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.