Body Unforetold

Working with M yesterday I noticed firstly even when he was still strapped into his chair and I had yet to touch him that he was alert to my voice. His eyes seemed to scan the duration of a sound emission then blink and like a wind-screen wiper run the opposite way. I felt the slight softening of his lips- something between a puckering outwards and a pressing inwards. The first touch then is always through the lips- that in a sense feel themselves... in anticipation for the breast..and later for any kind of nurturing contact. Sound emission is a natural consequence of  this touching into; readying through the sensate reciprocity of lips feeling both the hardness and the give-point of this pulsing muscle that both reaches out and receives in. Communication is the out spill of an organism readying itself for need- and reciprocity where at first it sets up its own internal feedback loop, takes on a wider patterning of self and other; of taking in and giving out. This gift-giving is the flowing of our capacity of reach and absorption through one another; a rinsing through and a co-emergence of a wider sense of unity. The body changes in this process of pouring into and out of other until in a sense there is only one body continually re-shaping as if by the wind through the trees that does not hold onto any one shape or position. Need is met, reacalibrated and sent forth in continual dynamic shifts of attention, of balance; of emphasis.

I lift M out of the chair having undone the many straps that hold him in place like the bound contents of a tidy rucksack, strapped and secured.

His body becomes stiffened as he meets the mat, belly down, and he rolls himself over by tensing his neck and torso at a slight torsion and thrusting himself over onto his back. His upper back is arched and tense and his hips and sacrum area are buckling on and off of the mat. He thrusts his fist into his mouth.

There is often this going into habitual patterns of self-soothing when M is lifted out of the chair into a prone position; as if his organism was trying to wrap itself back up into itself, becoming in its soft and vulnerable exterior, the shell of its own dwelling. But the way this is sought is through stiffness and the momentary jolts of sudden release with the muscles playing into waves and ripples of contortion and this becomes the stimulus of his awake life. That the release does not really ever come fully before another wave of contortion is set into action, means that what results is a build-up of spasm through the entire body so that the ankles, the hips, the diaphragm, belly, upper back, chest, arms, neck and face become self-referential; locked in and looping around their own particular locality as if self-existing; as if not needing the support of the whole.
The bowels tighten and the breath rises locked into the top-most parts of the body. The head becomes hot and the senses overwhelmed. There is a sense of scattering around the head like bees that do not settle and there can be no moment of focus; no precision grasp and no lull or drop in the intensity of  this-low level exhaustive excitation in order to settle back down; to settle through and circulate out into a wider atmosphere in the intensity and impact of every felt gesture and contact.

Working on the "Off "contact to give more space can help. But this space is only available out of the first holding points of containment and stilled waiting. I use the outer palms of my whole hand wrapped around the lower back from the mid line of the bony spine to the soft sides of the body and simply hold here.
No movement; no stimulation, caress or disturbance. Simply the slow filter emission of a natural heat; blood to blood warming as if it were flowing across the border of my skin to his; through my hands, through his shirt with no directionality, no intent or concern; no goal of healing or helping. This slow emanation gradually sinks in and then the subtle ripples under my hands inform me where to momentarily give more space or slant a little at an angle; to go into a certain level of depth and then no more and to then release this level of holding like a miner rising up through the layers of rock and earth sediments deep below the surface of the land. A recalibration at the surface can only come out of these low intensity barely active mining journeys where one simply takes up residence, waits for the slightest of shifts in the flicker or lightening ripple of fascia or muscles as it is animated through the swift and mobile play of the breath and then, in the precise and apt moment of this occurrence, it shifts.

M becomes aware of this co-ordinated shift; a certain unravelling or loosening of a bundle of nerve-flesh fibres contained in a trapped breath that at the slightest evocation of a wider pattern, is reflected in the shifting quality of touch. And as this undulation of touch and release; like the belows that at first create wind and disturbance and then heat and an emanation of warmth, gathers a momentum of its own, other areas of the body like gateways that need the co-attention of M and myself, open to view.

The upper back, stiffened from protection and holding that constrict the arm bent and turned so that the whole fist is bottled into M's mouth and the neck and face and throat en wrapped in this backwash that reverberates and lets nothing escape, is called to our attention. With my one palm still wrapped around the lower back and side like a sheath and the other opened wide yet with the pad of one or two fingers moving and tracing into small rivulets that are like vortexes that swirl and descend, I move in and out of these cushioned intensities again not trying to change anything; just aware of what is there beneath the pads of my fingers. Then again I spread my hand open and wide barely resting now on the flesh at all yet still carrying down into a depth with the other hand wrapped around the lower back so that each hand becomes a different vehicle of transport or dwelling the one drifting downwards by a kind of gravitational sensing, the other wafting up like a leaf on the wind just above the ripples and froth of the sea.

In the gap between these two qualities of contact; these two areas of the body, something is beginning to shift; a recalibration of what it means to be heavy and sinking and what it means to be light and dissipated. And between the sinking and the scattering something of interest catches in and M is blinking and pausing, listening and softening through his puckering lips; catching on to the threads and distillations of his own body pulsing. And my body too is tilting and settling, recalibrating through my base sitting bones and releasing through my chest and throat so that there is this two-way movement of giving and receiving through the subtle discrimination's of on-off contact that are forming and reformulating around finer and finer levels of variation like the ebb and flow of waves on an ever re-patterning shoreline.

What is given? Nothing. What is received? Nothing. Yet here we are moving in barely recognisable shifts that at a glance would look like nothing happening at all. And that is the case. For these are the preambles to movement, to sounding, to song-making. To the celebration and dismay the outrage and smiling. They are the premonitions; the mere feint outlines or ambient hum, out of which  the physical readiness to act and grasp; to intend and to move away, to push down and to rise up in locomotion evolve and upon which the ability to rest and renew in stillness and resettlement take shape. So too are they the pre-emptive baseline upon which emotional and social levels of communication take shape in brief and passing manifestations, like clouds passing in the sky.

Body Distortion

I have to use the distortion and let it move. The impact like a sudden punch, even if only anticipated and acted upon and not actually inflicted, is a real event. 

There is a distortion as flesh makes way for the supposed fist. This intrusion is in a sense accommodated; welcomed. And the redistribution of the impact as it is met, ripples through the mobile liquid flesh carried by the circulatory processes of breath, blood, nutrition and excretion. Yet more than this it must be worked through and through as a taking hold of mind; through the redistributed attention, as the indent creates protrusion somewhere else and this protrusion in turn displaces another mass of presencing. This then needs to be nimble in emptying out and probing a new temporary placement.

On and on this itinerant journeying becomes a formation where all parts remain in contact with one another like a crowd flowing through a space- stopping and starting in collectivity's and affinities that are exacting, precise, grammatical and then let go of.

Movement and pause is this filling and emptying as it hinges on the lid of a provocation; an assault. 

How to resist the startle-freeze fixture that is laid down like a fossil into habitual patterns of auto-repetition? For such exacting and prescribed repetition becomes stasis. The predictable goes on-foreseen. It is held in the cerebral memory bank rather than articulated through the body distortion and redistributed to keep the aliveness of a responsiveness that alludes always to a position taken up briefly in a configuration of multiple co-dependencies.

The assault must be heard and met; the distortion accepted; the redistribution that is the beginning of circulation entrusted piecemeal as it vibrates and pulsates throughout the accommodating body. 

The body must change and be met and contained by a reflective mind that is simply another level of body- movement. Articulation and communication is this double enfold; the body in constant adjustment as witnessed and attended to by the mind that in a sense pre-empts the movement by giving space for this filling and emptying. It makes it so, and this is freedom.

After Session with M. (Seiki reformulated)

To describe this experience is to gradually take out the parts of notable doing. For there is nothing else to do than work from out of the absence of this habitual stiffness. In this child a rigidity so full it blanks out the possibility of receptivity.

Yet there are layers underneath layers. Impossible realms that do not exist except in counter-point to the vacant fullness of this distressed absenting of a child's hope.

Gather than into the fullness and rest. Stay quiet, attentive and in every small degree of un-bunching of this knot as it repositions momentarily from here to there give space accordingly.

Finally the space is the space of an enquiring mind that forms into the vacancy outside of the pressure to remove itself with further tightening. For I too remove myself- wider into a dispersed arena of circulation- the sounds, feelings, touch and sensations of a mobile environ. So that I too am in the space together with the child absenting from the impossibility of grasping tight and so coming back around with inquisitiveness, freedom and hope.

This loosening of the mind is simultaneous to the loosening of the body. Like bunches of clung-together soil becoming successively porous and aerated. Each particle a separate piece in the ground orientation that gathers or redistributes as needs be.

So alignment through the body and the gestures that follow is predominately this tilting in and out of balance; this moving through the mid-line so that no angle carries the locked weight of a closed and private pocket but is a movement on the way through to those brief resting points of uprightness where vertebra upon vertebra stack up upon one another with optimum mobility in choosing each particular course of action as it follows.

As the extremities of hands, feet and head become more engaged and are pushing through out of the ground-base stability of a contained environment so the body is able to move not as a solid fixed mass, but in the intricacies of each movable part, like so many animals creating a collectivity that dialogue between themselves only to appear fully coherent and conversant in the brief and shimmering brightness of the eyes that flickers on and off.

This is joy. Song comes out of this unbidden and the child is there with you in all their open potential.

The Movement of the Body through the Imagination

It is the imagination that implements the first yearning towards a preparation for action; the capacity to move. The preparation for this action is nothing more than a tightening or holding in so as to build the volitional force needed for execution. The execution is simply an unravelling of this collected potential, like the bees storing nectar for honey. Yet the free flow of an act like the pouring of honey needs the precision of directed attention. This is where the imagination takes a hold of the potential in order to carry it through and like the banks of a river it channels and so consolidates the act as it is being done.

There is really no unitary act. More a series of on-off flickers of consolidation through the channelling of form in the imagination. Impulses are positioned and intensified in the breath, blood and musculature and then implemented in the falling off of this intensity in the act as it is being done. The appearance of the smooth flowing continuity of an act is this rapid pulsation of seizure and release. It only appears as smooth because the imaginative unity; which begins with the tendency to imagine an intentional act in the life of an individual, runs across the jolt of the preparatory activation through stories, songs, images, historical records, remembrances and on into the self-perpetuating dynamics of a physical action.

To be what we are there is this shimmering tension between an emptying out which is immediately recalled into action and re-orientation as a continuous fold-unfold.

The very flux of a horse shimmering with the animation of perturbation experienced in shifting air currents, sound intensities, smell nuances, nervous-muscular excitation; a continual revitalisation that momentarily cohere in admixtures that are the coursing buzz of an animate multitude that at another level fixes into the supposed figural relief of a horse that runs and gallops, snorts and pounds the earth.

But it is at the level of minute impulses activated through these emergent fields, that brings the coursing perception of a horse in motion into view.

Mental unrest could be called the activation of these impulses without their resolution through releasing acts. Contraction and tension builds up in the muscles and there is no possibility for circulation through the dynamic reorientation of the body. Patterns of held muscles and breath and the stagnation of bracketed-off residual impulses result. All sensations are affected by this continual putting on hold, becoming overly acute and intense. The person like a startled horse in a small pen is stilled and stultified by the impact of nervous excitation collecting at the surface and interior of the body-psyche. Over-riding fear results and an enmeshed longing that can never be satiated becomes the pervading background atmosphere. For in this constant state of over-preparation it becomes impossible to truly receive what the environment offers.

Touch Therapy can be a first port of call working at the border-line between contact, perturbation and impulse and reconfiguring the options from stagnation and holding to release and circulation.

It becomes the arena for a micro world mapping system that is made through the duration of a session in terms of co-responsiveness between practitioner and client as this emerges and transforms. In this sense it is a deeply relational contact therapy offering the possibility of participating in a fundamental secure attachment on a pre-verbal psycho-somatic level.

It becomes a battery-charger and memory repository experienced dynamically and played out through the body through sensory and visceral receptivity that can hold the possibility of tipping the balance- in a light and effortless way-  from touch responsiveness towards spontaneous movement responses. In this way it can create the ground for a person to work on reformulating their orientation from Self to Other. It may hold the possibility of shared experience and conjoint presence.

This may or may not manifest in the session but it is a possibility of formulating experiential and imaginatively varied ways of acting and resting and being in the world.

The Seams of our conversation

Forged in forgetting. A turnstile oblivious to its own turning. It is there and there and there- the frontal view of this locked-in activation. The startle response held wide open- unblinking. Or sleeping endlessly, drifting upon the seas that are indifferent to the turning that both carries and unsettles the flotsam upon its surface. Down below the reverberations are channelled into endless filters along which light and dark flow- fishes swiftly using the currents to streamline their speckled bodies and in a flick or a deviation from a given course, there is both suspension and the inflection of a vacuum momentarily filled and met. This embrace which is movement itself but appears so still. Is there an abstract diagram of this delay-thrust? This hesitation and reabsorbtion into a wider milieu and the immediacy of a sudden filling- as if by release- so that what was withheld, braced under the surface suddenly leaps up, breaks through the surface of the chopping tide and dances in the sheer light only to drop back down again; this cascading  into the splinters of current that carries and melds the body to the absolute necessity of a new course that only in that moment is given.
What is given? Where are the hints, the guidelines, the memory jolts, the course to be taken? There is no plan of action. Action lends itself like a sudden urge to yawn or burp out of the sheer emptiness of a hesitation- a rip in the yarn, a seizure of place and time, where identity which up until that moment seems to cohere along a given trajectory, suddenly is halted and freed of its contextual reading.

Illiterate and unpronounceable it gasps for air, forgetting indeed its aqua allegiance and in the vacuum or conflictual respiratory systems there is a charge- the near urgency of almost foretold death and the eyes blink both open and closed. This is the winking shudder manifesting who knows where that we come face to face with in those blue-grey clear running eyes and yet which quiver through the porous affinity of a gaseous liquid that runs and courses through the body, into the ground and back out into the atmosphere.

The reachabiltiy that a moment before appears to be the clasping of hands across an absolute distance- the distance between you and I , this and that, one object and the next, now melds and bends like the long grasses swaying in the wind after a monsoon in the rainy season in Africa. The desert gives birth. The roots push ever downwards into a subterranean lake of fresh water that sparkles below the baked earth, now loosening in the droplets of rain that part it by resting lightly and sinking into the grains that welcome this rain. It  becomes a dispersal- a gateway, the circulation system of a complex animal. It becomes you and  me in our life-form- dancing and wavering out of the still recession of our dream-space. Is this mere fantasy? Maybe not. The imagination can make flesh and blood live. It can cloth bare earth in myriad colour eruptions. It can bring life and it can bring catastrophe. How we enact it- grasp it to us as a seized truth or hold it lightly to go where it will, is up to the freedom of the milieu that we are a part of. We give permission to one another in the displays and in the quietude that sees both horror and the motivation of a dance in the same pedestrian tread. How do we make contact with the surface? Beckon it into a revealment of a depth that is not a masked hidden realm- accessible only in fantasy, but a lived encounter- in the particular sway and suspension of that dance.

A child who does not move from beyond a chair unless he is carried. Whose body is brittle. Whose fist is shoved deep into his mouth as if to stop up a constant leakage of vital resources out into an unseeing world. Who is blinded by his own internal reverberations that churn sluggishly and inhibit any possibility of release- of satisfaction or discharge.

But his aliveness is wrapped in this very conundrum of a disengaged alertness that turns into muscular rigidity- the breath caught within an old casket. It's not a question of fixing this- as if a plumber could come on to the job, locate the stuck point and simply loosen up the blockage with a few mighty movements of his own vital body. Vitality is not transmissible in this way- as if sheer effort and good intention created the right conditions for this virtuous leakage. More there must be a slow affinity where a simple proximity creates the charge necessary for low level responsiveness. Through the pads of ones fingers, barely resting on the body, the chest rises and lowers, the abdomen and diaphragm too. This undulation where a slight touch is then undone, timed in and out of sync with the body pulsation manifesting through the breath, creates a series of reverberations. Of hesitancy's, bracing and the sudden minute release of a built-up tension going to meet  the perturbation as always with habitual stiffening, only to find in its precision absence- a spaciousness that is a shared co-witnessing that then has nothing to do with touching here in order to fix rather but opens up this local choked protectiveness into its opposite- a sudden widening into an ever expanding realm.

The spaciousness cannot be felt out-side of the provocation of this stifling claustrophobia which comes at first on the arrival of any touch, sound or gesture. Gradually these gestures play out in reverse like an ever- receding view that is un-graspable, un-locatable and forever reassembling on the edge of what is felt. This is the domain of the mind when it is held in a very wide care connection that does not ask back anything and simply provokes, holds or lets go as a timed dance in and out of the siezure and flow of the breath, of muscle distortions and the momentary stretching or unravelling that occurs as their reverse patterning.

This coil and recoil becomes the gradual echolocation that talks back through the originally learnt talking to self- as a wider self that incorporates environment and the relationship of one perosn to another in this alignment/misalingnment that creates both the flow and grit of a true conversation.

The boy looks off into the distance. His foot is pushing against my hand and he is guiding as if by remote sensor the patterning of his leg-my arm as one movement in what before was a locking into the fixture of position. The very tendency towards rigidity is taken as one part of the paradox of movement; that to crush into an imoveable space gives the leverage to push against and to reverse back out  like a ball caught by the corners of a wall and bounced back out into a reverse flow that is effortless, unthought-about and therefore uninhibted. Movement patterns itself in this push-pull reversability. All communication is only this. The lock and the key engaged in an impossible embrace that somehow miraculously leads through the percieved opaqueness of what appears the blunt fact of what is before us into a moving through.

The boy dreams the dream of his endless momentum and through his body in small seizures and the reversals that their momentary intertia and release allow, he imparts this dream to me. It articulates through my body as a song and is imparted back to him as the enactment of this song in co-movement. His face is awash with light andshadow. There is interest and the flecks of conversant intelligence that is neither simply within him nor without him. It is flowing between in the sharp flickers of thresholds of light and dark, sound and silence, touch and non-touch that energises like a pump this conversant space where fishes swim in this darkened airless room swiftly with the agility of free creatures. Flicking the light and dust from their reversible spines, the colours are breathtaking. We wonder at them- for they are neither of us in entirelty. They are something more- on another realm that informs endlessly with multiple variation what we can be in connection to one another. This is  the mapping- the internal external fold and display of our unfixedbearing.

SPEAKING THROUGH

In the fold of an arm something springs undone. The reversibility a focal dispersion filtering outwards on every turn. What are we facing? Where are we heading? It is a round-about presenting that inclines out of each pre-set mid-line, to incline on a falling slope or to rise up as an inclination remembered from afar rinsing through. We are not where we are supposed to be. We are the thought-of motion built out of our oaring. This is the breath and it cannot be put into a holding though it builds in the vacuum of an encounter that fast becomes its momentary expulsion.

In the smells of the distance that collect around our quivering nostrils, here is our most immediate loci tingling through the nerve-ends in our face, quivering at the edge of our eyes, peppering in the breeze, our lips.

Do we speak? Not yet. Our bellies soften and the tendons in our neck pull taught bracing the clavicle and sternum and the moveable chest plates and rib bones under which our heart resides and our lungs too, emptying and filling, emptying and filling; blood and air mixed yet separate; this transmogrification from a spectre that is no more than the brief shapes of the wind held in the core depositary of flesh and bone.

Earth and sky; this admixture held apart; a mere hairs breadth or the separation of continents across the ocean.

Where are we? Where are we going? Between one deposit and one way of mark-making and its seeming erasure; the accumulation of layers that speak through this emptiness; harmonies and incongruities, clashing and holding, affronts and dispersals that rise and fall in the crest of a wave between dissonance and the continual reverberation of our people through the ages. This is the sounding that is placeless because it is mobile. It is the meshing that creates junctures of correspondence; a recognition and deep love that is both this tension and its release.

After Aikido

AFTER AIKIDO: PETER SHAPIRO

 

Solothurn: Switzerland: 26.7.14

 

In flux so that in a cascading together, directions are held and accounted for and in the stillness something rises, something sinks out of the same core and there’s a spreading, an opening; the Heart. Something that turns over and over; it is there only in this turning. Otherwise it dissipates.

 

In the falling the remorse and the loss; the natural ageing process of things that seem to be slipping away, there is a recurrence. Not a glancing in front or behind but a wavering a quivering, through which new life comes up.

 

The gaze is un-grasping. It is encircling, a quivering frailty through which the voice carries forth in an immediacy of expression. And because it has been set about its turning out of the near destitution of unclasping, in the fray of these threads, the magnetism of attraction/repulsion locks into dynamic balance and in the questioning; the perturbation; the unrest, all begins to fall and rise.

 

The wave; it isn’t here with the move but it is rinsing through into the fibres like a tensile buzzing that on touching is a touching through and so it immediately softens. The angles that we perceive are softened into this melting through. Then to stand up again; the shock of being alert like a child that asks again and again “….but why?…” The child soothed as if into the bosom, an enfolding surround that then awakens to a questioning in its own embrace. Then again this softening on and on… This is contact which in itself carries the shock of separation as a sharp intake of breath- then releases into expiration. To seize and abandon that position again and again- until all there is, is this pulsation- this on-off, fast-slow, hard and soft that are momentarily- as if in a blink- what they are, only at the threshold of what they are not.

 

The question like the wrinkling of a brow sends out patterns across the mobile skin. The flesh is malleable and softens around each turn, each fall. And the momentum of that fall carries through because it has come from a height. The move when held as  one from above and below, is patterning in the perceived effort of all intention towards and away, up-down, left-right, forward-backwards into the core seed where we are encapsulated as unity and grow out of one another, on the cusp of one another; on the brink of each ending a threshold of extremity which every extreme vocation must endure only to be softened by its nemesis, enfolding into what in the attack is perceived as extinction but is an angling round- into a greater dimensionality; a wider atmosphere; of Love- where time and space are enfolded as one and the meeting and the met is a unified gesture that is simultaneously a contraction and expansion.