MOUTH MUSICS

I guess psychology is a kind of medical practice, that aims to understand the principles of human:animal nature?

Ive been having this discussion with myself lately. Whispering around the practice, of thoughts and feeling. Netting together each separated species, of knowing on the subject.

>Who is god, in this dialogue, in this movement of speech?.

This human: animal nature, is structured in the mixing of suffering with pleasures of the soul + is placed in relation too the soul, surrounded by things, things bearing flesh, things happening as one and as another. This thing that is bound to the body, the thing being spirit, moving through mortality.

Psychology is a discipline, I tell myself, that it blends ritual, medicine, power and performance within its scope. The psychee is moved - and operated through the senses and can be traced, within the swinging pendulum of its own discipline- a plural sorting, through the nature, that tricky thing that is nature, of its own voice, echoing in space, as in breathing. Those disciplines, emptying out of myth + theosophy. Psychiatric history within the body of medicine, is occupied in the tension of temperament and social organisation, the throws of inner and outer experiences.

There is a querent bind, to the fastenings of “psyche” and that is what the origin, of this kind of medicine is. A querent looks to the health of the individual, the manner of the individuals dwelling, the ills of the individuals society. The querent works to study belonging and its container and its contaminants. And the querent reaches out to find a harmony, that harmony is built in the throws of this thing, as one and another.

The querent, asks what belongs to a body and what belongs to a group?

Belonging is understood as a culmination of all of the tethers of experience that are assigned to the soul, their are gradients of feeling, thoughts and actions, as they are all built up as clouds, reproducing eachother, between the substance of ourselves, bonding and separating. And what constitutes ourselves is the movements of the air and the atmosphere. And all atmospheres, link to behaviours that spread between crowds and the molecular cosmoses that build up personhood- and bodies share this, the personhood as company.

The question is asked through the teeth and tongue. A knotted tongue is a confessional muscle.

I think about questions to ask.

Voices are a strangeness, and so the substance of breath, in question seeps out of the flesh. The tongue is such a mortal muscle. Waiting for melody to arrive.

Medicine and melody are in a relationship with one another.

Medicine and melody remember that all natural bodies are the souls instruments.

I am,
recognising
the senses.
I am
recognising
my senses.
I am doing
this
through
processes of discernment, located in each aspect of the body. I am realising, extensions of the body relate to how the body moves - externally, to the atmosphere. I am realising that the animal body, is the atmosphere. And atmospheres appear, to the grouping of other things. Atmosphere is an invisible thing, I am following it.

I am following it, through the entrails, in a reaching act, to the solid world.

The body is a series of wires, blood vessels,
chambers of sweat, protein, bone. Temperatures of milk, spit, acid. Microplastics + dirt + dust.

Vegetal and animal are held together in such architectures as the bleeting lung.

There is the emotional world, the biological world, the primate, the soul. Each corresponds to a microbial and temporal signifier of human:animal and self.

And the mouth is a shape, a hole.

There is a vast, relational atmosphere of continuity. There are edges.

There are no, real edges. There is only, the bleeding into another thing.

Our bodies are tender chords. Strung together, matted together, the soft tissue, notational fibres, stretching themselves out through vibrations, through biological and acoustic waveform's.

In the messy areas between formed-self, and AIR: (that greedy creature who growls - and mummers).

The querent asks, who or what listens?, and speaks with the affects?.

AIR: is the channel of such switches in direction of the tongue.

+The affects, those coils of atmospheric possession are stored up in living places.

Such as: The.

Heart: a place of circulation, of the spirit. The discipline of exchange, the reversal of power in exchange.

Ear. A Listening drum. Home to motion and echo. Lung.the basin of filtering each shape, each note.

>>>>Within Flow: type of motion, where movement is defined by ephemerality. >The flow-state, explores within its reach, all kinds of subtleties in being. What is, Subtle?: an almost meeting, marked- with slight vapours, fluids, entering, mixing, becoming and passing over each-other.

Mouth: dark-place, the promise of infinity like a portal. wet/dry. Something in-human: A kind of music

In my searching, I arrived by boat at a singing community of sisters, based in an abbey, on a small island just off the coast of England. I wonder what the trace of the senses reveal, about (in)human singing worlds: as music.

Where there is this tension of virtue and embodiment. Of soul and flesh.

Singing, for the sisters is a practice of passing ones verse to the next, in each of their guts and throats. Singing is a way of ordering ones voice within a social context, ensuring that verses are continued as a whole - and are carried in the bodies of each-other.

Monastic chant offers a living ancient lung, those tendrils connect each participant. Chanting is a liturgical expression, that fills the cyclical day/night, where mortal worlds link onto immortal worlds. And the chant then is like an orb, of calculus and mysticism.

In the latin verse, “I open my lips” is what begins each service. Drawing attention to the humble animals instruments- the lips and the jaw.

Each mouths musics, moved in cords of the body. Splits and knots the tongue. What constitutes a chord is a ringing wire. Seeping out of the soul in vapours. Vapours of breath and social organisation. The breath that is passed through each interaction, is funnelled and filtered as a reciprocation of the outside coming in and the inside getting out. It is in this breath that lingual passages are formed, methods of dictation are aroused in verbal and partially verbal threads and bodies. The pant and the noise.

As the mutual, affectual world is made. There is something remarkable about the music that resides in the mouth. The gaping hole, that widens and stretches, emits, abjects, as the free site of expression, of the articulation, there within oneself. Feelings do not arrive as you, from “nowhere”. They are possessions, they reproduced in otherness. What is the mouths limit?. Its like a path that winds, emitting from the gut. It is a

weather- a substance, a molecular song, a chemical exchange: There is another body, it is a constellation, it is moving between each imagined body- here in the abbey, that body is yourself in the chant of your sisters.

When a sister dies within the community, A psalm is sung:
“The sublimate”. This is carried in the office of compline. Compline sends the community off to sleep, with blessing's for the darkness ahead.

The sublimate is sung, a song of the psalms of the father. This relationship between praise and with one’s hourly duties on earth is centred around the strength of gathering together to experience praise and lament. The sisters within their psycho-somatic environments are living the liturgical calendar fully. Living out, through each passing day into night, the lulls and arousals of scripture, based in devotion and the unity of love. Music here, is the meeting point of human and divine. The little animal who wakes and sleeps, attends to the grief of their sisters in the passing of their praise to the next.

“Singing”,
sister started to explain,

“is when we start what we will do for eternity, to become what we were supposed to be”.

It is a place, she continued for “Passing breath”
through

“Not touching each-other”

Singing is a way of sensorially orientating thorough the immaterial, to order feeling, and belief as though they themselves are harmonic through the living verse. And playing around with what is alive, realigns those sensitive acoustics networks, threaded together in affects and mediations , of possession.

An entry and an exit.

The lungs rise and leap, into polyphonic structures.

emotions can be passed on like that, in which the emotions are a sense of another as well as they are the hormone from the beast of which we reside. The mortal animal, the sleeping bloods and passions.

Chants are comprised of 150 psalms, antiphons, And each song, refers back to a verse in the bible. As an ancient reference system, that results in physical response and behavioural alterations as a result of reading, singing, following. The motivation of movement, the wetting of ones lips. A knotted tongue has wrapped itself around the experiences of its outer world, confession loosens the muscle. This cycle presents itself as a spherical code. A geometric shape to decipher through singing and praise.

Within the 150 psalm cycle, No part of the circle is the same on repetition,

“The circle is actually a spiral” sister said,

Year after year lacing over itself, thickening and stretching in temporality. This adds depth and multiplicity to the shape and familiarity for the reader, and the reader, living through the hours, touches these verses through the tongue, with each thread of time, as the orb of the circle spindles, spires. And the old world, swallows the new.

The praise and prayer is continual , it does not end. This is emulated through Gregorian chant, for the passing of each verse is an act of correspondence , a deep correspondence that relies on relationally. The chant relies on the ability of itself to be passed through the atmosphere and to reach the sisters across the space, and they hold that aural area together.

Sister said she was talking through instinct, and that together, the sisters don't come to the music for healing. It is the rhythm of their lives, held in common. And within this I began to notice, praise here in the holy community is everything and everywhere, where the praise meets the spirit, the breath becomes the atmosphere and moves back, to feed the lung. And the small things are all waiting for bigger
things.

A visiting
father left one
morning, he
had stayed and
we both spoke
about how we would miss him, and so sister asked me to join her in changing his bed sheets. Together we untucked and gathered the fabric, with the must of his sleep. I thought of the quieter traces of his domestic life, whilst here on retreat, some dry and some wet and we carefully cleaned them away together. It was as though we were children, lightly attending to our duty. With the linen growing larger than ourselves, bellowing in the room, guided by our hands that clutched onto its corners, inviting it back to dress the bed.

And in this silent fondness, we said good bye to the father. His scent and shape, disappearing, in sisters linen basket. Another orb of delicate, tender acts to build pace and rhythm to the feeling of an ordinary day, switching between the spirits of the humours. And emotional sequencing. Those material affects of stench, bacteria, saliva, insects and mites that pass from linen to skin and back again, to be bleached and parched and pressed. The residues of experience, layered up, materialised through their building as company. Emotions can be passed on like that, in which the emotions are a sense of another as well as they are the hormone from the beast of which we reside. The mortal animal, with sleeping bloods and passions. The life of animals, I thought, is in the blood, in the mud and earth, as well as in the building up of each-other in praise, thickening through the atmosphere.

I wonder how the senses linger in materials. How much of the sharing of senses across bodies, builds familiarity and builds strangeness.

Sister was a stranger, as she washed my bedsheets and towels without question. It was perhaps most strange, the immediacy of this quieter love, which presents itself through an exchange of hospitality and “monastic care”. At moments absolute trust circulated, in the tender operations of our discussion, as we moved around in muter states, until one day we held each-other and wept. That was when I became the querent. I became the querent with the organ of my mouth.Through asking, that motion of difference, the organ was

exercised.

Discernments played out -as a way to know what is real, what is felt, what is impressed. Discernment is not a question, but perhaps relies on the nature of where questions arrive from. Sister taught me how, the mouth, the tongue, the lungs, and the throat are bio social beings.

And how love is an otherness that we all share.