Small indications

 ........


There are small indications not actually of themselves but of what they are not. Like a lull after pushing into an object when the body falls back and feels lighter- more aerated somehow. As if the gaps between the cells had grown and the space between bodies and surfaces creates a thin layer beyond touch like the jets of air of a vacuum cleaner that allow it to glide so smoothely. The gravitational weights of giving into something- of merging and collapsing into mass are held minutely apart from this sure tendency and there is this moment of suspense. That's when the body begins to collect and seperate in a kind of meshing of voluume and levity. Posture is this reverberation between two sets of tendencies colliding and bouncing back through one another.

Working with a boy with Cerebral Palsy today it was like that. I did not have a plan of what to do- actually felt abit ill and groggy in myself so that any momentum or attitude of achievement in this or that respect could  not be imposed from my side because I literally didn't have it in me. But in that slight ineptitude as a therapist, there was this sense of taking a ride with these small indications, without being able to jump ahead to the end of the equation and realise a useful outcome in the jointings of bone and the correct usage of muscle ligaments.

Unstead there was this leaking consciousness where everything done was only done in the matter of factness of what it was and a following of where that led to without necessarily being able to see it coming or even stop it coming.

The boy is sitting on the floor pushing a swing that is hung from the ceiling. Each time he pushes, his body is stabilized, jammed between the natural leverage of this move before the swing parts company and launches out on its own. In the split second before its return something strange happens. The boy gains a buyouncy and I see his body literally swell to fill out into this aerated mass. What this means for him- between the pushing and the waiting, is uprightness. But this has nothing to do with  the deliberate learning of posture- of arduously mastering the ability to sit up straight and correct the head in relation to the cocyxic etc.. It is just this hairs breadth between the pushing and the return- known in the timed release of the swing that than knocks back at the boy as the direct reflection to his push- a push made tangible in its return thta each time jolts him slightly.

I feel sure that the problem of standing, of walking- of getting to grips with gravity and the weight of ones body in relation to that gravity can only be known in the reflective mirror of this buyouncy. The black-hole or anti-matter is never seen or known directly- but only through the circling planets and their various orbits around this ommission, like the swing bouncing on and off the body of the boy. The body can only be known in the buyouncy or timed suspension through which it experiences posture. Otherwise we would be consummed by our own heavinness or simply fly apart- as at times is the case.

.......

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.

Frontiers

Frontiers




Skin after all is a membrane that lets in the vacuous and treats it as its own or propels like a drum the flotsam that sprays and bounces upon its surface to create patterns of attraction and repulsion in a snow-storm- a magnetic pull that in its certain aspect of responsiveness becomes a push. Nerve endings, heart beats, the pull and thrust of the lung, expressions flickering like rivulets gathering, popping and redistributing like mice under our skin make for the feckless activity of a living system. Adaptation is all of this and more. This wavering question of whether to absorb or whether to bounce out again. Senses coalesce around these possibilities becoming in part the hearing that hears a crafted sound, the sight that sees a crafted conglomerate of light intensities. And touch too is only this. To play itself out into a rhythmic flourishing that is never only this or that- an embrace or a holding tight- but is this minute flexion amassment of valve modulations- the crafting itself of a thoroughfare, a threshold bolted in the moment between absorption and bounce, between enfoldment and exteriorization, between compression and extension.

A spasmic riveting in the knot of the belly or a yawning release into the tendrils of our most distal parts- the mitten hands furling and unfurling like new growth where plant-life and sensate life become imbued in this same tendency.

And what of intention- that hikes a ride on all these variously propagating furling and unfurling; the machine assemblage of push-me-pull-you in the spontaneous autonomic cascades of pulling in and sending out. A touch; the body temperature, the sweat glands, the speed of a tendency- a motivation building, a leaning and an off-setting of that leaning- this wavering pulsation that is like the flicker of a strobe light- so fast- so totally modulated with the bodies’ impulses to going into and offsetting in the next glance, the next breath, the next heart-beat, that all play into a semblance of stillness- a poise that is the fast patterning of all contagions, absorptions, ejections and reintegration’s into constancy. The crisis of contact- the trauma of invasion off-set in this near constant plasticity that is all the way through; the body changing shape, shaping to think, to move, to feel- a constant metabolic shuffling like a highly adapt gambler who creates every possible tone and innuendo of actual countenance and hidden possibility in a limited deck. We are at every level in the business of this magician act, not as deceit or as in a closed hand, but as the rippling whirr of the cascading cards as they vibrate through a widening and closing interval of two hands that play them like an adept accordionist.


So the cripple learnt to stand- the distortion becomes the impulse to a leaning, to a slight displacement of attention, to a new resolve that spirals around a certain curtailed oaring and flies off at the very moment of abrupt endings into the insignia of all that is valued- a metaphor, a dream, a myth, the conjurers adeptness- her adaptability- the flaying out of a peacock's feather beyond the bird ending. We are followers of these patterns- sunk and swooning in the need for this something more- the lost script of the cripple who once slowed to simply standing and nothing more, simply moving from here to there and nothing more and so at that moment, fell- coming undone- is all of our broken stories.

Instead we craft stories upon stories- little epitaphs - insignia and adverts that carry with the wind and become our transcript- the invisible guy-ropes upon which we fly


across stage, swoon into and away from one another in this compulsive aversion, this aversive compassion that adjoins one to another so that there are no curtailments- only this leakage and this bleeding through of vessels and sinews, blood and bone and air admixing and separating in its own multiple intelligences.


We walk and face each other and communicate because we create scenarios past the functions that would itemise capacity and let drop off impossible feats of limited perfection. By elaborating this mesh of entwinement- our feeling responses are mixed up already with every other- and the gaps themselves are the part of the pulses, the beat of a throbbing strobe in which we activate and rest- hopelessly lean and fall back into. Uprightness is nothing more than this- a slim loophole between a tendency to fall one way or another- attunement into any position, any posture, any semblance of a gathering and meshing of muscles, skin, bone; a release of breath, an articulation and reverberation deep in the guttural passages of a throat, is only these thin wedges of random suspension- between one tendency and another- these zero points of resonance that begin to build until they are an escalation that effortlessly pulses back and forth; a feedback that takes on a life of its own. In this sense our capacities are that point of effortless dropping; of giving way; even of deletion or forgetting. They are not a goal orientated skill set. They are happy times- the holiday in amongst the coming and going. Laziness is useful- the only useable thing because it is primed in amongst all the other tendencies hidden or exposed which filliate out into this environmental ecology in which at every level there is a twinning and separation over and over again. Every point of attention at whatever scale is a holograph of every other replicating association scaling up and down into endless conurbations. Structure and flow is this- a pulse of stopping and starting- a pulling together and a widening out again.


That this replication and slurred redistributed admixture happens simultaneously over and over again at the level of cell, fibre, fascia, bone, human composure, expression, relatedness, and global climatic tendencies is only to say that the meshing of hard and soft, hot and cold, wet and dry, brittle and smooth, gaseous and contained is a single necessity in the coming and going of form as ideation and ideation as form.

Human interest and attention is the next area of research for delving into what is usually thought of as physical, sensory and neurological complaints. Rather than erase these complaints they must be the starting point for building a wider attentional zone of variable impulses and tendencies. Disturbance or irritation is the point of activation for a re-settlement – a continual re-organization at every level imaginable. And to imagine these finer and finer thresholds of difference is to modulate them- to adapt ever more rapidly to the circumstances of our bearing.

This is the creative work to be done as environmental concern and as an inventive language/thought process rather than as individual pathology and therapeutic intervention. Our curtailments are the point of unknown sudden growths whether imaginative, prosthetic or as a total re-working of what it means to move, to articulate to further and to look back. Somewhere in all that is a re-conceptualization of present experience that is a meshing with no particular inside or outside. For that reason it is relational but not as a set of socially acquired know-how bullet points but as an ecology of intertwining metabolic, physical and nervous tendencies.

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.