Clinic

                                                          

I knock on the iron door. My knuckle bounces off the cold surface sending the sound back into the cutting air. I wrap my coat sleeve around my knuckle and I bang it again, thud, thud, thud, trapping the sound at the point of contact, muffling it into place like squeezing a mouse against a wall not to kill it just to keep it there. The thud becomes a boom echoing inside.

Then a sound like someone falling downstairs. The metal door cranks open- a slit- then widens and I enter. I climb the stairs. There are vases of dead flowers on the table. People like shadows glowing in the half light to slowly reveal aspects of colour; the red sleeve of a jumper, a knitted blue and white hat, fingerless navy mittens, a yellow shoulder of a kaftan. They are moving around a blue flame which is intermittently covered and revealed by cooking vessels. There are utensils, crockery, uncut vegetables such as turnips, leaks and potatoes in a large cardboard box. There are packets of unopened sushi all in a row and the lingering smell of bananas slowly melting beneath their pulverising skin.

The tap in the corner is dripping into a puddle of water in a bowl. Cooking utensils cover the grey office carpet around this puddle that is bouncing off the dim light from the window.

At the other end of the room a man is having his hair cut. He has grey hair that curls around his neck and a placid face and he is sitting upright on a hard backed chair with a bib over his chest tied at the back of his neck. The whirr of the electric shaver is busy at the back of his head where a small young woman is guiding it like a miniature lawn mower.

I am ushered into the side room. There is ash on the carpet and rows of packets of meat on the window sill where a crack of air gets in because the heavy sill has been wedged open with a brick. My stomach turns. There is no smell because the meat- large wedges of red and brown the size of small loaves, is smell-less in the vacuum packed plastic that seals it from all contact. Nevertheless my stomach leaps and I think I am going to throw up.

I back out and say to the first person I see,

“Please can you remove the meat on the window sill in that room”

Someone comes in and the meat is taken out.

I sweep the floor with a broom while a man puts up a cloth over the inner glass partition of this office cubicle. He stands on a chair and dislodges the white ceiling slates one at a time in order to tuck the cloth into the gap and then let the slate fall back into place. Soon the room is self-contained- a vacuumed space in this wider building.

I look out the window and see office workers working in an adjacent building glancing up and down back at their fingers on the touch-pad.  Another man, maybe an architect is standing over a map spread out on a low table. His finger is pointing to one place on the paper and his whole body is leaning too, over in that direction.

I unroll the mat and put it in the middle of the room, then take out the halogen heater from my bag and plug it in. Its two elements glow orange.

A woman comes in with a crooked neck. She has fallen down a flight of stairs whilst carrying a sofa up to the top of the building. She limps in and lies down.

Fine-tune

FINE-TUNE



Absolute pitch like any navigational chosen spot is edged towards out of an infinite series of variables that precede or succeed it, or play out simultaneously as background harmonics or low level buzz.

Any positional leaning, any tone, any tincture of a colour gradient is situated in this held myriad of complex differentiations. Some of these make it to the table. Others do not. Awareness flickers on and off glinting through specific frequencies that become the quality of an on-going gesture, expression, posture, song or story; or simply the countenance of all that is there. Yet each fragment that glints onto consciousness is so set in this myriad of possible tendencies. These are literally the pulls and pushes- the compressions and release of the physical body as it tilts and pivots around a tendency to turn that is forever offset by a counter tendency so that it becomes executed movements or lingering stillness- a pause-gap that can last seconds, minutes hours and is only known as something other than that which got stuck at the point of perception or filmic unravelling, because the plant at the side of the speaker/mover is still arching and curling in the wind of a nearby but unseen open window that gives light to the scene on that particular sunny afternoon.


The natural curvature of all life forms creates in an act of effortless change all one needs to go on with. These tilting tendencies present themselves to us as opportunities to rely on for short instances of optimum worth. It's our special niche to be able to time these attachments and detachments so as to take a ride on these larger currents and than to drop off again at just the right moment. All language is carried up into longer and more intricate trails and tales according to this adeptness of jumping on an off. We follow the current of the wind that is a larger pattern - a pattern of becoming that we do not exactly know or anticipate but that we simply give into and gain a particular composure around- as a bird is carried by the wind without ever becoming the wind. There is differentiation and affinity at every moment. How we hold and release muscle sets, viscosity, breath, and affinity with other life forms whether human or non-human is about this proximity and release; an involvement together with a non-involvement.


The voice too is a construct of this interior negative forming that is about the elasticity of the throat lining, the air circulating in and out – in this squeeze-release that gives it shape and push and the minute adjustments of constrictive, expansive tendencies that play into sound loops that cascade over one another, interrupt, cancel out and reinvigorate in turns and swoops. This air caligraphy carves out a space that is indeterminate; always caught into a moment yet reliant on a deeper sense of grounding through the shifting accommodating centre of the body, the earth, and the environ that is our surround and our release. Tilting is how we get to the ever changing yet constantly followed point of alignment through many different scales and tempos that calls and re-calls differently at each moment our being present. This deep set orientation is the method of coming into action, into speech, into address in the most effortless manner without having to recount the details one by one of how we got there. It is a broader shaping – a broader sweep of the brush. Something felt in the on-off balance between falling and catching in again, primed in the tiny thresholds of compression and expansion that we generate between brief associative leanings and between the intervals we articulate in these measured timings.

Torsion as feeling

TORSION AS FEELING



Torsion hits the back spine cradling the lumber, pelvis, sacrum and abdomen and keeps on splaying out- unravelling and tightening by degrees in hypo and hyper flexion/release that are a semblance of one another- converting off each other's extreme as a continual modulation that never ever breaks into one or the other.

The differing gradation is an on-going project- a matter of degrees that is time-specific; definitely consecrated in this bracket of this or that and so becomes a concretized attention zone to be dealt with through a physical accommodation.

Yet it is a part of an on-going story with myriad textures woven back and forth in this unbreakable depth. Every startle response is placated- soothed and re-dressed as a moment of entwinement before partially jolting free again. Inter-relatedness occurs all the way through as the knot splits into the two and interconnects re-bonding like a rope continually winding and unwinding round its own coils. This labyrinth coil is not a thing it is a situation so that it becomes a coiling movement emblazoned into the execution of a permanent low-level hum.

The viscosity of the body fibres that knit and arch into knots of holding create at another level, as an opponent composition, a lengthening, release and unwinding. That may be sudden as in a jerk or cataclysm or gradual as in a stretch or yawn.

So the levity of one arm is given in the compression at shoulder, hip, wrist, ankle, belly; wherever. These twinned responses of compression and expansion are the touch syllabus that is equated into movements that seem to be automatic spins out of specific localized and time-engaged holdings. This on-off pulse is the degree to which we feel and know the feeling of that feeling. Yet it percolates all the way through from the low level hum- the buzzing non-even beat that is life's fascination with continuity and change- or variation. It's in small degrees of contrast that any kind of momentum and stillness know themselves. So that movement and pause as different degrees of pressure and twinned non-localized release become a self-rendering combustion.

Torsion is self evident in what appears as stillness and in what appears as movement. It is read not at the surface but all the way through in the thickness of the skin and the way in which viscosity bears down on itself according to environmental probes and influences and as an outcome or symptom, lightens up again. Those symptoms can become useable- they can become our most effortless movements and on-going accommodations within a wider pattern.


Torsion occurs too in the affability and repulsion of seemingly disparate objects, surfaces, contexts. It is the flesh-machine that percolates in simple manifestations of play; a ball poked under a bowl with a dip in it's outer perimeter- that ball emerging in a concordant dip at the other side, taken over the back by one hand, passed back around to a different hand from a differently placed body who re-winds the process so that body-bowl-ball-body-bowl-ball is a continuous running process-torsion that links the internal working and external affability of two bodies through objects and ground-sky in a loop that plays out until it alters of its own accord in the hesitation, disturbance, friction and re-routing that is any running system. Consciousness becomes part of this torsion that follows the body adaptation in tiny thresholds of compression/release and the degrees of depth-expansion that assemble in this ensemble that is both simultaneous/sculptural/symphonic and narrative/sequential/episodic at varying levels of engagement.


How we posit our bodies and orientate them in this dance of combined elements that create a continuous torsion of engagement across time and distance is how we ecologically play out from the bounded and unravelling centre-spine outwards and simultaneously back inwards again. We are one and we a relational and so more than one and neither can be known without the other so total is this admixture and separation at every pulse of our lives. Language occurs out of this orientation that is forever making itself- recombining and falling away over and over. The diagram of this torsion is felt and apprehended- created as image and sensed all the way through in our ability to adjust or to imagine adjustment as a bodily and ongoing tilt between falling and stature. Torsion is the fine–tuning that is mobile but seems to be a point of permanent twist and flexion because it is flickering in this pulsation of contraction-release or on-off movement and hesitation.

Touch is more than discovering an object/person through surfaces and the qualities of rough-smooth, hot-cold that they offer to pre-established senses. It is the primer to this movement in space that articulates this reshaping of body-environment as a continuous re-invention so that what is there is always apt yet always slightly slewed so as to be on-going and contageously generative. Never simply a narrative played out immune to the context in which it quite literally takes hold and becomes what it is, reflective always of a wider situation in which it can not know but in which it is bathed.

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*The above notes are in relation to my therapeutic/creative experience of working with a boy in a school with limited language and on-going interest in his surroundings in very specific processes involving his body, objects, sound textures, touch as pressure-release, facial mirroring. These relational sessions occur for roughly 45 mins per week.

The sessions act as a pacing device through body-environment-thought-image-articulation.

They are a creative investigation of body as Space-Ecology where every attentional matter becomes relevant and a part of this evolving diagram. He becomes the central investigator in the making of this diagram in which his body can orientate as it continuously adapts and re-shapes itself. Language begins to concretize around this pacing mechanism that he is creating with my facilitation/inclusion. Words are the last pieces- the pauses-punctuation that marks certain points of emphasis- like certain resonances in colour-sound-pressure found initially in the experience of these feelings and equated with fixed measures; as in near-far, up-down, fast-slow as relative terms that only come to mind and speech through the prior playing out of the event as process. He becomes week by week more assured in the making and re-making of this diagram-story with me that is always adaptive and agile to the situation- always apt. He is demonstrating his intelligence through and because of his increased body sensitivity- his ability to accommodate and adjust in ever more subtle variations so as to keep the contact- the torsion- the line of consistent enquiry through on-going change. He is six years old.

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Ref:
Antonio Damasio: The feeling of what happens
Vintage Books 2000