Teacher

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

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

Waiting

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

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

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

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

Empty Diagram

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

Opportunistic Enclosures

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

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

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

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

The section of a journey

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

Cessation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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