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.