After Sei-ki

Scotland and the boy in London

I go down the track. There are some new houses built. It seems there is no way through. Then I notice something familiar; the shape of the garden on the edge of a non-descript bungalow. It is filled now with rubble, pieces of wood and the part-disassembled contents of the bungalow’s furnishings. It’s a clue. And I know to hook around this protrusion- then to follow the green fence up to the gate at the foot of the woods. The path seems endlessly long and I keep wondering if I am already there on each new refraction of light in a puddle or an un-drained swamp. But no. This is not what I am heading for. With no map there is nothing definite to aim for. Nevertheless I am there and my chest expands at this lake covered over with the fur of living grass. I am at the foot of the mountain and over at the far end is the broken tree. Then I know that the stream trickles on up to the double stone, parted to reveal a slit of light through which I always pass through. It is windy. I stay at the far side making it onto the thick moss that filters the water and is dry on top. I sit down facing the small green tree that is sprouting up from the middle of the lake where earth has accumulated and the water is stilled. I can hear the wind. It does not reach me in the valley but it rushes above.

_______

Later, I am back at the school. I am in London on the edge of Walthamstow marshes at this tiny make-shift Special Needs School in a room that would have been an outhouse tagged on the edge of the 70’s playground that was here before it.

The boy is on the red mat.  I have just lifted him onto the mat from the other room where I began working with him through the drowsiness of half-sleep.  He relaxed and breathed deeply- a breath that ripples out unwinding his limbs and softening his lips and throat. Now in his raised consciousness he taughtens. But not too much. I hold his body close to mine and bend down with him to the mat then come back up to sitting. He remains lying on the mat.

His stomach muscles flex and he tries to pass wind or pass a stool. It is hard and blocked and he writhes with the effort. His lower back flexes off the mat and he stuffs his right fist deep into his mouth stifling a gargle as if plugging himself. My hands land on his abdomen then separate out so that one is on his upper chest near to his left shoulder and neck. The treatment begins and I breathe into the contact expiring and then coming off as I breathe in through my nose. His breathing is erratic. Sometimes it correlates sometimes it falls out of sync. My eyes observe his face and I work with the pads of my finger tips on his neck. At first my hands feel separate from one another but soon they begin to work as one, made coherent by the pattern of this living boy at the centre and my own life in that same centre. Out of disturbance a great joy seems to well up. I notice it in the flicker-like shadows and light crossing the boys face rapid and unstoppable as his attention reflects the patterns of on-off pulsar contact over his body.

The texture of this enquiry comes through not in relative distance but in variable depths that are reconfiguring on and off of one another. There is always this time-frame that hold sameness and variation in a meaningful account.. Through this duration there is an understanding of presence- a presence that is not an image- a snap-shot- but a gradual development through complexity and sometimes through contradiction. So that the writhing and spasmic end ligaments of creased legs and fisted hands is altogether smooth and elongated as an idea of contact that is taking place at the same time.

Gradually this idea like a wave ripples deep below the surface eruption and, not through inhibition but through setting up a counter-flow, it begins to account for a different feeling. This is literally a felt sensation and it occurs through my body and his simultaneously at certain points where a ripple drifts out form centre to extremity, then back in again.

This completion of a circle is so swift encompassing not only two bodies but a wider sense of the room, the class-rooms adjoining and the park and marshes, streets and traffic beyond that- that it is not useful to give a location- a start and a finish. It is a distributed exchange back and forth in awareness that is not only in human life but courses through all life. This exchange is reflectively whole. The joy is in the double loop of movement and pause. It is an embrace come full circle. A simple smile that is there and then dissipated beyond the limits of any single face. Yet the situation of the boy- his historical bearing is always in view; the mother’s shame of his condition. The bereftment; a denial of contact as a physical merging that can then lead to full separation.
But there is the idea of that contact that can be emoted or welcomed and that wells up out of its physical equivalent in considered contact. The mother is always already there deep in the boy triggered through touch.

Just them the no-contact of this historical boy and the contact of a deeper recognition play out simultaneously.This creates great empathy not only between me and the boy but in relation to the boy and the situation of his life and of life on general. There is soft crying in the room next door, rhythmic and insistent, low and sorrowful. I look up while continuing with my hand contact and the boy pauses and makes space in his breathing to include that sound at just the same moment. As one we notice this together, embrace it and make a wider contact.

I see this freedom in generosity shining out behind the cracked and reddened eye-lids opf this child. His blue eyes become deep, calm and unending. They capture light and send it back through then radiate it out again. His fist slips out of his mouth and unfolds.

Everything is in dynamic relation to everything else questioning and adapting back and forth in relays that begin to quietly whisper to one another. The muscle groups, the breath, the sinews and even the spittle and bowel movements begin to correspond and play off one another. I see the blotchiness of the child’s face visibly clear. I feel my heart opening and as his mouth frees up and begins to burble and make sounds that rise up as deep guttural throat sounds I am magnetically transported into this realm of sound as well and I begin to hum and sing. His voice becomes stronger, louder, more insistent. His fingers play out entwined in my fingers. His grip grows confident and explorative. I stroke his forefinger and his abdomen settles like water disappearing down a plug-hole. His face follows this enquiry in the creases at the edge of his eyes and in his moving lips. Now the sounding comes loud and clear. There is anguish, outrage, discomfort, life-force, joy and engagement in his voice. It plays out in tandem with the rumbling of his belly.

Something shifts abruptly- very slight like a minute tilt- then repositions.  The alignment from head through to feet is activated and drawn through the sacrum and lower abdomen that are alive and engaged as one.

I remain with the boy even when my hands are no longer touching his body.  The engagement continues to create a very slight tension like a low level buzz. We breathe as one through an atmosphere which gradually melts back into the ground. We separate.

The session ends.

I address him by his name.

_____

* This was written after the last Seiki workshop in Scotland March 2012 with Kishi and Kyoko.
Since this time Kishi has become critically ill. He will never teach again though at the time of writing I didn't know this.

I continue to work with this child.

(Added Oct 2012)

The problem is a good thing to get into

 .......

The problem.The problem of the defunct body. Of the wandering attention, the wandering body. The limbs that struggle to be still. The wavering arms and the convulsing spine. The problem. The problem of inattention, of distractiion and a widening series of articulations, half-met and half stacked to one side. The problem of enunciation that chews sounds like pebbles and sucks them into flavours that are agreeable or not. The touch that jolts away and realigns slightly to the left or right, running up alongside a movement and breaking off here and there in a surprise stuccato that works off the pattern that is there- the schedules and programs of a  school with its curriculum and statement recipes of one or two doses a day that is Government backed and so authenticated as correct remediation for this or that problem. Is this a cure or a way of dealing with somthing that cannot be dealt with in a standard classroom but needs more of a one to one approach?

None of this actually matters. The child is just there. And attends to surfaces of connection or not. These may describe patterns that carry themselves forward, reinstegate a move meant as a request or an attack or a therapy of sorts but never actually becoming any of these in the moment in which it occurs. And as it occurs it is changing, being invigorated into an angle, a tangent, a tilt that is a lever off from the main concern- with limited or gandiouse intentions, benefits and authenticity depending on how the case is argued.

The child can't be helped in that way. Because the child is already o.k.- can only be o.k according to a situation of adaptations not according to a bench-mark of norms but in and of themselves as a line drawing itself out of every single aggravation and/or softening- of all the depth readings- the moments of absorbtion and bounce through which action and reaction are melded before they become either of these. In Aikido, the attacker comes at you dead straight seeing you as a target in order to deal the blow. The aikido move is not a technique but an absorbtion and proliferation of this move into a wider conjoined moving where the blow and defense dance into a raising up, turning around an invisible point that is an axis with no extention and then refolding back on itself to create the lever and the downward plunge. Nothing in the original move could have notified this result- which the attacker would never have believed in had it not actually taken place. Yet  in terms of expansion, torsion, constraint, levity and gravity there is absolutely nothing that is contrary to the original move. It has simply been joined, re-ignited into a unity that is a larger pattern than the solitary command of abrupt confrontation. There is no mis-understanding of intent. There is just a lack of interest in focusing according to the limited conflict in which the movement first sets out its terms. In a sense it is the movement itself that has been freed- freed from a limiting and totalising regime in which "This means That" and must be responded to according to the dialogic anti-part of an equation that already maps out the events and the characters of violence and subjugation; of command and rebellion; of authority and individual repression.

But the body is teeming with possibilites on the verge of discovery that only exist in this enfoldment of practices where one directive, rather than being faced squarely and understood or received for what it is, is tagged like running alongside a moving train than leaning out and letting the the anti-gravity carry the body upwards. It is an effortless borrowing of volition to take a ride and use the pivotel point between any meeting in orderto use momentunm and sudden stoppage to create real interest. Then there is something really occuring right at the heart of the problem that is apt for the occasion.

Special needs children are profoundly skilled in these apt moments where collisions melt and become something else in the atmosphere and deeper feelings that these energies procur.

Movement ecology

23.4.10


How to see movement as a moment by moment shifting point of contact? Even a movement that seems like stillness- a breathing movement so that there are fractional points of impact at this slant and then that slant at the surface that bit by bit feel out a depth of that thing.

Can every fractional bond- each hit that becomes a sticking point- be seen in the rolling duration of what is occurring? A rolling compulsion- not of the thing, the object, the body, the motivational goal, but in the compulsing itself. This constant slippage from state to state- a dying as a leverage comes unstuck and a reapplication so that the contact is a tilting, swinging on/off. Yet snail-like, or tank-like there is always at least one molecule aligned with another around which all else falls and catches; around which all else turns. So that movement is a continuum and can only be understood through duration- an environment unfolding in this Rumble-on. A complex of occurrences insinuating into one another. (This is Whitehead who is influencing my thinking right now).

Am I stealing a term to call it an ecology? Movement as an ecology? Well of course I am. But pulling words into unlikely association aids the hijacked word as well as the new subject matter.

Movement as ecology. A habitus that is a tumbling of instances. The contactability at the heart of the shift. A way to address situations- a way to think.

If movement is an environment of duration then what particular environments elicit this kind of tactile movement? In other words not a movement where functions and tasks are executed- considered outcomes mapping in advance upon a given terrain. Rather the ground is tapped and prodded into existence through every contactable moment that spills into each other, bleeds through in a contagion that is never done with.

Of course the mismatch fracturing does occur between one noticeable event and another and that is how we determine it as such; as contrast; as change. Yet there is the level of tactile workability that is a continual state- in the crunching and churning over of what this actual experience is of movement and stillness when in stillness there is always a movement gradation and in movement there are always slight pauses.

To enter into this perplexity is to stay with the motioning that is not then decided between a before and after. Because each instant is circulated and flushed through to the next one. In this sinking down/rising up that pervades one another the distant regard has a touchable gesture at its heart and that place of sticking is already a bouncing out into the circulation of an aerated patterning.

The movement is the lean-to that spans across out of the drill-like meter of consecutive touch one point after another as an articulated arching- a stretching and redistribution- the thrust and torsion of a three dimensional state catapulted out into this ability through the miniscule and consecutive folding and unfolding, in order to stay present. This becomes the ecology of a body and the ecology that is an environment. Of course the two are intertwined- as a hand against a walking stick connects up a body moving and the environment it presses itself into. In this way the rivulets in the creases of the hand are patterned into the sticks. They are smudges but they speak of more than only that smudge of association.

Every point of contact; of constraint and a furthering in once more in letting go has the capacity to pop up this wholeness of integral participation. It is experienced not as a mind concept or a vision of a universe or a multiverse, but known through these on-going acts of momentary association where surfaces come up against one another that become intersections for the passing through and mixing up of many capacities or potentialities.

So it is not surprising that in each act that is not some kind of hesitation held back and spun back on itself there is a chance for sensing a body through this environmental complex. Out of that there is a placement- a fractional nudging into place at that very instant in relation to all else.

So a passage is cleared and there is a transparency through the paucity of what at another slant would be a reverberation of bounced out light and sound distortion that would become unbearable and so close down the faculty of languaging. All timings derive from this experimentation. These time jumps can spin to the outer edges language, emotion, thought, social address which are all mixed up in the layers and foldings of what this movement or event is to become. The imagined rotary to this movement which is so often the backdrop and generator to our thoughts and conscious states; that selects by the way things converge in an act is second nature so that we do not even realize it. But it is there so that without a body or the idea of a body it is questionable that we would be able to think or feel at all.

Why then do we stop autistic children from moving- jumping off surfaces, wobbling on the precipes between balance and fall?

How does this kind of considered articulation when allowed to play out allow a body to exist?

What kind of environment approaches this level of accessibility? I think more than the objects or areas of interest, or kinds of activity it is about a certain kind of attention that hold open a space of time for a certain amount of time. That becomes a considered listening space for all that occurs. Whether in a four hour contact dance score or an eight year garden project, a shared meal or sitting on a bench in the park (as I am now doing)

It’s an attention to how all that happens within that assigned time becomes of interest and so that the components brought up in a certain attention begin to interact with one another. It is like the thrust and fall of a constant bantering that acts like an intermeshing to bring in and out of focus certain aspects that relate consistently in the randomness of this shuffle. So, the quality of light and the air currents are unsettled; minutely disturbed, throwing up filaments of invigoration in the contrasts that become this patterning reworking itself- this sewn together ecology of occurrences.

This kind of listening space is more important than all the play equipment or educational programs put together because it is dissipated, everywhere apparent and yet able to turn to a precision of attention that puts together the body portion by portion and simultaneously the mutable environment that is the sounding partners of our bodies. Feeling occurrences require that level of shifting contact.

There may be a different kind of way to measure suitable learning environments for SEN. Not in accordance to various theoretical models or an analysis of deficits and what therefore needs to be done to make it right. But by asking, is the child or adult engaging in these moment by moment shifting encounters in order to further them on in movement-thinking? If not, why is that so?

It could be that with the best will in the world a program that seeks to give children various “Tools” for coping in functional life- certain words, picture cards and a strong guidance with positive reinforcements to encourage appropriate behavior, misses the point that this very application actually distracts the child from an ability to feel out the environment in a way in which they influence it and it influences them. Only this will give modulated response through slight impulses of feedback held open for long enough to take affect. Only that can be called learning.

What this also means is that what counts as “Learning”, “Engagement”, “Interaction”, “Feeling” for different people; differently “Bodied” and “minded” people is going to look and sound and be very different.

The standard is not a rational box. It is the means of application. The responsibility falls not only on the child to attend to certain things but on the wider learning and domestic atmosphere to notice when these conjunctions “hold” in whatever way they do so. When there is the presencing of an environmental space rather than a “type” or ideal form for a body or a typical self to aim for, slight connections build into accumulative states of awareness. That opens up a coherent space where different dramas and stories can play out; here the body, the emotion and our thinking take affect because they are entirely intertwined modes of each another. They are the sensibility of a resonant ecology.

This would question the whole notion of “disability” and ensure a serious re-think of what it means to therapeutically educate or re-habilitate various categories of people. We could no longer implement programs according to those categories of disability but would need to separate educational approaches out from the functional diagnosis. To find a definition of education, learning and creativity that did not rest on an outside model that was a deficit linked to a preferential goal of attainment. In that way we would ultimately deal with the diagnosis in a much broader way according to the approach of contact or the possibility of holding open an interest. This model would necessitate a time-based approach, seeing various contrasts and differentials of approach not as a progressive single directional ascent or a regression but as the variability that made possible any connection and built and deepened the quality and intensity of contact through repetition and change.

That interest in testing and on-going experimentation would involve looking towards the practices underway and whether they had the qualities of a learning feedback or the seeds of that possibility. We would need to question in what way strands of a certain practice could be extended and maintained in these feedback loops so as to become pacing mechanisms inherent to an ecology involving many associations perhaps remote from the practice at hand. This interconnection would be crucial even to understanding the simplest of acts. That ecology would need to be sustainable and endurable in every facet and at every scale of its multiple workings.

It would raise the question that much behavior considered fragmented and un-useful becomes this way in as much as it is left unincorporated into an optimal environment. The patterning in which a life can fit in and begin to tweak and work with and against a basic interactional frame of reference as a unit of composition needs to be there in order for every known capacity in the human repertoire to get going.

This needs looking at