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.