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PART 1

EXPLORATION PERIOD: NOV 2023 - 15 DEC 2023

Focusing on listening to the recordings (alongside practising).

PART 2

EXPLORATION DATE: 15.12.2023

FOCUS/PRACTICE: Conversation-as-Material (I) as a shared practice. The focus of this conversation practice was the preceding period of exploration (November 2023 - 15 December).

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 [10 mins each]

3. 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.

This sense of wrestling with the material and how to meet with it in a way. I have tried to listen to it, to really lie down and listen to it. And today something emerged which was much more about listening with it, this alongside-ness. Or doing something alongside. And the way that you were describing at times there being a resonance and then feeling like wanting to take what was heard into the movement. I was lying on the floor and it felt like these are so, they are not instructions or they are not invitations. They are wordings that somehow invite or encourage me or provoke me to adopt a different kind of relationship to the kind of embodiment that I am experiencing at this moment, or I can let them go. There were many times I suppose when I wanted to pause it, and stay with a particular phrase – to stay with that, and move with that. And then other times, wishing for it to be slower and for there to be more spaces. But then again, I wonder if all of this is me grasping for something, it is me grasping for something from the voicing. It is wanting something from it – and it is making me think a lot about, or reflect a lot about what the voicing resists. What the voicing disallows. What I thought we were doing was an exercise in listening, and maybe something about this co-presence or being in proximity to the voicing helps me to get closer to what the voicing is doing somehow. On the one hand it being about listening – how it is to listen, what kind of listening is required. But then, what is this voicing doing, what is the nature of the dorsal voicing that we are evolving. It does not accumulate into kind of logical sense. Because of its improvisatory qualities it does not build into an argument, or build into a paragraph, or one thing build upon another. But maybe like a kind of dreamy associative thing – where sometimes things connect and then the next line takes a different tangent altogether. So it is making me think a lot about the form of the voicing itself – and how this might disallow or disrupt a certain kind of sensemaking that is looking for cohesion or evolution of sense, or something that can be discerned from it. Instead it activates a different kind of drifty, fragmentary phrasing or sensemaking that is much more partial somehow. I like these ways of capturing – this shift of preposition: from listening to, to listening with or listening alongside. With and alongside-  there is more of dorsal sense of around-ness and you used this co-existence. Inhabiting the same space and time. With the voicing and being, kind of listening, not listening to get something, but listening to experience something does open up anyway a different motivation, a different relationship to the body, to the space, to time. There is lots that I understand or remember or know that isn’t being said. So there is a whole process behind the listening to, or listening with, which is why it feels that the body is immediately involved. I feel that next time I really want to find a way to just lie and not to move around – to really make sure I am relaxed and warm and I can just lie. I can really drift. It surprised me when I was first listening, the surprise of listening to our two voices. That maybe caught my attention, I think I said this before – our voices caught my attention more than the words. Yes, I am finding that as you are talking so many things are being prompted and triggered and as soon as it is the chance to speak they have all dissolved and disappeared again somehow. Whether to try to follow that recollection, to try to bring them back to mind or to see how it is to move with what comes now. Yes, something about the restlessness and impatience. The tone is not trying to tell something or say something or communicate something as such. Where the intention in the voicing is very strange in a way – maybe to think about the mode of address and the lack of direction to a listener somehow. If I try to listen to that in the way that I might for a podcast or a talk I get thrown out of it – I cannot hold my attention. There is almost nothing there for me to hold, or it doesn’t accumulate. Yes, maybe there is something about activating a different kind of listening, it calls for a different kind of listening. And I start to think again – what might that be? And I really began to enjoy this rhythm between lying down and really listening, and then moving and the listening somehow softening a little bit, so I was catching less; and then notemaking where the listening experience or the sound of the voicing was more backgrounded as I was making notes. And I really loved this rhythm – what really struck me was somehow that listening to the voicing enabled me to stay with the movement enquiry. It enabled me to stay in a mode of enquiry in relation to movement. Or at least to be moving with a mode of enquiry a little more. So there was this mutually supporting system where the listening to the voicing enabled me to stay with the movement for longer, the movement enabled me to stay with the listening. And then the notetaking was somehow strengthening the relationship between the two. And yes, it felt like there was this, I think it is called a trefoil knot, it is coiled knot, all one string. But it has these different components – and it felt like this. That there are these three fields of practice (or more than that): of voicing, and listening, and moving and note-making. They were all working in a little ecosystem somehow. This felt very exciting. And the quality of it was … something about this hard-to-graspness. It was about doing it but not for something. The thing that kept coming up in my notes was around soft enquiry, or soft listening, or attunement or holding open a space, and it felt that there was something about really being able to softly stay in an enquiry almost as a basic foundation in a way. It felt more like this dwelling and inhabiting and moving and listening was a preparatory practice in many respects, just the capacity to be. Something about creating the conditions for enquiry, or staying with the enquiry. And the listening, less about attending to the content, but more like getting the feel of something and staying with the feel of something, attuning to the feel of something felt like it was more the quality of the listening. And then, yes, every so often as you were saying, there were fragments that would come and I don’t know, I was struck by how some of the content really functions as singular fragments. I felt as if I could really dwell with that – the sense of the richness that you were talking about. But the fragments, maybe there is something in the listening about the fragmentary, the floating kind of chains of thoughts, they are like chains of thoughts but these chains are not sequential or logical. There is this dreamlike fragmentary quality where sometimes one of the phrases resonates more strongly than another – and I hear it, I really hear it, or I hear it as if I have never really heard it before, even though we have said it many times. But yes, this co-presence between the act of listening and the voicing, or the moving and the voicing, or the note-making – almost like a constellation of different practices happening altogether. It is almost like there is a drift, something holds my attention to the sides. Maybe there is something to do with the pull of attention to the side. Rather than my thoughts drifting to what I need to do in the day during the movement practice, the language somehow fills that space, or enriches that space, so I feel nourished by the language that is co-present with the body movement. The curiosity of what might happen or what kind of space might we be able to drop into. A lot of it is probably unspoken and a sense of something that we both share, which is beyond the actual materials that have accumulated. I had these two other thoughts when you were speaking – one, it made me reflect a little bit on, you mentioned this idea of dorsal and is this a kind of dorsal listening then. This way – which isn’t to or isn’t trying to glean information. I wonder sometimes in, also in normal daily life – there are moments where I feel that I am not paying attention. But maybe it is because I have slipped into this dorsal listening. And I am listening to the voice and to these other things, and to this more immersive sense of where a conversation might be taking place. Not paying attention to what is being said. So there is something interesting about slipping into a dorsal listening where there is … I suppose what am I trying to say in daily life is frowned upon or not useful because you are having to get a job done or it’s very frustrating for people if you haven’t actually listened to the details of what they are saying. Lots of situations in daily life demand a different kind of listening, but maybe it is that it is accessible, to slip into it when it is possible or to even to be able to slip into in 1 out of 10 or 10 out of 10, where there it is interesting to have somehow an understanding of when to maybe move in or move out. No a deeper understanding or practice of listening. Understanding it through life in general these different modes, ways, kinds, degrees of listening. It really opens up a wider sense of what it is to listen. And I suppose it opens up also a sense of the experience of being listened to as well. I suppose, I wonder if part of listening to something, to someone, is also a sense of listening to oneself or of being listened to. There is something maybe part of listening with or alongside that involves yourself as listened, as being part of that listening. Or also the … I want to say if we say listening to there is a thing there but this listening with or listening alongside includes oneself also in the listening. It is not only me listening. A more inclusive sense of listening. To have this space of carved out time to linger and drift and often not quite know what is going to be heard or said. It reminds me of this sense of familiarity – like when it is always such a surprise when it is Spring. Or surprise when it is Autumn, when it happens every year and you know it is going to happen. But a swim in the sea. Or how porridge tastes. It is funny how these familiar things can surprise still. Maybe there is something that about the soft enquiry or just sort of trust that familiar things, and slow practising and steady practising and daily practising – the capacity for it still to surprise and what is that surprise. Is that also linking to that returning or that re-confirming or re-finding – all these … knowing something or having experienced something, it doesn’t stay, it always needs to be re-found or reexperienced in order to be alive and stay connected. I think that there is something there about the re-experiencing. It is about re-experiencing – not even routines. Something like re-experiencing. And I suppose in the same way something that you have experienced very deeply can disappear or be buried deeply or can dissipate. Again, I have this sense that as you were talking so much felt very vivid, and it now disperses or dissolves somehow. The thing that has surprised me as this has been evolving has been to do with how much, how much I am turning towards thinking about the voicing. And not, no, not not about the listening, but how much the listening is showing up to me something about the voicing. And I was also thinking about the difference between the dorsal listening that we are doing now and the dorsal listening that I am maybe wondering is possible when we listen to the voiced recordings. And then I was thinking about how the practice that I am describing – of getting up, and moving, and making some notes, and drifting, would feel very different if I did that now. It does feel as if is supported by the sense that there is full listening present albeit from the back. Yes, from the back, maybe there is something that is interesting here about this kind of, it is not facing, it is a not-facing form of listening. But it is, here it feels as if it is a strong sense of witnessing, and really listening. And then, really listening, what do I mean by the really listening. It is not our own voices necessarily – so what we hear when we listen to those voicings, there isn’t any I. It is not like it is “me” or “you” saying – it is personal content, it comes from personal direct experience but it is somehow not from a position of an “I” speaking. And I think that this is so liberating. Because it means that I can listen deeply or I can drift and not feel any – like there is no judgement in that somehow. It is not like sometimes if you are listening to someone and you drift it is like oh, this boring, I am bored of that, I am bored of you … it is not like that, there isn’t any “I” in that voicing, the words are dislocated somehow from our, no, not dislocated, something anyway about the “I” being a little softer somehow. The sense of how the different ingredients support a certain kind of concentration or focus. Something about not being too forceful. Or, there was something about finding a sweet spot between turning in and turning away. And, that turning in and turning away, or a kind of soft attention, not the direct glance, not the forceful grasping. Time and time again, the recording was reminding me of ways to listen somehow, of even correcting me maybe, correcting me is too strong a term, but correcting me if I had slipped into something that was trying to grasp. There were these little reminders, little poetic reminders. When you were talking about the voicing, this voicing rather than the listening, I suppose it made me ponder on this idea of the publication. This idea of voicing – this idea of publication which might have an audio element to it. It is almost like in these situations needing to sink into the experience of a memory of something, to pull it up into focus. As you were saying there is something about this way of listening, coming from the back. There is a kind of listening to. So I pull back now, I have gone a bit blank, so I am really pulled into the experience now of trying, not trying, just no words coming. I am struck by the situation of the now. And, me sitting in this room, and this sense that you are in another room. Slightly pulled back into the novelty or the novelty as well as the familiarity of working remotely and having a conversation. There is a kind of intimacy that each time is evoked, which also for me resonates with this more listening space rather than a doing-action space. How listening, or listening in the broader sense of listening, and how the dorsal practices that we do creates a kind of intimacy with the environment and intimacy with oneself. Or intimacy – a closeness to the things. A way of practising that moves between things, that is moving, listening, writing, notetaking. They inform each other, they inform each other in the moment. So it opens up the complexity of what is happening, and beginning to shift between different modes of experiencing or listening or having an idea. This entanglement is able to manage the complexity of experience – it opens up the poly, the multi, the around-ness, rather than a single direction or focus. Yes, I think that there is something about the interwovenness of the practices that feels extremely resonant for me. Different degrees of intouchness or proximity. In my own sense, this really holds a space open, there is really this mutually supporting dimension where the languaging really helps me to stay for longer in the movement practice, and the movement practice helps me to stay for longer – and together something opens up. Little micro scores or exercises to extend that space of enquiry that seemed to be held open through the pairing of the voicing and the listening and the moving and the lying and the notemaking. So yes, maybe to do with recognising this mutually supportive dimension, the co-presence of languaging and bodying being very important. Maybe even embodied enquiry. A language-based embodied enquiry or an embodied language-based enquiry. And all the different ingredients that form that. So that it is not only a language-based enquiry and not only a body-based enquiry but a real enmeshing of these two modes of thinking in a way. And that the one and the other are not distinct but there is something that really emerges very differently of their meeting. I think that some of it is a kind of thinking which is much more, it is not about an argument or a clear proposition. Even this sense of the aphoristic, these phrases they felt self-contained in a way – I did not need any more. There are certain sentences, or even a line, where I think I could really take that and spend time with that. Or maybe, I don’t need to spend time, maybe that spending time is an assumption. It might be that these phrases land in my experience and do something. It resonates in that moment. And then it can be gone. This idea, this sense of, that things can be let go of, can come through and away and appear and disappear. That feels so exciting and at the same time, what have I got, or how can I record that or work with it, or move it forward. But they are habits aren’t they. And actually it reinforces the coming back to, coming back to something. That the letting go, that things can enter and disappear, and the value of that. And in that moment … no not disappear, it doesn’t disappear. I guess I think that some of those things, it is because I can’t say them again – but they have entered me and they have formed, they enter and they stay but it is not in a way I can explain or that way even make a note of, because it is not language. The sense that something enters or moves through and leaves its trace or is somehow connecting with something. The value of fleetingness, and fleeting does not mean that it is gone – it has entered, and sunk, or dropped, and shifted something. That is exciting. And the other exciting thing was you talking about this enmeshed-ness and the finding of a form, the moving and the languaging. There is something in this little block of listening and relistening that is putting the moving and the languaging, is meshing it. It felt very exciting hearing you think that through somehow – this idea of, because we often talk of these practices and we are bringing them together, but this does really start to enmesh or mingle or fold. Really folding into each other, that circular, these circular practices and enfolding practices. So that really is exciting. And maybe they soften the edges, the edges of movement and the edges of language – they, maybe they soften and they start to blur. So this blurring of what it is to be saying it is language or saying it is movement -the edges of those things get blurred. The edges of those different practices, or modes of experiencing or thinking. Yes, ways of thinking or knowing something, or note-taking or taking note. Because moving is also a taking note. Different ways of observing or note-taking. Yes, note-taking – just noticing, noticing.