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.