Fire-fly

Work in the limit of where you are. For what else can you do? That means if you are in a perceptual straight- jacket try it out for size. This is a serious proposition. It's only in the flat-lands of seemingly dead-end dimensions and in the very act of describing these borderlands and in the tiny dotted and lined details of this and that - however parochial and limited they may seem- that there will be a flip-out as the end-pieces of these details accumulate and begin to hum and buzz of their own accord. This is the Tuning and makes a flat piece of paper or a repeated mantra that seems to be going nowhere; a nursery rhyme with just two bars- suddenly somersault. Because the given ingredients can never be known in full as simply a descriptive representation of some kind of inertia or pathological memory loss. And in the very act of this description or basic accountancy, the buzz of the pieces- as if they were tiny little animals with a life of their own who somehow knew how to congregate without anybody having told them how- will begin to hum and manoeuvre, talk and exchange possible positions in relation to one another. This is like a kind of over-tone that is nowhere in the original piece and could never be found if one by one these elements were dusted off and inspected however long that took or carefully that was done. Because it is a combination that lives in and of the moment in the speed reading and resonant flashes and sparks of a certain frissure that vibrates and shimmers with no will or intent that could be summed up under one organism but simply as the ultimate landing point in a series of minute disruptions and exchanges- of emptying out here and filling in there.

There is  a vacuum surge in which suddenly a dead weight- a broken limb or eruptive gut or strained ankle surges into movement and momentum and is set free within a wider circulation as if a piece of dead wood caught in a gutter pipe is suddenly released. One could say that all representation is necessarily flat and one dimensional. But something gives and something is received there and then on the dry uninspiring paper- or in the bars of notes that are code-able one by one but that create some kind of backwash surge where they drift up the coast-line as if by an attraction that is nowhere given. The luminosity of colour combinations have the same affect so that the isolation of hues can suddenly take it no longer and buzz into another dimension where they rinse through one another being neither this nor that. This is the realm of atmosphere. It is environmental and it is lived here and now in the activities that rinse through neurological thresholds brimming to a break-point and on the verge of collapse, somehow furthering through the body and through the air particles; into reaching and affecting the skin of others, drifting on currents into the pathway of and through the respondent flow of other organisms, rocks and plant-life. And there are tables and chairs too. Biros and drums, sunglasses and depleted hand-bags. Everything is there just as it is but nothing is a given.

Pieces in a stage set to be primed into motion- into imaginative excess on the briefest of touches where there is this sustained attention . And so the moment of transformation is given but somehow extended indefinitely having never reached a conclusion known by itself in advance. And time here is collapsed - past and present streaming in myriad channels into the minutiae of affect. The spin comes out of that; a driving downwards through gravitational pull and a stoppage as cartilage and bone, sinew and muscle, blood and breath heave and practically give out jamming and crunching together only to wait; to have the stamina- the blind-faith patience- that there will be this turn around  right on the verge of death- of inertia or collapse. And whether that occurs here in this body or another, there is a spinning back round and the figure leaps free out of its own inhibition and foreclosure, into a dimension hovering briefly like a fire-fly over the paper- practically a smell-  more a breeze than a locatable object.

Coming together or coming apart?

In the intervals there's a hesitancy that is in the air. Space unmarked is monotonous and in the end we blank it out. Perhaps the only way to rest in it is through the rips and tears, the thrusts and delays. How do we read speed and see it as a coalescence or a gathering of form? When do the pieces come together as a person recognisable as such? Or a flower, a building, a tent or a field? There's a permeation through one to another and the wider the intervals before any kind of resolution into what we are facing or what exactly a face is, the more charged is this frissure of meshing strands. Perhaps the resolution is a continual state of abeyance; holding things apart in order to attune to a song that is simply a passing breeze caught  through the branches of a tree.

The air is nothing but this buzz of tendencies that sometimes come together and sometimes seem to dissipate into the implicit feelers that are probing beyond their seeming reach and likewise are wrapped around and spun out like a candy-floss with no beginning or end. Maybe then it is more to do with itinerant use that is always on the move- and is somehow opportunistically grabbed into a certain kind of binding as it is binding something else itself. That would be a Deleuzian attitude with the Flower-Bee being a system stretched out amidst wasteland, back gardens and highway verges never known in any single object or location. The view is always necessarily limited- locked in and winking half shut an exposure that would be blinding and far beyond the perceptual currents that animate sensation into the events that we come to know and that we therefore become. But perception is always good enough - a haphazard assemblage that is apt in that moment in that way. Perhaps that is what Gibson is saying about Prehension.

I`d like to develop this dissipated- perhaps shattered- view as a way of addressing some of the behaviours and rituals of people who may in a more limited socially functional bias be seen to be doing non-sensical or inappropriate acts. How can reviewing the speed of approach and delay affect the way we perceive a jerk, a spasm or a breaking off of immediate contact. How can opening up the wider sensual and perceptual affective field contextualise these movements and alow for more variations of energetic occurances and their associative meanings?

How can playing with speeds begin to bring Autistic people into the frameworks of symbolic resonance which are partial, make-do and random and for this reason are common enough to be treated as cheap currency to be played with and then discarded again in the wider run of things in which there is this endless meshing and reconfiguration of involvements in even the simplest or most mundane of circumstances; such as making a cup of tea. This could break the value of obsession as a repeated narrow tract and let it run into a wider scope in which it is an imaginary "Take" on a theme played out specifically in that way at that time; with its own colour, consistency and flavour that in a sense can "Speak back" to the user.

Language then is not emitted out of the mouth of a comprehensive autonomous Subject with a motive in mind as opposed to the pathological repetition of an unchanging obsession. Rather it is an imaginary play of aggregate elements that come together in a certain way and throw up physical sensations, dissipated perceptual fields and associative flavours that call it into being as this or that kind of enactment. It is the setting of a stage that opens out into the imaginary and that creates charged image-words. The symbolic nature of this domain comes bit by bit through repetition and change to be recognised for what it is; itinerant and improvised collectivities bound together momentarily out of a wider field than could ever be subjectively and consciously grasped at that moment. There is a freedom in letting habitual constraints play out and become affected by the field in which they are a part- as an interdependency or co-emergence that cognitively we are never fully aware of and where a rational over-view is impossible.

In this sense rather than trying to air-brush away unwanted behaviour and thoughts, keep them exactly as they are but with the possibility that gradually over time- out of a series of seemingly identical images and gestures, the variations in nuance can be recognised so that the imaginary frame- that is too wide and too disparate to comprehend- starts to be acknowledged; even through the impossibility of actually taking hold of it as something that could be grasped or percieved in the ordinary sense.

This of course draws on Buddhist teaching, particularly Dzogchen and Mayahana.
It is a similar process to meditation that then throws up contemplation.
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Here than is the beginnings of an idea- that language like perception is always nested in a far wider field than could be directly grasped through language or perception. It can in this sense never talk about itself. But it can throw out multiple reflections as affective momentary states as they are actually happening. These always operate throug the rhythmic and spatial intervals of their occurance- in other words in "real-time". This is their pacing. Out of this pacing the conditiions of a specific imagistic-word play can be enacted and reflected on. But it is only in the gap between the image and the word- joined at a more basic level through luminosity and sound that a poetic meaning is suddenly distilled. This is a jump in scales and is always non-logical and does not follow temperal or spacial rules.

All later analysis must draw out of the richness of these distilled word-images that are deeper and more yielding than the word analysis they will eventually throw up.

Dyslexia can be addressed by moving through these rich poetic image-sound-environment-word domains as a battery-charger for more linear word narratives. These narratives- such as the one I am now writing- will only come about after a gestation period where this rich texture- like a kind of nutrient or compost- begins to filter and settle down through the kinaesthethic and visceral body-perception of the person who will then find themselves in the position of or in the line of the relevant words for the occasion. These will almost overflow or spill out since the conditions for their arrival have been carefully tended to.

Tune

Integration is not an immediate thing. There is a slur- a slight incongruity- a gap that opens up between  any alignment in address. This is useful. Because it buzzes and ticks in the vibration of the gap. The mismatch is an incognito abatement. Something that is shifting even as it appears still and is held in this nudging gesture of abeyance swivelling towards a meeting that is only on passing met. It's like trying to open a safe by switching one way and then another- a fraction here and a fraction in reverse as the clicks of alignment bring one into a sense of getting hotter or getting colder by minute degrees.

In the address of one person to another this is never completely there. It is not completable because that would lock out the dynamic co-adjustments out of which contact or the idea of contact is sought and lost, lost and found over and over in a piecemeal fashion. For there can be no conglomeration into that appearance for that would then melt into everything with no location or it would fix into a smaller and smaller point of intensification and disappear internally.

Between dissipation and solidification there is the idea of  a contact running through every mismatch and chance brush that can never be known or planned in advance. It is a choreography with no written score. A tuning into a resonance that at one moment is compelling and at  perhaps the very same moment is unbearable- deafening.

What does it mean to hear- to turn and orientate one' own emissions into the atmospheric sound waves that reach towards the sense of where one is and then bounce off, converted and revitalised by this internalisation-externalisation which is all as one. The giddying sway of our bodies along a swaying axis that is reset against an uneven ground is the same as our gestures towards one another and is where body-environment swims in the same medium as both all-of-apiece and as a relatively separate location out of which sounds, gestures and movements topple endlessly. In this busy-nes where there is a loose attention to a point of resonance where tones or vibrations not actually generated in the original emissions are somehow set free into the to and fro of grasp and letting go there is this moving in the line of a synchronicity whereby at a certain point all extremes merge and throw out reflective tangents of one another. And they are cancelled back down to nought and in the silence of this immediate but instantaneously vanishing point there is a a kind of facing- a kind of physical alignment emanating out from the lower spine and belly in two directions simultaneously up out of the neck and throat and head and down into the pelvis and sitting bones, the thighs, ankles and feet.

The heart opens and the breath comes freer and freer as articulation that is not signalling anything but simply a cry of connection- a link in a chain that is wider and further than any single being. And as the heart and chest opens further, the arms float outwards effortlessly of their own accord and the fingers unfurl. The air on the skin, in ones nostril, on ones lips vibrates as if in a tumbling ricochet and then through the connectivity  and bringing into oneness of our body at this location at this time there is an instantaneous reaching and merging with all that appears other. Both time and space dissolve out of this point and run their course onwards and outwards and this becomes a feeling of spaciousness; of there being all the time in the world and simply we stand where we are lightly and in tune with one another.
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(Some thoughts after the 1st singing workshop with Jamie Mcarthy and linking this loosely to feelings about meeting and beginning to work with hearing impaired children)

Layers

Language does not stand apart as a discreet category or function from the lived body in continual and unforetold application. In that sense, Use is the continually updated interface that joins us in our facing objects, surfaces and one another. Feeling is not a higher realm. It is a basic realm. But it does not stop at the blunt-ends of stubbing ones toe against a door. It goes all the way through, testing out and probing a kind of meshing and synchronicity that is as if the very fibres of matter -of self-and other- were sending on through tiny aspects of dispersive messaging, through what appears one and another. This is connectivity and it is immediate yet without any absolute demarcation in time and space. To say this means that our intentionality to make contact; to touch, to press down; to impact is only an initial placement; a kind of insertion into a far wider and more dispersive potential- a matrix of co-influences that ripples outwards and collects at certain points- as with an echo that gradually runs out and only then is known to be a discreet sound. So these delimitations are actually known not in a beginning but as an inevitable bleeding away from the concentrated placement. This is the reverb, the bounce, the journeying of a body of movement or of a body of sound and it is playing with intensity and how this changes of its own accord through duration- rather than with intentionality or semantic meaning.

We are concurrently running alongside or in tangent to so many co-dependencies that feel out these brief and waning positions in the process of moving together. We collect into concurrences but these never remain at stable and even momentums. The fact of their changing through duration; that the impact of a placement begins to bleed, disperse and travel down this shifting melee of make-shift affinities that in the next moment become less clinging; less merged, plays not with the contact but with the intervals of its unravelling; a re-definement within a rippling frame that is continually accommodating so that all aspects as they collect and discharge give glancing reference to this mobile frame. It is a pendulum that keeps ticking but the intervals double up over and over again to cascade in as one or float out into a spaciousness that is near silence. Between these two there are infinite intervals and they coil and uncoil around one another.

Drumming in a group is this shoring up of aspects into and through one another- and the dexterity of a central point of cohesion is not an actual line or mark; it is this weaving together and apart of disparity and cohesion. It is got at through a near falling out of any perceived line and in the small accidents of this tick-tocking undulation. A wave reaches up and  becomes a transcendence that is both imaginary and real; of the body and not of the body so that these distinctions begin to play like a koan on and off of one another and the simple factitcity of a felt involvement; a placement or insertion there amidst many becomes the basis for a felt sense of unity. Coordination happens on this shifting surface. This rises like a mist which is place-less but everywhere. And it puts into question the perceived difference of unique players scoring points with virtuosity. For as tiredness and ease start to come about through the repetitive rhythms that spiral around and through one another there is no start, no finish; simply this insertion so that a delay is built back up and through and in this very application it begins to fall away. Within then this very hesitancy grows the assuredness of moving as one single texture that like a coiled tyre- a mobius strip- runs from background to foreground without changing its feel but as a nuanced sensitivity to the field  in which it is placed. From this wall of sound-noise comes a silence and that is when sound and its absence run parallel and become a figment of the mind- a felt affinity.

A child who moves and stumbles on their own through a sea of furniture and on-known bodies.That child has a certain diagnosis attached to them that is there in the paperwork even before they manifest as real flesh and blood in that classroom with their likes and dislikes their repetitive actions and the breaking off of these actions. But these begin to shape into the flux and uncertainty of an environment that by its nature- like their own bodies- is unstable. Work with this instability and let it reach through in this touching grasp that even as it knows itself- as a teacher imparting knowledge or systems of routine and obedience on those children and as children seemingly perfecting their wobbly gait and delivering - like elixir- word sounds- and let all this unravel, dislocate and jumble as sudden pressing downs, jerks upwards, passing between children who may never seem at any exact point ot actually meet- and the rhythmic staccato; the felt impact that is waning and coming back through in the backwash of its own deliverance. Articulation will sound out in utterances like gasps and trapped breaths, sighs and smilings. There will be sounds such as the body crashing; the swimming through of this disaster before it is known as such into a jerkiness like a cross rhythm and the sing-songy melody of this fall and rise, this rise and fall. And out of all this- just where functionality seems to come undone and just where a sound  that should be this or that as a semantic category becomes neither and breaks free into pure soundedness that travels on its own waning shoreline, so the implicit intonation will begin to figure itself as if from itself out of the layers that come and go to become pure rhythm, pure melody in the stop-start hazardness of our mutually arising existence.  

Staying with the feeling

Staying with the feeling of a ricochet. What is this drumming hesitation? This explosive thrust coupled in a refraction? This folded exposition and hiddenness? Together they form a conundrum impossible to prize apart. There is no goal. Because the overview is never known in full. The advancing to all intents and purpose is a spillage. A mere over-running of expected limits. The limited frame is there and not there. For as soon as it is established this becomes the leverage into another frame and another and another. The ticker- taper that charges its own progression; a habit turned not into an end in itself but as a background buzz- the bounce of unabsorbed energy thrust back out only to descend and again; the propeller wave of a directive freed from any source of complete absorption. So the elocution becomes a trilling of the tongue that drums against the pockets of encasement; the mouth undone in the inexpressible sounding of sound vibration that feed into positive recurrence a spillage that is beyond the mouth, the larynx, the chest and ribs. There is no single location for a sound. Rather it is an itinerant travellor becoming first one quality then another as it touches in as kinaestaetic, visceral, muscular, emotional and language potentials. These float up and die away again- a continual aggravation and relaxation as waves upon waves meet as interferance patterns of one another; the stone dropped in the pool sinking and no more; the reverberations blossoming on the dying ebb of one another; aceepting and welcoming these re-births that escalate on the briefest of touches.

The ground is this trilling reverberation and this offers up a way to be with children with complex and chronic medical conditions. There is no drive towards the source of a problem; a technique of exposure, isolation and explicit intervention. Rather there is this drumming up of the field of affectivity; an enlivening into the repercussions set in motion at every level of contact. This could be seen as aggravation, invasion, or soothing medication. It could be seen in the placebo of a prayer or the  supplication of  a wished for outcome. It could be medication- a source in a bottle to be swallowed at intervals during the course of a day. Or it could be the care of a soothing touch to the brow; a wave of back and forth that strokes the pained area. All these are the fragmented parts of a wider embrace; a whole that can never be got at or grasped in a single diagnostic procedure where problem and solution are clearly set apart in the trajectory of a cure. Rather the field of connectivity is allowed to play out and widen, meld and concretize, intensify, flourish and dissipate back into a movement of affects and co-dependencies that has no beginning or end. This play of responsiveness is the story unfolding- never known or even concretely existing in advance- that is prized into action one thing at a time until all such positions begin to cascade and work through one another rinsing through in waves of concurrence and seperation. So that the very spaciousness, the base-line of all asumed premeditated affect is played out in the effects themselves. They become the actors with no need for a puppeteer set apart who co-ordinates as a long-distance probe such end results. For the ricochetting of the ground is ruffled into its waverinng vibration out of each incremental point of contact; then let free to sound out in the voice-box of its residence. Such frames are opportunisitc, unstable and propositional. They are humorous tales spun in the moment of their making that bubble up and die away because the conditons call them into the possibility of a certain showing as patterns that have a life and a death.

In practical terms this means that working with highly vulnerable children whose metabolic, muscular, communication and biologic condition would seem to insist on intense pre-planning, hesitation and the utmost caution, may at times benefit form a more creative approach where a ground of possible resonsiveness is drummed up in the moment of its occurence. There is here a very high level precision in the initial points of contact and the quality of that contact based on the first feint possibility of this ricochetting of responsiveness. This may indeed be mostly automatic; the touch that creates a pooling and then an outpuring of breath at that point. For instance the lower diagphram, throat, back of the neck, lower abdomen, knees and soles of the feet. But a circuit very quickly begins to make itself as one affect shows up the non-local position of another affective area. Resonance ensues between practitoner and reciever until there is no given limitation in the borders of people, of the room, of a demarcated school, locality or even city. There is this outflowing and in reverse an inflowing that cascade and mesh over the tide of one another simultaneously rinsing pebbles back up the shoreline even as the water recedes strongly in the next breath. The same kind of reverberation can be set up in the movements of  the body so that rapid momentums of movements from left to right, back and forth, up and down begin to cascade in upon one another in the slight mismatches of their own sequences and then this ricochetting doubling and redoubling over the original habitual pattern begins to shape itself and to take on a life of its own.

Very often stillness comes out of these ricochetting movements as the settlememtn at the bast of movements that ar eallowed to play out in full. This becomes the frame of enquiry as a story or picture that talks back to the "self-actor" and repositions by embracing the context and influences that coalesce in any event or action. So these wider frames that are less like demarcated lines then interferance patterns, create stories out of the imaginings that are shaping in a complex relationship of affects. The "Person" reads back these story lines that break and fall upon one another endlessly not as the initiator or author of these stories but as an active participant in the folds of the story-line. In this way residual and encumberant affects in which we are swayed and pulled into habits of comfort and rejection, seclusion and autonomy begin to open out into connotations that spread and gather through the physical and energetic relationship inherant in the thrust, hesitation and echo of their own incomplete making. We know them for what they are and we play with them.We bare witness to this together as it is happening and the drama of illness and health plays out on the cusp of one another. Song-lines and imagery come to the fore out of the contradiction of  reams of soundings that break into and out of one another. In this way new allies are found in the incidental melodies that could never be known in advance but that come when needed out of the total field of relatedness. A sense of resting into engaged stillness and the presence of simple intimacy resounds in the aftermath and in the continuing exploration of these stories of possibility.

Touching Through

Ricochet- running through every touch. It is not a finality. But a teasing through. It began somewhere else and is running on somewhere beyond the border where it seems to stop. It is drawing into a position and coming undone, tightening and unravelling between a grip and  its release. Neither position exists actually. But both are spun into one another out of one another in a game of varying intervals. These are never fixed but draw out of the impulse towards fixture the longing that undoes every goal of that longing. That is why the touching through is a vehicle to a wider connectivity. It permeates through sound, through smell, through the refracted light that catches on the rainbow tendrils of its own escape.

In the drumming jam this Sunday sounds position themselves against the border sounds of other sounds. There is this interplay of pure surface that draws out the gestures towards and away from one another in the resonance of these soundings. Placement is exact but the ricochet bounce travels or is muffled on and through these curtailments. The touch positions the stoppage and according to the impact of each placement in this inter-relationship of surfaces that create lines in the sky, the outflow of colouration flavours a contraction of form or a dispersal and this becomes apt. Like the colouration of the sky as the sun sets throwing into turbulence colours that admix with this refracted light into the spin-offs of radiant colour; reds, yellows, mauve, orange, lime green, misty grey, purple luminance and deep blood red. Black crows fly through this cawing and gliding, lifted up as if stirring through the fixity and separation of these colours, then gently descending onto the top-most branches of trees already in shadow whose outlines are muffled and imprecise against the light-dark unsettlement of meshing colours. And the colours now are pulled and teased out in the final death throws of the descending orb. A rush of wind and a strange silence even between the near constant rustle of early Autumn leaves; the swimming calls of birds that are there-not there so rapid is their rush across the small section of sky now open to luminosity. A radiant mixing of light and shadow that produces not by design but out fo a seeming accident, an array of colour that is never finalised. In each shadow- each blockage a new possibility of light as it is brought out in the relief of that very obstacle of line and shadow. Each journey then never a thing in itself; more an interruption into the blinding evenness that begins to show shape and colour, mood and feeling in the very obstacle of its constancy. In this way the incremental becomes the charge for the story; the play, the patterning against a wide sky.

In a treatment session with M today. A body hardened into itself where the ricochet impulse tries to pattern itself alone outside from touch. Habitual circuits are formed his fist shoved deep into his mouth plugging a stimulation into a self-soothing that is a choking gasping denial of inter-connectivity. The brath cut-off the rib-cage hard and brittle, the throat blocked by its own need for nurture- for constant arousal. To cut this by pulling the fist from his mouth is not helpful- just another onslaught of pulling apart you and I. Connection must set up very gently this touch ricochet whereby the drama of impulse and its reorientation off of every border line begin to make themselves; a swiftly drawn line then let go of so that the colours and sounds fly out of their own accord. In this two handed levelled contact- as with the drumming- slight discrimination into the quality of contact from hand to hand seem to merge into hollowness or fly off from the tightness of the body. The hand bounces off as from a drum but simultaneously it rests and sinks in. These are the two qualities of Kyo- hollow- and Jitsu- mountain found in the touch and yet never totally existing apart from the touch or as separate prescribed postitions. Rather the Shiatsu/Seiki session is a play of these differences and the intervals that separate and bring them closer in an interplay that is never done with.

The provocation of any touch holds within it both this tendency to push away and to draw in and merge. Neither is actually executed in full but the habitual impulses are played with, given free range and scope to become an infinite array of possibilities like the early night sky that bruises and glows as the sun drops lower and lower. So too the contact drops more and more into a position of affinity- a resfullness in what is there whatever it may be- between incorporation and rebuff, joy and pain. And in that moving close to the border of contact without actually merging with it as any one fixed position the ricochet of resettlement goes on and on. And what it means to touch; to connect is found at every possible interval of perceived distance and closeness; the tightness in the chest and its ease, the fisted palms raised  to the mouth, red raw and numb, becoming tendrils of folding-unfolding into what is a near clap; the disturbance of unruly children from next door embraced back into the room as the counter-point to a humming melody that comes through on the waves of this seeming aggravation. So that gradually the face; one face in me the practitioner, him the boy and the children that stand at the half-open door, swaying back and forward; the adult teachers who are busy bringing in and taking out stuff from the room as they adjust equipment and aggragate this equipment around clusters of children, all become the one face.

And no sooner has this face emerged than it dissolves across and through the borders of its own making- aiming towards a dream that breaks on the cusp of its own arrival that is never entirely there but is always a possibility.