The Seams of our conversation

Forged in forgetting. A turnstile oblivious to its own turning. It is there and there and there- the frontal view of this locked-in activation. The startle response held wide open- unblinking. Or sleeping endlessly, drifting upon the seas that are indifferent to the turning that both carries and unsettles the flotsam upon its surface. Down below the reverberations are channelled into endless filters along which light and dark flow- fishes swiftly using the currents to streamline their speckled bodies and in a flick or a deviation from a given course, there is both suspension and the inflection of a vacuum momentarily filled and met. This embrace which is movement itself but appears so still. Is there an abstract diagram of this delay-thrust? This hesitation and reabsorbtion into a wider milieu and the immediacy of a sudden filling- as if by release- so that what was withheld, braced under the surface suddenly leaps up, breaks through the surface of the chopping tide and dances in the sheer light only to drop back down again; this cascading  into the splinters of current that carries and melds the body to the absolute necessity of a new course that only in that moment is given.
What is given? Where are the hints, the guidelines, the memory jolts, the course to be taken? There is no plan of action. Action lends itself like a sudden urge to yawn or burp out of the sheer emptiness of a hesitation- a rip in the yarn, a seizure of place and time, where identity which up until that moment seems to cohere along a given trajectory, suddenly is halted and freed of its contextual reading.

Illiterate and unpronounceable it gasps for air, forgetting indeed its aqua allegiance and in the vacuum or conflictual respiratory systems there is a charge- the near urgency of almost foretold death and the eyes blink both open and closed. This is the winking shudder manifesting who knows where that we come face to face with in those blue-grey clear running eyes and yet which quiver through the porous affinity of a gaseous liquid that runs and courses through the body, into the ground and back out into the atmosphere.

The reachabiltiy that a moment before appears to be the clasping of hands across an absolute distance- the distance between you and I , this and that, one object and the next, now melds and bends like the long grasses swaying in the wind after a monsoon in the rainy season in Africa. The desert gives birth. The roots push ever downwards into a subterranean lake of fresh water that sparkles below the baked earth, now loosening in the droplets of rain that part it by resting lightly and sinking into the grains that welcome this rain. It  becomes a dispersal- a gateway, the circulation system of a complex animal. It becomes you and  me in our life-form- dancing and wavering out of the still recession of our dream-space. Is this mere fantasy? Maybe not. The imagination can make flesh and blood live. It can cloth bare earth in myriad colour eruptions. It can bring life and it can bring catastrophe. How we enact it- grasp it to us as a seized truth or hold it lightly to go where it will, is up to the freedom of the milieu that we are a part of. We give permission to one another in the displays and in the quietude that sees both horror and the motivation of a dance in the same pedestrian tread. How do we make contact with the surface? Beckon it into a revealment of a depth that is not a masked hidden realm- accessible only in fantasy, but a lived encounter- in the particular sway and suspension of that dance.

A child who does not move from beyond a chair unless he is carried. Whose body is brittle. Whose fist is shoved deep into his mouth as if to stop up a constant leakage of vital resources out into an unseeing world. Who is blinded by his own internal reverberations that churn sluggishly and inhibit any possibility of release- of satisfaction or discharge.

But his aliveness is wrapped in this very conundrum of a disengaged alertness that turns into muscular rigidity- the breath caught within an old casket. It's not a question of fixing this- as if a plumber could come on to the job, locate the stuck point and simply loosen up the blockage with a few mighty movements of his own vital body. Vitality is not transmissible in this way- as if sheer effort and good intention created the right conditions for this virtuous leakage. More there must be a slow affinity where a simple proximity creates the charge necessary for low level responsiveness. Through the pads of ones fingers, barely resting on the body, the chest rises and lowers, the abdomen and diaphragm too. This undulation where a slight touch is then undone, timed in and out of sync with the body pulsation manifesting through the breath, creates a series of reverberations. Of hesitancy's, bracing and the sudden minute release of a built-up tension going to meet  the perturbation as always with habitual stiffening, only to find in its precision absence- a spaciousness that is a shared co-witnessing that then has nothing to do with touching here in order to fix rather but opens up this local choked protectiveness into its opposite- a sudden widening into an ever expanding realm.

The spaciousness cannot be felt out-side of the provocation of this stifling claustrophobia which comes at first on the arrival of any touch, sound or gesture. Gradually these gestures play out in reverse like an ever- receding view that is un-graspable, un-locatable and forever reassembling on the edge of what is felt. This is the domain of the mind when it is held in a very wide care connection that does not ask back anything and simply provokes, holds or lets go as a timed dance in and out of the siezure and flow of the breath, of muscle distortions and the momentary stretching or unravelling that occurs as their reverse patterning.

This coil and recoil becomes the gradual echolocation that talks back through the originally learnt talking to self- as a wider self that incorporates environment and the relationship of one perosn to another in this alignment/misalingnment that creates both the flow and grit of a true conversation.

The boy looks off into the distance. His foot is pushing against my hand and he is guiding as if by remote sensor the patterning of his leg-my arm as one movement in what before was a locking into the fixture of position. The very tendency towards rigidity is taken as one part of the paradox of movement; that to crush into an imoveable space gives the leverage to push against and to reverse back out  like a ball caught by the corners of a wall and bounced back out into a reverse flow that is effortless, unthought-about and therefore uninhibted. Movement patterns itself in this push-pull reversability. All communication is only this. The lock and the key engaged in an impossible embrace that somehow miraculously leads through the percieved opaqueness of what appears the blunt fact of what is before us into a moving through.

The boy dreams the dream of his endless momentum and through his body in small seizures and the reversals that their momentary intertia and release allow, he imparts this dream to me. It articulates through my body as a song and is imparted back to him as the enactment of this song in co-movement. His face is awash with light andshadow. There is interest and the flecks of conversant intelligence that is neither simply within him nor without him. It is flowing between in the sharp flickers of thresholds of light and dark, sound and silence, touch and non-touch that energises like a pump this conversant space where fishes swim in this darkened airless room swiftly with the agility of free creatures. Flicking the light and dust from their reversible spines, the colours are breathtaking. We wonder at them- for they are neither of us in entirelty. They are something more- on another realm that informs endlessly with multiple variation what we can be in connection to one another. This is  the mapping- the internal external fold and display of our unfixedbearing.

SPEAKING THROUGH

In the fold of an arm something springs undone. The reversibility a focal dispersion filtering outwards on every turn. What are we facing? Where are we heading? It is a round-about presenting that inclines out of each pre-set mid-line, to incline on a falling slope or to rise up as an inclination remembered from afar rinsing through. We are not where we are supposed to be. We are the thought-of motion built out of our oaring. This is the breath and it cannot be put into a holding though it builds in the vacuum of an encounter that fast becomes its momentary expulsion.

In the smells of the distance that collect around our quivering nostrils, here is our most immediate loci tingling through the nerve-ends in our face, quivering at the edge of our eyes, peppering in the breeze, our lips.

Do we speak? Not yet. Our bellies soften and the tendons in our neck pull taught bracing the clavicle and sternum and the moveable chest plates and rib bones under which our heart resides and our lungs too, emptying and filling, emptying and filling; blood and air mixed yet separate; this transmogrification from a spectre that is no more than the brief shapes of the wind held in the core depositary of flesh and bone.

Earth and sky; this admixture held apart; a mere hairs breadth or the separation of continents across the ocean.

Where are we? Where are we going? Between one deposit and one way of mark-making and its seeming erasure; the accumulation of layers that speak through this emptiness; harmonies and incongruities, clashing and holding, affronts and dispersals that rise and fall in the crest of a wave between dissonance and the continual reverberation of our people through the ages. This is the sounding that is placeless because it is mobile. It is the meshing that creates junctures of correspondence; a recognition and deep love that is both this tension and its release.

After Aikido

AFTER AIKIDO: PETER SHAPIRO

 

Solothurn: Switzerland: 26.7.14

 

In flux so that in a cascading together, directions are held and accounted for and in the stillness something rises, something sinks out of the same core and there’s a spreading, an opening; the Heart. Something that turns over and over; it is there only in this turning. Otherwise it dissipates.

 

In the falling the remorse and the loss; the natural ageing process of things that seem to be slipping away, there is a recurrence. Not a glancing in front or behind but a wavering a quivering, through which new life comes up.

 

The gaze is un-grasping. It is encircling, a quivering frailty through which the voice carries forth in an immediacy of expression. And because it has been set about its turning out of the near destitution of unclasping, in the fray of these threads, the magnetism of attraction/repulsion locks into dynamic balance and in the questioning; the perturbation; the unrest, all begins to fall and rise.

 

The wave; it isn’t here with the move but it is rinsing through into the fibres like a tensile buzzing that on touching is a touching through and so it immediately softens. The angles that we perceive are softened into this melting through. Then to stand up again; the shock of being alert like a child that asks again and again “….but why?…” The child soothed as if into the bosom, an enfolding surround that then awakens to a questioning in its own embrace. Then again this softening on and on… This is contact which in itself carries the shock of separation as a sharp intake of breath- then releases into expiration. To seize and abandon that position again and again- until all there is, is this pulsation- this on-off, fast-slow, hard and soft that are momentarily- as if in a blink- what they are, only at the threshold of what they are not.

 

The question like the wrinkling of a brow sends out patterns across the mobile skin. The flesh is malleable and softens around each turn, each fall. And the momentum of that fall carries through because it has come from a height. The move when held as  one from above and below, is patterning in the perceived effort of all intention towards and away, up-down, left-right, forward-backwards into the core seed where we are encapsulated as unity and grow out of one another, on the cusp of one another; on the brink of each ending a threshold of extremity which every extreme vocation must endure only to be softened by its nemesis, enfolding into what in the attack is perceived as extinction but is an angling round- into a greater dimensionality; a wider atmosphere; of Love- where time and space are enfolded as one and the meeting and the met is a unified gesture that is simultaneously a contraction and expansion.