Emmanuel and Alex were in the club space. Emmanuel was aware of the space as a location where an indeterminate multiplicity of modalities came together.
To some extent it had the character of a laundromat—where complete strangers but also intimates all gather to wash their clothes.
It was also like a cafe.
But, more essentially, it was that space in which they had established a certain stability, within a mode of insight, a way of being and acting in relation to the collective world.
It was not exactly true to say that he and Alex had ‘figured this out’, because this insight-stability-location was inherently a work-in-progress, a focused art of improvisation.
The occasion at hand was about being there in the club space to receive Malcolm, who was coming along just now. They could see him passing by the window.
Malcolm was always coming by and was always welcome.
Malcolm pushed open the door and entered, came over and sat down at their table.
Emmanuel began to speak, to gesture, but mainly to convey via a species of non-verbal ideation, the nature of their stabilized-yet-dynamic insight club space.
Malcolm was taking it in like a regular cafe conversation at first, but then, as the import began to sink in, Emmanuel saw that the characteristic existential vertigo was affecting Malcolm—it was a feeling like suddenly becoming aware that there was an immense sky above one, silent, opening out vastly all around, and that the ordinary objects, and one’s very bodily being, were becoming unnervingly transparent, tenuous.
Predictably, Emmanuel began also to feel the unsettling vertigo, the ‘too high feeling’; it rubs off. Alex of course picked up on it too. But more strongly present was that stability, the matrix of insight feeding forward to Malcolm an equanimity, their hard-won certainty, via the momentum of long repetitive work or focused play.
Emmanuel remained poised, shifting into a light, improvisational mode, whereby he adopted the tactic of unfolding the expressive, dynamic feedback nature of the new stable space. He teased out for Malcolm the underground interplay of subtle perceptual-cum-communicative emanations they utilized consciously here, revealing how there was an ongoing, non-verbal stream-field of environmental energy that, in broadcasting everywhere, was also everywhere its own feedback—making it a highly flexible condition. The trick was to ride this with a certain attentiveness, to get the knack of synching up with it, learn to float words across to each other on its silent waves.
The nature of their improvisational flow was tuned to make it the new normal, the new everyday, just about adapting to a more thorough, more rich and resonant level; it was taking fuller advantage of what was already there.
And they could see now that Malcolm was getting it, saw him settling into his chair, relaxing into infinite potential space.
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