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.