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.

Disused Skate-Park

Incapacity; a temporary closure of certain functional directives- the rinsing over of sounds and light intensities that come and go as the body sits inert seemingly sinking into the pavement. No one in sight. But the rumble of engineering works close at hand. Trains too going past and birds constantly twitter. There's the graffiti- stained wall; the light sprayed dark and the dark sprayed light again; patches that open up to the passing sun  in between layering's of cloud bouncing it back out in an impossible glow or with the dark, fixing it in the brick itself as warmth that hardly settles. The sun is inconsistent from down here or rather the clouds are inconsistently covering it now and again. With the loud echo of refractive sun on a white-skull?- and the warm glimmer from out of the darkly sprayed lettering, my eyes are pulsating between open and closed and so the images on the wall, such that they are- as first one thing is superimposed on another- break up and never get to a point of patterning. The eideitic flickering of continual blinks and holds gathers into and out from the scenery as this one pulse constantly repeating and going astray. The exposure like a cat's eye is being peeled open and closed  through the action of the lids even as the eye remains still; unseeing. Light transgressions; sudden jumps in exposure create this automatic drill- almost pneumatic- around the muscles and flesh of the eye. It is not the eye that is the active part. It is all the props and holds that place it just so. But in fact perhaps it is nothing to do with the vision at all. It's that constant deep rumbling of a construction work that is out of view together with the high frequency tweets that interject this from the birds that come and go flitting on this empty branch and then that. These random sounds somehow hold my body here fast on this wall with the graffiti of countless generations who have grown up and been replaced one after another rising and falling and that leap too far out to be deciphered or barely become anything at all in the subtle and nuanced lines that hardly have a chance to capture the fleeting light.

Back on the canal a heron is still waiting to be fed looking up expectantly to a window that is closed. The window is reflecting back the murky water below and the brightly colored boats- green, blue, yellow and red seem to be melting into and equally rising out of these depths. The heron is tottering back and forth closer to the edge of the water or closer to the grass bank as people go by.

Blink

To be called into participation one thing at a time. Each thing a depositing into the graininess of the day here  and just here. Each call to attendance a jump-start out of that fitting enclave into a tangential repose. This effortless cruising with no mind of where to go. It's the same all the time and every day this yawning out from a belly-flop and rising on the inertia of a grating crayon. It skids and catches across the coloration bleeding through the paper done many months ago and left, seeming complete there and then in the light and playful bouncing refraction of a summers day. But here, submerged in the rain and the comforting oppression that this sends out, after a sleepless night of door slamming from the flat below, with preparation of food underway- an inclination to move on the stuckness of this harsh febrile receptivity that jolts the body into spasm after spasm until the anticipated fright is all the way through  in muscles held before the covers of a duvet are ever felt- this sense of aloneness giving rise to specualtions that bleed out into the night; the peeping of car horns as the last party-goers return in the early hours. Then the wind that is shaking the window frame creating a vibrationary buzz where the seal is just off touching.Liike a whistling through the teeth that is making my gums tired.

Now I pull out this piece of color-stained blotting paper on the very next day. I sink into it, the vibrancy of sunshine long gone. But there is this harsh clarity- like lines cutting across the surface- joining by demarcating, demarcating by joining  patches of color that read like temperature; the hot and the cold mixed up but never becoming each other. I take a piece of brown crayon from the draw, lay the paper on my table and begin to cut into it, like a skater whose journey is frozen here and there in the skid-marks and lingering turns that line and dot  the icy but glowing white surface. What is creating these turns and stops, hesitations and jumps?
I don't know. I am there involved  in this fragment and then in that fragment over and over again, layering up coordinates that  have a sense of their own. I am riding them not driving them. But every now and then I linger long enough to notice, like a refrain- a glance or a reaching, a descending downwards or a levitation  like something scattering and expanding and these channels intersperse and coordinate one another. Other colored crayons, specifically this color or that are one at a time layered over like a new film of transparency that is superimposed and by degrees brings into confluence some kind of  pulsing that could be read as depth or could just be the flaying end-pieces of a long departed encounter. But the contact is written here and now, riffing off from one another into the pools of color that followed their own kind of hopping  immersive dance there on that sunny day- a year now gone and never to be repeated..

When I stand back I hear the rain still coming down evenly bracketing this locality in a vaporous  humid perspiration that never lets up then exceeding its own inclusiveness and breaking out into the out-beyond, a haze of indeterminacy that goes on and on and on stretching past you and I where even vision even recognition gives up on itself losing interest in distractions that root you to the spot. People stay indoors. Curtains are late to be pulled back. A solitary figure in green-  a skinny young man with a black mop of hair hanging out of  the window drawing deeply on a cigarette, puffing the excess into the damp air. It is Sunday, past 1. o'clock. Lunchtime played out in so many different ways in the households and assemblages of individuals gathered as one or pocketed off into autonomous units- all staying home today. This great wait- this pause for warmth; the fragile coldness of late winter. But it should be spring I hear someone say in the shop on the corner. A holiday in Spain- but there are so many things to organize- so many decisions to make- who has the time? who has the money these days?

I venture to see or perhaps I imagine or dream some kind of repository of half-formed gestures leaning towards one another out from that piece of paper, bouncing and jostling between up and down until they are all suspended in the colored clouds that still seem to be reorganizing. The warmth of a bygone summer and the wet cold drizzle of a late winter just before the spring kicks in somehow interacting and meshing through one another.Not touching but through this interval,  hollowing out a kind of lost space that perhaps never was really lost or perhaps can't be found. The haziness of relaxation and the clarity that is a definitive line almost like a shock and that verges - in this isolation- on the neurotic; the constant replay of lines taking up the pulse of one another but going nowhere. Then I see a face yawning through the haze- a face yawning through the vibrancy of colors;  temperature gauges. Drifting before breaking up and disappearing in a thousand other coordinates- like constellations in the night sky dream-filled with color that come and go and are never decided upn. Is it real or is it a figment of our imagination? It is neither. It is both. I feel some kind of yearning- years gone past, years to follow. But today there is a pause gap- a cloudburst evaporating back to naught in the blink of an  eye.

Trajectory of Touch

Sheet metal that does not bend. Rigidity keeping a predetermined shape- a shape discovered by accident through all the recoils into hardened surfaces that also do not give. This strategic suspension, a moment's hesitation before the point of contact; holding into a laminate texture as if grinding up the pulp of countless lives now reconstituted into a smooth if buckled fabrication- like an indent to an explosive crash never felt; the shock waves of a spasm that comes before the disaster not after it. Some kind of contortion that has done with contorting and presents itself through this appearance as a protective shell; like a crab shell with the meat already hollowed out. A perfect vessel that rattles and echoes back every impulse of that which approaches the tap tap tap of an intruder who hears as if from the multiplications inside its own skull, the tap tap amplification of its own gestures. is this utter passivity in the crustacean turned in upon itself - and yet sounding out the gestures of  a multifurous beckoning environment as detail after detail is played out in the carbonated sounding chamber of this hollowed out tree. A fossil that rattles reflectively with the passing life shadows like the blinking blinds between light and dark- the on-off that is not given or driven from a supple belly but is an empty resonant chamber with infinite variation. The dance that dances out the aggravation of each prod- a febrile pulsation that meanders until its own to and fro of pulsation quivers on the wind and like an Eoleon harp transfigures the wind that we are blind to into resonant chambers of compression and expansion.

This sounding out is passive. It is effortless- the grasping/ungrasping of a hand like the pump chamber between left and right ventricles of the heart. So this heart  that is pre-figured on this loop of return, squeezes fluid out but this very exit becomes the in-door to its neighbor at a later date in the circulation of blood. Blood that is red because it is oxygenated so that another loop of exit/entry is implicated as air passes through a softened mouth held slightly open and exits through the nostrils at a later date. And this flow begins to transgress every known boundary as the transformation of elemental compounds warps the difference between space and matter importing through the ambiguity of what constitutes anything at all, across borders suddenly becoming porous-  the boundary of this and that a play on words that is confounded, betrayed and held as a laughable and rise-able joke as it floats through the inner and outer hemispheres of cells. Skin too that is breathing and air too that is feeling. This myriad meshing that is rinsing through an environment broken from the outset into a fragmenting cascade of unlocate-able forms. These forms never really existed apart from the distillation of all difference into a make-shift story that is unhinged before it reaches the first full-stop.

This is how touch, out of the impossibility of touch, becomes possible floating on its own lack of reason   between gravity and imaginary reach.

The boy who spasms even when his brittle body is lowered by degrees to a matted floor is not then in the position to gesture or initiate any kind of contact. He is concretized beyond the possibility of any livable existence; sent back into a heaviness of being that seems impossible to the tendencies of extortion into a more casual forbearance. So it is with absolute passivity and on the mere accidental that this loaded heaviness begins to dis-invest itself from itself. And all the collusion's of those around who, witnessing  these spasmic flexions, back off and so concertize even more this isolated form from real embrace; too present to approach from any angle, begin to open up a question- what if this was not the absolute case of this existence but something brought about one slice at a time until  the volume suddenly loomed up as if undoubtedly and always there; too austere now to approach or invade in any meaningful way?

And it is in the fall that the boy through negation begins this slide into contact like a rolling off a wall that has him  previously locked on a knife edge of total symmetry until through a casual absenting he falls one way or another absenting himself into the floor or absenting himself into the unpredictable happen-chance of  another form buffeting one side of his body as he lies there on his side on the red mat. So the contact is a kind of falling away- a loss of form melting into this gradual decomposition that has no intention- no beginning or end  but just a continuation.

This is how touch becomes possible and builds through its own distractions like the streams and trickles of a river gradually bursting out of  its given channel. So that it is this bursting apart that guides and encourages  the flow of reach not a kind of consigned goal of functional integration which would only further reify this  fossilized stone-body that has momentarily seized under the burden of its own existence this sense of impossible permanence within life's unstoppable course.

When I think of this incident of working with this boy I superimpose it with the recurrent image of  black-birds that lower their bulky forms  form out the sky into the bare branches of the trees below and into the nests built and stacked up around these branches. This is an image I watch from my window every day in the days and weeks leading up to the break of Spring where winter is still almost at its coldest. There is this high tone to these birds lifting up against the wind currents, bracing outstretched wings that are flayed and battered by the wind and then this slight giving way as they drop this resistance against gravity and allow themselves to descend by degrees until the position is calibrated in these small velocity shifts into the nests below. They are falling into place by letting go the effort that resisted this falling. So they become nested. It's the same with the boy and how he gradually falls into a place of touch and the receptivity and adaptation that this gives rise to not by effort or interest as an image aimed at before the event.

Perhaps this is also the condition of Autism; not a dislike of touch or contact but a learning to de-intensify the tone of heightened form against gravity. Learning to activate feeling response in each moment is then not a positive injection of sensory stimuli;  it is more an opportunistic lending oneself to these moments of letting go so that falling becomes buffeted and propelled back out into the possibility of wider patterns and thoughts about movement and pause. Touch as pause or interval is then an accidental lever that initiates a counter-intuition; expansion. This expansion is built out of a near seizure into compression, only then flipping back out into flight and the inter-connectivity of forms rinsing in and through one another. Space is experienced in this way- in this capacity to move freely with no given plan and to think about movement in the tiny impulses between the On touch and the Off touch that activate and code for this movement possibility.

Dancing with eyes closed; fragments

Fragments- a splintering that was never constituted of a whole. Not  a vase moved on from its original form- the accident detailed in the bits and pieces strewn across the hard and brittle floor. But rather the fragments that are fragmenting out of their own misplaced utility that never knew of a directive apart from this rupture. An interruption that is a bouncing out of discrete outcomes locked onto a provinciality that then cannot turn corners; cannot loop loops or even side-step a fragment of a hairs breadth without falling off the edge of the world. These worlds are tight affairs and unlikely to persist outside of consecrated meters and plans that are always stricken down in the process of  living. We are doubling up against our counter-parts- against the other that would invade and even destroy our neat ways. This is a scuppering of all reason- a cutting up of the story-line- the identity shot through and through burnt out of all recognition- a smoldering mass that has become object- a carbonated intensity turned to powder on the touch. In life flesh meets flesh, and with a degree more resistance bone meets bone. What to do with this limit? These briefings that are not on the agenda but outside of which we would be blind. We don't remember our blindness because we are patterned into habitual recurrences that bring up the world in all its exuberance and flowering as if it were experienced that way for all time by all beings. Passages. Passages of our movement- trajectories that are a kind of stretching reach- like a yawn, pushing out from an uncoiling center that is provoked into this brief excess by the cool surface of the ground upon which it stretches and flays. This undulation has a rhythmic pulsing that doubles  or revokes on each brief curtailment. We can not slip through the floor so we rise and fall out of it, charged into a space which only becomes manifest through these brief rebuttals and counter directives.

When we meet one another, there is such a thing as blind-sight where the end-point of a gesture or tendency is the point of seeing and this seeing is only felt in the inflection of a joint, a muscle, the brief holding of the breath and out of this there comes a flipping open that is making space in every turn. Dimensionality is a consequence of these slight slurs and re-directives that act like reminders of our partiality and double and redouble at the borderline of this consecrated realm as it is taken out of itself into and beyond this line only as the enactment of surfaces upon surfaces. These then are the splinters- the fragmenting that is not alluding to any prior period or possible state of unity but is a multiplying and evolving out of the very points of curtailment. These become markers- brief turning points in which a sprouting multi-directionality can erupt like a virus onto and out of any intensity of existence. It alters before it is known as one identity in one place and so all that there is is this alterity- like a nodal sneeze of filaments carried on the breath in  pockets of liquid that are so fine that they only translate into liquid as they crash and are stopped mid-flight by another. These trajectories carry bodies too, perspiration dripping from the flesh so that we are literally swept up with  things, undulating and turning before it would be possible to determine and analyse the gloved hand that meets the ball in flight and imploding out of being a catching hand, it is carried into the wave of the ball's motion. Bodies carry one another in a similar way;  in flight, waiting for the moment to rupture that flight by a sudden vertigo or an angled rolling like a ball point pen that can go one way and then turn around its own center to reverse the line. Impact is mediated in this stoppage and going on, so that there is never any point of absolute stasis or absolute advancement; simply these shifts in intensity as degrees of near neutral compression through touch and the vacuumed counter movement- almost like a spasm- of a flourishing that is this running space as body. Absence and presence not as polar exclusion zones but as relative fixtures that turn and transform around each other. These small tilts and perturbations of a mid-line or a set trajectory are not diversions or loss of attention to an incentivized goal- they are the very possibility of movement as life- of the interpolation of space and matter in a constant inhibition and advancement of one to another to another, tunneling through one another, lent up against one another in a provocation that is also a soothing drone.

Techniques are never learnt- they explode out of their own stoppage- not an emotion but an unstoppable wave in its interplay with the every day objects that it cradles and crashes-  moving houses, putting household belongings such as sinks, cups and dresses in the branches of trees; maiming, killing, saving and pervading with the same tender endurance that is the play of affects simply giving rise to and laying to rest one another; the turbulence that indicates a deep settlement as in life and as in death.
___________


*This piece was written after a contact Dance improvisation Class with Charlie Morrisey at Moving Arts Base, in which we attuned to one another's movements by having first one dancer and then both dancers in a pair move with their eyes closed. However it was the dancer with their eyes closed who first led or "directed" the dance, until as the dance progressed the roles of receptivity and passivity become totally melded, pulsing on remote shards of contact; turning on a living dimensionality. When we then opened our eyes and streamed freely through the space the movements seemed to pulse and warp with the patterns already experienced in the former intimate dance and we seemed to make contact with other dancers not by looking or anticipating an approach but through feeling the pulse of these stoppages on the cusp of one another and the turning points and brief directives that these allowed. In this way limit and limitlessness began to turn on one another and so undo one another and the seeming givenness of these states came under question as they percolated and transformed creating a mixed identity that would be fraudulent like a severed hand at any point of exaggerated stoppage. Affect or responsiveness became the only possibility in this meeting- both the hard and the soft burgeoning out of one another.

Passivity

Passivity- the open space of irresolution;  not going this way or that way-neither good nor bad. No positionality sitting tight from which to mark an alternate wished for or discredited domain. Just this aching opening that courses through the limit-limitless conundrum and plays cat's cradle in the movement between  the palms of two hands. What are these hands made of? Flesh or the interim space between these pads of meat? Some kind of winding through with no outcome or leave-point as a recourse to a set perspective.
Is this tragic? Lostness? Some kind of wandering away from the homestead? No because there is no integrity of a beginning and so no yearned for return- but a coursing through that in its repetitive forwarding and backtracking creates the vertigo of a spherical space that is more like a pulsating- condensing and widening with no grand plan and that is more or less aggravated  into a responsiveness like a simple life-form that turns in and ejects out according to light frequency, temperature gauges or the casual or not so casual prods from passers-by. A fly-by-night kind of synchronicity of  propellants that lean up briefly in tethered support; a yawn that is a kind of usurpation and ejection in fast succession. But this is not read as a welcoming and consequent rejection of  the air currents. A pump; some kind of constrictive working activation that makes of these currents a propulsive current that almost seems to push within the narrow confines of the tubes and ventricles; those hollow regions within the depth of our meat bodies.

Is air a vacancy or a utilizing force? And space-something that shoves up against form crushing it in the corner of an airless room whilst it parties and swings around the vicinity seemingly oblivious to the discomfort of its territorial volume? Maybe not. There is this interspersing so that the animation of the body is felt through this rinsing through of our active breath; of a space not within nor without. We share it but we do not give it- do not take it either. More like a game of catch and throw that plays with never-ending through the limits of given positions and stances. But these are not serious- they are not for real. They are enactments made into events just for the drama of it and as a way of playing space. A chase where the cat chases its tail round and round  getting exhausted in its limited but limitless space. And there is no apparent reason to this. Or a child flops to the floor in laughter. Caused by what? By this momentary letting go into the release of speed and out into the vacancy of a sudden stoppage- onto a nothingness. Suspension- where all angles cancel out one another, all speeds run through or bounce back out from one another. Intense reflectivity as the bounce of mirrors on mirrors; the ricocheting of sounds that extend and warp on the excess of one another. Total domination, crushed to a naught before the word is out. The vacancy not of an absence that used to be full, but an absenting that is the distraction of our every effect; its insessant failure as a mark of differencing. How we feel things as they draw through these endless affects into a disappearing  frontier that in the end is not even hoped for or glimpsed and so is off-set as a permanent running out on itself. This gesture of a yearning, interrupted in forgetfulness of what is yearned after or what is sought after as the homeland is the irritant that, held in abeyance, becomes active suspense. And the recurrence of these given  unsettlements until the countless inflexion is all that there is and in this permanent distortion, in the wry smile, the slanted gaze, the crushed directionality, we meld from shape to shape to shape with no recourse or sentimentality to a lost or yearned for unifying form. For that would take us away from this dance of awkward, tragic, humorous, despondent unstoppable life.


* Written after reading Maurice Blanchot: The writing of the disaster

Drum Circle

A running tempo underneath exacting placements. The placements are islands; their arrival and their making way for something else impossible without the running tempo that sends them up and sends them down again. This is a temperance practice of a depth reading that is always shifting. It is a matter of emphasis within the on-going running tempo where a slight hesitation or a slight forwarding that ruffles the flow puts a glitch in the momentum and in this sense snags a hook or a foothold that becomes something; a sound put into relief  and that foreshadows the level pulsation silencing it as the core structure like the veins of a leaf with no color or meat of its own. So sounds are brought up as shapes with a real visceral quality that indents and bounces back into a fullness creating an excess thrust into spring-like reversal into this pushing out. This is a making visible or pushing into view. But before it is apprehended as a visual or sound frontier it is felt;  at the level of the body and the weight of the foot going into or out of the ground or the level of  the palm of  a hand creating contact with the surface of a drum and then bouncing back out again.

In the interim between contact and no-contact there is the space for resonance. This effortless residual sound out of the act of bearing down and bouncing back out again is heard as a certain riff which is stored by the player as if it were a message not of their making but coming to them fresh and accidentally. Then something is made of this and it is repeated, inverted, delayed and plunged back down into the level transparency of the core structure becoming the supportive foundation for a another floating sound. There is in time this constant ricochet of  levels that fall in and out of sync with one another so that a rapid pulsation like a jamming or a positive feedback that distorts and then distorts some more evolving into this complexity. And as long as there is a core structure or pulsation, even if this never actually manifests but is simply made implicit like a steady and slow heart-beat, then the play of differences can multiply catching and snagging on to one another; bringing each other down as a head dive and then soaring back out of the ground on the sheer impetus born of this dropping away into an impossible contraction. Invisibility and explosion follow on one from the other as diminshment and excess.

Every opposite plays  into its extreme and then reverses and in this way the music begins to make itself. And the ricocheting tumbling counter-rhythms torn out of the inner pulse begins to organize around a body; a body that does not make music as the placement of notes in a sequence one after another in long impossible strands that knit and pull apart as if from a  master-plan. Rather each affect is felt in the slight sway and perturbation of the core balance in the lower body- the hips, sacrum, lower belly and back- and  in every slight displacement  from side to side and tilting forward and back again. This tilt catches into its polar  opposite so that the body becomes light and transparent and almost nullified as each tendency is matched and steadied through its counter-part. These twinned movements like a pendulum swing begin to create a rapid circulation through the base line of the body as it swivels to orientate into the sound beats that play out as incidentals of this swiveling centralized rooting.  And in time this rapid readjustment becomes refined so that barely a movement is perceived. There remains the semblance of an upright body as a continuous circulation of upwards and downwards movement crossing and binding up from the back base of the body at the lower back and sacrum to the head and down the front of the body to the belly which is a kind of collection point that is like a knotting together. Through this circulation in relation to the lived experience of uneven encounters- in the surfaces, sounds and intimations of our on-going lived environment- all the perturbation of left-right, forward-backwards, up-down is absorbed and accommodated without being stilled or inhibited. This is the spring-like aliveness of a connection as it manifests as a heart-to-heart understanding between musicians in a musical setting but may equally emerge in many dynamic settings where this kind of tuning is allowed to  take hold. There is a sense of spaciousness and extendable time and each placement- as if in slow-motion finds its insertion in amongst the running pulsation of the main beat in an easy affinity that binds in and out of its multiplying shoots.

The effort is taken out and the heart slows. Even perspiration begins to diminish as if  the outer activity of this rapid drumming were somehow superfluous -an accidental slippage out from a calm stillness of simply sitting together in silence. The silence and the mayhem now go hand in hand supporting rather than interfering with one another. And this brings a sense of deep calm matched by an alertness drawn out of this global clarity. Outside of the drumming circle everything is just as it is and this may well bring a feeling of vacancy and even depression because this state of  open absenting whilst remaining in the moment is so unknown in the usual business of day to day life. Stay with this sense and what it brings up both as positive and negative feeling.
It will come and go and translate into something else-something more impersonal-  in  its own time. Even as a period of physical or mental restlessness- even that will dissipate in time into a wider field.

The Dancing Terrain

On the train from Maclesfield back to London looking out the window with different depths of scenery streaming past my face at varying speeds. Fix my eyes on the far off hill; the mound that will stay in view for several seconds or minutes at a time and use this as a kind of pole star; like a ridgepole from which to perceive relative planar flashes of scenery that seem to group as banners or clusters and operate as if acting on a local wind. Such an assembly could encompass the cows, the bashed in farm houses, bails of hay ruffled in the bad weather, metal fences broken or dipped here and there. They wave past my eyes going backwards at one set speed as part of a consistent fabric. Then another layer travelling faster; the stark whisp-like hedges that travel in reverse yet are ghost-like revealing- like the spread apart fingers of a hand or the bones and veins showing up between transparent flesh, the slower layer behind. There are some ducks, a  pond or area of ditch water, spikes in the ground, a horse racing at this intensified speed in relation to the languorous cows and farm houses up near the horizon. And of course above and surrounding this level of land there is the tumbling sky; grey and deeper shades of grey pouring in on one another; the angular and tumultuous pooling of sections into sections becoming a deep fog that never falls onto the sparse land. Yet this vastness all around teaches the eye to look at the land with its variations of speed readings as one; a structure or topology of different densities where the color of the earth or a road or a river or a collection of buildings gives rhythm to this outspread surface and even in this rapid moving vehicle all that is there may also appear as stillness; exacting and outstretching.

Then as my eye-balls droop to their lowest points in the sockets and simply scoop up the detritus of the track line below there is this hurtling movement tumbling and pouring out of itself like the gallop of the horse that at the distance of a bounded image appeared in my picture landscape as a cut out silhouette moving across a fixed stage. Now in this hurtling of train track underneath the thunderous train as if it were spewing out of some unknown source; a track turned liquid and that keeps coming in the rumbling of this motion that is under my body and that carries me forward, I can feel  the plasticity of the land not as a space with one thing laid out after another like a set of dominoes all in a row, but as a vibration that is undulating in the very slight inconsistency of its placement across terrain. The greater the variation between one point and another in the track line or the more discrepancy between an absolute alignment, the more there is this rippling undulation as the moving train eats up and multiplies minute differences into this wobbling dipping and rising pulsar tone of an impossible set level that vanishes or overextends past  the bench-mark set by my eye gaze. My eye gaze is very precise. It holds forth in this tight absolute alignment and so it discriminates the variation and reads it back as movement. Yes the train track is dancing; gyrating under my body and streaming in time to the pounding mechanics; a deftness of touch through and through and that only exists because of this lumbering machinery as it comes into contact with my perception  in just this way. The other banners of land continue to dance past in relative speeds of extreme excitation and poise reaching near stillness on the horizon and complete fixture where my vision takes the sky as the medium compass reader and applies this law of structure on to the global surface of the land.

And again those running dipping and contouring tracks that reveal  inconsistency across space as a dance in time. I think of the spine; those set bones one after another from the head down to the sacrum; the open space of the chest; the gathering consistency of the abdomen like a knotted bundle held firm. I think of the holding in place and the springing up that this gives rise to as two opposite poles integrating and dancing around one another. I think of the kids I work with at the Center for Communication Difficulties. I imagine the waywardness of these kids in motion- of their expressiveness, their experimental utterances and the sheer exuberance of their dancing swinging bodies that are falling and rising, being lifted, helped up, breaking  apart, spinning and bumping into surfaces, ricocheting off of these into un-foretold spins and brief levitation's  before again hitting the ground. I think of the uniqueness of each child; the way they approach, smile, turn away,  hesitate or reassert their own interests beyond the realm of any single category of adult reification.

I see the kids as these train tracks; not as something spaced out across a terrain but as something that is being played out into a certain potential according to the speed of all the relative perceptual and generative fields around it. How it is a coordinate point spun into a pattern of behaviors according to slight discrepancies in these planar levels of the field that show up as different correspondences and different gaps and jilts in the frame. The alignments from here to there from the back of the head down the cervical, thoracic and lumbar spine and into the sit bones that bind at the sacrum; the muscle groups,  ligaments and blood flow that course up and down this spine; the oxygenated blood and what it takes to make it oxygenated at the level of breath and the chest and at the level of the  pumping blood coursing through the body at regular ebbs and flows- and the nutrients that are taken from the ingestion of food, condensed and absorbed at a cellular level with the waste being eliminated out the body. How these processes mesh in and through one another so that at no level could one talk of one system outside of all of them. And at every level of organisation of flesh and bone and vitality, there is this admixture or rinsing through. These different speeds mark the different capacities of  how we absorb or create bounded dimensions in our cells, our organs, our bodies our psyches and how the one state of relative boundedness transforms into the other state of relative porosity at apt moments that swiftly replace one another. So that it is in the very mismatch of physical integrity and alignment without which there would be immobility,  that  the dynamic and expressive nature of who we are, manifests throughout our life.

But a child needs to  be able to hold a level gaze in their body and in the environment in order to play with the discrepancies of life and bring these undulations into the playfulness of a unifying dance. They need to learn the set level - or hold in place the pole star- as a double poise simultaneously in the body as an alignment between chest and belly/lower back and in the perceptual and experiential field through which the attention moves. Animation  through body movement and sound utterance is the act of manifesting the contradictions or wobbles built into these alignments. By staying true to the involvement at every level and at every moment these variations can be put to use as the basis of animated living. Spacial  placement is non-living as a map unless it is played out- like a record where the speed can be altered into varying sonic exposures- into the continuous unfolding of the terrain.


* I was returning on this train journey from a Buddhist talk by James Low. What he had talked about in relation to utilizing or activating Space, the Radiating Field and Clarity in relation to Wisdom and Compassion was shifting almost imperceptibly through my senses as I gazed out the window. The teaching allowed a subtle shift in my understanding several hours after the event; To have  the  sense that different layers of attention play out in their own speed readings and are only experienced in relation to one another at a very different  level of attunement. I think it is always necessary to step away from the language in which a teaching has been delivered before this integration has the space and time to play out in the differing momentum's that are always meshing through one another.

This also points to a direction to working with non-verbal children: Begin in the timing or the speed readings of the actual movements and pauses and in the discrepancies and tilts that show up through these. Treat these not as mishaps to be corrected and straightened out but as the very fabric of the terrain unraveling and gathering in various ways. This reveals itself as the plasticity that is operative through time- not in the words or concepts that if they are brought in too soon will swamp and cauterize this plasticity. Yet words and concepts do have their place and will self-group spontaneously out of this freedom of play. Children need to feel the dancing terrain in order to pattern into their own experience of animation; in order to then be able to place themselves into apt moments of co-involvement.

The unlikely dance

I did some charcoal pictures to try and work out what is this practice of making space that we are all up to in different ways. Just putting it down in writing like that makes it sound very rushed- very tight and the nature of that urgency seems to preclude space. How to make space or experience it as a come-uppance even as figures from time to time plough down a plumb-line that would enter right through your chest if one didn't jump to one side or the other on a busy street. Can this challenge-this driving and relentless forging forward actually prompt and spill us into more space not less? What does it mean not to confront but to engage within the wider field of spaciousness? To feel this as a driving force or lever and to actually use the compression as a way to circulate so that the distraction or being put out of sorts, sends attention into a cascade of channels; perceptual, energetic, physical  and feeling, where there is actually more space not less but space as it is lived or utilized as a sending out- sending through or absorbing into. So it could be then that the limit factor as it is reached becomes the point of torsion or bounce out of which an extension to another area rolls out. This could be the lived body from moment to moment redistributing and inter-meshing through environment, growing limbs, extensions or idea protrusions; auditory encounters with far-off trace elements of a sound as it reverberates through the city; the downstairs thump of a door from the flat below closing from one area to another that you yourself have never passed through. But these imaginings- the light filaments rinsing through bare trees, cascading off  the window panes that at just that instant become reflective; taking on the golden hue of the sinking sun, and even the memory brought up so suddenly of a child playing in the rubble outside of a house which this time round is deserted with only the loose bricks and piles of sand acting as a trigger for this play of life that has now moved on. As I pass through the streets, some filled with people hurrying against the light which is on its way out and some empty with not a figure in sight as far as the eye can see, then a sudden emergence as a car roars down the center of the road and disappears at the far end, it's red rear light trailing in my perceptual field even when the event is over, I let my breath come and go. Why is this breath so conditional on outside influences, at times cordoned as if in a tight enclosure at other times spreading and filiating like tendrils that pass through my nose, around my body, and out through my mouth in a swift soundless whistle that is spreading and dancing with all the other silently whistling lips. Bodies; bodies that do not stay still. Bodies that intimate a gesture towards or a gesture away from where these two possibilities wrap and spiral around one another in ever more complex patterns. That is the dance. But only when it stays with the immediacy of what is indeterminate. An embrace or a quiet moment of reflection  and the still moments between  these varying levels of leverage and spin that generate yet still more moments between them. They are made out of  the mutual hesitancy and the going into again and again of these possibilities of encounter and in the end the touch is intimated out of these various tendencies that are inverted, extended or abruptly curtailed before they reach into any particular manifestation. And the touch becomes effortless, invited in even as it is re-configuring around a different space of invitation,  leaping between one embrace and another that never becomes air-tight; is always in the process of breaking apart again. This was the one dance I was drawn to watching amidst the swirling of bodies that seemed to become passing shadows against a blinding light. As I lay there letting the sun hit directly on my face so that the moving bodies almost cancelled one another out like the burn-out of an after-image where the body is still lingering in space even as it is beginning to drop away I felt I was almost dreaming.

So to return to the pictures; the pictures of the dance that were drawn before the dance even took place. How could that happen? It happened because the pictures were not a representation of the dance. They were not an episodic narrative of the moves made, the configurations built up, the postures and gestures that struck first to one pose and then to another pose. The pictures just made themselves by this abrupt forwarding into contact;  the contact of a piece of charcoal across a piece of paper that was mediated between the one extreme of grinding the stick into the paper until it crumbled to dust and the other extreme of suspending the weight of the stick just above the paper so that no mark at all would be made. Between the two was this skidding, diving, swerving line interjected and interrupted by other lines to create junctions or nodal points out of which other extensions of circulation could begin to journey.  This went on until it was done; the patterning through the patterning building up textures that carried the semblance of a form with a certain gravitational tendency. So touch or contact began to become manifest in this way on this flat and oblivious surface of paper. Something in the feeling sensation and built-up memories of my own body informed me of a given rule that I would not have come to in this way outside of the drawing; The rule was that where contact leans into contact through the experience of the body as stoppage or containment, this is off-set as a sense of spaciousness in another non-localized area; in the dissipation and widening of attentional gaze or as the physical extension and freeing up of weight in a limb or in the chest or the head. So that the weight-bearing point pools and intensifies and this offers up the possibility of greater distribution as a circulation that may spiral out to the extremities of bodies and indeed beyond these bodies into the space held by the architecture of the room and then even beyond this into the light patterns radiating off from the trees out the window; the lines of the roofs and even beyond this to the dissipated sounds of the borough and the city circulated in the air-currents of countless breaths driving countless moves played out in the inter-changes that are not witnessed but are a given and in a sense are dramatized through this one dance in this one place at this one time.

And somehow through all these filiated moves the outline of the child rocking and stabilizing on a swing at the center of a room begins to take shape on the paper as the very last picture that I draw because it is the last piece of paper that I own. It arrives there as the dance arrives there; not my dance- but the dance that stays with me in the bits and pieces that I witness or encounter first hand- at the Saturday Dance Jam that afternoon- so that the dance is this patch-work of dances and the bits that are able to fix and be brought up again as aspects of one another prompted into life all over again when I am back on the street. But the picture of the child arrived on the piece of paper BEFORE I went to the dance and before I arrived back on to the street after the dance. It is from a time that was not really in my mind when I put the charcoal to the paper earlier that morning. And the picture is not even of a dance; it is a singular child on a singular swing, spinning and turning this way and that way, pausing and  re-circulating as my hand catches and re-spins the swing and the child sets her position deep into the mat of the swing bearing down through her hips and sit-bones in order to stay upright, and whispering with her whistling breath-like voice going:  "LA, LA, LA" and then waiting for my reply. So the dance was really there even though I had absented myself from the charcoal picture. The cut-out border of the paper does not delimit the end of the contact so that in fact the dance occurs at the boundary of  its own representation. It is the heart to heart drawing of the child- before and beyond my consciousness of it- which then bleeds into the dancing later in the day in which there is no curtailing of the field to size. The tilting ground of the dance like the tilting base of the swing can not be absolutely stopped; and the child finds herself not through herself- which is an impossible abstraction- but through her contact with the unreliable nature of the swing and through the at times rather clumsy interactions between myself and her which nevertheless keep manifesting. This is not picture perfect. The function is  never to be completed-never to be tidied away. For it is always in its aspect of becoming, beyond closure. This open interval is how we experience one another and it is how we might experience ourselves through what is always an excess of ourselves.

It is on the street that my final dance occurs- that is the one with the old man; a Hassidic Jew who is leaning heavily on his stick as he walks so that his left  leg- perhaps the injured or painful one- is practically floating over the pavement and it is the right leg acting in parallel to the heavy stick that bares the full force of the contact, tunneling into the ground and sending the man's weights and attention heavily downwards through his joint anchorage. His wide brimmed hat nearly precludes all views of his face but then just as we pass something lightens in his face and I am drawn into the  brief animation between his eye-brows and his lips that does not involve eyes; neither his nor mine at all. It is more the slight staccato step, heavy one side and light on the other and the contact of the palm of his hand wrapped around the top of the stick, taking on its shape, that regulates my breath with his for an instant and in the next moment, as we have already passed one another, my breath comes very lightly and freely and I sense the beauty of the setting sun as if my vision had somehow widened and been flung open as something very exacting but non-locate-able. It is the quiet hesitancy of a movement that is looking back at itself as if in suspension whilst the movement carries on that actually defies the closure of that movement and sends it escalating beyond anything that could be grasped. And it is the heaviness and awkwardness of  the man's lumbering step that has brought the possibility of this lightness- a lightness that is the transparency of a feeling that does not exploit that feeling. Each and every contact that we experience; this plummeting downwards into containment and closure, is simultaneously the propulsion into a wider field when it is let go of and allowed to unfold. That is the dance that makes "one" out of "two"- even when the "two" will never meet as such and no words will pass between. This can not foreclose a space that is always there and that always does pass between points whether these points appear as impossibly distant or impossible close.  Strangers pass without a word whilst knowing one another and holding that connection with care.
__________

*Pictures can be seen here: wwwmovements.blogspot.co.uk

The rope

This was written last year; Autumn 2012


I went down to the canal the other day, a day of sunshine and clear mild winds. It was the day before the gusts began to build and build so that at the top of the hill a leaf storm speckled the sky throwing leaves randomly across the sloping surfaces of the park. A man with a hoover with its powerful engine strapped to his back was walking up and down the green verges of the pathways blowing the scattering leaves into thin straggling piles that were almost immediately taken up by the wind  again; like a squirrel that buries a nut just under the surface of the ground and a moment later a blackbird swoops onto that very spot and unearths it. Then came the rain incessantly and quietly soaking the ground, bouncing off the pavements as I returned from work. The leaves were not moving anymore in the park. They were stuck and embroiled with the grass that was already growing and entwining around them in the mild autumn air and the sodden ground  And suddenly as if in a blink of an eye, the trees are almost bare.

But before all this happened it was sunny and calm enough for me to sit down on a bench at the side of the canal. There was a boat moored  just to the right in front of me and the sound of the trains came and went over the bridge to  the left of me. People were continually walking past behind me on the small pathways that separated the canal from the open marshland. Dogs occasionally came my way sniffing around my shoes  then darting off through a change of concern or through the call of an owner.

Because of the warmth on my body I stayed and didn't hurry on, leaning into this warmth, bracing forwards slightly and then sinking back into my sit-bones on the hard wooden bench. There was no back to this bench so I had to sit downwards and sink my feet level into the slightly moist ground.
I began almost without thinking to follow the slight tug and release of the rope that tied the small long boat to its moaring  The water created this slight tension, driven into a real but slight force through the weight of the boat that followed as if lulled by a distraction into this emphasis away from the bank. It would go so far until the rope would stretch taught and then at a certain point in time as it reached its full stretch it would buckle and the tension in the thread would evaporate so that the boat swung very slightly towards the bank again. Then  knocking gently the edge of the ground it would be nudged back outwards into the canal flow and again the string would be stretched out taught. This occurred over and over as a kind of configuration and lull that with the moving water and the slight breeze I found myself breathing in time to. It became then the pattern of my metabolism and with this an inherited schema for the flow of my perception and moving attention.

I became deeply relaxed and the torsion in part of my body became apparent to me; areas of numbness and locked-in body parts that seemed to act like a hood over the clarity and free movement of my mind. The relaxation flooded over this limited experience because as soon as I took each body state of atrophy to its fullest level of tension it then went into reverse loosening and seeming to unravel like the rope between the boat and its moaring.

I realized  that rather than working separately and locally with a problem area such as gait, balance, perceptual overload, locked in habit, or communication difficulty, there was a possibility for global re-orientation in this slight but precise re-emphasis of address. There is a sense that observing  a process of tension and release as a whole creates a kind of phase-shift whereby the entire disposition of body-environment as a comprehensive set is aligned differently. This is a relational approach- relational in terms that the body tendencies and environmental tendencies are co-emergent with thought, attitude and disposition in terms of situating and moving through one another. At this level of tendencies rather than separate objects and bodies there is this streaming affect where the physical implications of very simple consequences of going one way and re configuring another way are informing levels of awareness that are bodies in interaction and the thought and felt perception and attitude of those bodies in interaction. One does not fore-front the other.

What occurs at the physical level is co-occurring at the mind level. But there is a gestation period and formulating these felt experiences into concepts or word based programs of diagnosis and remedy provokes them out of their intimate engagement in a process that can not be cordoned off as health, environment,  education, culture, therapy or play because they inquiry permeates all categories.

There needs to be an informed following through what is felt and what is happening moment by moment. Affects bleed through one another but only where there is right timing and a right point of engagement.
This ebb and flow of contact and release, torsion and unwind, absorption and bounce are processes that  approach and tenderize across object-human-environmental-animal peripheries,  scattering through one another like the leaves on a windy day. The are non-contactable but only lived and then let go of.

I stayed with this feeling of the rope stretching into tension and release, each phase feeding and replacing the other. Then I went and bought a large quantity of paper. There was a rush in this because I felt the weather closing in. This transition time between Autumn and Winter is special and brings up the interface of processes that affect and con volute into one another bringing about the turn of  a season. This plays out into the body  consciousness as well and I tried to catch this in the feelings and thoughts that rose up in me in the rope and then in a series of color and then charcoal body drawings. There are many of these in my art blog but I wanted to feel in every line and mark this urgency of pulling one way and then re configuring up against this practiced limit that is performed and enacted in order to take the drawing onward  This I believe is what occurs in the lived body and so the art of composition in drawing or in music and movement dance practices  follows the same rhythm of prompting cataclysmic eruptions and limit thresholds that incite a kind of jump or spin as something goes one way and then reverses in a different speed the other way. I believe this is a life energy.

Going in to work after a day of doing art work, my body aching but free in this continual activity swinging into one extreme and enfolding back through, I noticed very clearly and fully this process in these children. These children are very young- between two and five and they are all there at this Center because they are seen to have communication difficulties. The inventiveness of their experiments with torsion and release are a device for them to think and inquire and move. It is very important to take this torsion and use it in its continuation as a kind of sound and re-verb that plays into and off of one another. In somatic movement practices this can become the push-me pull-you of two bodies acting as one to create areas of slight tension and going into this freeze and hyper tension and then rewinding this back and through into the release and expansiveness. I believe that as the body enacts through a  responsive environment into this torsion and release or constriction and unfurling, so does the voice begin to burble and configure around this lived situation. Communication and voice is not something separate from the body's hyper and hypo tonal extremes; it plays on and off of this polarization into the upright steady body just as the clear strong voice comes through in these pulsatotory rhythmic and a-rhythmic modulations. The ebb and flow of difference through which we learn by wobbling what it means to be steady is the practice ground of our every step. Really this is a step into the unknown. But it is played as if familiar and as if it were repetition or more of the same. This stutter and uncertainty of our every movement roots us into the familiar by drawing us continually into discreet moments of engagement. In this sense it is the unknown that draws us into taking the leap of faith between the gaps of certainty as if it were firm ground. Without these gaps we would be land-locked.

On:Off

Maybe we set up spaces of opportunity by how we fill things just before. That filling and the emptying it implies as a counter balance could be another word for touch. Touch is not a thing that one body does to a surface or to another body- It is  a proposition that cannot know a specific intent which would be another way of closing the loop before it had got started. We set up these distances by committing to a point of usurpation  This jumping in is an occupancy but it doesn't claim possession but simply hangs around enough for that occupancy to be registered  Only as such- as an indent, a mark, a sensation, a slight brush with another at just this precise point at just this precise time can the vacuum suck of an absenting be felt with true force. Can we speak of force in terms of absence? Or nothingness or silence or space as a kind of substancing? That all depends on what went before and what is to come after. We are talking here of thresholds of difference, so slight as to be almost imperceptible where a grander pre-prepared narrative of a life, a person, the holding or the absence of a functional integrity is put to the fore-front of our minds. Deeds somehow get  lost  in the bulk of this march of a life. So that the small  interspersing filaments that weave in and through one another, rinsing  into parallel and suddenly jumping into relief as a directional tangent inter-ups the smooth surface of these occurrences, seems like so much detritus spoiling the view of what we face as a given.

But it is not given- it is made; made by the timing of how things come together to be what they are, and how they come together to carry on being something different through the movement that these brief points of contact activate as if without thought. Rather the thought is not governed by a cranium encased in hard bone, it is felt and lived all the way through so that intelligence is this adaptive coming together and coming apart at the micro level of on-off contact. What is this on-off? It is  a pulse, a pattern and  a code. It can manifest  between form and movement, energy and bulk, air and ground  but it can only formulate into these polar extremes because it shares at both ends of its possible manifestation a similar structure. It is the algorithmic knot that is also the grasp just prior to dispersal. There is no dispersal without the knot and the knot becomes an impossibly dense intrusion without the possibility of dispersal at its fringes.

Having difficulty with "reading"  gestures, movements  words or with stationary objects each with a name  such as car, sheep, pram or body is also having difficulty with the pulse between contraction and expansion, compression and release, density and the tendency or possibility of flight. These are not divided states, they are unitary markers of  a transitory life that pulses between activation and non-activation; between "On" and "Off".

This "On-Off" guides movement and cradles sleep before we ever learn the particularities of the Tango let alone the more difficult task of how to tie our shoelaces or simply to stand up without falling over again. And "Rest" is the state of unraveling between a certain tension that is there, not there, there, not there through-out our waking lives meshing together different transparencies like see-through color slides that tint one another indefinitely according to this or that combination. The purely make-shift nature of these combinations is another way to talk about Interaction which is far less a social rule book of guided turn-taking and etiquette rules on smiling and making eye contact at opportune moments to add gravitas to a word or statement and is more the opportunistic making of something out of nothing and in inverse logic, of making nothing out of something. Filling and emptying- that is all we ever really needed to know. The dance makes itself. Even the concepts of "Up" and "Down" are simply scheduled to take place though this pulsation of pressing into and jumping back out. Touch or no touch is the difference between the speeds of this dyed that becomes one spinning around its oppositional potential into a thread of pure arrival, separating to become a boundary as surface to surface jump out against one another,  or melding and  creating the consistency of glue as the warming and absorptive affect of this slowed down contact creates dispersal through the filaments of the thing itself rather than through an ulterior realm we call air, space or sky. So spaciousness may be an internal component that is manifesting and dissolving minutely moment by moment. Similarly form may become the pockets of air and their openings into a wider movement that is barely touchable in its excitation and swift adaptation to what is before it.

We could go on and on and we do simply on a whim which we may even call an aggravation. This is enough to disrupt the barely palpable sense of unity shattering it into an endless array of splinters and the splinters of splinters and so on down the line that roots upward and downwards like an impossible tree on a misty morning where the invisible roots actually feel more real than the branches that disappear at the mid-point of their journey in the white opaqueness all around.

In that whiteness we can barely see our own hand outstretched before us let alone plan for an executive function in which tendons are tightened and lengthened like the pulley systems at a mad inventor's bequest.
There is nothing to head towards in the mist. And there is nothing that we can remember leaving for as we glance behind us even our eyes seem to roll away across the oceans of mist. All we are dealing with then are affects; the immediacy of the on-off contact that is specifically local and joins entities or bodies which rather than being separate a moment before were non-existent a moment before and are simply called into arrival out of the consequences of this contact. Yet the patterns that they give rise to proliferate outside the boundedness of this moment alone. So that the touch catapults back out into a wide and vast canopy of cross-references, depth-readings and exploratory meanderings in which the body is taken up. These are the imaginings that do not rest in the cranium or in any one place at all but are lassoed out like an endless stream of party-poppers absorbing one another and than collapsing and reemerging as another touch catapults out another eruption. And these threads can go through bodies, through walls, through buildings and bones and into the soft earth below. They can spiral up a tree, became the tree and become the hair or mane of an impossible beast with its head lost in the cloud and its feet luxuriating in the mud. They are an undulation, an approximation that is never definitive as "This" or "That" but simply take hold of myriad assemblies unifying bodies through ideas and gestating ideas through people.

People are the carriers of these idea-threads and these people are only ever manifest and in robust health when they are movement-ideas. These are spontaneous outpourings; automatic sky-writing, births and deaths in the blink of an eye. They are you and they are me. They are the child who says "Cookoo" over and over again,  the politician with his slogan or catch-phrase, your neighbor when she is out of sorts because the telephone cables are all mixed up so that your messages go next door but next doors' messages end up in Peru. It is the internet and the crashed video of a Jazz trombonist from fifty-eight years ago. It's the misspelling of this blog address so that one ends up at an entirely different blog-site; a better one. And it is the crazy dance to the episodic "Stop- Start" of a toy xylophone in a sweaty matted room in East London in the roof space to  a desanctified church.