LISTEN

I reach for the buzzer than suspend the move glancing to the building next door. There is building work going on. There's sand and stone heaped up outside in the street and wooden slats going over a pit in the pavement and into the open-fronted space that is going to be the room next door. I ask a builder, "Is that going to be a sandwich bar?" He says "Yes, but we're going to remove that sign that says "sandwich bar" and replace it with another one."

The fountain in the courtyard of the children's centre is working. It's been plugged in and frothy water tips from one metallic cup into another. This water is lit up in each cup by an underwater light. It catches on to the froth making it white and shiny. As I get closer to the water I can smell Indian food. I start to salivate but when my fingers become immersed in the lighted water the smell disappears.

Once in the building I sign in with my name and the time. It is 1.15pm. I take the lift up to the second floor which is the top floor and cross through the Occupational Therapy Room that has been booked this afternoon by another therapist. There's the ball-pool with red, blue, yellow and green plastic balls. These balls are hollow and some of them are crushed. Some of the children like to crunch down on them, using their jaws like heavy industrial cranes that implode and dismantle them like buildings. The room has a slightly contained and stuffy atmosphere. It is padded with blue mats, a swing tilting back and forth gently as if a child had only that instant, vanished.

Next door the floor has been taken up. All the furniture is heaped into a corner and the bare bones of  the wooden support slats starts to reveal a symmetrical pattern like the criss-cross map of a chess board. There are indents between the slats stuffed with the soft insulation that is normally invisible under the floor covering. This covering usually offers a level surface for crossing from here to there and back again and this is usually done without too much thought. Because some of the floor has been removed I need to step carefully along the narrow lines of wood in order not to slip into the immediate give of this softness that is rising and enlarging.

Carefully I make it over to the other side of the room and go down the metallic stairway which is pinned onto the outside wall of the building. I reach the ground floor in this way by a different route.

The building is silent. I put my knuckle to a door but instead of knocking I listen.
There's a low level hum like the sound of a tractor or a tank and it's getting nearer. It stops and starts, stops and starts and it soon becomes evident that it is moving in the same cadence as Standard English. Soon it drowns out the silence and even in the gaps between it's advance, I sense this hidden form looming and preparing itself on the other side of the wood door. I fling the door wide open and a small child with its head pressed sideways against the concrete floor is gazing with wide eyes into a red plastic bus. He is looking through the back end where the back panel has been wrenched off or has fallen away. He is making engine-like noises and they reverberate around the empty room as if divorced from the throat and diaphragm of their original source.

Sway

The sway creates a pendulum precision that goes so far then reverses. It's a visitation more or less here and then a return more or less there. It sets up a meter like a pulsation that knows itself not in the places it ends up but in the pulsar squeeze and release through which this momentum regenerates,  passing so swiftly, almost unheeded across the razor-thin threshold of the centre-line. What is this threshold that is a moment's suspension interior to and beyond any directive? It is not a thought, not an intention. It's a wavering; a shimmering that doubles and redoubles the pulsar swoop with it's visible aspects and clear tick-tock to become a revolution unseen. But it gets inside our bodies- is our bodies to become the silent keep-sake and unheard promoter of all that is to follow. Movements, words, gestures and song. This unravelling is endless, though it turns or seems to turn on its own heel going so far, then reversing. In the sway there seems to be more of the same thing- endless repetition means not moving at all. But it is a grid; not a mapping past oneself with deeds and acts, thoughts and plans superimposing on this handy device in which memory is simply the clicking into place of this and that as it slows into one of the extremities and so draws a firmer placement. More it is this shimmering or shudder it sets into motion and out of which we solidify or seem to be here and nowhere else; really here. Presence is ambiguous. It erases it's location in these deviations between the upstart and the regress. But the ticking holds no smell or fragrance to it. It is not a balmy summer's day nor a freezing winter morning. It's a preemptive fold that is in permanent retreat and out of which all else unfolds.We do not have to and cannot even if we wished to, know or map the conditionality of this sway- triangulate it's far corners and multiply the potential for a spontaneous outpouring of language, manners and good deeds. Because we are alive only within this matrix and we are becoming out of it and not a special case scenario with a sky view. We are in it- in the middle of it and what it becomes- the melodies fixated out of this elasticated torsion of pulsar beats- is simply a matter of emphasis here and subsequent absence there. We play with the reversibility of this pattern in endless modifications that redraft the proposal so that what is plus becomes a minus and what is merely the background absorption for a loud clang or the dark and matted humus to a vibrant colour is turned inside out chiming outloud and putting into shadow the gesture that a moment before was the centre-ground.

What is a voice, an enunciation, a descriptive contour, a thing possessed?  What is it's absence? A loss, the slipping away of faculties or their never-to-be-grasped-in-the-first-place nature?

There is a teenage boy in the cafe where I am waiting for my tuna and mayonnaise baked potato. My hands wrap around a cup of tea, the first time I have made use of this complimentary warmer as Autumn sets in and a tendency to retract and solidify like the fruit on a tree sets in; a need to contain and make opportunistic moves to enhance the warmth within.

The teenager is swaying and making sounds into his hand as another man reassures him by putting his face very close to that of the teenager and smiling broadly without inhibition. The teenager leans forward and backwards and his face glows. It's the noise of multiple conversations that have raised their level suddenly as a group of elderly women who recognise the teenager from when he was a boy come in and settle at the adjacent table that momentarily invokes a wider stream of movements and mannerisms in the boy. The teenager has a colourful soft velvet toy. It isn't a figure or even a representation of an animal. It is just a series of sponge-like malleable shapes with each protrusion sewn in a different colour. He brings the softness to his lips, part-covers his face and eyes with it then lets his hand fall back down gradually so that the softness, smell and aftermath of  an intense rush of colouration becomes the camouflage that absorbs and mixes the variously pulling tangents of sound and rushed proximity generated from the people tumbling into and out of this small cafe.

I used to have a garden project up the road made on a piece of disused land belonging to a National Charity. Autistic children would run and stop, looking at this or that, swooping up handfuls of green-brown leaves in the Autumn and throwing them on the fire that responded by streaming black smoke. The gestures and mannerisms would multiply as each child followed these patterns into the space, tracing their dispersal as the intervals between them increased and the dance ensued. It is now nearing completion as a new building development, a series of tall streamlined and elegant-looking constructions with the first prospective buyers viewing the properties they may soon call their home.

The Mental Health Housing and Work Training Facility on the other side of the wall is still there; exactly the same run down and make-shift array of buildings with a series of improvised shelters branching from one structure to the next linking into some kind of unity what used to be discreet stables and workshops in a previous era.  I went into the cafe and asked for Jenny who used to work there but I was told she left several months ago. I went in because I still use the hairdresser on the opposite side of the street from the days where I was regularly at this site. Something pulled me in for the first time in three years since the garden closed. Possibly because the new building is nearly complete so the erasure, all the but the nut tree at the far end that the new buildings must carefully work around because of a preservation order, is nearly complete. All the new kitchen staff wear white hygiene caps and that is certainly a new feature, although I recognise a few of the old regulars who still eat there. From what I can see the food is more fried and processed than in the days of Jenny who prided herself on vegetarian creations but at a glance this is probably an unfair comment.

Later I go down to the Arts Hut in Finsbury Park where on a Sunday I do drumming. Reza is there, a continuous if not at times strained smile on his face as he encourages the group en masse and one at a time to join in. They arrive for the session in a white bus from their Care-Home once a week. Suddenly there is a new influx of people and it is getting to be so many people that some are standing, some dancing in the middle. The enthusiasm starts to become a bit strained and it's clear some of the autistic members are finding the sound levels hard to stay with, covering their ears with their hands and looking down. There's a point at which enthusiasm no longer cuts it and simply increases the impossible demands for participation that people are straining under. Others though really do enthuse at this party atmosphere on a Friday afternoon, rocking and swaying back and forward with a good sense of time for the music.

I sit next to a woman who seems quite rigid and whose eyes are far back inside herself.  However she indicates very effectively that she is cold to me by putting her hood up and tugging at her open coat, then glancing behind her at the open door and back at me. I get it and close the door. I am beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by all the sound and movement in this small room on a day that Reza had told me, was "A quiet day". It later becomes clear that two groups have clashed coming simultaneously on the same day and at the same time. I do what I do at the Sunday drumming which is to use the drumming as a practical act to cut diagonally across the rapidity of the rhythm and break into a slower sense of portioning like a lethargic sway, out of which gradually as the repetition accumulates as a sculptural shape over the doubling and redoubling of other beats, it takes on a simplicity that I can settle into. I "forget" the sense of being overwhelmed and find myself back in the middle of it rippling through without too much thought. Out of this simplicity that arches into a torsion like a spider's web curving away and back into an expanse of surface, a certain leaning or emphasis takes hold in my body and I do not so much hear a melody as lean into this sway that offers very real opportunities for rest and then propulsion. It is a feeling of inhabiting a spherical space and moving around, changing my shape in order to discover this or that area of emphasis. Yet these areas of emphasis are also the internal states of my own pulsar movement and pause; of compression and expansion in the viscosity, bones and sinews of my altering frame; of the sense of air coursing through me, beyond me and back into me.  So I am before I know it altering to the beat by setting out tangents that lend themselves to this beat without merging or running parallel to the actual sound. This is where the interior meter becomes charged- at the brink of what is heard or percieved and what is felt or implicated as an underscore and there is this wave-like surfacing and giving way. Right timing becomes all important. The woman sitting next to me wants to hold my hand. I continue with one hand on the drum and the other still going up and down with her hand in mine. Soon it is not me raising and lowering my hand but her and this silent beat is in perfect counter-rhythm to the sound being made which in turn is informed and slanted throguh the spaciousness of the off-beat. The sound is articulated beyond itself. I see in the woman that her eyes are clear, sensitive and mobile. She is not simply tolerating sounds imposed on her. She is shaping them in this co-emergence. I realise I am as Autistic as her- as the teenager in the cafe earlier. We are all just trying to move into the simple shapes we feel and see that are partially lent by, partially occluded by the fragmentation of sound, gesture and movement all around. The continual remix is the basis of disruption, of new flushes of creativity and of integration. They are not opposed. They are streaming through one another all the time.

Bodies that move anyway

The tilting sway and catching in of bodies that are made and unmade on the roll is not as hazardous as it may appear. Not even something to be eradicated with the proper kind of interventions and encouragement. It's the questioning and curiosity of our envelopment in a wider mass that is all pervasive and is a co-shaping. Not just these bodies here and there in their immaculate and stationary uprightness- a near picture perfect representation of all that is worthy and eager to be counted. That is false. We need to slip from this; to generate all the uncertainty and muddle in order to orientate first in this catchment and then in that. there is no correct positioning for all time. What works here is too forward or too hesitant, too much of a lurching leftwards or rightwards in the next instance. It's a working leverage that settles down in order to simultaneously spread and lighten and that this is only a feeling sense of give and resistance in which each juncture draws out the act according to what is possible out of this meshing. Every slight mediation in absorption or propulsion never stands alone but is layered one on top of another yet it is only the surface as it is met at each moment that fashions that precise level of experience. These tilts and sways of perturbation are a rolling cycle that is self correcting only out of the turbulence it exists within. We cannot do away with this turbulence; pretty it up and air-brush the imperfections of inappropriate swaying in the Autist, spasm and shudder in the one with cerebral palsy. Every sway is a patterning and description out from an invisible mid-line. Does this mid-line exist? This perfect ridgepole of exactitude and human uprightness and stabilisation of body, mind and emotion? It only exists in relief as the abstraction of all the lurching this way and that; the executive mismanagement and organisational blips whether in bodies, neighbourhoods or countries through which ideals are extracted like an elixir that is left after the boiling process practicaly removes all liquid and all signs of life. This will leave us thirsty- but it is an archaeological dream come true- the perfect human who on the touch will implode into dust. Looking and admiring from afar is possibly the best vantage point for seeing this totalising aspect of mankind.

In Education, Therapy and the day to day trials of doing the shopping, getting on a bus and making a meal, the perspective has a way of constantly shifting. What is this aggravation that seems to well up within us and outside us as we come into contact with this or that kind of physical or social terrain? It is us- in relation to this or that. Because we only come into that particular being in relation to soemthing. That can never be got away from. Modulation or adaptation therefore is not a "making do" or a civilising consequence of learning the right rules and a set of good manners. It's this turning and inflecting in relation to a certain call for inflection drawn out of the conditions of the ground or context as it is met. Safety is going with the flow because wherever we are drawn is the right place to be if we remain in tune to the particular soundings we are entering. Noise or irritation is only where this sounding is resisted and we stand cocooned in our own immaculate uprightness. We are actually mostly clumsy, making do, shuffling, stumbling, correcting and losing the thread only to catch in again here or there on the fly as if a bird were circling in a such a wide orbit that it periodically diapered and reappeared and it was only through faith alone that we tied in this beautiful patterning as integrated field rather than as moments of gain and loss.

The more we stumble the more flashes of thought and image flare up and then die away again. This can create a rumbling stream of stuff and it is impossible to catch on to every passing one because as we chase  the one, more keep coming. It;s then that the stumbling becomes relentless as we try to catch up with a sense of the immaculate ridgepole through which clarity of the whole field is supposedly possible. But this vantage point does not  seem to be forthcoming so it remains as the mummified body, destroyed on the touch.

People with physical mobilities or neurological mobilities beyond the spectrum that is supposed to be normative, are both at risk of stumbling on and on in this search for a sound bearing, but are also  in a position where then many reorientations in their swaying bodily and perceptual fields, throws up countless images and these kaleidoscopic flares of light and colour, shape and sound that are a result of physical turbulence and the need to constantly reset the balance, can become a way to practise remaining very alert within this stream of becoming. because there is no possibility of halting it and it will anyway keep coming, there is the possibility of transcribing it onto the realm of a background context; the wider orbit in which the incessant flapping of wings of the circling bird comes and goes.  The very changes in perceptual and body spectrum's of engagement, creates a relativity in which turbulence is naturally the state in which everything comes and goes. Without that turbulence there would be no way of noticing the itinerant nature of these moments. There is a feeling then that people whose bodies and neurology's are not anyway aiming for  an outside map of stream-lined repetition, are drawn by necessity to rely on and act on the emerging situation that presents itself.  (Perhaps we all anyway are part of this contingency though some more than others may strategise that maps actually work).

We ourselves are nothing but the meeting into this presentation- or the turning up for an event however fragile, lurching or upside down this may seem when given as an account from an outside perspective. But really there is no valid second-order perspective. We are either in it and getting on with it or we are nowhere to be seen.

Stairway

I have began working in a new place with very young children who are said to have communication difficulties. I climb many many stairs with them from the ground floor level up into the skies where the metallic staircase actually flips to the outside of the building and becomes nothing much more than a slightly more ornate fire escape with railings and wooden slats to stop either therapist or child from taking a sky-dive.  There are added elements apart from the sheer excess of energy for very tiny bodies who at some point either earlier or later I will usually need to hoist  into my arms and make the final laps as one condensed body hip to hip. There are the elements of rain, sunshine, wind and the pervading sounds of the voices and traffic from way down below along the busy Euston Rd. The children begin to brighten and even their body mass becomes lighter and more buoyont on about the third lap of landings. They sense the spaciousness of unconstrained air that plays freely over their skin and the light becomes a tactile stroking of faint warmth in the early Autumn. The wind pushes us gently from behind or creates a buffer through which we plough forward by descending our weight in the lower body and pressing into the rivetted and patterned metal steps  immersing ourselves more only to be levitated out with chest widening. But as fatigue sets in this bounce outwards becomes saturated like wet cloth and each step seems to pull us back down and into its level surface as if we might slip through it. The rain is the best, dropping lightly like a mist or in heavy globules from high up above us. It invigorates and we lean into it madly tasting it through our pores and through open mouth. Eyes and ears are also more widely open and the many reflectivee surfaces of windows, metallic vents and chimneys draws the child upwards and outwards until they are tasting the view and smilingly sounding out this circulation of space. Finally we get to the therapy room, a converted office space..and it is nearly time to go down.

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)

Seiki is in the interstices.

 ........


Seiki is the particualar kind of body-work that Akinobu Kishi has develooped out of Shiatsu. It works with two way  heart to heart touch and is adaptive in the moment linking closely to the rhythm of breathing and attentive to right timing and right distance known in Japanese as Ma-ai.

It has greatly affected the way I treat people and my understanding of how to be with others in general. I think it applies to much more than just touch treatments. It is the basis of how I work to create living adaptive environments with children with complex needs. Without this approach, I would not have come to understand the non-verbal dialogue of such children as being so rich and vast.

This piece was written in 2010 after returning from a workshop in Scotland. It  is also an entry in the recent book Se-Ki, Life in Resonance, by Akinobu Kishi and Alice Whieldon, Singing Dragon where students give accounts of Seiki in their own words. I have been following Seiki since 2004.

______

Seiki is in the Interstices:

It is in the gap between what we come up against and that which melts away on the touch.

It is cutting meat when the timing makes the flesh part on the slightest of touches. The knife does not come down hard. It does not push. It glides. 

It is the heat between the hands in Gyoki. The hands come together. Sweat forms in the fold. It expands and dissipates into the graininess of the atmosphere. This is environment. A canopy that holds together as one. A body connection that becomes a movement unfolding from a hidden point into a bearing. 

It is automatic like a catapult. A spontaneous evolution like a leaf unfurling. This time of when to go and the going with it in a total commitment brings responsibility. It brings two- directional response. It leads to change. Because a certain phase in the way things are- a situation that one is in- the ripple of the flesh; it bunching up and slipping away again, has been noticed.

The eyes follow through from the alignment of the body that moves as one like a single snake vertebrae- from sacrum to occiput- through the pores of the skin opening out-

The smell, the breath- the small muscular groupings- the clenching of the anus- the Hara, the throat, the valves of the heart, the lung, tendons in the knees, the muscle calves, the ankle and wrist tendons, the scapula jointing. All are orifices that open and close as a gage to a wider association.

They work in conjunction with one another. They are echoes of one another. A voicing. 

In that way we also course and filter though one another- through a reverberation of tendencies that work like a pump. The on-off of contact is this. It is Gyoko or breathing between the hands. Building up the heat of proximity in the out-breath then allowing it to unfurl in the off touch; the in-breath.

The intervals. Seiki lives in these intervals creating a space of possibility. The space between cells.

To feel a constraint, go with it into its wringing turn like a spring tightening. To go with the disease or aggravation until at its extremity the re-wind catches in.

This is automatic release when the body moves and the conscious human association follow. This is thought-tendencies through and through with feeling response at every minute level of interest.

There is an intermingling and a conjoint intelligence which comes through. A deep compassion lasting.

There is a gathering and spreading simultaneously. A filtering system that nourishes every cell as each turns and jostles around another. The body breaks and is re-made. Not only once in a single trauma and cure but endlessly.

Life and death meet in the moment. In this gap is every different human possibility. A story is told.

Tilt