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.

 

 

 

Fire-fly

Work in the limit of where you are. For what else can you do? That means if you are in a perceptual straight- jacket try it out for size. This is a serious proposition. It's only in the flat-lands of seemingly dead-end dimensions and in the very act of describing these borderlands and in the tiny dotted and lined details of this and that - however parochial and limited they may seem- that there will be a flip-out as the end-pieces of these details accumulate and begin to hum and buzz of their own accord. This is the Tuning and makes a flat piece of paper or a repeated mantra that seems to be going nowhere; a nursery rhyme with just two bars- suddenly somersault. Because the given ingredients can never be known in full as simply a descriptive representation of some kind of inertia or pathological memory loss. And in the very act of this description or basic accountancy, the buzz of the pieces- as if they were tiny little animals with a life of their own who somehow knew how to congregate without anybody having told them how- will begin to hum and manoeuvre, talk and exchange possible positions in relation to one another. This is like a kind of over-tone that is nowhere in the original piece and could never be found if one by one these elements were dusted off and inspected however long that took or carefully that was done. Because it is a combination that lives in and of the moment in the speed reading and resonant flashes and sparks of a certain frissure that vibrates and shimmers with no will or intent that could be summed up under one organism but simply as the ultimate landing point in a series of minute disruptions and exchanges- of emptying out here and filling in there.

There is  a vacuum surge in which suddenly a dead weight- a broken limb or eruptive gut or strained ankle surges into movement and momentum and is set free within a wider circulation as if a piece of dead wood caught in a gutter pipe is suddenly released. One could say that all representation is necessarily flat and one dimensional. But something gives and something is received there and then on the dry uninspiring paper- or in the bars of notes that are code-able one by one but that create some kind of backwash surge where they drift up the coast-line as if by an attraction that is nowhere given. The luminosity of colour combinations have the same affect so that the isolation of hues can suddenly take it no longer and buzz into another dimension where they rinse through one another being neither this nor that. This is the realm of atmosphere. It is environmental and it is lived here and now in the activities that rinse through neurological thresholds brimming to a break-point and on the verge of collapse, somehow furthering through the body and through the air particles; into reaching and affecting the skin of others, drifting on currents into the pathway of and through the respondent flow of other organisms, rocks and plant-life. And there are tables and chairs too. Biros and drums, sunglasses and depleted hand-bags. Everything is there just as it is but nothing is a given.

Pieces in a stage set to be primed into motion- into imaginative excess on the briefest of touches where there is this sustained attention . And so the moment of transformation is given but somehow extended indefinitely having never reached a conclusion known by itself in advance. And time here is collapsed - past and present streaming in myriad channels into the minutiae of affect. The spin comes out of that; a driving downwards through gravitational pull and a stoppage as cartilage and bone, sinew and muscle, blood and breath heave and practically give out jamming and crunching together only to wait; to have the stamina- the blind-faith patience- that there will be this turn around  right on the verge of death- of inertia or collapse. And whether that occurs here in this body or another, there is a spinning back round and the figure leaps free out of its own inhibition and foreclosure, into a dimension hovering briefly like a fire-fly over the paper- practically a smell-  more a breeze than a locatable object.