Seeing through the leaves

I worked with M again today at the Jewish school. I Left the school at the end of last term when the funding stopped. I mourned the disconnect of this abrupt ending and did a series of small colour pictures of faces changing expression as colours melding through one another like a dim light flushing between layers of cloth caught and held in suspension. The faces only come together at a certain angle of glance, then disappear again through the intensity of gaze.

Out of the blue I got to work with M after a local man died and left some money. So the mourning and the continuation of life somehow began to work through one another without cancelling one another out.

After work today I walked up the hill and I could hear the voices of the children through the leaves that were dislodging on every blow of the wind so that those that remained seemed to stand out in midair in spherical formations through which the thick bark of the trunk was clearly visible yet somehow set apart. Black birds were rising through the leaves as if pulled magnetically up to a certain height, then dropping back down through the cascading leaves to balance momentarily on invisible branches then fall away again.

I have began working at the school again with G as well. He was non-verbal when I last worked with him and into the rushes of sound that streamlined or cut diagonally his actions he would put "whoosh" and "wheee" which are now filled out into story-lines. Words now punctuate the push and pull of careful operations such as the hoisting and lowering of a stuffed animal on the end of a piece of string. This was a child who when wordless was immersed in process and now with his on-going word commentary, he still is.

M is a different kind of child. He is wracked with spasm, blotchy around the eyes, his chest heaving in gravelly shifts that stop and start at uneven gaps. Today I could see that his pupils were dilated and his eyes rolling back as he was coming and going into different states of consciousness. There was this slight pulsation around the black pupil; a thick band of gold flecked blue which was turning this way and that like a combination lock working on a code all by itself. Several staff peered deeply into the black and blue depth. Each one saw something different.

After calling his parents on a mobile phone we discovered that he had had an epileptic fit the night before. No one had told us. It was agreed that I should still go ahead with the treatment. I would need to keep aware of his eyes because there was the possibility that if things took a turn for the worse we had to phone an ambulance. But as it turned out we didn't need to do this.

Since re-starting work with M, I have found it hard to write standard case studies about him.
It seems that there is this cascading of events where the problem areas and their shift into a wider circulation are so much beckoning in on one another that the "positive" and "negative" almost give a reason for the other to exist. There are layers of affect in warmth, muscle tone and breath that come and go and that begins to organise how I make contact with M and how he beckons me into this contact or fills out into a spaciousness that we are both in. There are so many things streaming through one another- different temperature gradients of  hot/cold, rigidity and movement and even in the stuckness there is a certain clustering and a mounting up of intensity and then the forging of many new routes of connection that escalate out, then die away. These are not given by me but are gone into by his awareness as he interprets and unlocks the potential of a mute touch which starts to animate through his body as a living dialogue almost with a life of its own. It is enough for both me and him to witness this. 

There are points that work to relieve spasm just behind the ear and on the bridge of the foot. I am drawn also to the right side of his diaphragm that seems cold and unusually inflated and suggests a stress on the liver. But my hands simply pad to areas that lend themselves to be touched here and here and then there so that no point is active or useful outside of the living resonance of a wider pattern. Affects spill into one another and the pattern makes itself out of these emergent floodgates that are opening and are time specific and that then spill and superimpose one upon another. Touch becomes this sensing of varying depths drawn and re-configured around responsiveness; of going into and bouncing out at the level of subtle variation and co-adaptation. This is forged there and then like a pulsatory beat captured into an echo through the conditions of a wider space. This wider context only becomes visible through the foregrounding of immediate affects.Yes there is a tendency to bring the rising of heat and conscious busyness of excess activity away from the head and to follow a trickle-down descent through the neck, shoulders, diaphragm and remaining on the belly for some time. Ther eis also attention to supporting the junctions in the wrists, elbows, knees and ankles where there can be a build up of tension through blockage with the resultant unevenness of hot/cold throughout the body.

But no area of contact or attention makes any sense if it is not feeding through the visioning of the eyes and the patterning of the body-mind that is looking inwards and tracking these re-circulations. By following these spontaneous response patterns forged through the breath, through muscle tone, digestive and excretory sphincters, skeletal shifts in alignment, heat variance in the blood flow and neurological tilts of emphasis in the minute changes of light, touch and sound, these affects begin to organise like a melody that gradually comes through. In the physical torsion of yawning and stretching the voice begins to come through. It breaks into a moan that is sustained and carried thickening into a chord with many flavours. I chime in and out catching on the tail-end then extending past his ending only to stop as M chimes back in so that in relays there is a continuous sounding through which we than begin to cut away. Silence mounts up or shines through out of the excess that is falling away revealing frames through frames which are transparent and shimmering in the same view.

The concreteness of definite touch, definite utterance or steady eye contact is built up through the pulsatory and flickering quality of there/not thereness. This playing of presence and absence hones a sensitivity of touch-responsiveness by using touch to make space in the "off" touch and using sound to make silence in the interval. Negative space becomes imbued with significance. It's only when there is this spaciousness that there is the proper distance and right timing necessary in which to articulate contact. Gradually the voice becomes clear and resonant and M's grip around my fingers becomes a nuanced touch. I feel him coming through in these layers of on/off contact and the clear and unclear becomes one. Wherever there is an explicit connection it rises up through layers that are more porous than our idea of material existance and that in the practice, convolute together into a pulsatory whole. Contact then is not something overwhelming or harsh like a bright light or a high speed collision of muted impact. At every moment it is tenderised and nuanced but fullt present like the flickering light between autumn leaves. The base can settle and find alignment out of this play of continual dissolvement. There is something regenerative in this because it is on-going.

Even the harsh thrashings of spasm in an epileptic seizure carry the possibility of this re-tuning into circulation. And I have often found with young children who are epileptic that the day after having a fit they are open to radical reorganisation. A dramatic re-circulation of structural, emotional and psychological creativity becomes accessible on the surface and through the rippling affects at many depths of contact when that contact is open-ended. There is this merging of the distraught discomfort of the body as a rigidly held structure and the utter fatigue of successive waves of fitting that is a kind of giving way to movement and this creates the conditions for a possibility of clearance. In the blotchiness of the skin and the wavering of the eyes there are the beginnings of both symptom and the passing of a certain phase of blockage. This may come through little by little into a deep calm that is momentary but undeniably there. There is an occasion of meeting and it cannot be refuted. But it is on the edge between destructiveness and re-emergence and it must be held with great care and love by both practitioner and child.

Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore

Introduction:

In the Underscore there is the possibility of bringing into reflection a practise as we are doing it. It is a movement meditation; a practise of non-attachment to every state whether perceived as favourable or un-favourable. It becomes the movement of states rather than a pre-figured ideal state that drives the dance as it cares for the dancers. This enquiry that is non-localised and takes on different positions of enfoldment and expansiveness as a streaming consciousness, generates the life-force that flows so naturally in Contact Improvisation.

...........

Last night we danced Nancy Stark Smith's Underscore. We did not enter it as a guided road map talked through in advance. Rather we created our own focused attention within the possibilities of the score which we shared in quick thoughts beforehand and then in the practise itself. There is the part lying on the ground where time seems to slow down and there is both this vacancy/absence and the beginnings of a possible opening. This is not given in the immediate mirrored responses of others but is more a melting through that seems suddenly, as if entering a certain current, to stretch out indefinitely. The room itself begins to animate that elastic quality and vision follows the minutiae of fall and lift like the fine-tune balancing of sound experienced in the inner ear as differences in pressure gradient that fluctuate and equalise.

The body is not made up completely on its own; there are gaps in the contour. Nor is vision thrown out beyond a self-made body like a hook flung out on the end of a rope. In the underscore perception is taken apart back into its living state and thread by thread unravelled into the space. The body becomes movement; the movement of fleeting ideas and the movement of the body beyond any fixed state.

The first touch connection can feel strange after the slow and quiet investigation with the floor. It can be a shock after lying there on the ground in the skinesphere to suddenly be formulated and called into response by another. So there begins a practise of modulation about how we form on one another's incompletion and the shifts this implies. This changes the focus away from dutiful obligation or knowing the rules of the dance to simply turning up in each moment. The hospitality is the open space. There is a silence here that can sometimes feel like being thrown onto the wide sea as a kind of loneliness. But in time this becomes the practise itself. It is an open invitation to manifest in many different ways over and over again. In this careful or cared-for attention an open gauge can be many things at once. The dance space is part of the "care" which allows for right touch at the right time.

At first it is enough to feel the quality of warmth from the flesh that is not self generating but comes from another body. But soon this idea of self and other is non-applicable within the practise. There is a steaming through so that the heat gradually equalises and seems to emanate from no particular direction or source but to spread with a life of its own. This needs open availability without codifying this back into the familiar resoluteness of the dance with its supposed moves tumbling out of each other like a pack of cards. Rather there is staying with the contact without bringing it too completely into movement and remaining with that movement through the space without formulating it into a meeting with beginning middle and end. The elastic stretching yawn encounter becomes a contagion between many bodies that are formulating and reformulating at the threshold of exposure. There is a temperature gradient like a light shift or the disassembly out of a vertigo spin suddenly caught and reorganised. There is the heaviness of imploding organs suddenly released. The interface is everywhere within and between bodies in these overlapping kinespheres. Wherever there is a quality shift in experience and in the perception of experience there is the rush of contrast that becomes the continuance of the dance. The small dance and the greater dance are one pervading gesture lending themselves to one another.

There is a circulation that links floor to wall to window to body through a tumbling reorientation of contact and into a new compass point which explodes back out into the space. This is the geometry of the felt space. Movement runs its course out of a build up of heat that suddenly frees itself out into the dissolving space. There is that running and opening through the chest, arms spread out to what before had been a near implosion where impact literally took the breath away. A trapped shape born from repetition resolves itself and finds the simplest escape routes. Lines and curves cut through the air propelled out of a questioning ground. Forms cannot help it; they must flip inside out on the briefest of touches living and dying, riding and shaping off of their own limits.

The tempo is not immediately given. It builds out of the bodily sensations that build and escalate as shape on shape, layer on layer. Staying with these long enough allows an open frame of attention to be set. Micro and gross levels of change can be witnessed and modulated simultaneously as they are performed out of this open frame. There is an investigation or probing into levels of detailed focus and then an interest and staying with the distractions which are spin-offs from this. There's a planting down into a stable and unwavering mind from out of which the body can be flung this way and that acting through each connotation and the lived implications of this.  There are these run-ins with excess activity and then a deepening stillness where the tempo remains held delicately in active but quiet suspension. There is a pulsation that is felt like the blood rushing through the body; a precision in the heightened attention to every mode of amplification or diminshment. In this there is the endless re-versioning until the compact and absolute boundedness of bodies begins to melt in the practise of bodies coursing through one another. What was impossible becomes possible. Certain flights of the body and the rolling and tumbling shaping and sounding in the tenderness of contact contradict pre-set personalities. The rigid choreography of our set social standings breaks apart in the dance, whatever may happen later in the day.

We are swiftly drawn markers running across an absent space and intoning it into substance. We have evoked make-believe surfaces in order to play. The hard line which can be used as a point of bounce is a moment later coming apart. The dissolving line still captures our attention like a feint echo. Held loosely we begin to ride on the waves of sound/not sound and to link into this quality of engagement continually perpetuated on the edge of movement in parallel dances.

The diagram of pulsation is sometimes manifesting violently and with force or delicately as a tender embrace. The movement that catches against hard contact is openly softening into a wider sense of spaciousness against the on-off piercing of a brass clarinet that fades out into the catatonic silence we still inhabit. In this torsion there is a double move; both pushing into and spreading apart. This two-way traction courses through ligaments and muscles, veins and sinews, air cavities deep in the diaphragm and the glutinous texture of our digestive liquids. There is the melodious flow of blood coursing through arteries and veins running into and out of the heart and lung. These organs are shaped and re-formed out of the passing of substances that are never stable. The body is the nodal point that opens back through the spherical space of the dance. It continues to flow out into the sounds and colloidal lights of the city that are streaming through the air and that carry on through us into our day to day gestures and the consequences of life. 
   
We are in the particularity of this one moment at this one time in this one dance and yet meshed into this interweaving of tendencies that reach a breaking point on the cusp of every encounter. There are no independent dancers because at every awakening idea of a movement or gesturing into a learnt engagement, there is this interruption that breaks like a wave into a new dance.

...........

Voice

There was the sweet smell of fertiliser being dumped out of a wheel barrow on to the pavement directly in front of the church. Yes this is London. Steam was rising from deep within its belly because of the heat being produced from out of the slow process of decomposition. It was rich and dark like crumbling chocolate but there were small pieces of straw and sticks poking out from within it that couldn't be broken down. It smelt of animals- the rich smell of animal hide and what comes out of the back of them and is steaming from being incubated within the digestive tract running from mouth to anus inside their warm animal bodies. The digestion was carrying on now out on the pavement amongst the sodden yellow leaves. Soon the fertiliser would be scooped up and spread onto the dying flower beds to either side of the pavement where small gated public squares looked stark in the half-light.

_______

The man on stage had a guitar like the time I had seen him on TV when his voice had soared unexpectedly from his quiet frame. He was lit up today in a warm purple light against the background of the pulpit carved out of soap stone with a space underneath that could have doubled up as a child's den. The stained glass windows captured the dispersed and dank light of the outside and brought it in, creating a channelled aura in figures of biblical scenes. The small electric heaters glowed orange at alternate intervals along the upper most pews bringing the people corralled below into one single entity.

There would be no singing today because the singer had woken up without his voice. The man announcing him said that this was the bad news but the good news was that he would be playing some acoustic music for about half an hour. There was a visible rustle. A restlessness set in. The woman in front leaned forward to her friend and there was whispering. Several people checked their blackberries lighting up the fronts with the push of a button.

The music started. The man worked his vocal range between chest and forefinger without opening his mouth. Within this looped sounding eye and ear created between them first precision of focus and then reverb. Sound on sound tumbled out in each delicate placement like setting colours free each one allowed to fly into the spaciousness or nullified and dampened by the turning wheel of the meter and the melody that kept coming, an attack so sweet it was relentless. A body moving forward delicately but insistently.

Voice is not only a quality of the vocal tract. It is anywhere that our attention is put full-heatedly and with courage; where a loop is made between unwavering attention and the free play of movement. I remembered than a small girl whom I`d known. Her wide eyes scanning, like moving across a new terrain, the features of the children and adults before her. She would pick up objects one in each hand and then gazing at them with outstretched arms run with them for a distance before replacing one object with another as if refuelling for the next part of the journey. She had no words but it became obvious that she was patterning her sing-songy breath-like sighs to this stop/start lullaby drawn out of her movements like a waltz sweeping so far then lingering as if in a dip only to be seized by another impulse and carried on by the wave. Then she had began to drum caught up in the drumming and tapping of others and acutely entering into these stops and starts with her own two hands. She began putting the objects onto the skin surface of the drum to watch them jump and dance as she beat out her rhythm. I would hum around this rhythm and then lift her up in one sweeping motion to carry her through the air than land her back down as the song continued to sweep up and around and down again. Perhaps there might be a gap- a silence and a listening into the breath which is coming and going. Then again I might tap back into the rhythm or she would as if it had simply journeyed underground for some time and is now re-emerging on the surface with the flow unbroken and recognised by all.

I`d seen the singer with no voice doing this same thing here in the desanctified church catching in through the hesitancy of a silence which becomes an interval loaded with expression because the tune had been caught back into with the same consistency and tenderness as before. No one is watching their blackberries now. No one is whispering. All are deeply settled in the journey sitting as one.

This common meter is what gives the voice whether sounded through tapping or moving or humming or story-telling, a vibrancy and clarity. There is a warmth to this like the digesting compost that is carried further into each consistency where it lingers on the airwaves and in the delicate fibres of our nostrils that flare slightly as we draw closer.

Open Field

I`m beginning to feel a sense of an open field in which the particulars of attention come and go. There's such a wide panorama and it seems at times unfathomable. Only that at each particular moment it is very specific- a precise involvement in just this way or that way. Yet at times we may get hooked into these particulars and forget the dissolving presence of that which holds it. I'd rather call this hold an embrace because it wells up all around like mist enveloping. It's almost like a temperature gauge yet perhaps perceived as colour. Colour seems to have definite boundaries- red or blue, green or purple, yellow or pink. Yet these hues come up and pervade just as song and melody do, lingering as an atmosphere before they ever get fixed into a word-meaning.
Word-meanings are limited yet not so much when they bubble up rising and dipping on a far deeper conundrum.

Children burble before they say separate words, streaming the sounds together as they wobble and tilt, slip and re-group their bodies. They are tendrils enveloping in and through the environment. This may sound strange or wistful but it is the actuality of the world being inhabited. At the Children's Centre where I work I see these tendencies like a yearning. There is maybe a false start, a re-tuning midway, a partial collapse and then a bringing back through not in body mechanics but through this shifting involvement that ebbs and flows as it leans into brief associations and then bounces apart again. But this On-Off pulsar pull of involvement and disassociation is not two opposed or antagonistic impulses. Both impulses lend themselves into one another energised into this mutual pump of contraction and expansion. It's a pattern subject to small on-going shifts of adaptation that envelope and embrace like layers of cloud or thick smoke tumbling in upon one another. There's a fascination with this in the child and the pattern is as much a thought meander as the physical gait and gestural stops and starts of a child in a play-setting.

It is the same with the dance. The dance erupts on its own tail-ends petering out only to gather into another colloidal axis where contact spins and flips back on itself into a two-way tangent of volition. Whether moving through touching, streaming through spacial intervals or engaging in movement which becomes so subtle and finely co-ordinated that it seems to be the stillness of one, these micro shifts are physical thoughts moulded through time and space by bodies. This is a craft thta is crafting itself out if its own interruption within and through the open field. We know the field only by the brief and sporadic impact of our broken gait, a questioning glance, a falling and extended slide. In these exaggerations that live to the fullness of their limit and then just beyond, there is a flickering filtration all the way through the body. This tensile-like awareness is activated in communual realignment- a stretch, a yawn, a torsion-like twist, the bunching and release of the spine and how this impacts and translates through many bodies that become one. And in all these ripples there is the in and the out breath, and the quivering of nostrils and lips on the verge of song or utterance yet in this interum silence of the dance.

Sound and utterance wells up out of this body-environment in which silence is the larger field. We snap into place all at once and all as one by vacating what we have once filled over and over again; by giving up position. It's a dance of omission that gathers so gradually to well up into the possibility of movement, of touch, and of this halting pulsation between moving and stopping. There is the feeling of lightness and the feeling of mass. We interpret that at a certain point as "Up" and "Down" and so the words fix what is complex and never the same. It's really at this visceral level of bones and muscle, organs and blood, air passage and temperature gauges that the pulse is set in one particular vein after another. These layer up on one another to create complex possibilities of volition and near total suspension and these occur as sound and shape formations morphing in and out of our experience in this wide open field. Word utterances rise out of an already activated slant with the air pressure in our bodies matching or teasing apart the other pressure forces so that we pucker our lips, extend our nostrils and widen our pores reaching out beyond the body that is ours and leaning heavily or lightly into our own arrival and our staggered fall. There are vortices's, channels, causeways and dams that are intensities that lend into and fathom out from one another. The dance is the spin of difference enveloped together yet held a hair's breadth apart and that is always pulsing on one level but unwavering on another level. We are birthed out of this becoming, these brief displays caught before being offered up in voice and gesture on every fall and rise on the threshold of many vectors. We are humming songs, shaping pressure gradients between us before they ever hit the airwaves and become audible . That is how we face one another. Talking is implicated out of the total field arising out of silence. Like people and objects and days of the week talking can never be taken away and exist on its own simply as the idea or the wish-fulfillment of perfect speech by someone who has already taken speech for granted. Speech can never be taken for granted. It is a practice of devotion. Children who do not speak or who are on the verge of utterance remind us of this.

Creating individual programs of therapy that hone in on function and the problems of expression and that try to remediate these as if balancing the books implies that there is a book to balance. There is no such book. We learn to come into being through our bodies and in our particular gait in correspondence to a wider field that is emerging in the same instance as we are. How we manage the moments of this wavering step by step in the flickering spectrum of colours that splinter against white lightand re-group continuosly is how we ultimately stabilise into the continuity of uprightness, of an unwavering tone and of a word so simple as to mean Up or Down. But we need the tempestuous field of life in order to live life as it is experienced. 

Utterance cannot be taken out of the mouth of a child and offered back up to her like a rare and precious gift that she is not quite able to match in her body. Speech is situational and inhabited.
It rises up effortlessly without plan or intent just like a dance. Can we remember the broken-off parts of the dance after it is over? Is there any relevance in this memory? Can we remember the melody of our last conversation with a friend? What is the feeling-tone of our friendship?: can it every be summoned up in one episode? It wells up through the cracks and spaces we allow to exist. We cobble it together out of the stops and starts of one another. We are continually atuning to one another by filling and emptying space and time, creating loose and often improbable signifiers as our play-things and then letting them go. We make this pump out of whatever is to hand. It is a make-shift affair. When it works it is because we don't take it too seriously. But we hold it carefully in practice.

Children are not an itinery of "good" and "bad" qualities. Even their defictis are essential to their learning. So by giving weight to portions of the child as "bad" this only creates a heavy compactness that blocks the free flow of curiosity that we all share as potential. Things need to play out in their own way as valued moments of connection which are felt and are fully occupied by child and adult without judgement or prejudice. This does not mean that there are not issues at a physical and psycho-social level to be addressed in a child at times. But these will play out and work themselves through with more exuberance and clarity from out of an open and shared ground than from out of a divisive and problem-seeking mind-set. We all need the space and time to engage in free play and deep exploration before a foreclosure about who we are fixes a tone and a particular attitude of self and other is concretized. A child will show their engagement in the most apt way possible at that time according to a co-involvement that is made byt the occasion. And a dance will dance itself in the particular way that that dance has of dancing. The life is in the practice itself which is rising and falling out of an open field. As for us, we are simply adjusting the lighting between shows.

PASSING

 

Through the disparate form that keeps unlocking, loosening its grip and falling away. It is there/not there and all of a day in the half light it rides on this kind of misty fragrance. Dissolving it becomes vapour stuck to momentary hard lines like the frail cobwebs that ache from stretching across window panes steaming up from the inside. A cooking pot that is slowly discretely emptying out its contents implicated now as the touch on our skin, the wiping away of a thread of hair now compliant in the sweat of this living air. This living/dying that we are all made up on, how it escalates to such a pitch as this and this and then winds it's way down like the smoke from a single chimney that heaps back onto itself. All thickness is this, this tumbling upwards and downwards simultaneously. Only when the upwards is cut off- a sudden cessation of the necessity to keep displaying, does the envelope loop of these bundles of rising and falling gradually stretch out breaking the threads and letting loose the vapour that continues to travel  unhindered. Without the constant patterning of habit onto habit locking down the frame, there is no trace left- No information given except in the many practises that renew onto unlikely material- the script in the sky written on the brow of a speechless child.

On Kishi's Passing:

Akinobu Kishi was the founder of Seiki, a way of being with others quietly and non verbally through touch sensitivity and global clear observation and acceptance. He developed this out of his own life situation and an urgency of addressing mind and body in the same instant through effortless action that was also a way of keeping still. He was trained initially in Shiatsu but transformed through his own personal experience- including episodes of crisis- this doing practise into a non-doing- and an embrace of all the struggles and momentary findings between life and death. In his direct method of demonstration and treatment he taught us not to be frightened of these passing states but to open and trust to what was occurring.

He himself died on 23rd October 2012 in the company of his wife, Kyoko, at his home in Maebashi, Japan. He taught frequently and commitedly in Europe preferring to go from home to home of his long-term students in the various European countries; Germany, Austria, England, Italy, Greece and Scotland living amongst, not apart from those he addressed in a simple and straight-forward, at times humorous way. In his treatments and way of being he showed non-attachment; simply residing in the moment very lightly but whole-heatedly and then moving on. Even as he approached death, this was his teaching; for people to find their own way and to move lightly and freely with the situation as it presented itself- not to stay heavily with any moment or feeling and to give it too much weight.
He called touching someone in the right place at the right time, "Happy Hands". This developed naturally according to a two-way involvement and through the opening of an awareness that was not contained in any single life form but was an attentiveness of careful connection. Kishi left us with these "Happy Hands".

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.