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.