4 January 2021

you sit at this table – this wooden table. as you have always sat at it. you save the file. textedit freezes. you force quit textedit and re-open. this file opens again. your headphones are not here so you can t listen to the outside. your back is damaged. all this new year period, for whatever reason, your back has been damaged – it s been hard to walk. it's been hard to sit down or stand up. your back feels like it s on the edge of collapsing, as if vertebrae could slip out. it s hard to lie down. in the morning it s hard to get up – physically to rise to your feet. it s hard to go down the stairs. especially when you re cold – when the cold damp gets into you, your back appears to seize up. the muscles around the spine grip against the spine, making it hard to breathe. at those times you take shallow breaths. through this period you are doing t'ai chi. Max gave you a link and you started doing Feldenkrais with Alfons. you do back exercises for lower back from and stretches – cat – dog – cow – for the upper back and lower back. you read the advice at nhs choices, medicalnewstoday, all those sites with pictures of people doing curls half curls or child pose. you do all those things. you breathe and look out the window as you stand breathing. you fit a plaform to the table and type while standing. your back goes through phases of improvement when it is better. it goes through phases when it is harder to move, with constriction on the upper back. it becomes more painful in the lower back. the improvements do not lead out into a clearer situation. they are partial, giving way again to difficulties.

you have no resolutions. you met h and j in the park around midnight after the fireworks were off and the 2 fire balloons were gone. you were not resolute, you said. you collapsed like a cartoon. you are still collapsed. you saw the first fire balloon at the end of the street over the train tracks like a ufo. what is that, p asked, a ufo? it rose steadily, an elongated bright object burning in the night sky. a scattered group of people came under the bridge and turned up the road by the tracks toward the park, running and looking up into the sky. a second fire balloon appeared afterwards, rising lower and perhaps further back to the west of the first. there was no sense of perspective – simply the glowing objects were rising slightly, hanging in the night sky. you remembered the fire balloons that caught fire in the wind on takeoff – this evening was quite still, you think now, the moon partially full briefly behind thick cloud, then masked – fireworks all over the city – far and near – in small groups of a few or sometimes large sequences – rising with a fizz, hanging, exploding with a bang, spreading coloured shapes falling. the distributed effect was equal, you thought, to the usual massed displays, notwithstanding, you thought, it was not easy to get fireworks, maybe. for some people it was not easy to be out. directives had said, you were told, that people going out would have blood on their hands.

you watched the second part of Andrei Rublev [*], which you had been meaning to watch again for a long time – you and p and sam – m was out, s was in liverpool. In the first part of part 2 of Andrei Rublev, we see horsemen encamped by a wetland. a long shot shows them in feint smoke and mist, in black and white, while the sound conveys a sense of the sounds of the camping coming across the lake to the listener. an almost peaceful period is evoked

you get up and set up a platform on the table to try to reduce the pain in your back

an uncertain period of pause is suggested

when the tartars are sighted, the camp goes into preparation. when the tartars arrive, they go together with the russians to raid the city of vladimir, killing and abusing the inhabitants. one person asks why. they strip the gold sheets off the roof. eventually they leave, leaving the inhabitants on the floor of the church among burned timbers and partly burned paintings. Andrei Rublev renounces painting and takes a vow of silence which is broken only much later when he goes to comfort the boy who has supervised the casting of a huge bell, following his intuition, after his father refused to tell him the method for casting in bronze. as the clapper approaches the rim of the bell for the first testing, a conversation among italian diplomats is heard. then the bell rings out. andrei rublev finds the boy collapsed in the mud by a wooden post after the dignitaries and others have dispersed, and comforts him, cradling his long figure in his long limbs. at this point he speaks to him.

black and white footage of a smouldering fire gradually shifts to colour. this is the transition to the final scene, where the camera follows the frescoes believed to be painted by Andrei Rublev in rhythmic passages across the walls. we understand that he resumed speaking and accepted a commission which he rejected before, and began to paint again.

you re having trouble standing up. you heard max lighting the fire downstairs. it may be you can warm up and your back will get better. either that, you think, or lie down. find a position in gravity near the ground. but it is not easy to find a position where your vertebrae align. in Feldenkrais with Alfons, Alfons says to walk down the street without pain is an achievement. it takes time and concentration, Alfons says, to be able to walk down the street or lie on the ground.

Credits / References

[*] Tarkovsky, Andrei: Andrei Rublev. Moscow 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Rublev_(film) accessed 26 October 2023.