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.