Making Unmaking: Part Three

There’s pattern-making that catches in at the same time as the pattern evolves and equally comes undone. That is not an intentional linking in to a social network- not an affiliation to a membership that has any inherent or long-term existence. It is generated by something far more removed, and yet far more common- a gradual filling in of pauses and emptying out of intensity- a continual re-positioning that is mobile, immediate because each component only has in its dealings those small shifts necessary to tweak local encounters. And yet there is this sense of wholeness- the pulsating filiations of this spreading and cohering that lets the very atmosphere become a kind of distributed lung.

Contact/no-contact is a bit of a misplaced priority for concern- and this should be understood too in all socialization programs aimed at including the seemingly socially removed priorities of autistic compulsion, anti-social attention seeking noise fanatics, oddly clothed teenagers or infants more interested in spinning than in playing age appropriate games of cowboys and Indians, mothers and fathers.

What I mean by this is that there are an accumulation or backdrop of tiny motionings- all the turns and re-turns, the trials and errors that never make it to any well toned meaning or even to a coordinated whole, let alone a personalized intent or historically relevant passage of time in which a certain action can be said to take place.

Out of this multitude, festering and boiling and cooling in which we insert and remove minute involvements that are contingent upon other involvements the beginnings of gestures collide, meet and separate, forming themselves. Only out of these impacts do brief occurrences stay for long enough to create the beginning of ideas. These ideas are multi-facetted lean-tos worked out between bodies or body parts, or chemical interactions and border exchanges and therefore can not get started out of one direction alone. They summon up you and me in relation to one another. Language arrives out of that pacing- that to and fro questioning that plays with tempo, with abbreviation, with sudden extension and growth spurts seemingly coming out of the blue.

Last night I watched a program about the work of Professor Lovelock, a maverick thinker who came up with the Gaia theory whereby earth’s atmosphere as an optimum environment for the diversity of life is linked in by continuous feedback into the cycles of intake and waste through which populations prosper to a certain optimum level, thereby altering the balance of climatic and chemical conditions that led to that explosion and so sending themselves into a natural decline in order to be replaced by a species more suited to these new conditions. Until again the same optimum threshold is reached in this species and so on, in a pendulum balance where different species are intimately entwined and modulated through natural selection. That is always linked into environmental plateaus that their own behavior instills and eventually over-runs in order to push into likelihood a different set of conditions. Intake and emissions at microscopic levels are amplified in planetary systems to create conditions conducive or un-conducive to various life-forms in entangled phases.

Can this same logic be applied in a speeded up form to a dance, an educational program for autistic children, a creative episode of output, exhaustion and renewal? Can aesthetics- the productivity of a period of making be considered in the sense of pixels or sound waves or motioning intertwined with physical actions, metabolisms, co-ordinate thresholds of physical possibilities connected with denser enfolding periods of separation, pause, decline, dissociation? Here then instead of talking about the ebb and flow of species as they tip the atmosphere this way and that way, one could talk of an ebbing and flowing of states of movement and rest, of conscious discrimination and the indiscernible progress of pattern-making that rus onwards.

James lovelock made a simple computer program called Daisy World in which he showed the ebb and flow of black daisies and white daisies according to the periodic affects that each species had on the earth’s temperature. At first the temperature is cold. Gradually the black daisies take hold because they absorb the maximum amount of heat and so in minuscule degrees the earth’s temperature begins to rise. At a certain threshold it becomes warm enough for the white daisies to germinate and they prosper as the temperature rises because they deflect the heat of the sun off form the earth’s surface. The heat on the surface of the earth gradually diminishes until they go into decline and so again the black daisies are able to get a foot-hold and to become the predominant species.

There is another computer program which shows how a simple model of a clumsy top-heavy walking avatar gradually optimizes the capacity to walk in countless generations where only the models who learn, often by chance, from their falls to bounce back up, or roll or soften so as not to break limbs are able to reproduce. What emerges through this program in several hundred generations up the line are figures that can run and fall and roll and re-stand and playfully intertwine and come apart with one another. In other words they interact and “learn” a full repertoire of coordinated human movements based on interlocking patterns of stabilization and de-stabilization. A pendulum of falling and rising that becomes self-fulfilling as a manifestation of human physical, mental and emotional integration.

Making and un-making: Part Two

Entering the studio I had a sense of separation, through the tiny involvements that had come before- all non-verbal- which had disarticulated me from any sense of grouping- somehow taken me into the filaments of these patterns, trailing off in different directions. I go out on to the balcony- well really a ledge of rusted metallic red leading down a fire-escape the total length of the building. The ledge catches the sun- throws it back out in a kaleidoscope way from building to building, ricocheting and opening up London in this way from surface to surface. I re-enter the space and lie down. The score allows for this. For many things:-

Many states that can lead on from one to another. From activity to inactivity. Feeling into the miniscule of detailed touch with the surface of the floor. Sinking down. Walking around speedily or at leisure. Stopping, flaying arms and limbs, bouncing, twisting. Laying down again, rolling, tumbling and rising. Minimal encounters; glancings. Stoppages. Aversions. Moving on- small lean-tos, propulsion out. Turning on the core of these small propositions, in these glancings or physical contact. The one becoming the other or inhibiting the other. Played out scenarios. Facings and unfacings.

I at first feel uncomfortable. Disinclined. The stoppage and holding apart has gone too far. My vision, in the periods alone had poured out in the other direction, again too far. The elastic connection of falling in and bouncing out appears broken. Everything too loaded. An affray of short bursts and non-starters. How to use that? Emotionally I feel contorted by the fray of bodies. Like the swash of a tide churned into foam but effervescent- untouchable. I too feel this way. Too fast, or suddenly imploding on the spot into inertia. I lie down again. Wait. Do nothing. Even when someone approaches I bury my head in the sand. Nuzzle into the black cold floor. I am cold and burrowing into the conditions that make that so; make me colder. Exploring this as possibility. Strangely that becomes a link. The first viable linkage because it is a physical sensation and a feeling-pattern; one of contraction. I contain the coldness and wonder about the reserve.

All grouping would seem to push for maximum contact- for sociability and an openness to others. Not in this score- maybe Contact Dance is wrongly named, because it would seem to offer opportunities for staying in what is occurring however that may be positioned. It follows the way things build up and how opposites become generative of one another. It’s the core of stillness- the suspense of something that seems untenable to the dance- to association- to commonness that goes somewhere deeper, to situations that are not tidy- where groupings are not easily resolved into hard-wired parties. It goes to the ebb and flow of circumstances- the edge of how a space becomes made through ignition of parts and revulsion of parts- working off and on one another. Considering these things in ones own responses is a kind of border crossing- but is also only possible in the careful fostering of constraints. How could these opposing values be so intertwined? And yet they are.

Making and Unmaking: Part One

15.4.10




I come into the dance studio from the park. There has been much time to spare. A lull or interim, between an earlier warm up and the cooling off before the final score in the late afternoon- a score by Nancy Clark Smith which is pasted on the bare wall at the back of the space and runs the width of the upper floor warehouse adapted many years ago into a dance space.

In the interim when people were dissipated- some in the park, some making their way across London, others idly eating from the mass of supplies crowding a table in the room next door, I have been standing by the lake in the park. It became too cold to dance in the park as arranged and so I gave up even trying to find the group, then spotted them between some trees but did not make my way over because the cold put me off. Instead I watched the single stream of water spouting from this reduced water-feature and splaying out on the wind into a thin film almost like a partition across sections of the lake. Kids were throwing bread at the birds, sometimes whole slices. One child stares into the middle distance, resisting parent’s requests to move on, then glancing and burbling at a nearby child so that they time their throws of bread with one another. Other things play out. There’s a row of chairs. A child picks up the end one and drags it off; I sit on the next one then get up again. It is cold now even to sit down and be still. In the loo, a kid keeps repeating “It’s dirty, it’s dirty, it’s dirty” as she waits her turn with her mother. I’m about to go, then sit down on a high stool by the café that wobbles because of a dip in the tarmac. I am facing the man-made lake again. A small dog finds a strip of black plastic in the water picks it up with its teeth and deposits it by the foot of its owner. The owner ignores both the dog and the plastic. The dog keeps picking it up again, re-positioning it a little closer and backing off. The owner still ignores the dog. A man behind me approaches another man who is sitting down on a step off from the round café building. He has noticed a tattoo on the man’s arm of a famous surrealist artist and comments on it. The man explains in a deadpan and bored tone why he got it done. Later he disappears from the step, enters the café and re-exits with a large hamburger on a white plate. Kids run around him blocking his view of the lake, looking for sticks in the water to give the small dog that has the plastic strip. The man ignores them and continues to chew on his hamburger. I continue to wobble on the chair. I feel a bit out on a limb in my dance gear, feeling cold suddenly. I have not brought any money with me. I would like a coffee.

Earlier I had been watching foxes on a piece of scrub-land out the back window of the main reception area to the dance space at the base of the canal. Because it was a warehouse it was a long way down to where the foxes and cubs were. They were small moving animals in amongst the foliage, occasionally tumbling out across the pavement, tearing at old plastic bags, letting them fly up, then pouncing on them. Wrestling one another too, tearing the bags to shreds. I watched for the patterns they made, not really with any sense of why they did what they did.

Workshop with Charlie Morrissey

Chisenhale Dance Weekend



9.4.10

We begun on the floor- of course. Rolling and descending portion by portion. Finding comfortable zones to fall into on the black floor. Than moving into that a bit more. Settlement. Affinity. Surface to surface, giving way to depth. A falling containment. Black hole, flotation tank.

Lingering here and there, rolling some more. Something about stretching out yet containing within. A kind of rebound spring whereby the extremities- the fingers and toes calibrate the stretch-contraction torsion of the central junction points. The tummy that flops on to the floor. That gives and then minutely vibrates to push away. Between the two tendencies, something catches in and in the cross-over there is both leverage and an outpouring. Both focus a certain contraction of the body and an instantaneous falling and spreading through the ligaments, through the floor, through the atmosphere surrounding.

A dissipation and filtration system that is also all about the body holding to a position. The mark of enquiry- a questioning. The interplay of portions not one after the other but as a set point immediately exploded into multitudes over and over again. A decision. An idea. A sense of compulsion acted upon. A need. Intimate enquiry into the minutiae of a certain holding. The catapult out from here is instantaneous- multi-directional. Spherical.

Patterns that do emerge. In the space surrounding. In the space contained. Breathing- threshold between the two. Planetary systems that affect one another but of a very particular gaseous exchange. Small affects tumble into events. Cataclysm or staying put. Simply a question of these minute pressure gages. Containment, the body pulsed- stream-lined in hands feeling the area of resistance in muscle groupings on another body. Hands the last point of contact in a moving through of one body into another. From centre to centre. A falling though, catching and giving some more. Slow, ponderous, padding. A gradual disturbance. In affects that build out of this nothing into stretches, turns; a yawning body that rolls and pours, then curls and twines around itself to builds out of this fickle introversion upwards by degrees. I feel my body almost buckling with a slight touch, like a spasm that I stay aware in and follow into the ground. Into stillness, then rise up out of the pressure point of that very descent. A partner who tweaks this on the way up, like a branch suddenly twisting in speeded up growth towards a light source now revealed, whilst simultaneously rooting down. Now an admixture of this lean in/lean out as slight inclines of pressure give way to release and a spinning and buckling torsion into a sudden outgrowth. That followed through. Extended or curtailed. Here and then there, widening and containing again; a pump that is now the traction and release between the two of us- this furling and unfurling that makes pattern- it rolls out into the wider scope- our bodies are not always touching- they are following through the conditions of the patterns that they set in motion and that then we ride upon- slight brushes, collisions, near misses, turn-around, falling as one, splaying apart, splintering into shards sent out into the room, drawing the room into us- winding and unwinding continuously. Emotioning. Universes pulsating.

Over and over something builds. A capacity to breathe. To take in and let out. Opening/closing. Can you speak of one without the other? Meaning needs something to work against. Bodies operate through the same tendencies. They are that tendency. To spread and contain. To flow and to buffer up against. Or to shore up. Against surfaces. Now bodies, propping each other up from the hips back to back. The push-me-pull-you central ligament of two backbones articulated as one. A central pulley. And the lifts go up and down. That jamming in place- two directions coursing through and stuck- hips bound in unity, creates a light-touch in the feet, the hands, the breath, all the tendrils- each individual hair on the head, flying up, circulating around a face with open pores. Sweat, movement, coolness. Smell. Each turn and re-equation offers up new possibilities in this circulation system. The eyes are awake now- alive, fueling responsiveness in the shards of light the shadows of moving figures like cloud formations that we pass in the breeze. We go down together. Rise up. How do we know? What is it that we feel together. Some kind of transmission across the skin- slight indentation, a door-crack of aeration- almost between the cells. Nurturing that containment, that letting go. On-off pressure – an idea. A thought process. And so it gets going. Follows the pattern of this continual re-distributed weight. Really gets going into movement itself. Effortless. Who decides? The deciding of each new arrangement- the molecular jostling spins into momentum- looks from the outside to be a plan. But there is no maker. No made. We are not inventors. We are participants. Reading the messaging that culminates out of all the particular instances of settlement and unsettlement, the state of play.



So it moves on. From the sharing of burden as in a drunken stagger- two bodies heaved up on one another, giving in to this support. Now a lessening. A dissipative outreach, not in the hand; the hand on the chest. Not anymore this time as a follower and an instructor. This time a movement of particles that affect a shifting tendency. The a shoring up not as pressed bodies that can not get through but as a coming to rest. A lightness in this natural entropy. A dissipative stature, where the senses widen with an alert ease. A figuration of all the players in the room- conjunctions and compositions- avenues to move through. Vortices and nesting places. Tumults and spins. Lighter and lighter the contact becomes, fuelled by the patterning that is both something else and something generated between. Where is the point of exchange, the threshold? That is impossible to say- it is the playing with this threshold that makes the dance. The dance tat in the end makes itself. Riding on a Breeze generated by the physical sensation of bodies under pressure. That pressure diluted again and again like a homeopathic solution until only the ghost or memory or idea of that pressure remains- the body as falling, as bounding up again. This flickering between the two becomes the magnetism; a kind of spark constantly re-worked into the conditions of its firing up. Those conditions worked up as much out of negation, constraint, inhibition as out of flow, expansion, liberation. One without the other unthinkable. So we articulate a freedom- a kind of emotioning, out of the roles and rules that initially lock us to the ground.

Contact dance about using our human conditions- our limitations. Questioning and riding off of these from one tendency into the other. Never having to choose. Using the meshing of these differences. Learning from the generative propensity of the two in one. The one in the many.

Disturbance and clarity

Disturbance and clarity set each other up. I read a chapter form Deleuze’s book, The Fold. The chapter is called “Perception in the folds”. I guess I picked it up after my walk in the city yesterday. I read it after writing the piece, “Disparity” and before the piece, “Afterthought”.

Deleuze talks of differentials in the way that Whitehead talks of limitation, as that which sets up a clear marker as a point of contrast in molecular fluctuations and vibrations that are on-going and everywhere and that are a constant unsettlement to perceptual certainty and yet make up the very conditions out of which clarities are worked up. Deleuze discusses Leibniz and his idea of the Monad. The monads are instances of these conjunctions that subsume and envelop the resonant flickerings of dual states into perceptual ideas that are stable in those particular circumstances. For instance the color green that is a certain stabilization of the undecidedness of yellow and blue.

Clarity is not a replacement of disturbance, it is the working through of disturbance- which is an active and continual process of interchange- there to articulate certain states that are only the momentary balanced points of tension and release within that process so that those balanced points are never ideals or goals set apart. They are perceptual states. For Whitehead they are Feeling states. For Deleuze, thought states.

“A collection will have as much (more) unity as there are relations amongst the ingredients, relations carried out necessarily through thought.” P108 The Fold

These feeling-thought states are the working through of particular vibratory complexes to the point of a threshold- the brink of transformation where a flicker becomes a drone, a swaying, a figure arrived at precisely through this perceptual aggravation. Where shapes and bodies are the complex of feelings they give rise to until there is a point of satiation and some kind of alternation sensitizes a different appetite of holding or letting go.

These differentials are not only the mechanics of response sensation. They organize what a body is at any moment- where it has a capacity for absorption or projection. There is this continuing clenching and letting go in the swirls of dust and filiated light circuits before the body has the functionary idea of doing that too in the way that organs have storage and circulation functions and in the way that senses sustain or move on a certain regard or bearing.

Form is an idea- the thought of collection and dispersal, contraction and expansion, stopping and starting when these differentials are associated into a working bond. This is similar to ideas in Traditional Chinese medicine where organs are the idea of a certain vibratory energy co-opted within a wider potential of other vibratory tendencies. The demarcation of an organ such as the liver, kidney, lung is only the limitation of the otherwise continuous score of frequency possibilities. It is the differentials playing out in a certain way in order to hold to a certain shaping- a certain functioning within the body, within the environment, within the cycles of change and recurrence in the seasons. Liver then is the capacity to grow connected to spring. It is also the welling up of anger and impatience, when that capacity is inhibited. The emotions are connected to that- and the taste- sourness which is biting in to initiate movement but also the sourness of stuckness when that is disallowed. Yet there is never just one or the other. The edge of constraint is also the edge at which anything gains traction. Of course then body and environment can not be separated because the conditions in form, function, emotion are arrived at in the interchange through which circulation processes- the movement of the blood, the movement of sap in a tree flow or are inhibited from flowing to a greater or lesser extent. Difficulty in the liver create patterns of spasm, knottiness, joint and tendon restrictions, rheumatism, oedema, just as a trunk of a tree swells when the sap is inhibited from a too rigid protective bark. Yet so too do these constraints allow for directional changes; curves, bends, folds that are an on-going shape-making in the run of things. Here then growth and creativity and stuckness and emotional bitterness are two sets of tendencies that emanate from the same vibratory quality, playing out in different ways within a wider relational complex. (look at the series of books by Claude Larre and Elizabeth Rochat dela Vallee covering all the organs of the body as commentaries following closely texts from the Chinese Classics).

“Leibniz is not stating that perception resembles an object but that it evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ” Deleuze, The Fold.



Projective geometry

Pain-Treatments- bodily resonance.

Afterthought

 9.4.10

My afterthought is three encounters that pervaded the atmosphere of yesterday’s stroll in the city of London.

They were not mentioned in the run of things, because that run needed to get on- to build up speed in a particular momentum in order to become generative from one moment to the next on that day and in order to engage with the running process that led from word to word in the composition under the heading, “Disparity”. Yet embedded or occluded within that header were three associations; cohesive involvements; strange affinities that galvanized and spurred on the release in the journey into the overall theme of “disparity”. They are now there clearly, in relief on the following day. They have not gone. Rather the processual meshing which they gave rise to is shimmering into transparency, bringing these occasions up to the fore, whereas before they were too dense, too slow, too lingering even in their brevity, to remain consciously relevant. Yet they come up again and again, whatever the turns and twists and wobbles and perceptual infidelities. They keep being arrived at, reinvigorating the flickering scene with their permanence- a permanence that has arisen out of this very flickering and so it endures.

____

Three events- three human encounters- occluded before. Told backwards.

1. An elderly Sikh couple on the curb, holding hands. I’m already stuttering from the fragmented light- They are there- a certain absorption- a density in their body matter- the affinity that reverberates between them, idling there on the curb. Momentarily I settle into this presencing, absorbing into their body matter between going one way and another. A pause that extends beyond that time. I backtrack. Evade moving bodies by speeding and then slowing through the sweeping criss-crossing. I am between one direction and another, hesitating. Again, there they are, now just ahead on the crossing. Suspended as if the only thing unmoving. The centre of a kaleidoscope. From that base I glance out down a side street and that’s when I catch sight of the Gherkin building. In the last written account it is that gherkin building that I record though it is the presence of the Sikh couple that grounds and set up that perception. In that moment they become the gherkin building. They are subsumed in it. They are both invisible and axiomatic to perception at that instant. Now as I think of them on the curb, the gherkin building is shimmering through them, the glass panels reflecting light as they absorb it. I cannot take the two apart anymore. (Is that what Whitehead means by “Prehension” rather than “apprehension”?

2. In the courtyard where I eat my sandwich in front of the building with the external lifts going up and down. I get up and cross the courtyard to the fountain sculpture and place my hand in the running stream of water over the surface of the metallic silver. There is a man standing just behind the sculpture speaking into his mobile phone. I orchestrate my approach and he his conversation so that we are fractionally adjusting our angles in relation to one another so that we never meet. Yet there is this high level of on-going bodily accommodation that allows the smooth running of my necessary action and his necessary phone call in parallel yet separate spheres of operation. Yet in order for that to unfold flawlessly there needs to be this high level of perceptual-bodily configuring so that these operations are actually one event. That choreography is blanked out in the recounting of my sandwich stop in that courtyard but is the main event in my mind and of the most significance on the following day when I look back at the day’s events. There is a presencing so that my actions in the way they played out and his as he spoke in that way would be unthinkable without the twinned shadow of one another that created in both of us, propulsion and demarcation in the way the actions took place. We never met. The encounter was one of absolute avoidance or negation. Yet somewhere in there, there is the use of “we”; the use of “Us”.

3. Coming out of the green just beyond Tower Bridge where I have managed to crush my glasses whilst slumbering along with countless office-workers over the lunch time period who are also creasing their clothes. The light hits me starkly and I can not avoid the charge of elation that this brings. Then it is snapped out as the shadows of the tight streets take hold. Some workmen in fluorescent yellow jackets lie out on a portion of pavement where the light is still captured. I am drawn into a church courtyard in an adjacent street where there is a gap in the wall. The courtyard is entirely in shadow. There are grave stones and well tended flower beds just coming into leaf along the short curved pathway towards the church. The church doors are closed. I can see this before I get to them so I don’t bother. There is a tree in the middle of the grass in the centre of the square with purple buds still wrapped in leaves that have not yet opened but are just on the verge of doing so. In one or two the purple of the top-most petal has just begun to unfurl. I touch one, then feel slightly foolish for doing so. Back at the entrance to the courtyard that leads back out onto the street again a woman walking very fast stares at me for a sustained amount of time without changing her pace. I cannot read her face at all. It appears to me entirely blank. Even when she passes she looks back at me and continues staring. There is a sort of taking hold and it is not only resting on that final stare although the stare seems to me to become axiomatic. Something about these three consecutive occurrences collapses them into one another- the men slouching in yellow jackets in the spot of light, the feeling of touching the purple bud and the slightly resistant abrasion of the outer leaf, the woman staring and holding me there, puts in relief all three in relation to one another. The next morning I only think of the woman and that pause in the stare that becomes a lull before my turning back outwards into the road. Again I can not think of that event without it somehow subsuming the feel-color-scent of the bud in the darkened courtyard. That courtyard was somehow brought into relief by the light attack of the fluorescent jackets that still shimmers and holds the bud in place, the still attention of the woman that lingers.

Disparity

I am thinking about this word and how it becomes an effective kind of slippage where the very thing unuttered takes up occupancy between two poles set apart. Of course this is not a spatial housing complex or a sleep in the park, though it can come to be this. It is how we leap the distances between un-matching parts. How our ears bend the note between this mis-match slurring it to fit by widening the gap. This kind of acoustic spaciousness somewhere bares in mind the absolute fit-Whitehead’s Eternal objects?- but the body is lolloping and dragging, stuttering and compounding itself with all the riff raff of passers by that we hang on to or tear past. That we become. All the stuff taken in, in impromptu sandwich stops and omitted again in unsolicited uses of toilets in coffee shops and pubs along the way where we never place an order. Riff raff is passing through us all the time.

listening to the radio later- a reggae Channel where certain notes are got at in a round about way almost as though the revolutions that created a particular frequency were being staggered and hiccupped along the way- a certain hesitancy yet with a mind set so clearly on what is not altogether reached or got at- trying to find ones way through the streets- passages and slim entry points through the cascading channels of shadow and light, flickering off and on the building surfaces, the moving and seated people, the buses and vans that do not stop or suddenly halt so that you feel the wind on your face. I am blind like a bat having rolled on to my sunglasses and broken them lying on the green. I only see in the searing discrepancies of one figure tearing away from another surface that is relatively stable. What moves and what stays is forever changing, jumbling- a complex mix of filaments and shards of light lengthening and containing again like the close of two hands suddenly snapping out the light. I put my hand in the stream of water that runs endlessly off the shiny polished metal sculpture in the courtyard, then put my hand to my face. I am in this courtyard where I have just eaten an egg sandwich listening to the lifts exposed on the outside of buildings go up and down. Levers and pulleys working the ropes. People come into and out of the building. I am not sure if it a public place. If I can be there. I continue on my way and glimpse the Gherkin building through a back-street in the city of London. There is no way to get to it and soon I am ferreted away on a bus I have only just boarded in time.

The music plays on, on the radio at home. Before that in the street opposite some people turn their music up to the limit and dance around their car. There’s real heat in the air for the first time this year. (Yesterday was so cold.) Their white long-haired dog sits exhaustedly in the road as they dance about, taking pictures of one another on their mobile phones. The man does a kind of head-stand back flip off of the wall. There is exuberance in the air. I don’t know where it comes from.