Passivity

Passivity- the open space of irresolution;  not going this way or that way-neither good nor bad. No positionality sitting tight from which to mark an alternate wished for or discredited domain. Just this aching opening that courses through the limit-limitless conundrum and plays cat's cradle in the movement between  the palms of two hands. What are these hands made of? Flesh or the interim space between these pads of meat? Some kind of winding through with no outcome or leave-point as a recourse to a set perspective.
Is this tragic? Lostness? Some kind of wandering away from the homestead? No because there is no integrity of a beginning and so no yearned for return- but a coursing through that in its repetitive forwarding and backtracking creates the vertigo of a spherical space that is more like a pulsating- condensing and widening with no grand plan and that is more or less aggravated  into a responsiveness like a simple life-form that turns in and ejects out according to light frequency, temperature gauges or the casual or not so casual prods from passers-by. A fly-by-night kind of synchronicity of  propellants that lean up briefly in tethered support; a yawn that is a kind of usurpation and ejection in fast succession. But this is not read as a welcoming and consequent rejection of  the air currents. A pump; some kind of constrictive working activation that makes of these currents a propulsive current that almost seems to push within the narrow confines of the tubes and ventricles; those hollow regions within the depth of our meat bodies.

Is air a vacancy or a utilizing force? And space-something that shoves up against form crushing it in the corner of an airless room whilst it parties and swings around the vicinity seemingly oblivious to the discomfort of its territorial volume? Maybe not. There is this interspersing so that the animation of the body is felt through this rinsing through of our active breath; of a space not within nor without. We share it but we do not give it- do not take it either. More like a game of catch and throw that plays with never-ending through the limits of given positions and stances. But these are not serious- they are not for real. They are enactments made into events just for the drama of it and as a way of playing space. A chase where the cat chases its tail round and round  getting exhausted in its limited but limitless space. And there is no apparent reason to this. Or a child flops to the floor in laughter. Caused by what? By this momentary letting go into the release of speed and out into the vacancy of a sudden stoppage- onto a nothingness. Suspension- where all angles cancel out one another, all speeds run through or bounce back out from one another. Intense reflectivity as the bounce of mirrors on mirrors; the ricocheting of sounds that extend and warp on the excess of one another. Total domination, crushed to a naught before the word is out. The vacancy not of an absence that used to be full, but an absenting that is the distraction of our every effect; its insessant failure as a mark of differencing. How we feel things as they draw through these endless affects into a disappearing  frontier that in the end is not even hoped for or glimpsed and so is off-set as a permanent running out on itself. This gesture of a yearning, interrupted in forgetfulness of what is yearned after or what is sought after as the homeland is the irritant that, held in abeyance, becomes active suspense. And the recurrence of these given  unsettlements until the countless inflexion is all that there is and in this permanent distortion, in the wry smile, the slanted gaze, the crushed directionality, we meld from shape to shape to shape with no recourse or sentimentality to a lost or yearned for unifying form. For that would take us away from this dance of awkward, tragic, humorous, despondent unstoppable life.


* Written after reading Maurice Blanchot: The writing of the disaster

Drum Circle

A running tempo underneath exacting placements. The placements are islands; their arrival and their making way for something else impossible without the running tempo that sends them up and sends them down again. This is a temperance practice of a depth reading that is always shifting. It is a matter of emphasis within the on-going running tempo where a slight hesitation or a slight forwarding that ruffles the flow puts a glitch in the momentum and in this sense snags a hook or a foothold that becomes something; a sound put into relief  and that foreshadows the level pulsation silencing it as the core structure like the veins of a leaf with no color or meat of its own. So sounds are brought up as shapes with a real visceral quality that indents and bounces back into a fullness creating an excess thrust into spring-like reversal into this pushing out. This is a making visible or pushing into view. But before it is apprehended as a visual or sound frontier it is felt;  at the level of the body and the weight of the foot going into or out of the ground or the level of  the palm of  a hand creating contact with the surface of a drum and then bouncing back out again.

In the interim between contact and no-contact there is the space for resonance. This effortless residual sound out of the act of bearing down and bouncing back out again is heard as a certain riff which is stored by the player as if it were a message not of their making but coming to them fresh and accidentally. Then something is made of this and it is repeated, inverted, delayed and plunged back down into the level transparency of the core structure becoming the supportive foundation for a another floating sound. There is in time this constant ricochet of  levels that fall in and out of sync with one another so that a rapid pulsation like a jamming or a positive feedback that distorts and then distorts some more evolving into this complexity. And as long as there is a core structure or pulsation, even if this never actually manifests but is simply made implicit like a steady and slow heart-beat, then the play of differences can multiply catching and snagging on to one another; bringing each other down as a head dive and then soaring back out of the ground on the sheer impetus born of this dropping away into an impossible contraction. Invisibility and explosion follow on one from the other as diminshment and excess.

Every opposite plays  into its extreme and then reverses and in this way the music begins to make itself. And the ricocheting tumbling counter-rhythms torn out of the inner pulse begins to organize around a body; a body that does not make music as the placement of notes in a sequence one after another in long impossible strands that knit and pull apart as if from a  master-plan. Rather each affect is felt in the slight sway and perturbation of the core balance in the lower body- the hips, sacrum, lower belly and back- and  in every slight displacement  from side to side and tilting forward and back again. This tilt catches into its polar  opposite so that the body becomes light and transparent and almost nullified as each tendency is matched and steadied through its counter-part. These twinned movements like a pendulum swing begin to create a rapid circulation through the base line of the body as it swivels to orientate into the sound beats that play out as incidentals of this swiveling centralized rooting.  And in time this rapid readjustment becomes refined so that barely a movement is perceived. There remains the semblance of an upright body as a continuous circulation of upwards and downwards movement crossing and binding up from the back base of the body at the lower back and sacrum to the head and down the front of the body to the belly which is a kind of collection point that is like a knotting together. Through this circulation in relation to the lived experience of uneven encounters- in the surfaces, sounds and intimations of our on-going lived environment- all the perturbation of left-right, forward-backwards, up-down is absorbed and accommodated without being stilled or inhibited. This is the spring-like aliveness of a connection as it manifests as a heart-to-heart understanding between musicians in a musical setting but may equally emerge in many dynamic settings where this kind of tuning is allowed to  take hold. There is a sense of spaciousness and extendable time and each placement- as if in slow-motion finds its insertion in amongst the running pulsation of the main beat in an easy affinity that binds in and out of its multiplying shoots.

The effort is taken out and the heart slows. Even perspiration begins to diminish as if  the outer activity of this rapid drumming were somehow superfluous -an accidental slippage out from a calm stillness of simply sitting together in silence. The silence and the mayhem now go hand in hand supporting rather than interfering with one another. And this brings a sense of deep calm matched by an alertness drawn out of this global clarity. Outside of the drumming circle everything is just as it is and this may well bring a feeling of vacancy and even depression because this state of  open absenting whilst remaining in the moment is so unknown in the usual business of day to day life. Stay with this sense and what it brings up both as positive and negative feeling.
It will come and go and translate into something else-something more impersonal-  in  its own time. Even as a period of physical or mental restlessness- even that will dissipate in time into a wider field.

The Dancing Terrain

On the train from Maclesfield back to London looking out the window with different depths of scenery streaming past my face at varying speeds. Fix my eyes on the far off hill; the mound that will stay in view for several seconds or minutes at a time and use this as a kind of pole star; like a ridgepole from which to perceive relative planar flashes of scenery that seem to group as banners or clusters and operate as if acting on a local wind. Such an assembly could encompass the cows, the bashed in farm houses, bails of hay ruffled in the bad weather, metal fences broken or dipped here and there. They wave past my eyes going backwards at one set speed as part of a consistent fabric. Then another layer travelling faster; the stark whisp-like hedges that travel in reverse yet are ghost-like revealing- like the spread apart fingers of a hand or the bones and veins showing up between transparent flesh, the slower layer behind. There are some ducks, a  pond or area of ditch water, spikes in the ground, a horse racing at this intensified speed in relation to the languorous cows and farm houses up near the horizon. And of course above and surrounding this level of land there is the tumbling sky; grey and deeper shades of grey pouring in on one another; the angular and tumultuous pooling of sections into sections becoming a deep fog that never falls onto the sparse land. Yet this vastness all around teaches the eye to look at the land with its variations of speed readings as one; a structure or topology of different densities where the color of the earth or a road or a river or a collection of buildings gives rhythm to this outspread surface and even in this rapid moving vehicle all that is there may also appear as stillness; exacting and outstretching.

Then as my eye-balls droop to their lowest points in the sockets and simply scoop up the detritus of the track line below there is this hurtling movement tumbling and pouring out of itself like the gallop of the horse that at the distance of a bounded image appeared in my picture landscape as a cut out silhouette moving across a fixed stage. Now in this hurtling of train track underneath the thunderous train as if it were spewing out of some unknown source; a track turned liquid and that keeps coming in the rumbling of this motion that is under my body and that carries me forward, I can feel  the plasticity of the land not as a space with one thing laid out after another like a set of dominoes all in a row, but as a vibration that is undulating in the very slight inconsistency of its placement across terrain. The greater the variation between one point and another in the track line or the more discrepancy between an absolute alignment, the more there is this rippling undulation as the moving train eats up and multiplies minute differences into this wobbling dipping and rising pulsar tone of an impossible set level that vanishes or overextends past  the bench-mark set by my eye gaze. My eye gaze is very precise. It holds forth in this tight absolute alignment and so it discriminates the variation and reads it back as movement. Yes the train track is dancing; gyrating under my body and streaming in time to the pounding mechanics; a deftness of touch through and through and that only exists because of this lumbering machinery as it comes into contact with my perception  in just this way. The other banners of land continue to dance past in relative speeds of extreme excitation and poise reaching near stillness on the horizon and complete fixture where my vision takes the sky as the medium compass reader and applies this law of structure on to the global surface of the land.

And again those running dipping and contouring tracks that reveal  inconsistency across space as a dance in time. I think of the spine; those set bones one after another from the head down to the sacrum; the open space of the chest; the gathering consistency of the abdomen like a knotted bundle held firm. I think of the holding in place and the springing up that this gives rise to as two opposite poles integrating and dancing around one another. I think of the kids I work with at the Center for Communication Difficulties. I imagine the waywardness of these kids in motion- of their expressiveness, their experimental utterances and the sheer exuberance of their dancing swinging bodies that are falling and rising, being lifted, helped up, breaking  apart, spinning and bumping into surfaces, ricocheting off of these into un-foretold spins and brief levitation's  before again hitting the ground. I think of the uniqueness of each child; the way they approach, smile, turn away,  hesitate or reassert their own interests beyond the realm of any single category of adult reification.

I see the kids as these train tracks; not as something spaced out across a terrain but as something that is being played out into a certain potential according to the speed of all the relative perceptual and generative fields around it. How it is a coordinate point spun into a pattern of behaviors according to slight discrepancies in these planar levels of the field that show up as different correspondences and different gaps and jilts in the frame. The alignments from here to there from the back of the head down the cervical, thoracic and lumbar spine and into the sit bones that bind at the sacrum; the muscle groups,  ligaments and blood flow that course up and down this spine; the oxygenated blood and what it takes to make it oxygenated at the level of breath and the chest and at the level of the  pumping blood coursing through the body at regular ebbs and flows- and the nutrients that are taken from the ingestion of food, condensed and absorbed at a cellular level with the waste being eliminated out the body. How these processes mesh in and through one another so that at no level could one talk of one system outside of all of them. And at every level of organisation of flesh and bone and vitality, there is this admixture or rinsing through. These different speeds mark the different capacities of  how we absorb or create bounded dimensions in our cells, our organs, our bodies our psyches and how the one state of relative boundedness transforms into the other state of relative porosity at apt moments that swiftly replace one another. So that it is in the very mismatch of physical integrity and alignment without which there would be immobility,  that  the dynamic and expressive nature of who we are, manifests throughout our life.

But a child needs to  be able to hold a level gaze in their body and in the environment in order to play with the discrepancies of life and bring these undulations into the playfulness of a unifying dance. They need to learn the set level - or hold in place the pole star- as a double poise simultaneously in the body as an alignment between chest and belly/lower back and in the perceptual and experiential field through which the attention moves. Animation  through body movement and sound utterance is the act of manifesting the contradictions or wobbles built into these alignments. By staying true to the involvement at every level and at every moment these variations can be put to use as the basis of animated living. Spacial  placement is non-living as a map unless it is played out- like a record where the speed can be altered into varying sonic exposures- into the continuous unfolding of the terrain.


* I was returning on this train journey from a Buddhist talk by James Low. What he had talked about in relation to utilizing or activating Space, the Radiating Field and Clarity in relation to Wisdom and Compassion was shifting almost imperceptibly through my senses as I gazed out the window. The teaching allowed a subtle shift in my understanding several hours after the event; To have  the  sense that different layers of attention play out in their own speed readings and are only experienced in relation to one another at a very different  level of attunement. I think it is always necessary to step away from the language in which a teaching has been delivered before this integration has the space and time to play out in the differing momentum's that are always meshing through one another.

This also points to a direction to working with non-verbal children: Begin in the timing or the speed readings of the actual movements and pauses and in the discrepancies and tilts that show up through these. Treat these not as mishaps to be corrected and straightened out but as the very fabric of the terrain unraveling and gathering in various ways. This reveals itself as the plasticity that is operative through time- not in the words or concepts that if they are brought in too soon will swamp and cauterize this plasticity. Yet words and concepts do have their place and will self-group spontaneously out of this freedom of play. Children need to feel the dancing terrain in order to pattern into their own experience of animation; in order to then be able to place themselves into apt moments of co-involvement.

The unlikely dance

I did some charcoal pictures to try and work out what is this practice of making space that we are all up to in different ways. Just putting it down in writing like that makes it sound very rushed- very tight and the nature of that urgency seems to preclude space. How to make space or experience it as a come-uppance even as figures from time to time plough down a plumb-line that would enter right through your chest if one didn't jump to one side or the other on a busy street. Can this challenge-this driving and relentless forging forward actually prompt and spill us into more space not less? What does it mean not to confront but to engage within the wider field of spaciousness? To feel this as a driving force or lever and to actually use the compression as a way to circulate so that the distraction or being put out of sorts, sends attention into a cascade of channels; perceptual, energetic, physical  and feeling, where there is actually more space not less but space as it is lived or utilized as a sending out- sending through or absorbing into. So it could be then that the limit factor as it is reached becomes the point of torsion or bounce out of which an extension to another area rolls out. This could be the lived body from moment to moment redistributing and inter-meshing through environment, growing limbs, extensions or idea protrusions; auditory encounters with far-off trace elements of a sound as it reverberates through the city; the downstairs thump of a door from the flat below closing from one area to another that you yourself have never passed through. But these imaginings- the light filaments rinsing through bare trees, cascading off  the window panes that at just that instant become reflective; taking on the golden hue of the sinking sun, and even the memory brought up so suddenly of a child playing in the rubble outside of a house which this time round is deserted with only the loose bricks and piles of sand acting as a trigger for this play of life that has now moved on. As I pass through the streets, some filled with people hurrying against the light which is on its way out and some empty with not a figure in sight as far as the eye can see, then a sudden emergence as a car roars down the center of the road and disappears at the far end, it's red rear light trailing in my perceptual field even when the event is over, I let my breath come and go. Why is this breath so conditional on outside influences, at times cordoned as if in a tight enclosure at other times spreading and filiating like tendrils that pass through my nose, around my body, and out through my mouth in a swift soundless whistle that is spreading and dancing with all the other silently whistling lips. Bodies; bodies that do not stay still. Bodies that intimate a gesture towards or a gesture away from where these two possibilities wrap and spiral around one another in ever more complex patterns. That is the dance. But only when it stays with the immediacy of what is indeterminate. An embrace or a quiet moment of reflection  and the still moments between  these varying levels of leverage and spin that generate yet still more moments between them. They are made out of  the mutual hesitancy and the going into again and again of these possibilities of encounter and in the end the touch is intimated out of these various tendencies that are inverted, extended or abruptly curtailed before they reach into any particular manifestation. And the touch becomes effortless, invited in even as it is re-configuring around a different space of invitation,  leaping between one embrace and another that never becomes air-tight; is always in the process of breaking apart again. This was the one dance I was drawn to watching amidst the swirling of bodies that seemed to become passing shadows against a blinding light. As I lay there letting the sun hit directly on my face so that the moving bodies almost cancelled one another out like the burn-out of an after-image where the body is still lingering in space even as it is beginning to drop away I felt I was almost dreaming.

So to return to the pictures; the pictures of the dance that were drawn before the dance even took place. How could that happen? It happened because the pictures were not a representation of the dance. They were not an episodic narrative of the moves made, the configurations built up, the postures and gestures that struck first to one pose and then to another pose. The pictures just made themselves by this abrupt forwarding into contact;  the contact of a piece of charcoal across a piece of paper that was mediated between the one extreme of grinding the stick into the paper until it crumbled to dust and the other extreme of suspending the weight of the stick just above the paper so that no mark at all would be made. Between the two was this skidding, diving, swerving line interjected and interrupted by other lines to create junctions or nodal points out of which other extensions of circulation could begin to journey.  This went on until it was done; the patterning through the patterning building up textures that carried the semblance of a form with a certain gravitational tendency. So touch or contact began to become manifest in this way on this flat and oblivious surface of paper. Something in the feeling sensation and built-up memories of my own body informed me of a given rule that I would not have come to in this way outside of the drawing; The rule was that where contact leans into contact through the experience of the body as stoppage or containment, this is off-set as a sense of spaciousness in another non-localized area; in the dissipation and widening of attentional gaze or as the physical extension and freeing up of weight in a limb or in the chest or the head. So that the weight-bearing point pools and intensifies and this offers up the possibility of greater distribution as a circulation that may spiral out to the extremities of bodies and indeed beyond these bodies into the space held by the architecture of the room and then even beyond this into the light patterns radiating off from the trees out the window; the lines of the roofs and even beyond this to the dissipated sounds of the borough and the city circulated in the air-currents of countless breaths driving countless moves played out in the inter-changes that are not witnessed but are a given and in a sense are dramatized through this one dance in this one place at this one time.

And somehow through all these filiated moves the outline of the child rocking and stabilizing on a swing at the center of a room begins to take shape on the paper as the very last picture that I draw because it is the last piece of paper that I own. It arrives there as the dance arrives there; not my dance- but the dance that stays with me in the bits and pieces that I witness or encounter first hand- at the Saturday Dance Jam that afternoon- so that the dance is this patch-work of dances and the bits that are able to fix and be brought up again as aspects of one another prompted into life all over again when I am back on the street. But the picture of the child arrived on the piece of paper BEFORE I went to the dance and before I arrived back on to the street after the dance. It is from a time that was not really in my mind when I put the charcoal to the paper earlier that morning. And the picture is not even of a dance; it is a singular child on a singular swing, spinning and turning this way and that way, pausing and  re-circulating as my hand catches and re-spins the swing and the child sets her position deep into the mat of the swing bearing down through her hips and sit-bones in order to stay upright, and whispering with her whistling breath-like voice going:  "LA, LA, LA" and then waiting for my reply. So the dance was really there even though I had absented myself from the charcoal picture. The cut-out border of the paper does not delimit the end of the contact so that in fact the dance occurs at the boundary of  its own representation. It is the heart to heart drawing of the child- before and beyond my consciousness of it- which then bleeds into the dancing later in the day in which there is no curtailing of the field to size. The tilting ground of the dance like the tilting base of the swing can not be absolutely stopped; and the child finds herself not through herself- which is an impossible abstraction- but through her contact with the unreliable nature of the swing and through the at times rather clumsy interactions between myself and her which nevertheless keep manifesting. This is not picture perfect. The function is  never to be completed-never to be tidied away. For it is always in its aspect of becoming, beyond closure. This open interval is how we experience one another and it is how we might experience ourselves through what is always an excess of ourselves.

It is on the street that my final dance occurs- that is the one with the old man; a Hassidic Jew who is leaning heavily on his stick as he walks so that his left  leg- perhaps the injured or painful one- is practically floating over the pavement and it is the right leg acting in parallel to the heavy stick that bares the full force of the contact, tunneling into the ground and sending the man's weights and attention heavily downwards through his joint anchorage. His wide brimmed hat nearly precludes all views of his face but then just as we pass something lightens in his face and I am drawn into the  brief animation between his eye-brows and his lips that does not involve eyes; neither his nor mine at all. It is more the slight staccato step, heavy one side and light on the other and the contact of the palm of his hand wrapped around the top of the stick, taking on its shape, that regulates my breath with his for an instant and in the next moment, as we have already passed one another, my breath comes very lightly and freely and I sense the beauty of the setting sun as if my vision had somehow widened and been flung open as something very exacting but non-locate-able. It is the quiet hesitancy of a movement that is looking back at itself as if in suspension whilst the movement carries on that actually defies the closure of that movement and sends it escalating beyond anything that could be grasped. And it is the heaviness and awkwardness of  the man's lumbering step that has brought the possibility of this lightness- a lightness that is the transparency of a feeling that does not exploit that feeling. Each and every contact that we experience; this plummeting downwards into containment and closure, is simultaneously the propulsion into a wider field when it is let go of and allowed to unfold. That is the dance that makes "one" out of "two"- even when the "two" will never meet as such and no words will pass between. This can not foreclose a space that is always there and that always does pass between points whether these points appear as impossibly distant or impossible close.  Strangers pass without a word whilst knowing one another and holding that connection with care.
__________

*Pictures can be seen here: wwwmovements.blogspot.co.uk

The rope

This was written last year; Autumn 2012


I went down to the canal the other day, a day of sunshine and clear mild winds. It was the day before the gusts began to build and build so that at the top of the hill a leaf storm speckled the sky throwing leaves randomly across the sloping surfaces of the park. A man with a hoover with its powerful engine strapped to his back was walking up and down the green verges of the pathways blowing the scattering leaves into thin straggling piles that were almost immediately taken up by the wind  again; like a squirrel that buries a nut just under the surface of the ground and a moment later a blackbird swoops onto that very spot and unearths it. Then came the rain incessantly and quietly soaking the ground, bouncing off the pavements as I returned from work. The leaves were not moving anymore in the park. They were stuck and embroiled with the grass that was already growing and entwining around them in the mild autumn air and the sodden ground  And suddenly as if in a blink of an eye, the trees are almost bare.

But before all this happened it was sunny and calm enough for me to sit down on a bench at the side of the canal. There was a boat moored  just to the right in front of me and the sound of the trains came and went over the bridge to  the left of me. People were continually walking past behind me on the small pathways that separated the canal from the open marshland. Dogs occasionally came my way sniffing around my shoes  then darting off through a change of concern or through the call of an owner.

Because of the warmth on my body I stayed and didn't hurry on, leaning into this warmth, bracing forwards slightly and then sinking back into my sit-bones on the hard wooden bench. There was no back to this bench so I had to sit downwards and sink my feet level into the slightly moist ground.
I began almost without thinking to follow the slight tug and release of the rope that tied the small long boat to its moaring  The water created this slight tension, driven into a real but slight force through the weight of the boat that followed as if lulled by a distraction into this emphasis away from the bank. It would go so far until the rope would stretch taught and then at a certain point in time as it reached its full stretch it would buckle and the tension in the thread would evaporate so that the boat swung very slightly towards the bank again. Then  knocking gently the edge of the ground it would be nudged back outwards into the canal flow and again the string would be stretched out taught. This occurred over and over as a kind of configuration and lull that with the moving water and the slight breeze I found myself breathing in time to. It became then the pattern of my metabolism and with this an inherited schema for the flow of my perception and moving attention.

I became deeply relaxed and the torsion in part of my body became apparent to me; areas of numbness and locked-in body parts that seemed to act like a hood over the clarity and free movement of my mind. The relaxation flooded over this limited experience because as soon as I took each body state of atrophy to its fullest level of tension it then went into reverse loosening and seeming to unravel like the rope between the boat and its moaring.

I realized  that rather than working separately and locally with a problem area such as gait, balance, perceptual overload, locked in habit, or communication difficulty, there was a possibility for global re-orientation in this slight but precise re-emphasis of address. There is a sense that observing  a process of tension and release as a whole creates a kind of phase-shift whereby the entire disposition of body-environment as a comprehensive set is aligned differently. This is a relational approach- relational in terms that the body tendencies and environmental tendencies are co-emergent with thought, attitude and disposition in terms of situating and moving through one another. At this level of tendencies rather than separate objects and bodies there is this streaming affect where the physical implications of very simple consequences of going one way and re configuring another way are informing levels of awareness that are bodies in interaction and the thought and felt perception and attitude of those bodies in interaction. One does not fore-front the other.

What occurs at the physical level is co-occurring at the mind level. But there is a gestation period and formulating these felt experiences into concepts or word based programs of diagnosis and remedy provokes them out of their intimate engagement in a process that can not be cordoned off as health, environment,  education, culture, therapy or play because they inquiry permeates all categories.

There needs to be an informed following through what is felt and what is happening moment by moment. Affects bleed through one another but only where there is right timing and a right point of engagement.
This ebb and flow of contact and release, torsion and unwind, absorption and bounce are processes that  approach and tenderize across object-human-environmental-animal peripheries,  scattering through one another like the leaves on a windy day. The are non-contactable but only lived and then let go of.

I stayed with this feeling of the rope stretching into tension and release, each phase feeding and replacing the other. Then I went and bought a large quantity of paper. There was a rush in this because I felt the weather closing in. This transition time between Autumn and Winter is special and brings up the interface of processes that affect and con volute into one another bringing about the turn of  a season. This plays out into the body  consciousness as well and I tried to catch this in the feelings and thoughts that rose up in me in the rope and then in a series of color and then charcoal body drawings. There are many of these in my art blog but I wanted to feel in every line and mark this urgency of pulling one way and then re configuring up against this practiced limit that is performed and enacted in order to take the drawing onward  This I believe is what occurs in the lived body and so the art of composition in drawing or in music and movement dance practices  follows the same rhythm of prompting cataclysmic eruptions and limit thresholds that incite a kind of jump or spin as something goes one way and then reverses in a different speed the other way. I believe this is a life energy.

Going in to work after a day of doing art work, my body aching but free in this continual activity swinging into one extreme and enfolding back through, I noticed very clearly and fully this process in these children. These children are very young- between two and five and they are all there at this Center because they are seen to have communication difficulties. The inventiveness of their experiments with torsion and release are a device for them to think and inquire and move. It is very important to take this torsion and use it in its continuation as a kind of sound and re-verb that plays into and off of one another. In somatic movement practices this can become the push-me pull-you of two bodies acting as one to create areas of slight tension and going into this freeze and hyper tension and then rewinding this back and through into the release and expansiveness. I believe that as the body enacts through a  responsive environment into this torsion and release or constriction and unfurling, so does the voice begin to burble and configure around this lived situation. Communication and voice is not something separate from the body's hyper and hypo tonal extremes; it plays on and off of this polarization into the upright steady body just as the clear strong voice comes through in these pulsatotory rhythmic and a-rhythmic modulations. The ebb and flow of difference through which we learn by wobbling what it means to be steady is the practice ground of our every step. Really this is a step into the unknown. But it is played as if familiar and as if it were repetition or more of the same. This stutter and uncertainty of our every movement roots us into the familiar by drawing us continually into discreet moments of engagement. In this sense it is the unknown that draws us into taking the leap of faith between the gaps of certainty as if it were firm ground. Without these gaps we would be land-locked.

On:Off

Maybe we set up spaces of opportunity by how we fill things just before. That filling and the emptying it implies as a counter balance could be another word for touch. Touch is not a thing that one body does to a surface or to another body- It is  a proposition that cannot know a specific intent which would be another way of closing the loop before it had got started. We set up these distances by committing to a point of usurpation  This jumping in is an occupancy but it doesn't claim possession but simply hangs around enough for that occupancy to be registered  Only as such- as an indent, a mark, a sensation, a slight brush with another at just this precise point at just this precise time can the vacuum suck of an absenting be felt with true force. Can we speak of force in terms of absence? Or nothingness or silence or space as a kind of substancing? That all depends on what went before and what is to come after. We are talking here of thresholds of difference, so slight as to be almost imperceptible where a grander pre-prepared narrative of a life, a person, the holding or the absence of a functional integrity is put to the fore-front of our minds. Deeds somehow get  lost  in the bulk of this march of a life. So that the small  interspersing filaments that weave in and through one another, rinsing  into parallel and suddenly jumping into relief as a directional tangent inter-ups the smooth surface of these occurrences, seems like so much detritus spoiling the view of what we face as a given.

But it is not given- it is made; made by the timing of how things come together to be what they are, and how they come together to carry on being something different through the movement that these brief points of contact activate as if without thought. Rather the thought is not governed by a cranium encased in hard bone, it is felt and lived all the way through so that intelligence is this adaptive coming together and coming apart at the micro level of on-off contact. What is this on-off? It is  a pulse, a pattern and  a code. It can manifest  between form and movement, energy and bulk, air and ground  but it can only formulate into these polar extremes because it shares at both ends of its possible manifestation a similar structure. It is the algorithmic knot that is also the grasp just prior to dispersal. There is no dispersal without the knot and the knot becomes an impossibly dense intrusion without the possibility of dispersal at its fringes.

Having difficulty with "reading"  gestures, movements  words or with stationary objects each with a name  such as car, sheep, pram or body is also having difficulty with the pulse between contraction and expansion, compression and release, density and the tendency or possibility of flight. These are not divided states, they are unitary markers of  a transitory life that pulses between activation and non-activation; between "On" and "Off".

This "On-Off" guides movement and cradles sleep before we ever learn the particularities of the Tango let alone the more difficult task of how to tie our shoelaces or simply to stand up without falling over again. And "Rest" is the state of unraveling between a certain tension that is there, not there, there, not there through-out our waking lives meshing together different transparencies like see-through color slides that tint one another indefinitely according to this or that combination. The purely make-shift nature of these combinations is another way to talk about Interaction which is far less a social rule book of guided turn-taking and etiquette rules on smiling and making eye contact at opportune moments to add gravitas to a word or statement and is more the opportunistic making of something out of nothing and in inverse logic, of making nothing out of something. Filling and emptying- that is all we ever really needed to know. The dance makes itself. Even the concepts of "Up" and "Down" are simply scheduled to take place though this pulsation of pressing into and jumping back out. Touch or no touch is the difference between the speeds of this dyed that becomes one spinning around its oppositional potential into a thread of pure arrival, separating to become a boundary as surface to surface jump out against one another,  or melding and  creating the consistency of glue as the warming and absorptive affect of this slowed down contact creates dispersal through the filaments of the thing itself rather than through an ulterior realm we call air, space or sky. So spaciousness may be an internal component that is manifesting and dissolving minutely moment by moment. Similarly form may become the pockets of air and their openings into a wider movement that is barely touchable in its excitation and swift adaptation to what is before it.

We could go on and on and we do simply on a whim which we may even call an aggravation. This is enough to disrupt the barely palpable sense of unity shattering it into an endless array of splinters and the splinters of splinters and so on down the line that roots upward and downwards like an impossible tree on a misty morning where the invisible roots actually feel more real than the branches that disappear at the mid-point of their journey in the white opaqueness all around.

In that whiteness we can barely see our own hand outstretched before us let alone plan for an executive function in which tendons are tightened and lengthened like the pulley systems at a mad inventor's bequest.
There is nothing to head towards in the mist. And there is nothing that we can remember leaving for as we glance behind us even our eyes seem to roll away across the oceans of mist. All we are dealing with then are affects; the immediacy of the on-off contact that is specifically local and joins entities or bodies which rather than being separate a moment before were non-existent a moment before and are simply called into arrival out of the consequences of this contact. Yet the patterns that they give rise to proliferate outside the boundedness of this moment alone. So that the touch catapults back out into a wide and vast canopy of cross-references, depth-readings and exploratory meanderings in which the body is taken up. These are the imaginings that do not rest in the cranium or in any one place at all but are lassoed out like an endless stream of party-poppers absorbing one another and than collapsing and reemerging as another touch catapults out another eruption. And these threads can go through bodies, through walls, through buildings and bones and into the soft earth below. They can spiral up a tree, became the tree and become the hair or mane of an impossible beast with its head lost in the cloud and its feet luxuriating in the mud. They are an undulation, an approximation that is never definitive as "This" or "That" but simply take hold of myriad assemblies unifying bodies through ideas and gestating ideas through people.

People are the carriers of these idea-threads and these people are only ever manifest and in robust health when they are movement-ideas. These are spontaneous outpourings; automatic sky-writing, births and deaths in the blink of an eye. They are you and they are me. They are the child who says "Cookoo" over and over again,  the politician with his slogan or catch-phrase, your neighbor when she is out of sorts because the telephone cables are all mixed up so that your messages go next door but next doors' messages end up in Peru. It is the internet and the crashed video of a Jazz trombonist from fifty-eight years ago. It's the misspelling of this blog address so that one ends up at an entirely different blog-site; a better one. And it is the crazy dance to the episodic "Stop- Start" of a toy xylophone in a sweaty matted room in East London in the roof space to  a desanctified church.

Navigation

I was tested and taxed on the verge of doorways dragging a large drum out of one self-closing door that acted like a tight-lipped word that has to get it right right there and then, whatever the bit between its teeth. On that occasion the bit between its teeth was my finger and did it hurt! So much so that I knelt down in the corridor despite the overhead cameras and groaned out loud as if praying or wracked by grief, lost in the moment. Pain has a way of doing that to you and suddenly there you are. It was all senseless in the end because the room I was vacating was never used due to a cancellation and so sat empty and bare as I pressed myself into the much smaller sensory room. When i switched on the bubble tube that rose and fell with a burbling sound into colors that changed from red to blue, that's when I really began to feel sick.

But before this kneeling on the ground still between rooms, I was discovered by a Learning Assistant who deftly picked up the drum and deposited it in the small room then busied herself with other tasks before leaving the space. I finally got the room sorted and went out to pick up the American Girl who began nodding her head vigorously and swaying at the side of her mother. It turned out she enjoyed being in the small room because she likes to fixate on the image of both of us in the mirror waving back at ourselves. It's a strange scene like being on holiday in a far away place then posing for a shot then unsatisfied with this shot, moving slightly and trying again. But there we were each time staring back picture perfect and smooth to the touch.

It takes a good drum beat and a lot of vocal experimentation to tilt us off the vertical line and into a fascination of our own drama rather than the image before us.With her sitting on my lap she could pretty much steer me and by leaning back or from side to side I would collapse in this direction taking her on a ride she was predisposed to. I was told the American Girl has movement sickness and would throw up continually on the journey between America and  the UK. If she was driving the plane, leaning into the curves, lifting into the expansiveness of the throttles' release, there would be no such mismatches. Language  can be angled anywhere; between the light-headedness of sound variation and the compression/release of pressing into and away from contact one can navigate even in the foreclosed space of a mirrored room which is six meters by four.