Sparks from the ground; Session with M

There is a fullness to M's body today. Not this as a static mass of  body stuff. More an aliveness that is  an enquiry that we are in together. Even with  the occasional slumping and seeming tuning out, there is a waiting; like a pause-gap where something is filtering through. Some kind of  pulsed impact that is being digested and circulated- spread around in this interaction with the breath, touch and sound-making; levels of impact so that  the way in which I touch M is mediated by many kinds of gaseous, synaptic, visceral, digestive and excretory processes and his awareness of these processes as they are happening. These become the feeling states as they rise and become tangible as a point of contact. This then is the exact point of impact that is received just here and now before dissipating or translating into something else. There are levels that at any one moment are the apt levels of this contact boundary. These rise and fall continually and are gauged between the two of us. Where they settle is not known as a predisposition beforehand. The thing is made up along the way. This is the game; the enquiry; how things settle or how they move on.

Is there sentient sensitivity in the finger pads as I make physical contact with M that works its way right through the neural networks as a kind of distributed body-brain? Any point of contact, immediate or delayed- in the time it takes for it to be received- is this. As I write up these notes the same operation is in process. The impact and the feedback of pressing the computer key-pad over and over again in this rhythmic pulse patterns the text; like a resonance or a feeling atmosphere of that session with M now four days ago where under our joint conjured act something was made. Making something together is this entwining; a kind of delicate knitting that passes in and out and so passes through. Surface and impact go together and depth readings are these probings where sink holes and coverings vie for interest in this constant descent and flotation over and over again. It is the play of gradients that shapes value in an almost tactile image crafted between us.

I have said much without saying anything so far about the details of this particular session with M this time around. What actually happened? What took place? What I am trying to get at is a mood; an attitude; something that has been built up like waves in the sea over many weeks, months and years. This is the virtual relationship between M and I which is never seen or tangible or forthcoming. Yes there are these patterns of probings that we welcome or upset playing off repetition and change and this becomes the play of the meeting in that precise moment and then in the next. A reverie or a kind of passing of wind that has a whiff of something deep, innocuous and unspeakable and also the carefree sense of something being let out, set free within a wider network; allowed a new forum of play. This wider scope is only possible as an a-rhythm of a tightly articulated metre. The frame of this practice is scheduled and repeatable and sequential; the tuning into the breath; the quiet touch both warming and spreading yet from a still beginning. The gradual noting and inclusion of body regions as they gather become synonymous with one another as our attention together is drawn and fine-tuned  back and forth from one to another as a passing through; until there is just the motion, the pattern; the description emanating out of this centre that is always re-traceable because it can be found anew. So a flourishing image of growth as it reaches through expansion and natural amplification from a small invisible start-point. The star point is almost random, simple and unthought out; a direct landing just here or here as M's abdomen rises and falls or his chest heaves and a slight knot or tightening at the right hand shoulder seems to beckon. The contrast between this gathering or tightening and a loosening or unwinding some place else; in the diaphragm or hip or ankle-joint or in  the small tip of his finger or at the outer edge of his eyes. This creates a sense of spreading; a lightness out of a covering. There is concurrently a slight urge or want or inclination to reach out or open up or to make a sounding as a snap unfolding rather than a cause and affect mechanism of motor function or vocal intent. So the movement comes back to front as a release of tension and its unwinding through the body in contact with another body and in contact with a yet wider and wider sense of environmental holding. So like Russian Dolls nestled one inside the other there is this opening up of a wider complex of relationships so that any simple movement or twitch or yawn or burp is nestled within this cocoon of blossoming affect; like a bud budding itself because simply the coordinate conditions give rise to such an affect at this precise moment without thought or effort. Aptly there is a co-witnessing of this happening as it is taking place so that in human terms, an action really did occur because we were present to it in a way that made it something we could feel in the moment together and perhaps even recount and bring up at a later date if we so wished. in this way something could be made of it.

But who made the action? where is the self-determination; the intentional thrust? It is embedded and at once removed from any present focus, continually displaced as the one inclination rides through into its rooting someplace else. This is not like lighting a fire-cracker and seeing it gradually take hold and light up from one end to another. It is more a kind of archaeological tracing where the gesture is the flowering of what has already occurred at a more embedded level. On-off touch; sound and no-sound; contraction and release; an eye blinking open and closed; consciousness and automatic response; falling into contact and pushing away; the thrust and the embrace; the cocoon and the journeying along a disparate road. Holding and letting go. All these are two ends of the same thing. They engine and keep in relief one another. There is this synergy of high tension and floppy giving into ground. This is the contouring of  our landscape in which we are one yet feel ourselves and one another only in relation to our performed difference.

M is falling into resting on me as I raise him up on my knees with the sun brushing his face through the dappled leaves of the tree by the window and his head either in the dip of my shoulder or lent far back in the crescent curvature of the reinforced plastic cushion. Yet I also feel this growth outwards and upwards so that he is pushing out of this very contact into uprightness; a sense of slight disgruntled un-settlement as we awkwardly coordinate this dance of resting back in the fold and leaping out into single verticality. M is between the two states; They cannot be resolved because they are the states of source or nurture and volition or growth. Growth only exists with nurture and nurture only becomes such when there is the possibility of growth. Outside of their contradictory conundrum they do not exist. But wrenched into existence and given form they are like a poem that talks in riddles about something that before us and within us is so simple that it would be ludicrous to try and put it into words. So this wording just like a session with M is kind of ludicrous; awkward and unresolved- a combination of expressions of discomfort and of extreme tender enfoldment. Taken apart and to either extreme there would be a merging into the sea of no experience or a continual provocation into anxiety and restlessness.

M and his pattern right now in the classroom is of falling asleep mid-feeding or mid Physio-therapy session or else a crying lament for all the intrusions of his daily Care regime of which he has no say.  This is a protestation against either extreme or the divorce of one pole from the other in the mimicked pretence of autonomy or of passive dependency.

I am using the touch in relation to his breath as a way into a kind of imagery that plays on these opposites without merging them. The story of the tree, the nest, the wind, the birds circulating the tree, the songs of the children down below and the dialogue in the story now recently emerging  of M and the  younger girl Jenny ( The male and the female) who witness each others' hidden and buried songs; a thread running through from the inside to the outside so that the wider  patterning of passive and active inter-dependency; an ecology if intertwining can emerge. This is the story line that describes the imagery of a body in relation to a wider environment that is brought into being there and then in the moment of this practice,

The positioning of conscious intent is one of rooting that precision-focus in a wider bearing of circulation; like a football game where the ball is only ever in one place at a time yet there is this distributed ownership as the trajectory of a ball in flow that is never actually seen by the players because of their position in the game; where past and future is somehow already given according to the precision of the contact of just that angle of the ball at the side of  a player's foot before it ricochets off that contact and between midair and contact with a new player there is this levitation; this floating amorphous suspension that is yet a spark from the ground from which it has found a momentary resting place and a corresponding impetus or surging forth.

M and his coming into body presence and into the use of his limbs and hands and eyes and ears is yet the same thing. You cannot start from the position of his separate organs or functions  but only see these as derivatives of a wider connectivity that preempts and primes this supposed separation.

Mood then is everything; a kind of effluence that goes beyond the point of any one grasp- of any one contoured action, even as it primes the way for these fleeting movements to occur.