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.