Fire-fly

Work in the limit of where you are. For what else can you do? That means if you are in a perceptual straight- jacket try it out for size. This is a serious proposition. It's only in the flat-lands of seemingly dead-end dimensions and in the very act of describing these borderlands and in the tiny dotted and lined details of this and that - however parochial and limited they may seem- that there will be a flip-out as the end-pieces of these details accumulate and begin to hum and buzz of their own accord. This is the Tuning and makes a flat piece of paper or a repeated mantra that seems to be going nowhere; a nursery rhyme with just two bars- suddenly somersault. Because the given ingredients can never be known in full as simply a descriptive representation of some kind of inertia or pathological memory loss. And in the very act of this description or basic accountancy, the buzz of the pieces- as if they were tiny little animals with a life of their own who somehow knew how to congregate without anybody having told them how- will begin to hum and manoeuvre, talk and exchange possible positions in relation to one another. This is like a kind of over-tone that is nowhere in the original piece and could never be found if one by one these elements were dusted off and inspected however long that took or carefully that was done. Because it is a combination that lives in and of the moment in the speed reading and resonant flashes and sparks of a certain frissure that vibrates and shimmers with no will or intent that could be summed up under one organism but simply as the ultimate landing point in a series of minute disruptions and exchanges- of emptying out here and filling in there.

There is  a vacuum surge in which suddenly a dead weight- a broken limb or eruptive gut or strained ankle surges into movement and momentum and is set free within a wider circulation as if a piece of dead wood caught in a gutter pipe is suddenly released. One could say that all representation is necessarily flat and one dimensional. But something gives and something is received there and then on the dry uninspiring paper- or in the bars of notes that are code-able one by one but that create some kind of backwash surge where they drift up the coast-line as if by an attraction that is nowhere given. The luminosity of colour combinations have the same affect so that the isolation of hues can suddenly take it no longer and buzz into another dimension where they rinse through one another being neither this nor that. This is the realm of atmosphere. It is environmental and it is lived here and now in the activities that rinse through neurological thresholds brimming to a break-point and on the verge of collapse, somehow furthering through the body and through the air particles; into reaching and affecting the skin of others, drifting on currents into the pathway of and through the respondent flow of other organisms, rocks and plant-life. And there are tables and chairs too. Biros and drums, sunglasses and depleted hand-bags. Everything is there just as it is but nothing is a given.

Pieces in a stage set to be primed into motion- into imaginative excess on the briefest of touches where there is this sustained attention . And so the moment of transformation is given but somehow extended indefinitely having never reached a conclusion known by itself in advance. And time here is collapsed - past and present streaming in myriad channels into the minutiae of affect. The spin comes out of that; a driving downwards through gravitational pull and a stoppage as cartilage and bone, sinew and muscle, blood and breath heave and practically give out jamming and crunching together only to wait; to have the stamina- the blind-faith patience- that there will be this turn around  right on the verge of death- of inertia or collapse. And whether that occurs here in this body or another, there is a spinning back round and the figure leaps free out of its own inhibition and foreclosure, into a dimension hovering briefly like a fire-fly over the paper- practically a smell-  more a breeze than a locatable object.

Coming together or coming apart?

In the intervals there's a hesitancy that is in the air. Space unmarked is monotonous and in the end we blank it out. Perhaps the only way to rest in it is through the rips and tears, the thrusts and delays. How do we read speed and see it as a coalescence or a gathering of form? When do the pieces come together as a person recognisable as such? Or a flower, a building, a tent or a field? There's a permeation through one to another and the wider the intervals before any kind of resolution into what we are facing or what exactly a face is, the more charged is this frissure of meshing strands. Perhaps the resolution is a continual state of abeyance; holding things apart in order to attune to a song that is simply a passing breeze caught  through the branches of a tree.

The air is nothing but this buzz of tendencies that sometimes come together and sometimes seem to dissipate into the implicit feelers that are probing beyond their seeming reach and likewise are wrapped around and spun out like a candy-floss with no beginning or end. Maybe then it is more to do with itinerant use that is always on the move- and is somehow opportunistically grabbed into a certain kind of binding as it is binding something else itself. That would be a Deleuzian attitude with the Flower-Bee being a system stretched out amidst wasteland, back gardens and highway verges never known in any single object or location. The view is always necessarily limited- locked in and winking half shut an exposure that would be blinding and far beyond the perceptual currents that animate sensation into the events that we come to know and that we therefore become. But perception is always good enough - a haphazard assemblage that is apt in that moment in that way. Perhaps that is what Gibson is saying about Prehension.

I`d like to develop this dissipated- perhaps shattered- view as a way of addressing some of the behaviours and rituals of people who may in a more limited socially functional bias be seen to be doing non-sensical or inappropriate acts. How can reviewing the speed of approach and delay affect the way we perceive a jerk, a spasm or a breaking off of immediate contact. How can opening up the wider sensual and perceptual affective field contextualise these movements and alow for more variations of energetic occurances and their associative meanings?

How can playing with speeds begin to bring Autistic people into the frameworks of symbolic resonance which are partial, make-do and random and for this reason are common enough to be treated as cheap currency to be played with and then discarded again in the wider run of things in which there is this endless meshing and reconfiguration of involvements in even the simplest or most mundane of circumstances; such as making a cup of tea. This could break the value of obsession as a repeated narrow tract and let it run into a wider scope in which it is an imaginary "Take" on a theme played out specifically in that way at that time; with its own colour, consistency and flavour that in a sense can "Speak back" to the user.

Language then is not emitted out of the mouth of a comprehensive autonomous Subject with a motive in mind as opposed to the pathological repetition of an unchanging obsession. Rather it is an imaginary play of aggregate elements that come together in a certain way and throw up physical sensations, dissipated perceptual fields and associative flavours that call it into being as this or that kind of enactment. It is the setting of a stage that opens out into the imaginary and that creates charged image-words. The symbolic nature of this domain comes bit by bit through repetition and change to be recognised for what it is; itinerant and improvised collectivities bound together momentarily out of a wider field than could ever be subjectively and consciously grasped at that moment. There is a freedom in letting habitual constraints play out and become affected by the field in which they are a part- as an interdependency or co-emergence that cognitively we are never fully aware of and where a rational over-view is impossible.

In this sense rather than trying to air-brush away unwanted behaviour and thoughts, keep them exactly as they are but with the possibility that gradually over time- out of a series of seemingly identical images and gestures, the variations in nuance can be recognised so that the imaginary frame- that is too wide and too disparate to comprehend- starts to be acknowledged; even through the impossibility of actually taking hold of it as something that could be grasped or percieved in the ordinary sense.

This of course draws on Buddhist teaching, particularly Dzogchen and Mayahana.
It is a similar process to meditation that then throws up contemplation.
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Here than is the beginnings of an idea- that language like perception is always nested in a far wider field than could be directly grasped through language or perception. It can in this sense never talk about itself. But it can throw out multiple reflections as affective momentary states as they are actually happening. These always operate throug the rhythmic and spatial intervals of their occurance- in other words in "real-time". This is their pacing. Out of this pacing the conditiions of a specific imagistic-word play can be enacted and reflected on. But it is only in the gap between the image and the word- joined at a more basic level through luminosity and sound that a poetic meaning is suddenly distilled. This is a jump in scales and is always non-logical and does not follow temperal or spacial rules.

All later analysis must draw out of the richness of these distilled word-images that are deeper and more yielding than the word analysis they will eventually throw up.

Dyslexia can be addressed by moving through these rich poetic image-sound-environment-word domains as a battery-charger for more linear word narratives. These narratives- such as the one I am now writing- will only come about after a gestation period where this rich texture- like a kind of nutrient or compost- begins to filter and settle down through the kinaesthethic and visceral body-perception of the person who will then find themselves in the position of or in the line of the relevant words for the occasion. These will almost overflow or spill out since the conditions for their arrival have been carefully tended to.

Tune

Integration is not an immediate thing. There is a slur- a slight incongruity- a gap that opens up between  any alignment in address. This is useful. Because it buzzes and ticks in the vibration of the gap. The mismatch is an incognito abatement. Something that is shifting even as it appears still and is held in this nudging gesture of abeyance swivelling towards a meeting that is only on passing met. It's like trying to open a safe by switching one way and then another- a fraction here and a fraction in reverse as the clicks of alignment bring one into a sense of getting hotter or getting colder by minute degrees.

In the address of one person to another this is never completely there. It is not completable because that would lock out the dynamic co-adjustments out of which contact or the idea of contact is sought and lost, lost and found over and over in a piecemeal fashion. For there can be no conglomeration into that appearance for that would then melt into everything with no location or it would fix into a smaller and smaller point of intensification and disappear internally.

Between dissipation and solidification there is the idea of  a contact running through every mismatch and chance brush that can never be known or planned in advance. It is a choreography with no written score. A tuning into a resonance that at one moment is compelling and at  perhaps the very same moment is unbearable- deafening.

What does it mean to hear- to turn and orientate one' own emissions into the atmospheric sound waves that reach towards the sense of where one is and then bounce off, converted and revitalised by this internalisation-externalisation which is all as one. The giddying sway of our bodies along a swaying axis that is reset against an uneven ground is the same as our gestures towards one another and is where body-environment swims in the same medium as both all-of-apiece and as a relatively separate location out of which sounds, gestures and movements topple endlessly. In this busy-nes where there is a loose attention to a point of resonance where tones or vibrations not actually generated in the original emissions are somehow set free into the to and fro of grasp and letting go there is this moving in the line of a synchronicity whereby at a certain point all extremes merge and throw out reflective tangents of one another. And they are cancelled back down to nought and in the silence of this immediate but instantaneously vanishing point there is a a kind of facing- a kind of physical alignment emanating out from the lower spine and belly in two directions simultaneously up out of the neck and throat and head and down into the pelvis and sitting bones, the thighs, ankles and feet.

The heart opens and the breath comes freer and freer as articulation that is not signalling anything but simply a cry of connection- a link in a chain that is wider and further than any single being. And as the heart and chest opens further, the arms float outwards effortlessly of their own accord and the fingers unfurl. The air on the skin, in ones nostril, on ones lips vibrates as if in a tumbling ricochet and then through the connectivity  and bringing into oneness of our body at this location at this time there is an instantaneous reaching and merging with all that appears other. Both time and space dissolve out of this point and run their course onwards and outwards and this becomes a feeling of spaciousness; of there being all the time in the world and simply we stand where we are lightly and in tune with one another.
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(Some thoughts after the 1st singing workshop with Jamie Mcarthy and linking this loosely to feelings about meeting and beginning to work with hearing impaired children)

Layers

Language does not stand apart as a discreet category or function from the lived body in continual and unforetold application. In that sense, Use is the continually updated interface that joins us in our facing objects, surfaces and one another. Feeling is not a higher realm. It is a basic realm. But it does not stop at the blunt-ends of stubbing ones toe against a door. It goes all the way through, testing out and probing a kind of meshing and synchronicity that is as if the very fibres of matter -of self-and other- were sending on through tiny aspects of dispersive messaging, through what appears one and another. This is connectivity and it is immediate yet without any absolute demarcation in time and space. To say this means that our intentionality to make contact; to touch, to press down; to impact is only an initial placement; a kind of insertion into a far wider and more dispersive potential- a matrix of co-influences that ripples outwards and collects at certain points- as with an echo that gradually runs out and only then is known to be a discreet sound. So these delimitations are actually known not in a beginning but as an inevitable bleeding away from the concentrated placement. This is the reverb, the bounce, the journeying of a body of movement or of a body of sound and it is playing with intensity and how this changes of its own accord through duration- rather than with intentionality or semantic meaning.

We are concurrently running alongside or in tangent to so many co-dependencies that feel out these brief and waning positions in the process of moving together. We collect into concurrences but these never remain at stable and even momentums. The fact of their changing through duration; that the impact of a placement begins to bleed, disperse and travel down this shifting melee of make-shift affinities that in the next moment become less clinging; less merged, plays not with the contact but with the intervals of its unravelling; a re-definement within a rippling frame that is continually accommodating so that all aspects as they collect and discharge give glancing reference to this mobile frame. It is a pendulum that keeps ticking but the intervals double up over and over again to cascade in as one or float out into a spaciousness that is near silence. Between these two there are infinite intervals and they coil and uncoil around one another.

Drumming in a group is this shoring up of aspects into and through one another- and the dexterity of a central point of cohesion is not an actual line or mark; it is this weaving together and apart of disparity and cohesion. It is got at through a near falling out of any perceived line and in the small accidents of this tick-tocking undulation. A wave reaches up and  becomes a transcendence that is both imaginary and real; of the body and not of the body so that these distinctions begin to play like a koan on and off of one another and the simple factitcity of a felt involvement; a placement or insertion there amidst many becomes the basis for a felt sense of unity. Coordination happens on this shifting surface. This rises like a mist which is place-less but everywhere. And it puts into question the perceived difference of unique players scoring points with virtuosity. For as tiredness and ease start to come about through the repetitive rhythms that spiral around and through one another there is no start, no finish; simply this insertion so that a delay is built back up and through and in this very application it begins to fall away. Within then this very hesitancy grows the assuredness of moving as one single texture that like a coiled tyre- a mobius strip- runs from background to foreground without changing its feel but as a nuanced sensitivity to the field  in which it is placed. From this wall of sound-noise comes a silence and that is when sound and its absence run parallel and become a figment of the mind- a felt affinity.

A child who moves and stumbles on their own through a sea of furniture and on-known bodies.That child has a certain diagnosis attached to them that is there in the paperwork even before they manifest as real flesh and blood in that classroom with their likes and dislikes their repetitive actions and the breaking off of these actions. But these begin to shape into the flux and uncertainty of an environment that by its nature- like their own bodies- is unstable. Work with this instability and let it reach through in this touching grasp that even as it knows itself- as a teacher imparting knowledge or systems of routine and obedience on those children and as children seemingly perfecting their wobbly gait and delivering - like elixir- word sounds- and let all this unravel, dislocate and jumble as sudden pressing downs, jerks upwards, passing between children who may never seem at any exact point ot actually meet- and the rhythmic staccato; the felt impact that is waning and coming back through in the backwash of its own deliverance. Articulation will sound out in utterances like gasps and trapped breaths, sighs and smilings. There will be sounds such as the body crashing; the swimming through of this disaster before it is known as such into a jerkiness like a cross rhythm and the sing-songy melody of this fall and rise, this rise and fall. And out of all this- just where functionality seems to come undone and just where a sound  that should be this or that as a semantic category becomes neither and breaks free into pure soundedness that travels on its own waning shoreline, so the implicit intonation will begin to figure itself as if from itself out of the layers that come and go to become pure rhythm, pure melody in the stop-start hazardness of our mutually arising existence.  

Staying with the feeling

Staying with the feeling of a ricochet. What is this drumming hesitation? This explosive thrust coupled in a refraction? This folded exposition and hiddenness? Together they form a conundrum impossible to prize apart. There is no goal. Because the overview is never known in full. The advancing to all intents and purpose is a spillage. A mere over-running of expected limits. The limited frame is there and not there. For as soon as it is established this becomes the leverage into another frame and another and another. The ticker- taper that charges its own progression; a habit turned not into an end in itself but as a background buzz- the bounce of unabsorbed energy thrust back out only to descend and again; the propeller wave of a directive freed from any source of complete absorption. So the elocution becomes a trilling of the tongue that drums against the pockets of encasement; the mouth undone in the inexpressible sounding of sound vibration that feed into positive recurrence a spillage that is beyond the mouth, the larynx, the chest and ribs. There is no single location for a sound. Rather it is an itinerant travellor becoming first one quality then another as it touches in as kinaestaetic, visceral, muscular, emotional and language potentials. These float up and die away again- a continual aggravation and relaxation as waves upon waves meet as interferance patterns of one another; the stone dropped in the pool sinking and no more; the reverberations blossoming on the dying ebb of one another; aceepting and welcoming these re-births that escalate on the briefest of touches.

The ground is this trilling reverberation and this offers up a way to be with children with complex and chronic medical conditions. There is no drive towards the source of a problem; a technique of exposure, isolation and explicit intervention. Rather there is this drumming up of the field of affectivity; an enlivening into the repercussions set in motion at every level of contact. This could be seen as aggravation, invasion, or soothing medication. It could be seen in the placebo of a prayer or the  supplication of  a wished for outcome. It could be medication- a source in a bottle to be swallowed at intervals during the course of a day. Or it could be the care of a soothing touch to the brow; a wave of back and forth that strokes the pained area. All these are the fragmented parts of a wider embrace; a whole that can never be got at or grasped in a single diagnostic procedure where problem and solution are clearly set apart in the trajectory of a cure. Rather the field of connectivity is allowed to play out and widen, meld and concretize, intensify, flourish and dissipate back into a movement of affects and co-dependencies that has no beginning or end. This play of responsiveness is the story unfolding- never known or even concretely existing in advance- that is prized into action one thing at a time until all such positions begin to cascade and work through one another rinsing through in waves of concurrence and seperation. So that the very spaciousness, the base-line of all asumed premeditated affect is played out in the effects themselves. They become the actors with no need for a puppeteer set apart who co-ordinates as a long-distance probe such end results. For the ricochetting of the ground is ruffled into its waverinng vibration out of each incremental point of contact; then let free to sound out in the voice-box of its residence. Such frames are opportunisitc, unstable and propositional. They are humorous tales spun in the moment of their making that bubble up and die away because the conditons call them into the possibility of a certain showing as patterns that have a life and a death.

In practical terms this means that working with highly vulnerable children whose metabolic, muscular, communication and biologic condition would seem to insist on intense pre-planning, hesitation and the utmost caution, may at times benefit form a more creative approach where a ground of possible resonsiveness is drummed up in the moment of its occurence. There is here a very high level precision in the initial points of contact and the quality of that contact based on the first feint possibility of this ricochetting of responsiveness. This may indeed be mostly automatic; the touch that creates a pooling and then an outpuring of breath at that point. For instance the lower diagphram, throat, back of the neck, lower abdomen, knees and soles of the feet. But a circuit very quickly begins to make itself as one affect shows up the non-local position of another affective area. Resonance ensues between practitoner and reciever until there is no given limitation in the borders of people, of the room, of a demarcated school, locality or even city. There is this outflowing and in reverse an inflowing that cascade and mesh over the tide of one another simultaneously rinsing pebbles back up the shoreline even as the water recedes strongly in the next breath. The same kind of reverberation can be set up in the movements of  the body so that rapid momentums of movements from left to right, back and forth, up and down begin to cascade in upon one another in the slight mismatches of their own sequences and then this ricochetting doubling and redoubling over the original habitual pattern begins to shape itself and to take on a life of its own.

Very often stillness comes out of these ricochetting movements as the settlememtn at the bast of movements that ar eallowed to play out in full. This becomes the frame of enquiry as a story or picture that talks back to the "self-actor" and repositions by embracing the context and influences that coalesce in any event or action. So these wider frames that are less like demarcated lines then interferance patterns, create stories out of the imaginings that are shaping in a complex relationship of affects. The "Person" reads back these story lines that break and fall upon one another endlessly not as the initiator or author of these stories but as an active participant in the folds of the story-line. In this way residual and encumberant affects in which we are swayed and pulled into habits of comfort and rejection, seclusion and autonomy begin to open out into connotations that spread and gather through the physical and energetic relationship inherant in the thrust, hesitation and echo of their own incomplete making. We know them for what they are and we play with them.We bare witness to this together as it is happening and the drama of illness and health plays out on the cusp of one another. Song-lines and imagery come to the fore out of the contradiction of  reams of soundings that break into and out of one another. In this way new allies are found in the incidental melodies that could never be known in advance but that come when needed out of the total field of relatedness. A sense of resting into engaged stillness and the presence of simple intimacy resounds in the aftermath and in the continuing exploration of these stories of possibility.

Touching Through

Ricochet- running through every touch. It is not a finality. But a teasing through. It began somewhere else and is running on somewhere beyond the border where it seems to stop. It is drawing into a position and coming undone, tightening and unravelling between a grip and  its release. Neither position exists actually. But both are spun into one another out of one another in a game of varying intervals. These are never fixed but draw out of the impulse towards fixture the longing that undoes every goal of that longing. That is why the touching through is a vehicle to a wider connectivity. It permeates through sound, through smell, through the refracted light that catches on the rainbow tendrils of its own escape.

In the drumming jam this Sunday sounds position themselves against the border sounds of other sounds. There is this interplay of pure surface that draws out the gestures towards and away from one another in the resonance of these soundings. Placement is exact but the ricochet bounce travels or is muffled on and through these curtailments. The touch positions the stoppage and according to the impact of each placement in this inter-relationship of surfaces that create lines in the sky, the outflow of colouration flavours a contraction of form or a dispersal and this becomes apt. Like the colouration of the sky as the sun sets throwing into turbulence colours that admix with this refracted light into the spin-offs of radiant colour; reds, yellows, mauve, orange, lime green, misty grey, purple luminance and deep blood red. Black crows fly through this cawing and gliding, lifted up as if stirring through the fixity and separation of these colours, then gently descending onto the top-most branches of trees already in shadow whose outlines are muffled and imprecise against the light-dark unsettlement of meshing colours. And the colours now are pulled and teased out in the final death throws of the descending orb. A rush of wind and a strange silence even between the near constant rustle of early Autumn leaves; the swimming calls of birds that are there-not there so rapid is their rush across the small section of sky now open to luminosity. A radiant mixing of light and shadow that produces not by design but out fo a seeming accident, an array of colour that is never finalised. In each shadow- each blockage a new possibility of light as it is brought out in the relief of that very obstacle of line and shadow. Each journey then never a thing in itself; more an interruption into the blinding evenness that begins to show shape and colour, mood and feeling in the very obstacle of its constancy. In this way the incremental becomes the charge for the story; the play, the patterning against a wide sky.

In a treatment session with M today. A body hardened into itself where the ricochet impulse tries to pattern itself alone outside from touch. Habitual circuits are formed his fist shoved deep into his mouth plugging a stimulation into a self-soothing that is a choking gasping denial of inter-connectivity. The brath cut-off the rib-cage hard and brittle, the throat blocked by its own need for nurture- for constant arousal. To cut this by pulling the fist from his mouth is not helpful- just another onslaught of pulling apart you and I. Connection must set up very gently this touch ricochet whereby the drama of impulse and its reorientation off of every border line begin to make themselves; a swiftly drawn line then let go of so that the colours and sounds fly out of their own accord. In this two handed levelled contact- as with the drumming- slight discrimination into the quality of contact from hand to hand seem to merge into hollowness or fly off from the tightness of the body. The hand bounces off as from a drum but simultaneously it rests and sinks in. These are the two qualities of Kyo- hollow- and Jitsu- mountain found in the touch and yet never totally existing apart from the touch or as separate prescribed postitions. Rather the Shiatsu/Seiki session is a play of these differences and the intervals that separate and bring them closer in an interplay that is never done with.

The provocation of any touch holds within it both this tendency to push away and to draw in and merge. Neither is actually executed in full but the habitual impulses are played with, given free range and scope to become an infinite array of possibilities like the early night sky that bruises and glows as the sun drops lower and lower. So too the contact drops more and more into a position of affinity- a resfullness in what is there whatever it may be- between incorporation and rebuff, joy and pain. And in that moving close to the border of contact without actually merging with it as any one fixed position the ricochet of resettlement goes on and on. And what it means to touch; to connect is found at every possible interval of perceived distance and closeness; the tightness in the chest and its ease, the fisted palms raised  to the mouth, red raw and numb, becoming tendrils of folding-unfolding into what is a near clap; the disturbance of unruly children from next door embraced back into the room as the counter-point to a humming melody that comes through on the waves of this seeming aggravation. So that gradually the face; one face in me the practitioner, him the boy and the children that stand at the half-open door, swaying back and forward; the adult teachers who are busy bringing in and taking out stuff from the room as they adjust equipment and aggragate this equipment around clusters of children, all become the one face.

And no sooner has this face emerged than it dissolves across and through the borders of its own making- aiming towards a dream that breaks on the cusp of its own arrival that is never entirely there but is always a possibility.

Teacher

Touch into a feeling that is disappearing fast. It has never been that way before. Edges of a sound that are waning, tempering and leaning into an exegesis that has lost all markings of a contour. It is feeling its way in the dark- a pin-point of light from the light-up screen of a mobile phone not needed for ringing anybody at all. The screen-saver is irrelevant. Only the glow that touches this or that strand of grass in each single step that is a hesitation in the run of things and so becomes not walking at all but simply a momentary alert that is there, not there. And maybe this is what walking is- this blinking on-off pulsation between putting down and taking off again. It's a pressure gradient that is stroked out of the footedness of the ground. They are known in one step. And no sooner known are lost again. We stumble against the unevenness of the terrain. Air currents cross our cheeks and pass. They are there but also in the trees; the scrambling of tangled threads of cloud moving and spinning across and around the bulk of the moon. It winks and we wink back. Or rather the wink happens all of a piece so that there is no messenger and no destination where the message gets through. In that way even with the pin-point glimmer of a mobile phone and the wide but evasive bulk of the moon naked or part-concealed as it is, we are blind and are feelingly caressing into the dips and tumults of the land beneath us; the ebb and flow of a voice of wordless sounds; of movements out of the tail-ends of bodies gone from the scene. It's about balance and falling into the moment whilst watching it happening. Again and again what is still there and what is moving past? We are all of a piece streaming as one. Your face in mine and then it is gone. My face in hers and then it is gone. His face in yours and then it is gone.

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*Written after a teaching workshop with James Low at a camping weekend in East Sussex

Waiting

Violence exists when an act is cuaterized from the wider fold of influences and co-emergencies in which it finds itself specifically placed. Every tangent is a touching in- a stroking of a portion of a face it never sees in full. It is intuited or invited out into a series of affective screenings that glimmer and wane on the edge of one another reconstituting and furthering on the tail ends this journey that makes itself from within its own questioning. These are pools within pools where the interferance patterns of these residual echoes breaks into new forms that are both mirages and real situations that we face out of our own making; our own imaginings.

Perspective is a sinking into each address and a letting go again. It is following a disapearing point that can never be met but that tunes our own beckoning and waiting; an  invitation of open address and the timing of our opening out, merging together and unravelling back into the wave.

We are nowhere but where we are and that is a place already vacated. Yet there is a crossing over like a slight pulling of the threads taught that creates a reverb "twang" that sends into reverse all that brielfy touches it. That is the energizer of contact; a turn-around at the moment of complete intimacy that can hardly be placed before it is transformed into a latent directive executed and emptied in the same instance. That is the joy of effortless motion out of the calm centre of a total meeting.

It does not matter if that meeting began as an act of projected violence. For it is in and through the moment of contact that the dynamic plays into its own unique settlement and so there is a merging; a rinsing through as with the living matrix of crystal formations that re-settle inside a forged blade of steel even as it cools from intense light and heat; a labrynth of material density and porous carbonated holes ringing out in dynamic counter-balance; holding in relationship this fullness and emptiness that is permeating and patterning through and through. This is forged by use as a single projective which holds like a hologram at every aspect of its hidden and explicit revealment, this art of keeping still; the art of waiting.
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( This was written after reading The Art Of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba. He was the founder of Aikido)

Empty Diagram

The image is not stable. It is re-settling as it reaches the paper. It is making itself. In this sense it echoes the human capacity for self-reflection though in a more impersonal and dissipated form. In that sense it has a different kind of intelligence not tethered to narrow self-definition but more open to an enquiry about a wide field of inter-penetration across duration. It is an intelligent form that in this very form is curious about the conditions of its own emergence. In that sense it must also be curious about its interdependance into realms not contained within the graphic or pictorial setting. It may alude to sounds, smells, velocities, kinaesthethic waves of movement and to the vast swathes of open space that run through the prohibitions of buildings, bodies and objects and yet use these as the conduit and reflexivity of its becoming. In the silence and containment of the picture lies a realm made untouchable, non-coherant in that exclusivity. Yet reading back from the form to the conditions of its arising, these unacknowledged primers that halt and so than allow to flow with increased force directives that are uni-directional and on-going, a wider realm is aluded to even in the silence of a wordless diagram.

Opportunistic Enclosures

Each point to flower out into unforetold stories not as the revealment of anything more essential that lies up until then covered. But by creating a connectivity that is apt in that moment. Allowing the timbre of its sounding to strike open and move freely as the splaying out of many tendrils at once. This is automatic- a touching in and a release. So that the feeling tone of receptivity is the perceptual field that splays out like the scent from a dispersive field of wild flowers filled with the yet more distant fumes of a large busy city of engine fuel and fragrant body odour mixed in with ungraspable conversations  that wane on the wind. And the body fills and is filled in and emptied in this swaying momentuum that meets and empties by degrees each tangent and turn of this multi-directional regard.

The chest and solar plexus opens as the lower belly and sacrum settle into a breathing pulsation rooted from top to bottom to make one single line cut into mid-sections that only align through the momentum of the lived space, leveling and binding into one, this ever-present tendency to go up and down indefinitely. And in the balance between these tendencies an axis is borne between the neck and the lower sacrum in which the flowering of the senses are free to sway back and forth, rooted as they are deep into the earth. There is an opening of the throat, a maleabilty of the lips and the nostrils flair slightly and quiver open and closed as the atmosphere travels freely over the small hairs attached to blood vessels deep inside the nose cavity. The arms flay upwards and the ribs seems to move in tandem away and towards one another, creating small velocites of stretch and relaxation as minute levels of local tension are built and folded back into and out of one another, concertina-like. The hips begin to turn around the softened belly that like a liquid pool which is well ordered by the tight containment of the banks at either side, dips downwards like water pouring into a fold and cauterizes at a binding dip into the lower back that open back out and becomes the bones of the pelvic girdle radiating forcefully downwards into strong bones, muscles and sinews of the thighs and legs. These then swirl around the knee junction, than continue into the tendrils at the back of the foot; the ankles, where the whole capacity of swivel in minute degrees of cessation and release;  found like reverberant reflections in the body torso, the shoulders and neck, is funneled now into this small arena just before the probing and planting of the feet. These splayed out coursers of th ebones of the feet  thta then sperate and continue to grow into the toes, are both on the surface and probing deep deep down into the labrynth channels of the unseen earth below; the potential for growth.

For the rising up and flourishing of a human being rests here, guided as it is by this very life-form; the swaying tilting re-calibration at every minute tangent of existance, reformulating the tilt of the hips, the torsion of the rib-cage and all the organs it contains. The gentle pulsing re-alignment of the neck muscles, the throbbing inside the throat that widens ever further into the full vocal range expressed in a call and the attendance to the reply and the opening out through the eyes of vision and regard that fine-tune our placement in relation to the axis of the sky-earth and all that reveals itself to us in the space between.

For it is in this firing out into the reach of this and that as momentary excitations that come and go, that this spherical episodic unlocatebale presence comes to gradually arrive even as it retreats far faster. It is in the cascade and the meshing that this allows into the very fibres of this breathable flesh-environment; into the idea of a movement yet to be completed, that this two-way pulsation locks and unlocks like the ventrilces of our own heart, this partial and opportunistic enclosure that we are.

The section of a journey

To begin where it feels right. To settle into a dip, cradled in the crest and to rely on the cessation of this prolongation of movement by settling where one rests. Travelling over the land and sitting down in the long grass ragged at the end of summer, the split-ends of random growth seeding; splayed out in the wind that paces back and forth. This restlessness plays out upon our faces the lids of our eyes folding back over to half blinker from the even day-light while our lips fold in dry like the folds of an envelope yet to be sealed. And with the movement of the winds it appears that we are talking or mumbling though the sound is wider and deeper spread across the fields; rising starkly into the rows of houses teepering up on the hill as if the reflectivity of each cut-out window, stung radiant and white in the facing sun, would be beckoned by degrees into the watery depths below. The slim line of a section of canal laced with the eclectic paint marks of a margin of house-boats buffeting one another from head to toe in the current.

Cessation

When is it enough and when is it not quite there? A moment later, a fraction more and it would be too much. But there's a very finely tuned sensor that monitors the colouration of the coffee; the muscle contractions and releases in the chest, upper arm, forearm and hand and the discrete multiple ripple of flexion /release that allows the fingers to dynamically clasp and unclasp the plastic half litre of milk as a continuous slow pour in this wave-like action of ebb and flow. But there comes a time; an instant in the activation of space as movement, where the thin stream of milk funnelling in one continuous arch from the bottle into the cup below, must cease.

What is this slow ceasing that is in preparation at every connective instant where the action still occurs. Put like that it is not really apt to call it an interruption. Because it is written into the act from the very beginning, monitoring and containing the stream so that its halt is a foregone conclusion. We foresee this stoppage even in the full flow of an activity. This pact between expansion or doing and containment and the cessation of doing is far more nuanced then it is often portrayed in words where action and halt cut a dry line between two polar opposites that seem to sit alongside one another as clear demarcations without ever touching or really having anything to do with one another.

I think the action and cessation are rinsed through and through like breath particles in the air that may manifest as liquid where the right conditions of joint volition and the potential for cessation are there. This is more like a clasp around which the patterned thought that takes shape around our physical and practically induced pacing arrives and departs simultaneously.

There is something to enquire about in this simplest of acts of judging how we like our coffee or tea and making it so. How anxiety-inducing this would be if we worked off a colour chart similar to the ones we find in a household paint shop to match what we remember to be the hue on our bedroom wall with these strips of tonality that jostle at minute gradations next to one another. It would be near impossible to work off such a stored bench-mark of desired tone. No it is in the very act of the pouring when muscle groups and breath in the lived body are symphonic patternings around minute thresholds of eye-hand-muscle coordination that the cessation locks in as if it had a life of its own. So then what is this lived body that is deciding the details of our coffee preference and somehow reaching the soft spot like in a good game of tennis where the ball effortlessly reflects back off the players' bat and the shot plays itself simply because all the details of court, player, hand, racket and ball are momentarily aligned to make use of  this one optimum contact.

We do not usually think of the cessation of an action as this kind of sweet sensation but maybe there is a deep pleasure; a kind of sensory- neurological stroking into a feeling of rightness that this cessation brings, just as  the racket held in the optimum position then comes to rest and simply waits for the ball to impact and bounce out again. In that sense then the action is automatic without any particular agency. It is simply the staying put in the details of a multiple and dynamic field pf action; the working through duration into a deeper and more disparate sense of pattern-making. Action only really has an impact- is felt and known to itself- when in these cessations or pause-gaps it is allowed to linger as if in total suspension; between here and there, this and that. These intervals are like breathing buffer zones that give nuance and articulation to movement and are as much a part of movement as the manifest exhibition or end result they bring forth.
They are the timing; the commas and semi-colons that mark out a new intake of breath in the explication of  a phrase in a story, a news bulletin, a personal narrative.

There is always a great deal of skill in these pause-gaps but they do not; cannot know themselves in the immediacy of their occurrence or even when they are reformulated over and over again. Because they are dissipated through and through within the action that when read back simply omits to see the gaps as anything but glitches or interruptions in a near continuous flow.

Without containment there can be no movement. But this containment like a good mother must be invisible to the action outside of its simple practical executive functioning of bringing forth or pacing what are perceived to be end-results.But the real value is in the pacing as it takes place in its details and particularities and in the fine-tuning of human-environment in to a co-emergance that has a particular resonance or flavour unmissable but unrepeatable. If the containment or cessation started to be a thing in itself or even to take on a kind of personhood with agency and decision making powers of its own it would sabotage the action and the automatic settlement in the sweet spot of the game out of which un-foretold stories might effortlessly emerge.
The cup of coffee speaks back to the coffee maker but it is a sign, a symbol of multiple actions that could never be reduced to that cup of coffee alone let alone to the bench-mark preferences of that drinker who may state as a gross overstatement to a third party; "I Like it milky" or "I like it strong". Yet it is in the continual monitoring and resetting of the threshold between too much and too little that the power of cessation; the embracing quality of a breathable containment comes through allowing foreground to shimmer on the waves of a darkened background and allowing this interplay between stillness and movement to coordinate and co-define one another as an integrated action: a literacy that evolves its own grammar in the moment of its making- never as a thing set apart.

Enquiry

Human acts will be looped as repetitions until the background affective context shifts or creates a contrast that registers as difference. The practitoner, tutor, parent, therapist can act as this background context for an autistic child so that they act like the ground or wider field feeding in and mediating sensory spectrum shifts that create micro levels of interest and sensitivity, contrasting base sounds with high frequency sounds, "On" touch with "Off" touch, spaciousness and wider peripheral movements with direct contact and physical dynamic supportive lifting, spinning and  setting back down. Concurrently the practitioner can become a site for more and more subtle energetic connections- micro touching-in through alignment down the spine with the pads of ones fingers and core body support through open palms that warm but are undemanding and with no agenda of their own. Sounds and melodies crafted directly out of the moment by moment response and interest of the child can begin to manifest almost as leanings that go so far and then fall into a paralel harmonic or a counter rhythm. Where gaps and holes appear these may become moments for pause and quietude or invitations for the child to jump in and fill the gap furthering or intensifying the pattern in their unique way from within its very texture and through listening and atuning to the conditions of its arising.

In this sense there becomes a listening contact where mediation occurs across the threshold of the contact itself as the child leans in or moves away from touch contact, settles into positions or stances or melds and adapts around the seeking out or avoidance of particular areas in a room. The practitioner becomes simply a series of surfaces that respond as they prompt into a series of certain shadings as  an escalation or diminishment in the affective space between one to another, where a gulf is bridged, beckoning flight or is curtailed as phases demarcating a staccato or even an intake of breath back in to a wider movement.
All objects, surfaces, textures, sounds- whether in the room or beyond the room- as well as the child and practitioner- become actors in this ritualised dance between relative placements and intervals and this starts to draw the pulse of  the interaction into a momentum that begins to take on a life of its own.

A thinking body of material arises and is shaped in the process of its beckoning into something usable, playful and balanced lightly between a memory and repetition of what has gone before; a framework that holds fast as an idea or as a room, a garden, a backyard, and the bending, scuppering and reinvention of these guidelines in each new and fresh moment of interaction between living beings.

Affect

Now's the time to link together the experience of fluctuating affect in auditory, light, touch and speed perception and the ritual practises and repetitions important for people on the autistic spectrum. The sensory alteration is key to why some movements and practises become important. It's the shifting landscape in the perceptual field that calls for a space of ritual mediation. This becomes a benchmark against which the fluctuation intone and colour each change. Therefore it is not the core interest or attentional field that needs to be curved or enlarged in order to give a greater scope of experience; and autistic people will fight tooth and nail against this, but rather the context in which this practise operates. If the context or atmosphere can begin to act like a looped resonance; that layers into different qualities of affect through duration and accumulative intensification or in a paring back down of input, then the attentional zone within the parameters of a given activity will alter and the relative ritualistic or story-board quality of this version will start to play out into a wider field of possible "Takes".

Autistics are said to lack imagination or an awareness that the activities they and others partake in are make-believe or relative. They are said to lack the ability to play. This is because they are triggered so totally by the rapid affect-response of contact that there is no or little patterning in or out of this momentary excitation which flares up and dies away again without a trace. And when it is repeated it is as if it starts up for the very first time.

Timing responsiveness through mediated touch and sound and light as a way to modulate environmental affect is therefore a key way to work into imaginative play. Because without this work into the conditions of affect, there is no chance for the framing of practises as a ritual space or for acknowledgement of this framing.
This is key to imagination and playfulness. So if the neurological problem is about stimulation and mediated receptivity, this must be addressed as the foremost area of interest and concern, rather than a prescribed technique and/or program of social skills or behavioural normative control mechanisms learnt as if they could be imposed on any situation as a blue-print.. Only when a person has the practical skills to physically time their responsiveness and the degree in which an affect meets with their reception can the practises themselves become areas for symbolic interpretation or psychological meaning.
         
Because foremost  the manifestations- whether lining up automobiles, singing a song, swaying and rocking or composing a sophisticated diagram, are directed as affective stabilisers or enhancers/depressors and engaged with as a way to manage and/or record fluctuations in conscious sensory receptivity. They are not in other words objects in themselves and only seem that way to outside observers who judge them either as genius or deeply troubled trace elements of the autistic "Mind". But they are rather barometers of  the streaming of many fluctuating frequencies of light, sound, temperature, velocity that become conduits through the autistic person's body and into their ritual practises. These practises then are like transducers or conductors that earth these streaming affects through the body practise. It's worth really following and staying true to these practises because they will guide a shared awareness into the affects that have brought them forth and so shared activity can be built up  like a threshold conversion as the trigger-affects are played out differently as a compositional practise between practitioners weather autistic or not. These compositions tell of unseen currents, weather systems, untraceable auditory buzzes and the culminating affects of minor compressions and releases through out the body as it adjusts. Working at this level of body integration the practises even as they appear to remain the same, become part of a demarcated ritual or play space rather than the only reality playing out over and over again as if for the very first time.

In the garden, (An Autistic arts project called Memory Gardens that I ran in Highbury, London between 2002 and 2009) autistic people would line up bricks and found objects and sometimes build them upwards into dense constructions or aerated hive-like breathing vessels. Air flowed through the bricks and even in their very real form that occupied a certain space on the ground of this outdoor practise space, there seemed to be a spaciousness in these sculptures that simply let the wind through rather than being knocked down by it. This was a construction modification that came out of this outdoor garden practise over time and was developed out of the conditions of weather and ecology and the recycling of waste products from the neighbouring children's charity whose land this was. All these factors and the political implications of our presence on that piece of land- an informal and mostly ignored arrangement- was all a part of this environment. The practise was not therefore a thing in itself. It was a cross-section of velocity shifts including people, animals, plants, debris and discarded objects, pollutants and weather fronts. Whether the constructions stayed upright or fell down swiftly or by degrees was part of the circumstances of these interacting currents and either outcome in itself was not that important.

Autistic people in the same way as every other living being, are the cross current of various affects gathering momentarily in the muscle, nervous and visceral potentialities of that life-form. They are compositions made from all the missing affects that may convert into hyper or hypo tension, agitation or relaxation, embracing in and bouncing out again.

Rather than seeing this outlook of co-involvement as justification for indulging autistics in inappropriate repetitions, demarcating a ritual space of operation allows for this key gauge between fluctuating affect and stable translation to play out. This becomes an important area for building up the rhythms and intervals on to which symbolic and imaginative play can later take hold. The processes of up/down, in/out , movement and pause are a micro reading device that can become manifest in infinite varieties of sound and form. And so whatever the special interest or tone of activity engaged in by an individual or group of individuals these polarities can begin to play into a deeper affective resonance within a wider field of contrast and difference. This is the shared affective field that is not only received by the nervous system but is actually co-created in order to pace our involvement and coordinate our experience as one.

I talk as one who has a strong experience of these fluctuating affects in day to day life and where art practises have become important ritual spaces that absorb, reflect and transduce these variable dancing and shimmering affects. Being a therapist marks out another practise space or ritual space of operation. A space then of co-creation that is pertinent to that particular place at that particular time and in relation to who is present at the time. How people are placed dynamically and in interaction with one another whether physically at close range or at intervals where sound variation and fleeting episodes of movement and stillness like flashes of light and shade, a pattern begins to shape itself. This becomes a living diagram enacted through this living ritual space telling of spatial and time realignments, in the varying confluences, delays and fluctuations of their showing. How interest and attention play out and drift or migrate across areas, occupations and resting points becomes the drama at the heart of which a sense of quietude may or may not gradually emerge.

Kings Cross Disaster

The ritual building and destroying of compositional niches that are fine-tuning. An itch that keeps moving.
We can not address this itch directly nor outline or determine its whereabouts. We can only allude to it prostethically through these augmented situations we find ourselves in whether in a building or outside.
Some things go wrong. Fire catches on to a straggling piece of paper beneath the ancient wooden escalator stairs of a central London underground station. It is Kings Cross 1989. Signals somehow work too efficiently and people are let through the barriers and down on to the platform just as they are dispatched off from bulging carriages into the smoke-filled pitch black alleyways. It is a death trap and the waves of smoke belch back on themselves at the top of the escalators, driven by the upwards surge of heat from the fire below creating a discreet climate there and then; a tornado-like thrust of fire that feeds itself around and around in the gulp of oxygen it takes from the top of the stairs before it plummets back down as a fire ball into the path of escaping passengers. So the disaster is born; a feedback system of organisational methodical routine; people going down from the barriers, people coming up from the trains that could not adjust in the altered details of this disaster. And so the disaster occurs where the order of an ordinary day on the tube meets the disaster of the unaccountable escalation of a fairly small-scale fire. The fire grows and people, put into harm's way, die or are incredibly burnt, remembering evermore this moment as the moment that changed their outlook on life. Compensation claims go unmet or are shoddily dealt with. People are wounded all over again and while the suffering grows, those in charge on that day seek therapy. No one is actually there to deal with  one another in the moment that is relevant. There is a delay and reconciliation around a DJ's radio program many years later separates each human in a bubble of their own injury, interest, longing and impossible meeting.

Precise

A gesture or inclination towards a certain tendency and how that plays out through the body is the feeling; the idea that reaches through the body. That is connection. Connection is not about a specific intention towards someone or about some issue already in our stock of memory and available imagery. It is something forging into existence there and then; a reaching through a touching into by going through the demarcation even as that borderline is alluded to. We are playing on and off from the there/not thereness of something both definite and untouchable. The fact that we go through these borderlines does not mean we do not reach towards or away from, solidify in condensation or dissipate through the breath. The push-pull of these polarities works together. They create the knot of a forbearance that is situated and shifted, unravelling through its own placement over and over. This is the there/not thereness of our lives where we fill and vacate, creating the circumstances for movement guided on a thread that is playing into countless directives like a game patterning itself though experiential and perceptual shifts that free up further directives by erasing over and over again every impression of momentary dwelling. These dwelling points and the directives they map out; between up and down, in and out, tilting this way and that, balancing on a precipice and falling or flying as an impulse fuelled by these vacancies, is the tipping and tilting circular directive that only knows itself through partial memory. So a tendency to go up goes so far and then reverse into down; a tendency to go forward backtracks in a looped reversal to go backwards. These polarities that seem so exclusive in the singular act of their journey always revers into their contradiction.  And in that word- Contra-diction; against speech, speech evolves in the fluidity of a metaphor that wherever it is placed always alludes to its background context- the twin opposite which will eventually replace it or further it into a differing dimension. As this pattern plays out triangulating itself into and out of each course, straight lines begin to bend and a spherical placelessnes becomes this journey/prohibition, bouncing and redoubling out of a deadlock into a  furtherance of this journeying.prohibition.  This winde/unwinde is a passage of effect that need not know itself  for there is no grand gestalt- no completion of the plan into which we can gaze down and learn by heart. Heart indeed is this willingness to enter into the patterning of the pattern. To get lost in the discomfort or ease that the details bring up and simply to remain until the reversal takes the pattern a little further.

We are swaying and necessarily pulsating between tendencies wrought to us as inclinations or flavours, images or points of recognition. These memory traces seem to reflect a whole that we are constantly alluding to, stretching towards. But they are more like small indications and prompts that are exactly what they are- fragmented and very specific interventions that call into a responsiveness either as a momentary seizure of a movement or as its continuation as repetition, inflection, reversal or re-calibration and that pose a question in us that is never finalized and impossible really for us to formulate. The idea to move, or make a gesture or communicate is bubbling up in these small  high speed affective pulses that are born and die on the wind of our unthinking responsiveness- to fold out, fold in, tilt forward or backwards, upwards or downwards. And this movement in itself powers directives that pool here and here and then here into moments of confluence that then give rise to dissipation and the momentary sense of a greater spaciousness. Over and over again these reversals of containment and release pulse between on/off, open and closed.  We gain a sense of mindfulness only as part of this pulsing dichotomy that somewhere indeterminate in between all that can be alluded to, begins to play out in the actual situation of its arising.

Gradually the body becomes unintended from itelf and is a series of connections between movements, gestures and momentary pauses that manifest in and beyond the body and through which the body shows its form. These are carried through temperature and light gauges, velocity and speed thresholds.Thought is the pulsing between emptied residue and reformulation as the body disintegrates and remakes itself on the cusp of this versatile connectivty

Catching in

What is the floor we arrive at? The surface ground upon which we touch in? How do we recieve it, enfold it into our dynamic journey and send it on its way? What ideas does it have and what ideas do we impress upon it? Is it a part of something else and are we a part of that something too? Are we the missing parts to each other linked in an unavoidable dance that we do not so much operate but rather that takes us into its patterning? Is the patterning of this dance an idea that enfolds random events into its texture? Where do we rest? Or are we resting even in the pattern that is always making itself; that we never know in full but which implicates us and through which we emerge?

Can we move through this floor whilst also impacting on it? How can we become such a floor to one another; transparent and yeilding but with definite momentary limits and points of impact? How would such an interaction inform the nature of address between practitioners and children or adults with neurological and motor difficulties? Is the nature of this address a constellation recognised even in the hit and miss tangents of our lived situation? How is this timed? Is this what care is? Alluding to the practice of pattern-making through careful timing rather than to fixed ideas of each other. This is an outline for the aesthetics of contact.

About forgetting

A pattern that makes itself, touching in. A prompt to what? A memory trace that has no content and no directive. Yet a semblance of some kind of journey- like an opening- a possibility with no end. How far will it go? When will it run out? Does it need to be formalised, formulated? Is there this trajectory that always looks and feels the same? Or does it wobble between moments of equivalences- strange deja-vus that never really fill out as an original model simply done again and again. Can we go backwards? Rewind the order of events- like a bit or two of info that simply inverts and plays out the given intervals back to front. The mirror- image that knows it is an inversion because there is something out there that is the real thing? I`m not sure about this anymore. What is this thing we call learning, aptitude or know-how? It's some kind of collectivity that shuffles through on the briefest of touches. A mere reminder with a missing content- like an empty frame, a transparent box that bursts like the bubble it is on touching.

Working now with children with highly sensitised nervous systems- who spasm and redouble back and forth into and out of any given limit on the briefest of landings- how do they learn? Unfold or unfurl some kind of reaching out- some kind of stillness within. A connectivity that is undone as it makes itself. This dropping away from the context of repetition is actually a gift for renewal; an enquiry that is never-ending.

OCD- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or the carrying out of the same thing in the same way over and over again. Or the ritualistic pattern-making of autistic people- placing, ordering and sequencing their landings here and there than walking away and glancing back. The trace elements of an absented choreography still glimmering in the reflectivity of a bouncing light. Where all sounds give rise to this echoing as they double and redouble cascading in and out of themselves. What is the original? Is there a demarcated zone to move towards or away from? To move in and out of?

In the garden, the patterns built up over time with bricks and pieces of wood heaped into a pile or straggling out like the roots of plants and trees seemingly absented under the earth. Worms burrowing through the mud making porous this heaped-in earth. A means to an end that cannot be seen, that is not intentional in the blind thrusting of the worm amid the particles of earth; mineral and decomposing life forms. A kind of reshuffling in the compost that is mimicked in these lines and swirls of execution above ground. The sculptures that seem almost to make themselves as the footballer is guided by the ball  between two possible landings at either end of the pitch that  is never really arrived at- just this detraction and interruption; this foreshortening and prolongation that is the game. So to create a group sculpture or a group dance is a process of taking away- of decomposition as sensory and muscle memory, kinaesthethic pathways and visceral potentials are pulsing open and closed through a composite quality of light, sound, temperature and neurological, chemical  and fibrous firings. This on-off computation is a lived experience not a code set apart. It isn't a device for composition or for feeling. It is more like an aggravation away from the slavic execution of given functional procedures; the techniques and stories of getting from here to there, of lifting, of setting down, rolling over or keeping still.

Attention then is this slippage between tracks rather than a staying on track. And the aggravation that tilts a tendency this way or that becomes the only given route at that moment full of the pulsation of every other affect. Not than a deviation from a norm or a well-known nursery rhyme somehow ruined but the only authentic movement possible under those circumstances. Desire and repulsion, they are always in the making and they are rather than interruptions to an ideal state, the very stuff of motion and stillness. This pulsing of tendencies that never quite gets going and never therefore finalise are the provocation that encompas the calm through all the minor and major eruptions of our motor, kinaesthetic and sensory networks. These networks span terrain and travel through air, water, walls and furniture. Bodies also come into it and become conduits for this passing pulsation. This is not so much an information network as an affective streaming that splinters and cascades, builds under the dam-like conditions of an obstruction and torrents down hill and upstream against gravity or towards a natural but unintended pool. This pool is not social- it is not meaningful- it is simply shaping and absenting on the brink of memory and forgetting. A memory that is un-localised and micro co-ordinated even as it is falling away from any semblance of organisation.

What is forgotten? What is prompted only to vacate all known semblance of a repetition? What is provoked, caressed, lent into, felt as a moving through, dissipated as a sense of freedom of breath or contained and catapulted out of a choking compression? These become useful or usable impulses not at a functional level of normative behaviour or sense-making totalities but in the very fragments and pieces that splinter like the debris from an explosion that is not original- not the one-off big bang we are all somehow recovering or rearranging around but the minor incidental and random firings that excite and dampen simultaneously enlivening and deadening in execution and decrease as a thinking pulse. An idea that has no origin and no place to land. A seizure that is calm and composed through and through. A rippling outwards and a containment within where centre and periphery is a liminal criss-cross in which the circle is made and remade like so many light spots on the cornea of our eyes; unseeing.

Something about the tragedy then that is always occurring- can never be tidied away within a media-friendly version ready for public distribution. There is no safe version. No life story or functional remedy for neurological over or under responsiveness. There is no cocktail of a sensory diet or program for behavioural fixity. There is no pill for attentional longevity or for staying on the case. We wobble and slip, fall and reorganise. In the gaps and in what is not remembered something that prompts us into momentary attentiveness takes us or drops us somewhere we could never prepare the ground for. This is the basis of the Care-connection that is unknowing. Not towards or about anything or anyone in particular, but open  to  what is occurring as a flow of specs on the wind or a person sitting next to us in the park on a rainy day. Where it is hard to remember or think about what the sun felt like until it actually comes out again and so momentarily changes the way we are.

Take away

What does it mean to take away- to simplify?

Create a formal structure- a story, a meal, a garden, a physical practice of some sort, or the subject matter for what is to go in any frame; a picture to make it literal. Concentrate on this holding frame and play out the precise details like a series of placements the subject matter of which is more or less random but the placement, quite exacting. Detail in then the intervals- in time/space in which these details come to show themselves. Perhaps these are sound-tones sung in a particular order like the Kotodama: A, U,O, E, I  or the tendency of pushing down and release that then manifest in a series of learnt sequential movements, or the strokes and lengths of a brush over the surface of a piece of paper, or the back and forth methodical journeys in order to prune or water, compost or plant in an on-going garden; the pile of bricks and found objects that gather - as if by themselves- to heap and collate, stretch out and trail away within a given space over the weeks and months of different people visiting this habitat. Or simply the places that one finds to sit down; on benches, on a wall, on the ground or in a cafe in the day to day journeying between morning and evening.

Create then this space of attentiveness to the passing of what occurs within this open frame of reference. Like a lived meditation; a meditation taken into movement. In the therapy sessions with the kids, set up  the self-same space from week to week; random but then repeated and predictable inclusions within this bare room that becomes a stable holding space; an environment. Then as the stops and starts of being in that space together with a child actually play out, allow for absences, omissions, deletions and forgetfulness.  Leave out the anticipated next tone in a song but leave the correct spacing or interval that this omission implies. The same with physical movement practice; begin to engine the sequence but  then create hesitation, halts and slurs. So that pressing down is no longer driven into expansiveness but must simply flip this way or an alternate way through the vacuumed absence that begins to act as an inter-meshing that is impersonal- not driven by will or goal, intent or planned result. So with these very small stimuli affects that used to be placed very formally within given routines, begin to drop away from this routine while still sounding out trigger moments within this mostly absented pattern. In this way create the field of myth/story through physical practice as repetition without actually living the repetition as a consigned narrative. Play off the story line and introduce memory, utterances, gestures and sounds not by requesting the deliverance of an anticipated answer, but by leaving this vacancy more and more blank until a humming and resounding interaction gradually takes shape of its own accord. There is not one right answer- there are many versions of partially wrong answers or slippages. These give scope as a field in which more and more can be taken away or left absent. In this absence, which is the indentation of this structure of overflowing fullness- very precise gestures, utterances and touch engagements can come through and these are apt like welcome guests returning after a long time away, fresh and clear-headed with stories of time away. These are the absences which are capable of, there on the spot, being very full- precisely there and then not there again.

So create a lack or a loss that is not negation of a required result but is the field of  any passing occurrence  Use what has gone before  not in order to get back to this or to compete and better it but enfold in and out of what has gone before and experience spaciousness and freedom out of the minutia and continual absenting of a background rigor that is still driving and resounding even in its disappearance.

Then when the garden goes, the voice cracks mid-sentence, the body falls through a missed footing or an uncertain core, this becomes part of the practice and there is a moving through even as there is this usable slipping away. Without this continual absenting or making of space nothing can really occur. Contact; touch, engagement,  physical and mental application and manifested shapes, patterns and sound are these placements that charge a greater freedom in their absenting  We can't know this freedom without letting the the placements we so methodically build up, play endlessly into this unraveling. Repetition is not the mindless stability it seems to imply- particularly in the diagnosis of Autism; a pathological dead-end to be broken  through with an acquired sense of individual agency where a task is forwarded by a sense of a given result and a reward to follow; where the idea is in the mind before the body delivers what is required.  Repetition is the patient wait for the slip-up which operates through this difference or differencing which is the way experience begins to feel itself in the moment of its operation; something impersonal and ever-expanding- as frames within frames begin to cascade into and through one another as relative myths, stories and patterns of playful encapsulation that a moment later burst on the borders of another whose very life is a metamorphosis between unreliable shapes that coexist but cannot be felt to coexist within a single frame.

Use

While loading an image, in the time it takes for that thing to manifest there is a play of pixels; a dance across the blanket emptiness of the computer screen where first this collection and then that collection gather and superimpose one at a time at the given intervals required. And yes to begin with before the system is totally up and running there is that sense of spaciousness in the in-between of these gatherings. As if a certain freedom of expression could be found in the left-undone totality that never was. We are all too ready to read forward or backwards- to a time of given completion or a forecast of event-closure once the system's overload starts bit by bit to constitute its missing parts. And it's not only in this obviously temporal landscape of a decomposing and recomposing code tablet that the assembly/dis-assembly is taking place before our eyes. There at the British Museum standing an arm's length away from a painted vase shattered and rebuilt, the varnishing and ink-work all but a dream. But we are prompted into this idea of completion by the helpful sign beneath the glass cabinet; "A Goddess wearing a split skirt holding a bird in either hand" Oh so now we know. That is it of course.There it was before our eyes and now it is pointed out to us, well yes of course it is this. We stand a little further back. We squint and the vase could be nothing other than what is described.

Back at home I am listening to an ancient Bob Dylan CD- still working off a sound medium that can be physically scratched and re-rendered; distorted on the surface of a round translucent disc that in this way can then affect the reception and/or perception of a sound. But I am lucky it is playing at all. And that is a hit and miss thing since the 10 year old C.D player is losing its laser grasp on these inserted discs and randomly it seems, draws a blank; a mute disc where the song plays in my mind not on the physical apparatus that usually corresponds and slips so identically into this memory trace every time it catches in so that the two are inseparable  So it is playing- and I think really playing in the room "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland". But it is slipping and regurgitating itself in any which way sometimes cutting out and then doubling up in speed only to halt and fixate on a distant segment somehow plucked out of the blue. I cannot actually recount any words beyond this remembered phrase or is it simply the Title Name that plays over and over in my mind whether it is physically apparent at that moment  in terms of the track sequence or not. But yet all the other placements of this song all there with their own sound qualities are there as relatively heavy or light insertions held apart so that like the well spaced-out crowd in a large stadium who are strangely quiet and restful simply dropping into place in a crescendo wave of applause when it is their turn to be heard in this panoramic display and then disappearing from view. So there is this semblance of a whole even though at any one time only a single notation or rhythmic emphasis is actually occurring at any one moment. It's as if my own body is tilting and beckoning in and out of these dips ad crevices; the deep timorous accents of the voice and the shrill harmonica interspersing yet never becoming one. It's in this splayed out dissonance that some kind of aggravated mood that is swinging toward a closure that is never totally fulfilled sets up this mood of familiar yearning which is the song before the words mean or refer to anything. What do they refer to? They refer to themselves at that moment- the sound-intervals that float up and sink back down like bubbles that then pop on the surface.

Back in the British Museum I am standing before a stone tablet- one of many- the surface of which rises and falls like the water-worn stone that it in fact is. I feel these creases and undulations like I would feel a questioning on my brow even when the question was gone or no longer relevant and only the crevices of its affect remained. Or the small rivulets of valleys and mountains on the palm of my hand which if magnified would perhaps create a near-perfect match to these indentations that I stand before. That is all they are; indentations; a series of  foregrounds and backgrounds; of reliefs and shadows where the affect of the harsh overhead cool lighting accentuates the soft warm folds of the rock as if it were shaping in the time it took to look at it and simply melting away at other moments of inattention. I want so much to touch this surface but this is prohibited either by invisible laser-beams that ring out at a given interval of human body warmth or by the smooth panels of glass that separate me and the other observers from the object so that what is most significant is our own brief and passing reflections off from this glass behind which are the melting lumps of stone. But look carefully with a trained sense of observation and what is more read the notes inscribed in black typeset underneath each stone and one will gather the correct information about each scene. Look here a man caught in battle thrown midway between his galloping horse and the arms of  his savior or here, a tiger in the moment of a kill with jaws wide apart and  the rump of an antelope between his teeth or the soft supple body of a woman leaning towards her companion who perhaps in a later stone tablet is destined to become her lover. These stories are told in the script below but they in themselves are fragments; part-erased into the locked in details that become islands outside of any connective narrative. Sometimes they offer up strange semantic inconsistencies to our modern eye; a  dislocated hand near a crotch, the hoof of  an animal somehow stuck on the lower thigh of a man. But beyond and before these readings they are simply the hills and valleys of this relief. These are what are humming here on this day below the cool lights inviting us to pause or move away and amid the clutter of broken limbs and smashed in faces that are not the apparent replica of the signs that call them "Woman" "Horse" "Man" and "Chariot" but are something in and of themselves, it is the soft vacancy of almost total effacement where the stone is rendered back into itself as nothing other than stone, that calls us the most insistently  And we know so clearly in that feeling of calmness that it was always only ever this. So that we linger here jamming the procession of visitors on this Thursday morning in March of  the year 20013. And yet this collectivity of people seems strangely fitting; to come together on that day all by itself.

Up in a secluded top-floor segment of the Museum there is an almost -so it says- perfectly preserved  collection of Egyptian stone reliefs dating from BC 5,000 or thereabouts that loop around a landing in a full circle with the staircase allowing visitors to emerge and disappear from the center floor without disturbing this ringed circuit. A man in a blue uniform is walking rapidly around this runway. He never breaks his step but moves onward manically as if his heart were on a lead that simply swung him around and around. When I interrupt him on one of his turns and ask him why? he says it is good exercise and keeps him busy in the two-hour stint he must do up there on the landing before being relieved by another museum assistant. I say it must be a funny job to do; somehow being there but not being there to the visitors who come and go all day long in the museum. And he says yes, they are taught to somehow keep in the background and to become almost invisible; to give priority to the objects and the broken reliefs in the cabinets and on the walls around them. He says its O.K working there part-time but working full-time -as some of his colleagues do- would drive him crazy. Just then he is replaced by a female museum assistant. She takes up her place in the corner of the room where there is a seat that the man had not used the whole time I had been up there and which in fact I had not noticed at all before she sat down.

 British Museum Reliefs and Statues

 
                                     


                                                      "Fragments"

 Gouache on soaked paper with overlay charcoal and crayon. 2012-2013

Wait

All the inconsistencies;  the temperate leanings that get started because of the suddenness of sound, of touch, of an exposure to a passing wind that catch in to this body as it veers this way and that. There is a kind of incessant seizure as first this impulse and than that impulse catches in, cutting into obsessively to re-divert  before the act is done. What is the act? Some already consigned function with a clear trajectory; a beginning, middle and end that swoons irresistibly and seamlessly one into another to make this pre-fab action; a function of the body; a normative curved loop with no wrinkles, no kinks in the material. Is this you? Is this me? Are we composed as if abstracted around a common unspoken commitment only waiting to jump start into life's little prompters; the business of this and that- of tables and mugs, yogurt pots and spoons, words and their referents?  Are we too a referent of  the word we signify- something  that needs to get it right and so live up to all the definite versions of being human melted back down into the smooth texture of  unbroken acts?

The boy who wobbles over, prompts me into the remembrance of a rough and ready game that is never really the same game but anyway calls me into a responsiveness which without this child, would leave me at this point in time, inert, slightly collapsed, not having a particular idea of what to do next; how to fashion my limbs or voice usefully. He gives me a reason to engage. But the engagement as it follows from one thing to the next is a series of episodic jerks with smooth leanings somewhere along the line and frazzled end-pieces that explode or die away in muscle contractions and un-modulated vocalizations. Until again I forget the pattern or my attention wanders and again the boy needs to prompt me back into existence. This prompting  is a kind of falling; a falling out of integrity of a perfectly consigned symmetry of equally limbed body-parts engineered and collated from a central nervous system that is pulsing and firing like a well-oiled engine. No it isn't like that at all. There are glitches and burps, eruptions and involuntary moves. There is laughter and there is stretching out, rolling over, curling up, tilting this way and that and pausing  in a moment of still poised touch that he very slightly leans into; some kind of balance point that is a knife-edge of existence and would be unthinkable- unlivable without all these eruptive cataclysms that stretch out and compress in again the body as one, the body as a combination lock joined at the hip with another- a push-me-pull-you kind of existence of lean-to's and momentary collapses. Revitalization happens on the cusp of failure. It is the rebound out from disappearance  This act of un-presenting is a running together in a timed exposure of pulls and pushes, tangential journeys and back-tracking that creates a double-take of reverberation that blossoms until the act and the imagined or anticipated act are inseparable  And what will be will be. This is a faulty mix made visible where this confluence of affects somehow parts mid-sentence or inter-ups and hesitates on its own utterance; a tongue-twister.  Gestures are the pulling away from this rolling and tumbling momentum. They are the end-pieces of  our parting company. So also are words that are the lost and orphaned sound-tones of a rising falling sea where tendencies mesh and change places endlessly before they are ever known in their separated forms as initiations or responses. This two and fro undoes directionality as it undoes subject and object and simply there is a pulsation that is both concentric and expansive - meshing  and washing through one another in and out endlessly.

I think that ideas are the patterned shapes of these movements. They are shaped according to the stops and starts that glide and interrupt one another as we interact. These interactions occur at the very fault lines of a smooth automated act that is perhaps more a distilled concept than a fact of life which is always already an interjection and splicing of this impulse meeting or splaying apart that impulse. And such impulses as they are, are mostly automatic at the level of their activation- more an aggravation or flooding out in an over or under exposure that creates vast ranges of light, sound and visceral, kinaesthetic thresholds that lap and crash in on one another like waves hitting  a shoreline  that was unanticipated. So the meeting is never prearranged but is a series of on-the-spot adaptations where the very flesh and heart of the encounter is shaped according to speed indications and how we playfully intensify or moderate the force of a meeting. Meeting is always traumatic but it can be played into finer and finer filaments of nuanced approaches and retreats. It is never a clear on-off contact but is a modification of delay and heightened reach so that the patterns becomes a long and drawn out exposure or at times are bleached white; becoming  an invisible and perfectly smooth plate, where the acid of affect has over-done its business. It's in the small gaps and fault lines of a mismatched encounter that ideas and recognition formulate, making something out of nothing where there is pause or a simple vacancy- a letting go and uncoiling out of the high tonality; the intense investment for an ultimaton.
The close of a story-line or the resolution of a sequence of chords is somehow withheld- denied its happy and ending- splintered and fragmented or drawn out too long into repetition until we are momentarily blinded in this identical reflection and back and forth becoming nowhere at all. Then it is that we both just rest where we are- together and apart making no difference. Gestures of reach and intervals of separation are one and the same. They occur without us making an obvious move at all. Functionality is let go of and the thing- such as it is- simply unfurls from a center that is never to be found- always redrafting its possible location but always gone when we arrive there too heavily. So we wait and the untold story wraps and unwraps in the changing gusts of wind.