PART 2
EXPLORATION DATE: 22.05.23
FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the experience of sharing the practice as a 'performance reading' within the frame of the SAR conference in April, in Trondheim
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 [5 mins each]
4. 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.
Transcript 22052023
Re-turning/reflecting on SAR
What has stuck foremost in my mind and what struck me as it was being said and what I have taken a note of and what now immediately pops into mind in relation to SAR was this intermingling of voices and thoughts, that one of the audience members were saying that our two voices intermingle. And that also in that intermingling there was a kind of possibility to slightly drift with your own thoughts as a listener. And this kind of intrigued me, these ideas of an intermingling. I suppose the words on the page, us reading aloud, or scanning, in a way finding things and saying them as they get found and then what’s the relationship of someone listening to that. Our whole process of scanning and reading, that reading practice and speaking aloud and us listening to our own voices and also to the other’s voice and how much space there is for that, I do remember I tried to find those spaces where I would try and listen to you, rather than be frantically scanning, hoping I might find whatever I was assuming might be the right thing or the interesting thing or the thing I haven’t found yet. I found that a really interesting process as an experience, that might be an extension of practising - being able to read, speak aloud and listen to one’s own voice and the voice of the other, as well as acknowledging someone else’s listening and the complexity of that. So hearing from a listener that there were these intermingling of voices and their own thoughts and what they bring to it and the different connections that can be made. I found that fascinating how that might, well and also excited, that that happened, how special that can happen, that is perhaps then what happens that the language creates a space of listening, a space for reflecting, a space for thinking, a space for connecting. There’s a spaciousness in that. Sometimes it feels very dense. A sort of language density and yet it creates a space as well as a sonic texture. Maybe another thing this sonic texture, as well as an imagining, thinking, intermingling space of voices and thoughts. This leads me to think of a sense of the language being spoken and being listened to as a sonic experience. Maybe I was also trying to create space for myself with you, to hear your voice, how that would be a sonic experience, even if I’m not being able to hear the words you were saying, if I could hear your voice, feels like there is a lot more to experience within that set up of a performance reading or a practice sharing. Coming into the practice like that actually as a way of coming back to an experience at SAR was really interesting because I think I felt like I can’t get in touch with it somehow, everything feels so frantic. Somehow there was something to do with the way I was trying to recollect what happened as if it was located somehow, it feels as like I was searching for it somehow in a much more kind of a set of ideas or concrete thoughts or a certain way of relating to what happened. And feeling out of touch with it somehow. And then just before we were meeting, I was trying to find my notebooks and found them eventually and then what is there is so fragmentary it’s really strange, I felt like there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, I’ve got nothing to say I cannot recollect anything. It feels as if it’s very far away, almost like there’s a missed opportunity there to grasp or gather or capture. And then as soon as you’re talking and I’ve got my eyes closed, and I’m looking away, it was so strange it’s like I’m there in the space again it really was. And could really feel where I was sat, not so much when we were doing it, but because you were talking about what was coming from the audience, I was there in that chair, and I could really feel where you were, and where Jana was and where the audience was. And it just struck me while there’s a very different way of reconnecting to an experience and I was searching for it in the wrong places in a sense. And then very quickly from having a feeling like there’s nothing there, I failed to capture it, I didn’t make any notes or reflections, it was like an excess in the sense of all these possibilities and thoughts and reminders that were rushing to the surface, or not even rushing to the surface like they were there before but they’re budding again and again. And then I could feel an anxiety in myself that I wanted to capture them and write them down because there were so many things in terms of what you were saying, around this intermingling and the sonic and not wanting to lose that. And again, I’m approaching it in the wrong way again, this trying to capture it, trying to hold onto it, trying to somehow take hold of it, like I’m going to lose it. And then the sense of the practice is that it comes back, it will come back if I access it in a different way, not so much access but enter it from the back somehow, and it’s there. Maybe I’m sort of thinking about this sense of really being able to rest in the practice and what that is like. I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but it felt very restful in that five minutes of listening, very easeful and restful and a confidence in it somehow, then ah yes there are all these things there and I don’t have to chase them or hold them or try and remember, that they will come if I trust or rest in the practice. And I was thinking a little bit even before we began, just this sense of going to a conference without a sense of what we were going to do, no, not without a sense of, without a fixed sense of what we were going to do and the improvisatory dimension of that. And us standing or being in the corridor before it started and lying on the floor and having the papers and just that interval before of resting in the practice and trusting that it will be fine, well more than it will be fine, it'll be the practice, we are going to practice again. Just something about, there’s a quality of confidence in there that I find very rare really that we can rest in the practice because we have made a commitment to it. It's interesting you were saying about being able to access umm, well I had made some notes but I could feel also that the idea of intermingling has made a big impression on me. It’s given me a real sense, I would really like, not about liking, but maybe more of an excitement of ahhh we can do this more and again and there’s a lot more to discover, or maybe in having situations where we might do it again. And then I might be able to articulate some of the complexities better, beyond saying intermingling and sonic textures, because it’s the thing that exciting me. And perhaps the excitement especially because now we are talking again on Zoom in a very trusted and familiar way, there being different kinds of vibrancy that we were in the same space and there were people in the same space. That is still in a small way well no in a big way very new and fresh for us. Only a second time. So, there was also something of the thrill of the liveness. Also because it was live and there were live listeners, this brings another sense of the work. I can feel that loop of the idea and the performing of it and the experiencing of the performing of it and the sense of listeners being there. And yes all of those things that are live performance in a way and what that sets up in loops of experience and understanding of, and there being witnesses and feedback and resonance and relations, especially when there’s the voice and bodies. And also, there was the precarity or spontaneity of certain people moving which was a least planned aspect. It was surprising. So there’s also the surprise of the liveness. It’s not so well perhaps articulated but I can feel that. There is the buzz, a kind of buzz of performing, but in the liveness of it. Because I think there is also something in what you were saving about the framing of it as sharing a practice. This somehow relieves the performativity that can sometimes become a little, or what I think I mean is that performance can sometimes demand things from everyone. Whereas this feels like a more generous sense of let’s see what happens which even though the structure and set up is very clear there’s that sense of let’s see what happens. And I can really appreciate that and in a way there is something that a live performance always has but is not always allowed to have that let’s see what happens in the moment. I suppose in those live moments it’s pulling me back into also a familiar place of performance that I experience less these days. It is familiar and there’s something very particular. Something I like, or it’s not really about a desire or wanting but I just feel its maybe inviting other manifestations and situations and another phase. The sense of intermingling I think is one thing and also this sense of these other live presences, liveness maybe also, intermingling of voice and liveness. The intermingling, maybe the liveness first. There was something about beginning, I don’t know what I want to say, really a kind of the coming into it felt like it opened up, it sounds a bit grand really, that it opened up a different time and we all in the room had gone into this different place somehow. I’m not sure whether there was something, because in the practice there is a strange relationship between a certain kind of focussed concentration, a very focussed that’s very present-focussed, extremely presence-focussed because it’s about listening. There was something you were talking about before about this listening and speaking at the same time which was reminding me of something I’d read in terms of Gertrude Stein’s approach. And this dilemma. I think she speaks of listening and speaking at the same time and something around the occasionality of that and the present tense of that. I remember Clare and I were looking at it quite a lot at one point. Practising very much in the present in a very complicated way, no not complicated, complex. Where I have this material and part of it is to do with the relationship with the material, this re-meeting of the material, and being interested in the material, and letting the material speak to me in some kind of way, like really trying to not too forcibly find things and trying to be open to what’s coming and at the same I’m listening to you. As I’m looking, yes all these competing flows of energy in a way and somehow trying to make them sing together and just a certain quality of concentration that’s involved in that, that can’t be too focussed either because it’s kind of like being really focussed on the task but also really open to all these, almost like interferences from the side or forces from the side. Maybe this is describing improvisation I’m not sure but something about this focussing but openness, focussing but also a kind of capacity to be distracted, a concentrated capacity for distraction. And just how amazing it feels in a way. It’s so in it. I was aware of the things that were in the space, but it felt like it was a very different space somehow. It dropped into this very focussed, very concentrated almost like kind of, even a little bit ritualistic space of practice in a way where everything felt a little bit slower or a little more intense somehow. Then this experience of just witnessing or feeling the presence of people moving at the sides and I can remember how that felt. To begin with really just the sensation that someone moving but not being able to look because as soon as I would I look my concentration would be ruptured. So, there was this feeling, an awareness of something at the side, a presence at the side, a sort of another practising that was happening, very much a quality that there was another person’s practising at the same time as us. Actually very beautiful, almost very moving in a way, very intense in that sense. And the woman who was next to me, I caught her eye, and we smiled and it was a really strange smile because it wasn’t quite ooh that’s strange. It was like recognising the other in their practising somehow, just recognising that they were also doing a practice. Just very rich. I was saying that the first five minutes I felt that I had something to say because this intermingling had been so uttermost in my memory, and I also hadn’t prepared, it was so upfront, but now as we speak more, I am not sure what threads to pick up, how to continue or its become entangled. I was intrigued by what you were saying about the focus and how it is an intense concentration and how to focus but not getting too much a fixed focus. It’s almost like a juxtaposition, a two-force activity, on how to focus intently on not getting over focussed. The scanning of material rather than trying to refind something. There is an element of improvisation, at the same time it is a very specific kind of score, perhaps even how we have the sections and anchor points of when we move, that can hold this more spacious spanning acknowledging the corner of the eye stuff. It reminds me of something similar when I was working with a colleague, we were trying to perform being present, being present as in never repeating something, almost like keeping things alive, moving in the moment, and how much attention it takes to keep something processual rather than rehearsed. It is different than an open improvisation where everything goes. There is a particularity to it. Not sure what I am saying. Perhaps in this sharing of practice in this live way, maybe part of that experiencing of that situation is also, maybe the excitement of it, I remember feeling in those moments that where that material has come from, the conversations, transcriptions, the selection of things, in speaking those things in that live situation, I could really feel the weeks and time-space that those scores and the material holds and parts of that gets revealed in different ways. In a live situation. Yes something of what we have been doing, our conversations, reveals itself. What you were saying earlier too about cyclic modes of working, in that moment of performance, I could really feel that, feel the folds and circles and coming back, the returnings. It’s exciting because there are moments when the process is really resonating in the sharing of it and its also often quite hidden. I am thinking of the performances I have done. But with this sharing of the work, the length of time and the cyclical folding is so present in the material and also in the performing of it and keeps revealing and unfolding. It feels like I am remembering something. It keeps revealing. Like layers, like onion layers, another layer another layer. Keeping peeling and revealing. A kind of cyclic unpeeling of an onion but the onion doesn’t get smaller. Or you end up going round the other side. A multi-dimensional onion. I’m rambling. Not so much the unpredictability but the revealing and the surprise in that very moment, that the work gets activated or re-activated in different situations. Well maybe returning to what you were saying about Gertrude Stein and your work with Clare about speaking and listening at the same time, that’s maybe something interesting to, well, I would find that interesting how to look more into that, or to bring it up to the surface because in the situation of the performing that feels like a very strong element, because in how we are talking now it’s very much about a taking of turns, in that moment of the performance reading sharing it’s an intermingling of voices, that’s also a speaking out and a listening and the two voices intermingling those voices of speaking and listening and reading. Sorry I’ve got a bit muddled. You didn’t quite say this, were you saying something about refinding or rediscovering the material in the speaking out of it together with the listening of the other’s voice, how the material gets renegotiated somehow. I’ve really muddled that all up. Its all intermingling! Speaking and listening, it’s such a capacity in life which would be good to practice. And negotiating the variables from only speaking and other moments when there is a fluidity between speaking and listening. A kind of skill in that. I wonder in every living how in every day talking and conversing with people how is that operating?
Its setting so many things in motion. One was very vivid as you were talking and there was something about this relationship between circling and cyclical and it was like with my left hand I was making a move, a bit like what we do on the table where it’s like the hand is moving in a circular movement but horizontally as if its over the table top, circling as if it’s sort of looking, spatially circling somehow. And with my right hand it was like I wanted to do something like a circling, coming towards me like more in a vertical axis. It’s a bit like when we used to, like tap your head and rub your stomach somehow. So there were these two movements of circling, one on this horizontal register and one on this vertical register. Really vivid, like I wanted to be able to show it to myself with the movement of my hands in a way. And the vertical movement of the hand felt like it was a kind of temporal cycle of coming back to, like returning to in time, and coming back to material. Coming back. Or things coming back. There was this kind of looping. You were talking about feedback loops as well before. Something re-emerging. There’s something really interesting about this kind of relationship between something re-emerging or me returning to it. This very soft and seepy relationship between. Is something emerging or am I returning, is something emerging or am I returning. I can’t really tell, it feels as if its somewhere in the middle of that but this coming back and coming back and coming back but somehow not quite in linear time, it’s not like I’m going back to anything in particular, but there’s this quality of looping to the material over and over again. This was so much the theme of the conference too, this cycle, or this looping and coming back, these returns. But then the horizontal hand is really different or not really different, it's a slightly different register somehow and it felt like it’s got the same quality as when I am looking over the pages and wanting to let something come in that kind of way, not so much returning to something but circling around something, it sounds a bit abstract this, the right hand felt like it was much more to do with something in time and the left hand in this horizontal register felt much more to do with something being in space and circling around. I remember someone saying in the discussion or this notion of circling was coming up very strongly, around someone talking about, or they were talking about Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the violence of linear thought. And this is one of the references I’d written down, someone had talked about this violence of linear thought, and they were saying they couldn’t get a thought out, they couldn’t get a sentence out and the violence of this idea of constructing thought in the linear way would make sense. There was something instead about this kind of circling or meandering thought, that was kind of touching upon something, we’ve talked about this before this straightforward, direct sense, but something that is much more indirect. It feels like its kind of swaying around something, hovering over something a bit like the eyes hovering on the page and waiting for it to come somehow. A kind of sensitivity that’s to do with deliberately not trying to get there too directly but allow for that circling, this dreaminess was mentioned, a dreamt oozy kind of space some that was a bit formless in some ways, this formlessness but being able to register or recognise a very particular q of thinking in that space, very formless and soft but still there being a quality of thinking that was really different, and I think this guy, there was this sense of a jolt out of this into discursive mode at the end and not being able to get his thoughts, like he had been swimming around in this soft thought space. It feels as if there was something there with this other kind of thinking, and maybe this also resonates with this intermingling, this intermingling where there is a kind of thinking or languaging that is really emerging in this space in-between, it’s so in-between in a way because we’re reading these fragments that are themselves in between our voices where the one and the other it’s not possible to be clear about and then we’re doing it somehow again, so there’s this originary intermingling in the transcripts and this intermingling again. And then this intermingling at a sonic level in the registers of the voice and this intermingling between the listener and us speaking and then thinking. I think Jana in the audience was talking about this space moving between her own thoughts and listening, like she described this very beautiful actually, a kind of soft dance between thinking for herself and drifting back into listening. Just this really peculiar listening space, or language space that opens up. And all of these, kind of soft slippages, not even slippages, it’s just a very soft amorphous space but very precise at the same time. Maybe just something about the work that we’re doing, trying to honour that kind of space somehow and maybe also the dilemma in the work or the dilemma I sometimes might think of how to continue to honour that kind of space, and at the same time want to bring the work into some kind of form. So this interesting tension between the kind of live formless space the work opens up, the experiential space that these practices open up as live event and whether that’s now in the conversation or in the practising or in the reading and yet also a desire to share that in a singular event in some kind of way whether that’s through recording or through distilling the text in some kind of way. But there is something in the eventness of this very unpredictable, its unpredictable but there’s a real density. It’s soft but its dense, its thick but airy. There’s something about this shared quality of attention that opens up a thinking space. I feel a dilemma in how to bring form to the work beyond these events, which I would love to do, but there is something that is so ephemeral and the liveness of it and not to lose that somehow. That was so interesting, because while you were talking, or when you started to describe this formless space or even before that, there were these shifting images appearing, so for a little while, I was thinking of this fluidity and being in the sea and being immersed, how water and how there are these little shifts of light and you see slightly different patterns and shimmerings and it keeps changing, so it’s an immersion in a body of water but its the way light plays on it and sparks and threads and movements. And as you continued to talk I had more this image like a piece of tapestry, no more like a colourful woven web, not so much forming a neat pattern but still a precision, with the intermingling of different voices and layers I had this image of this bright fine yellow thread, which somehow there’s a precision but it’s not creating a fixed pattern. Then you started talking about it being very airy and I was thrown up into this airy substance. Something about the way you were describing it was creating these images of non-linear formless forms, also like a temporal ephemeral time-space, a very particular time-space that’s being perhaps generated in this situation of speaking and listening and reading and thinking. And then listening to you speak about the gestures of the hand and trying to notice the difference between the left and the right, we hadn’t really talked much about that before, it brought me back into a sensation of what my hands were doing, I don’t know exactly what they were doing, but more a very strong body memory of what you were saying, even though there were these slight differences, but a strong sense of the left and the right and I have a feeling that this horizontal was also much more linked with the left, it felt like the left hand was scanning the pages even almost brushing them, I do remember the sensation of brushing them and touching pages and the words, and it seemed kind of to remind me to keep my eyes scanning, it felt like this horizontal scanning, this left hand, and the touch, and the eyes, soft eyes scanning whereas the right felt in certain moments it picked something up, almost like the right hand that was saying, say this now. Maybe something about what you were saying the right more linked with time, a vertical, a coming to you in a way. I may have misinterpreted that. I have a feeling this was happening. It was usually the right hand that would then decide, that the right would pick something up, and the left hand might hover over something, keeping it warm, whilst the right hand would pick something up and decide in that moment, the left hand, was saying I do want to say this sometime later. Something like that. There’s something very interesting in the way, the organisation of the way our sitting and the eyes scanning and these hands, I think the connecting, the physical engagement with the reading practice and how the body was organising itself in that practice, organising itself with the reading but also how the gestures were part of the thinking, umm, yes with the thinking. There’s a certain resonance with what you were saying that I could pick quite immediately in the body. And now in talking, having not written it down and being able to being able to describe or feel what I remember about what my right and left were doing and particularly the left hand in touching the words. it reminds me, there’s that lovely quote that is often used by Hélène Cixous, something like about touching the words with the tips of the fingers which I have to think about here suddenly. It also reminds me of someone saying something about the paper being turned or moved, and the sliding of our hands and the tables was part of it which I found in that moment was very nice to be reminded of that, and that that is also part of it, that everything is part of it. Which is, that’s also a very enjoyable part too, because it’s a very physical sense of it, the table top and the surfaces. I keep repeating myself, the brushing of the paper, that’s rather, something I don’t know, its stayed with. Something about the real-ness of it, it has stayed, something about the idea of the pages, the printed material as sheets of paper and the table top as well as the words that were on there. Something about the combination of scanning of the eyes and the print as a flat thing in the paper and the surface of the table, something in there that I am not explaining very well but. There’s something too about having our backs to the listeners and that then also not being very clear or rigid as some people were moving at the sides in a way interrupts that. The hands. It’s really interesting. It’s really vivid actually in that sense of this reading that is very physical, very physically done. It almost feels that when I am doing it I need to somehow like move my hands in circles above the pages, not even in touch with them necessarily but like as a way of, what am I doing when I’m doing that? Like tuning into the pages or approaching it somehow. I feel like, when I do this when we’re online too I can feel like my hands are not on the pages but they’re above it, they’re kind of moving around. And this thing with the left hand, there’s something where at times I can feel I am holding something, so I’m marking it like there’s something I’ve found, and I want to come back to it but it’s not yet the time. Then it sort of softened into something else actually, where it feels like, what is it like, like a kind of, like the left hand is just holding back, it’s holding up as if there’s all of these other possibilities. And there is something with the right …what did it feel like? It felt like the left hand was somehow in this open eye, this open floaty keeping open of possibilities and the right hand became like where the voice was somehow. Like it was the voice, it even has a very different feel actually as I’m thinking about. The left hand has this lightness lateral many-ness of possibilities, and the right hand feels like it comes through, the voice comes through, or something comes through, kind of makes a decision in a way of what’s going to be said or what’s chosen. And then I was thinking how different these gestures are to other kinds of language to other kinds of speaking where the hands get used so much for emphasis. Because I do gesture a lot when I talk, I use my hands in all kinds of weird ways, excessively probably sometimes and the gesture of this particular reading practice felt like it was very different to that. It was definitely not about emphasis, it was almost anti-emphatic actually in a way. In fact I think the whole tone of it is quite anti-emphatic somehow. There’s something about the tone of the reading that’s very interesting, because there was something of this anti-emphatic anti-projection dimension, you know we’re in a conference context, but we’re not looking out to try and meet the eye of other individuals or speak to them as if to communicate this content to somebody which we could have done, it could have been a reading like that that’s improvisatory but still trying to speak from to. It didn’t feel like that kind of mode at all, it felt like, the address of it was very different, I’m trying to work out what that address is, on the one hand it is kind of very de-emphasised. It feels that instead of speaking to somebody, its like a pool of words that someone is invited to come into somehow. Like when Jana was describing this kind of listening and her own thoughts, it didn’t feel like that drifting into her own thought would be a problem, there was just this pool of language and voice and sound, a sonic scape you that you could drift in and out of, this drifting, these drifty edges in a way. Almost like we’ve spoken of before, with these conversation practices, it’s got this kind of quality of speaking to someone but also of speaking to myself, this sense of it’s not got kind of mode of conversational address that is part of an everyday language but it seems to have a different kind of register. There are not many places like that, or socially then, maybe it does feel there is a certain kind of thinking space, it makes space for a certain kind of thinking outside of the habitual dynamic of conversation, where someone says something and you’re thinking of, its much more, I want to say kind of luxurious almost, kind of spacious and maybe in the context of a conference where you are listening to people and you’re engaging with people and its quite demanding in a way. And how rare it feels to create the conditions for that kind of very focussed very absorbed kind of thinking, maybe its actually very close to this word reverie, a reverie space where its drifty associative soft quite playful sort of thining, a bit like daydreaming but a bit more in the body somehow, daydreaming feels like it takes flight away from the body whereas this has that quality but is very tethered to a very grounded experience somehow. Very amazing actually. And this quality of thinking when we have been doing the practice which I haven’t been doing so much lately, it’s a similar kind of thinking, there’s like a welling, the movement of thought is very different than my movement of thought feels in other contexts somehow. You were talking about water and the sort of watery fluid welling bubbling, yes welling feels as if its closer to it, its not like me doing the thinking its just that thinking is in the space that I’m in touch with. Like now it’s a space, a sort of space that gets made where this thinking is happening but it’s not me but I’m in this space of thinking and I’m sort of in touch with some of it but not all of it, its not really coming form force in that sense of me trying to think something but thoughts are swirling around and bubbling up and coming around and emerging and disappearing, cloudy almost, maybe like the murkiness we’ve talked about, like I get close to something to something and it drifts away and then it comes back. As you were describing this space of thinking and things circling around, and different registers than a social communication. It's almost like this last 10 minutes it was like I was listening like I was remembering the first time we did this turning of the back and listening. As you were describing that I was feeling oh I’m in it now and your voice is swirling and curling around and not being able to grasp everything. I have these images coming and going and many images and linked to the body and a kind of sensation of listening. Its nice. It felt like I wanted to hold onto this particular thought, there was something about the idea of when things are organised in a way of being de-emphasised, launched me back into ideas of my phd and the flatbed and how things organised that nothing has more emphasis. We had different kinds of things from philosophical thinking to I walked around the tree. So I was thinking there are these different kinds of thought that are equally available in the transcripts to be voiced. A flatbed organisation of materials and processes. A sense of equivalence of materials that creates a space of listening and thinking. You seem to have put me somewhere, into a wordless murky space. In a way rather lovely I feel like I have landed somewhere in this talking and listening. I’m in something. There are many different kinds of memories suddenly coming around me, they are not vivid, they are more like sensations, they have come around me, similar to the roundness of the practice perhaps even this idea of absorption, rather than communicating in a line through into the thinking, there is this absorption through the whole body. Interesting. I’m totally exhausted. Actually, exhaustion is one of these things that comes up again and again. I have this word exhaust written down from the notes and trying to think in the way in which it was said. I think we talked before about this sense that there could be this practice that could just keep going somehow, not so much that it was to do with a durational kind of exhaustion but just this, maybe it would be interesting to think what is the quality of exhaustion that would be there or is a desirable exhaustion or an exhaustion that has a quality of rest or ease in it. Maybe this relationship between exhaust and relax. A kind of surrendering or letting go or opening up or out through an exhaustion. We have talked before about the sense of a durational reading that might go on for longer than 40 minutes or an hour. Maybe there is something in this exhaustion and repetition also, this keep coming back to the material maybe there’s something, kind of familiar ideas, a kind of estrangement, or seeing it anew through repeating it, sometimes I’m reading a line and the actual originary context shines through very strongly but another time its like I’ve never seen that word or line before or never heard that before it or in a combination with another line it has a different meaning or different resonance that I’d never noticed. Tiredness is a way, maybe a kind of letting go of that front-facedness in a way. I also feel like that in the moment, not in a positive way. This complete exhaustion with a certain kind of set of habits and pressures and expectations and ways of being in the world and to be completely exhausted by those and at the same time this exhaustion opening up to a completely different possibility. I was doing some reading some years ago about burn-outs, not so much psychologically but in philosophy, and there was this Finnish writer or a guy called Finn Janning who wrote this book called The Happiness of Burnout, in that there was this possibility through a sort of exhaustion a capacity for a kind of joy or release or relief of just letting things go. Its a risky territory because there are many forms that are not like that. But maybe like an antidote an alternative or maybe even something about a resistant dimension to these habits that are so much a part of our culture in a way, of effort and frontality, fronting and professionalism in a sense and I was also reminded of the visual images and how the richness of visual imagery opens up a different kind of, a very physical engagement the I remember Jana saying that when you were saying something about the azaleas or rhododendrons that she was completely there, I remember her saying that, and some of the visual phrases relate to real life experience and then others they feel as if there’s a visual vocabulary that is trying to describe this thought space or that seems to open up a space, that’s quite virtual.
This intermingling of voices and thoughts. One of the audience members were saying that our two voices intermingle. And that also in that intermingling there was a kind of possibility to slightly drift with your own thoughts as a listener. And this kind of intrigued me, these ideas of an intermingling. The words on the page: finding things and saying them as they get found. Our whole process of scanning and reading, that reading practice and speaking aloud and us listening to our own voices and also to the other’s voice and how much space there is for that, I do remember I tried to find those spaces where I would try and listen to you, rather than be frantically scanning, hoping I might find whatever I was assuming might be the right thing or the interesting thing or the thing I haven’t found yet. I found that a really interesting process as an experience, that might be an extension of practising - being able to read, speak aloud and listen to one’s own voice and the voice of the other, as well as acknowledging someone else’s listening and the complexity of that. So hearing from a listener that there were these intermingling of voices and their own thoughts and what they bring to it and the different connections that can be made. I found that fascinating how that might, well and also excited, that that happened, how special that can happen, that is perhaps then what happens that the language creates a space of listening, a space for reflecting, a space for thinking, a space for connecting. There’s a spaciousness in that. Sometimes it feels very dense. A sort of language density and yet it creates a space as well as a sonic texture. Maybe another thing this sonic texture, as well as an imagining, thinking, intermingling space of voices and thoughts. This leads me to think of a sense of the language being spoken and being listened to as a sonic experience. Maybe I was also trying to create space for myself with you, to hear your voice, how that would be a sonic experience.
Coming into the practice like that actually as a way of coming back to an experience. I was trying to recollect what happened as if it was located somehow, it feels as like I was searching for it somehow in a much more kind of a set of ideas or concrete thoughts or a certain way of relating to what happened. And feeling out of touch with it somehow. And then just before we were meeting, I was trying to find my notebooks and found them eventually and then what is there is so fragmentary it’s really strange, I felt like there’s nothing here, there’s nothing here, I’ve got nothing to say I cannot recollect anything. It feels as if it’s very far away, almost like there’s a missed opportunity there to grasp or gather or capture. And then as soon as you’re talking and I’ve got my eyes closed, and I’m looking away, it was so strange it’s like I’m there in the space again it really was. And could really feel where I was sat, not so much when we were doing it, but because you were talking about what was coming from the audience, I was there in that chair, and I could really feel where you were, and where Jana was and where the audience was. And it just struck me while there’s a very different way of reconnecting to an experience and I was searching for it in the wrong places in a sense. And then very quickly from having a feeling like there’s nothing there, I failed to capture it, I didn’t make any notes or reflections, it was like an excess in the sense of all these possibilities and thoughts and reminders that were rushing to the surface, or not even rushing to the surface like they were there before but they’re budding again and again. And then I could feel an anxiety in myself that I wanted to capture them and write them down because there were so many things in terms of what you were saying, around this intermingling and the sonic and not wanting to lose that. And again, I’m approaching it in the wrong way again, this trying to capture it, trying to hold onto it, trying to somehow take hold of it, like I’m going to lose it. And then the sense of the practice is that it comes back, it will come back if I access it in a different way, not so much access but enter it from the back somehow, and it’s there. Maybe I’m sort of thinking about this sense of really being able to rest in the practice and what that is like. It felt very restful in that five minutes of listening, very easeful and restful and a confidence in it somehow, then ah yes there are all these things there and I don’t have to chase them or hold them or try and remember, that they will come if I trust or rest in the practice. And I was thinking a little bit even before we began, just this sense of going to a conference without a sense of what we were going to do, no, not without a sense of, without a fixed sense of what we were going to do and the improvisatory dimension of that. And us standing or being in the corridor before it started and lying on the floor and having the papers and just that interval before of resting in the practice and trusting that it will be fine, well more than it will be fine, it'll be the practice, we are going to practice again. Just something about, there’s a quality of confidence in there that I find very rare really that we can rest in the practice because we have made a commitment to it.
There was also something of the thrill of the liveness. Also because it was live and there were live listeners, this brings another sense of the work. I can feel that loop of the idea and the performing of it and the experiencing of the performing of it and the sense of listeners being there. And yes all of those things that are live performance in a way and what that sets up in loops of experience and understanding of, and there being witnesses and feedback and resonance and relations, especially when there’s the voice and bodies. And also, there was the precarity or spontaneity of certain people moving which was a least planned aspect. It was surprising. So there’s also the surprise of the liveness. In the liveness of it -the framing of it as sharing a practice, relieves the performativity. let’s see what happens. There is something that a live performance always has but is not always allowed to have that let’s see what happens in the moment. I suppose in those live moments it’s pulling me back into also a familiar place of performance. It is familiar and there’s something very particular. Inviting other manifestations and situations. The sense of intermingling I think is one thing and also this sense of these other live presences, liveness maybe also, intermingling of voice and liveness. The intermingling, maybe the liveness first. There was something about beginning, I don’t know what I want to say, really a kind of the coming into it felt like it opened up, it sounds a bit grand really, that it opened up a different time and we all in the room had gone into this different place somehow. In the practice there is a strange relationship between a certain kind of focussed concentration, a very focussed that’s very present-focussed, extremely presence-focussed because it’s about listening. There was something you were talking about before about this listening and speaking at the same time which was reminding me of something I’d read in terms of Gertrude Stein’s approach. And this dilemma. I think she speaks of listening and speaking at the same time and something around the occasionality of that and the present tense of that. I remember Clare and I were looking at it quite a lot at one point. Practising very much in the present in a very complicated way, no not complicated, complex. Where I have this material and part of it is to do with the relationship with the material, this re-meeting of the material, and being interested in the material, and letting the material speak to me in some kind of way, like really trying to not too forcibly find things and trying to be open to what’s coming and at the same I’m listening to you. As I’m looking, yes all these competing flows of energy in a way and somehow trying to make them sing together and just a certain quality of concentration that’s involved in that, that can’t be too focussed either because it’s kind of like being really focussed on the task but also really open to all these, almost like interferences from the side or forces from the side. Maybe this is describing improvisation I’m not sure but something about this focussing but openness, focussing but also a kind of capacity to be distracted, a concentrated capacity for distraction. And just how amazing it feels in a way. It’s so in it. I was aware of the things that were in the space, but it felt like it was a very different space somehow. It dropped into this very focussed, very concentrated almost like kind of, even a little bit ritualistic space of practice in a way where everything felt a little bit slower or a little more intense somehow. Then this experience of just witnessing or feeling the presence of people moving at the sides and I can remember how that felt. To begin with really just the sensation that someone moving but not being able to look because as soon as I would I look my concentration would be ruptured. So, there was this feeling, an awareness of something at the side, a presence at the side, a sort of another practising that was happening, very much a quality that there was another person’s practising at the same time as us. Actually very beautiful, almost very moving in a way, very intense in that sense. And the woman who was next to me, I caught her eye, and we smiled and it was a really strange smile because it wasn’t quite ooh that’s strange. It was like recognising the other in their practising somehow, just recognising that they were also doing a practice. How to focus but not getting too much a fixed focus: a two-force activity, on how to focus intently on not getting over focussed. The scanning of material rather than trying to refind something. There is an element of improvisation, it is a very specific kind of score.
Acknowledging the corner of the eye.Keeping things alive, moving in the moment, and how much attention it takes to keep something processual rather than rehearsed. Perhaps in this sharing of practice in this live way, maybe part of that experiencing of that situation is also, maybe the excitement of it, I remember feeling in those moments that where that material has come from, the conversations, transcriptions, the selection of things, in speaking those things in that live situation, I could really feel the weeks and time-space that those scores and the material holds and parts of that gets revealed in different ways. In a live situation. Yes something of what we have been doing, our conversations, reveals itself. What you were saying earlier too about cyclic modes of working, in that moment of performance, I could really feel that, feel the folds and circles and coming back, the returnings. It’s exciting because there are moments when the process is really resonating in the sharing of it and its also often quite hidden. The length of time and the cyclical folding is so present in the material and also in the performing of it and keeps revealing and unfolding. It feels like I am remembering something. It keeps revealing. Like layers, like onion layers, another layer another layer. Keeping peeling and revealing. A kind of cyclic unpeeling. In that moment of the performance reading sharing it’s an intermingling of voices, that’s also a speaking out and a listening and the two voices intermingling those voices of speaking and listening and reading. Refinding or rediscovering the material in the speaking out of it together with the listening of the other’s voice, how the material gets renegotiated somehow. Renegotiating the variables from only speaking and other moments when there is a fluidity between speaking and listening. Its setting so many things in motion. there was something about this relationship between circling and cyclical and it was like with my left hand I was making a move, a bit like what we do on the table where it’s like the hand is moving in a circular movement but horizontally as if its over the table top, circling as if it’s sort of looking, spatially circling somehow. And with my right hand it was like I wanted to do something like a circling, coming towards me like more in a vertical axis. It’s a bit like when we used to, like tap your head and rub your stomach somehow. So there were these two movements of circling, one on this horizontal register and one on this vertical register. Really vivid, like I wanted to be able to show it to myself with the movement of my hands in a way. And the vertical movement of the hand felt like it was a kind of temporal cycle of coming back to, like returning to in time, and coming back to material. Coming back. Or things coming back. There was this kind of looping. You were talking about feedback loops as well before. Something re-emerging. There’s something really interesting about this kind of relationship between something re-emerging or me returning to it. This very soft and seepy relationship between. Is something emerging or am I returning, is something emerging or am I returning. I can’t really tell, it feels as if its somewhere in the middle of that but this coming back and coming back and coming back but somehow not quite in linear time, it’s not like I’m going back to anything in particular, but there’s this quality of looping to the material over and over again. This was so much the theme of the conference too, this cycle, or this looping and coming back, these returns. But then the horizontal hand is really different or not really different, it's a slightly different register somehow and it felt like it’s got the same quality as when I am looking over the pages and wanting to let something come in that kind of way, not so much returning to something but circling around something, it sounds a bit abstract this, the right hand felt like it was much more to do with something in time and the left hand in this horizontal register felt much more to do with something being in space and circling around. I remember someone saying in the discussion or this notion of circling was coming up very strongly, around someone talking about, or they were talking about Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the violence of linear thought. And this is one of the references I’d written down, someone had talked about this violence of linear thought, and they were saying they couldn’t get a thought out, they couldn’t get a sentence out and the violence of this idea of constructing thought in the linear way would make sense. There was something instead about this kind of circling or meandering thought, that was kind of touching upon something, we’ve talked about this before this straightforward, direct sense, but something that is much more indirect. It feels like its kind of swaying around something, hovering over something a bit like the eyes hovering on the page and waiting for it to come somehow. A kind of sensitivity that’s to do with deliberately not trying to get there too directly but allow for that circling, this dreaminess was mentioned, a dreamt oozy kind of space some that was a bit formless in some ways, this formlessness but being able to register or recognise a very particular q of thinking in that space, very formless and soft but still there being a quality of thinking that was really different, and I think this guy, there was this sense of a jolt out of this into discursive mode at the end and not being able to get his thoughts, like he had been swimming around in this soft thought space. It feels as if there was something there with this other kind of thinking, and maybe this also resonates with this intermingling, this intermingling where there is a kind of thinking or languaging that is really emerging in this space in-between, it’s so in-between in a way because we’re reading these fragments that are themselves in between our voices where the one and the other it’s not possible to be clear about and then we’re doing it somehow again, so there’s this originary intermingling in the transcripts and this intermingling again. And then this intermingling at a sonic level in the registers of the voice and this intermingling between the listener and us speaking and then thinking. I think Jana in the audience was talking about this space moving between her own thoughts and listening, like she described this very beautiful actually, a kind of soft dance between thinking for herself and drifting back into listening. Just this really peculiar listening space, or language space that opens up. And all of these, kind of soft slippages, not even slippages, it’s just a very soft amorphous space but very precise at the same time. Maybe just something about the work that we’re doing, trying to honour that kind of space somehow and maybe also the dilemma in the work or the dilemma I sometimes might think of how to continue to honour that kind of space, and at the same time want to bring the work into some kind of form. So this interesting tension between the kind of live formless space the work opens up, the experiential space that these practices open up as live event and whether that’s now in the conversation or in the practising or in the reading and yet also a desire to share that in a singular event in some kind of way whether that’s through recording or through distilling the text in some kind of way. But there is something in the eventness of this very unpredictable, its unpredictable but there’s a real density. It’s soft but its dense, its thick but airy. There’s something about this shared quality of attention that opens up a thinking space. I feel a dilemma in how to bring form to the work beyond these events, which I would love to do, but there is something that is so ephemeral and the liveness of it and not to lose that somehow. That was so interesting, because while you were talking, or when you started to describe this formless space or even before that, there were these shifting images appearing, so for a little while, I was thinking of this fluidity and being in the sea and being immersed, how water and how there are these little shifts of light and you see slightly different patterns and shimmerings and it keeps changing, so it’s an immersion in a body of water but its the way light plays on it and sparks and threads and movements. And as you continued to talk I had more this image like a piece of tapestry, no more like a colourful woven web, not so much forming a neat pattern but still a precision, with the intermingling of different voices and layers I had this image of this bright fine yellow thread, which somehow there’s a precision but it’s not creating a fixed pattern. Then you started talking about it being very airy and I was thrown up into this airy substance. Something about the way you were describing it was creating these images of non-linear formless forms, also like a temporal ephemeral time-space, a very particular time-space that’s being perhaps generated in this situation of speaking and listening and reading and thinking. And then listening to you speak about the gestures of the hand and trying to notice the difference between the left and the right, we hadn’t really talked much about that before, it brought me back into a sensation of what my hands were doing, I don’t know exactly what they were doing, but more a very strong body memory of what you were saying, even though there were these slight differences, but a strong sense of the left and the right and I have a feeling that this horizontal was also much more linked with the left, it felt like the left hand was scanning the pages even almost brushing them, I do remember the sensation of brushing them and touching pages and the words, and it seemed kind of to remind me to keep my eyes scanning, it felt like this horizontal scanning, this left hand, and the touch, and the eyes, soft eyes scanning whereas the right felt in certain moments it picked something up, almost like the right hand that was saying, say this now. Maybe something about what you were saying the right more linked with time, a vertical, a coming to you in a way. I may have misinterpreted that. I have a feeling this was happening. It was usually the right hand that would then decide, that the right would pick something up, and the left hand might hover over something, keeping it warm, whilst the right hand would pick something up and decide in that moment, the left hand, was saying I do want to say this sometime later. Something like that. There’s something very interesting in the way, the organisation of the way our sitting and the eyes scanning and these hands, I think the connecting, the physical engagement with the reading practice and how the body was organising itself in that practice, organising itself with the reading but also how the gestures were part of the thinking, umm, yes with the thinking. There’s a certain resonance with what you were saying that I could pick quite immediately in the body. And now in talking, having not written it down and being able to being able to describe or feel what I remember about what my right and left were doing and particularly the left hand in touching the words. it reminds me, there’s that lovely quote that is often used by Hélène Cixous, something like about touching the words with the tips of the fingers which I have to think about here suddenly. It also reminds me of someone saying something about the paper being turned or moved, and the sliding of our hands and the tables was part of it which I found in that moment was very nice to be reminded of that, and that that is also part of it, that everything is part of it. Which is, that’s also a very enjoyable part too, because it’s a very physical sense of it, the table top and the surfaces. I keep repeating myself, the brushing of the paper, that’s rather, something I don’t know, its stayed with. Something about the real-ness of it, it has stayed, something about the idea of the pages, the printed material as sheets of paper and the table top as well as the words that were on there. Something about the combination of scanning of the eyes and the print as a flat thing in the paper and the surface of the table.It’s really vivid actually in that sense of this reading that is very physical, very physically done. It almost feels that when I am doing it I need to somehow like move my hands in circles above the pages, not even in touch with them necessarily but like as a way of, what am I doing when I’m doing that? Like tuning into the pages or approaching it somehow. I feel like, when I do this when we’re online too I can feel like my hands are not on the pages but they’re above it, they’re kind of moving around. And this thing with the left hand, there’s something where at times I can feel I am holding something, so I’m marking it like there’s something I’ve found, and I want to come back to it but it’s not yet the time. Then it sort of softened into something else actually, where it feels like, what is it like, like a kind of, like the left hand is just holding back, it’s holding up as if there’s all of these other possibilities. And there is something with the right …what did it feel like? It felt like the left hand was somehow in this open eye, this open floaty keeping open of possibilities and the right hand became like where the voice was somehow. Like it was the voice, it even has a very different feel actually as I’m thinking about. The left hand has this lightness lateral many-ness of possibilities, and the right hand feels like it comes through, the voice comes through, or something comes through, kind of makes a decision in a way of what’s going to be said or what’s chosen. And then I was thinking how different these gestures are to other kinds of language to other kinds of speaking where the hands get used so much for emphasis. The gesture of this particular reading practice felt like it was very different to that. It was definitely not about emphasis, it was almost anti-emphatic actually in a way. In fact I think the whole tone of it is quite anti-emphatic somehow. There’s something about the tone of the reading that’s very interesting, because there was something of this anti-emphatic anti-projection dimension.I’m trying to work out what that address is, on the one hand it is kind of very de-emphasised. It feels that instead of speaking to somebody, its like a pool of words that someone is invited to come into somehow. Like when Jana was describing this kind of listening and her own thoughts, it didn’t feel like that drifting into her own thought would be a problem, there was just this pool of language and voice and sound, a sonic scape you that you could drift in and out of, this drifting, these drifty edges in a way. Almost like we’ve spoken of before, with these conversation practices, it’s got this kind of quality of speaking to someone but also of speaking to myself, this sense of it’s not got kind of mode of conversational address that is part of an everyday language but it seems to have a different kind of register. How rare it feels to create the conditions for that kind of very focussed very absorbed kind of thinking, maybe its actually very close to this word reverie, a reverie space where its drifty associative soft quite playful sort of thinking, a bit like daydreaming but a bit more in the body somehow, daydreaming feels like it takes flight away from the body whereas this has that quality but is very tethered to a very grounded experience somehow. Very amazing actually. And this quality of thinking when we have been doing the practice which I haven’t been doing so much lately, it’s a similar kind of thinking, there’s like a welling, the movement of thought is very different than my movement of thought feels in other contexts somehow. You were talking about water and the sort of watery fluid welling bubbling, yes welling feels as if its closer to it, it’s not like me doing the thinking its just that thinking is in the space that I’m in touch with. Like now it’s a space, a sort of space that gets made where this thinking is happening but it’s not me but I’m in this space of thinking and I’m sort of in touch with some of it but not all of it, its not really coming form force in that sense of me trying to think something but thoughts are swirling around and bubbling up and coming around and emerging and disappearing, cloudy almost, maybe like the murkiness we’ve talked about, like I get close to something to something and it drifts away and then it comes back. I was listening like I was remembering the first time we did this turning of the back and listening. As you were describing that I was feeling oh I’m in it now and your voice is swirling and curling around and not being able to grasp everything. I have these images coming and going and many images and linked to the body and a kind of sensation of listening. There are these different kinds of thought that are equally available in the transcripts to be voiced. A flatbed organisation of materials and processes. A sense of equivalence of materials that creates a space of listening and thinking. You seem to have put me somewhere, into a wordless murky space. In a way rather lovely I feel like I have landed somewhere in this talking and listening. I’m in something. There are many different kinds of memories suddenly coming around me, they are not vivid, they are more like sensations, they have come around me, similar to the roundness of the practice perhaps even this idea of absorption, rather than communicating in a line through into the thinking, there is this absorption through the whole body. Interesting. I’m totally exhausted. I think we talked before about this sense that there could be this practice that could just keep going somehow, not so much that it was to do with a durational kind of exhaustion but just this, maybe it would be interesting to think what is the quality of exhaustion that would be there or is a desirable exhaustion or an exhaustion that has a quality of rest or ease in it. Maybe this relationship between exhaust and relax. A kind of surrendering or letting go or opening up or out through an exhaustion. We have talked before about the sense of a durational reading that might go on for longer than 40 minutes or an hour. Maybe there is something in this exhaustion and repetition also, this keep coming back to the material maybe there’s something, kind of familiar ideas, a kind of estrangement, or seeing it anew through repeating it, sometimes I’m reading a line and the actual originary context shines through very strongly but another time its like I’ve never seen that word or line before or never heard that before it or in a combination with another line it has a different meaning or different resonance that I’d never noticed. Tiredness is a way, maybe a kind of letting go of that front-facedness in a way. I also feel like that in the moment, not in a positive way. This complete exhaustion with a certain kind of set of habits and pressures and expectations and ways of being in the world and to be completely exhausted by those and at the same time this exhaustion opening up to a completely different possibility. I was also reminded of the visual images and how the richness of visual imagery opens up a different kind of, a very physical engagement the I remember Jana saying that when you were saying something about the azaleas or rhododendrons that she was completely there, I remember her saying that, and some of the visual phrases relate to real life experience and then others they feel as if there’s a visual vocabulary that is trying to describe this thought space or that seems to open up a space, that’s quite virtual.
PART 4
30.08.2023
FOCUS/PRACTICE: Reading as distillation
- Reading practices using the conversational transcript from 22.05.2023 as source text.
- Take time to tune into the transcript, marking phrases and words that strike you or that resonate
Moving between 2 practices as desired:
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.
30 minutes duration
PART 5
30.08.2023
FOCUS/PRACTICE: 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) 5 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)
(2) 5 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)
(3) 8 mins (e.g. ECs choice of words)
(4) 8 mins (e.g. KBs choice of words)