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.