Below are an eclectic bundle of writings from various periods of practice-research. They are my own notes and so written almost as a free association as I am in the midst of the work and where thoughts or ideas occur to me.
At the very end of this scroll is a more recent piece. I will keep this page as a rough sharing of ideas and the process involved over a long period of time.
Ruth Solomon, Main Practitioner
July 2021
A PROPOSITIONAL T I L T I N G
2011
A perturbation that sets the thing in motion. We are alluding to something beyond this caged identity in which we function or fall.
Along the way there are checks and balances to everything and in that respect everything is played into everything else in the wider motion on which we lean; through which we motion.
Do we know ourselves? Our thoughts, our motions, our utterances?
Only in the wider access through which we draw tiny incidents like refrains- slight tangents and their almost instantaneous interruption to be leant and curved along the way into this holding space; an emblem like a wrap-around in which you and I and another and another, like fold upon fold hold one another- off-set one existence with another.
There are tendencies- filaments and fragments that curtail, off-set and so set in propositional positions, one another.
So we come to face one another in the excitation and release of a thousand maneuvers of compression and release. A tilting like a supposed desire- more like a yearning or a barely recognizable attachment to this sweeping through of pattern on pattern that we shape ourselves around in this colloidal mesh of threads that intersperse, hold for an instance then let go in the give and take of going with and not going with these tendencies.
The checks and balance acts as small enclaves of constraint that then arch into a widening appreciation of a far-reaching set of influences even as we exist only here and now in this precise locality. We are positioned by our willingness to lock in somewhere, anywhere to this process.
Any movement, any pause arises out of these cross-currents like tethering a direction through a counter-weight.
Playing with the checks and balances does not fundamentally change anything. It may be that we are faced with a child with Cerebral palsy, with Autism, with chromosome abnormalities or physical and sensory problems. All it does is open up the possibility of a wider attention into this series of checks and balances. A play on engagement in a process that is on-going.
Playing with activation and relaxation we can create devices between us that are compelling and intimate compositions. The material flesh and blood- the circuits of synapses, of muscle responses and breathing routines become so many tendencies that are articulated perhaps as slight leanings off-set and reimbursed as systematic valves and resting points in this moment of reactivity. These are our deepest values.
All that is enmeshed in one another is of probable value; the compulsion to stiffen or go limp is not an end in itself but rather a direction that has run its course un-addressed but potent with possibility. It only needs activation- any form of interception to turn a corner.
We do not manipulate outcomes or fashion wish-lists for future activity. We engage in the quality and holding of what is there and what that comes to mean in the wider patterning that assimilates in this crafting of shared values. These allude to something that we feel out in co-action through the stops and starts without any of these units being in themselves the actual quality of that value.
We run with it or crunch down against this momentum, swerving or swiveling on the gravel to make something of it. This is the edginess of our meeting.
What matters is how specifically at each instance the conditions for creating a gage are made to occur- a holding that then re-winds into a pattern that is automatic and is a release out beyond and through any singular body and where the body does what it needs to do by acting on the immediacy of what it tangibly comes to address.
To run this into expression it is necessary to use the very tilt or aggravation that could be- if run indefinitely- a fall, an introversion, a spasm, a vacancy and as a pattern of movement rather than a broken part left dangling, to address all at once and in quick succession the tendencies that can play out of that tipping point.
Only then will a propositional biting point be set out of the reality of an emerging real situation. And so the situation met along the way as co-composition will be entered into as the point of traction, torsion, rebound, absorption that is felt out and pitched on the brink of a levity and near collapse, taken up in the last moment- the only moment given- where a motion simply happens and the body re-engages in order to be that perfect conduit in a wider movement. That is its value system; an imagining coming out of the commonality of a lived pattern. It is grasped in the immediacy of a total immersion or participation in an environment that gives us life and through which we hold life.
This is one tangent within a system which is making itself again and again on each new rebuke - each falling away and gathering. So life and death subsumes in one another as being intimately involved in a continuous pulsar engagement through which, like light between a screen, both occur simultaneously at different levels of awareness.
This Apparent Life
There is a shift. Not exactly a movement- a displacement. A far reach or yearning.
An inclination like a yawn or a tendency to arch a distance not through ordinary locomotion but as a kind of embrace. The near and far is held proportionally in that embrace which is like an interval sensitive to the miniscule incidents-filaments- the flossing and filtering of stuff amidst stuff that is not exactly movement, not exactly stillness. It is both. The quality of the breath and its propensity to widen and close.
A never exacting interval that is always perfectly attuned to the conditions of its holding and is yet never complete- not yet finalized as this or that.
How we find ourselves of a day- in one temperament or another- subject to a mood or inclination or affected by this or that nervous, physical or thought condition, is likewise never closed- yet also it is a perfectly formed interval, arching from one physical location to another- patterning in that arch, a tendency to both displace but yet to keep a connection through that initial place.
In this way our conditions are our opportunities- the boundary or limit condition is the moment of leaping or ejecting out of that area- like a blind person that reaches the curvature of a room through its negative sensory impression and ascertains the possibility of what is beyond that room by careful examination of the details at her finger tips and modulated in a thousand beckonings and retreats, according to the very texture of give and take between her body and the constitutive responsiveness of the wall. How very much more intricate and what a possibility for yet further thresholds of difference and variance in the touch between one body and another who find corridors, rivulets and pauses of relative absorption and bounce not according to any single material bearing but according to how the play of surfaces in speed, volition and stoppage bring about qualities, values and potential constraints-flows through which substances emerge and recede again. A kind of dance struck up between two otherwise inert and separate bodies that in actuality are never apparently separate for they only emerge as what they are in and during that dance.
Even in supposed separation the dance continues- intertwining filaments and fissures that course around one another through the breaking and grinding down of traces of sound, volume, temperate, and some sort of value system that is a co-mingling of every other into each other like a semblance that can no longer be taken apart; that is cherished through this intermeshing responsiveness so that in this tumbling, what is inside is then outside and what is outside enfolded back into the inside. These folds upon more folds begin to flake and absorb, break off and melt back down so that it is not anything in particular that is there to be cherished- only the process itself- a composition-decomposition so intimately entwined that the evolution and devolution is totally indistinguishable and only the pattern of coming and going remains. That alone is the embrace- an embrace without hands, without fingers, without inner organs or outer skin- an atmosphere that pervades and through which all else occurs only as secondary attributes.
A disability- an inability at one level or another to engage in the consigned manner with these secondary attributes- to pick up this or that- to go there or here carried on the regular bending and flexing of the lower limbs- the heart carried into an overt energy on the slightest touch, pumping and thundering out of it's cavity, the balance swinging back but not forward, forward but not back, the upper body spasming ‘till the hands are tight mittens with brittle turned in fingers, the head swimming and un-locatable in the flash of body parts, the glare of lights that break up into a splintering as if the cornea over the eyes was being itself teared to shreds.. the breath expanding indefinitely but never refilling until it is nearly too late, or holding down like each gulp was another stone in the pit of one’s stomach that one can no longer spit out- the sounds that do not disperse or that accumulate to become a timpani of thunders that set in motion yet more thunders in the reverberations of echoes so that no original clear sound is anywhere decipherable out of the accumulation of copies on copies..
Disability as disturbance and the putting on hold of responsiveness- the arch of that pattern outwards against the limit factor of our own consignment. We are all partial and modulate this partiality in ever more refined levels of response. It makes sense then when addressing any kind of limitation on response to go into the detail - to fine tune the precise intricate moment when this becomes that- when touch as absorption, touches back and becomes propulsions, bounce - where flaccidity ignites into a flickering grip or simply the propensity for flow to condense against a momentary constraint. There again for rigidity and the spasming of over excitation to distribute into easy channels that may be convoluted or multiple or looping reversals of the initial directive that becomes blocked and so can only recurs over and over on itself in the wavering stutter of back and forth played out again and again.
So to follow the easy way- to learn this route that can never be pre-planned because it is subject to an infinite distribution of contacts and reversals. Where is dwelling possible? Where must it back up and give way? How to follow this stream between boulders, surfaces, densities- creating even within and through the hardest of substances, porous avenues and even where there is only apparent vacancy, a sense of pushing back, like ringing a cloth one way and another to gain traction out of our ease. We begin to define these higher order compositions- of smoothness, hardness, smooth, rough, movement, containment, light , heavy out of the way we play with sudden meetings, collisions, avoidances that pattern into multiple ripples of coming together and coming apart.
Thresholds are made in this way, out of the limit factors that would seem to make autonomous boundaries of partial capability out of a too fast or too slow meeting where attention, response and feedback is somehow usurped and we are left bereft in a mistimed vacancy with the impression of passivity in ourselves or others.
Co-dependence when attuned into the infinite capability of response at every moment becomes a fluid re-grafting of form and the capacities we attribute to these supposedly limited forms. We create this wide variable composition out of the very basic gross forms that we come to expect and recognize, and so begin to mix meaning out of hardly exposed stories and narratives that cut in, fill in , undo, rearrange and playfully admix in order to dwell in the very centre of what they are not. Identities begin to parody, curtail, elongate, spin out and abruptly redirect at the very junctures of co-independent growths. Sensitivities come and go like the tending of a plant life where sun, water, light, soils composition, pruning, wind, atmosphere all become intermingling events and the plant itself as it grows upright, bends, swivels, stunts, then suddenly blooms, fruits and dies only to re-emerge when new conditions present themselves, is only the inverse area of all the movements, collisions and interferences through which that body is given life.
Play with these compulsions, tendencies, disturbances, and interruptions and you create living systems through relational responsiveness whereby the pattern is greater than the limit factors of either you or another. Disability grows into a different pattern of capabilities not by healing or fixing the problem or creating specific treatments for dysfunction or sensory distortion, but by following the patterns of these limits into their natural co-dependent tendencies in the environment, in a song that is composing, in a movement tendency or a muscle tone tendency- in the very atmosphere of a resonance that is un-locatable either in this body or that but that the limit factor somehow jolts into manifestation. It is this manifestation and co recognition of the conditions of it s bearing that need to be enacted in shared processes of ceremonial play, action, work, rest that brings up the right way to live - and so the embracing and enfolding of value systems evolve at high levels out of these supposed limit factors in human capability or form making. For we can not find any kind of completeness or symmetry in one form in isolation but only through the running through of processes based on responsiveness and the awareness and feeling this seeds- That’s the embrace, both disparate and intimate at the same time- never static- always in a constant arching process of lengthening and curtailing- of redistribution at every point of its apparent life.
EXRTRACTS FROM A NOTEBOOK
2007
We are placed in a specific alliance tilting forward and backward, to one side or another. These slants of raised and lowered emphasis correspond to one another in an endeavor which is always underway. It is our relationship to the space we occupy in various ways which is a channel for our various occupations. This is our first language; our placement in relationship to all else; in relationship to one another. It is never static. It is a dynamic moment-by-moment re-allocation. The intervals that carry the eloquence of this statement are held and cherished because we manipulate our body forms compressing and extending them in a dance of opposites so that the given space maps a coherence in relationship to the shapes between us, which we configure.
Movement is time-based. Communication depends on the same time-based operation for a given period of time. This is how we apprehend one another. It is not eyes and ears, mouth and throat alone. Firstly the body positions the emphasis according to shared co-ordinate points. These are never abstract-able. They are somewhere between the interchange of the one and the other. The shapes we make and the shapes between us are the web around which this point of shared focus emerges. This is the point of unity around which a dance of exchange is both drawing upon and is nurturing. It is the common point of exchange and the still point of focus. This is the basics out of which our life-execution emerges. It is our point of bearing.
In order to make contact with a child or adult whether they are verbal or non-verbal, in a position to carry their own weight or not, thrusting forward or falling back, it is necessary to catch into their movement which is constantly merging towards a re-allocation. Learning to dwell through moving into this process, creating exchange points at various approximations deep within the body fascia and in the space where bodies meet and separate is an on-going atunement.
In order to strike up the intervals of this exchange the emphasis must be followed to its epitome and then resolved into the interior opposing countenance which will then catch in and pump out into an outer manifestation. So feeling and expression go hand in hand and rely on creating a feedback link with one another. Sentient beings who draw out and feed back in to these evidential cycles create a loop of co-responses to what appears when stilted to be a staring out, coupled with an inhibition within.
Within this loop of affects what is inhibited will then become the very ground base and pivot of what needs to express itself by softening and completing its journey of sending back out.
This fluid cycle can be enacted with certain children by literally picking them up and gliding them through the air, dropping back down the weights through the sacrum, abdomen, pelvic area and seeing how in counter-flow the chest and arms and head and legs naturally thrust out and a lateral weightless distribution of body-mass can then apply. Equally, contact to the upper back can create a weightless rising of the abdomen-sacrum-pelvis area which naturally rights itself in relation to the spine.
Yet for this to be effective there needs to be a feed-in to the system of extension and containment in the body of the practitioner who acts now as a pivot around which the child turns now as an outer boundary upon which the child pushes, extends and re-locates within into their own central axis.
Interior and exterior is constantly relayed back and forth between practitioner and child. This is the exchange which is our first language of placement and orientation
______
Run a speed for an orientation of dynamic alignment to set in. That will be when gesture or beat is so swift and immediately tangled in upon one another that the positions are marked but not known/seen. For image, personhood, verbal language would not cohere at this level. But afterwards for these marked orientations, the traces that they leave; the social, the language, the affability can be played back through like applying a certain dye to a fabric or a negative film and seeing the image emerge.
This does not mean that those images are hidden or sunk inside a seeming blankness. It means that we cognitively build into form the position and orientation we in fact make at a far more refined level of continuous process or being.
Yet we never see/grasp or feel that being but come to it in the fragments of surfaces, sound frequencies, textured interfaces that then sound out- a linkage which our positioning and displacement sets in motion.
We think through these fits in a mode that has no sense of fit; no inward/outward for it is at that level that contrast itself is pumped into being. There is an interplay where what stares out and what enmeshes onto a depth sensation is continuously beaten back an forth; played with.
This game or gaming is how we come into processes alignment with one another.
Intelligence is in a rhythm that distinguishes and levers around stops and starts. With that all the frames of representation unfurl, like a paper flower in water. Outside of that, nothing occurs.
There can be incompletion as an invitation; an outward reach; music, pictures, habitats that enclose into what they are at the moment of entry, touch, a sending out and a listening in. That is resonance; the charge through which things hang together.
This is relatedness.
There is nothing inherent in a body, a mind, a home which only configures in one aspect or another, when this charge is activated.
There is a lot of hurt in the world because people think that the only part of them that will be accepted is that which coheres at the fixed level of image. They pile up signification upon signification until it holds heavy and burdensome. It is never referred back into the gauges of alignment through which it once- at a very specific moment- occurred and dissipated.
When these levels are engaged in it is felt as pain, vulnerability and so this invitation to re-formulation back through the surfaces of the categorical social sense is turned down. Many people get hurt or dissipated in that process of closure and limitation. Yet it is unfathomable and in times of joy or crisis when transformation is on-going it becomes the workable tract once again between sentient beings.
This is how disability is worked up as it comes and goes; is done and undone according to the subjective affability of all those around who intuit and make one another what they are.
Cognitive function and dysfunction occur then not at the level of pre-set intelligences but according to alignments and varying depths of felt responsiveness that create channels of meanings between entities.
They are first and foremost conduits of passageways and channels with a possibility of flow that work to become correspondent alignments at ever more diffuse circuits of resonance that systematically cobble together or close off varying gateways. It is the void, the gateway, the fission out of which converge the body, the mind, the being of form and information; of knowledge, consciousness and affability that are the conjured up affects of these interim spaces.
Presence and absence is part of the same set of gestures just as shadow and light discern one another.
How can we bare the blinding light without the border reference around it?
We carve out the border reference in our every move. Or else face one another into the blindingness of a continuous stare.
WHAT MAKES US STAND
With every mark, gesture or expression there is a splitting that teases open, leaning outwards from a central core of indivisible unity. This is the necessary tension that holds
up any figure of speech, visual sign or coherent shape.
Every mark has its re-mark, the unseen shading that holds it up and pre-empts its momentary excursion into the realm of accredited meaning.
Every “sign” is bordered and nurtured by a twin that is not seen. Thus Contact is the heart of any gesture.
We do not remember sequences, we create each articulation as a felt emergence out of this contact which then begins a journey in the direction where our attention is set. But there are two directions. It is a splitting apart- like axed wood falling two ways.
For every angle there is a counter-weight. This is its safety unseen, its joy within.
The anchoring and the flourishing is thus intimately linked.
To go out we dig deeper still into our unseen sibling. Yet perhaps in another realm we are the unseen sibling they the flourishing aspect. From moment to moment at any rate there is an exchange, a playing back and forth of roles both in the aspect that we call our “selves” and in each body part that gives momentum and invigorates our every breath by successively emptying and filling limbs, organs and cells around a central pivot which is simultaneously the relay point for both emptiness and fullness. It is never either one or the other. Never a quarrel between what is seen and what is not seen. It simply is. The flowering is a kind of emptiness and the fullness or substance is really hidden in the rooting.
We play between sign and form This is our provision in the world and in relation to one another. It brings joy and pain. We must hold both between our two outstretched arms; and enfold back in our hearts and the circulation of our breath, this twinning. Yet our center in the heart, is beyond such difference. It exists in unity before separation. Before home and journey. Before distance in the out-folding of our life’s` determination.
_____
TREATING WHAT IS THERE
Begin anywhere. Areas are wooden as if unattached. They have no basis but seem to allude to another area. They shield it. Front it out of shame. They are loose limbs or fraught with an abhoration that they do not yet know themselves. Senseless. Here is a pervading sense of danger that they turn away from. They are twisted; gnarled. Like fruitless branches of a tree.
What is happening in the belly of the trunk? What are the conditions under the earth? It is dry, the marrow turned to dust or wet and clogged. Stifling and bound in upon itself.
The limbs and extremities, scattered at tangents, do not articulate the center and send out its` good, disperse its waste. The call and return has gone missing.
So to lift these disjointed limbs. Let them in turn sink back down a little into this raised support. Bit by bit, a course of descent, of least resistance will be mapped out like a retracing of a lost path.
Gradually from extremity to within, the source of the need will pour into a single crevice. As if many tributaries flowed back into the crossroads; this meeting point. Here like an arrow–head, is the point of binding. From here the river will run back out more assertively and it will have its affect on the many tributaries; the disaffected limbs will be implicated. From one end of the spine to the other- from head to sacrum, a realignment will whip-snap itself back into place. Direction is everything. When we become the journey-maker the journey of least resistance will allow itself to come through.
A passageway will open up and simultaneously the extremities will shake into place.
All areas of obstruction and need, of Kyo (Softness) and Jitsu (hardness) will renew themselves. Perhaps an arrow-line from chest to lower back or from lower abdomen to sacrum will call out either at the back or the front. Like nails riven through the body they must be eased out. There must be containment, stillness and warmth. And sharp movement in reverse.
A presence felt, then removed. Both presence and absence together.
In the space between, the person will come through. A breathing, utilizing organism full of needs and cares and motivations and expressions.
Breath nurtures, freeing movement, thought, feeling which will simultaneously converge at the arrow-head which before was taken up as a shadow of need or a front of disconnected exposure.
Intention will come through as we sit a while, before piece by piece allowing a space of realization. Engaging and letting go then becomes a simultaneous transition. A passing between the two. A specification of focus within and in connection to a wider pool of support and reference.
It is the context or habitat of operation that is the most crucial in any process of re-vitalization and on-going life.
THE INFINITELY SMALL
Absorption. How to pass through.
Enter and dissipate. This is acknowledgement.
Changing through contact. Dispersing in order to pass through. Then re-gathering again.
The infinitely small swirls like stones at a water’s edge. Catching and re-directing only because the water is in passage. Vaults swing open or ban entry and redirect down another course depending on the force and volition of the water’s current.
The valve is shut or open according to the pressure exerted upon it.
The body an admixture of liquid and solid. What makes it act in either capacity is the pressure exerted upon it.
It can phase its own currents through a shifting contact that recalls it into matter and liquid states alternatively and sometimes simultaneously. This play of form and passageway is the stuff of realignment.
Making connections and recording these episodes occurs by nature of the journeys we make.
The infinitely small is constantly expanding and retreating.
The eye lets in light because the body is a conduit working in apropos. to that specific time and place. A meeting occurs. A sharing of place into an integrity of the whole.
Sentiment is intent reaching across. It is the bridge between beings with this instantaneous eruption from the infinitely small to the great expanse so that distance implodes.
Parts of the body ring together.
People meet.
All our gestures, all our infinitely variable articulations are coursings between above and below.
Between thumb and finger all possibility exists.
Only to find the relationship and the thing unfolds.
_______
Every outside formulation- each line or angle apperceived could become linked to a bodily resistance in the perceiver. Then our bodies have become mirrors of all we need to hold apart. A way to resist.
Let go this resistance and absorb through bodily involvement. Lean into the patterns in order to initiate an extension. Then finding a resting point, stop in order to dwell. Let the pattern again emanate out from within. No harm there.
The body apperceives and acknowledges both pain and resolution. Change happens as a perquisite to rest.
Take each angle to another place of alignment.
Relatedness across distance.
Bridges.
Then in hovering over the water, rest with others.
____
If you don’t wire into someone’s sensitivity you make of them clots.
Because the semblance of being does not unfold and show itself to you nor you to them.
You are both land-locked and ship-wrecked at the same time. Forlorn.
There is blockage.
SUSTAINED GESTURES
Focusing on the infinitely small, it takes root and grows.
It houses an arena with a clear demarcation which is known as a still place only when something enters- some living form walks on scene. Attention follows, because there is contrast.
We explore these depths in our original dwelling- in the development which is constant growth and cutting back.
In the interlocking of fingers the palms create a vacuum. It is the charge of life. We meet out of volition because the deficit creates a surge which we must follow.
We meet in space. Then jam a contact into place. The contact is the place of stoppage but only for an instant- before it turns and rebounds at another angle.
So we dress up the shape of our bodies as excursions that reach a meeting, then inflect. These meetings could be seen as prohibitions. We kick or push or shove against what is before us. But the very excess is induced out of this prohibition or limitation.
This turning point impels us to converge at a simultaneous moment with others. It is the impetus- this journeying out to a meeting. It does not have to be a rebuff though it may be framed as such when synchronicity is uncertain.
Even when there is nothing to meet we can fashion our condition as if.., literally hanging in the space as if an invisible counter-angle was there. Then as it dissolves enfolding back around an inner circuit in order to then unfurl again and hang on the hooks which are the logical energetic support of our every gesture. This is Tai Chi- a form of space-shiatsu where the movement and the pause in posture are turning points of extension and enfoldment, creating a resonance of alignment through differentially angled body-parts. These specifically angled parts are a function of the whole gesture. One of sensing out and re-implicating within.
___
TREATMENT EXAMPLE OF SUSTAINED GESTURES
With K the Autistic boy, the pull and shove of his legs and feet is gradually embedded into a rooting out for contact, where the space itself becomes the arena of articulation. Contact becomes a reaching out to those parts of emphasis that hold the body in various angles of alignment, allowing channels to open and a circulation to ensue.
This hanging in space is aided as each extended limb is shored up and met through an equivalent force, in me. It is not therefore that I work on K- do something to him by pressing into various points on his body-surface. Rather I prop up what he seeks out so that it neither turns into the rigidity of a kick- which is really a way to create enough energy for momentary suspension of an extreme angle unmet- or the flaccidity of falling down- which is the other alternative to a position off-center that is unmet. There is instead contact at the point of suspension.
So through like meeting like I offer the sole of my foot to K's kicking foot. I maintain it in stillness in mid-air. Then lightly push against the sole of his foot. Then I break the contact. Then push again and retreat - like bouncing a ball consistently against his sole. I find different angles to support the whole limb of his leg, shifting it out, folding it at the knee, letting it fall open, then stopping and holding it still.
Gradually a small gap opens between intent and contact that is a place of anticipation and an invitation to action. I suspend my foot mid-air just beyond the place of contact. K seeks out the contact and now he is pre-emptive, shifting my position. Then the movement and rest, the shoring up and letting go is played out as a fluid interchange.
We are seeking out places of alignment. Shiatsu points where the vault of circulation is open. Tai Chi postures hang in mid-air- only with me acting as the mirror-image- Both comprehensively guiding to a place where a correspondence- a certain tuning through the body is assured.
K now seeks out the contact and exchange through his feet, wherever I put my foot. In mid-air he necessitates a meeting, creating exact synchronicity, no longer needing a ground-base of unequal support to compensate for his over-extension.
He holds positions mid-air with his legs and feet by implicating lower back, chest, arms and head in an unbroken circuit of continuous re-emphasis and fine-tuning.
He begins to use his hands to support my foot, leg, arm or hand and the use is more a holding than a push.
There is an encirclement. A contact met and a resting in this.
It is now possible to establish and maintain points of contact on the body using the established principles of shiatsu. What has been articulated through physical movement is now internalized through the treatment process.
At first this articulation becomes similar to the initial stages of contact and retreat on the physical level. K alternately tenses and relaxes muscle groups in his abdomen and chest, first inhibiting and then over-extending breath into broken gasps.
Gradually the reflexes of muscle and breath become synchronized with the alternation of pulsation and release that then slows until it is a continuous contact yet nevertheless modulated according to the rhythm of this more stable breathing pattern. Contact and breath listen to one another in order to maintain through the natural changes of dynamic equilibrium, a light and living point of exchange.
RELATEDNESS
Our limbs are feelers out into the atmosphere pervading in every direction. They both suck in and pour out until the space just beyond our closed forms is an adjunct of rapidly moving exchanges. Whether these exchanges is the dance and emblem of filaments, particles or gases is unimportant. Only that there is this rapid attention and movement just beyond what is seemingly still and fixed.
Our limbs feel into the earth and reach into the sky. We are hinged between above and below in a far wider space than that which we ourselves occupy alone. Because aloneness is untenable. We are related in ways that implicate all that is beyond with all that is within. The inside turning out and the outside turning in again. This undulation is what creates our tenancy. The pieces shift so that the pattern may renew.
Our movement, our speech, our every gesture are responsive as an atunement within this dissipating environment. We grasp and collect, pull down and offer up.
Our ankle movements are not just a swishing of an ankle bone. This articulation is the rooting response of the foot as it adjusts and stabilizes in connection with each minute spatial realignment of the body. The body is forever falling into density and rebounding into lightness, ricocheting between earth and sky. The ankle movements are linked right through the body which is a conduit fine tuning our bearing between horizontality and linearity.
These on/off pulses of adjustment rapidly pump into a rotation which is the body’s gift. This rotation is the catching and letting go of posture. The holding tensile pose and the falling away into body weight like the flapping of bird’s wings that sends those outwards and wraps them back around the body. Every fall becomes the rotary of another lift affecting and transforming the air-currents that propel a given weight onwards.
With the bird it is the gestures themselves which create the favorable air-currents just as in human affairs our basic motor movements create the web of intricacy which is our emotional and social life.
The movement charges the feeling and brings it forth. The feeling is the affirmation of a pattern of renewal which operates beyond the threshold of what is apprehended. The scope is both wider and smaller then our own identifiable pockets of intent. Yet because we link our intentions to this arena, the arena carries us along in its air currents whilst adapting to our movements. These passageways open up when there is an alliance with what is beyond and what is within- with the explicit far-view and the inherent formative movement which in any process of becoming actual, are indiscernibly linked and co-mingled and so never really two separate things at all.
So this rooting down with our foot through the anklebone is not just a searching out below but is linked to the girdle, the shoulder, the head and the space beyond the head.
We draw lines with our body- a unique and subtle re-atunement moment by moment like a script that can only be read within a wider landscape or universe. We receive these messages of how to be through our lived body.
There is no one place for the eye, the ear, the nose. We are touching through on all surfaces.
We make contact through the hard and the soft; the substantial and the insubstantial, feeling out pockets of air as we move through undifferentiated warmth, than make contact with a cold and abrupt surface- modelling, as our contact informs us- falling and catching to strike poses which are pivots where energy is accumulated as tensile junctions that are the power houses to further action. Bearings, emphasis of a certain kind, thoughts and impressions accumulate at these collecting points. Then, swirling into outward eruptions they move on before again containing into given forms. This is our special dance with one another and with our planet.
We press down with one foot to pull up diagonally with an arm. Pressure in one place creates release in another. This is how we pump and charge and stamp our celebration of life.
When something condenses in one place but is not sent forth into an expansiveness somewhere else that is when there is a separation. Ourselves and the universe appear at loggerheads and this bracing without release causes damage to our form or internal organs.
Any treatment, health or educational programme must seek to address this static separation and to re-employ a living system within the true context in which it grows, develops and renews its own pattern and the pattern at large.
________
FROM ONE TO TWO AND ONE AGAIN
We are aligned in every aspect, implicated by our bearing to a wider passageway.
We hold this passageway open by moving in conjunction with intentions that spin together life into this wide yet directed space.
The place begins somewhere. It goes forward. It re-groups. This is the pattern of thought that leads to the doubling of re-visits that is our reflection. We journey and we return.
For we have a place to be that is contained within even in the journey.
We part the land and the air with our hands and move in. Yet we remain equally where we are, in our bodies, between our hands. A framework. A gage. A measure. The dance is a constant rebound from wall to wall. We play with contact and restriction and this is our freedom. We are none other than ourselves but we are free to move and travel. We tell stories of this because we place it within our own aspect of recognition. It is our language.
Between every gage there is circulation. Each band that circles the chest, the pelvis, the head create an order of circulation. Yet their meeting is where life begins. This meeting between separate orbits that nevertheless feed into one another- merge and in fact only become separate systems where they stabilize in our language as separate localities.
Yet the localities are points of view that are constantly invigorated by re-deployment. New routes and links open up. Tensile response is invigorated by pumping into a temporary restriction. The release is the expression of this built-up charge.
So we have the seasons- Autumn, the keeper, Winter, gestation, Spring, the eruption, Summer, the manifestation. Each prescribed difference is part of a wider pattern of passing on and through.
This passage is what we are in relation to one another and all of life or adaptability is to move with the movement in order to align to these life-passages. We work into invisibility through motion, each response freeing into the next and only registering as the sediments of so many experiences creating a depth through time as Memory and Recollection. This is on-going and determines our presence yet the presence of each action is a moving into the thought of the possible. A convolution of time and space into the immediate emblem of gesture.
Gesture is never solitary. It is the shapes we make between ourselves and other life-forms. The substance is the hollow inverse between our reaching bodies. This reaching is levelled and given direction and tone by other life-forms that are working from different perspectives.
The bridge is the reaching of hands into a unified arch. Two directions meet in this stillness and a multi-dimensional passage becomes an invigoration. Stillness has a running back and forth of movement that is in harmony at every point of initiation.
This matching of points is our alertness, our sensory attentiveness, our ability to launch into the flux in order to sculpt the forms that are our shared emblems.
When there is not this matching to allow the conduits of free circulation whether at the level of cells, organs, human interaction or environmental exchange, then forms become longer hold and extend an even influence which we then recognize as fixed forms.
There is distortion. An impasse in one direction and an extension in another.
These “yearnings” are not completed or resolved through the process of journeying out and back. There is no reflective honing in of shape and meaning and intent, and forms act autonomously. The passageways collapse and the forms impinge on one another.
There may be anger, failure, emotional unease, social tension. Each is for their own.
There is a lurching out of from which does not belong in itself because it is unsupported by a rooting life-system and a circulation of inside to outside. Forms become a slogan: a shout, and there is accident and mal-treatment; strain and unreasonable actions within our own organism and towards others.
_____
To harmonize we need to move into this mass of unmoving visibility. To prize a way through. To find a dwelling place within the seemingly most unhospitable place. We need to experiment with changing shapes, changing locations, creating routes of domesticity from here to there and back again, however mundane they may appear.
This re-routing emphasizes once again a place of value. Then journeys into a giving up of this place in a necessary wider encircling and to then the realignment of this experience back into the place of value. Value of place and invigoration of movement become inherently related and we gain back the freedom of passage.
Organisms no longer under duress to “snatch” this space of occupancy become the arching of jointly held bridges and passageways. All flows and our hearts are light and inquisitive like the tails of a kite.
We clear away cobwebs, dust out the strangulation of weeds. All has its place and growth allows a gentle and light touching of tendrils because our rooting system is not muddled by the rooting system of any other. We are no longer in a position of starvation, so we can afford to smile a little. Our step is lighter.
CATCHMENT
We all have a framework that we hold open. It is our catchment- our opening out and containment. It is our story. Our Depth and our breadth. We cradle it with our being and a space exists here and where other life-forms gage it with their own being. There is a continuous reaching in and a sending out; an interpenetration of frames. We strike chords with one another in this way.
But there must be the setting of this gage in the first place for this to happen. The holding first of a set piece that becomes the instrument which beckons movement and so by channeling the wind that makes for music.
We speak to one another because we all hold forth these tuning Fawkes and like tentacles or aerials to the wind, they span out in order to pool and direct the air currents borne from the movement of life.
We are each of us both sounding boards and the sound emitting. Both frameworks that act as receptors and the dance patterns that relay over these frameworks. A script must have a surface in order to manifest. This surface is the context of our inherent being. Out of this we must explore and welcome one another.
It is our very uniqueness; our own particular set of co-ordinates that form the brief upon which others make their presence heard and felt. We are to them as they are to us. And together we are one. Contact is life.
_____
For recognition both of oneself to oneself and to one another, there must be the holding of a fixed gage through time. There must be duration. Patience is needed.
Only then can there be time for conscious approach and an affirmation of a meeting. We must hold a space, balancing a set of positions that span out and become a resonant sound chamber. Then we have prepared the ground, prepared the home in which all else distant and close can be understood as a relational position, or a multi-facetted alliance in which boundaries are not the end but the beginning of this resonance in that all contours become the chamber in which movement sings.
THOUGHT FORMS
The form of our imagination is the form of our bodies moving fractionally past where we stand. Elasticated out and bending into contours that will shape our action. They lay the path- are the carpet we spin across the gulf. A bridge or stepping stone, just too wide to straddle so that we must launch ourselves outwards and jump or fly. If somehow captured as a visual entropy half-way, this becomes a levitation; a suspension were we are formed equally from above and below, buffeted and balanced from all sides by the connections we make- like tiny lassoes- to a wider environment. These filaments or tenterhooks position us at a fractionally different place at each instance as they lengthen and contract in pairs that angle us forward, backwards, upright or plummeting downwards.
No position is defined on its own. They work as diametrically opposed reflections. We trust our being on the wind and in this moment enliven the space we enter. Our whole bodies attune and complete each episode of multi-layered contact (which is equally what seems centered within our own skin and what separates, so better to connect the distance between one supposed completed form and another)
We stretch tendrils out towards one another, molding the space just out of reach; the gaps between our steps. This is our grafting or measurement, our thoughts and cognition.
Yet it is the falling into the thought about form just past the moment of standing which allows for this.
Form is a distinctive thought entity. With it, co-ordination, language and emotion is ensued. We emanate outwards from this unlimited seed. And it is from here that we perceive; issue out and receive in as a co-mingling.
When this thought-entity is fractured, reduced or bolstered past all possibility of sending out- stoked up and plastered shut or trickling away and bleeding dry outside of any situation of movement and connection, of sending forth and receiving back- when it is bruised, then problems will escalate. For then there is no feedback around a recognized entity. No integration depot- and nothing can be broken down nor built up.
It is the tiny seed-thought from our projected ladder that spans out in all directions to carry us far and take us home, which we must address. For when this is properly addressed then we can co-ordinate our time of coming and going and measure our contact with others. And it is this extension and re-deployment to a still point; these two diametrically opposed but self-fulfilling tendencies, that complete our humanity and send a switch-light out from the heart- which is re-routed at the source of our present living manifestation- at the Dantian (lower abdomen) where we fold in and fold out.
Our human forms come out of non-form. A great pool of many conjoining and separation. This nurtures us and is the point of possibility; the any-which-way, out of which we must grasp and send down the strands of any duality into our one unity.
Then at every breath and every gesture this duality must re-appear and express a different facet of our dynamism. We must sense by conjoining in our minds a unity which depends on the gulf of duality that is our origin. Our one emergent source is found anew at each instant in the metaphor of creating or sending forth a unity out of the necessity of duality which is our consignment in movement. We extend through time in duality, then send back down into the valuable but static source of our beginnings and end. This is our position in space. Our place on the earth.
We must grasp and seize the mass of stirrings into a co- partition of separation and unity in order to live and to be. This is our human destiny. The emblem anew at each moment. The contradiction. This is our will, our perseverance, our grasp and surge of life.
This is recognition.
This distinguishing and folding back in is our life.
__________
MEMORY
How to make the separation of elements ring together as one. To connect these points as tissue which stretches over the shape of ones expression. No separation between these ever changing expressions and the seed of ones growth -. Capability a meeting. No time to fall in the interstices.
A song that flows out from the center and is not caught in leaning back on itself before it is done. A simple movement. Self-contained yet prescribed outwards. Coming out without needing to be read simultaneously. Belief in the center of this message to direct a bearing. Expression then occurs naturally.
Same with jointly held space between people. It expands into movement and gesture or when returned into the seeds of intimacy can be brought back into simple contact of the one with the other.
Here we sit around a fire. Or spin to the outer periphery of a field. What is known at the edge is also returned to the center. There is guidance and direction in each phase through a central living momentum.
The rope held tight at one end swings free at the other. It creates a buzz in the air. A resonance that includes and embodies within all that it touches.
The separation of bodies in a garden comes together in the pathways they follow. There is an interstice. A cross-stitching of these multiple directions that stills into contemplation.
There is regard even in seemingly separate pockets of experience. Different levels of up and down. Throwing energy up in the fire. In floating banners of color in the wind. In all that is light and travels upwards. The head over heels bouncing over the ground.
The shattering and awakening of abrupt counter-flow. Then the descent moving inwards. The ash as it falls. The water from buckets of collected rain-water. Decomposition and sinking in to the ground. Contact with the damp grass. Sustained contact as one lifts back down from being lifted up. The quiet flow that settles after all eruption finds its place anew. Both up and down, out and in, are breaking across one another constantly. This is the fabric of our memory, as we hold together even in our separation.
______
There is an outreach or reaching out. We are the culmination or counter-balance that stretch out and interlink the distances between things and people. The centre holds firm because it needs to as the basis for these counter-weights. We are positioned in order to provide a maximum flow between the visible embrace of ourselves and others. This is ease of body and freedom in thought and movement whether minute or expansive. We are still, because the adaptations in order to keep the passageways open are on-going. A constant sensing and re-orientation from the centre outwards. Therefore the extremities are loose yet conscious, moving from the pivot of our inner bearings that exist only in relation to the inner bearings of all other life-forms. Distance becomes home. Expansiveness has an intimacy.
Simply “to be” relies on these fine filaments of sensing. These tendrils that seek out one another and wrap around every possible permutation. The connection is maintained whatever the passing shape or position. One shift involves a simultaneous shift in the texture that begins where we are now and travels to what we can not perceive or know. Yet something entices and enables us to shift our position so as to keep the vaults of transparency open, from one to another.
The message gets through and is known even as it is sent by our adaptive shape. We seek out the easy and the comfortable. Thus the connection is maintained. Smilingly it has a feeling of aptness.
There is nothing that we can approach or prize open. It is timeless. Both instantaneous and never-ending. Because there is no final shape. No mark of what we are and what we may move to. We punctuate the land but the quality of this punctuation is always a reinvention. We enliven the land through this transmutation, then blinkingly in the interstice of this revolution, we acknowledge one another.
This is where “mind” is set.
The Autist regards the wider picture but can never be simultaneously in the right place to express it. The smile nevertheless still lingers but can not look back on itself if it is wider than any one being. But in a brief touch the person is met and is wholly answerable.
Co-ordination and language depends fore mostly on all these other connections wider than what at present we conceive to be the boundaries of self and self-approbation to be.
“Regard” is fore mostly in our bearing towards “others”. For these bearings to be relevant they must be forever adaptable at many different scales of operation. There must be an open passageway of translation between these different scale dimensions.
“Mind” is the projection of the body into a space unknown which has yet been enlivened by all these other connections abounding. What is minute within is a resolution of the vast landscape without. This formulation can also be reversed.
_____
We anticipate our sure-footing because the fabric is woven simultaneously between every living being. It is therefore a rightfulness to progression. Space is given. Then filled. There is a waiting preparation. Then a brief occupancy. Then a letting go. This is the way of life acknowledged by the living and given to one life by the another. We all give and we all receive in order to co-ordinate our movements – Our beckoning into a space and our moving out, is how we make way for one another.
Contact is this dance of involvement and widened re-affirmation from a still place where all further rotation can be witnessed. Before once again we too become part of this spiral charge. We forever change places, taking on different roles in this ever lasting dragon’s dance.
______
Twist the combination-lock until there is a breathing through with the environment at large. All else that is good health and fortune will follow.
This is true meditation- attunement.
One’s means of expression whether through art or language or gesture only makes sense when there are reverberations of this comprehensive inter-locking canopy of energetic associations. This web of cross-stitching's of attraction and detraction that cancel one another out to create a way through of conflicting directions and the melting away of forms thus erected in a dialogue of transmutation; of interlocking and give-way; of holding together and passing through.
Within the micro and macro environment of social, political, cultural, ecological credentials, a melody rises, making of the context an invisible net, seeming to rise out of the volition of will yet residing and being born out of this mesh.
Without this frame of reference the language, gesture, expression and art-works fold and refolds back on itself becoming heavy or else trails off into wisps of non-entity.
For a consciousness that is balanced between growth and completion a context of operation must be held firm.
Many strains on communication and volition occur because at some level, whether micro-energetically, socially or ecologically, the mesh has been insulted. Then there is no sure footing.
The mesh must be repaired simultaneously to the organism gaining a sure foot-hold.
Sure-foothold depends on there being somewhere to put ones` foot.
We can only know where we are going when there is the possibility and hope of somewhere to go.
_______
LOCALITY AND DISTANCE
A state of being ill at ease occurs with the specialization and hence locking in of body-parts that become dense in their autonomy and hence unable to carry the burden.
Health involves the mutability between body-parts. The burden is shifted and there is a concertina affect and consequent expansion of focus. The centre of gravity that draws any one motion is bandied back and forth like a game of bat and ball.
The resonant inner shape is ferried to different regions whatever the outward dwelling may seem to suggest. For each action there is a constant give and take. A falling and holding. A going through boundaries and a containment of boundaries. This defines the ever-changing contours that both support a posture, organ function or emotion and yet let it breath and live by opening up ever-changing channels of movement. The sealing of one vault incurs the opening of another- like the chambers of the heart. Affectivity is summoned through this intensification which has the effect of closure and dissipation and the simultaneous affect of an opening. Timing is everything.
The mutability of body parts is the same for walking, the holographic pattern in the lumber, the neck, the ankles, the abdomen, the chest run into synchronicity separated by a hair’s breadth and interspersed with a polar opposite. There is a pattern of opening and a pattern of closing that cascades and filters into one another as they endlessly change places.
The result is a spaciousness around the head and chest and a containment around the lumber and abdomen but with this seized instant, in any played out situation, the opposite is ingrained, embedded and emergent within what is outwardly foreseeable.
The rooting and letting go is inherent to one another just as walking locally and walking across distance are combined; we start somewhere and then go on from there.
________
GAGES TO OUR BEARING
The speed that we set ourselves to become visible at, determines the way our senses record reality.
We are a sounding fawk. We emanate a harmonic, through which specific frequencies catch into. Then a pattern is continuously reinforced.
Initially vision, sound, sensation emanates from out of us, not into us.
We must set a tone to catch a beat. Then through the interval of beats we must read through these gaps, a melody.
The human endeavor is the ability to decode filled and empty spaces as pattern, to retrieve in our mind this pattern and to elaborate or simplify this pattern endlessly.
By creating out of these patterns closed meanings and entities we are free to move between these forms. Otherwise we would be caught in tangents that we could never leave because they would never be resolved.
It is thus by creating “things” and “meaning” that we can move beyond “things” and “meaning”.
Our ability to determine the speed at which we operate: the “spin” of a particular instant of being is our ability to set dimension as our specific relationship with a known entity. This may change in time as we shift the conditions of our evolved presence and thus shift the parameters of our every relationship with that which lives. But it is our ability to know the conditions of this relationship at any one time that determines our self-knowledge and our knowledge of others; our freedom in every sense depends on this.
It is this which literally engages, like the spokes of interlocking wheels, our vision with what is seen, our hearing with what is heard, our feeling with what is touched.
Language comes out of the accumulation of all these feedback loops.
One needs to learn to “spin” very fast at the centre and slow at the edges in order to be visible in this world yet able to integrate on many levels and to adapt to many circumstances in the presentation of life.
There needs to be a continuous stream from one place of presentation to another so that the unfolding viability of a life is monitored and not broken up into different “takes”; competing selves or “fonts” or phases that cancel one another out and compete to fix reality at the tempo conducive to their specific existence. For all tempos feed into one another and support/define one another. They are un-viable alone although in our specific range of focus we very often can only attend to one at a time. Often this extends to the range of our memory so that the existence of one in our minds cancels out all memory of the other.
We must therefore leave traces; symbolic markers so that when we are in one reality we have at least the resonance or “taste” of another, even if we can not bring it up as a complete fabric of knowledge when we are taken up in the out-fit of another phase.
Human integrity relies on our ability to find an integrity below and above the obvious contradictions on the sensory, rational, emotional or physical level.
What is generative are the beginnings and endings of any cycle- both distant yet close, in that an end gives rise to a beginning and a beginning to an end. This suggests a clue of how what is most distant is also the closest. Here lies the turning points in the revolution that enables life to continue past singular identities; past singular frames of reference.
It is these points of transmission that are the points that energize.
_______
Routines. Space taken up with closed self-referential attention to a pre-set ruling. Sequences. Strings that must be followed to reach other strings.
Orientation. Navigation outside of this, am accumulation of detris that does not comply with any contactable whole. Directional shift. One falls into the patterns of systems not of ones own making or knowing. Overwhelming danger of annihilation.
Yet the routine splits the person into enforcer of a system and follower of a system. Pressure from within, in order to block out pressure from without. The authoritarian engulfed.
How to give systems a similar basis of internal referencing? Binary opposites- like a pulsing on/off, open/closed. This can be started up anywhere any time with any material accessible by the senses.
Ultimately the senses are re-routed to a “law”, that of binary opposites and this is “played out” in many different lights. There are an infinite number of frequencies or intervals yet it comes down to the same thing- an engagement through an opposing yet compelling bias. A balancing point induced out of the co-ordination of any specific relationship. This balancing point, since it is a dynamic expression of this adjustable see-saw, must by its very nature be sought time and time again in each new arrangements of life.
Systems are not memorized or “played out” as closed bubbles. They emerge out of the environmental conditions that create the tensile structures for each impelling point o f balance. The person, seeker of the “law”, becomes adept at playing themselves or aligning themselves right at the causeway of balance.
They no longer look things up in the “outer world”, they position themselves at such a disposition that everything that surrounds falls into place instantaneously in relation to the primary placement of themselves. The world is reduced. They angle themselves and thus “read” the embedded meaning that was always already there, in the seemingly random placing of all else.
When the relationship is there all else has an aptness simply by being just the way it actually is. This is living in Situ. Not creating a stage-set outside the world, which is prone to collapse or disruption with each new unfolding situation. A house of cards.
These systems of props must initially be imposed as symbolic diving boards into a new experience They are a form of fine-tuning within carefully measured co-ordinates. But then the thing must be allowed to let fly. To expand and play. The garden must erupt into the field and then the world beyond.
The juxtaposition between the past frame and the present re-frame becomes the ultimate contrast. That between what has been monitored as a sounding box; a man-made structure and the wide open space surrounding. Not now so destructive because the garden matrix is carried within, wherever one is and whatever the conditions.
SWIVEL
-After Seiki workshop 2009 with Akinobu Kishi-
Alignment and tilt from the hips. A rotational swivel with infinite adjustments into momentary set positions. That informs a tendency that runs through and outwards like the threading of a needle –leanings out and towards- associations, relational tendencies that bolt together.
Assemblages in order to create conduits- circuits for sending out and sending in. Breathing is such an exchange. Located in the gravitational leanings of the hips. A capacity to contain, bunch together. Stress and release so that neither exists permanently separated.
In this heaviness of bone and flesh, this ability to feed by going into weight and its continual redistribution, in that pump at the core, all the senses emanate.
Taking in through containment- a grasping down and a release in cascades of outward flow. A squeeze pump-machine that by tilting allows the liquid to take on the sustenance of a place-able weight.
Then, only in that clear stillness- clear waters- descended as far as they can go, there is disturbance. A swaying. An inclination. Pure disposition towards this or that and its plaintive re-attention somewhere else.
The binding shifts so that there is a spiraling into exegesis- into the filaments that spread as they touch further and further outwards, molecule after molecule, displaced by and attracted to one another, now no longer as one but as singular unities- multitudes.
In that dispersal it reaches as far as it can go. Then reverses, pulled back down and in; into the vault of the spin-able hips. Between back and front, sacrum and Hara (abdomen), the eye and the ear and the smell and the soundings reside in these small tilts between opposites- back and front, left and right.
Through duration other states of dimensionality- between movement and stillness, unfold. This is the turning, the swivel, the spin caught and maintained in the stillness at the centre.
RIGIDITY
What is rigidity? The pairing up of occurrences too neatly as a mirrored recurrence of one to another. That sameness creates a continuum which is an unfaltering line. A single track in a single dimension. That lack of punctuation comes to mean not moving at all; rigidity. The continuous buzz of unchanged.
There needs to be a shift, a slight displacement. A leaning to, a swaying out of a posture. The socket burrows down, the branches sway. There is alteration in the pelvis, the chest. Between containment and dispersal there is contrast.
In the space of that differentiation a process starts. There are staccato breaks in continuity. A splaying apart of a thread. It’s shredding and re-knotting. Winding and unwinding. That process now the continuity. Break and mend enveloped into one another. This is the force of dimensionality. A building up and around each instance into entwined depth. A rope with thickness, twist, give and take. A rope that is pulled and pulls back. A back-bone around which a jelly-fish recollects itself. An impression sought in each contact.
Association with the surface of an environment- with one another, each turn-taking as the context, re-bound surface for the other. This bat and ball. This mutual lop-sided energizer. Give and take. A pump. An engine. Air surrounding becoming breath.
Transformation and change. Movement and rest. Adaptability. Consciousness and sleep. Lazy mornings. Task and repose. Eat and company.
______
When this is not forthcoming; when the process is inhibited mid-sentence, there is a building up of one semblance of a tendency to toxic levels and this manifests in an extremity of behavior. A tendency towards outward thrust, inward containment, a plummeting down or a rising up ever higher like a balloon without an anchor.
There may be vomiting, the loss of liquid from every orifice as an extreme correction to a former protectionism; a storing away, a ferreting away and eking out of resources. A claw-handedness; an introspection as if in a war-zone where self-preservation is a mission unto itself.
This in turn may be a self-correction to a period of volatility; a blowing in the wind and a catching onto this fancy or that; a riot of color and sound. A mutability. An affability to all that passes. A physical attraction that is unstoppable. Dissolvement into this fire-cracker of life. Burnt raw.
This may be countered by a need for immersion; a liquid stuckness. A drowning immersion into a soundless depth. A slow-motion fish-bowl existence, tapping on the glass that is sound-proofed and dissolves and softens all the lines of life.
So these extremes play out in this strange dance of cause and affect each an inverse of the other, each a caricature cure of one another yet none truly touching, interpolating with one another into new beings, new creatures of dimensional subtlety.
Sometimes it is necessary to let these spontaneous spasms and their morose counter-parts play out. Gradually these affects of intense agitation and inert despondency begin to creatively admix and as they do so they become an entwined dynamic where response is always the on-going conversation or assemblage of both.
They mediate, contain, extend and subvert one another and so the lines bend, move, wiggle, swell and thin into tails of smoke. An air-plane with an ever extendable trajectory that cannot be planned out in advance for it is adapting to weather conditions, air pressure gradients and the hot and cold shafts of atmospheric ratings.
Each moment is a meeting and a composition out of all these elements that converge, absorb and disperse at every instant.
Capacity is an ambience of multiple tendencies that are lived according to ways of approach, timed collisions, rushed embraces and prolonged associations.
All that is a breathing mechanism lived out in the punctuation of proximities and distances. Intervals through which thoughts and bodies evolve and dissolve again upon one another and through one another.
Association is always a way to reshuffle extremes that would otherwise run into paradoxes of a purity that is uninhabitable.
____
Autism needs these admixtures for realignment on a bodily-mental-emotional-sensory-cognitive level.
Trust in contact is the single pronged approach to all these diversities.
Alignment-Tilt-Tendency.
How can contact make this process responsive?
Activated.
Feeling-beholding-tolerance.
Assemblages that need no observer outside.
A practice of craftsmanship.
Bolting together of assemblages.
No separation.
No boundary.
Heart to heart through physical contactability.
Physical to supersede physical into the virtual.
LOVE
After Scotland Seiki, then “Side By Side” school session, Hackney London
18.5.07
Not necessary to have a compulsion or even a plan. It is enough to dwell. Sink in- let it catch- and let the breath come. On this expiration the pattern in thought, in physical gesture will emerge. Together it is a feeling. This is the bite in.
____
The kids understand more than is their initial appearance.
To give credit to what they are about means they will respond and let unfold.
The launching into space and catching back into the ground will be possible.
Meld with the movement, then draw back on the expiration and in the distance between the two they will draw through the thread like beads of dew.
This motivates the overcrowding of too much value in one position to spread through the dissipation of expression.
Pain comes when this is hoarded or stays in one place.
Move in and around.
Then the problem: epilepsy in S, a tilting back in M, will become the solution.
It will be played out as a way of re-routing the centrality at the base. In S through sudden jolts, in M through rotational swaying; falling, catching, pushing, tilting and then a surge of uprightness. In S the jolting leads to exhaustion, then calm, then internal flickering, then a slow sending out from a warm basis.
Without this catching in nothing occurs. Yet without outer co-witnessing, nothing catches in. Inner leads to outer leads to inner.
Go with the movement up, then angle around and down. Go with the movement to one side, then like rowing a boat, angle to the other side, then support the horizontal.
To go forward, practice falling back, then sending out as the falling is caught, sustained, then becomes a propulsion out like a bouncing ball.
In each dynamic and its reverberation the circle is completed and sent into an inner quiet. Again this creates another echo at the extremities, in gesture, expression, emotion, intent.
But never begin here, with emotion or intent. Begin with the physical sway or rippling. Follow through and meet at its resting point.
Then will occur a paramount motion.
Between the two; what seems to be the pattern or symptom and the inner grain of a counter-motion, will come recognition.
Between the hands. Between the contact of one and another. The meeting our genesis. Enfolding out and dissipating within. This is Gyoki ( Breathing between the hands; a simple practice of moving the hands apart and together again at chest level).
At the Heart and Extremity of all.
The kids will teach you how to remember what needs to be said and done as a follow through to where they emerge and again disappear.
People complete one another.
To have this holding space in relation to one another, move and position in order to angle into one pattern.
Then comes speech, movement, song, dance and rest.
This is Community.
______
Special Needs people teach the value of true energetic community as opposed to repressive social, familial or political obligation where a uniform pattern is superimposed rather than felt out as a coalition between changeable conditions of hard and soft.
Special Needs become very hard or very soft because the connections from one to the other in society, is missing.
By embodying an extreme, Special Needs people therefore tease out a valid or authentic modulation in others who accommodate to catch them and as such catch into their own counter-weight.
We each act for one another as counter-weights that allows the pendulum to keep swinging.
This is Centeredness, felt between an interchange.
________
The course that we take.
To confirm this as a guided walk.
The same parameters but as a rhythm of circulation.
One way up and around and drop.
Meet extremity with extremity as one point in a round tour.
To reach top of mountain, start at stagnant lake- go through corridor of valley. Then up the mountain by circumvention. Then peering down, go through rocks, down with the descending trickle of fresh water stream- back to lake which will be replenished thus far, through this journeying.
( *This is a walk I did in a wood in Braemar, Scotland after each annual Seiki workshop- led by Akinobu Kishi and his wife Kyoto in Banchory from 2007-2011. Kishi died in 2012)
We are keepers of the land and the land is a keeper of us.
____
At the point of near-collapse an eruption.
Here is the beginning.
It is a borderland.
____
The key to all this is in feeling.
And feeling is in the gaps between contact.
_______
The Group
June 2021
All is dissipated. Floating layers that co-exist in different time spheres. They may collide and surprise or shock us. Our nervous systems are fired but cannot pattern.
Or we can channel and bring these layers momentarily together throughout bodily systems, anchoring and rooting in one placement at this time in this place- an assignment which we enter knowingly, feelingly by making of our bodies transmitters; a relational field that is both taught and poised- a conduit that travels effortlessly through our vertical structures and that we let reside as an intensity; layers upon layers of deposit that builds a pressure and a holding that becomes formation- a shape; a rock; our bodies all as one; a rooting. Then at a given moment we may utilize this stored intensity; this battery we nurture deep into the ground and let fly outwards this potential. It’s enough that we create placement through our bodily attention in just this one single place and time and then trust that the flight will travel on its own momentum; a free-wheeling trip with many tendrils and plant-like leanings according to the light and the moisture of the day.
This outward display is our reach and joins us spatially in an environment to one another and to all else that grows or is placed or is momentarily built or put together. We indeed become one more item amongst many; an object placement- yet consciousness of our own placement opens our perception to the placement of all else and this creates a vibration or resonance like the striking of a chord which travels out, percolates, mixes and recombines, manifesting something or someone unforetold, with intentions and emotions and physical tendencies employed and brought out in the flowering that escapes this placement and yet is born from it. This is a kind of breathing together and it may become sound or action or quietude- it sucks in and lets out- pulls together and releases apart again. Yet these opposed tendencies happen at the same time and in the same space- a multitude of polar opposites brought back down to naught and cradled, nurtured deep within and equally at the far edges of what we see, hear and touch, beyond a limit that becomes potential or imagination and travels onwards unknown.
So the dissipation is something we embrace in the end by first channeling it through our human frames- digesting and guiding it through our bodily interiors, and then releasing from this still frame into multiple movements of excess. These may be seen as artistic or expressive creations or equally in another kind of social system, as waste and disturbance. Yet the process is equally necessary for health and free living so that however it is seen, it must be displayed- the interior cave of constriction, compression and tightness; a musculature so hard with tension, so knotted within its own interiorized restrictions it might explode and destroy the organism it seeks to protect. Yet becoming and acting now just in this instance, like a spring when carefully placed, so that it rebounds outwards trusting that the movement is always correct even when no single mind pre-arranges or navigates it in advance. For it is a collectivity, this mind of coalescing layers that to the outside viewer; the non-participant, seems disruptive and unconnected, but within the engine of this shared process creates harmonics that when listened to carefully as one body; one organism, brings peace and connection; so a group emerges...gradually inviting the audience in.