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.