PART 2
EXPLORATION DATE: 27.11.2022
FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration (10 October 2022 - 27 November 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
This sense of re-turn, or return, doing this already, its bringing to mind a bit this exploration we did in the Netherlands which was drawing on some of our work and one of the things was a back to back practice with somebody that you didn’t know and then I wasn’t anticipating being part of it actually, I felt you know I was maybe guiding them, but someone approached and so I’m sort of finding myself back to back with somebody. Then there was an exploration of, exploring leaning, pressing into the other’s back or over accommodating in some kind of way. There’s something about, I’m not really returning to what we did, to that experience, what it means to come into contact back to back with another being, another body which is so different to coming into contact with the floor or the wall or with a tree, where there is that sense of force or pressure or resistance or accommodation or like now I am not sure am I leaning or like am being leant upon. Actually, it feels quite even somehow but I am not sure if that’s the case. So maybe I’ll come back to that later as it unfolds, I’m not quite sure what, or where I want to go with that. Maybe this kind of coming back, maybe I‘ll come back to this, this is already returning. And I guess I’m interested in the sense of what it means to come back to or even that starting something, yes, as I’m talking now, starting something but not quite knowing where I want to go with, but placing it somewhere, and this idea of needing to come back to it. Maybe I’d like to try and think with that a bit, what is that. What is this capacity, what is this desire even to start something but not follow it through but to come back to it, or not to exhaust it then but to come back to it. It feels like there’s something about almost buying time in that, or placing something down but giving, buying time or allowing something to just be in the room or something and to just see what happens with that rather than knowing clearly what it is that I want to say about it, I know I want to touch on that but I don’t yet know how. So this gesture of coming back to something has a circling dimension, or maybe there is even that kind of quality of murkiness in there, that I know there is something there but I don’t quite know what it is at this point, so there is a desire to leave it and come back to it. Maybe even this gesture of leaving something and coming to something. Something about letting it settle, or not to try and force something, maybe there is something about not to try and force something there and then but to come back to. So I suppose if I’ve been thinking about returning some of the quality of that has been a gesture of coming back to practices or coming back to scores, or coming back to movement fragments or refrains that might have been explored and just keep coming back to them. And I was saying before one of the things I’ve been coming back to more
I was thinking now in this moment, in a way the number of thoughts racing around, my head, so coming back, a first thought, that we are reconnecting or coming back into this I suppose practice or project, in a very different space, in the same place, with the physical contact while we’re talking, having the contact between us, this is, it’s interesting in the way that there is a familiarity with coming back of how we set things up but it feels very very different with us being in the same physical space. There’s something around returning to things and this is a quite big difference, I was also thinking of when I was in Paf there was this possibility to return every day to a certain space, to return to a practice of moving, even the luxury of, of not having to try and find, well, no that’s not true, the returning to something in a simple way, of for example I’ll just start moving, In a very basic I’m just going to start. There are other levels of returning of sometimes trying to not necessarily refine but rather relocate certain entry points, sometimes that being successful, sometimes that not being relevant because it goes into something else. Or I come across something familiar but later on. Maybe there’s something about time and returning to something, how consciously that can happen and how possible that is and what is it that’s returning, is it returning to the score or the return to I’ll start moving or returning to drop into the back and see what happens. So, there’s a returning to the practice and within that, I was always very fascinated how some things disappeared and then a few days later they would re-emerge. So, there are these levels of possibility and levels of consciousness. And sometimes levels of frustration, or of having lost, or of not being able to return, it’s not there anymore, I’ve lost it. And on the side of that there’s this trusting, maybe similar to what you were saying, in not having to, mmm trusting in time, trusting there is time, trusting it can happen later, or it might not. Trusting and not really trying to return to something exactly but the possibility of returning, not trying to grab hold of something, but more just returning to the practice and seeing what’s coming out of that. What was I thinking, yes, coming across things, kind of ahh yes, I recognise this, and what’s similar and what’s different? Or how is it feeling today, yes, a sense of returning in a way that I’m returning to this but it’s feeling very different or the room is feeling very different or its cold or.
It's interesting, so much, I don’t know which threads to follow. In one sense I think, coming back to what you were saying about the difference and the familiarity and yes, familiarity and difference, I was almost thinking how strange it felt, that it felt so similar to the zoom conversations in a way because the quality of listening actually felt very similar and I was quite surprised by that. But then there is this difference of course of contact and breath, feeling the breath of somebody. Of you. And maybe it’s because I’ve got my eyes closed actually so as soon as I open my eyes it also feels very different. Whenever I have my eyes closed it does feel like there is a resonance or an echo or a similarity to our previous conversations, even though they were online. Where am I going? I’m trying to find some of the thoughts that were emerging. I’m noticing now that I’m leaving thing in the air, so I’m saying something and then leaving it in the air, and then moving to the side of it to explore something else. It’s an interesting tendency there, I wonder actually what it would be to keep coming back to this experience of physical back-to-back and the sensations of that now, but I feel as if I’m sort of pulled to the side somehow into this sense of returning, what is it that’s returning in this return, so I think, I’m also, yes let me think about where I’m going with this. On the one hand I’m sort of thinking what is it that I’m returning to in this dialogue and this voicing, is it that I’m returning to the direct experience of practising or specific event of practising or actually it feels as if there are many things emerging live in the conversation that feel resonant somehow. And to kind of come back to those, to loop back to those but how to hold it in proximity to a direct experience, like a real, how not to circle out into abstraction I suppose. But one of the things that really struck me when you were talking was the sense of returning not only being to do with, like human agency, like when I think about it, I think about I am returning to something, it’s me that’s returning to a practice or I am returning quite intentionally back to something to explore again, but there’s this sense, a strong sense that the practice returns, it’s not that I am seeking it or that I am returning it, but there’s something of a practice or a sensibility of a practice or an attitude that returns, or emerges, that kind of comes about or, yes, emerges. This return it feels as if, where is the agency in this returning, it feels as if it’s not my decision somehow, or not only my decision, that the practice itself has the capacity to come back into experience. And I think the thing you were touching upon, sometimes it being returned to in a way that feels quite different but sometimes a practice returning even unexpectedly in a different context or a different situation. So almost, is it me that’s making that decision?
It's sort of in the word, you talking about, somehow giving, to return feels like to go back as something linear, but has something in the linguistics, you go back, you come back, but the way we are talking it’s not linear at all, it’s how you said, more of a looping, reminds me of the idea of a return not to step back or reverse but more the turning over and over, returning to a circling, to come about, to come around. I think that’s. Yeh. It’s, I’ve lost my thought, I can feel I’ve pulled back, maybe almost into that sensation, of bringing attention into the back, it’s pulled me away from what I was saying. The practice coming back, I’m also reminded agency of what is possible for me to do, perhaps also returning to an idea not being able to control everything, but a sense of coming around again, or coming back to, perhaps setting up something that feels or is a return as a decision, like coming back to a particular space or a particular configuration like the back-to-back, that there is something that can be decided and re-installed or, and within that everything around it or within it has possibly, most likely has changed, like the way the light falls into the space or some other external circumstance has shifted that then shifts everything. What am I saying, I think its picking up on what you were saying, it’s not only us that have the agency to return. But there’s a circling, and a looping, and the chance of things popping up, resurfacing, remerging or emerging differently. And also within that I’m also thinking, well also the surprise of returning to or coming back to a situation or something that’s re-emerging unexpectedly and the surprise in how that might feel, even if its familiar, a kind of oh I know this, sometimes it can be totally surprising again. That’s interesting in the way perhaps there’s a value in returning to.
That is so interesting in the sense of a small shift and how that rewires and disorients and reconfigures, actually it seems as if it reconfigures all my thinking in a way. It’s almost like, I feel like the gesture of being spun around and having to try and find myself in my environment once more and the thread of thought that were there are not quite where they were a minute ago. Wow, very interesting. Maybe I should stay with that for a moment, to sort of stay with that in the sense of this turn, because that’s it all it’s been in a way, a ninety degree turn. Why would that make such a strong change somehow? It’s like I can’t find myself in a way. Yes, maybe there is something of this facing towards or facing away. I think in the experience of talking back to back, there’s something of my attention being taken backwards, and in a way what happens in that is that the attention drops further back into body, I wouldn’t even say to the back surface of the body, but certainty into, it falls back into the body-ness of the body and somehow that seems to lend itself so well also to this strange time of this conversation, which is like temporarily, yes maybe the temporal dimension of this, which I’m really struck with now, where there is something very clearly about a present tense, sense of noticing and registering and voicing from this very present a sense as its unfolding but also with a sense of recollection of previous practising and so that that temporal experience feels somehow quite indeterminate in a way that its moving somehow between sort of thoughts and experiences and triggers that are happening now as we are talking and this experience now as a dorsal practice of sitting side by side or back to back as a practice, so not only a conversation practice but also an embodied practice. Maybe that’s showing up more strongly now in being in the same room because it was already a physical practice. But somehow the very physical somatic sensorial dimension of that feels very tangible. It’s almost like I don’t need to go back to other practising because there is this sense of practising now and being able to voice from that direct experience of now. But now in this position there is a sense of sideness and a sense of someone, how is it to listen from the side? That’s not true because you are listening still from behind. There’s something about the way the voice, it doesn’t curl back or loop back in the same kind of way. It feels as if it moves to the side. I’m getting preoccupied with that which is very interesting. Maybe it even has something of this frontal dimension in this sideness, less dorsal and more lateral and I notice it in my thoughts in a way that I am surprised by. Like as if I’m finding it harder to lean back into the space of voicing and see what arises from that. I feel maybe more like I’m searching for something or trying to bring in from the sides perhaps. Maybe I will go back or take aside, to this sense of the active returning to certain movement practices or attention practices, and when I’ve been thinking about, in particular the word and the associations of the word repetition, didn’t feel very adequate or they didn’t feel as if they fit somehow. So there was something about this gap or difference between repeating and returning that I’m feeling interested in, almost as if the taste of the those two ideas or the sensitivity of those two ideas feel quite different. Or if I think about coming back to certain practices it doesn’t feel like repetition it feels like returning. I guess I want to dwell in that difference and get closer to what this quality of returning is if it’s not repeating or even what is it in repeating that is not quite the same as returning. And somehow, again there’s something to do with time here that repeating, it felt somehow like it was always this stepping into a future space somehow, like there was something about a directionality to repeating that was always moving forward still, even if was a quality of redoing or revisiting, it was in the direction of moving forwards. I don’t mean literally, I mean just the sensitivity of the direction was a forward orientation in my sense of it where returning it just feels as if there is a curve, a curve backwards or something about even doing something with time, it’s not about the past either and I think that feels quite important, that in this return although it’s not necessarily a movement forwards in the kind of direction of the arrow of time it doesn’t really feel like it’s a step back in time to revisit past either, it feels as if its neither of those things somehow, as if there this stretchiness of time or slowing of time or dispensing of that temporal frame altogether or maybe to suspend or hold open or return, to just stay with, maybe that might be a different way of thinking about it, to stay with something and to extend the duration of or to open the duration of or. There’s something around time that I can’t quite grasp somehow other than that there is this sense that there are different registers.
Maybe before I, I was going to start with how it felt, how it was to listen to be listening to you because it was surprisingly different. I notice I am now immediately pulled into this situation. Maybe before I totally get settled into here, listening to you and listening to you noticing there was a very different, the relationship in the space and the voice and how it was working at this right angle. I found it quite hard in the beginning to listen in the same way. I wondered if it was because, before because there was a clear sense, no because of the right angle rather than the 180 degree or the front back facing not facing seen not being seen creates a kind of, I’m not quite sure, a kind of clarity, there’s a kind of opposition there and within that the listening and talking can move between in a certain way. Whereas this right angle opens up, what does it open up, you talked about coming from the side, maybe it opens up the sides, it opens up another dimension of noticing something or perhaps a confusion with where, an interesting confusion around where the voice is coming from, what you are facing, what’s behind me, where the light is coming from. The sound isn’t coming equally into both ears I think maybe there is something about the sound, a sort of inequality of the right-left that was really interesting and noticing that the body had to reconfigure how it was, how I felt I could sit. I did close my eyes and was first noticing how the listening was working and the sense of the right-left-ness and how space was opening up on certain sides. I was still close to you, but I wasn’t as close to you, I was aware I had my back to you, I can’t quite put this into words but I’m aware the way you were sitting was open to me in some way. Something about the right angle that creates a kind of, well there isn’t a parallelness and more of a juxtaposition which is interesting, it creates a tension, not in a bad way, but yes a tension between, friction perhaps. And now sitting here, I feel a little more close to the Zoom mode in a way than I have, umm, I’ve got my eyes closed, I’m facing the wall rather than the camera. I’ve got my back to the laptop. Hmm. And then coming back to, coming around coming about I had these very strong images when I was in PAF, so it’s almost when I’m listening to you talking I am linking it to there, quite blurry but sort of an image sensation of working at PAF, I think perhaps because of the spaces, continued working, particularly one space, but maybe two spaces, that I have kind of or as if they are linked to those spaces and to that temperature or the feel of the light, it’s strange how it has linked up to this listening and to this talking, those spaces, the feel of the floor. It has left traces in the body, quite strong traces, because I was returning to those, literally returning to those spaces, that somehow has become part of the practice at the moment, which might shift or entangle itself again when I’m working in a different space. Strangely enough talking, this feels very different than when I was working in Access Space, which I seemed to have separated in a different kind of package although there were some things I was returning to. Something you were saying about repetition and this idea of returning, and returning as a very different gesture and how that’s working temporally, like the returning has opened up a very different space, even literally going back to a same space, it opens up another space, and I have a sort of image of a system of a space in a space of a space or a kind of unfolding of another space which is still connected to this previous space but that they all start to overlap, or overlap in a way that they become almost the same space. Something about an unfolding and an overlapping which I think is linked with an experience of time, and in this way this idea of returning might be to try and pull something that has happened previously. A sense of a temporal space whereas repeat feels much more, to repeat something feels much more the action of a making or a doing of a making happen trying to achieve something perhaps, to repeat you really need to remember, whereas to return there is no pressure to have to remember or pick something up. It feels perhaps, well, I’m curious what you were saying the gesture, what is that gesture, what is that move, feels like a shift, a move, a reach, a reaching out, that opens up. Opens up a situation in which to inhabit and be in for a while.
I feel like I need to close my eyes. These shifts, I think one of the things that was coming to my awareness with the last practice was and I think it is also present in this orientation or position was there can be a quality of backness that is somehow evasive. There’s something about the positioning of being to the side or being to the back or turning the back or not meeting someone in the eye that has this feeling of evasiveness or. When we are talking back to back it feels as if that dorsal experience really enables a kind of opening up, an opening, a capacity of openness, and that sense of speaking as if to oneself and or revealing something as if speaking to oneself and being listened to but more like being witnessed in the act of speaking rather than in conversation with somebody, to be really listened to and the sense of ease or a release from facing or the release from face to face and how that enables a kind of an opening a real opening of thought in some ways. I almost think its not like thinking in speaking it’s just like opening up to the situation, almost opening my mouth and things just come out. I’m not actively thinking but it’s more like thinking’s happening, but I don’t mean a kind of automatic thinking, like the mind chatter, its kind of like there is a thinking that is coming from the experience and if I can let it unfold and take my time with it. And in that experience being surprised at times by what becomes voiced or being surprised
how a turn of thought goes into a direction. I also feel I arrive somewhere without being in charge or control in the direction of those thoughts. And then somehow in this previous orientation, in some ways strangely more so than now, a feeling of evasiveness and not feeling this sense of openness in quite the same way. But maybe there’s these habits of orientation and the sense of side by side or to the side of someone but not meeting their eye feels as if there’s a habit there or a conditioning there about a certain kind of communication. Feeling like there’s a trying to avoid face to face, looking away, yes there is a quality of backness and looking away and sideness and turning the back that I guess have maybe more, I don’t know if you would describe them as negative connotations but certainly not with openness or receptivity but acts of concealment or withdrawal or separation. Evasive is the thing that keeps coming back. That’s so interesting because as we’re moving in this small way its making me think about how the conditions of dorsal practices are so critical, I mean the way they are set up the relation of a body to another body or to a place is also critical in the way that the practice is able to unfold and practised in a different kind of way maybe there is this sense of separation and isolation and withdrawal and turning away or turning ones back. I think we’ve even talked about there are these connotations of the dorsal that have self-protection built into them somehow. So I’m thinking a lot about this sense of dorsal conditions in an affirmative sense, what are the conditions that allow for an opening up of dorsal practicing. And maybe there is something of this returning that is really important because it feels as if perhaps in there, there is this sense of ease or. No I’m not sure really whether that return is part of the fabric of a dorsal practising that is opening and receptive. Maybe I’m also thinking about the sharing of practice in the context of the Netherlands and how you set up an invitation to another to engage in a practice and how the care taken to set up a practice because the leaning against the wall practice, to lean against the wall can become a, can be a practice of awareness and sensitivity and balance and embodied feeling or it can be just leaning against the wall. It can even be being bored and leaning against the wall or like almost withdrawing from the scene and leaning against the wall, kind of pulling away or pulling back. Even the same movement no not the movement but the same posture if you like has the capacity to be inhabited and dwelt with in such can radically different ways. It feels as if it connects with the micro that we’ve been touching upon all these micro interventions or micro invitations or micro arrivals into a practice feel that they set the course for how it will unfold. Or even the sense of what might trigger a dorsal sort of curiosity which is not the sort of what’s happening here kind of trying to work it out or understand curiosity but a real enquiry, a sort of enquiry that moves with what’s unfolding rather than trying to somehow work to out from above or from the sides. So maybe there again there’s something about, maybe a bit kind of corny, but I want to say something like dropping in rather than dropping out. I feel like the dorsal has the capacity for this deep sense of dropping in and a deepening of body awareness but I can think of many contexts where this turning of the back or leaning into back is much more of a dropping out and zoning out or switching or disengaging actually. Maybe you can see that in a room of people and someone leans against the wall and you know the threshold between engaging and disengaging that’s been.
This idea, picking up from what you were saying about disengaging and engaging or zoning out dropping in dropping out. That’s very interesting because I think also I can relate to that in certain situations, and also linking up with this idea of side by sideness, and I also have my eyes closed and it feels like I need to have my eyes closed, because otherwise the tendency, because yes I will be able to see something out of the corner of my eye, I can see you sideways, it feels as if the body’s natural social mode might be to turn my head, that’s right the possibility of turning to face is much closer than if I have my back to you which has somehow given a full permission to be listening in that way and I can feel the relief of that. And in this situation the closing of the eyes feels necessary. And it reminds me of situations, perhaps of a meeting or with a group of people where I’d often love to close my eyes because then I think I would be able to engage better and listen more at the same time knowing that could be very disturbing and somehow not function. Imagining myself now in a team meeting but having our eyes closed it would be strange but an interesting I think it’s a way of picking up from what you were saying, I’m projecting a possibility of having a meeting what would happen and still engaging in a conversation about something or maybe even having to make certain decisions. Perhaps there would be certain practicalities and strangeness, but it would be an interesting experiment, I’m wondering then would there be a possible different balance or equality of who might be speaking. Somehow there is a curiosity there to open up that possibility as an experiment. Thinking of a dorsal orientation in a social space how that, or maybe I’m linking to this idea of evasiveness, because I know I do zone out sometimes I drop away I disengage and. What am I saying here? So how might a dorsal orientation still be a mode of engaging rather than of disengagement and dropping out. Or engaging differently, not being pulled here and there but sitting within what’s happening and unfolding in such a group meeting for example. I’m thinking now also of ideas of performance, which in a way is another kind of social space perhaps, or we have talked about that before this performing of presence, and thinking now of two days ago in a performance space, of people coming to watch Rob and I in a performance, I almost feel that sense of what level of performance to allow someone to just witness what you are doing or what is it then to, also the generosity of yes you are watching me or how not drop of that to be pulled into an entertainment mode or having to perform that presence. That’s very interesting the evasiveness or the difference between or perhaps the precariousness of being both in and, no the precariousness of, no I’m not sure. Perhaps there is or a delicacy? Maybe there is something around the dorsal that it sort of reveals the delicacy or fragile thresholds between this and that or out or in or zone, a dorsal mode or dorsal orientation, where is that operating? And the side by sideness is bringing up images of being on busses and trains or walking together, with people, sitting next to people. Sideness maybe does also give a certain permission to just sit, to stand and to walk together, a sense of togetherness in a very different way than the dorsal. And because we are in this conversation practice and thinking how listening and hearing and not seeing is operating, I’m feeling now maybe because I’m facing the wall that I quite like this talking towards the wall but while I’m listening to you, I’m very much on this side of it, physically one side is closer to your voice than the other. That creates a kind of energetic field that works on one side, quite interesting but it also feels then that the other side is free, is operating differently to the voice to the wall to the air. There’s an interesting disbalance to, and also noticing how the body adapts and settles and readjusts. Working in a way our dorsal practice with these different configurations.
It's like every move my mind is wiped completely clean somehow. I have my eyes closed again and actually I’ve had my eyes closed a lot and it was making me think about this relationship between dorsality and the eyes, and the eyes closed and how often even in walking backwards and lying on the floor, if I now record experiences of lying on the floor and this desire or tendency to want to close the eyes. I’ve opened them now but this sense somehow the dorsal and sight and visuality somehow feel there’s a relationship there or there’s even a kind of antagonism there that somehow the eyes feel as if they’ve got this stronger forward future orientation and listening particularly this kind of listening feels as if there’s much more an orientation towards the back, the sides, but towards the back receptive listening. Then there was something I wanted to come back to and I can’t find it again now. How interesting. What does it mean to really search for the thing, I think of the phrase of racking your brain which seems so violent in a way, to kind of almost shake the mind to reveal something of what you wish to talk about. But actually it does come back, it does return. Maybe there’s also something about, not only how, before I was talking about more how movements or attitudes return, so the attitude that returns most is this almost like a remembering to take my attention to the back, not even so much moving with the back but just to take the attention back. I notice it when I’m least doing it. It’s like it returns as a call when I’m feeling most hurried and most rushed or most future leaning but the memory of the recollection of leaning into the back comes then. I’m also thinking now about the ways thoughts come back or return. I don’t know how much is it I am returning to a thought or that thought returns almost by its own accord in a way. It feels as if its very reciprocal or very hard to tell whether its me that returns or whether the thought returns. Actually I think in a dorsal practising its leaning much more towards an allowing the thoughts to return. Like I have this image of things surfacing or bubbling up or again something about liquid, like a very liquid sense of thinking. And then there was something also about this dropping in and dropping out and how dropping out feels like its spatial, it feels like a spatial manoeuvre, it’s almost like there’s a circle of attention and I step out of it, I’m stepping out, I’m stepping to the side but its a spatial manoeuvre somehow. If I drop in, oh no that’s not true its a horizontal movement, it steps to the side horizontally whereas to drop in is vertical I drop in I go down in some kind of way and that shift in register feels really significant. Yes to drop in I’m falling in, I’m somehow becoming immersed, I’m diving in. If I drop out I just step to the side I’m out, its very prosaic, pedestrian, every day, I just step out and I’m back in the everyday domain. I drop out.
That was so interesting, so interesting. It felt like the, your talking and your voice was coming around me, a sort of wrapping around me, when its back to back the voice has to come out and then curl around to get to the other whereas with this there is an immediacy of coming through and wrapping, a kind of a sort of quite a warm or enveloping, almost like arms would come to wrap around, a very different kind of. With back to back and touching there is a kind of intimacy with that, this is less physical but perhaps more of an airy intimacy yes. Perhaps the voice travelling through the air and the space rather than sort of the flesh and the breath and the warmth of another body leaning. Whereas now if I, well I think I had my eyes open and I find it really interesting to have eyes closed and eyes open. I quite like to shift to open them for a while and then close them again. I’m not quite sure why that is, maybe its also something to remind myself that I am here, there’s the window there’s the wall there’s this light to very gently let that in. And this alternating between eyes open and closed I find very interesting in relation to the dorsal mode and in relationship to listening and hearing. We have talked about that before how to be able to not always shut out but to let the eyes function or operate differently in relationship to listening and hearing differently, and or to touch this relationship to seeing and touching and seeing otherwise. I was also thinking of breath and breathing in relationship to return, it’s almost well a thing that’s happening by itself, but it is something that is to be returned to or feels good to return to or bring attention to or something bubbles up like I notice oh I’m not breathing properly, I’m not sure thats just a thought while we’re sitting noticing how the breath adapts in or is activated differently of course while talking but also then how is the breath working while listening or in being still. And there was something about what you were saying about this liquid sense of thinking and thinking somehow something about things not being separated, the thinking not being separated from the body that can sometimes happen more in that frontal mode. In these practices.
Exploring leaning, pressing into the other’s back. What it means to come into contact back to back with another being, another body which is so different to coming into contact with the floor or the wall or with a tree, where there is that sense of force or pressure or resistance or accommodation. Now I am not sure am I leaning or like am being leant upon. The sense of what it means to come back to. Starting something but not quite knowing where I want to go with, but placing it somewhere, and this idea of needing to come back to it. What is this desire to start something but not follow it through but to come back to it, or not to exhaust it then but to come back to it. Placing something down, allowing something to just be in the room, to just see what happens, rather than knowing clearly what it is that I want to say about it. I know I want to touch on that but I don’t yet know how. This gesture of coming back to something has a circling dimension, or maybe there is even that kind of quality of murkiness in there. I know there is something there but I don’t quite know what it is at this point, so there is a desire to leave it and come back to it. This gesture of leaving something and coming to something - letting it settle. Not to try and force something, there is something about not trying to force something but to come back to. A gesture of coming back to practices or coming back to scores, or coming back to movement fragments or refrains - just keep coming back to them.
Coming back - we are reconnecting or coming back into this practice, in a very different space, in the same place, with the physical contact while we’re talking, having the contact between us. There is a familiarity but it feels very different with us being in the same physical space. Trying to not necessarily refine but rather relocate certain entry points. There’s something about time and returning to something, how consciously that can happen and how possible that is and what is it that’s returning. Is it returning to the score? Returning to drop into the back and see what happens. So, there’s a returning to the practice and within that - some things disappeared and then a few days later they would re-emerge. So, there are these levels of possibility and levels of consciousness. And sometimes levels of frustration, or of having lost, or of not being able to return, it’s not there anymore, I’ve lost it. And on the side of that there’s this trusting, trusting in time, trusting there is time, trusting it can happen later, or it might not. Trusting - not really trying to return to something exactly but the possibility of returning. Not trying to grab hold of something, but just returning to the practice and seeing what’s coming out of that.
Difference and familiarity, familiarity and difference. Trying to find some of the thoughts that were emerging. Noticing that I’m leaving things in the air, so I’m saying something and then leaving it in the air, and then moving to the side of it to explore something else. What it would be to keep coming back to this experience of physical back-to-back and the sensations of that now, but I feel as if I’m sort of pulled to the side somehow into this sense of returning. What is it that’s returning in this return. What is it that I’m returning to in this dialogue and this voicing, is it that I’m returning to the direct experience of practising or specific event of practising or actually it feels as if there are many things emerging live in the conversation that feel resonant somehow. To come back to those, to loop back to those but how to hold it in proximity to a direct experience, real. How not to circle out into abstraction. The sense of returning not only being to do with human agency, like I am returning to something, it’s me that’s returning to a practice or I am returning quite intentionally back to something to explore again. But this sense that the practice returns, it’s not that I am seeking it or that I am returning it, but there’s something of a practice or a sensibility of a practice or an attitude that returns, or emerges, that kind of comes about or, yes, emerges. Where is the agency in this returning, it feels as if it’s not my decision somehow, or not only my decision - that the practice itself has the capacity to come back into experience. Sometimes a practice returning even unexpectedly in a different context or a different situation. Is it me that’s making that decision?
To return feels like to go back as something linear - you go back, you come back, but the way we are talking it’s not linear at all. It’s more of a looping. The idea of a return not to step back or reverse but more the turning over and over, returning to a circling, to come about, to come around. I’ve lost my thought, I can feel I’ve pulled back, almost into that sensation, of bringing attention into the back. It’s pulled me away from what I was saying. Returning to an idea not being able to control everything, but a sense of coming around again, or coming back to. Perhaps setting up something that is a return as a decision, like coming back to a particular space or a particular configuration like the back-to-back. There is something that can be decided and re-installed - and everything around it or within it has possibly, most likely has changed, like the way the light falls into the space or some other external circumstance has shifted, and that then shifts everything. What am I saying - it’s not only us that have the agency to return. There’s a circling, and a looping, and the chance of things popping up, resurfacing, remerging or emerging differently. The surprise of returning to or coming back to a situation or something that’s re-emerging unexpectedly and the surprise in how that might feel, even if its familiar.
The sense of a small shift and how that rewires and disorients and reconfigures - it seems as if it reconfigures all my thinking in a way. Like the gesture of being spun around and having to try and find myself in my environment once more and the threads of thought that were there are not quite where they were a minute ago. To stay with that in the sense of this turn. It’s like I can’t find myself in a way. Facing towards or facing away. In the experience of talking back to back, there’s something of my attention being taken backwards, and in a way what happens in that is that the attention drops further back into body. I wouldn’t even say to the back surface of the body, but certainty into, it falls back into the body-ness of the body. Somehow that seems to lend itself to this strange time of conversation, temporally, yes, maybe the temporal dimension of this - there is something very about a present tense. The sense of noticing and registering and voicing from this present sense as its unfolding, but also with a sense of recollection of previous practising. So that temporal experience feels somehow indeterminate in a way – it is moving between thoughts and experiences and triggers that are happening now as we are talking. In this experience now as a dorsal practice of sitting side by side or back to back - as a practice, not only a conversation practice but also an embodied practice. Somehow the very physical somatic sensorial dimension of that feels very tangible. It’s almost like I don’t need to go back to other practising because there is this sense of practising now and being able to voice from the direct experience of now. But now in this position there is a sense of sideness - how is it to listen from the side? There’s something about the way the voice doesn’t curl back or loop back in the same kind of way. It feels as if it moves to the side. Maybe it even has something of this frontal dimension in this sideness, less dorsal and more lateral. I’m finding it harder to lean back into the space of voicing and see what arises from that. I feel more like I’m searching for something or trying to bring in from the sides perhaps. There was something about this gap or difference between repeating and returning - almost as if the taste of the those two ideas or the sensitivity of those two ideas feels quite different. If I think about coming back to certain practices it doesn’t feel like repetition it feels like returning. To dwell in that difference and get closer to what this quality of returning is if it’s not repeating. Or even, what is it in repeating that is not quite the same as returning? There’s something to do with time here – with repeating, it felt somehow like it was always this stepping into a future space somehow, like there was something about a directionality to repeating that was always moving forward. Even if there was a quality of redoing or revisiting, it was in the direction of moving forwards. I don’t mean literally, I mean just the sensitivity of the direction was a forward orientation. Where with returning it feels as if there is a curve, a curve backwards. Doing something with time - it’s not about the past either. That feels quite important, that in this return - although it’s not necessarily a movement forward in the direction of the arrow of time - doesn’t feel like it’s a step back in time to revisit the past either. It feels that it is neither of those things, as if there this stretchiness of time or slowing of time or dispensing of that temporal frame altogether. To suspend or hold open. To return, to just stay with. Maybe that might be a different way of thinking about it, to stay with something and to extend the duration of or to open the duration of. There’s something around time that I can’t quite grasp somehow other than that there are these different registers.
How it was to listen, to be listening? This right angle opens up - what does it open up? You talked about coming from the side. It opens up the sides, it opens up another dimension of noticing something, an interesting confusion around where the voice is coming from. What you are facing, what’s behind me, where the light is coming from? The sound isn’t coming equally into both ears – there is something about the sound, a sort of inequality of the right-left. Noticing that the body had to reconfigure. I did close my eyes - noticing how the listening was working. The sense of the right-left-ness and how space was opening up on certain sides. I was close to you, but I wasn’t as close to you, I was aware I had my back to you, I can’t quite put this into words. I’m aware that the way you were sitting was open to me in some way. Something about the right angle that creates - it isn’t a parallelness, but it creates a tension, not in a bad way, but yes a tension between, friction perhaps. Sort of an image sensation. Something about repetition and this idea of returning. Returning as a very different gesture and how that is working temporally. Returning has opened up a very different space, even literally going back to a same space, it opens up another space. I have a sort of image of a space in a space in a space or a kind of unfolding of another space which is still connected to this previous space but that they all start to overlap, or overlap in a way that they become almost the same space. Something about an unfolding and an overlapping which is linked with an experience of time. A sense of a temporal space. To repeat feels much more, to repeat something feels much more the action of a making or a doing of a making happen, trying to achieve something perhaps. To repeat you really need to remember, whereas to return there is no pressure to have to remember or pick something up. What is that gesture, what is that move, feels like a shift, a move, a reach, a reaching out, that opens up. Opens up a situation in which to inhabit and be in for a while.
I need to close my eyes. There can be a quality of backness that is somehow evasive. There’s something about the positioning of being to the side or being to the back or turning the back or not meeting someone in the eye that has this feeling of evasiveness. Talking back to back feels as if the dorsal experience really enables a kind of opening up, an opening, a capacity of openness. That sense of speaking as if to oneself and or revealing something as if speaking to oneself and being listened to. But more like being witnessed in the act of speaking rather than in conversation with somebody, to be really listened to and the sense of ease or a release from facing or the release from face to face and how that enables a kind of an opening a real opening of thought in some ways. It’s not like thinking in speaking - it’s just like opening up to the situation, almost opening my mouth and things just come out. I’m not actively thinking but it’s more like thinking is happening. But I don’t mean a kind of automatic thinking, like the mind chatter, it is like there is a thinking that is coming from the experience and if I can let it unfold and take my time with it. And in that experience being surprised at times by what becomes voiced, being surprised.
How a turn of thought goes into a direction. I feel I arrive somewhere without being in charge or control in the direction of those thoughts. In this previous orientation, in some ways strangely more so than now, a feeling of evasiveness and not feeling this sense of openness in quite the same way. Maybe there’s these habits of orientation and the sense of side by side or to the side of someone but not meeting their eye feels as if there’s a habit there or a conditioning there about a certain kind of communication. Trying to avoid face to face, looking away. Yes, there is a quality of backness and looking away and sideness and turning the back that has negative connotations - not openness or receptivity, but acts of concealment or withdrawal or separation. Evasive is the thing that keeps coming back. As we are moving in this small way the conditions of dorsal practices are so critical – the way that they are set up the relation of a body to another body or to a place is critical. If the practice is able to unfold and is practised in a different kind of way maybe there is this sense of separation and isolation and withdrawal and turning away or turning one’s back. There are connotations of the dorsal that have self-protection built into them somehow. But I am thinking about the sense of dorsal conditions in an affirmative sense - what are the conditions that allow for an opening up of dorsal practising. Opening and receptive. How do you set up an invitation to another to engage in a practice - the care taken to set up a practice. Because leaning against the wall, to lean against the wall can become a practice of awareness and sensitivity and balance and embodied feeling or it can be just leaning against the wall. It can even be being bored and leaning against the wall or like almost withdrawing from the scene and leaning against the wall, kind of pulling away or pulling back. Even the same movement, no, not the movement, but the same posture has the capacity to be inhabited and dwelt in through radically different ways. It feels as if it connects with the micro - all these micro interventions or micro invitations or micro arrivals into a practice feel that they set the course for how it will unfold. Or even the sense of what might trigger a dorsal sort of curiosity, a sort of enquiry that moves with what is unfolding rather than trying to somehow work to out from above or from the sides. Something like dropping in rather than dropping out. I feel like the dorsal has the capacity for this deep sense of dropping in and a deepening of body awareness but I can think of many contexts where this turning of the back or leaning into back is much more of a dropping out and zoning out or switching or disengaging actually. Thi threshold between engaging and disengaging.
This idea of side by side-ness. I have my eyes closed and it feels like I need to have my eyes closed, because otherwise the tendency, yes, I will be able to see something out of the corner of my eye. I can see you sideways, it feels as if the body’s natural social mode might be to turn my head, the possibility of turning to face is much closer than if I have my back to you and I am given full permission to be listening. The closing of the eyes feels necessary. To close my eyes - to engage better and listen more. Somehow there is a curiosity there to open up that possibility as an experiment. Thinking of a dorsal orientation in a social space. So how might a dorsal orientation still be a mode of engaging rather than of disengagement and dropping out. Or engaging differently, not being pulled here and there but sitting within what’s happening and unfolding. What level of performance allows someone to just witness what you are doing - the generosity of, yes you are watching me, and how not drop of that to be pulled into an entertainment mode or having to perform that presence. Perhaps there is a delicacy? Maybe there is something around the dorsal that it sort of reveals the delicacy or fragile thresholds between this and that or out or in or zone, a dorsal mode or dorsal orientation, where is that operating? And the side by Sideness maybe does also give a certain permission to just sit, to stand and to walk together, a sense of togetherness in a very different way than the dorsal. How listening and hearing and not seeing is operating, that creates an energetic field. There’s an interesting disbalance - the body adapts and settles and readjusts.
It is like in every move my mind is wiped completely clean somehow. I have my eyes closed again. This relationship between dorsality and the eyes. Having the eyes closed and how often - even in walking backwards and lying on the floor – there is this desire or tendency to want to close the eyes. This relation of the dorsal and sight and visuality - there’s a relationship there or there’s even a kind of antagonism there that somehow the eyes feel as if they’ve got this stronger forward future orientation and listening - particularly this kind of listening - feels as if there’s much more an orientation towards the back, the sides. Towards a back receptive listening. Then there was something I wanted to come back to and I can’t find it again now. How interesting. What does it mean to really search for the thing, I think of the phrase of racking your brain which seems so violent in a way, to kind of almost shake the mind to reveal something of what you wish to talk about. But actually it does come back, it does return. How movements or attitudes return, so the attitude that returns most is this sense of remembering to take my attention to the back, not even so much moving with the back but just to take the attention back. I notice it when I’m least doing it. It’s like it returns as a call when I’m feeling most hurried and most rushed or most future leaning and the memory of the recollection of leaning into the back comes then. I’m also thinking now about the ways thoughts come back or return. I don’t know how much is it that I am returning to a thought or that thought returns almost by its own accord in a way. It feels as if it is very reciprocal or very hard to tell whether it is me that returns or whether the thought returns. Dorsal practising is leaning much more towards an allowing the thoughts to return. This image of things surfacing or bubbling up or again something about liquid, like a very liquid sense of thinking. And then there was something also about this dropping in and dropping out - and how dropping out feels like its spatial, it feels like a spatial manoeuvre. It is almost like there is a circle of attention and I step out of it, I’m stepping out, I’m stepping to the side but it is a spatial manoeuvre somehow. It is a horizontal movement, it steps to the side horizontally, whereas to drop in is vertical. I drop in, I go down in some kind of way and that shift in register feels really significant. Yes, to drop in, I am falling in, I am somehow becoming immersed. I am diving in. If I drop out, I just step to the side - I’m out, its very prosaic, pedestrian, every day. I just step out and I’m back in the everyday domain. I drop out.
It felt like your talking and your voice were coming around me, a sort of wrapping around me. When it is back to back, the voice has to come out and then curl around to get to the other, whereas there is an immediacy of coming through and wrapping. Warm or enveloping, almost like arms would come to wrap around. With back to back and touching there is a kind of intimacy - this is less physical but perhaps more of an airy intimacy, yes. Perhaps the voice travelling through the air and the space rather than sort of the flesh and the breath and the warmth of another body leaning. To have eyes closed and eyes open. This alternating between eyes open and closed I find very interesting in relation to the dorsal mode and in relationship to listening and hearing. To not always shut out but to let the eyes function or operate differently in relationship to listening and hearing differently. Or to touch this relationship to seeing and touching and seeing otherwise. Something about this liquid sense of thinking and things not being separated, and the thinking not being separated from the body.