew as if for the first time.

Small indications

 ........


There are small indications not actually of themselves but of what they are not. Like a lull after pushing into an object when the body falls back and feels lighter- more aerated somehow. As if the gaps between the cells had grown and the space between bodies and surfaces creates a thin layer beyond touch like the jets of air of a vacuum cleaner that allow it to glide so smoothely. The gravitational weights of giving into something- of merging and collapsing into mass are held minutely apart from this sure tendency and there is this moment of suspense. That's when the body begins to collect and seperate in a kind of meshing of voluume and levity. Posture is this reverberation between two sets of tendencies colliding and bouncing back through one another.

Working with a boy with Cerebral Palsy today it was like that. I did not have a plan of what to do- actually felt abit ill and groggy in myself so that any momentum or attitude of achievement in this or that respect could  not be imposed from my side because I literally didn't have it in me. But in that slight ineptitude as a therapist, there was this sense of taking a ride with these small indications, without being able to jump ahead to the end of the equation and realise a useful outcome in the jointings of bone and the correct usage of muscle ligaments.

Unstead there was this leaking consciousness where everything done was only done in the matter of factness of what it was and a following of where that led to without necessarily being able to see it coming or even stop it coming.

The boy is sitting on the floor pushing a swing that is hung from the ceiling. Each time he pushes, his body is stabilized, jammed between the natural leverage of this move before the swing parts company and launches out on its own. In the split second before its return something strange happens. The boy gains a buyouncy and I see his body literally swell to fill out into this aerated mass. What this means for him- between the pushing and the waiting, is uprightness. But this has nothing to do with  the deliberate learning of posture- of arduously mastering the ability to sit up straight and correct the head in relation to the cocyxic etc.. It is just this hairs breadth between the pushing and the return- known in the timed release of the swing that than knocks back at the boy as the direct reflection to his push- a push made tangible in its return thta each time jolts him slightly.

I feel sure that the problem of standing, of walking- of getting to grips with gravity and the weight of ones body in relation to that gravity can only be known in the reflective mirror of this buyouncy. The black-hole or anti-matter is never seen or known directly- but only through the circling planets and their various orbits around this ommission, like the swing bouncing on and off the body of the boy. The body can only be known in the buyouncy or timed suspension through which it experiences posture. Otherwise we would be consummed by our own heavinness or simply fly apart- as at times is the case.

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Dream Objects- Workshop

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/02/2012
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
 
Location  School of Ideas, 57 Fetherstone Rd, Islington, EC1Y Near Old St Tube


Workshop Facilitator: Ruth Solomon

DREAM OBJECTS:  A Collective Composition done in an Afternoon.

We will use the moveable objects around us to create a design sculpture on the floor.
This will be a turn-taking exercise that unfolds at its own pace much as a game of dominoes does – only on a much larger scale.

This is an interesting excercise in learning to not think too far ahead; Simply place an object in a way that pleases you and see how the next person adds to this.

In this project we will work together to create a composition that is not designed to last forever.
Unlike many learning forums that rely on verbal speed, this one will rely on spatial skills and the art of right timing.

It is open to anyone.

As far as possible the project will be done without speaking.

schoolofideas.org.uk

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The problem is a good thing to get into

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The problem.The problem of the defunct body. Of the wandering attention, the wandering body. The limbs that struggle to be still. The wavering arms and the convulsing spine. The problem. The problem of inattention, of distractiion and a widening series of articulations, half-met and half stacked to one side. The problem of enunciation that chews sounds like pebbles and sucks them into flavours that are agreeable or not. The touch that jolts away and realigns slightly to the left or right, running up alongside a movement and breaking off here and there in a surprise stuccato that works off the pattern that is there- the schedules and programs of a  school with its curriculum and statement recipes of one or two doses a day that is Government backed and so authenticated as correct remediation for this or that problem. Is this a cure or a way of dealing with somthing that cannot be dealt with in a standard classroom but needs more of a one to one approach?

None of this actually matters. The child is just there. And attends to surfaces of connection or not. These may describe patterns that carry themselves forward, reinstegate a move meant as a request or an attack or a therapy of sorts but never actually becoming any of these in the moment in which it occurs. And as it occurs it is changing, being invigorated into an angle, a tangent, a tilt that is a lever off from the main concern- with limited or gandiouse intentions, benefits and authenticity depending on how the case is argued.

The child can't be helped in that way. Because the child is already o.k.- can only be o.k according to a situation of adaptations not according to a bench-mark of norms but in and of themselves as a line drawing itself out of every single aggravation and/or softening- of all the depth readings- the moments of absorbtion and bounce through which action and reaction are melded before they become either of these. In Aikido, the attacker comes at you dead straight seeing you as a target in order to deal the blow. The aikido move is not a technique but an absorbtion and proliferation of this move into a wider conjoined moving where the blow and defense dance into a raising up, turning around an invisible point that is an axis with no extention and then refolding back on itself to create the lever and the downward plunge. Nothing in the original move could have notified this result- which the attacker would never have believed in had it not actually taken place. Yet  in terms of expansion, torsion, constraint, levity and gravity there is absolutely nothing that is contrary to the original move. It has simply been joined, re-ignited into a unity that is a larger pattern than the solitary command of abrupt confrontation. There is no mis-understanding of intent. There is just a lack of interest in focusing according to the limited conflict in which the movement first sets out its terms. In a sense it is the movement itself that has been freed- freed from a limiting and totalising regime in which "This means That" and must be responded to according to the dialogic anti-part of an equation that already maps out the events and the characters of violence and subjugation; of command and rebellion; of authority and individual repression.

But the body is teeming with possibilites on the verge of discovery that only exist in this enfoldment of practices where one directive, rather than being faced squarely and understood or received for what it is, is tagged like running alongside a moving train than leaning out and letting the the anti-gravity carry the body upwards. It is an effortless borrowing of volition to take a ride and use the pivotel point between any meeting in orderto use momentunm and sudden stoppage to create real interest. Then there is something really occuring right at the heart of the problem that is apt for the occasion.

Special needs children are profoundly skilled in these apt moments where collisions melt and become something else in the atmosphere and deeper feelings that these energies procur.

Clinic

                                                          

I knock on the iron door. My knuckle bounces off the cold surface sending the sound back into the cutting air. I wrap my coat sleeve around my knuckle and I bang it again, thud, thud, thud, trapping the sound at the point of contact, muffling it into place like squeezing a mouse against a wall not to kill it just to keep it there. The thud becomes a boom echoing inside.

Then a sound like someone falling downstairs. The metal door cranks open- a slit- then widens and I enter. I climb the stairs. There are vases of dead flowers on the table. People like shadows glowing in the half light to slowly reveal aspects of colour; the red sleeve of a jumper, a knitted blue and white hat, fingerless navy mittens, a yellow shoulder of a kaftan. They are moving around a blue flame which is intermittently covered and revealed by cooking vessels. There are utensils, crockery, uncut vegetables such as turnips, leaks and potatoes in a large cardboard box. There are packets of unopened sushi all in a row and the lingering smell of bananas slowly melting beneath their pulverising skin.

The tap in the corner is dripping into a puddle of water in a bowl. Cooking utensils cover the grey office carpet around this puddle that is bouncing off the dim light from the window.

At the other end of the room a man is having his hair cut. He has grey hair that curls around his neck and a placid face and he is sitting upright on a hard backed chair with a bib over his chest tied at the back of his neck. The whirr of the electric shaver is busy at the back of his head where a small young woman is guiding it like a miniature lawn mower.

I am ushered into the side room. There is ash on the carpet and rows of packets of meat on the window sill where a crack of air gets in because the heavy sill has been wedged open with a brick. My stomach turns. There is no smell because the meat- large wedges of red and brown the size of small loaves, is smell-less in the vacuum packed plastic that seals it from all contact. Nevertheless my stomach leaps and I think I am going to throw up.

I back out and say to the first person I see,

“Please can you remove the meat on the window sill in that room”

Someone comes in and the meat is taken out.

I sweep the floor with a broom while a man puts up a cloth over the inner glass partition of this office cubicle. He stands on a chair and dislodges the white ceiling slates one at a time in order to tuck the cloth into the gap and then let the slate fall back into place. Soon the room is self-contained- a vacuumed space in this wider building.

I look out the window and see office workers working in an adjacent building glancing up and down back at their fingers on the touch-pad.  Another man, maybe an architect is standing over a map spread out on a low table. His finger is pointing to one place on the paper and his whole body is leaning too, over in that direction.

I unroll the mat and put it in the middle of the room, then take out the halogen heater from my bag and plug it in. Its two elements glow orange.

A woman comes in with a crooked neck. She has fallen down a flight of stairs whilst carrying a sofa up to the top of the building. She limps in and lies down.

Another body between others

MALKI: Enquiries

She taps her teeth with her fingers and thumb. Patterns of sound are coming from deep within the chambers of her skull. The echo machine of bracketed panels criss-crossing seam-lines that once were floating free like arctic rafts then in the force of their meeting buckled to form two concaves riveted as one are now her skull.

In this vault, sea sounds rise in a swirl of brain matter. The music persists in the emptiness pocketed everywhere. The child draws on the forensic grittiness of her distant form playing it like a Jews harp, her skull the amplifier though which she hears back emissions doubling and redoubling into one another because this tapping never stops. No sooner is one beat fading than another is meeting this ghost chiming in sympathy until what is lost is built up on the memory of a dying sound. Past and future play back and forth until this syncopated mismatch reaches deep inside the chamber of her head.

She is smiling the kind of smile of someone digging at a discovery that was always there. This form-object clasped in her living body is the first object of her composure. She has not touched the snacks placed before her on the table, her Learning Assistant sitting earnestly watching first the dish than the eyes of this small child whose optical vision was always missing. The reverb box of her skull is expert at holding together the small calculated melting gestures of her tapping motion, amplifying and distorting them into waves.

From the outside it looks like self absorption. But it is not the self but the object-instrument glancing back at a once remove in this practice of enquiry. The sounding sinks before it rises, invisible to the ears at any distance away from this skull. The reverb of the amplifier comes face to face so exactly as to cancel out all audible traces. Only the wetness of the brain acts as an interference pattern that dampens as it bears witness to a composition in which it is an accomplice.

For the children sitting across the table it is quite inaudible. For the Learning Assistant close at hand it is also inaccessible. Even the one sitting side by side to the child brushing shoulders with her, cannot get inside. This is not because there is an interior so immaculate as to cast all others away but because there is an object in there with practical implications for how it conveys the echo, distortion and buzz of its own provocative throes.

To be included in the band one would need to be placed in the middle of the milieu whether that meant straddling millimetres, miles, countries or worlds. Scale is not the issue here but rather how to enter into a unified distortion at the heart of equanimity. Human enquiry begins at the level of object performance. It is of a practical nature nothing more.

The child breaks in two to provoke the object as an alien deep within her registered form. This dance of the human and the non-human must play itself through. Whenever ripped from its game, the social will always be an empty gesture; something learnt by rote to please others. This social is so highly prized that more and more surfaces are ripped up on the way to some missing trump card that is never there because it doesn't persist independently in humans. There are surfaces running all the way through in the very texture of this ecological world so that forms only ever converge out of these junctions that have crushed or folded together over millennia. The rapid sound-waves that beat in upon one another relentlessly; a distant hum that is not a voice but is the atmosphere arching back and bellowing over and over upon itself in order to lean forwards a fraction. Actions are not intentional-they are insertions into a multiplex- a sudden seizure or downward emphasis in a complexity so dense that often the mark is made through omission not addition. That frees up a surge that rides the occasion as any opportunistic object would in the current of a strong enough wind.

All that may be spoken; all that is laughed about or cried about- the silence through

the music that is not really silence but is crowding in on us; the high frequency interference patterns of the big bang coming across the air-waves as static that keeps coming, crossing lifetimes over the coming and going of countless forms that will never meet. Do we ride it or not? That is the choice- not what we want to do or who is included in the doing because it is already happening anyway.

Later when she is swimming across the dry floor speckled with cushions and other tilting surfaces, Malki meets the dry skin of a drum. She usually rejects all moveable objects that disturb her passage, throwing them to either side after a quick examination. The expanse of dry stretched skin held taught over the bulk of a wooden frame extending still in the shape of a tree acts like a surface not a thing. It beckons her. With the slightest of contact it begins to below out mournful deep and permanent tones that resonate both in the body of the drum and within the echo chamber of her skull.  Between dry skin and living hand it arrests her attention. The sudden contact reverberates in each added beat the faster her aversion. It jumps out so suddenly almost by mistake into the space between walls and buildings and objects in which it is audible to other people too.

The sound feeds into her alien object practice where each contact interrupts and negates each other. The beats pop out as a delicate weave they can not observe because they are part of it. Each stress is a barrier that is felt in sudden stoppage so abrupt that it bounces out almost as shock into a pattern it was not expecting to meet. That is the signature of the blind whose physical passage is experienced as acoustic feedback.

Forensic objects are buried at the heart of living forms. They are drummed into audible exchange; a human translation within a deeper atmosphere. Malki’s music pre-exists in non-social, non-communicative and non-audible practices between the object aspects and the human aspects that she is.  She plays the drums like a professional with no former contact, no former inclination towards such objects only because the resonance of a chance encounter chimes at the right interval with the echo chambers of her skull. The music is built upon the still living remnants of other practices that are assessed by many care professionals to be obsolete, inappropriate and without use but out of which this sound draws.  The sound came when the practice became audible to others. For the first time other people could apprehend Malki’a music making from the inside. They could not get inside her skull but the skull as a resonator could be expanded as a drum, as the acoustics in a room and so could finally reach their auditory channels that could resonate in sympathy too.

Objects buried deep within human practices deep within human bodies are the non-human forefathers; the hidden teachers of practices later claimed as the sole domain of human culture, of ceremonial exchange.

This has wide implications for the treatment and teaching of children with sensory or neurological differences that seem to be “In a world of their own” caught up in “Special Interests” that detract them from social participation. Rather than ruling these Special Interests out or trying to de-incentivise children from such behaviours, these enquiries could be paramount to what it means to be human- where objects are in valid partnerships with humans and are actually embedded deep within our composition like insoluble metals or fools gold. They are equals. Just as there is no absolute order or lineage that set apart dryness from wetness so skull as an object and Brain as liquid must be reconsidered as a unit. From the ecological to the cultural this applies. Things and what is done with things becomes of utmost significance in reconfiguring responsiveness as an alignment that does not cordon off any special category that either belongs or does not belong in this mesh of cross-currents. Nothing blocks this. Nothing is too hard or too soft. There is no cement door- no inside or outside. The mesh is simply re-translated according to every level of contact.

Some say there must be more to it than this, this constant mixing and separation of objects. Maybe not, but this is not a materialistic dead-end or the end of thought. Awareness always does exceed a limited definition of the human as a social and cognitive set of skills played out on objects as mere conveniences. There are some things that come before any idea of grasping or enveloping in this sense because they exist where surfaces come into contact with one another as equals. This encounter then builds into certain reverberations and significances that at some levels are called sentient and others are called non-sentient. But there is a meshing far more subtle than we could perhaps ever imagine. Try to unravel it and we literally come apart.