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PART 1

EXPLORATION PERIOD: January - February 2022

Drawing on the first phase of shared activity (January 2021 - October 2021, during which we were individually exploring various dorsal practices through lying down, transition, rotation and movement and engaging in a series of conversation/reading practices), in early 2022 we took time to return to our previous notes and memories to identify the specific prompts, provocations, questions, invitations, triggers that we had each generated in and through the process of exploration. Whilst we had engaged in conversation in relation to our individual enquiries, we did not previously name or share with each other the specific exercises or practices that we were individually activating during this earlier phase of enquiry. How did we score our explorations? Is score an appropriate term for desribing the relation of language and experience? Where, when, how, why did various prompts, provocations, questions, invitations, triggers arise? How can individual practices and exercises be shared? Following this conversation, we each took time to draft a set of prompts, provocations, questions, invitations, triggers, based on what we actually did, which are now included in Part I of the corresponding phase of exploration. e.g. prompts, provocations, questions, invitations, triggers relating to LYING DOWN, or TRANSITION, are now included on the corresponding page of the exposition. 

PART 2

EXPLORATION DATE: 18.02.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration (between 01.01.2022 - 22.02.2022), or more specifically the experience of going through our notebooks and identifying the prompts, provocations, questions, invitations, triggers etc. from the previous block of practice.

STRUCTURE OF PRACTICE

Speaker is not visible (masks camera with tape), listener has back turned, active listening.

1. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

2. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [5 mins each]

3. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

4. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

5. Speaking/listening: taking turns facing [10 mins each]

'SCORE' FOR CONVERSATION PRACTICE

- Take a moment to tune into the chosen object/focus of exploration – this could involve a period of recollection, or looking back at notes, sketches, wordings that relate to the object/focus of exploration, or by noting/drawing/diagramming.

- Connect and try to stay connected with your direct experience.

- Feel free to speak before knowing what it is that you want to say – thinking through speaking.

- Feel free to speak in single words, partial phrases, half sentences, and thought fragments.

- Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment – for wrestling with, stumbling and falling over one’s words.

- Consider different speeds and rhythms. Allow for silence.

- Approach listening to the other as an aesthetic practice.

PART 3

INTERIM PERIOD

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Transcription and distillation of resulting text through marking/highlighting, undertaken separately.

EXERCISES/SCORES

So, this morning, I printed out the prompts, the notes, the questions, the activations, the invitations … and was then looking through them but also writing alongside them, or thinking alongside them. And, I think that one of the things that I was bringing to mind, was really a sense of when were they written. Yes, when were these texts written in the process, and I got my notebooks out to almost try to verify that. And so there was something about when do the questions or the prompts arise? Or where do they arise? Or how do they arise? Or why do they arise? So when did I make the note of the question, or note the practice – and so I was reflecting on this before, during and after quality of the practices that we were doing. I mean, maybe I was even coming back to the term practice or exercise as a language for describing the actions themselves. But what I noticed in my notebooks, is that they were coming in the middle. There were several marks in my notebook where I was breaking off from a kind of movement, or a bodily practice, almost like in a moment of excitement. I mean, revelation seems a bit too strong – but something becoming clear to me in the moment of doing it, that materialised as a question or a reflection or a prompt. So I was struck by this sense that the questions were never written in advance, or the prompts were not written in advance, I had not conceived of something and then did it. This sort of surprised me in a way – what I noticed was that they pretty much had all emerged in and through the doing, or if not right in the middle of doing – because I was also trying not to keep breaking out of a movement practice to turn to language which is where I probably feel more comfortable, I could feel this tendency to want to come out of movement and want to write – so if it wasn’t coming in the middle, it was somehow between the during of the activity and the after. But it definitely was not reflecting on,which was quite interesting. I was trying to hold in mind, or bring a sense of the action – rather than necessarily reflect on it. So there was something about the quality of the enquiry, coming from in the middle, so I was thinking about this “in the middle”. I was making notes here about almost like having a dorsal quality to the enquiry. This sense of letting it just come, letting it unfold, or letting the questions arise. So being open to the questioning that was happening through the questioning itself. And the sense that it was unfolding, almost associatively, rather than through a set of pre-planned ideas in a way. I really like Hélène Cixous’ writing, and the thing that was coming to my mind was this line that she says about ‘Have on hand a notebook’, because often there are these fleeting thoughts that are passing too quickly to capture.And it really did feel like that in the experience, I needed my notebook with me at the time. Because the nature of the enquiry was emerging absolutely at the moment of the doing in a way, and the impetus for the next exploration was coming out of what has just come before. I think that this is what makes it quite challenging sometimes for me, because I have a tendency to want to prepare, and have a sense of what might happen or what I might do. Coming back to the notes, what became very evident was this, maybe even a sense of trusting that something will come.

It is interesting what you said about the notebook, no, not the notebook, but about wanting to plan. Because I have a tendency - and I noticed it when I was trying to write these prompts, and when I also started to send you something in December – that I try and … I am a bit impatient with thinking that I need to understand and jump to, maybe past the questions, even though there are questions, it is almost that there is something that comes in the writing, that I feel I need to know or conclude something. So it was interesting to go back to the notebook. I suppose thinking of these, this idea that a note can become a prompt, and that the question, the question sometimes, how to keep the question, even if it is in a note. To be able to see that the question is still there, rather than seeing it as a guess or an incomplete sentence. Or something that isn’t quite formed yet – to erase that, to be continued sense of the exercises or practices. You mentioned Cixous, and I keep working with this quote that she says that she writes to touch the body, to touch the body with the tips of the words. It can become a kind of mantra, that you can write, it embodies this sense of writing with and through the body. And back into the body.And yes, there is something about going back into the notebooks … so some of these things I did from memory, or in a way, casting my mind back to, some things just stay and they are really are on, I can just touch them quickly. But when I go into the notes, there is so much more nuance or things I have forgotten, or things that are actually quite important. So my memories are, they sometimes miss something out or have again jumped somewhere. Which is not wrong … but looking at the notes again, it is surprising that the things that I would notice immediately, what they hold within them as an experience, so there is something about this, the notetaking, very close or in the moment of experiencing something. Because there is no pre-thought, there is an immediacy, about the notetaking, which really holds something. So it is interesting how to read those notes which are kind of, a little bit, trying to grasp something. And then to work, almost then you are almost working with memory and in writing you are editing. Which is a kind of future … towards a prompt. Like what you said, this sense of time of when these things happen in a way. These questions also project backwards and forwards. I also got curious how to write something which is very based in a physicality and how that does open up something more, maybe rich with image or even philosophical.

I was struck by what you were saying about rushing ahead towards something. Rushing to a conclusion, or not even rushing, but moving in the direction of that. And, what it might mean to stay in the process for longer, what emerges in the process. It was interesting, what I did was write out all of my notes from my notebook and went through again to try to identify things that might be more identifiable as prompts or questions or concrete exercises. But this thing that you were saying about how a sentence, an incomplete sentence, might itself function as a prompt, I am wanting to dive back in, to look again at the materials. Because even as I was looking through the notebooks this morning, I was thinking that there are a lot of things here that I have not seen as possible exercises, but they have that quality. So I was thinking about the forms of the prompts in a way, and some of them got reformulated in the writing up, more as an instruction. Maybe even with the view of being an instruction that someone else could follow – so maybe one of the zones I am interested in is the sense of a question or prompt for oneself in the process of enquiry, and the sharability of that, in the sense of giving that prompt or cue to someone else. Actually, maybe cue could be interesting as well. And then, some of the groupings of things were concerned with variation, or transition or even comparison. So describing one experience and then comparing it with another. Or even reversing it. But I also noticed how much attention was figuring in the questions and in the notes. I was interested in thinking about how some of the prompts and questions invite a certain movement practice, a physical practice, and how some of them were inviting a certain quality of attention, sharpening perception in a particular way. So it felt like there was this very close relationship between movement and awareness and attention. Noticing. Watching. Observing – this was some of the language that was emerging. Notice what changes, what happens. So an action, a kind of call towards a certain kind of movement practice and then almost in the same breath if you like, a call towards a certain kind of attention to bring to that. And then this kind of … what happens. What happens if you do this, or what happens if you do that? What if? So sort of tilting into a sense of calling them experiments, or testings in some kind of way. I think that within this there was a sort of search, or an interest in trying to find a language through which to describe what these prompts or exercises were. Because we have talked about the sense of them, I might use the term score. The question of whether this is quite right, and what alternatives there might be? Yes. And then something about this active space between the experience and the writing, and what was happening in that gap, or that relationship. And whether the writing was also a form of attention in a way. And whether the writing was already grasping at something or whether it could stay in this dorsal register in some kind of capacity.

I was also thinking about this idea of the score, perhaps becoming less relevant to what we do. And reading your suggestions, it does feel that score suggests that it knows, it is a set of instructions or parameters or ways to do things, following things.  So there is something nice about these other things – prompts and cues, and testings. And also the idea if they can stay active, or somehow interesting for us, this seems to be an interesting measure of how that might work for someone else. So it is interesting to be working together on that, to keep that, even between us we can be testing what words activate and what they open, and how a bunch of words can absolutely offer a situation to explore or determine very little. So finding those interesting balances between suggestion or activation, inviting something to be done with it, but not filling in anything of what you should be finding or how you should be finding it. I think that there is something in the writing that can’t help I suppose move a little way from the immediacy, but I am wondering if that is, it is almost as though, having these physical experiments and tests and revisiting what that feels like, there is something that you can bring with you into writing somehow. So even though you are straying off or entering a different kind of suggestion, it still has a sort of embodied ground to it. Sometimes I feel I have gone too far, I have gone too far. I am writing something that I have not really felt, have I really felt that? Is that really interesting? Somehow I can almost sense it has lost its thread, maybe that’s it, it has lost a thread or a root. But then other times perhaps there is that permission to lose that thread, and to enter more of a poetic license. So it is interesting to know those, how one thing might slip into another. I am just reading, skipping through. Oh, what am I skipping? That is what you wrote. What am I bypassing, what am I not noticing, what am I not intrigued by? Maybe what am I trying not to grasp onto? This sense of a whole list, how a list of questions opens up a whole territory. I am reading and not talking, reading and noticing how those lists of questions sort of bring me here and there, and start to build up a kind of space that I can be in. So it’s not just about skipping or bypassing but those sort of different kinds of words bring me into a shape, shape a space.

It is interesting – I am feeling a sort of tension between how much to look at the notes I have made and how much to see what arises now, also in response to what you said. I think that one of the things that I was really struck by in what you were saying then was this sense of being alert to the point where you are stepping away, or moving away from the experience itself, and that questioning of how much is this really in contact with the experience. This feels interesting – I know that my tendency is to fly off or fly away and throughout our explorations this question of is this something I am really experiencing or is it something I am thinking about the experience has been alive for me. Even the challenge of direct experience, and staying with that, and getting close to direct experience, rather than withdrawing into, or side-lining into thinking about experience, which might not have any correlation to the experience itself. So there is something to do with this relationship between the live experience, the lived experience, and a mode of writing in relation to that. I think that where it felt, going back to my notebooks, it felt faithful to or in fidelity to the experience was when the writing somehow enabled me to stay with it for a bit longer. And in a way, without the writing component, or without the attempt to put something into language, the experience itself would have passed me by. Somehow the writing or the notetaking sharpened my awareness. I think maybe that is how I am thinking about it, writing as an attention practice in its own right somehow. It enabled me to stay with that experience, and sometimes those list of questions that would come from that would come very quickly, from almost … a slight experience would open into a field of questions. Open up the experience in a richer sense, and almost like alert me or draw me into the richness of the experience which I think perhaps might have gone unnoticed without the support of language. Maybe there is something to do with thinking about the way that language supports, or allows a kind of dwelling, or staying with in a sense. And to try to notice, yes, like the thing we were talking about with the function of the eyes, sometimes the eyes have this sense of grasping, or reaching out or sort of stretching towards experience in an almost controlling way, a sense-making way, the desire to understand or know. And at other times, you said this beautiful line about just letting the light come in. They have this capacity to also just let the light in. To be receptive. I think that there is something like that in language – there are moments where it feels as if it is really moving with the momentum of the experience, or holding a space open even for that experience to be dwelled in for longer, beyond the experience itself. And then there is a point where it tilts and it starts to be kind of conceptualised, or packaged, or formulated, or coming to conclusions, or resolved in a way.Yes, this tendency of language to want to resolve, to make sense of. The difference between language … the image I have in my mind, maybe it is because of the wind happening, the storm … there is something about flying a kite, no, where am I going with this. That language carries, it can hold or carry something in movement or in motion, but it has to stay in touch with the experience. I am not sure how kite-flying comes in here – something about holding or staying with the experience of a movement is different to … trying to stay with the sensing, or the sense-making that is emerging rather than trying to make sense of it, or hold it all or grasp it in a particular kind of way. So this sense of how is the mode of writing in relation to the experience, and maybe because we were tending very much to transitions between uprightness and lying down, or verticality and horizontality, to really pay attention to this transition between the direct experience and language. Maybe that would be something that I would be interested in, in the future – to really notice this transition space, how to take care of that transition and how to open up that transition so the line between the one and the other becomes more porous, that it is not such a clean cut distinction between experience and language, but more like a transition where language holds more of the experience within it somehow. So yes, letting the questions come. Allowing the questions to emerge out of the movement practice or out of the lived experience. It is very interesting, even now in the conversation, trying to stay in tune with what that might mean, and here I have got this almost tension between letting it come now in the situation of our conversation, and looking at my notes. So there is already a push and pull between letting thought come from where we are now, and tuning back into what I have already thought, the notes that were already there. Maybe this issue of space and time is interesting – the timings of our turn taking, the time of turn taking. Of hitting a blank and that not being a problem, being able to drop into this hole where I don’t really know what it is that I want to say. What you were saying about memory, leaning back into the experience of something and seeing what comes from that. Actually, getting in touch somehow, the leaning back is a way of reigniting a recollection of experience, as if it were live, no, not as if it were live, as it is live. So in my notebook, the notes were very live in the moment that I was writing them, but now I am reading some of them, or tuning into some of them, and I am not sure I am in touch with the liveness of how it felt somehow. Sometimes I feel like I am, and sometimes I feel like I am sharing something that happened a few hours ago when I was thinking. Maybe there is something to do with the actual liveness of where the thinking is happening.

That is, there was a lot in there. When you were talking, something flipped, so that writing was the practice of… no, what was I going to say. We had been writing from practice, but suddenly the way you were talking it felt, oh, there is a mode of writing which is very linked to the immediacy of the experiencing. Somehow you opened up this idea that writing, we are writing, also as part of the practice. Which is kind of obvious, but the way that you were talking was, there was something new in there, this writing, I suppose as a way of thinking around time and memory. And also, you started with this analogy of how the eyes try to grasp and name things, or they can just let the light in. So this idea of the writing just letting the light in. That is what it did for me, the connection there. And then, the writing is a physical practice in that way, or can be. That isn’t right really… but there is a real sense of that. It suddenly became much more embedded in what we are doing, more than I had realised before something. I think it is quite exciting. I also think to be writing very quickly and in between the exercises, it feels that by just writing something down it has been noted and therefore there is space to keep experiencing, like the notetaking creates a space. Or otherwise, trying to hold on, to all the experience that happens in half an hour and then to write afterwards, and this sense that you know you, as you experience more and more, you are losing the thinking of it. Or it is too much to hold onto and to be able to get into words. So it is exciting how the writing in this, can also just be scanning and notetaking, and really just sitting back into what might come up. That the writing belongs to the body in those moments rather than to thinking. Or maybe this is the body thinking, bodily thinking coming through the writing in those moments of experimenting and exercising. Yes, so the kite. The wind whipped around, and the kite came. And I am holding on to the image of the kite, here. It is interesting how the wind absolutely scatters thinking. There is something in the wind, because it is bringing me into, into the body. And it is interesting then how this idea of thinking or trying to articulate thoughts, becomes more difficult. I think I am also trying to bring back a little bit, trying to remember what you were saying because I was excited. So I am going to let go of trying to remember what you were saying. There is something about trying to write these prompts – they are also a way of trying to share something, also sometimes I am writing something and I am thinking – this is obvious, and lots of people have thought this. There are also these little thresholds – there is something that is interesting about revisiting something that is obvious, that is absolutely demanding attention again. And that maybe that is also part of the dorsal, that there is not an embracing, but a sort of acceptance of coming back to what is already known but as soon as you relive it or reactivate it, it has got that mysterious, almost a kind of rediscovery. We keep needing to move back, or drop back in order to reactivate the things that the body knows and maybe we are also proposing its, not needs, but it does create a particular quality in moving, working, living. Flicking through. And maybe there are, there were things that I was thinking when I was reading mine and also yours, these terms that we create and that I think that you are really good at grasping. This back-behind-ness. Or this lovely phrase – future-leaning. And I have adopted this axial-surface-technologies which I also … these little terminologies that they have moved away but they are kind of parcels in a way, aren’t they. They sort of encapsulate maybe a number of things that we have experienced and have talked about, and kind of shared. There is this kind of vocabulary or lexicon that is arising.I think that the writing in a way offers that opportunity as well, and I find that interesting. To notice how these are emerging, how they emerge, and how they create a kind of language in themselves. And perhaps at the same time, I notice that once I am using those words there is somehow a danger of somehow assuming quite a lot, because it might be that where it has come from … once you have a phrase it takes on its own life and can also move away. Or maybe also needs to be kept alive or nuanced or that it is allowed to shift and not become a fixed thing in language. Maybe that is also a prompt or opening. What does that mean – that back-leaning, or back-behind-ness? Or what is axial-technology? Maybe that is interesting, to yes, to fold back these terms into opening up, using those in the prompts as openings rather than fixings. It is also making me in a way making me itchy – I want to be doing some more, the practising and the writing and the exercises and the writing. It feels that maybe after this little period, or this block or phase, it is interesting that it invites back to the floor. And I am remembering now the writing in the movement, in movement.

There were things that you were saying there that I want to try to hang on to but they are slipping away from me somehow. Yes it is interesting – you are also talking about trying to recollect or remember something to respond or how much effort to put into that recollection actually. One of the things that really struck me was this folding back, folding back to reengage with certain terms. I was struck when you were saying the prompts, to go back through, back-notes. I was thinking what is this gesture of going back through your notes or going back to. Because it does not feel as if it is in the key of reflection, it feels as if the nature of it is something different. Reflection feels as though it would be with some distance now. Looking again. You know, drawing out things with distance, to reflect back on. But going back through, these back-notes, going back to the notes feels as if there is something very much like a re-enlivening, or reinvestigating. So not reflecting on an experiment or practice, but reactivating or re-enacting or re-enlivening it. This thing that you were saying about how certain experiences or ideas crystalise into certain terminologies – like future-leaning, or axial-technologies. And then, almost like, there was almost a sense of them hardening as you were saying that, into an object almost. Like an object. The word is almost like an object on the page. That is easy to copy and paste, or move from here to there, because it is just like an object that you can lift up and move. And then the desire that this language is not movable like that, it is not possible to, it is never, there is this desire for it not to coalesce into an object, that you can lift and move from here to there, without even thinking about it, without interrogating it. But that somehow the language itself has to stay with a quality of mobility. The language is like the spine in a way, it has to be exercised in all of its directions. There is a desire for the back not to stiffen into object, into a flat plane of existence. Yes, I feel from so much sitting at the screen, my back does feel like an object in a sense. A solid block that is not even part of me somehow – it is just this thing. And as you move the back and explore the back, it stops being a thing and starts being an experience. And I think that there is something that this same quality with language – if you are not exercising it, or not moving it or not rolling with it in a way, it starts to solidify into something which is quite hard and object-like. And that going back, this back-note, this going back through, is not to try and crystalise ideas into objects, or blocks of terminology but to try an exercise of repetition which is to do with keeping it fluid and mobile in some kind of way. Because language has this tendency to stiffen quite quickly into concepts. Or into something that is not, that is no longer synchronous, or within the same space of the experience itself. One of the things that was interesting when I read through your prompts was the mode of it … so there are a lot of -ings. So letting, waiting. Waiting for the back to respond. Letting the body drop away. And I was noticing in the form that I had, it had transitioned into “notice the plane of contact” or :lie down on one’s back”. The -ing had in places disappeared – so from “lying down on one’s back” to “lie down on one’s back”, from “coming to one’s back” to “come to one’s back”. So somehow in this transition it had gone from a kind of language which was describing an unfolding experience to an instruction, that felt as if it could be set in advance of the action somehow. Like “lie down on one’s back” – it feels as if the tone of that is an instruction that comes in advance of action, it comes before the movement. It even has a degree of authority to it in a way. So it was interesting, because I went back to my notebook, and in my notebook that is not how it was written. In the notebook, more often than not, either there is no expression like that, there is no instruction, or it is in the -ing-ing form. So “taking awareness to the back” is how it is written in my notebook but when I typed it up it because “take awareness to the back”. I got interested in what was happening there – it was not even a transition into language, because the notebooks are quite faithful to the experience, they are in the key of during-ness. But in the typing up something was happening even without my attention, there was a transition between a kind of language that was happening almost like alongside the movement, it was moving with the movement, it wasn’t saying “lie on one’s back”, it was saying “lying on one’s back”. So it was a language which was parallel to the experience itself, synchronous to it, or unfolding at the same time. And then something happened, which made it into a prompt which would always come before the movement. Lying on one’s back, taking awareness into one’s back becomes lie on one’s back, take awareness to the back. So I was thinking about the precision of language, and in a way being precise about staying close to the form which emerges in the note-taking, or really attending to these moments in the text, even reintroducing this -ing dimension to the prompts so that the language feels as if it is much more describing something as it is unfolding, rather than instructing prior to action in some kind of way. Yes, I was surprised by this, in a way it is a minor detail but it does something quite dramatic to the quality of the prompt. And then I was thinking about deliberately having a passive quality in the writing, you know, the difference between an active form of language. I don’t know enough about grammar really – but to try to really inhabit a more passive mode where it is more deliberately not possible to pin down to a specific subject. So it leaves it more open in a way. But I think that this sense of the -ing was to do with trying to get close to a form of language which feels as if it is unfolding, almost like it is interwoven with the experience, or at the same time as the experience.

It is interesting the -ing or the not -ing. When I was writing there is a kind of puzzle in that, I often change back and forth. And I think it is because we said we would write these prompts and notes, and then in the writing, is this a note about what was experienced turning into a prompt. Who is it then for? Is there a you? Or is there an I? Or as you say, sometimes trying to get rid of the you and the I, so it is very open as to who, and what, and when. That is very interesting. I feel that when I am writing I am puzzling that through and there is a bit of a mix of different things in there because of that. Is there something … yes, it is interesting, how something might not instruct but still might invite someone or even give to the urge to do it. So in a way although it is not instructing it kind of invites strongly enough that it does the same as an instruction. I am also interested in how these things can work in time and can sometimes slip between, sometimes there are little moments (and also in yours) which feels like there is a link to this has happened for someone, and it can happen again. And even if it doesn’t happen it is still possible. Between what has occurred and what is still possible.I think that it is really interesting. Writing these words and then that is being read, I find that fascinating what that can open up. As you read it an experience of time. It reminds me of those scores – and they are called scores – those Yoko Ono scores that in a way are an instruction but they are in a way almost impossible to happen. But they, the imagination of it immediately enters the body. Yes, and the detail of writing is fascinating, and that shift between a certain tense, or if it is to someone or if it is left, what did you call it, a passive mode of writing. Little details have a huge impact. What kind of space is opening? It is making me think now also, in movement, it is interesting that we started with lying. And how that is still, maybe that is the first thing we did. But maybe the doing and the talking about it, maybe because it was at the beginning of our process, that feels even more immediate than these last sections that we called Movement or ‘in moving’. I really need to revisit, I have not got that immediate memory of that, and I think it is also to do with the complexity that opens up – the lying, the standing, the transitioning, the twist and the turn. As we put through these four things – there is a complexity build up and it almost becomes harder to have a, I am not sure what I am saying, I am not sure what I am saying. That feels further away than the lying whereas actually it is closer in process timewise, than the lying. That is interesting. Memory does jump here and there, and the body memory also will do lots of lovely playing around with time. Maybe there is something in the movement and something that you were suggesting – this idea of the movement of the writing as well, and as soon as it comes into motion, all these different folds and twists and forces and pulls and pushes and little devices. The complexity of that in motion and also of writing, it also has that. I also feel I don’t have enough understanding and it is only through writing and through puzzling through writing. But it making me think actually, about this constant feeling of ‘I can’t write’ but also knowing that I find things out through writing and that I enjoy writing as a practice. And actually, I have got over the fact that I think I can’t write because of that, because it is becoming more of a fascination and a curiosity, very much linked with the body and with conversation and exchange. Now I do feel as if I have let go of the kite and it is drifting off into the wind. I wrote this last sentence – moving through the back is a quiet dance. And then, sometimes when I write things like that there is a little ooh, that’s nice. And then afterwards it is like, well it’s not only a quiet dance. It is also this and also that. So that immediate sense, when it totally makes sense and also a kind of fear of pinning something down and claiming something. Maybe it is similar to this idea of not wanting to instruct but still wanting to be clear. That is very interesting I think in language, and then you can feel the awkwardness of – I like that but it is not totally true,it is not how do you let something out and see what happens rather than prejudge it. Maybe there is something like that also in the testing. Yes the testing out of something. Moving through the back is a quiet dance – just seeing what happens when that is in the world, or given to someone else, or looked at or read again the next day. And how it sits on the page or how it sits in the voice. And now, something that you said about the flatness of the page – I think that you were talking about the fixing of terms. How not to flatten the ideas somehow? Yes it is interesting, I was working in a space with students, and there was this projection in the space and moving bodies, different kinds of materials, like plastic, and it was interesting in terms of how we put things in the space, spatialised, and how when we put it in another way in flattened the ideas again.

Yes there is something that you were saying about, you were talking about Yoko Ono’s instructions or scores. And her work was also in my mind a little as I have been turning over the sense of what to call these forms of language, in relation to experience. I was thinking about her work a little in the sense of how, as you were saying, they do hover between an instruction for action and an instruction for or an invitation for the imagination. I was also thinking about, I suppose, the more bodily somatic practices and contexts which also shape my approach, or have shaped my experience, the things I do really or which I participate in. Certain kinds of yoga practice or some of the somatic practices I have experienced, and Feldenkrais also. And how, in some of those contexts, the invitation is also imaginative, it is not always activated with a physical movement, or at least, not with a visibly recognisable physical movement. So I was thinking about in the yoga tradition that I practice in, there is a strong sense that if you don’t feel it is appropriate to make a movement on a particular day, then visualise it, or do it imaginatively, and how that sense of an imaginative action or the imaginative bringing to mind of a movement also creates some kind of neural pathway. Even though it is not physical it has a physical effect in some sense. And I was thinking about this in relation to Yoko Ono’s work – to call them imaginative in a way, almost devalues the action that they are capable of, that imagination is an action in a way. It has something to do with transformation of possibility or opening up of a perceptual space that is possible through actual physical movement or actual physical action and also through imaginative proposition. This became very interesting. And that sense of hovering between actual invitation towards actual physical movement and proposition towards imaginative exploration, I am interested in the liminal space between these two modes. I mean, there is a cautionary side to this, as I could, my tendency might be to move in the imaginative direction and then leave the direct experience or the physical experience. Maybe there is something there about a quality of imaginative action which is embodied. There is a quality of imaginative action which does actually activate that neural pathway and there are others which I suppose take flight from the body and from embodied experience into a pure kind of thought realm where there is no transformation of actual experience. And this imagining or bringing to mind of previous experience and the capacity of, it feels as if it is more than bringing to mind, it really brings to body. Also like sending a shiver of neural connection when certain experiences are brought to mind. So maybe there is a hinge between imagination and memory. There is also a threshold that you were talking about, another transition space, there is this one between the imagined and physical dimension, and how a score might activate that.

I don’t know, I think that there is something, a very fundamental thing, is it a relationship between simplicity and complexity. And even moving towards, even coming up with this idea of prompts and scores, trying to find a sparseness, a simplicity, which opens up, a complexity which can open up in that. This feels like a puzzle in the moving and being with the body and also reflected in the writing as well. Back and forth – wanting to describe and capture and communicate and articulate all the complexity of it all, and the impossibility of it actually. And how to do that, how to manage that, how to work with that – is something that we are doing with the body but also in the writing that I find quite fascinating. And it feels that we are doing this, even if we haven’t said that. Maybe all writing is somehow trying to do that. Or maybe some of the writers that I enjoy to read – that is something that I value and get very excited about. Yes, between … we have talked about that before. These practices, particularly Feldenkrais, that really aligns with some of the things that we are doing. Tuning into the back, sitting back, even more so than yoga. Maybe that is not fair. But this idea of the noticing. Not trying to correct or perhaps even intervene or desire something but in the noticing of something already something changes. That’s right, even in visualising or thinking of what might be the first move before moving, this already interferes with habit and skipping over something. Which I find harder to do in writing – well it is hard enough in movement.

The prompts, the notes, the questions, the activations, the invitations:writing alongside them, or thinking alongside them. When were these texts written in the process?So there was something about when do the questions or the prompts arise? Or where do they arise? Or how do they arise? Or why do they arise? So when did I make the note of the question, or note the practice – and so I was reflecting on this before, during and after quality of the practices that we were doing. I mean, maybe I was even coming back to the term practice or exercise as a language for describing the actions themselves. But what I noticed in my notebooks, is that they were coming in the middle. There were several marks in my notebook where I was breaking off from a kind of movement, or a bodily practice, almost like in a moment of excitement.

Something becoming clear to me in the moment of doing it, that materialised as a question or a reflection or a prompt. The questions were never written in advance, or the prompts were not written in advance:they had all emerged in and through the doing, or if not right in the middle of doing – because I was also trying not to keep breaking out of a movement practice to turn to language.ISo if it wasn’t coming in the middle, it was somehow between the during of the activity and the after. But it definitely was not reflecting on,to hold in mind, or bring a sense of the action – rather than necessarily reflect on it. So there was something about the quality of the enquiry, coming from in the middle, so I was thinking about this “in the middle”. I was making notes here about almost like having a dorsal quality to the enquiry. This sense of letting it just come, letting it unfold, or letting the questions arise. So being open to the questioning that was happening through the questioning itself. And the sense that it was unfolding, almost associatively, rather than through a set of pre-planned ideas in a way.

Hélène Cixous’ writing, and the thing that was coming to my mind was this line that she says about ‘Have on hand a notebook’, because often there are these fleeting thoughts that are passing too quickly to capture.The nature of the enquiry was emerging absolutely at the moment of the doing:the impetus for the next exploration was coming out of what has just come before. Trusting that something will come.

So it was interesting to go back to the notebook. I suppose thinking of these, this idea that a note can become a prompt, and that the question, the question sometimes, how to keep the question, even if it is in a note. To be able to see that the question is still there, rather than seeing it as a guess or an incomplete sentence. Or something that isn’t quite formed yet – to erase that, to be continued sense of the exercises or practices. You mentioned Cixous, and I keep working with this quote that she says that she writes to touch the body, to touch the body with the tips of the words. It can become a kind of mantra, that you can write, it embodies this sense of writing with and through the body. And back into the body.

Some of these things I did from memory, casting my mind back to, some things just stay. I can just touch them quickly. But when I go into the notes, there is so much more nuance or things I have forgotten, or things that are actually quite important. So my memories are, they sometimes miss something out or have again jumped somewhere. Which is not wrong … but looking at the notes again, it is surprising that the things that I would notice immediately, what they hold within them as an experience, so there is something about this, the notetaking, very close or in the moment of experiencing something. Because there is no pre-thought, there is an immediacy, about the notetaking, which really holds something.

These questions also project backwards and forwards. How to write something which is very based in a physicality and how that does open up something more, maybe rich with image or even philosophical. And, what it might mean to stay in the process for longer, what emerges in the process.

How a sentence, an incomplete sentence, might itself function as a prompt. Because even as I was looking through the notebooks this morning, I was thinking that there are a lot of things here that I have not seen as possible exercises, but they have that quality. So I was thinking about the forms of the prompts in a way, and some of them got reformulated in the writing up, more as an instruction. Maybe even with the view of being an instruction that someone else could follow – so maybe one of the zones I am interested in is the sense of a question or prompt for oneself in the process of enquiry, and the sharability of that, in the sense of giving that prompt or cue to someone else. Some of the groupings of things were concerned with variation, or transition or even comparison.

I also noticed how much attention was figuring in the questions and in the notes. I was interested in thinking about how some of the prompts and questions invite a certain movement practice, a physical practice, and how some of them were inviting a certain quality of attention, sharpening perception in a particular way. So it felt like there was this very close relationship between movement and awareness and attention. Noticing. Watching. Observing – this was some of the language that was emerging. Notice what changes, what happens. So an action, a kind of call towards a certain kind of movement practice and then almost in the same breath if you like, a call towards a certain kind of attention to bring to that. And then this kind of … what happens. What happens if you do this, or what happens if you do that? What if? So sort of tilting into a sense of calling them experiments, or testings in some kind of way. Trying to find a language through which to describe what these prompts or exercises. Something about this active space between the experience and the writing, and what was happening in that gap, or that relationship. And whether the writing was also a form of attention in a way. And whether the writing was already grasping at something or whether it could stay in this dorsal register in some kind of capacity.

Score suggests that it knows, it is a set of instructions or parameters or ways to do things, following things. These other things – prompts and cues, and testings. And also the idea if they can stay active, or somehow interesting for us, this seems to be an interesting measure of how that might work for someone else.To be working together on that, to keep that, even between us we can be testing what words activate and what they open. So finding those interesting balances between suggestion or activation, inviting something to be done with it, but not filling in anything of what you should be finding or how you should be finding it. Having these physical experiments and tests and revisiting what that feels like, there is something that you can bring with you into writing somehow. So even though you are straying off or entering a different kind of suggestion, it still has a sort of embodied ground to it. Sometimes I feel I have gone too far, I have gone too far. I am writing something that I have not really felt, have I really felt that? Is that really interesting? Somehow I can almost sense it has lost its thread, maybe that’s it, it has lost a thread or a root. But then other times perhaps there is that permission to lose that thread, and to enter more of a poetic license. So it is interesting to know those, how one thing might slip into another. I am just reading, skipping through. Oh, what am I skipping? That is what you wrote. What am I bypassing, what am I not noticing, what am I not intrigued by? Maybe what am I trying not to grasp onto? This sense of a whole list, how a list of questions opens up a whole territory. I am reading and not talking, reading and noticing how those lists of questions sort of bring me here and there, and start to build up a kind of space that I can be in. So it’s not just about skipping or bypassing but those sort of different kinds of words bring me into a shape, shape a space.

This sense of being alert to the point where you are stepping away, or moving away from the experience itself, and that questioning of how much is this really in contact with the experience. And throughout our explorations this question of is this something I am really experiencing or is it something I am thinking about the experience has been alive for me. Even the challenge of direct experience, and staying with that, and getting close to direct experience, rather than withdrawing into, or side-lining into thinking about experience, which might not have any correlation to the experience itself. So there is something to do with this relationship between the live experience, the lived experience, and a mode of writing in relation to that. Going back to my notebooks, it felt faithful to or in fidelity to the experience was when the writing somehow enabled me to stay with it for a bit longer. And in a way, without the writing component, or without the attempt to put something into language, the experience itself would have passed me by. Somehow the writing or the notetaking sharpened my awareness. I think maybe that is how I am thinking about it, writing as an attention practice in its own right somehow. It enabled me to stay with that experience.

A slight experience would open into a field of questions. Open up the experience in a richer sense, and almost like alert me or draw me into the richness of the experience which I think perhaps might have gone unnoticed without the support of language. Maybe there is something to do with thinking about the way that language supports, or allows a kind of dwelling, or staying with in a sense. And to try to notice, yes, like the thing we were talking about with the function of the eyes, sometimes the eyes have this sense of grasping, or reaching out or sort of stretching towards experience in an almost controlling way, a sense-making way, the desire to understand or know. And at other times, you said this beautiful line about just letting the light come in. They have this capacity to also just let the light in. To be receptive. I think that there is something like that in language – there are moments where it feels as if it is really moving with the momentum of the experience, or holding a space open even for that experience to be dwelled in for longer, beyond the experience itself. And then there is a point where it tilts and it starts to be kind of conceptualised, or packaged, or formulated, or coming to conclusions, or resolved in a way. This tendency of language to want to resolve, to make sense of.

There is something about flying a kite.That language carries, it can hold or carry something in movement or in motion, but it has to stay in touch with the experience. I am not sure how kite-flying comes in here – something about holding or staying with the experience of a movement is different to … trying to stay with the sensing, or the sense-making that is emerging rather than trying to make sense of it, or hold it all or grasp it in a particular kind of way. So this sense of how is the mode of writing in relation to the experience. To really pay attention to this transition between the direct experience and language. Maybe that would be something that I would be interested in, in the future – to really notice this transition space, how to take care of that transition and how to open up that transition so the line between the one and the other becomes more porous, that it is not such a clean cut distinction between experience and language, but more like a transition where language holds more of the experience within it somehow. So yes, letting the questions come. Allowing the questions to emerge out of the movement practice or out of the lived experience.

So there is already a push and pull between letting thought come from where we are now, and tuning back into what I have already thought, the notes that were already there. Maybe this issue of space and time is interesting – the timings of our turn taking, the time of turn taking. Of hitting a blank and that not being a problem, being able to drop into this hole where I don’t really know what it is that I want to say. Leaning back into the experience of something and seeing what comes from that. Actually, getting in touch somehow, the leaning back is a way of reigniting a recollection of experience, as if it were live, no, not as if it were live, as it is live. So in my notebook, the notes were very live in the moment that I was writing them, but now I am reading some of them, or tuning into some of them, and I am not sure I am in touch with the liveness of how it felt somehow. Sometimes I feel like I am, and sometimes I feel like I am sharing something that happened a few hours ago when I was thinking. Maybe there is something to do with the actual liveness of where the thinking is happening.

There is a mode of writing which is very linked to the immediacy of the experiencing. This idea that writing, we are writing, also as part of the practice. There was something new in there, this writing, I suppose as a way of thinking around time and memory. This analogy of how the eyes try to grasp and name things, or they can just let the light in. The idea of the writing just letting the light in. The writing is a physical practice in that way, or can be. But there is a real sense of that, much more embedded in what we are doing. By just writing something down it has been noted and therefore there is space to keep experiencing, like the notetaking creates a space. Or otherwise, trying to hold on, to all the experience that happens in half an hour and then to write afterwards, and this sense that you know you, as you experience more and more, you are losing the thinking of it.

How the writing in this, really just sitting back into what might come up. That the writing belongs to the body in those moments rather than to thinking. Or maybe this is the body thinking, bodily thinking coming through the writing in those moments of experimenting and exercising. Yes, so the kite. The wind whipped around, and the kite came. And I am holding on to the image of the kite, here. It is interesting how the wind absolutely scatters thinking. There is something in the wind, because it is bringing me into, into the body. And it is interesting then how this idea of thinking or trying to articulate thoughts, becomes more difficult.

 There are also these little thresholds – there is something that is interesting about revisiting something that is obvious, that is absolutely demanding attention again. Maybe that is also part of the dorsal, that there is not an embracing, but a sort of acceptance of coming back to what is already known but as soon as you relive it or reactivate it, it has got that mysterious, almost a kind of rediscovery. We keep needing to move back, or drop back in order to reactivate the things that the body knows and maybe we are also proposing its, not needs, but it does create a particular quality in moving, working, living.

This back-behind-ness. Or this lovely phrase – future-leaning. And I have adopted this axial-surface-technologies which I also … these little terminologies that they have moved away but they are kind of parcels in a way, aren’t they. They sort of encapsulate maybe a number of things that we have experienced and have talked about, and kind of shared. There is this kind of vocabulary or lexicon that is arising.I

To notice how these are emerging, how they emerge, and how they create a kind of language in themselves. And perhaps at the same time, I notice that once I am using those words there is somehow a danger of somehow assuming quite a lot, because it might be that where it has come from … once you have a phrase it takes on its own life and can also move away. Or maybe also needs to be kept alive or nuanced or that it is allowed to shift and not become a fixed thing in language. Maybe that is also a prompt or opening. What does that mean – that back-leaning, or back-behind-ness? Or what is axial-technology? Maybe that is interesting, to yes, to fold back these terms into opening up, using those in the prompts as openings rather than fixings. It invites back to the floor. And I am remembering now the writing in the movement, in movement.

One of the things that really struck me was this folding back, folding back to reengage with certain terms. I was struck when you were saying the prompts, to go back through, back-notes. I was thinking what is this gesture of going back through your notes or going back to. Because it does not feel as if it is in the key of reflection, it feels as if the nature of it is something different. Reflection feels as though it would be with some distance now. Looking again. You know, drawing out things with distance, to reflect back on. But going back through, these back-notes, going back to the notes feels as if there is something very much like a re-enlivening, or reinvestigating. So not reflecting on an experiment or practice, but reactivating or re-enacting or re-enlivening it. This thing that you were saying about how certain experiences or ideas crystalise into certain terminologies – like future-leaning, or axial-technologies. And then, almost like, there was almost a sense of them hardening as you were saying that, into an object almost. Like an object. The word is almost like an object on the page. That is easy to copy and paste, or move from here to there, because it is just like an object that you can lift up and move. And then the desire that this language is not movable like that, it is not possible to, it is never, there is this desire for it not to coalesce into an object, that you can lift and move from here to there, without even thinking about it, without interrogating it. But that somehow the language itself has to stay with a quality of mobility. The language is like the spine in a way, it has to be exercised in all of its directions. There is a desire for the back not to stiffen into object, into a flat plane of existence. Yes, I feel from so much sitting at the screen, my back does feel like an object in a sense. A solid block that is not even part of me somehow – it is just this thing. And as you move the back and explore the back, it stops being a thing and starts being an experience. And I think that there is something that this same quality with language – if you are not exercising it, or not moving it or not rolling with it in a way, it starts to solidify into something which is quite hard and object-like. And that going back, this back-note, this going back through, is not to try and crystalise ideas into objects, or blocks of terminology but to try an exercise of repetition which is to do with keeping it fluid and mobile in some kind of way. Because language has this tendency to stiffen quite quickly into concepts. Or into something that is not, that is no longer synchronous, or within the same space of the experience itself. The mode of it … so there are a lot of -ings. So letting, waiting. Waiting for the back to respond. Letting the body drop away. So somehow in this transition it had gone from a kind of language which was describing an unfolding experience to an instruction, that felt as if it could be set in advance of the action somehow.

In the notebook, more often than not, either there is no expression like that, there is no instruction, or it is in the -ing-ing form. So “taking awareness to the back” is how it is written in my notebook but when I typed it up it because “take awareness to the back”. I got interested in what was happening there – it was not even a transition into language, because the notebooks are quite faithful to the experience, they are in the key of during-ness. But in the typing up something was happening even without my attention, there was a transition between a kind of language that was happening almost like alongside the movement, it was moving with the movement, it wasn’t saying “lie on one’s back”, it was saying “lying on one’s back”. So it was a language which was parallel to the experience itself, synchronous to it, or unfolding at the same time.

I was thinking about the precision of language, and in a way being precise about staying close to the form which emerges in the note-taking, or really attending to these moments in the text, even reintroducing this -ing dimension to the prompts so that the language feels as if it is much more describing something as it is unfolding, rather than instructing prior to action in some kind of way. Yes, I was surprised by this, in a way it is a minor detail but it does something quite dramatic to the quality of the prompt.

To try to really inhabit a more passive mode where it is more deliberately not possible to pin down to a specific subject. So it leaves it more open in a way. But I This sense of the -ing was to do with trying to get close to a form of language which feels as if it is unfolding, almost like it is interwoven with the experience, or at the same time as the experience. The -ing or the not -ing. Is this a note about what was experienced turning into a prompt. Who is it then for? Is there a you? Or is there an I? Or sometimes trying to get rid of the you and the I, so it is very open as to who, and what, and when. How something might not instruct but still might invite someone or even give to the urge to do it. So in a way although it is not instructing it kind of invites strongly enough that it does the same as an instruction. I am also interested in how these things can work in time and can sometimes slip between, sometimes there are little moments (and also in yours) which feels like there is a link to this has happened for someone, and it can happen again. And even if it doesn’t happen it is still possible. Between what has occurred and what is still possible.I

What kind of space is opening?

Memory does jump here and there, and the body memory also will do lots of lovely playing around with time. Maybe there is something in the movement and something that you were suggesting – this idea of the movement of the writing as well, and as soon as it comes into motion, all these different folds and twists and forces and pulls and pushes and little devices. The complexity of that in motion and also of writing. I wrote this last sentence – moving through the back is a quiet dance. And then, sometimes when I write things like that there is a little ooh, that’s nice. And then afterwards it is like, well it’s not only a quiet dance. It is also this and also that. So that immediate sense, when it totally makes sense and also a kind of fear of pinning something down and claiming something. Maybe it is similar to this idea of not wanting to instruct but still wanting to be clear. That is very interesting I think in language, and then you can feel the awkwardness of – I like that but it is not totally true.Moving through the back is a quiet dance – just seeing what happens when that is in the world, or given to someone else, or looked at or read again the next day. And how it sits on the page or how it sits in the voice.. How not to flatten the ideas somehow?

 What to call these forms of language, in relation to experience. the invitation is also imaginative, it is not always activated with a physical movement, or at least, not with a visibly recognisable physical movement. Then visualise it, or do it imaginatively, and how that sense of an imaginative action or the imaginative bringing to mind of a movement also creates some kind of neural pathway. Even though it is not physical it has a physical effect in some sense. Imagination is an action in a way. It has something to do with transformation of possibility or opening up of a perceptual space that is possible through actual physical movement or actual physical action and also through imaginative proposition. And that sense of hovering between actual invitation towards actual physical movement and proposition towards imaginative exploration, I am interested in the liminal space between these two modes. I mean, there is a cautionary side to this, as I could, my tendency might be to move in the imaginative direction and then leave the direct experience or the physical experience. Maybe there is something there about a quality of imaginative action which is embodied. There is a quality of imaginative action which does actually activate that neural pathway and there are others which I suppose take flight from the body and from embodied experience into a pure kind of thought realm where there is no transformation of actual experience. And this imagining or bringing to mind of previous experience and the capacity of, it feels as if it is more than bringing to mind, it really brings to body. Also like sending a shiver of neural connection when certain experiences are brought to mind. So maybe there is a hinge between imagination and memory. Another transition space, there is this one between the imagined and physical dimension, and how a score might activate that.

Is it a relationship between simplicity and complexity. And even moving towards, even coming up with this idea of prompts and scores, trying to find a sparseness, a simplicity, which opens up, a complexity which can open up in that. Back and forth – wanting to describe and capture and communicate and articulate all the complexity of it all, and the impossibility of it actually. And how to do that, how to manage that, how to work with that – is something that we are doing with the body but also in the writing that I find quite fascinating.