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)

Questions

I have been thinking around issues on perception. They are really a whole lot of questions. It leads into my idea that it is the questions themselves that open up the scope of perception. But how to get to those questions? I think this is about modulating more and more subtle thresholds of touch sensitivity- these almost immediately jump out of each locality and an atmosphere starts to pervade like smoke billowing in on smoke. Visual and auditory perception unfolds in this dissipative way- there never are these separate elements of things and places except as a kind of omission or emptying out of these binding and intermeshed atmospheres. Details do not exist separately. Rather they configure from out of the sum total of an extensive network. This billowing – made so real by the pictures of Iceland’s eruptive volcano- many shades of grey and depths of blackness with fire raising and burning off the sulfur fumes of gas has animated this before my eyes. Each panel of relative darkness is invading and overwhelming one another yet in moments of held configuration, each becomes a defined gage and border in which one becomes noticeable in relief to another. What it is not, defines how it is seen.

Smoke of course is changeable and we see it reconfiguring for us there before our eyes. But we have a tendency to lock into place these configurations, then to preclude the surfeit around the border in order to claim for intrinsic identities. We love to do that with one another, forgetting the motioning that brings things forth. Yet that motioning is on the verge of overwhelming us causing many rebuttals or over-exposures. We are pulled into it or pushed out of it. That is when perception starts to fade to white. All the discriminatory differences are set upon separate pedestals and yet outside of this modulated turning back into one another, no color or sound can remain consciously viable. Keeping things present then is to perturb them- allow for this activation in the jostling, where pigments and frequencies associate and in the mish mash sort out their working frontiers. Touch sensitivity is this. An awakening into this meshing. Moving into them with a questioning.

Contact dance on Saturday. Kathy Crick is giving the class in this space that cradles wandering bodies- allows them to rest back down so better to fly up. On the way there on my bike there is a gap between two cars but the gap depends on the cars moving at the rate they are going. One car halts as the horn slurs a continuous peep. The man swears and says, “Someone’s going to take you out”. I stop to get out money at a Tesco hole in the wall. As I steer the bike off the road the queue is already forming as pedestrians slow and one after the other fall into line. I go to lock up my bike. I turn back to the queue and a woman on a bike is veering off the road and braking into place at the back end of the queue. I nestle in just before she arrives. She understands this to be me butting in on her. We have words. She calls me a weirdo. I call her Mrs. Normal. It’s a full morning. A busy time. So of course I melt into the mat almost immediately. My body is breaking into a thousand portions. The light is attacking the skin around my eyes.

No matter I am claimed into the ordering of the class. I give into it. We are practicing nudging into place, rolling minutely over the surface of the mat. Absorbitant and resistant- bone and water. The cradling takes on many insinuations- small crevices that fill in or erupt out of any holding. The level ground becomes a mass of indentations, out bodies rising out, affected by countless probes, falling then into their reverse. Things rise up, flatten back down. So a spine is born, curving and twisting to create multiple levels. The body is this multiple sectioning of brief responses acted upon in order to bring about a certain “take”, then another and another. A concertina affect of accumulated mass. The jointing are the movement out of each contact, and a repositioning out of that. This is the task. The tasking or taking into account the procedures of the day. In this way we remember our bodies and the environment in which our bodies find themselves. In this way we make our bodies; our bodies make us. We are snapped back into place. A place we have yet to totally arrive at and yet to leave. Something spanning time- a bridge or lever between one portion and the next. It is being evolved into for the first time ever and yet it is yet a repercussion of every surface to surface encounter that has moved the question on. Allowed the matter to stay.

The first human encounter is a witnessing with brief touch into the twists and buckles known firstly as the affects that rise another body out and back into the ground. It is at first a slow configuration. An exercising on many layers that then begins to play off the knowledge from one to the other. Using the relative slowness to gain the traction of a new momentum. That ending or trailing away into something more wistful, more finely filiated within the actual air molecules in the room. Moods that come and go. The witnessing hand gages finer and finer degrees of absorption and rebuttal form this twining body mass, making itself at each turn. Until the consequences of all these exposures joins into an articulated massing and un-massing that the eyes now bear witness to. The moldings in the crevices of the hand join their staccato beat into the smooth motioning of a continuous body. The eyes for the first time now “See”. That is they have something to see, orchestrated and paced by the feedback from the hands; this on and off contact. The patterning over and over again is configuring. Where is it? Is it in the hands, in the floor-body interface, in the body moving, in the eyes? It is constantly being displaced from one to the other. Each moment of breathlessness, raised to an optimum point- a critical moment, where it is re-worked into another configuration. The patterning crosses through mediums, trailing through thresholds through which it becomes known, through which the question is sustained into the very uncertainty between multiple environments, multiple kinds of bodies that are not exactly aligned. Between disruption and smoothness. The road, the bicycle, the queue the slamming match, the accusations, the moment of contact- human exchange. Even an argument can be a celebration of sorts. How much of that do we take into the room, into the dance. This mismatching of our continuous living in amongst others?

The eyes have something to work on because of all the small portions of pressure-release that are on-going and are now built into this seeing process. The body 2remembers” how to move because of this accumulated pattern that appears to be there all at once and yet happens in stages, each moment having its particular place. This evolution that unfolds each time for the first time as a different admixture of all the tried out possibilities is a questioning attention. Yet the transformation at every moment happened s effortlessly out of the volition or jolt where these alignments slide in and out of place. That is the working energy of the thing. The priming that makes it so is the questioning- the bringing of mismatching portions into the same realm, where they may take on an affect. That affect is beyond conscious grasp but all the preparation is considered, tested, laborious; the edging of numbers; an accountancy transfixed by the fault-lines it sets in motion and that then become the backdrop of new misdemeanors. Possibly this is the event- similar to Whiteheads’ that trails through the slow motion stasis of mountains into the cataclysm of eruptive encounters, and near misses. Perhaps though I would like there to be more emphasis on the mistakes as the working traction behind all adaptations that moves the thing on. Questions then are recursive. They don’t hold out for answers- they just hold open a space in which events happen and continue to be affected and muddled rather than elicited into separate categories of independent means. That means the affecting goes on for longer- forever.

When the dance does occur and the whole of the body surfaces are given over to an on-going affect and the turning that this brings, the pattern is there. Where? Not in the body not out of the body. It is making and unmaking the question that is the body at any one moment in its relational composure. That composure is still. The attention held open- not the bracketing and re-joining of components already separated, but the jumping back through of a wholeness out of this continual fractional splitting and re-working that is the very mass and movement of the body- a body that spreads and condenses according to this process of small minimal affects- a point splaying wide open into environment on each call, at every given tangent of the dance. That is a dance that knows itself in relative separation through relative proximity. Cells collecting and cells dissipating in the space, the music, the notion of that event.

After the dance we talk for the first time. There is an ease of words that accompany what is already there. A falling back out into another layering of articulation. It is easy. There are navigational sign-posts- the stops and starts of our own pulsing listening that inform it that has already played out in other ways. There is agreement and interest. At how it arrived into that way. At how it made itself out of so little beginnings. It turns out the woman I have been dancing with also had a difficult and problematic journey to the class across London.

Afterwards I go to the market. All the fruit to pick up and put down, testing the give and tautness. Accepting and rejecting over and over. People moving though people. There is warmth in the air.