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PART 1

EXPLORATION PERIOD: 14 - 22 April 2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: The focus during this period was on the experience of back-ness, with reference to the word "perhaps". This word "perhaps" or maybe even per-haps (per - through, hap - happen, happenstance) has emerged as a point of interest from the last phase of conversation. Rather than selecting a named focus or even specific 'scores' or 'instructions', we decided to explore what might unfold operating in the mode of 'perhaps'. 

We each undertook this exploration separately over the period. Below are some of the individual exercises / scores / questions / prompts that we used for activating the exploration or that emerged through the enquiry.

PART 2

EXPLORATION DATE: 22.04.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration (between 14.04.2022 - 22.04.2022).

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 [5 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

22.04.2022 Perhaps

I was thinking just before, partly because I had opened up some of the suggestions that we had put in for that conference proposal, and that idea of what we had been reading, and some of the ideas that were informing us. And I noticed that each time I feel as if I need to work with that or to share it or articulate the things I have been reading to another person, how I start to squirm and wriggle. And I think it is because I am realising, for example with the David Wills book and other examples, how they, how they also sort of seep. Because we were talking last time about this experience in a way of the dorsal more as a quality that can seep through rather than be more of sort of very conscious activation. And I thought this is how reading also works, and this is kind of obvious but I think it feels quite poignant in relation to this attention to the dorsal that theories from others and ideas can also work in that way – that they are not always immediately understood or that we value, even though you think you understand, the next day you do not understand or you understand something different. And I was realising that some of the things I am reading, I am really not understanding in a way if I need to speak it back to myself, or write it down, or tell someone else. It slips through my fingers again. And I have become a little more confident in that, that is a different understanding or processing that is going on there. And some of these ideas they come into the body or they create images almost as a choreographic prompt to work with in the body. So some of David Wills’ with the ‘dorsal turn’, he has this convoluted way of writing in circles which I kind of accept and understand through the body, and take that on board. But at the same time, I get very lost in the writing and actually what he is saying, because there isn’t a beginning point and an end point. So I am working through this circular writing and reading, that he is in a way proposing I think. It was interesting thinking about how ideas inform us and how our conversation on our reading and on our digesting of ideas can I suppose in different ways or be absorbed in different ways and be expressed later in different ways and at different times. This is one thought I had and maybe this links up with this from last time, about micro-articulation and micro-frequency. I thought maybe these ideas seep into the body, when someone has written this whole book - difficult philosophical and theoretical – just to take a little micro-feeling, or a micro-sense or a micro-image of it and how that can then, how that can open up a big territory of exploration or an ongoing curiosity or intrigue or working-with. Something like the turning, the turn. That just continues to resonate in the body, something I have taken away still without fully understanding perhaps what he is even saying.

It is interesting that you are talking about reading, because it has been on my mind a little bit this week. We have just started a reading group around ‘slow practices’ and I think that there is a lot of resonance. And it has made me really realise how this relationship between reading and some kind of practice and language, is so important for my practice. Like they sort of animate each other somehow, in a way that I cannot always put my finger on how. So I can do more conventional scholarship where the reading is engaged perhaps more intentionally perhaps, but this is definitely not how I read, and that sense of how you were describing reading and it somehow, the excitement of reading and yet it slips through your fingers and it is impossible to, like the inability to be able to précis what has been read, or to be able to distil down into key points or key arguments. My experience is very much this case. But there is something very much to do with a kind of animating spark that gets set of in reading, and I think that the places where I notice it most is when the reading is brought to mind or arrived at accidentally or by chance or by the trigger of a word. It happened today actually, I feel tired and I was thinking about this idea of the relief of lying down, the relief of coming into the body and then the sense of ‘release’ was there as a possibility of exploration. In the reading this week, on slow practices, part of it was referring to Heidegger’s ideas around dwelling and lingering. But one of the terms mentioned was ‘releasement’. I have come across this term before and I find it really intriguing, and this prompted me to look again at this idea of releasement. It feels like the movement led it there in a way, but there was also this sense of a chance encounter from earlier. So sometimes it feels like chance constellations in a way, and sometimes it is easy to miss, as it feels so fleeting and fragile, that flash of connection gets lost. At other times it is just possible to catch that kind of chance stimulus of a word and a reference comes to mind again. And to follow with it. But I think that there is also something there about not grasping into it, to hold it somehow lightly. The same with the dorsality text, to not look towards it for explanation, to hold it lightly within experience somehow. To like move with it, yes, to move with it. My mind feels all over the place. This morning I was walking through the wood, in the park, and it is windy today, and so the notion of ‘sway’ was quite present because the trees were really moving. And there was this point where I was swaying and I think of this with reading as well, just swaying with it. Or somehow, yes the other thing in my awareness today was this sense of having something in mind, quite lightly. So having the notion of dorsal practices lightly in mind, held in the background but not looked at too directly. I think that there is something about this with reading as well, for it to sit there but it is not studied as such, so it informs but in an indirect way.

I like what you were saying about holding it lightly in mind. Even this sense of light, of lightly rather than … not to go to the opposite with heavy, but lightly as in so that things can still move and don’t get stuck or fixed and weighty so that they can’t move. So there is a fluidity in them. And also how ideas, sometimes they pass through or they stick around for a while or they connect with other things, and perhaps there is something about this lightness and taking things with into walking, into talking, into working, then ideas start to come into all of these different activities and processes, and come into experience. I like this, I think it is interesting that it can be brought even into this activity of reading which is often wanting to grasp, or I can often feel very frustrated if I cannot grasp. And yet when I don’t try to grasp and admit that I am a little more of a person who skims and sketches than digs and digs, also I find this very interesting. There are different ways of being able to process and how perhaps giving it a bit more value, but there is something about this skimming and sketching rather than in depth, full colour representation. It picks up on something else, and maybe can be more easily taken with, or be brought into experience, as you said. This week I have been, I have been actually lying down quite a lot in small moments here and there – ten minutes or five minutes or even two minutes. Quite regularly, and very simply, not moving, very simply lying on my back. I think because the weather is so light in the Spring, it feels like it is pulling you into action, but then there are those moments where I sit more in, and stay. To lie, and let everything pass over or pass through, rather than be drawn into the crazy seagull activity and wind, the birds are super busy at the moment. It is nice to pause and lie down, I have also been lying down outside. We talked about this before … more joining in with the other things around. Something about coming away from the upright always, often surprises me after I lie down and have a couple of breaths, how the body starts to settle in a very different way and the breath, the muscles, the heart, the pulse, the whole configuration of the body and the senses change again.

One of the things that was coming to me this morning was this thing about letting, letting go, no, how was it? It was … I was lying on the floor and thinking about, or bringing to mind the idea of release. Before I got to releasement, and before I had started looking at this Heidegger reference to releasement. But thinking about what is it that inhibits release and releasement, what stops it? And one of the things that stops it was time. Like feeling like there was not enough time to do it, so contraction of time. And then there was just, I am not sure if this is to do with time or with the body, but an unwillingness to drop into the experience. So almost like an involuntary movement of the leg as if I wanted to get up again. Like out of my control in a way, the impulse of the body or of the mind was not allowing me to drop into this settled experience, but was compelling me to get up and do something. So I was interested in … there are some movements that enable this releasing and then there are also some of these movements that are much more restless and resisting in a way. And where this led was something to do with this notion of letting go in the sense of what needs to be let go in order to, in order to release. So this quality of loosening, and relaxing and renouncing. Letting go. And then what was interesting was that it then paired with this idea of letting, which I don’t think, I mean it is there in what I had been thinking, but it was not so clear as this morning, that there is this correlation between ‘letting go’ and ‘letting’. And letting had much more of a sense of opening up and allowing and following, but it seemed that these two momentums were really somehow working in a sort of complementary way or certainly there was something about letting go in order to let. And I don’t know which comes first – maybe you have to first let in order to let go.And so the letting had much more of a quality of fluidity. Actually it was making me think of blood letting and I wanted to look at that – the histories and origins of blood letting, the incision that lets the blood flow, the blood flowing or this kind of opening into something more playful and curious in a way. So one of the things that is more strong is again this curiosity about certain etymologies and this play between letting and letting go, or letting go and letting. This felt very live this morning, and it was also making me think of “let’s”. So, in a previous conversation we have talked about scores and I do like a lot of Yoko Ono’s scores actually because of the way they operate between an imaginative proposition and a call to a certain kind of movement or action. But there is a quality in a lot of her scores of “Let’s”. So a “try this”, “let’s try this” , “let’s”, “let us, let us do this” – it opens it up, it has this invitation. So there became this almost poetic field emerging between letting go, and letting and let’s. That started to emerge and I got interested in, in a way. This let. I really want to explore it now – this notion of letting, or opening or allowing, or … I don’t know its etymology fully, I am curious about it in that sense. And the relationship of those three fields.

I was listening to the radio when I was driving the other day and there was a short programme around looking at the four cardinal directions, and then it went into more introductory stuff around how each direction has a number of histories and cultural aspects circulating around each of them – North, South, East, West. And bringing up the idea of how we navigate differently now, or how many of us have lost the ability to use a map or a compass. Even these ideas of navigating by the sun, the moon, the stars and wind. Which I thought was nice when you were talking about the swaying trees is the wind, in that there is a technique there for understanding where you are in relationship to how the wind is blowing in certain places. Where am I going with this? I suppose he was talking about orientating and navigating and understanding where you are in relation to other things. And it was linked to another conversation that I have been having in relation to located-ness. We have been talking about how seeing and hearing, and understanding where you are through different ways, through listening, even senses the vibration of other things through the skin. A wider sense of located-ness, in terms of understanding where you are in relation to other things, other people. But even wider than that – political or cultural or social or material. There was something in there, coming back to these ideas of orientation and oriented towards the East and the North, which is always up on a map, we always point up to the North. So these systems of navigation and in a way what we have been talking about is different because this is in relationship to forwards or backwards or around the side. Perceiving through the senses. But in some ways I think that there are some interesting overlaps, the programme was also talking about wayfinding, finding the way. I think I was triggered because we were talking about this last week or the week before, especially in relation to trying to respond to what the other has just said and not being able to recall it. And having to go around the back of things, or meander a little while in order to find a way in, or find a way back. There was also something about google maps and all these apps which tell you where you are and where to go, it is a very different relationship to the body and where you are going, and what this technology is telling you. That is very different to unfolding a huge map and working out where you are in relationship to where you are going and all these systems of roads and geographical details. And satellite maps – just how technologies change. Our part of how we evolve and how we locate ourselves and how we understand what is close to us, what is far away, what is almost impossible to get to, or how to get to places. And I find that very interesting somehow around these different systems of locating, navigating, orientating. In relation to the dorsal as well, how that fits in. Or a sense of orienting backwards, towards the back. There was something that brought me back – this sense of facing to the back, or face to face, or back to back. Maybe because of this North, South, East and West, and the front to the back and right to the left. Which is very kind of simplistic but within, that is what we are moving within. There are these modes, where we passed through very quickly – oh it is to the right or it is to the left. And then all this slippery manoeuvring and articulating and understanding among that. So there was something interesting in that brought me back to … I feel would like to write these things down and just go in there a little more. Way finding, to find the way. And finding a way, finding a way, rather than looking for the way. There is something about way finding that felt that you, it is nice this idea that you are not focused on where you are going or don’t have a plan of where you are going but you find, you discover, you come across. Perhaps, per-chance, a way. And maybe there is, you were talking about the score again, and the ‘lets’, and how the let’s, the different ways, invites, whether a prompt might invite. Invite in. The let’s is very inclusive, it includes the prompter as well as the prompted. I like that, the let’s includes, in the case of Yoko Ono, it absolutely includes her as well, and includes everyone, anyone, who might read or take up such a score. Which is very different from an instruction which somehow puts a distance from where it has come from, it puts the onus on the person receiving or engaging with it.Maybe this is not quite true? Maybe that is not quite true, but there is a different quality of where it is coming from and how that is included. The ‘let’s’ is a very gentle and inclusive way, it does not have the authority that an instruction might have, or a sense that the someone ‘behind’ that prompt knows something that the other person doesn’t. It is much more of a testing, a trying out, let’s see what happens if we do this. And there is something coming back to this wayfinding, this place and direction, and I might be, now I am thinking aloud, the let’s or instruction, and how these different forms of prompt might operate.

It is so interesting this experience of listening in this way, like it almost feels like there are all of these melodies of possibility that are … and I cannot quite hold them, they are in the air. They come and go somehow in my recollection of what you were saying. Yes, I don’t have a direct path to get to them somehow. It is interesting. Maybe one thing that you were talking about which I was really struck by was this sense of wayfinding. And this finding of the way, rather than sort of acting with purpose or direction at the outset, or setting the destination in advance. You know, finding a way. And maybe there is something in the exploration, that I was struggling to identify prompts in advance. And as soon as I stopped doing that and just began it kind of, things led to other things. It is like the route or the path was not planned in advance. The thing that came to mind very strongly was the sense of just trusting that something would come from something, and just being willing to enter that space. And again, a sense of relief or of release in that. Just not needing to plan all of the time, but to just trust that with a degree of openness something will lead to something, and some place will be arrived at, some experience will be arrived at that could not have been anticipated at the outset. And yet, often I don’t trust that. I can have such a struggle in trusting that, and in having confidence in that. But when I do it, when I do have confidence in it, it is so liberating, getting out the way really of what is unfolding, and allowing things to take their course in a way. Like, again, we have talked about a river motif in the past, maybe, at least I think we have. And there is a sense that it wants to go somewhere but often I just get in the way and stop it or block it. So actually as you were talking about wayfinding, I was thinking about, not me finding the way, but the way finding me. So it is not that I find the way but that the way finds me. And actually sometime this does feel closer to experience. Yes, I am found by the way, rather than me finding it. So there is something about - maybe this is also this letting or allowing or being receptive to what might happen. Funnily enough, in the walk today, there is a kind of weird little valley in the park that has a river running through it, it is very small. I know that there are entry points to go down the side of this valley, but in 20 years of living here I have never gone down the valley, even though I know you can. And today the path called me. You have to go through the undergrowth and then drop down and it was really exciting. And it felt like it was because I was entering this space with this sense of dorsal practising more foregrounded. It was not like I had discovered something I had never seen before, I know it is there, I have seen it. But there was never the sufficient curiosity to follow that path in a way. And today there was. And it was really amazing, it drops down and there was a completely different perspective because you were effectively lower than the playing field which surrounds it which would be the usual walk. So there was this dropping under, this sense of dropping under the usual experience of the space that I had. Yes, and maybe that sense of orientation and disorientation. Maybe this connects with the thing that you were saying about the orientation of North and South and East and West. And I was again struck by and thinking about how things are not always what they seem in a way. So this idea of North facing, and the idea of the uprightness of the North, the up-ness of the North, but I was thinking maybe it is like the experience of being in the woods, the Northerly side of trees is often mossy, because it is the most shaded area. So the North side is always the most shaded or the most murky. So I was thinking about this murkiness, this shaded, this shadow. The shadow side, it is like the reverse side or the back side of things. So it is interesting, I was thinking, does the dorsal have more of a Northerly dimension, this mossy, shadowy, shady side. And then I thought, this is interesting, is this only true of the North hemisphere? Do trees on the Southern hemisphere … I don’t know. My sense of ignorance of how the sun and our planet work – I don’t know. Is it that the shaded side is only like this in the Northern hemisphere – I don’t know? Again, a sense of how the radical positioning of ourselves on the planet takes - all of our metaphors, all of our language is so determined by the position that we have, positions that we take, where we are located even in the world. And then this idea of hemisphere became interesting – like the North and the South hemisphere of the planet, and then as you were talking about the right and the left, I was thinking about, what it brought to mind, was a sense of the hemispheres of the brain. And how, they are opposite to what you think, I think that this is true. That the right hemisphere of the brain is more connected to the left side of the body. So they work on that kind of diagonal. So the right side of the body is more connected to the left hemisphere of the brain. And this sense, coming into contact with the work of Iain McGuilchrist, who talks about how the sense that the left hemisphere is more involved in analytic thinking, maybe even future leaning thinking. And the right is associated with a wide expansive, perhaps even creative, form of attention. I was thinking that this is interesting – it does feel as if dorsal thinking sits more in that right hemispheric thinking of expansiveness and opening and not the narrowing, analytical thinking of the left hemisphere.All these orientations – of North and South, and left and right, and narrow and wide … these different momentums. And the thing that you were talking about … not having a straight path. Maybe this also connects to the wayfinding, that the path is not drawn like a straight line, it meanders and it takes tangents. The word that was coming to mind this morning was this sense of not being ‘straight forward’. And then I got interested in this ‘straight-forward-ness’ and what does this mean, it is such a strange idea. Even the value of being ‘straight forward’ seems so weird. I would really like to explore that – what does it mean to be straight forward? And, why is that a value? It seems such a strange value – so one dimensional in a way, to just be straight forward. What is this straight-forward-ness? And, how is a dorsal way of practising, not straight forward? This sense of not being straight forward is often used in a derogatory sense, and this struck me as interesting. Why is that so? And what might it be to reclaim the sense of not being straight forward as a positive quality in a way, not being direct?

Picking up on what you were last saying about straight forward. Isn’t that a strange term – straight forward. And it does seem to be something that people value because I suppose it creates a kind of … one dimensionality is at least clear. There is at least little that has to be discussed or decided, it is tidy and it is neat. And it is just this one thing. And there is perhaps a practical pragmatism to it. Actually when you were saying about right and left, I was thinking that is interesting because it is there in myths or in the sense of people being left handed … are more creative, and that the left is more to do with the dark and the non-rational. But I suppose it is to do with the diagonal of how the brain is working, with the diagonal opposite of the body. It is interesting how different feelings of right-ness and left-ness, and how the left if often thought of as more mystical and the right as more rational. And how the brain works – and I found this really fascinating, what you were saying about the brain and the hemispheres. Yes, how we understand how we are, or who we are in relation to where we are, in amongst who we are with. Yes, now I am really meandering, but there is something about ‘straight forward’,which I notice mostly in work situations where if you are not straight forward you can be easily dismissed, or passed over, or not taken seriously, and these things which are a little bit more, which require thinking through things, or indirectness. Yes, indirectness – it is not straight to the point. There is the pressure of time and people are impatient, and things need to get done and sorted. So it is interesting how actually, it is so valuable to have these indirect and not quite knowing states, even in work situations where things need to get done. So it is interesting, it somehow feels important to be able to value those things in order to bring them to the table, into the work place, into living spaces, so that they can manifest. And sometimes there is a wonderful pleasure in going straight forward. I think about this, also because are talking about this North and South and East and West and uprightness and you walking and being drawn into the valley. It made me think again of the singing, no not singing, swimming that I am doing a lot. And I don’t think about it because I am going a lot, and I don’t go for very long, but very regularly. So there is a sense that there is a straight-forwardness to it – I often do front crawl, so going up and down, swinging arm and pulling water, and breathing to the right and to the left. And in and out, so very much a whole set of these binary things – front and back and right and left and up and down and front and back. It is almost that the straight-forward-ness creates in a way a score or a prompt. And I often think about this because it is not in nature. Swimming in the sea or in the river is different, and somehow more about, more a sensual immersive experience. But the pool, it is also a rectangle. You have lanes. There is very much a square straight-forward-ness in the architecture and in the activity. But it also acts as a possible score with which to play and to explore, and certainly the back for me is very present in swimming, with front crawl, the coordinating … it made me think of this right and left and this diagonal relationship. What is happening in the brain, what is happening on the right and left side of the body? It made me think, that is why we have to turn then, to keep turning and to keep moving the spine to turn, to activate these diagonal relationships, and the criss-crossings and the meanderings. The turn is in a way – it is not straight forward. It brings me back to the turn – maybe that is why the turn is so fascinating. It is constantly pulling you off the straight, the upright – pulling you a little this way and a little that way. It is like the swaying, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. And swimming is like that – this playground of how everything is coordinated, and the up and the down, the kicking of the legs which is hard to coordinate with the twisting of the spine and the breathing. And understanding when you are at the end. So there is something interesting in how a straight-forward situation might be a playground for a very detailed, nuanced, subtle, fluid, light, murky, dorsal activity. There is something about swimming and being in the water which does create immediately a different relationship to gravity and a different relationship to seeing and hearing and I suppose touching – you are immersed in something rather than being on something, rather than on the ground. The floating and the different relation to gravity and the not being upright, also I think reconfigures the relation of the body and gravity. It is not a social space, because you have goggles on and head down. People are passing but there is an understanding of not being in a social space. Swimming together, alongside, passing or overtaking. Interesting. So perhaps because it is disturbing this uprightness. And I was also thinking about how this straight forwards can feel very one dimensional in relation to this word simple or simplicity, which I also find a fascinating word. Sometimes I am writing it because I mean something, but I realise when it is read it might mean something else – this idea of simplicity. When something is simple in the sense that is it naïve or has not been understood or even looked at… but sometimes a simplicity, maybe like Yoko Ono’s scores … maybe we are searching for something like this with our scores. The simplicity has absorbed a lot of understanding and a lot of practice, and finds a simple suggestion.

Yes such a lot of interesting things. This image of the diagonal or this sense of the diagonal feels very strong. There was a point when you were talking and I was imagining some swimming pools that I have been in which are quite short in length, and thinking why ever would I never swim on the diagonal. Even if I am in there myself or the lanes are not set, to swim the diagonal makes the space longer. So there is this sense of a diagonal orientation somehow creating space where there appears to be none – this cut of the diagonal and this triangulation occurs through that, it make things longer, it give space.And then what came to mind was the sense of the diagonal as a desire line. Again, maybe thinking of my experience in the wood and all of these diagonal paths which cut across the path or cut the corner, so it has got this weird quality of extending space but also the desire line of cutting the corner. Refusing to be one or the other, but being both. And then the movement of front crawl and that bringing to mind some of the experiences or exercises from Feldenkrais, and that sense of the diagonal between the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle and how that carries into walking. And to really have this awareness of the correlation. I remember Fiona Wright, who has been my main teacher within Feldenkrais and I have not done it all that often, but her talking, and it is a Feldenkrais sense of the torso almost being like a hankerchief and you are taking the corners of the hankerchief towards one another. The diagonal corners of the shoulder girdle and the pelvis. And then this sense of liberation when you take that into walking. I don’t have this experience in walking, actually my walking is quite upright. My torso feels as if it stay rather still – probably this is why I have back issues. That sense of when you really move into walking and really allow this sense of the diagonal to be operative. And in swimming as well. When you really go into swimming and you really feel that diagonal. Thinking of front crawl as this really weird operation that you are really working the diagonal in order to go forward. And it is just really efficient. Again that notion of efficiency in a really pleasurable sense. Yes, and then something about desire. When I was talking about the desire lines, I don’t know, thinking about the sense of desire, at times it can have this wilful dimension to it. That idea of grasping towards something which we have mentioned earlier, but I was thinking about another kind of desire which is much more receptive, a receptive desire. I am not sure where I am going with this. Maybe it is not so much a desire, but a pleasure or a joy which is not a grasping kind, but really holding a space open and being receptive to things. Earlier you were talking about that sense of feeling in movement with things, feeling in movement with the world. And I had a sense of this, this morning when I was exploring this swaying. No, actually what I did this morning was before I … if I were to begin a practice usually I might come to the floor as a first port of call if you like, that would be the reset. And I was interested today to think about sensation. And often, I feel quite desensitised. So before beginning, no, I came out of the beginning and was exploring stroking or tapping the back of the body, like the back of the legs, and the back of the calves and the kidneys, and the back. And using touch as a way of sensitising the body before then releasing, and I think that these are practices that are used in somatic practice – touching, or tapping, or activating the body through active touch. And then shaking, really activating the body before coming to the ground. And it was such a different experience actually, there was a tingling and vibration of the body which then spread into groundedness. This was really different. So I was interested in taking this touching and tapping and shaking of the body into the woods and into an outside space, and as I was doing that, there was this strong sense of sway or of movement. And there was this sense that ordinarily I am just passing through. It was interesting that you talked about passing through earlier, but it felt that my passing through was quite negative in a way. I am like an arrow cutting through the experience of life. But then standing and moving, it was really a movement with the world. Maybe again there a sense of the multi-directionality of life becomes really apparent then. It is almost like my orientation, particularly if I am in a hurry feels very horizontal, or directional. Singularly directional, straight forward in fact. But there was something about the movement in this space, where everything was just moving in so many directions and it sensitised me to that. Almost a bit chaotic in a way, the vibrancy of the situation was almost too much, in its vibrancy. But really exciting too because it was about being with all of that. Where often it is just, there is a sense of too strong a sense of agency or of will, and just getting through it, getting through. Even getting through the walk because I am in a hurry and I need to get to what is coming next. And that idea of lingering in it and being with the movement of the world in a different way felt very vibrant. And actually, it is bringing me back to this text which I really want to look at. This text by Heidegger on releasement, or the term is, a German term, Gelassenheit.But what was funny is that I was trying to print it but my printer was going super slow, because it was printing it in colour. So I was really easy to read this text which in a way is talking about non-willing, or letting go of willed action. And yet I was willing this text to print and it was coming through very slowly, maybe a millimetre every minute or something. But there is something in it, which I have touched upon, which is to do with this non-wilful dimension. A kind of thinking, is what the focus of the text is, which opens up through non-willing. And in the text there is something about weaning ourselves off from will. And it really feels like that sometimes, that the wilfulness, or the frontality of action, keeps creeping back, time and time again. And I feel that with this work I am weaning myself off it, but it is hard. You know, it is really hard. And it is interesting to think, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? I don’t know. And something in this releasement is this idea of opening to something that is not known. So releasing into the mystery or the not known or the unknown. And maybe there is something there, of course the direct route is easier, because the unknown is really frightening actually and uneasy. Maybe there is something here about uneasiness. Yes, uneasy. Like uneasiness, and all of the different dimensions of uneasiness. So there might be difficulty. Difficulty is the opposite of easy.

It is funny how these un- words, how they, so easy and uneasy. Oh, that’s easy. But uneasy is difficulty but also that feeling, as you say, of not knowing. So it is unsettling. An uneasy, uncomfortable. It is not only to do with difficulty but also creates a strange, murky unease, when things are not quite known. They disorientate, they pull us off that strong feeling of being grounded, and ‘I know where I am’. Yes, linked with fear. I like this unease, this slight unease, something that is lurking a little bit. Releasement – I don’t know this term. This is interesting. Moving into what is not known, so there is a relationship with some of the things that we have been talking about with the dorsal. Things that are murky or that are not known or are not sharply in focus. It is bringing me into … I was thinking about another book where I don’t get past the first page but which keeps bringing me to this image of the un-. The title of the book is called Unthought, Katherine Hayles idea of the levels … you were talking about the brain. It is also about cognition, so these discoveries around what she calls non-conscious cognition. And unthought as that which happens before thinking. But it is shared, there is a lot more non-conscious cognition happening than we, that was first thought. There is still a lot more to discover around that. But also it is, it is also something that is shared with other animate beings, so there is this sense there of the before-thinking, before-articulating, which is also perhaps uneasy, and is unclear and ungraspable. I am thinking of all these un- words now – uncertain, unsure. I was … now this un- is making me think of re-, when we did this etymology of re- as in back, as in return, and recollect. I have lost my thought. It has disappeared. Yes, I am now in this image of swaying, of you swaying and of trees swaying. Deviating from right to left and being a bit off kilter. But the sway is a very gentle, fluid, subtle way, it is different from stumbling. There is fluidity to it, it reminds me of those wonderful movies. Crouching Tiger, these fights happening and these swaying trees, and the movement in that. In sway. And to be swayed.

Being swayed. And easily swayed. This is super interesting because this is what I was aspiring to in that practice – to be easily swayed. And it was hard actually, because there is so much of the habit of my body resisting that sense of swaying. I was looking up at the trees – and how the strength of the tree was also coming from its capacity to be easily swayed. I think it even strengthens the roots in trees, right, the sway, the sway in the wind. There is something about not staking trees for too long, because the sway really encourages root growth and stability. And again, there are all of these phrases that are written into our culture that have positive or negative connotations. Straight-forward-ness has this positive connotation. Easily swayed has a negative connotation. And there is something about the kind of voluntarily swaying or moving into a sense of sway that feels really delightful, again this sense of delight. Just releasing. This feeling of just releasing into the movement of the world. Yes, especially when it is windy. It even sounds a bit far-fetched in a way … having a sense of grounded on the floor and this sense of the planet moving. Just the bizarreness of that, that there is this huge land mass, and there we are on the surface of it. And wow, why are we not swaying more, you know. And that play with gravity. I guess that gravity is also the thing that stops us from swaying in a way. I don’t know. Now I am thinking of vertigo, and that sense of dizziness and the sway that can be experienced in vertigo, of not being steady. All these positive and negative connotations – of sway, and just the navigation of that, the untangling of that, of the properties, or qualities or characteristics that might be worth redeeming or investigating, from those that are somehow paralysing. Because there is a sense of vertiginous, dizzy sway which is undesirably disorientating. But then at other times this can be really pleasurable. So I am thinking, what are the circumstances that makes something desirable or non desirable. Same with straight-forward-ness or simplicity – in some circumstances I might be really drawn to that, and at other times there is something about this meandering, circling – and maybe it is not one or the other, but how the two cooperate. And maybe it is back to this sense of cooperation and how seemingly opposite orientations or tendencies between directness and indirectness, and steadfastness or stillness and swaying, and groundedness and ungroundedness.There is something in this transitional movement or range of possibility that opens up between these poles that seems interesting somehow. That they are in cooperation, creative cooperationsomehow. And maybe the straight forward is only that, it is only one-dimensional. And it is making me think again of that full sense of you know, 360 possibilities, you know, the multi-dimensionality possibilities of being alive. And how to really activate that. And now I am bringing to mind the sense from the round before of the lateral and the sides. This sense of the lateral being activated in the diagonal. So beyond this split of the front and the back, the roles of the sides and the diagonal and the lateral. And bending in a way.

22.04.2022 Perhaps

I was thinking just before, partly because I had opened up some of the suggestions that we had put in for that conference proposal, and that idea of what we had been reading, and some of the ideas that were informing us. And I noticed that each time I feel as if I need to work with that or to share it or articulate the things I have been reading to another person, how I start to squirm and wriggle. And I think it is because I am realising, for example with the David Wills book and other examples, how they, how they also sort of seep. Because we were talking last time about this experience in a way of the dorsal more as a quality that can seep through rather than be more of sort of very conscious activation. And I thought this is how reading also works, and this is kind of obvious but I think it feels quite poignant in relation to this attention to the dorsal that theories from others and ideas can also work in that way – that they are not always immediately understood or that we value, even though you think you understand, the next day you do not understand or you understand something different. And I was realising that some of the things I am reading, I am really not understanding in a way if I need to speak it back to myself, or write it down, or tell someone else. It slips through my fingers again. And I have become a little more confident in that, that is a different understanding or processing that is going on there. And some of these ideas they come into the body or they create images almost as a choreographic prompt to work with in the body. So some of David Wills’ with the ‘dorsal turn’, he has this convoluted way of writing in circles which I kind of accept and understand through the body, and take that on board. But at the same time, I get very lost in the writing and actually what he is saying, because there isn’t a beginning point and an end point. So I am working through this circular writing and reading, that he is in a way proposing I think. It was interesting thinking about how ideas inform us and how our conversation on our reading and on our digesting of ideas can I suppose in different ways or be absorbed in different ways and be expressed later in different ways and at different times. This is one thought I had and maybe this links up with this from last time, about micro-articulation and micro-frequency. I thought maybe these ideas seep into the body, when someone has written this whole book - difficult philosophical and theoretical – just to take a little micro-feeling, or a micro-sense or a micro-image of it and how that can then, how that can open up a big territory of exploration or an ongoing curiosity or intrigue or working-with. Something like the turning, the turn. That just continues to resonate in the body, something I have taken away still without fully understanding perhaps what he is even saying.

It is interesting that you are talking about reading, because it has been on my mind a little bit this week. We have just started a reading group around ‘slow practices’ and I think that there is a lot of resonance. And it has made me really realise how this relationship between reading and some kind of practice and language, is so important for my practice. Like they sort of animate each other somehow, in a way that I cannot always put my finger on how. So I can do more conventional scholarship where the reading is engaged perhaps more intentionally perhaps, but this is definitely not how I read, and that sense of how you were describing reading and it somehow, the excitement of reading and yet it slips through your fingers and it is impossible to, like the inability to be able to précis what has been read, or to be able to distil down into key points or key arguments. My experience is very much this case. But there is something very much to do with a kind of animating spark that gets set of in reading, and I think that the places where I notice it most is when the reading is brought to mind or arrived at accidentally or by chance or by the trigger of a word. It happened today actually, I feel tired and I was thinking about this idea of the relief of lying down, the relief of coming into the body and then the sense of ‘release’ was there as a possibility of exploration. In the reading this week, on slow practices, part of it was referring to Heidegger’s ideas around dwelling and lingering. But one of the terms mentioned was ‘releasement’. I have come across this term before and I find it really intriguing, and this prompted me to look again at this idea of releasement. It feels like the movement led it there in a way, but there was also this sense of a chance encounter from earlier. So sometimesit feels like chance constellations in a way, and sometimes it is easy to miss, as it feels so fleeting and fragile, that flash of connection gets lost. At other times it is just possible to catch that kind of chance stimulus of a word and a reference comes to mind again. And to follow with it. But I think that there is also something there about not grasping into it, to hold it somehow lightly. The same with the dorsality text, to not look towards it for explanation, to hold it lightly within experience somehow. To like move with it, yes, to move with it. My mind feels all over the place. This morning I was walking through the wood, in the park, and it is windy today, and so the notion of ‘sway’ was quite present because the trees were really moving.Andthere was this point where I was swaying and I think of this with reading as well, just swaying with it. Or somehow, yes the other thing in my awareness todaywas this sense of having something in mind, quite lightly. So having the notion of dorsal practices lightly in mind, held in the background but not looked at too directly. I think that there is something about this with reading as well, for it to sit there but it is not studied as such, so it informs but in an indirect way.

I like what you were saying about holding it lightly in mind. Even this sense of light, of lightly rather than … not to go to the opposite with heavy, but lightly as in so that things can still move and don’t get stuck or fixed and weighty so that they can’t move. So there is a fluidity in them. And also how ideas, sometimes they pass through or they stick around for a while or they connect with other things, and perhaps there is something about this lightness and taking things with into walking, into talking, into working, then ideas start to come into all of these different activities and processes, and come into experience. I like this, I think it is interesting that it can be brought even into this activity of reading which is often wanting to grasp, or I can often feel very frustrated if I cannot grasp. And yet when I don’t try to graspand admit that I am a little more of a person who skims and sketches than digs and digs, also I find this very interesting. There are different ways of being able to process and how perhaps giving it a bit more value, but there is something about this skimming and sketching rather than in depth, full colour representation. It picks up on something else, and maybe can be more easily taken with, or be brought into experience, as you said. This week I have been, I have been actually lying down quite a lot in small moments here and there – ten minutes or five minutes or even two minutes. Quite regularly, and very simply, not moving, very simply lying on my back. I think because the weather is so light in the Spring, it feels like it is pulling you into action, but then there are those moments where I sit more in, and stay. To lie, and let everything pass over or pass through, rather than be drawn into the crazy seagull activity and wind, the birds are super busy at the moment. It is nice to pause and lie down, I have also been lying down outside. We talked about this before … morejoining in with the other things around. Something about coming away from the upright always, often surprises me after I lie down and have a couple of breaths, how the body starts to settle in a very different way and the breath, the muscles, the heart, the pulse, the whole configuration of the body and the senses change again.

One of the things that was coming to me this morning was this thing about letting, letting go, no, how was it? It was … I was lying on the floor and thinking about, or bringing to mind the idea of release. Before I got to releasement, and before I had started looking at this Heidegger reference to releasement. But thinking about what is it that inhibits release and releasement, what stops it? And one of the things that stops it was time. Like feeling like there was not enough time to do it, so contraction of time. And then there was just, I am not sure if this is to do with time or with the body, but an unwillingness to drop into the experience. So almost like an involuntary movement of the leg as if I wanted to get up again. Like out of my control in a way, the impulse of the body or of the mind was not allowing me to drop into this settled experience, but was compelling me to get up and do something. So I was interested in … there are some movements that enable this releasing and then there are also some of these movements that are much more restless and resisting in a way. And where this led was something to do with this notion of letting go in the sense of what needs to be let go in order to, in order to release. So this quality of loosening, and relaxing and renouncing. Letting go. And then what was interesting was that it then paired with this idea of letting,which I don’t think, I mean it is there in what I had been thinking, but it was not so clear as this morning, that there is this correlation between ‘letting go’ and ‘letting’. And letting had much more of a sense of opening up and allowing and following, but it seemed that these two momentums were really somehow working in a sort of complementary way or certainly there was something about letting go in order to let. And I don’t know which comes first – maybe you have to first let in order to let go.And so the letting had much more of a quality of fluidity. Actually it was making me think of blood letting and I wanted to look at that – the histories and origins of blood letting, the incision that lets the blood flow, the blood flowing or this kind of opening into something more playful and curious in a way. So one of the things that is more strong is againthis curiosity about certain etymologies and this play between letting and letting go, or letting go and letting. This felt very live this morning, and it was also making me think of “let’s”. So, in a previous conversation we have talked about scores and I do like a lot of Yoko Ono’s scores actually because of the way they operate between an imaginative proposition and a call to a certain kind of movement or action. But there is a quality in a lot of her scores of “Let’s”. So a “try this”, “let’s try this” , “let’s”, “let us, let us do this” – it opens it up, it has this invitation. So there became this almost poetic field emerging between letting go, and letting and let’s. That started to emerge and I got interested in, in a way. This let. I really want to explore it now – this notion of letting, or opening or allowing, or … I don’t know its etymology fully, I am curious about it in that sense. And the relationship of those three fields.

I was listening to the radio when I was driving the other day and there was a short programme around looking at the four cardinal directions, and then it went into more introductory stuff around howeach direction has a number of histories and cultural aspects circulating around each of them – North, South, East, West. And bringing up the idea of how we navigate differently now, or how many of us have lost the ability to use a map or a compass. Eventhese ideas of navigating by the sun, the moon, the stars and wind. Which I thought was nice when you were talking about the swaying trees is the wind, in that there is a technique there for understanding where you are in relationship to how the wind is blowing in certain places. Where am I going with this? I suppose he was talking about orientating and navigating and understanding where you are in relation to other things. And it was linked to another conversation that I have been having in relation to located-ness. We have been talking about how seeing and hearing, and understanding where you are through different ways, through listening, even senses the vibration of other things through the skin. A wider sense of located-ness, in terms of understanding where you are in relation to other things, other people. But even wider than that – political or cultural or social or material. There was something in there, coming back to these ideas of orientation and oriented towards the East and the North, which is always up on a map, we always point up to the North. So these systems of navigation and in a way what we have been talking about is different because this is in relationship to forwards or backwards or around the side. Perceiving through the senses. But in some ways I think that there are some interesting overlaps, the programme was also talking about wayfinding, finding the way. I think I was triggered because we were talking about this last week or the week before, especially in relation to trying to respond to what the other has just said and not being able to recall it. And having to go around the back of things, or meander a little while in order to find a way in, or find a way back. There was also something about google maps and all these apps which tell you where you are and where to go, it is a very different relationship to the body and where you are going, and what this technology is telling you. That is very different to unfolding a huge map and working out where you are in relationship to where you are going and all these systems of roads and geographical details. And satellite maps – just how technologies change. Our part of how we evolve and how we locate ourselves and how we understand what is close to us, what is far away, what is almost impossible to get to, or how to get to places. And I find that very interesting somehow around these different systems of locating, navigating, orientating. In relation to the dorsal as well, how that fits in. Or a sense of orienting backwards, towards the back. There was something that brought me back – this sense of facing to the back, or face to face, or back to back. Maybe because of this North, South, East and West, and the front to the back and right to the left. Which is very kind of simplistic but within, that is what we are moving within. There are these modes, where we passed through very quickly – oh it is to the right or it is to the left. And then all this slippery manoeuvring and articulating and understanding among that. So there was something interesting in that brought me back to … I feel would like to write these things down and just go in there a little more. Way finding, to find the way. And finding a way, finding a way, rather than looking for the way.There is something about way finding that felt that you, it is nice this idea that you are not focused on where you are going or don’t have a plan of where you are going but you find, you discover, you come across. Perhaps, per-chance, a way. And maybe there is, you were talking about the score again, and the ‘lets’, and how the let’s, the different ways, invites, whether a prompt might invite. Invite in. The let’s is very inclusive, it includes the prompter as well as the prompted.I like that, the let’s includes, in the case of Yoko Ono, it absolutely includes her as well, and includes everyone, anyone, who might read or take up such a score. Which is very different from an instruction which somehow puts a distance from where it has come from, it puts the onus on the person receiving or engaging with it.Maybe this is not quite true? Maybe that is not quite true, but there is a different quality of where it is coming from and how that is included. The ‘let’s’ is a very gentle and inclusive way, it does not have the authority that an instruction might have, or a sense that the someone ‘behind’ that prompt knows something that the other person doesn’t. It is much more of a testing, a trying out, let’s see what happens if we do this. And there is something coming back to this wayfinding, this place and direction, and I might be, now I am thinking aloud, the let’s or instruction, and how these different forms of prompt might operate.

It is so interesting this experience of listening in this way, like it almost feels like there are all of these melodies of possibilitythat are … and I cannot quite hold them, they are in the air. They come and go somehow in my recollection of what you were saying. Yes, I don’t have a direct path to get to them somehow. It is interesting. Maybe one thing that you were talking about which I was really struck by was this sense of wayfinding.And this finding of the way, rather than sort of acting with purpose or direction at the outset, or setting the destination in advance. You know, finding a way. And maybe there is something in the exploration, that I was struggling to identify prompts in advance. And as soon as I stopped doing that and just began it kind of, things led to other things. It is like the route or the path was not planned in advance. The thing that came to mind very strongly was the sense ofjust trusting that something would come from something, and just being willing to enter that space. And again, a sense of relief or of release in that. Just not needing to plan all of the time, but to just trust that with a degree of openness something will lead to something, and some place will be arrived at, some experience will be arrived at that could not have been anticipated at the outset. And yet, often I don’t trust that. I can have such a struggle in trusting that, and in having confidence in that. But when I do it, when I do have confidence in it, it is so liberating, getting out the way really of what is unfolding, and allowing things to take their course in a way. Like, again, we have talked about a river motif in the past, maybe, at least I think we have. And there is a sense that it wants to go somewhere but often I just get in the way and stop it or block it. So actually as you were talking about wayfinding, I was thinking about, not me finding the way, but the way finding me. So it is not that I find the way but that the way finds me. And actually sometime this does feel closer to experience. Yes, I am found by the way, rather than me finding it. So there is something about - maybe this is also this letting or allowing or being receptive to what might happen. Funnily enough, in the walk today, there is a kind of weird little valley in the park that has a river running through it, it is very small. I know that there are entry points to go down the side of this valley, but in 20 years of living here I have never gone down the valley, even though I know you can. And today the path called me.You have to go through the undergrowth and then drop down and it was really exciting. And it felt like it was because I was entering this space with this sense of dorsal practising more foregrounded.It was not like I had discovered something I had never seen before, I know it is there, I have seen it. But there was never the sufficient curiosity to follow that path in a way. And today there was. And it was really amazing, it drops down and there was a completely different perspective because you were effectively lower than the playing field which surrounds it which would be the usual walk. So there was this dropping under, this sense of dropping under the usual experience of the space that I had. Yes, and maybe that sense of orientation and disorientation. Maybe this connects with the thing that you were saying about the orientation of North and South and East and West. And I was again struck by and thinking about how things are not always what they seem in a way.So this idea of North facing, and the idea of the uprightness of the North, the up-ness of the North, but I was thinking maybe it is like the experience of being in the woods, the Northerly side of trees is often mossy, because it is the most shaded area. So the North side is always the most shaded or the most murky. So I was thinking about this murkiness, this shaded, this shadow. The shadow side, it is like the reverse side or the back side of things. So it is interesting, I was thinking, does the dorsal have more of a Northerly dimension, this mossy, shadowy, shady side. And then I thought, this is interesting, is this only true of the North hemisphere? Do trees on the Southern hemisphere … I don’t know. My sense of ignorance of how the sun and our planet work – I don’t know. Is it that the shaded side is only like this in the Northern hemisphere – I don’t know? Again, a sense of how the radical positioning of ourselves on the planet takes - all of our metaphors, all of our language is so determined by the position that we have, positions that we take, where we are located even in the world. And then this idea of hemisphere became interesting – like the North and the South hemisphere of the planet, and then as you were talking about the right and the left, I was thinking about, what it brought to mind, was a sense of the hemispheres of the brain. And how, they are opposite to what you think, I think that this is true. That the right hemisphere of the brain is more connected to the left side of the body. So they work on that kind of diagonal. So the right side of the body is more connected to the left hemisphere of the brain. And this sense, coming into contact with the work of Iain McGuilchrist, who talks about how the sense that the left hemisphere is more involved in analytic thinking, maybe even future leaning thinking. And the right is associated with a wide expansive, perhaps even creative, form of attention. I was thinking that this is interesting – it does feel as if dorsal thinking sits more in that right hemispheric thinking of expansiveness and opening and not the narrowing, analytical thinking of the left hemisphere.All these orientations – of North and South, and left and right, and narrow and wide … these different momentums. And the thing that you were talking about … not having a straight path. Maybe this also connects to the wayfinding, that the path is not drawn like a straight line, it meanders and it takes tangents. The word that was coming to mind this morning was this sense of not being ‘straight forward’. And then I got interested in this ‘straight-forward-ness’ and what does this mean, it is such a strange idea. Even the value of being ‘straight forward’ seems so weird. I would really like to explore that – what does it mean to be straight forward? And, why is that a value? It seems such a strange value – so one dimensional in a way, to just be straight forward. What is this straight-forward-ness? And, how is a dorsal way of practising, not straight forward? This sense of not being straight forward is often used in a derogatory sense, and this struck me as interesting. Why is that so? And what might it be to reclaim the sense of not being straight forward as a positive quality in a way, not being direct?

Picking up on what you were last saying about straight forward. Isn’t that a strange term – straight forward. And it does seem to be something that people value because I suppose it creates a kind of … one dimensionality is at least clear. There is at least little that has to be discussed or decided, it is tidy and it is neat. And it is just this one thing. And there is perhaps a practical pragmatism to it. Actually when you were saying about right and left, I was thinking that is interesting because it is there in myths or in the sense of people being left handed … are more creative, and that the left is more to do with the dark and the non-rational. But I suppose it is to do with the diagonal of how the brain is working, with the diagonal opposite of the body. It is interesting how different feelings of right-ness and left-ness, and how the left if often thought of as more mystical and the right as more rational. And how the brain works – and I found this really fascinating, what you were saying about the brain and the hemispheres. Yes, how we understand how we are, or who we are in relation to where we are, in amongst who we are with. Yes, now I am really meandering, but there is something about ‘straight forward’,which I notice mostly in work situations where if you are not straight forward you can be easily dismissed, or passed over, or not taken seriously, and these things which are a little bit more, which require thinking through things, or indirectness. Yes, indirectness – it is not straight to the point. There is the pressure of time and people are impatient, and things need to get done and sorted. So it is interesting how actually, it is so valuable to have these indirect and not quite knowing states, even in work situations where things need to get done. So it is interesting, it somehow feels important to be able to value those things in order to bring them to the table, into the work place, into living spaces, so that they can manifest. And sometimes there is a wonderful pleasure in going straight forward.I think about this, also because are talking about this North and South and East and West and uprightness and you walking and being drawn into the valley. It made me think again of the singing, no not singing, swimming that I am doing a lot. And I don’t think about it because I am going a lot, and I don’t go for very long, but very regularly. So there is a sense that there is a straight-forwardness to it – I often do front crawl, so going up and down, swinging arm and pulling water, and breathing to the right and to the left. And in and out, so very much a whole set of these binary things – front and back and right and left and up and down and front and back. It is almost that the straight-forward-ness creates in a way a score or a prompt. And I often think about this because it is not in nature. Swimming in the sea or in the river is different, and somehow more about, more a sensual immersive experience. But the pool, it is also a rectangle. You have lanes. There is very much a square straight-forward-ness in the architecture and in the activity. But it also acts as a possible score with which to play and to explore, and certainly the back for me is very present in swimming, with front crawl, the coordinating … it made me think of this right and left andthis diagonal relationship. What is happening in the brain, what is happening on the right and left side of the body? It made me think, that is why we have to turn then, to keep turning and to keep moving the spine to turn, to activate these diagonal relationships, and the criss-crossings and the meanderings. The turn is in a way – it is not straight forward. It brings me back to the turn – maybe that is why the turn is so fascinating. It is constantly pulling you off the straight, the upright – pulling you a little this way and a little that way. It is like the swaying, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. And swimming is like that – this playground of how everything is coordinated, and the up and the down, the kicking of the legs which is hard to coordinate with the twisting of the spine and the breathing. And understanding when you are at the end. Sothere is something interesting in how a straight-forward situation might be a playground for a very detailed, nuanced, subtle, fluid, light, murky, dorsal activity. There is something about swimming and being in the water which does create immediately a different relationship to gravity and a different relationship to seeing and hearing and I suppose touching – you are immersed in something rather than being on something, rather than on the ground. The floating and the different relation to gravity and the not being upright, also I think reconfigures the relation of the body and gravity. It is not a social space, because you have goggles on and head down. People are passing but there is an understanding of not being in a social space. Swimming together, alongside, passing or overtaking. Interesting. So perhaps because it is disturbing this uprightness. And I was also thinking about how this straight forwards can feel very one dimensional in relation to this word simple or simplicity, which I also find a fascinating word. Sometimes I am writing it because I mean something, but I realise when it is read it might mean something else – this idea of simplicity. When something is simple in the sense that is it naïve or has not been understood or even looked at… but sometimes a simplicity, maybe like Yoko Ono’s scores … maybe we are searching for something like this with our scores. The simplicity has absorbed a lot of understanding and a lot of practice, and finds a simple suggestion.

Yes such a lot of interesting things. This image of the diagonal or this sense of the diagonal feels very strong. There was a point when you were talking and I was imagining some swimming pools that I have been in which are quite short in length, and thinking why ever would I never swim on the diagonal. Even if I am in there myself or the lanes are not set, to swim the diagonal makes the space longer. So there is this sense of a diagonal orientation somehow creating space where there appears to be none – this cut of the diagonal and this triangulation occurs through that, it make things longer, it give space.And then what came to mind was the sense of the diagonal as a desire line. Again, maybe thinking of my experience in the wood and all of these diagonal paths which cut across the path or cut the corner, so it has got this weird quality of extending space but also the desire line of cutting the corner. Refusing to be one or the other, but being both. And then the movement of front crawl and that bringing to mind some of the experiences or exercises from Feldenkrais, and that sense of the diagonal between the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle and how that carries into walking. And to really have this awareness of the correlation. I remember Fiona Wright, who has been my main teacher within Feldenkrais and I have not done it all that often, but her talking, and it is a Feldenkrais sense of the torso almost being like a hankerchief and you are taking the corners of the hankerchief towards one another. The diagonal corners of the shoulder girdle and the pelvis. And then this sense of liberation when you take that into walking. I don’t have this experience in walking, actually my walking is quite upright. My torso feels as if it stay rather still – probably this is why I have back issues. That sense of when you really move into walking and really allow this sense of the diagonal to be operative. And in swimming as well. When you really go into swimming and you really feel that diagonal. Thinking of front crawl as this really weird operation that you are really working the diagonal in order to go forward. And it is just really efficient. Again that notion of efficiency in a really pleasurable sense. Yes, and then something about desire. When I was talking about the desire lines, I don’t know, thinking about the sense of desire, at times it can have this wilful dimension to it. That idea of grasping towards something which we have mentioned earlier, but I was thinking about another kind of desire which is much more receptive, a receptive desire. I am not sure where I am going with this. Maybe it is not so much a desire, but a pleasure or a joy which is not a grasping kind, but really holding a space open and being receptive to things. Earlier you were talking about that sense of feeling in movement with things, feeling in movement with the world. And I had a sense of this, this morning when I was exploring this swaying. No, actually what I did this morning was before I … if I were to begin a practice usually I might come to the floor as a first port of call if you like, that would be the reset. And I was interested today to think about sensation. And often, I feel quite desensitised. So before beginning, no, I came out of the beginning and was exploring stroking or tapping the back of the body, like the back of the legs, and the back of the calves and the kidneys, and the back. And using touch as a way of sensitising the body before then releasing, and I think that these are practices that are used in somatic practice – touching, or tapping, or activating the body through active touch. And then shaking, really activating the body before coming to the ground. And it was such a different experience actually, there was a tingling and vibration of the body which then spread into groundedness. This was really different. So I was interested in taking this touching and tapping and shaking of the body into the woods and into an outside space, and as I was doing that, there was this strong sense of sway or of movement. And there was this sense that ordinarily I am just passing through. It was interesting that you talked about passing through earlier, but it felt that my passing through was quite negative in a way. I am like an arrow cutting through the experience of life. But then standing and moving, it was really a movement with the world. Maybe again there a sense of the multi-directionality of life becomes really apparent then. It is almost like my orientation, particularly if I am in a hurry feels very horizontal, or directional. Singularly directional, straight forward in fact. But there was something about the movement in this space, where everything was just moving in so many directions and it sensitised me to that. Almost a bit chaotic in a way, the vibrancy of the situation was almost too much, in its vibrancy. But really exciting too because it was about being with all of that. Where often it is just, there is a sense of too strong a sense of agency or of will, and just getting through it, getting through. Even getting through the walk because I am in a hurry and I need to get to what is coming next. And that idea of lingering in it and being with the movement of the world in a different way felt very vibrant. And actually, it is bringing me back to this text which I really want to look at. This text by Heidegger on releasement, or the term is, a German term, Gelassenheit. But what was funny is that I was trying to print it but my printer was going super slow, because it was printing it in colour. So I was really easy to read this text which in a way is talking about non-willing, or letting go of willed action. And yet I was willing this text to print and it was coming through very slowly, maybe a millimetre every minute or something. But there is something in it, which I have touched upon, which is to do with this non-wilful dimension. A kind of thinking, is what the focus of the text is, which opens up through non-willing. And in the text there is something about weaning ourselves off from will. And it really feels like that sometimes, that the wilfulness, or the frontality of action, keeps creeping back, time and time again. And I feel that with this work I am weaning myself off it, but it is hard. You know, it is really hard. And it is interesting to think, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? I don’t know. And something in this releasement is this idea of opening to something that is not known. So releasing into the mystery or the not known or the unknown. And maybe there is something there, of course the direct route is easier, because the unknown is really frightening actually and uneasy. Maybe there is something here about uneasiness. Yes, uneasy. Like uneasiness, and all of the different dimensions of uneasiness. So there might be difficulty. Difficulty is the opposite of easy.

It is funny how these un- words, how they, so easy and uneasy. Oh, that’s easy. But uneasy is difficulty but also that feeling, as you say, of not knowing. So it is unsettling. An uneasy, uncomfortable. It is not only to do with difficulty but also creates a strange, murky unease, when things are not quite known. They disorientate, they pull us off that strong feeling of being grounded, and ‘I know where I am’. Yes, linked with fear. I like this unease, this slight unease, something that is lurking a little bit. Releasement – I don’t know this term. This is interesting. Moving into what is not known, so there is a relationship with some of the things that we have been talking about with the dorsal. Things that are murky or that are not known or are not sharply in focus. It is bringing me into … I was thinking about another book where I don’t get past the first page but which keeps bringing me to this image of the un-. The title of the book is called Unthought, Katherine Hayles idea of the levels … you were talking about the brain. It is also about cognition, so these discoveries around what she calls non-conscious cognition. And unthought as that which happens before thinking. But it is shared, there is a lot more non-conscious cognition happening than we, that was first thought. There is still a lot more to discover around that. But also it is, it is also something that is shared with other animate beings, so there is this sense there of the before-thinking, before-articulating, which is also perhaps uneasy, and is unclear and ungraspable. I am thinking of all these un- words now – uncertain, unsure. I was … now this un- is making me think of re-, when we did this etymology of re- as in back, as in return, and recollect. I have lost my thought. It has disappeared. Yes, I am now in this image of swaying, of you swaying and of trees swaying. Deviating from right to left and being a bit off kilter. But the sway is a very gentle, fluid, subtle way, it is different from stumbling. There is fluidity to it,it reminds me of those wonderful movies. Crouching Tiger, these fights happening and these swaying trees, and the movement in that. In sway. And to be swayed.

Being swayed. And easily swayed. This is super interesting because this is what I was aspiring to in that practice – to be easily swayed. And it was hard actually, because there is so much of the habit of my body resisting that sense of swaying. I was looking up at the trees – and how the strength of the tree was also coming from its capacity to be easily swayed. I think it even strengthens the roots in trees, right, the sway, the sway in the wind. There is something about not staking trees for too long, because the sway really encourages root growth and stability. And again, there are all of these phrases that are written into our culture that have positive or negative connotations. Straight-forward-ness has this positive connotation. Easily swayed has a negative connotation. And there is something about the kind of voluntarily swaying or moving into a sense of sway that feels really delightful, again this sense of delight. Just releasing. This feeling of just releasing into the movement of the world. Yes, especially when it is windy. It even sounds a bit far-fetched in a way … having a sense of grounded on the floor and this sense of the planet moving. Just the bizarreness of that, that there is this huge land mass, and there we are on the surface of it. And wow, why are we not swaying more, you know. And that play with gravity. I guess that gravity is also the thing that stops us from swaying in a way. I don’t know. Now I am thinking of vertigo, and that sense of dizziness and the sway that can be experienced in vertigo, of not being steady. All these positive and negative connotations – of sway, and just the navigation of that, the untangling of that, of the properties, or qualities or characteristics that might be worth redeeming or investigating, from those that are somehow paralysing. Because there is a sense of vertiginous, dizzy sway which is undesirably disorientating. But then at other times this can be really pleasurable. So I am thinking, what are the circumstances that makes something desirable or non desirable. Same with straight-forward-ness or simplicity – in some circumstances I might be really drawn to that, and at other times there is something about this meandering, circling – and maybe it is not one or the other, but how the two cooperate. And maybe it is back to this sense of cooperation and how seemingly opposite orientations or tendencies between directness and indirectness, and steadfastness or stillness and swaying, and groundedness and ungroundedness.There is something in this transitional movement or range of possibility that opens up between these poles that seems interesting somehow. That they are in cooperation, creative cooperationsomehow. And maybe the straight forward is only that, it is only one-dimensional. And it is making me think again of that full sense of you know, 360 possibilities, you know, the multi-dimensionality possibilities of being alive. And how to really activate that. And now I am bringing to mind the sense from the round before of the lateral and the sides. This sense of the lateral being activated in the diagonal. So beyond this split of the front and the back, the roles of the sides and the diagonal and the lateral. And bending in a way.

This experience in a way of the dorsal more as a quality that can seep through rather than be more conscious activation. And I thought this is how reading also works. I think it feels quite poignant in relation to this attention to the dorsal that theories from others and ideas can also work in that way – that they are not always immediately understood or that we value. Even though you think you understand, the next day you do not understand or you understand something different. If I need to speak it back to myself, or write it down, or tell someone else, it slips through my fingers again. A different understanding or processing that is going on there. And some of these ideas they come into the body or they create images almost as a choreographic prompt to work with in the body. There isn’t a beginning point and an end point - this circular writing and reading.

Maybe these ideas seep into the body, when someone has written this whole book – difficult, philosophical and theoretical – just to take a little micro-feeling, or a micro-sense or a micro-image of it and how that can then, how that can open up a big territory of exploration or an ongoing curiosity or intrigue or working-with. Like the turning, the turn. That just continues to resonate in the body, there is a lot of resonance. The excitement of reading and yet it slips through your fingers. There is something very much to do with a kind of animating spark that gets set off in reading, and I think that the places where I notice it most is when the reading is brought to mind or arrived at accidentally or by chance or by the trigger of a word.

The relief of lying down, relief of coming into the body. Dwelling. Lingering. “Releasement”. This idea of releasement. It feels like the movement led it there in a way, but there was also this sense of a chance encounter. It feels like chance constellations in a way, and sometimes it is easy to miss, as it feels so fleeting and fragile, that flash of connection gets lost. At other times it is just possible to catch that kind of chance stimulus of a word and a reference comes to mind again. And to follow with it. But I think that there is also something there about not grasping into it, to hold it somehow lightly. To not look towards it for explanation, to hold it lightly within experience somehow. To move with it, yes, to move with it.

It is windy today, and so the notion of ‘sway’ was quite present because the trees were really moving. There was this point where I was swaying and I think of this with reading as well, just swaying with it. This sense of having something in mind, quite lightly. So having the notion of dorsal practices lightly in mind, held in the background but not looked at too directly. I think that there is something about this with reading as well, for it to sit there but it is not studied as such, so it informs but in an indirect way.

Lightly so that things can still move and don’t get stuck or fixed and weighty so that they can’t move. So there is a fluidity. How ideas, sometimes they pass through or they stick around for a while or they connect with other things, and perhaps there is something about this lightness and taking things with into walking, into talking, into working. Then ideas start to come into all of these different activities and processes, and come into experience when I don’t try to grasp.

There are different ways of being able to process and how perhaps giving it a bit more value - there is something about this skimming and sketching rather than in depth. It picks up on something else, and maybe can be more easily taken with, or be brought into experience.

To pause and lie down. Joining in with the other things. Something about coming away from the upright always, often, surprises me after I lie down and have a couple of breaths. how the body starts to settle in a very different way and the breath, the muscles, the heart, the pulse, the whole configuration of the body and the senses change again.

An involuntary movement of the leg - like out of my control in a way, the impulse of the body or of the mind was not allowing me to drop into this settled experience, but was compelling me to get up and do something. Something to do with this notion of letting go in the sense of what needs to be let go in order to, in order to release. So this quality of loosening, and relaxing and renouncing. Letting go, paired with this idea of letting. There is this correlation between ‘letting go’ and ‘letting’. Letting has much more of a sense of opening up and allowing and following, but it seemed that these two momentums were really somehow working in a sort of complementary way or certainly there was something about letting go in order to let. And I don’t know which comes first – maybe you have to first let in order to let go. The letting had much more of a quality of fluidity, making me think of bloodletting - the incision that lets the blood flow, the blood flowing or this kind of opening into something more playful and curious in a way. This curiosity about certain etymologies and this play between letting and letting go, or letting go and letting. It was also making me think of “let’s”. So a “try this”, “let’s try this”, “let’s”, “let us, let us do this” – it opens it up, it has this invitation. There became this almost poetic field emerging between letting go, and letting and let’s - that started to emerge. This let: I really want to explore it now – this notion of letting, or opening or allowing, or … I don’t know its etymology fully, I am curious about it in that sense. And the relationship of those three fields.

Each direction has a number of histories and cultural aspects circulating around each of them – North, South, East, West. The idea of how we navigate differently now, or how many of us have lost the ability to use a map or a compass. These ideas of navigating by the sun, the moon, the stars and wind. When you were talking about the swaying trees in the wind, in that there is a technique there for understanding where you are in relationship to how the wind is blowing in certain places. Orientating and navigating and understanding where you are in relation to other things. In relation to located-ness, a wider sense of located-ness, in terms of understanding where you are in relation to other things, other people. But even wider than that – political or cultural or social or material. There was something in there, coming back to these ideas of orientation and oriented towards the East and the North, which is always up on a map, we always point up to the North. So these systems of navigation and in a way what we have been talking about is different because this is in relationship to forwards or backwards or around the side.

Perceiving through the senses. Wayfinding, finding the way. Having to go around the back of things, or meander a little while in order to find a way in, or find a way back. These different systems of locating, navigating, orientating. Or a sense of orienting backwards, towards the back. This sense of facing to the back, or face-to-face, or back-to-back. Way finding, to find the way. And finding a way, finding a way, rather than looking for the way. You are not focused on where you are going or don’t have a plan of where you are going but you find, you discover, you come across. Perhaps, per-chance, a way. You were talking about the score again, and the ‘lets’, and how the let’s, the different ways, invites, whether a prompt might invite, invite in. The let’s is very inclusive, it includes the prompter as well as the prompted. Which is very different from an instruction which somehow puts a distance from where it has come from, it puts the onus on the person receiving or engaging with it. The ‘let’s’ is a very gentle and inclusive way, it does not have the authority that an instruction might have, or a sense that the someone ‘behind’ that prompt knows something that the other person doesn’t. It is much more of a testing, a trying out, let’s see what happens if we do this. And there is something coming back to this wayfinding, this place and direction … now I am thinking aloud, the let’s or instruction, and how these different forms of prompt might operate.

Interesting this experience of listening in this way, it almost feels like there are all of these melodies of possibility and I cannot quite hold them, they are in the air. I don’t have a direct path to get to them somehow. This sense of wayfinding. Just trusting that something would come from something, and just being willing to enter that space. A sense of relief or of release in that. Just not needing to plan all of the time, but to just trust that with a degree of openness something will lead to something, and some place will be arrived at, some experience will be arrived at that could not have been anticipated at the outset. And yet, often I don’t trust that. I can have such a struggle in trusting that, and in having confidence in that. But when I do it, when I do have confidence in it, it is so liberating, getting out the way really of what is unfolding, and allowing things to take their course in a way. You were talking about wayfinding, I was thinking about, not me finding the way, but the way finding me. So it is not that I find the way but that the way finds me. And actually sometime this does feel closer to experience. Yes, I am found by the way, rather than me finding it. And today the path called me. It was not like I had discovered something I had never seen before, I know it is there, I have seen it. But there was never the sufficient curiosity to follow that path in a way. And today there was. There was this dropping under, this sense of dropping under the usual experience of the space - a sense of orientation and disorientation.

I was again struck by and thinking about how things are not always what they seem in a way. This idea of North-facing, and the idea of the uprightness of the North, the up-ness of the North. But I was thinking maybe it is like the experience of being in the woods, the Northerly side of trees is often mossy, because it is the most shaded area. So the North side is always the most shaded or the most murky. So I was thinking about this murkiness, this shaded, this shadow. The shadow side - it is like the reverse side or the back side of things. I was thinking, does the dorsal have more of a Northerly dimension, this mossy, shadowy, shady side? Is this only true of the North hemisphere? Is it that the shaded side is only like this in the Northern hemisphere – I don’t know? A sense of how the radical positioning of ourselves on the planet takes - all of our metaphors, all of our language is so determined by the position that we have, positions that we take, where we are located even in the world.

The North and the South hemisphere of the planet, and then as you were talking about the right and the left, I was thinking about, what it brought to mind, was a sense of the hemispheres of the brain. And how, they are opposite to what you think, I think that this is true. That the right hemisphere of the brain is more connected to the left side of the body. So they work on that kind of diagonal. So the right side of the body is more connected to the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere is more involved in analytic thinking, maybe even future-leaning thinking. And the right is associated with a wide expansive, perhaps even creative, form of attention. It does feel as if dorsal thinking sits more in that right hemispheric thinking of expansiveness and opening and not the narrowing, analytical thinking of the left hemisphere. All these orientations – of North and South, and left and right, and narrow and wide … these different momentums. And the thing that you were talking about … not having a straight path. Maybe this also connects to the wayfinding, that the path is not drawn like a straight line, it meanders and it takes tangents.

‘Straightforward-ness’ - what does this mean?  What does it mean to be straightforward? And, why is that a value? It seems such a strange value – so one dimensional in a way, to just be straightforward. What is this straightforward-ness? And, how is a dorsal way of practising not straightforward? This sense of not being straightforward is often used in a derogatory sense, and this struck me as interesting. Why is that so? And what might it be to reclaim the sense of not being straightforward as a positive quality in a way, not being direct? To do with the diagonal of how the brain is working, with the diagonal opposite of the body. It is interesting how different feelings of right-ness and left-ness, and how the left if often thought of as more mystical and the right as more rational. What you were saying about the brain and the hemispheres - yes, how we understand how we are, or who we are in relation to where we are, in amongst, who we are with. Yes, now I am really meandering, but there is something about ‘straight-forward’. If you are not straightforward you can be easily dismissed, or passed over, or not taken seriously, and these things which are a little bit more, which require thinking through things, or indirectness. Yes, indirectness – it is not straight to the point. There is the pressure of time and people are impatient, and things need to get done and sorted. It is so valuable to have these indirect and not-quite-knowing states, even in work situations where things need to get done. It somehow feels important to be able to value those things in order to bring them to the table, into the workplace, into living spaces, so that they can manifest.

And sometimes there is a wonderful pleasure in going straight-forward. Swimming - there is a sense that there is a straightforwardness to it. I often do front crawl, so going up and down, swinging arm and pulling water, and breathing to the right and to the left. And in and out, so very much a whole set of these binary things – front and back and right and left and up and down and front and back. It is almost that the straightforward-ness creates in a way a score or a prompt. Swimming in the sea or in the river is different, and somehow more about, more a sensual immersive experience. But the pool, it is also a rectangle. You have lanes. There is very much a square straightforward-ness in the architecture and in the activity. But it also acts as a possible score with which to play and to explore, and certainly the back for me is very present in swimming. This diagonal relationship - that is why we have to turn then, to keep turning and to keep moving the spine to turn, to activate these diagonal relationships, and the criss-crossings and the meanderings. The turn is in a way – it is not straightforward. Maybe that is why the turn is so fascinating. It is constantly pulling you off the straight, the upright – pulling you a little this way and a little that way. It is like the swaying, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. There is something interesting in how a straightforward situation might be a playground for a very detailed, nuanced, subtle, fluid, light, murky, dorsal activity. Swimming and being in the water does create immediately a different relationship to gravity and a different relationship to seeing and hearing and I suppose touching – you are immersed in something rather than being on something, rather than on the ground. The floating and the different relation to gravity and the not being upright, also I think reconfigures the relation of the body and gravity. It is not a social space - people are passing but there is an understanding of not being in a social space. Swimming together, alongside, passing or overtaking - perhaps because it is disturbing this uprightness.

When something is simple in the sense that is it naïve or has not been understood or even looked at… but sometimes a simplicity, the simplicity has absorbed a lot of understanding and a lot of practice and finds a simple suggestion. This image of the diagonal or this sense of the diagonal feels very strong. To swim the diagonal makes the space longer. So there is this sense of a diagonal orientation somehow creating space where there appears to be none – this cut of the diagonal and this triangulation occurs through that, it make things longer, it give space. The sense of the diagonal as a desire line. Again, maybe thinking of my experience in the wood and all of these diagonal paths which cut across the path or cut the corner, so it has got this weird quality of extending space but also the desire line of cutting the corner. Refusing to be one or the other but being both. And then the movement of front crawl and that bringing to mind some of the experiences or exercises from Feldenkrais, and that sense of the diagonal between the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle and how that carries into walking. That sense of when you really move into walking and really allow this sense of the diagonal to be operative. And in swimming as well. When you really go into swimming and you really feel that diagonal. Thinking of front crawl as this really weird operation that you are really working the diagonal in order to go forward. And it is just really efficient. Again that notion of efficiency in a really pleasurable sense. Yes, and then something about desire. When I was talking about the desire lines, I don’t know, thinking about the sense of desire, at times it can have this wilful dimension to it. That idea of grasping towards something which we have mentioned earlier, but I was thinking about another kind of desire which is much more receptive, a receptive desire. I am not sure where I am going with this. Maybe it is not so much a desire, but a pleasure or a joy which is not a grasping kind, but really holding a space open and being receptive to things, of feeling in movement with things, feeling in movement with the world. And I had a sense of this, this morning when I was exploring this swaying.

Using touch as a way of sensitising the body before then releasing, and I think that these are practices that are used in somatic practice – touching, or tapping, or activating the body through active touch. And then shaking, really activating the body before coming to the ground. There was a tingling and vibration of the body which then spread into groundedness. Taking this touching and tapping and shaking of the body into the woods and into an outside space, and as I was doing that, there was this strong sense of sway or of movement. I am like an arrow cutting through the experience of life. But then standing and moving, it was really a movement with the world. Maybe again there a sense of the multi-directionality of life becomes really apparent then. It is almost like my orientation, particularly if I am in a hurry feels very horizontal, or directional. Singularly directional, straightforward in fact. But there was something about the movement in this space, where everything was just moving in so many directions and it sensitised me to that. Almost a bit chaotic in a way, the vibrancy of the situation was almost too much, in its vibrancy.

That idea of lingering in it and being with the movement of the world in a different way felt very vibrant. Heidegger on releasement, or the term is, a German term, Gelassenheit -talking about non-willing, or letting go of willed action. This non-wilful dimension. A kind of thinking, which opens up through non-willing. There is something about weaning ourselves off from will. And it really feels like that sometimes, that the wilfulness, or the frontality of action, keeps creeping back, time and time again. I feel that with this work I am weaning myself off it, but it is hard. You know, it is really hard. And it is interesting to think, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? I don’t know. And something in this releasement is this idea of opening to something that is not known. So releasing into the mystery or the not known or the unknown. The unknown is really frightening actually and uneasy. Maybe there is something here about uneasiness. Yes, uneasy. Like uneasiness, and all of the different dimensions of uneasiness. So there might be difficulty. Difficulty is the opposite of easy. Uneasy is difficulty but also that feeling, as you say, of not knowing. So it is unsettling. An uneasy uncomfortable. It is not only to do with difficulty but also creates a strange, murky unease, when things are not quite known. They disorientate, they pull us off that strong feeling of being grounded. Yes, linked with fear. I like this unease, this slight unease, something that is lurking a little bit.

There is this sense there of the before-thinking, before-articulating, which is also perhaps uneasy, and is unclear and ungraspable. I am thinking of all these un- words now – uncertain, unsure. Un- is making me think of re-, when we did this etymology of re- as in back, as in return, and recollect. I have lost my thought. It has disappeared. Yes, I am now in this image of swaying, of you swaying and of trees swaying. Deviating from right to left and being a bit off kilter. But the sway is a very gentle, fluid, subtle way, it is different from stumbling. There is fluidity to it.

Sway and to be swayed. Being swayed and easily swayed. There is so much of the habit of my body resisting that sense of swaying. I was looking up at the trees – and how the strength of the tree was also coming from its capacity to be easily swayed. I think it even strengthens the roots in trees, right, the sway, the sway in the wind. There is something about not staking trees for too long, because the sway really encourages root growth and stability. And again, there are all of these phrases that are written into our culture that have positive or negative connotations. Straightforward-ness has this positive connotation. Easily swayed has a negative connotation. And there is something about the kind of voluntarily swaying or moving into a sense of sway that feels really delightful, again this sense of delight. Having a sense of groundedness on the floor and this sense of the planet moving. Just the bizarreness of that, that there is this huge land mass, and there we are on the surface of it. And wow, why are we not swaying more, you know. And that play with gravity. I guess that gravity is also the thing that stops us from swaying in a way. Now I am thinking of vertigo, and that sense of dizziness and the sway that can be experienced in vertigo, of not being steady. All these positive and negative connotations – of sway, and just the navigation of that, the untangling of that, of the properties, or qualities or characteristics that might be worth redeeming or investigating, from those that are somehow paralysing. Because there is a sense of vertiginous, dizzy sway which is undesirably disorientating.

And maybe it is back to this sense of cooperation between seemingly opposite orientations or tendencies, between directness and indirectness, and steadfastness or stillness and swaying, and groundedness and ungroundedness. There is something in this transitional movement or range of possibility that opens up between these poles that seems interesting somehow. That they are in cooperation, creative cooperation.

And maybe the straightforward is only that, it is only one-dimensional. And it is making me think again of that full sense of you know, 360 possibilities, you know, the multi-dimensionality possibilities of being alive. And how to really activate that. And now I am bringing to mind the sense from the ‘round’ before of the lateral and the sides. This sense of the lateral being activated in the diagonal. So beyond this split of the front and the back, the roles of the sides and the diagonal and the lateral. And bending in a way.

PART 4

16.05.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Reading as distillation

- Reading practices using the conversational transcript from 22.04.2022 as source text.

- Take time to tune into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

Moving between 2 practices:

Reading (Noticing Attraction)  – Have the transcript to hand, allow gaze to be soft and glide/roam the pages. Practising simultaneously. When a word draws your attention speak it outloud. Allow for overlaps and also silences.

Conversation-as-material distillation – Have the transcript to hand.

When the time feels right read aloud some of the words and phrases that have been highlighted - these could be single words, phrases or a cluster of sentences. Or alternatively, identify words and phrases live and read them aloud.

(1) 5 mins

(2) 15 mins

Fluidity. Connection. Murky. Swaying. Releasement, sometimes. Diagonal. Shadowy. Expansiveness. Straightforwardness. Hemisphere. Narrowing. Sense of light. Located. Skimming. Coming back. Wind. Wayfinding. Letting go. Moving within. Digesting. A sense of orienting backwards, towards the back – it feels quite poignant, a big territory of exploration. Wayfinding, to find a way, and finding the way, finding a way rather than looking for a way. To take a little micro feeling, a micro sense or a micro image of it. Finding a way rather than looking for a way – you are not focused on where you are going or don’t have a plan of where you are going but you find, you discover, you come across. Per-haps, per chance, a way. Something about the turning, the turn, that just continues to resonate in the body. Opening a big territory of exploration, of curiosity or of intrigue or of working with. It is much more of a testing or a trying out – let’s see what happens if we do this. The turn is in a way – it is not straight, it is not straight forward. It brings me back to the turn – maybe that is why the turn is so fascinating, it is constantly pulling you off the straight, off the upright, pulling you a little this way and a little that way. It is like the swaying, swaying this way and that way, even as you are progressing forwards. And you were talking about not having a straight path and maybe this also connects to the wayfinding – that the path is not drawn like a straight line. It meanders and it takes tangents. This sense of not being straightforward – straightforward, what does this mean, the value of being straightforward. What does it mean to be straightforward and why is this a value. I have this image of sway, of you swaying and the trees swaying, deviating from right to left, and being off kilter. But the sway is a very gentle, fluid, subtle way – it is different from stumbling. There are these things which require thinking through with indirectness, yes, indirectness, it is not straight to the point. When I was talking about the desire lines – thinking about the sense of desire. Sometimes it can have this wilful dimension to it – this sense of grasping towards something, which we mentioned earlier. But I was thinking about another kind of desire which is much more receptive. Receptive desire. And the sense of the diagonal as a desire line, and maybe thinking about the experience of the wood and all those diagonal paths which cut across or cut the corner. So there is this weird quality of extending space but also the desire line of cutting a corner. Refusing to be the one or the other but being both. I am like an arrow cutting through the experience of life – but standing and moving, it was really a movement with the world. Maybe again there is a sense of the multi-directionality of life becoming really apparent, almost like my orientation, particularly when I am in a hurry, is in a very horizontal direction.

Dizziness, dimension. Releasing. Straightforwardness. Unease. Letting go. Being swayed. Easily swayed. Vibration of other things. A wonderful pleasure. Wayfinding – before thinking. Melody as a possibility. Discoveries, momentums, deviating. Resisting. Lingering. Multidimensionality. Lateral. Unknown. Disorientating – frightening actually and uneasy. Easy and uneasy – but uneasy is also difficulty, but also as you say that feeling of not knowing. So it is unsettling and uneasy, uncomfortable. These indirect and not quite knowing states. Even in work situations when things need to be done, deviating from right and left and being a bit off kilter. The sway is very gentle, fluid, subtle – it is different from stumbling, there is a fluidity to it. There is something interesting in how a straightforward situation might be a playground for a very subtle, nuanced, murky dorsal activity. There is something about swimming and being in the water which creates immediately a sense of touch. You are immersed in something rather than being on something, rather than on the ground. Floating has a different relation to gravity and to not being upright. Also it reconfigures the relation of the body to gravity. There is something about not staking trees for too long because the sway really encourages root growth and stability. There are all these phrases that are written in to our culture that have positive or negative connotations – straightforwardness has a positive connotation, easily swayed has a negative connotation. Yet there is something of a voluntary swaying or moving into, which feels really delightful. Again, this sense of delight. The thing that came to my mind very strongly was the sense of just trusting that something would come from something. Just being willing to enter that space. A sense of release or of relief in that way – just not needing to plan all of the time but to just trust that with a degree of openness, something will lead to something. Some place will be arrived at, some experience will be arrived at. It could not have been anticipated at the outset. Often I don’t trust that. Moving to what is unknown – so there is a relationship between some of the things that we have been talking about the dorsal, things that are murky or that are not known or that are not sharply in focus. And today the path called me – you have to go through the undergrowth and then drop down. And it was very exciting. It felt like it was because I was entering a space with a sense of dorsal practising more foregrounded. It was not I had discovered something that I had never seen before, and now it is there, I have seen it. But there was never the sufficient curiosity to follow that path in a way – and today there was. There are all these melodies of possibility that I cannot quite hold. They are in the air. They come and go somehow in my recollection of what you were saying. Yet I don’t have a direct path to get to them somehow. The shadow side – like the reverse side, or back side of things. Interesting – I was thinking, does the dorsal have more of a Northerly dimension. This mossy, shadowy, shady side. And then I thought – this is interesting, is this only true of the Northern hemisphere. Do trees on the southern hemisphere – I don’t know, how the sun and our planet works, I am not sure. Is it that the shaded side is only like this in the Northern hemisphere? Again a sense of how the radical positioning of ourselves on the planet takes, all of our metaphors and all of a language is determined by the position that we have, the positions that we take, where we are located even in the world. Looking at the four cardinal directions – the North, South, East and West – and this idea of how we navigate differently and how many of us have lost the ability to use a map or compass. These ideas of navigating by the sun, the moon, the stars and the wind. Swaying trees in the wind – there is a technique there for understanding where you are in relation to knowing how the wind is blowing in certain places. So these systems of navigation and in a way what we have been talking about is different because it is in relation to forwards, or backwards or round the sides. Proceeding through the senses. And in some ways there are interesting overlaps – talking about wayfinding and finding the way. I think I was triggered because we were talking about this last week or maybe the week before, especially in relation to, responding to, what the other has just said. Not being able to recall it – to find a way back. Having to go around the back of things or to meander a little in order to find a way in, to find a way back. All of these phrases that are written into our culture – that have these positive or negative connotations. And having the sense of being grounded to the floor and the sense of the planet moving and there is this huge land mass and there we are on the surface of it. Why are we not swaying more? So let’s try this, let’s try this, let us, let us do this – it opens it up, it is an invitation. So there is almost a poetic invitation between letting go and letting and let’s – that started to emerge and I got interested in it in a way. This let.

What are the circumstances that make something desirable or non-desirable?  And maybe it is not the one or the other but how the two cooperate. And maybe it is back to this sense of cooperation and how seemingly opposite orientations or tendencies between indirectness and directness, or steadfastness or stillness and swaying, groundedness and ungroundedness. There is something in this transitional movement – a range of possibility that opens up. Understanding where you are through different ways – through listening, even sensing the vibrations of other things through the skin. A wider sense of locatedness – in terms of understanding where you are in relation to other things, other people, but even wider than that – political, social, cultural, material. There is something in that – coming back to orientation and the sense of the East and the North. The North is up on the map, we point up to the North. Dwelling and lingering – this idea of releasement. It feels like the movement led it there in a way but there was also this sense of a chance encounter, chance constellations. Sometimes it is easy to miss as it feels so fleeting and fragile – that flash of connection gets easily lost. At other times, it is just possible to catch that chance stimulus of a word and a reference comes to mind, to follow with it. So releasing into the mystery, into the not known or the unknown. Maybe there is something there, although the direct route is easier. Because the unknown is really frightening actually and uneasy – maybe there is something here about uneasiness. Like easy and uneasy and all of the different dimensions of uneasiness. So there might be difficulty as the opposite of easy. To hold it lightly – to move with it, yes, to move with it. So the notion of sway was really present because the trees were really moving and there was this point when I was really swaying. And I think of this with reading as well – just really swaying with it. The sense of having something in mind quite lightly – held in the background but not looked at too directly. So that it informs but in an indirect way. Now I am thinking of vertigo. That sense of dizziness and the sway that can be experienced in vertigo – of not being steady. Untangling of that – properties, or qualities, or characteristics, that might be worth redeeming or investigating, from those that are somehow paralysing. Because there is a sense of a vertiginous, dizzy sway which is undesirably disorienting and at other times this can be really pleasurable. There is a sense of the multidimensionality of life which becomes apparent then – there was something about the movement in this space where everything was just moving in so many different directions and sensitising to that. Almost a bit chaotic in a way, the vibrations and vibrancy of the situation was almost too much in its vibrancy. But really exciting too because it was about being with all of that. I like what you are saying about holding it lightly in the mind, even a sense of light, of lightly – not to go to the opposite with heavy, but lightly so that things can still move, don’t get stuck or fixed or weighty. Weighty so that they can’t move, but that there is a fluidity to them. And also how ideas – sometimes that pass through or they stick around for a while or they connect with other things. Perhaps there is something about this lightness and taking things with into walking, into talking, into working. I am now in this image of you swaying and the trees swaying – deviating from right to left and being a bit off kilter. Sway is a very subtle way – it is different from stumbling. Being swayed and easily sway – this is what I was actually aspiring to in practice, to be easily swayed. But it was hard actually because there is so much habit in my body resisting that sense of sway. And I lie down and have a couple of breaths – and the body starts to settle in a very different way. The breath, the muscles, the heart, the pulse, the whole configuration of the body and the senses change again. These ideas seep into the body – a little micro feeling, or a micro sense or a micro image. How that can then, how that can open up a big territory of exploration or an ongoing curiosity or a working-with. Like the turning, like the turn – that just continues to resonate in the body. All these different ways of being able to process and giving them more value – something about this skimming and sketching, rather than an in-depth cover, which picks up on something else and which can maybe, can maybe be more easily taken with and brought into experience. Very simply not moving, very simply lying on my back – I think because the weather is so light in the Spring, it feels as if it is pulling me into action, but there are those moments when I sit more in and where I stay. To lie – and let everything pass over or pass through rather than be drawn into the crazy seagull activity and the wind. It made me think of the right and the left and this diagonal relationship – what is happening in the brain, what is happening on the right and left side of the body. It made me think – that is why we have to turn then, to turn and to keep turning. To keep crossing the spine to turn, to keep activating these diagonal relationships, the criss-crossing and the meandering. I get very lost in the writing – there is not a beginning point or an ending point, I am working with this circular writing and reading. It is interesting thinking how our ideas inform us and how our ideas around conversation and our reading and our digesting of ideas can be absorbed in different ways, be expressed later in different ways and at different times.

PART 5

22.05.2022

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Fields of Association

Fields of Association 

- Tuning into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate

- Each selects a cluster of single words to explore through conversation and etymological exploration, live within the conversation), as a field of association.

(1) 3 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(2)  3 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

(3) 5 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)

(4) 5 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)

So, to sway. To go quickly. To move or go quickly, or to move along or to carry. This is interesting – I would not think that. I think I saw it more in this static movement. So probably from a Scandinavian source – to bend, to swing, to give way. The whole group might be related to swag, or to swing, the sense of swing, to waver, moving in a swaying or sweeping motion, to move from side to side. To cause to move from side to side. To cause to be directed to one side, or prejudice. Swag. To move heavily or unsteadily, to swing or sway. Lurching or swaying. This is interesting – I had imagined sway more graceful in a way. This unsteadiness, meaning to swing. To swing – to beat, strike; scourge, flog; to rush, fling oneself. To swing, swingle, oscillate – meaning moving freely back and forth. Yes, maybe this is what I had more in mind, this moving freely back and forth, to cause to oscillate, to bring about or make happen. Ah, this is swinging – to engage in promiscuous sex, to enjoy oneself unconventionally. Swing. Swag. Sway. Waver. Maybe closer to waver – in the sense of showing indecision, a restless wavering. A frequentative form of the root of wave. To move back and forth, to waver, fluctuate, restless, unstable. Undulation or hovering about – a movement to or fro, to weave. This is interesting – to waver, to weave. This interlacing, ah yes, this interlacing of yarn. To weave, also to move quickly. I am interested that these waves and sways and weaves have this urgency or quickness, where my sense of it was more slow. Something woven, a weave – to move from one place to another, sorry, to move from one space to another. Wave - uncertain origin, perhaps from weave. To move to and fro, to move side to side.

I am sure we did this before, when we talked last time – sentient. Sentient. Sentient. Sentient. Adjective. Capable of feeling. Having the power of or characterized by the exercise of sense-perception. From the Latin sentientem – feeling. Feeling – present participle of sentire "to feel". Sentience – as a noun, the faculty of sense; sentient character or state, feeling, consciousness – ah yes, sentience, conscious. Susceptibility to sensation. Susceptibility to sensation. That is quite nice, because it indicates this potential possibility but not necessarily being aware of it happening. Sentience. Interesting – there is animal next to it. I am not quite sure how this works, I am following something that I am not quite sure about … under sentience, sentience (noun) it has got animal (adjective). Which is interesting. Oh yes here, pertaining to the animal spirit of man, pertaining to the merely sentient as distinguished from the intellectual or rational or spiritual qualities of a human being. So, this link with the animal, pertaining to sensation, pertaining to or derived from the senses. It is interesting this link to the animal. Animal kingdom rather than vegetable or mineral – having life, living, animate. Sense – to perceive an object by the senses, consciously, inwardly of. Sense – to perceive or understand a fact or situation, not by … hmm, a sense of to perceive or understand a fact or situation not by direct perception is from 1872. Oh, this idea of sensing, coming a little bit away from the immediacy of working with the senses, perceiving things. I suppose sometimes we might slip between that.

Yes, so, I am curious about this ‘straightforward’. I am not sure whether it will …. Ah, yes, straightforward as an adjective, directly forward or right ahead. Of two adjectives – straight and forward. It is interesting – I like looking at these nearby references, so there is a nearby reference to ingenious, honourably straightforward. There is this word – how do you say this: tergiversation. Tergiversation – a noun meaning turning dishonestly from a straightforward action or statement; shifting, shuffling, or equivocation. Shifting, evasive, declining, refusing. From tergiversari "turn one's back on, or to evade," from tergum "the back", mmm, tergum, the back, and versare "to spin, turn," frequentative of vertere "to turn". This is the same component that is in conversation, so conversation, versare, to turn together. So, to turn or bend one’s back – I want to look at this deviation. Turning from a straightforward direction, shifting or declining. What is this tergi part then? How do you say this – tergiversate? Back formation – to be evasive, to turn one’s back, to turn one’s back. I cannot see where this tergi comes from. Tergi. There is no way to connect here. Evasive, evasive – to get away or to escape, evasion, a way out. To escape. It is now making we want to look at back. Surely we have looked at this. The back – the horizontal back of an animal or a mountain range. Yes, I recall this. The modern word for back may come from the word for spine. By synecdoche, "the whole body,". To turn (one's) back on (someone or something) or to "ignore", or to know (something) like the back of one's hand, implying familiarity. I want to go back to this straightforward – it is interesting that there is nothing in it that suggests a sense of value as such, it is quite minimal in its etymology. Straight - "direct, undeviating; not crooked, not bent or curved," ah, here we go, of a person, "direct, honest;" properly "stretched,". This is interesting. Why would this be? Ah yes, straight from Old English streht, past participle of streccan "to stretch". Properly stretched. True direct and honest, unambiguous, unconvoluting or uncomprising. As in straight whisky. As an adverb from the thirteenth century – as in "a straight line, without swerving or deviating." Sometimes meant as serious. To go straight, to become respectable. The straight arrow, the decent conventional person. To stretch. To reach or extend. Perhaps a variant of stark. Stark. Stiff. Strong. Rigid. Obstinate. Stark - stiff, strong, rigid, obstinate; stern, severe, hard; harsh, rough, violent. This straightness as stiffness or starkness – the same root as stern. Stern as in severe, strict, grave, or hard. To be stiff or obstinate.

So notice, noticing the verb. Notice. This is interesting – there is one meaning, to give notice, or notify of, notice - noun. To sense or to point out, to remark upon – from the 1600s. the meaning to take notice of, perceive, to become aware of … by 1757. But it was long execrated by purists in England as an Americanism (also occasionally as a Scottishism, the two offenses not being clearly distinguished). Let’s see – notice, noticing. So noticing – information, knowledge, intelligence. from Old French fourteenth century notice. From Latin notitia – a being known, celebrity, fame, knowledge. Notice, known. Past participle of (g)noscere – come to know, to get to know, to get acquainted (with). This is all relevant in a way – to get acquainted with. PIE *gno-sko-, a suffixed form of PIE root *gno- "to know." So something around knowledge but also this idea of coming to know or getting to know, rather than being known. This is interesting. Oh yes, also this meaning of giving information. Or notice. Noticable – this idea of being worthy of notice, likely to attract attention. capable of being noticed or observed. That is quite interesting – and bringing attention to something or is something capable of being noticed or observed. Also, this relationship to turning towards or noticing as an act of choice or turn, turning towards. Or an act, an action of attracting attention, or of being available to attract attention. But this prefix “gno” is nice because it forms part of all these words – like knowledge, acquaint, agnostic, astrognosy – ah, and also is part of cognition. Ignore. Incognito. So yes, this relationship with knowledge and also notifying, recognising, recognising. A hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence provided by the Sanskrit jna- "know;". Recognise. Hmm. It is interesting – this link with knowledge is interesting. How the process of noticing is actually moving away from knowledge as a fixed thing, and more coming-to-know, or becoming familiar with, or noticing as in becoming aware of. These other words that were coming up – the idea of experience more as a contour, as a contour, an outline, circumference, to go around.