Disused Skate-Park

Incapacity; a temporary closure of certain functional directives- the rinsing over of sounds and light intensities that come and go as the body sits inert seemingly sinking into the pavement. No one in sight. But the rumble of engineering works close at hand. Trains too going past and birds constantly twitter. There's the graffiti- stained wall; the light sprayed dark and the dark sprayed light again; patches that open up to the passing sun  in between layering's of cloud bouncing it back out in an impossible glow or with the dark, fixing it in the brick itself as warmth that hardly settles. The sun is inconsistent from down here or rather the clouds are inconsistently covering it now and again. With the loud echo of refractive sun on a white-skull?- and the warm glimmer from out of the darkly sprayed lettering, my eyes are pulsating between open and closed and so the images on the wall, such that they are- as first one thing is superimposed on another- break up and never get to a point of patterning. The eideitic flickering of continual blinks and holds gathers into and out from the scenery as this one pulse constantly repeating and going astray. The exposure like a cat's eye is being peeled open and closed  through the action of the lids even as the eye remains still; unseeing. Light transgressions; sudden jumps in exposure create this automatic drill- almost pneumatic- around the muscles and flesh of the eye. It is not the eye that is the active part. It is all the props and holds that place it just so. But in fact perhaps it is nothing to do with the vision at all. It's that constant deep rumbling of a construction work that is out of view together with the high frequency tweets that interject this from the birds that come and go flitting on this empty branch and then that. These random sounds somehow hold my body here fast on this wall with the graffiti of countless generations who have grown up and been replaced one after another rising and falling and that leap too far out to be deciphered or barely become anything at all in the subtle and nuanced lines that hardly have a chance to capture the fleeting light.

Back on the canal a heron is still waiting to be fed looking up expectantly to a window that is closed. The window is reflecting back the murky water below and the brightly colored boats- green, blue, yellow and red seem to be melting into and equally rising out of these depths. The heron is tottering back and forth closer to the edge of the water or closer to the grass bank as people go by.

Blink

To be called into participation one thing at a time. Each thing a depositing into the graininess of the day here  and just here. Each call to attendance a jump-start out of that fitting enclave into a tangential repose. This effortless cruising with no mind of where to go. It's the same all the time and every day this yawning out from a belly-flop and rising on the inertia of a grating crayon. It skids and catches across the coloration bleeding through the paper done many months ago and left, seeming complete there and then in the light and playful bouncing refraction of a summers day. But here, submerged in the rain and the comforting oppression that this sends out, after a sleepless night of door slamming from the flat below, with preparation of food underway- an inclination to move on the stuckness of this harsh febrile receptivity that jolts the body into spasm after spasm until the anticipated fright is all the way through  in muscles held before the covers of a duvet are ever felt- this sense of aloneness giving rise to specualtions that bleed out into the night; the peeping of car horns as the last party-goers return in the early hours. Then the wind that is shaking the window frame creating a vibrationary buzz where the seal is just off touching.Liike a whistling through the teeth that is making my gums tired.

Now I pull out this piece of color-stained blotting paper on the very next day. I sink into it, the vibrancy of sunshine long gone. But there is this harsh clarity- like lines cutting across the surface- joining by demarcating, demarcating by joining  patches of color that read like temperature; the hot and the cold mixed up but never becoming each other. I take a piece of brown crayon from the draw, lay the paper on my table and begin to cut into it, like a skater whose journey is frozen here and there in the skid-marks and lingering turns that line and dot  the icy but glowing white surface. What is creating these turns and stops, hesitations and jumps?
I don't know. I am there involved  in this fragment and then in that fragment over and over again, layering up coordinates that  have a sense of their own. I am riding them not driving them. But every now and then I linger long enough to notice, like a refrain- a glance or a reaching, a descending downwards or a levitation  like something scattering and expanding and these channels intersperse and coordinate one another. Other colored crayons, specifically this color or that are one at a time layered over like a new film of transparency that is superimposed and by degrees brings into confluence some kind of  pulsing that could be read as depth or could just be the flaying end-pieces of a long departed encounter. But the contact is written here and now, riffing off from one another into the pools of color that followed their own kind of hopping  immersive dance there on that sunny day- a year now gone and never to be repeated..

When I stand back I hear the rain still coming down evenly bracketing this locality in a vaporous  humid perspiration that never lets up then exceeding its own inclusiveness and breaking out into the out-beyond, a haze of indeterminacy that goes on and on and on stretching past you and I where even vision even recognition gives up on itself losing interest in distractions that root you to the spot. People stay indoors. Curtains are late to be pulled back. A solitary figure in green-  a skinny young man with a black mop of hair hanging out of  the window drawing deeply on a cigarette, puffing the excess into the damp air. It is Sunday, past 1. o'clock. Lunchtime played out in so many different ways in the households and assemblages of individuals gathered as one or pocketed off into autonomous units- all staying home today. This great wait- this pause for warmth; the fragile coldness of late winter. But it should be spring I hear someone say in the shop on the corner. A holiday in Spain- but there are so many things to organize- so many decisions to make- who has the time? who has the money these days?

I venture to see or perhaps I imagine or dream some kind of repository of half-formed gestures leaning towards one another out from that piece of paper, bouncing and jostling between up and down until they are all suspended in the colored clouds that still seem to be reorganizing. The warmth of a bygone summer and the wet cold drizzle of a late winter just before the spring kicks in somehow interacting and meshing through one another.Not touching but through this interval,  hollowing out a kind of lost space that perhaps never was really lost or perhaps can't be found. The haziness of relaxation and the clarity that is a definitive line almost like a shock and that verges - in this isolation- on the neurotic; the constant replay of lines taking up the pulse of one another but going nowhere. Then I see a face yawning through the haze- a face yawning through the vibrancy of colors;  temperature gauges. Drifting before breaking up and disappearing in a thousand other coordinates- like constellations in the night sky dream-filled with color that come and go and are never decided upn. Is it real or is it a figment of our imagination? It is neither. It is both. I feel some kind of yearning- years gone past, years to follow. But today there is a pause gap- a cloudburst evaporating back to naught in the blink of an  eye.

Trajectory of Touch

Sheet metal that does not bend. Rigidity keeping a predetermined shape- a shape discovered by accident through all the recoils into hardened surfaces that also do not give. This strategic suspension, a moment's hesitation before the point of contact; holding into a laminate texture as if grinding up the pulp of countless lives now reconstituted into a smooth if buckled fabrication- like an indent to an explosive crash never felt; the shock waves of a spasm that comes before the disaster not after it. Some kind of contortion that has done with contorting and presents itself through this appearance as a protective shell; like a crab shell with the meat already hollowed out. A perfect vessel that rattles and echoes back every impulse of that which approaches the tap tap tap of an intruder who hears as if from the multiplications inside its own skull, the tap tap amplification of its own gestures. is this utter passivity in the crustacean turned in upon itself - and yet sounding out the gestures of  a multifurous beckoning environment as detail after detail is played out in the carbonated sounding chamber of this hollowed out tree. A fossil that rattles reflectively with the passing life shadows like the blinking blinds between light and dark- the on-off that is not given or driven from a supple belly but is an empty resonant chamber with infinite variation. The dance that dances out the aggravation of each prod- a febrile pulsation that meanders until its own to and fro of pulsation quivers on the wind and like an Eoleon harp transfigures the wind that we are blind to into resonant chambers of compression and expansion.

This sounding out is passive. It is effortless- the grasping/ungrasping of a hand like the pump chamber between left and right ventricles of the heart. So this heart  that is pre-figured on this loop of return, squeezes fluid out but this very exit becomes the in-door to its neighbor at a later date in the circulation of blood. Blood that is red because it is oxygenated so that another loop of exit/entry is implicated as air passes through a softened mouth held slightly open and exits through the nostrils at a later date. And this flow begins to transgress every known boundary as the transformation of elemental compounds warps the difference between space and matter importing through the ambiguity of what constitutes anything at all, across borders suddenly becoming porous-  the boundary of this and that a play on words that is confounded, betrayed and held as a laughable and rise-able joke as it floats through the inner and outer hemispheres of cells. Skin too that is breathing and air too that is feeling. This myriad meshing that is rinsing through an environment broken from the outset into a fragmenting cascade of unlocate-able forms. These forms never really existed apart from the distillation of all difference into a make-shift story that is unhinged before it reaches the first full-stop.

This is how touch, out of the impossibility of touch, becomes possible floating on its own lack of reason   between gravity and imaginary reach.

The boy who spasms even when his brittle body is lowered by degrees to a matted floor is not then in the position to gesture or initiate any kind of contact. He is concretized beyond the possibility of any livable existence; sent back into a heaviness of being that seems impossible to the tendencies of extortion into a more casual forbearance. So it is with absolute passivity and on the mere accidental that this loaded heaviness begins to dis-invest itself from itself. And all the collusion's of those around who, witnessing  these spasmic flexions, back off and so concertize even more this isolated form from real embrace; too present to approach from any angle, begin to open up a question- what if this was not the absolute case of this existence but something brought about one slice at a time until  the volume suddenly loomed up as if undoubtedly and always there; too austere now to approach or invade in any meaningful way?

And it is in the fall that the boy through negation begins this slide into contact like a rolling off a wall that has him  previously locked on a knife edge of total symmetry until through a casual absenting he falls one way or another absenting himself into the floor or absenting himself into the unpredictable happen-chance of  another form buffeting one side of his body as he lies there on his side on the red mat. So the contact is a kind of falling away- a loss of form melting into this gradual decomposition that has no intention- no beginning or end  but just a continuation.

This is how touch becomes possible and builds through its own distractions like the streams and trickles of a river gradually bursting out of  its given channel. So that it is this bursting apart that guides and encourages  the flow of reach not a kind of consigned goal of functional integration which would only further reify this  fossilized stone-body that has momentarily seized under the burden of its own existence this sense of impossible permanence within life's unstoppable course.

When I think of this incident of working with this boy I superimpose it with the recurrent image of  black-birds that lower their bulky forms  form out the sky into the bare branches of the trees below and into the nests built and stacked up around these branches. This is an image I watch from my window every day in the days and weeks leading up to the break of Spring where winter is still almost at its coldest. There is this high tone to these birds lifting up against the wind currents, bracing outstretched wings that are flayed and battered by the wind and then this slight giving way as they drop this resistance against gravity and allow themselves to descend by degrees until the position is calibrated in these small velocity shifts into the nests below. They are falling into place by letting go the effort that resisted this falling. So they become nested. It's the same with the boy and how he gradually falls into a place of touch and the receptivity and adaptation that this gives rise to not by effort or interest as an image aimed at before the event.

Perhaps this is also the condition of Autism; not a dislike of touch or contact but a learning to de-intensify the tone of heightened form against gravity. Learning to activate feeling response in each moment is then not a positive injection of sensory stimuli;  it is more an opportunistic lending oneself to these moments of letting go so that falling becomes buffeted and propelled back out into the possibility of wider patterns and thoughts about movement and pause. Touch as pause or interval is then an accidental lever that initiates a counter-intuition; expansion. This expansion is built out of a near seizure into compression, only then flipping back out into flight and the inter-connectivity of forms rinsing in and through one another. Space is experienced in this way- in this capacity to move freely with no given plan and to think about movement in the tiny impulses between the On touch and the Off touch that activate and code for this movement possibility.

Dancing with eyes closed; fragments

Fragments- a splintering that was never constituted of a whole. Not  a vase moved on from its original form- the accident detailed in the bits and pieces strewn across the hard and brittle floor. But rather the fragments that are fragmenting out of their own misplaced utility that never knew of a directive apart from this rupture. An interruption that is a bouncing out of discrete outcomes locked onto a provinciality that then cannot turn corners; cannot loop loops or even side-step a fragment of a hairs breadth without falling off the edge of the world. These worlds are tight affairs and unlikely to persist outside of consecrated meters and plans that are always stricken down in the process of  living. We are doubling up against our counter-parts- against the other that would invade and even destroy our neat ways. This is a scuppering of all reason- a cutting up of the story-line- the identity shot through and through burnt out of all recognition- a smoldering mass that has become object- a carbonated intensity turned to powder on the touch. In life flesh meets flesh, and with a degree more resistance bone meets bone. What to do with this limit? These briefings that are not on the agenda but outside of which we would be blind. We don't remember our blindness because we are patterned into habitual recurrences that bring up the world in all its exuberance and flowering as if it were experienced that way for all time by all beings. Passages. Passages of our movement- trajectories that are a kind of stretching reach- like a yawn, pushing out from an uncoiling center that is provoked into this brief excess by the cool surface of the ground upon which it stretches and flays. This undulation has a rhythmic pulsing that doubles  or revokes on each brief curtailment. We can not slip through the floor so we rise and fall out of it, charged into a space which only becomes manifest through these brief rebuttals and counter directives.

When we meet one another, there is such a thing as blind-sight where the end-point of a gesture or tendency is the point of seeing and this seeing is only felt in the inflection of a joint, a muscle, the brief holding of the breath and out of this there comes a flipping open that is making space in every turn. Dimensionality is a consequence of these slight slurs and re-directives that act like reminders of our partiality and double and redouble at the borderline of this consecrated realm as it is taken out of itself into and beyond this line only as the enactment of surfaces upon surfaces. These then are the splinters- the fragmenting that is not alluding to any prior period or possible state of unity but is a multiplying and evolving out of the very points of curtailment. These become markers- brief turning points in which a sprouting multi-directionality can erupt like a virus onto and out of any intensity of existence. It alters before it is known as one identity in one place and so all that there is is this alterity- like a nodal sneeze of filaments carried on the breath in  pockets of liquid that are so fine that they only translate into liquid as they crash and are stopped mid-flight by another. These trajectories carry bodies too, perspiration dripping from the flesh so that we are literally swept up with  things, undulating and turning before it would be possible to determine and analyse the gloved hand that meets the ball in flight and imploding out of being a catching hand, it is carried into the wave of the ball's motion. Bodies carry one another in a similar way;  in flight, waiting for the moment to rupture that flight by a sudden vertigo or an angled rolling like a ball point pen that can go one way and then turn around its own center to reverse the line. Impact is mediated in this stoppage and going on, so that there is never any point of absolute stasis or absolute advancement; simply these shifts in intensity as degrees of near neutral compression through touch and the vacuumed counter movement- almost like a spasm- of a flourishing that is this running space as body. Absence and presence not as polar exclusion zones but as relative fixtures that turn and transform around each other. These small tilts and perturbations of a mid-line or a set trajectory are not diversions or loss of attention to an incentivized goal- they are the very possibility of movement as life- of the interpolation of space and matter in a constant inhibition and advancement of one to another to another, tunneling through one another, lent up against one another in a provocation that is also a soothing drone.

Techniques are never learnt- they explode out of their own stoppage- not an emotion but an unstoppable wave in its interplay with the every day objects that it cradles and crashes-  moving houses, putting household belongings such as sinks, cups and dresses in the branches of trees; maiming, killing, saving and pervading with the same tender endurance that is the play of affects simply giving rise to and laying to rest one another; the turbulence that indicates a deep settlement as in life and as in death.
___________


*This piece was written after a contact Dance improvisation Class with Charlie Morrisey at Moving Arts Base, in which we attuned to one another's movements by having first one dancer and then both dancers in a pair move with their eyes closed. However it was the dancer with their eyes closed who first led or "directed" the dance, until as the dance progressed the roles of receptivity and passivity become totally melded, pulsing on remote shards of contact; turning on a living dimensionality. When we then opened our eyes and streamed freely through the space the movements seemed to pulse and warp with the patterns already experienced in the former intimate dance and we seemed to make contact with other dancers not by looking or anticipating an approach but through feeling the pulse of these stoppages on the cusp of one another and the turning points and brief directives that these allowed. In this way limit and limitlessness began to turn on one another and so undo one another and the seeming givenness of these states came under question as they percolated and transformed creating a mixed identity that would be fraudulent like a severed hand at any point of exaggerated stoppage. Affect or responsiveness became the only possibility in this meeting- both the hard and the soft burgeoning out of one another.

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.