Luminance

The equivalent of pressure touch gradients to discern depth would be in visual terms, luminance gradients. I think luminance as the context in which details or objects emerge and then re-integrate is an interesting way of looking at how environments throw up different affects at different moments. That can never be divorced from the act of feeling which is always in its turn enmeshed with the act of perception. So, feeling-perception would have to be a double barreled term always.

I think this is along the lines of some of what Whitehead says.

This languaging of perception then seems to root it through duration. A duration where different intervals of luminance play out whilst remaining stable in an ecology of movement-environment interactions. Bodies are established out of these patterns across luminance thresholds. Otherwise every turn would create a different body that would not equate or stack together with the ones before- the multiplicity would unravel into single planes that could not maintain themselves in that they could not “do” anything or have an existence from one moment to the next.

This long-term staying power could be called envisaging.

Man with a grey-black beard

Sunday I go to the drumming hut. Despite or maybe because of the uneasiness of restrictive attitudes there; limitations and closures; un-sustained displays and re-butts, something comes through. The hitting of the drum helps. Plasters on the fingers to stop blood appearing on the drum surface. The blood flows on through the veins. It cannot escape. Run for cover. There is a staying with the situation. This caucus of addictive tendencies that break into something else. A gesture or inclination- subsumed under the noise of another display. One on another jutting in. Impossible mostly to look one in the eye. But you can look between- sounding on and off between the crash of beats- a necessary closure. How to soften it up- tenderize it without spoiling it?

A man walks in. He wears Arabic clothing and has a grey-black beard. He has some weight on his body. He is quiet, careful, good-mannered. His playing is like a delicate labyrinth of cross-stitching. It is a shuffling kind of edging into place. Then as it grows, a growing back down. A diminishment that seems to be as much about evolution as the one before.

What arrests and engages me is his listening. Not just a placing of hands in front of him because it has been done before into a procedure of pattern, but this shifting emphasis engaging in all surrounding. His ears monitor his hands that voice out something. There is belief. It is not an easy conversation. There is nothing known about it. It slips and slides and converts mid-way between many directions, none of which are entirely given up. There are tangents that sprout up and are drawn back in, like throwing out a net in the water- what fish pass through- what gets stuck? Tracing out moves according to how each new configuration is read- tea leaves the rhythm of the water one set in motion. The stopping. The pouring out. The remains. A call to action. Any action. A decision. But it could have been otherwise and just as valid. Just as valued. To cherish what occurs. To put oneself into it. Let it catch on to something else. Then is the time to leave the room. To return as if discovering a wind cycle by looking at a tree one has come across. Re-implementing a place back in amongst that pattern, that by chance one has come across and that is stirred up again in a different way. Coaxing out the tendencies set up in small independent reactions to specific beats as they affect one. Splintering further and further these summations. Impossible equations that one rides as long as it lasts before they become wholly untenable. Something shatters. The lull of a waltz building back through out of the meter-mover of a regular beat. Angles and circles that are never entirely angles or circles but approximations, playing on and off just before and beyond the arrival of any set measure.

There is a soft spokenness to the man though I have not heard him talk. Yet his arrival and exit is timed to build on what is there and to let settle back down what is mounting beyond anything plausible in the experience of this grouping. There is a feeling out of something. The beat becomes more and more a quality of felt impressions. An exposure coming through more or less clearly, playing with the hiddenness as much as the clarity- creating gages of depth that become the emphasis of this articulation. A vocal range through the hands- a scope on the breath. A holding and tying together in the abdomen.

The clenching into competitive beats all the way over that tires the body and makes the nerve endings ache is loosened into this more back-seat approach of coming through now and again. Playing with the relief of different levels of proximity. A depth that is a multi-dimensional holding space. Human relief. Joy and sadness.

I go home past the enclosure of the circus. A white canopy that allows in and shuts out. Wild animals are inside. Tamed with treats.

__

In the park my vision is agonizingly wide open. I cannot discern an order of relevance. All is apparent. A wide unblinking panoramic view sweeping the back steps of Kent where the city gives way here and there. Trains rattle through crisscrossing and deviating through one another- going up or down so in affect they do not meet.

Only in the distant gaze do they appear to mingle in each other’s company. But perspective is always a falsification bringing together traits that do not associate. Yet maybe this associative neighborhood all in a glance is valid, brought up as it now has been by the intricacies and labyrinth stitch-work of the drumming session. It has been played out. The myth told. Now in the view it simply holds together out of that score. It is the result of human endeavor, worked up out of tangible associations. The relationships have been earnt and here they stand. But now the view in that single grasp is untouchable. It brings sadness before I can stop it. I know the disability of this wide open view that slams into mis-encounters when brought up close again. And in that is speechlessness, because the co-ordination cannot be re-visited in this extended medium. It’s the intensity of pressure-release that jumps out the scope and that there on the spot is then immediately useable in language and gesture as a kind of reverberation of this intensity bounced back out in extension. Then the song inherent in the pattern jumps out the necessary meter of the procedure that bursts out from this single spot. But in the extension without this on-going pressure contact, the pattern soon fades. There is either a restrictive narrowing of vision in line with the narrowing of the contact feedback or the pattern lingers un-rooted like an encumbrance- a dream or vision that feels like a gaping hole. That becomes something voiceless but brimming with a consciousness not angled by on-going questions. That becomes an autistic state. Using this wide vision that comes from interaction and feeding it into a continuous traction of positing questions and augmenting results is the educational work in languaging perception. This is a question of nuance, emphasis and continual contrast so that the limitation becomes the point of interest, worked up differently each time, and not the boundary of awareness- something fixed that will necessarily shrink as one plane of reference taken in isolation eventually extinguishes because it is not enlivened with any point of active concern.

Questions

I have been thinking around issues on perception. They are really a whole lot of questions. It leads into my idea that it is the questions themselves that open up the scope of perception. But how to get to those questions? I think this is about modulating more and more subtle thresholds of touch sensitivity- these almost immediately jump out of each locality and an atmosphere starts to pervade like smoke billowing in on smoke. Visual and auditory perception unfolds in this dissipative way- there never are these separate elements of things and places except as a kind of omission or emptying out of these binding and intermeshed atmospheres. Details do not exist separately. Rather they configure from out of the sum total of an extensive network. This billowing – made so real by the pictures of Iceland’s eruptive volcano- many shades of grey and depths of blackness with fire raising and burning off the sulfur fumes of gas has animated this before my eyes. Each panel of relative darkness is invading and overwhelming one another yet in moments of held configuration, each becomes a defined gage and border in which one becomes noticeable in relief to another. What it is not, defines how it is seen.

Smoke of course is changeable and we see it reconfiguring for us there before our eyes. But we have a tendency to lock into place these configurations, then to preclude the surfeit around the border in order to claim for intrinsic identities. We love to do that with one another, forgetting the motioning that brings things forth. Yet that motioning is on the verge of overwhelming us causing many rebuttals or over-exposures. We are pulled into it or pushed out of it. That is when perception starts to fade to white. All the discriminatory differences are set upon separate pedestals and yet outside of this modulated turning back into one another, no color or sound can remain consciously viable. Keeping things present then is to perturb them- allow for this activation in the jostling, where pigments and frequencies associate and in the mish mash sort out their working frontiers. Touch sensitivity is this. An awakening into this meshing. Moving into them with a questioning.

Contact dance on Saturday. Kathy Crick is giving the class in this space that cradles wandering bodies- allows them to rest back down so better to fly up. On the way there on my bike there is a gap between two cars but the gap depends on the cars moving at the rate they are going. One car halts as the horn slurs a continuous peep. The man swears and says, “Someone’s going to take you out”. I stop to get out money at a Tesco hole in the wall. As I steer the bike off the road the queue is already forming as pedestrians slow and one after the other fall into line. I go to lock up my bike. I turn back to the queue and a woman on a bike is veering off the road and braking into place at the back end of the queue. I nestle in just before she arrives. She understands this to be me butting in on her. We have words. She calls me a weirdo. I call her Mrs. Normal. It’s a full morning. A busy time. So of course I melt into the mat almost immediately. My body is breaking into a thousand portions. The light is attacking the skin around my eyes.

No matter I am claimed into the ordering of the class. I give into it. We are practicing nudging into place, rolling minutely over the surface of the mat. Absorbitant and resistant- bone and water. The cradling takes on many insinuations- small crevices that fill in or erupt out of any holding. The level ground becomes a mass of indentations, out bodies rising out, affected by countless probes, falling then into their reverse. Things rise up, flatten back down. So a spine is born, curving and twisting to create multiple levels. The body is this multiple sectioning of brief responses acted upon in order to bring about a certain “take”, then another and another. A concertina affect of accumulated mass. The jointing are the movement out of each contact, and a repositioning out of that. This is the task. The tasking or taking into account the procedures of the day. In this way we remember our bodies and the environment in which our bodies find themselves. In this way we make our bodies; our bodies make us. We are snapped back into place. A place we have yet to totally arrive at and yet to leave. Something spanning time- a bridge or lever between one portion and the next. It is being evolved into for the first time ever and yet it is yet a repercussion of every surface to surface encounter that has moved the question on. Allowed the matter to stay.

The first human encounter is a witnessing with brief touch into the twists and buckles known firstly as the affects that rise another body out and back into the ground. It is at first a slow configuration. An exercising on many layers that then begins to play off the knowledge from one to the other. Using the relative slowness to gain the traction of a new momentum. That ending or trailing away into something more wistful, more finely filiated within the actual air molecules in the room. Moods that come and go. The witnessing hand gages finer and finer degrees of absorption and rebuttal form this twining body mass, making itself at each turn. Until the consequences of all these exposures joins into an articulated massing and un-massing that the eyes now bear witness to. The moldings in the crevices of the hand join their staccato beat into the smooth motioning of a continuous body. The eyes for the first time now “See”. That is they have something to see, orchestrated and paced by the feedback from the hands; this on and off contact. The patterning over and over again is configuring. Where is it? Is it in the hands, in the floor-body interface, in the body moving, in the eyes? It is constantly being displaced from one to the other. Each moment of breathlessness, raised to an optimum point- a critical moment, where it is re-worked into another configuration. The patterning crosses through mediums, trailing through thresholds through which it becomes known, through which the question is sustained into the very uncertainty between multiple environments, multiple kinds of bodies that are not exactly aligned. Between disruption and smoothness. The road, the bicycle, the queue the slamming match, the accusations, the moment of contact- human exchange. Even an argument can be a celebration of sorts. How much of that do we take into the room, into the dance. This mismatching of our continuous living in amongst others?

The eyes have something to work on because of all the small portions of pressure-release that are on-going and are now built into this seeing process. The body 2remembers” how to move because of this accumulated pattern that appears to be there all at once and yet happens in stages, each moment having its particular place. This evolution that unfolds each time for the first time as a different admixture of all the tried out possibilities is a questioning attention. Yet the transformation at every moment happened s effortlessly out of the volition or jolt where these alignments slide in and out of place. That is the working energy of the thing. The priming that makes it so is the questioning- the bringing of mismatching portions into the same realm, where they may take on an affect. That affect is beyond conscious grasp but all the preparation is considered, tested, laborious; the edging of numbers; an accountancy transfixed by the fault-lines it sets in motion and that then become the backdrop of new misdemeanors. Possibly this is the event- similar to Whiteheads’ that trails through the slow motion stasis of mountains into the cataclysm of eruptive encounters, and near misses. Perhaps though I would like there to be more emphasis on the mistakes as the working traction behind all adaptations that moves the thing on. Questions then are recursive. They don’t hold out for answers- they just hold open a space in which events happen and continue to be affected and muddled rather than elicited into separate categories of independent means. That means the affecting goes on for longer- forever.

When the dance does occur and the whole of the body surfaces are given over to an on-going affect and the turning that this brings, the pattern is there. Where? Not in the body not out of the body. It is making and unmaking the question that is the body at any one moment in its relational composure. That composure is still. The attention held open- not the bracketing and re-joining of components already separated, but the jumping back through of a wholeness out of this continual fractional splitting and re-working that is the very mass and movement of the body- a body that spreads and condenses according to this process of small minimal affects- a point splaying wide open into environment on each call, at every given tangent of the dance. That is a dance that knows itself in relative separation through relative proximity. Cells collecting and cells dissipating in the space, the music, the notion of that event.

After the dance we talk for the first time. There is an ease of words that accompany what is already there. A falling back out into another layering of articulation. It is easy. There are navigational sign-posts- the stops and starts of our own pulsing listening that inform it that has already played out in other ways. There is agreement and interest. At how it arrived into that way. At how it made itself out of so little beginnings. It turns out the woman I have been dancing with also had a difficult and problematic journey to the class across London.

Afterwards I go to the market. All the fruit to pick up and put down, testing the give and tautness. Accepting and rejecting over and over. People moving though people. There is warmth in the air.

Interface

What I mean by a body is an interface. An interface is the beginning of the idea of a body. A body is just a complicated interface.

The body needs to be constantly made up according to the hit and miss interface that pop it into a certain figment of what it is possible to be. That reduced back down to one singularity in the instance in which it is figuring in that way and no other.

The ease of a body is the timing to become what it must become right there and then.

It is the usability of playing out every interruption. To swerve in and out of missed placements. To reorientate and align further down the road. According to another point of attention one perhaps occluded in the disturbance and yet one that the disturbance inadvertently sign-posts in a continuous motioning that is becoming emotion. (O.k, the ing on the end of becom-ing is from Gilles Deleuze, french philosopher- a whole book about "Folds")

Emotion is the interface playing with a multi-directional off and on sensing of what is possible, and making it so.

Emotion is the body becoming.(Deleuze there you are again) It is also our thought. The stacking of interfaces to accumulate into critical points. To become more than would be considered or conceptualized or felt in only one take, or one place-in any one bounded part of the operation- in any solitary body. Yet where every instant- every fractional edging into place between one surface and another at whatever scale, is a key in the body becoming.

The interface is a questioning. The more interfaces the more questioning. This questioning hones in, situates within a shored up inter-relational mass of moving parts.

What is Learning?

What is learning?


Are they asking questions?

If there is not the chance to ask questions the thing will not cohere; not in body, language, attention, perception.

Question-interest

Duration

Noticing difference.

Nothing can be monitored and prepared for without this proximal questioning and on-going adjustment- that is why hot water burns, clothes itch, gestures frighten, light overwhelms.

There must be a slow progression of on-going association, of mixing up by degrees in order to learn how to modulate intervals; align workable proximities; attune.

Create patterning through a constant repositioning.

Passageways and safe havens.

To regulate the processual unwinding of events. Enfold them one into another as form.

These complex multi-directional forms that tell stories of these multiple journeys; snails’ trails or roller-coasters can temper the assault and move on the tedium of misplaced encounters.

Learning to accommodate with a dynamic flow in learning how to feel, perceive, relate; to stop and start at varying speeds.

It is more central- more crucial than social programs and writing exercises for it underpins social encounters and literary and communication encounters.

It is the underscore.

Movement ecology

23.4.10


How to see movement as a moment by moment shifting point of contact? Even a movement that seems like stillness- a breathing movement so that there are fractional points of impact at this slant and then that slant at the surface that bit by bit feel out a depth of that thing.

Can every fractional bond- each hit that becomes a sticking point- be seen in the rolling duration of what is occurring? A rolling compulsion- not of the thing, the object, the body, the motivational goal, but in the compulsing itself. This constant slippage from state to state- a dying as a leverage comes unstuck and a reapplication so that the contact is a tilting, swinging on/off. Yet snail-like, or tank-like there is always at least one molecule aligned with another around which all else falls and catches; around which all else turns. So that movement is a continuum and can only be understood through duration- an environment unfolding in this Rumble-on. A complex of occurrences insinuating into one another. (This is Whitehead who is influencing my thinking right now).

Am I stealing a term to call it an ecology? Movement as an ecology? Well of course I am. But pulling words into unlikely association aids the hijacked word as well as the new subject matter.

Movement as ecology. A habitus that is a tumbling of instances. The contactability at the heart of the shift. A way to address situations- a way to think.

If movement is an environment of duration then what particular environments elicit this kind of tactile movement? In other words not a movement where functions and tasks are executed- considered outcomes mapping in advance upon a given terrain. Rather the ground is tapped and prodded into existence through every contactable moment that spills into each other, bleeds through in a contagion that is never done with.

Of course the mismatch fracturing does occur between one noticeable event and another and that is how we determine it as such; as contrast; as change. Yet there is the level of tactile workability that is a continual state- in the crunching and churning over of what this actual experience is of movement and stillness when in stillness there is always a movement gradation and in movement there are always slight pauses.

To enter into this perplexity is to stay with the motioning that is not then decided between a before and after. Because each instant is circulated and flushed through to the next one. In this sinking down/rising up that pervades one another the distant regard has a touchable gesture at its heart and that place of sticking is already a bouncing out into the circulation of an aerated patterning.

The movement is the lean-to that spans across out of the drill-like meter of consecutive touch one point after another as an articulated arching- a stretching and redistribution- the thrust and torsion of a three dimensional state catapulted out into this ability through the miniscule and consecutive folding and unfolding, in order to stay present. This becomes the ecology of a body and the ecology that is an environment. Of course the two are intertwined- as a hand against a walking stick connects up a body moving and the environment it presses itself into. In this way the rivulets in the creases of the hand are patterned into the sticks. They are smudges but they speak of more than only that smudge of association.

Every point of contact; of constraint and a furthering in once more in letting go has the capacity to pop up this wholeness of integral participation. It is experienced not as a mind concept or a vision of a universe or a multiverse, but known through these on-going acts of momentary association where surfaces come up against one another that become intersections for the passing through and mixing up of many capacities or potentialities.

So it is not surprising that in each act that is not some kind of hesitation held back and spun back on itself there is a chance for sensing a body through this environmental complex. Out of that there is a placement- a fractional nudging into place at that very instant in relation to all else.

So a passage is cleared and there is a transparency through the paucity of what at another slant would be a reverberation of bounced out light and sound distortion that would become unbearable and so close down the faculty of languaging. All timings derive from this experimentation. These time jumps can spin to the outer edges language, emotion, thought, social address which are all mixed up in the layers and foldings of what this movement or event is to become. The imagined rotary to this movement which is so often the backdrop and generator to our thoughts and conscious states; that selects by the way things converge in an act is second nature so that we do not even realize it. But it is there so that without a body or the idea of a body it is questionable that we would be able to think or feel at all.

Why then do we stop autistic children from moving- jumping off surfaces, wobbling on the precipes between balance and fall?

How does this kind of considered articulation when allowed to play out allow a body to exist?

What kind of environment approaches this level of accessibility? I think more than the objects or areas of interest, or kinds of activity it is about a certain kind of attention that hold open a space of time for a certain amount of time. That becomes a considered listening space for all that occurs. Whether in a four hour contact dance score or an eight year garden project, a shared meal or sitting on a bench in the park (as I am now doing)

It’s an attention to how all that happens within that assigned time becomes of interest and so that the components brought up in a certain attention begin to interact with one another. It is like the thrust and fall of a constant bantering that acts like an intermeshing to bring in and out of focus certain aspects that relate consistently in the randomness of this shuffle. So, the quality of light and the air currents are unsettled; minutely disturbed, throwing up filaments of invigoration in the contrasts that become this patterning reworking itself- this sewn together ecology of occurrences.

This kind of listening space is more important than all the play equipment or educational programs put together because it is dissipated, everywhere apparent and yet able to turn to a precision of attention that puts together the body portion by portion and simultaneously the mutable environment that is the sounding partners of our bodies. Feeling occurrences require that level of shifting contact.

There may be a different kind of way to measure suitable learning environments for SEN. Not in accordance to various theoretical models or an analysis of deficits and what therefore needs to be done to make it right. But by asking, is the child or adult engaging in these moment by moment shifting encounters in order to further them on in movement-thinking? If not, why is that so?

It could be that with the best will in the world a program that seeks to give children various “Tools” for coping in functional life- certain words, picture cards and a strong guidance with positive reinforcements to encourage appropriate behavior, misses the point that this very application actually distracts the child from an ability to feel out the environment in a way in which they influence it and it influences them. Only this will give modulated response through slight impulses of feedback held open for long enough to take affect. Only that can be called learning.

What this also means is that what counts as “Learning”, “Engagement”, “Interaction”, “Feeling” for different people; differently “Bodied” and “minded” people is going to look and sound and be very different.

The standard is not a rational box. It is the means of application. The responsibility falls not only on the child to attend to certain things but on the wider learning and domestic atmosphere to notice when these conjunctions “hold” in whatever way they do so. When there is the presencing of an environmental space rather than a “type” or ideal form for a body or a typical self to aim for, slight connections build into accumulative states of awareness. That opens up a coherent space where different dramas and stories can play out; here the body, the emotion and our thinking take affect because they are entirely intertwined modes of each another. They are the sensibility of a resonant ecology.

This would question the whole notion of “disability” and ensure a serious re-think of what it means to therapeutically educate or re-habilitate various categories of people. We could no longer implement programs according to those categories of disability but would need to separate educational approaches out from the functional diagnosis. To find a definition of education, learning and creativity that did not rest on an outside model that was a deficit linked to a preferential goal of attainment. In that way we would ultimately deal with the diagnosis in a much broader way according to the approach of contact or the possibility of holding open an interest. This model would necessitate a time-based approach, seeing various contrasts and differentials of approach not as a progressive single directional ascent or a regression but as the variability that made possible any connection and built and deepened the quality and intensity of contact through repetition and change.

That interest in testing and on-going experimentation would involve looking towards the practices underway and whether they had the qualities of a learning feedback or the seeds of that possibility. We would need to question in what way strands of a certain practice could be extended and maintained in these feedback loops so as to become pacing mechanisms inherent to an ecology involving many associations perhaps remote from the practice at hand. This interconnection would be crucial even to understanding the simplest of acts. That ecology would need to be sustainable and endurable in every facet and at every scale of its multiple workings.

It would raise the question that much behavior considered fragmented and un-useful becomes this way in as much as it is left unincorporated into an optimal environment. The patterning in which a life can fit in and begin to tweak and work with and against a basic interactional frame of reference as a unit of composition needs to be there in order for every known capacity in the human repertoire to get going.

This needs looking at

Honing perception

 

Something about the glints of light that crack open upon dense surfaces that slide over one another in counter direction on the turn of a head, the movements of the eyes, the run of the body. We open up these shards and glints, widening and narrowing them as we see fit- or often simply for our amusement or stimulation.

Perception is about that working on and off those counter-points. We play with what is the background and relatively still and what is the foreground moving against that- but these are provisional. The churning of water by the canal- the froth from the rubbish, mixing up into a lather as it plummets through the gaps of the wooden dam that keeps a wedge of water at a higher level from which it rushes in wherever possible to the lower level where I am standing.

They have removed the benches that used to stand beside the fig tree brutally pruned back before the growth is even shooting. It’s to stop the feverish rooting system from sucking up all the water I guess. I stand there for a long time listening to the rumble which becomes the frothing before my eyes, the tumbling motion, the vortices that create pock-marks in the watery turbulence, the edges of which are almost smooth.

Like a drumming session it is impossible to stabilize the back ground from the foreground, because the mix-up is continuously turning one fixture inside out in relation to another. Nothing holds still to become a frame of operation or a geographical surface in which there is any contemplation of getting from A to B. Rather the only way to go is down into the depth that leaps up and vacates endlessly, filling and emptying becoming encapsulated air bubbles, mixing the worlds. The process – this on-going rumbling is a kind of thinking machine. The continual motioning creates a kind of pause-suspense where a pattern leaps up and clinches into memory an aspect of itself. That aspect could be rolled out almost endlessly- like a simple equation that could jump-start complexity. That in any case is what is actually happening so that it is hard to thin of it as an abstraction at all. Within that situation my focus becomes sharp- a discriminatory probe that is tutored in the act of being with the water, into going into more and more slender brackets of perceptual differentials. Slight shifts in light patches and shadow as birds take to the air or swoop down again or in which clouds mesh and separate endlessly, register on my consciousness before the “things” stand out or or become relevant. Sounds and smells get the same treatment. Not now as units or configurations of entities but only in this shifting colloidal bracing against one another- that is what becomes the exposure; the small crack through which attention is held. The very precision of a line a dot, a crease a fleck known not in and through any essence of itself, but in how it is placed in this dynamic dance that throws it into relief, occludes it back into a process of extinction, over and over again; this flickering that dances below and through form.

I think these kinds of differentials that we activate and that we consequently attend to, can begin to hone in a vision for noticing and emotioning human states and empathetic soundings in that there is a constant attention for disturbances and resolutions- harmonies and adjuncts in the composure and interaction of life-forms. In that regard I actually think it is misplaced to say that autistic people can not “see” or “read” emotion or states of mind as if these were integral units that stood alone on a clear cloudless horizon like distinct statues. Yet in practice I think this noticing is worked up through differentials. That it is occluded by the very totalizing language and terminology- the very tests and skill quotas that are meant to sign post it and measure its level of functioning. That is why I notice so strongly in the drumming group for autistic and Special Needs adults at the arts hut, a depth of vision and an emotional consistency that runs through the polymorphic mixed up beats that these adults ride- that never overload them because they are implicated all the way through.

The problem is a language- or more a narrative- divorced from the flickering canopy of unsettlement through which feeling states occur. Emotional overload come out of this mismatch between deep states of depth formation in the interplay of gradients of contrast and the enveloping of this complexity into totalizing schemes of Happy-Sad and facial recognition tasks taken from lines that slant upwards or downwards in order to demarcate complex states of becoming as if the becoming could fit such a graphic wobble on the paper and the graphic wobble could fit a facial expression of a human nature. Emotion must be worked up through the differentials through which it knows itself and effortlessly becomes what it is because at that instance that is the only thing it can be. It is not known through a test chart intermediary that can be ticked “yes” and “no”. If you have to ask such questions you can be sure that the compositions that would generate such emotional states have already gone missing.

Timed Response

16.4.10




I have been thinking about the quality and activity of this shaping that is taking place in the dance- where out of nothing- inertia or mismatch or awkward stagger something catches in. How this catching in occurs through a certain quality of listening. Listening almost to the rush of air between bodies. The way that air fizzles and snaps, bolsters up and flattens. And how at the heart of all this it is about timing- the hairs breadth closing and opening of a gap and how it is that quality of discernment- one that works through the panels of moving and differently gauged intervals, that the shaping occurs.

This working up of differentials needs to be the centre axis of any understanding of perception- how it is refined into a multi-scalar tool of discernment- or again how it is occluded- fuzzed over like a bear paw trying to grasp a pin.

Form and function must be understood as being worked up through this exercise in differentials that can be honed more and more – timed into bursts and flurries of address out of which a spinning apart furthers the pattern. When these patterns are being worked up, bodies have an agenda- not a program of outcomes or a wish-list for functionality and inclusion but a means of working through these resonances that even random activity when allowed to play out brings about; a charge and interest in this constant dance of association and dissociation.

I think autistic people have a difficulty in rendering the pattern outside of the movements that bring it forth. Without that dance of intervals, the pattern is collapsed into objects almost as an emergency place of safe-keeping. Yet there can be a fixation into those objects that render the body still and so misplaced in order to rev up this patterning in the intervals it creates.

Understanding objects and the placement of objects in relation to one another as a kind of archive for associations and patterns that only truly reveal a dynamic and renewable quality through a body’s motion is a way to let objects play a part as a holding place whilst considering them in a wider circuit of motioning. Objects could be known as movement slowing into form. The transformation of states through playing with speeds- movement and pause- therefore becomes crucial in dealing with the issues of patterning through which continual minor adjustment, insertion and an emptying out again create articulation through nuance and emphasis; something like a physical punctuation.

Language comes out of this system worked up in gestural punctuation- the on-off of gradients of pressure and the emphasis of pulling apart and tightening back up these elastic threads through which we press into surfaces or move relatively further away. This becomes a continuum of playing with gradients that in order to operate must have a way of composing through this entwinement. Split them apart- with a wish list of encouraging one set of behaviors over another- the cream on the cake without the dough- sociability without solitary reflection, and the party suddenly becomes macabre- a Willy Wonka affair because there is no on-off switch; no way of being able to modulate from the shadow of which is not in view. Too often programs of intervention tick off such a wish list through positive reinforcement and discouragement or simply ignoring the “negative”. Of course there will be island instances when the “positive” is replicated- by demand- and so a positive outcome is seen to have been achieved. But since there is no way to self-regulate this particular sought after trait by the child themselves who becomes almost a container for it rather than a spontaneous initiator, the physical or emotional intensity tethered as it must be in the physical, chemical, magnetic qualities of its opposite, is snapped off. And so the behavior spirals into extremes and then collapses. That may not be immediately apparent. Not in the school room. Not in the surgery or the therapy room. But later on- in the playground, at home, in the street. And so the deficit is put on to the shoulders of the individual- who has forgotten their good behavior or have been unable to generalize the rule form one place to another. Or it is put on to the parent who is seen to not reinforce the good lesson in the right way and in the way they should. But that is often not the whole story. Many times the way this island of goodness is set up, it is bound to implode because it has no sensible way of playing out in the long-term- of being felt and experienced and integrated by the child.

It is better to start with the tiny differentials of how states are arrived at- to follow that emergence with curiosity in the way it is always working on the cusp of what is seen and what is occluded. Working at the threshold of an occurrence, perhaps in another medium; with physical pressure gradients as a way of sounding, with passages of air currents and the quality of falling and bouncing back up to create articulated movement, and with thresholds of light velocities- almost as sensations of hot-cold- in order to jump-start or pop back up vision. That makes the spaciousness of very specific moments of attunement jump into areas of joint operation. It is immediately about relatedness but in a broad sense not just in terms of certain expectations of social sharing. Functionality – if that is what it is to be called, comes out of that- a wide and deep patterning of association, like a child’s “mindless” scribble that gradually solidifies into a closure of form, then is scrunched up for a new beginning. That ball of paper taken up by another child, and bounced back in something that is both a distraction and a momentary point of attention; not for the thing it was, nor the thing it was considered to be, but for the potential that open attention holds for the thing it is becoming.

*I notice after dance or drumming that afterwards I have a marked disregard for objects and the busyness of things that become to me a hindrance. I will even remove various pieces of stuff from around my living space, clearing away things to create passages worked up in the dance or music and held in resonances that fire up into complexes of motion in my imagination. Yet with time, as these motionings begin to fade or are superimposed upon with other patterns- adverts, news reviews, reports, form-filling, there is a slowing down and a resting in the certainty of these objects that stack up shards of patterning of their own so that the memory of how to navigate a movement, a thought or an idea does not totally leave me. The dynamic patterns that keep that memory afloat can be struck up through the juxtaposition of these objects or the internal dynamics and tensegrity that they offer in their very form. The motioning can be brought back into tangible use by following through these processes of structuring and letting them have an accumulative affect on sensory and neurological linkages that build up an assemblage of activation. Outside of that I lose the ability to language; to think conceptually and to string together words, sentences, ideas. The shapings that make that possible dissolve.

Ideas are forms- forms of association- resonant sounding matter that cohere through the gaps in frequency. That process is ideation. The words are the final cap- but they are not the most essential part and when brought in too soon can crowd out and occlude the pattern and in so doing consign themselves to a limited place.

Objects like bodies can be seen as the intersections of movements. And a wider scope of a perceptual field can be kept oxygenated by looping the intervals between things and people through these minute and gradated interactions rather than with an emphasis on essential substance. I hope in Special Needs Education as well as in aesthetics we have got beyond those kinds of essentialisms where we jam people into moulds with set tasks of performance where essentially they become stuck- land-locked, as if objects or bodies were ever unrelated to the people and things around them.

There is research evidence for this occlusion of communication potentials in Autistic pre-school children by over-loading an interaction with verbal usage (Whittaker and Potter, “Enabling Communication”, 2001 Jessica kingsley)

There is also documentation in this book, for the actual pulse playing out in real-time of different speeds of operation in an interaction. The shaping of a context through cyclical shifts between bursts of active engagement and periods of quiet removal. This is an attempt to situate what is done and how it is done in the actual and on-going responses as they are shaping up in the interaction. It is the feeling out of a form out of what is happening and an acceptance that this cannot be known in advance. A willingness to engage with the lull between events- to wait for things to build- to carefully follow a person into their readiness- to sense the tiny shifts in breath and gesture, in body posture, muscle tightness and the texture and musicality of soundings that explain to and key in a teacher, parent, therapist to a readiness or to an anxiety or to a need to simply stay with the situation and wait. This becomes a way to co-ordinate on a deep level with an autistic child so that events build as shared moments into crescendos; to then allow these thresholds to diminish and so become assimilated or to be moved on into other bearings.

My one question over this material is that there is still an emphasis on gauging a certain moment of optimal readiness for a type of certain communicative exchange involving specific and repeated eye contact, sound or tapping and that this communication is more often seen as being built up around a child asking for something that has stopped and that they like in order that it can be re-started. There is this deliberate withholding of complete engagement by the adult so as to nudge a child into initiating such requests.

However I believe that a communicative atmosphere builds into a pattern that encompasses everything that happens- the still inactive periods as well as the highly physical rough and tumble activities- what Whittaker calls Proximal communication- together with the more subtle musical and glancing exchanges.

As discussed in earlier entries I believe that all phases are linked and give rise to the pattern that holds the possibility of a joint regard. That regard builds in the very stops and starts so that the stops are not just moments in which to encourage further request for interaction. They are part of the interaction. Even without deliberate looking or doing, this shared space is emoted in the very spaciousness of this letting go and dissipation as well as the more intentional and active getting hold of things or calling for an adult’s attention. The glancing and the physical motioning when they come, often come as if out of the blue, from this pause gap and that sinking down and are not simply a child noticing that nothing is happening and therefore requesting in the only way possible, for something to be continued.

It’s the lull that energizes physically, emotionally, magnetically, this catching in. By allowing for these pauses the child can take up and read this patterning, then work it back through into physical engagement. From my experience with autistic children, a child is inventive with these transitions. The lull takes them back into a movement through which they initiate a certain resolution that sweeps up everything in the environment into their sphere including a re-charged capacity and often a dramatically energized momentum in a physically dynamic interaction. For instance there was one child, a boy of around 8 years old whom I worked with a great deal over a period of two to three years. Here is what occurred in one short passage of time within the sensory room as it unfolded one day towards the end of a session and nearing the end of my time at the school:

He walks back and forth, strikes a solitary note on an instrument, walks some more, brushes me lightly on the hand on passing, then on my shoulder on his way back across the room in the other direction. As he reaches the wall, he turns swiftly around, collapses his body on to the ground, gets up walk to the door turns, glances at me, makes an explosive sound with his mouth than pulls that out into a drone-hum, picks up a cymbal, drops it to hear it crackle against the floor, runs to the other side of the room, comes back over towards me, stops turns around, returns to the instrument, twangs another string, runs back over to the door, crashes his body explosively downwards, comes back over to me, then falls over my left shoulder and dives head down into the space just beyond me until that became an initiation of rough and tumble.

Trying to prize apart the useful from the un-useful episodes in this five minute episode is untenable. So too my part in it and really I think my whole bearing was important though for the best part I remained where I was, seemingly doing nothing. Yet there was a quality of attention- a certain focus in letting a process play out and the proximal moment of communication came into that scenario- almost walked in of its own accord. The focus was set up through far more removed scenarios. My emphasis was to stay with the boy and follow the interests like listening to a story unfold. I became more actively implicated in that story as time went on, yet my attention and involvement was equally there in every detail of what happened. All that occurred- the action and the pauses were completely distributed so that each element held every other element in place. The rough and tumble and the glance were important parts of this punctuation but they were not the culmination or the goal or the episode as such to be isolated and prized apart. They were a facet made possible by and through all the other wanderings.

Out of all these wanderings a nuance starts to develop like the stacking one on top of another of layering that interact within the folds. The sounds, the walking pace, the breathing, the giving into gravity, the startled crashes, the sweeps of body movement, the staggered turn, the look, the physics of falling over another body, softening into body parts, then separating out again.

I got to know this boy over many sessions. Words were kept to a minimum, but the quality of vocal expression became over time more resonant, tempered by all the physical excursions, repetitions and slight shifts in stopping and starting. There was an emotioning in the vocal attack and fade in which it was never entirely his or mine, but a taking up of a looseness at one point, a winding it into a tightening somewhere else. How we articulated sounds- the air pressure rolling and shaping in our mouths was intimately tied in to how we maneuvered and managed bodies; proximity and separation were the continual pump of this exposition and became a dramatization- an epic with no final outcome. Interruption as much as coordinated flow helped to shape this presencing and out of this a genuine affection grew up in the refrain of what at any cross-section of occurrences may have looked like mere burbling in the mouth and the repetitious pacing of an autistic boy back and forth.

Writing

15.4.10

In the same way by writing and continuously writing the words seem to jumble and interact and gradually I deliver them in an order where they begin to write themselves. Otherwise, with some specific tasks set out or – in particular to write something I do not believe in- my writing goes to pieces- literally- it no longer coheres. The deficit is put on my shoulders- or in my hands which become unstable and unable to grasp a pen or write complete figures, and the context or environment is occluded, exempted of blame. I forget because the writing no longer comes form a deeper pattern. The environmental scaffolding falls away. I suffer then from dizziness because the wording is not coming out of a sounding, a gesture that creates a sticking point for yet more words, more soundings. In the gap of hesitancy where I dissolve from a body placed in every aspect, I fall in the gap between buildings. Until the idea- the belief re-emerges and the flow carries the words that settle then into their own continuous perplexity. This questioning is language. It’s how words get to know their place and wonder what it feels like to be somewhere else instead. There is the breadth of time- the holding space in order to play around and let the argumentation and jostling get going rather than holding everything in place as a should- be or as something to be discounted. In that contingency there is room to notice where and when something feels right and where it feels wrong- to savor the gap that is the very pulse of the words, the sound-form that they make in the mouth. The juicings in adjunctions and abbreviations that bombard the palate. Passages felt out in the journey. That is how the whole thing gets going and the writing then occurs in the only way it can do. One is on the crest of the beat and it moves things on into variance and sense of rightness within a wider and necessary disturbance in the interplay of light and dark- with one thing and another and their being permanently entwined. It is this play of difference that keeps up the interest- fires wide open the idea whilst rooting it all the same to a consistency- making each twitch play into a tumult of centered affects- to further it- to make something of hesitant beginnings so that it unrolls pressed towards and against what it has been a moment before.

I write because it is one more placement in thinking- part and parcel of a continuous doing. I write to survive. To be able to move and think and hold many things together without closing down one in choice above another. I write to stay fair to myself and others because otherwise my perception and the inevitable slant into one emphasis or another, would close down the environment- stamp out a space in which to operate- put me on a precipe where all movement became too much to bare. I write as a displacement that opens up the way back through by re-inventing a necessary journey far from a place of absolute resolution- that can never know or rest easy in a single rule-book. I write to further things on. To keep them open. To mark a moment whilst leaving it where it was first set down.

The Garden

 15.4.10


The garden environment I set up between 2001 and 2009 was an attempt to play out a simple program and to let unfold various actions, associations, wanderings without any direct goal of making it happen and so determining it in a closed format according to skill, capacity, intent or even wishes. Rather the point was to set up various limit factors and constraints that should have been repetitive and perhaps should even have magnified the autistic “tropes” so popular and familiar with both professionals and the general public concerning the triad of impairments associated with autism:- deficit in communication, social skills and imagination- and through essentially non-verbal practices of how things were put together in the making of a garden and in accumulative balance sculptures, to see how various gestures and timings allowed for an ongoing passing commentary through this placement of objects and bodies. Could a memory space emerge that did not reside in the minds of the participants but in the environment itself which brought forth through affect the composite actions and over and over again reinforced certain ways of being that we did not aim for but simply arrived at because they worked in that context.

These ways of being, tenderized people to one another in brief exchanges that played out and altered over time to become countless versions of each other. It was that capacity for split-second changes and adaptations that became a thinking model- the beginnings of an idea and hence in the terms set out, a languaging intimately connected to emotion; emotion as an active verb- hence, emotioning. That language emanated out of a constantly revisited and reinforced atmosphere that was known in the small differentials set up in contrasting kinds of pressure and release through which materials were felt, handed from one to another, angled and settled back down into various juxtapositions.

The sculptures became a site of a kind of learning, molded over time to become wind-resistant whilst also being open to change; animal inhabitation and child wreckage alike. These contingent elements became as it were, written into the sculptures; embalmed as their background code and within that frame autistic people were un-phased by change- something that is always highlighted as a major difficulty for them- indeed it is a major factor in their diagnosis. Yet they came to expect these differences that played out in positions of sculptures that built up and fell down and they played inventively off of these transformations in the stop-start of their own positioning. That came to be an articulation that was only possible in the gages held open between each others presence within the wider sphere of what came to be the environment of a garden.

The environment was made by the actions – actions not usually considered to be emotionally loaded- indeed actions classically associated with autistic aloneness. Yet these actions held the key to creating points of reinforced joint actions, departures from these repetitions, and gradual piece upon piece innovative change. The three triads of impairment: deficit in communication, in social skills and in imagination were addressed not by setting up closed tasks with positive reward- such as is found in Applied Behavioral models but by simply holding open a space of on-going activity according to the tendencies already in play and letting those actions affect one another and meld into new possibilities, through a process of contagion and affect. In that sense practices usually associated with isolation and mindless self-absorption within the psychological rule book, became the key to playing out conjoint pacing through which fractionally differentiated states interacted and over time the garden came to exist. People- not through ideas in their heads but through the actions taking place through duration came to establish and reinforce affinities and an in-depth knowledge of one another. This grew as if a new species of plant had been cross-fertilized. Yet outside of an enabling environment how could that hybrid last? When the consensus is that these people are by definition lacking in emotional, communicative and social capacities that plays a part in any emergence which can not self-maintain in an island reservation.

What happens when the dance stops? When the garden goes? The affinities exist in the practice. Already, one year after the garden was closed down by a hostile charity who had the rights to the land, the link between garden members is vanishing outside of the practices that set it in motion.

One would hope for a loose network of many such related practices that can, as it were drum up particular and unique resonances – that we become adept at invigorating into make-shift habitations that come and go and yet that this capacity remains as a conjoint thinking tool. Outside of these loose structures- as perhaps we already are aware of, we do not have the chance to jump start our many repetitions into variation and therefore into something of interest. Is there a creative equivalent to the admixture that happens in conception? Do we need to mix up parts at every level and at multiple scales all the time as the very process of our individuation- as the conditions for the maintenance of any kind of life?

Yet surely this endless capacity to pop up and then dissipate is in itself part of the patterning- part of the resilience that never dies out completely even as it is passed on from one dying connection to another.

After-thought

15.4.10



Function is too limited a concept to explain the questioning that shapes falls, mistakes and slurs into useful and calibrated systems that work on and off balance, and find pause gaps or moments of precision and focal clarity out of the engine of noise and multidirectional contradiction that is the backdrop to any useful word, to any useable gesture- a gesture that is useable in a particular scenario, because it is placed, then again allowed to fly up or spin below the surface of that placement. Everything is an attunement in a wider resonance in which it influences the general possibilities of a condition of life. This is the idea. Language is a questioning. A bringing into the loop- into the fold all that appears irrelevant- that appears oppositional or distracted- all that allows, through those edges of contrast the conditional borders of any thing that at any time, we call credible. Then again spitting out that very semblance of coherence into a fractured lack of integrity. The credible and the incredible dance with one another bolting together workable frontiers between them. Then letting that slip.

Making and Unmaking: Part Four

Back to the dance in the dance studio set up through the refrain of Nancy Stark Smiths’ “Tuning Score”. At the beginning I felt clumsy and un-integrated in the dance. It was as if a common wind to carry the motion between us all was missing- at least in my experience. There were separately executed “moves” that worked or did not work. However through the actual process something begun to occur. In the playing with speed and the various points of suspension like a kind of intermeshing between falling and rising, turning one way and another the dance begun to shape itself.

We simply fitted in or playfully resisted this emergent pattern that nobody authored but everybody knew. In amongst this there was one particular dance that I had which seemed to make itself so that whether in close contact or dancing apart one state seemed to generate the other like a thrusting inwards and a spiraling outwards so that the contact could be touched back in and brought to bear as a leverage within a far wider patterning- something we pulsated in and out of. There was this flying calibrated stillness- a sending back in at the very moment of letting go- a wind-re-wind that became through the doing, an emotioning. It as embroiled in everything that happened and our avoidance of certain other possibilities rather than with any sense that emotion could stand outside of that momentum. It became an accumulated affect- a threshold of significance where something unexpected caught in and emerged. That’s when the dance started doing itself and we simply fell into place or at times resisted that place while simultaneously holding it there. It became a kind of joke –a humoring that allowed for depth of feeling without that disappearing down the fire escape.

Leaving that patterning can be awkward and Nancy Clark Smith even has written in to the score this feeling of disorientation and hesitancy after the intensity of partnering where there is a period of dis-coordination after extreme fluency- like the yolk of an egg spinning on disruptedly after a spinning egg has been stilled. That may be a time of vertigo, of forgetting and of emotional anxiousness. So a period of extreme integration can be followed- sometimes must he followed- with disintegration- clumsiness and mismatch. There is a sense of going back down- deeply into the miniscule arrangements of a composition- to feel out and sense the split second timings of doing and undoing that cohered in the dance at a certain and unique speed and set of circumstances. The same impulses may play out later as fears, euphoria, and physical, verbal or sensory slurs- where the light comes too brightly, or sounds overwhelm or movements are rushed and then halted. When divorced from the physical split-second coordinated movements that have generated the energetic spark that figures them out each second they explode into countless shards of possibility that can never be acted on exactly in the same way and so crowd in. Here in this storage or archive is the possibility for increased sensitivity that can be converted into language or action, or emotional depth… or overload. In that sense autism is perhaps intimately connected up with knowledge seeing, questioning, ideas, curiosity. It is one phase of a pattern. It may be dangerous to simply wash out the sensitivity. It may be better to use it. To convert it and move it on in a cycle of learning.



The next day after the dance, sitting at home, I have an intense awareness of the filaments of dust in my flat. Tiny specs that can be individually calibrated on the surface of furniture and on the floor. I am seized with a –probably- obsessive need to do some house-cleaning which I enter into with fervor as a new solitary dance revving up because it has to go that way. Yet it is summoned out of events far beyond itself. In that way the house-work eventually gets done in spite of myself.



P.S Today no planes are landing in British air-space because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the wind direction over the British Isles and the strong possibility of cloud ash in British air-space particularly between the hours of 11hrs and 19hrs on 15.4.10 which could jam up the engines of planes. The lingering affect of this incident will probably last for days.

Making Unmaking: Part Three

There’s pattern-making that catches in at the same time as the pattern evolves and equally comes undone. That is not an intentional linking in to a social network- not an affiliation to a membership that has any inherent or long-term existence. It is generated by something far more removed, and yet far more common- a gradual filling in of pauses and emptying out of intensity- a continual re-positioning that is mobile, immediate because each component only has in its dealings those small shifts necessary to tweak local encounters. And yet there is this sense of wholeness- the pulsating filiations of this spreading and cohering that lets the very atmosphere become a kind of distributed lung.

Contact/no-contact is a bit of a misplaced priority for concern- and this should be understood too in all socialization programs aimed at including the seemingly socially removed priorities of autistic compulsion, anti-social attention seeking noise fanatics, oddly clothed teenagers or infants more interested in spinning than in playing age appropriate games of cowboys and Indians, mothers and fathers.

What I mean by this is that there are an accumulation or backdrop of tiny motionings- all the turns and re-turns, the trials and errors that never make it to any well toned meaning or even to a coordinated whole, let alone a personalized intent or historically relevant passage of time in which a certain action can be said to take place.

Out of this multitude, festering and boiling and cooling in which we insert and remove minute involvements that are contingent upon other involvements the beginnings of gestures collide, meet and separate, forming themselves. Only out of these impacts do brief occurrences stay for long enough to create the beginning of ideas. These ideas are multi-facetted lean-tos worked out between bodies or body parts, or chemical interactions and border exchanges and therefore can not get started out of one direction alone. They summon up you and me in relation to one another. Language arrives out of that pacing- that to and fro questioning that plays with tempo, with abbreviation, with sudden extension and growth spurts seemingly coming out of the blue.

Last night I watched a program about the work of Professor Lovelock, a maverick thinker who came up with the Gaia theory whereby earth’s atmosphere as an optimum environment for the diversity of life is linked in by continuous feedback into the cycles of intake and waste through which populations prosper to a certain optimum level, thereby altering the balance of climatic and chemical conditions that led to that explosion and so sending themselves into a natural decline in order to be replaced by a species more suited to these new conditions. Until again the same optimum threshold is reached in this species and so on, in a pendulum balance where different species are intimately entwined and modulated through natural selection. That is always linked into environmental plateaus that their own behavior instills and eventually over-runs in order to push into likelihood a different set of conditions. Intake and emissions at microscopic levels are amplified in planetary systems to create conditions conducive or un-conducive to various life-forms in entangled phases.

Can this same logic be applied in a speeded up form to a dance, an educational program for autistic children, a creative episode of output, exhaustion and renewal? Can aesthetics- the productivity of a period of making be considered in the sense of pixels or sound waves or motioning intertwined with physical actions, metabolisms, co-ordinate thresholds of physical possibilities connected with denser enfolding periods of separation, pause, decline, dissociation? Here then instead of talking about the ebb and flow of species as they tip the atmosphere this way and that way, one could talk of an ebbing and flowing of states of movement and rest, of conscious discrimination and the indiscernible progress of pattern-making that rus onwards.

James lovelock made a simple computer program called Daisy World in which he showed the ebb and flow of black daisies and white daisies according to the periodic affects that each species had on the earth’s temperature. At first the temperature is cold. Gradually the black daisies take hold because they absorb the maximum amount of heat and so in minuscule degrees the earth’s temperature begins to rise. At a certain threshold it becomes warm enough for the white daisies to germinate and they prosper as the temperature rises because they deflect the heat of the sun off form the earth’s surface. The heat on the surface of the earth gradually diminishes until they go into decline and so again the black daisies are able to get a foot-hold and to become the predominant species.

There is another computer program which shows how a simple model of a clumsy top-heavy walking avatar gradually optimizes the capacity to walk in countless generations where only the models who learn, often by chance, from their falls to bounce back up, or roll or soften so as not to break limbs are able to reproduce. What emerges through this program in several hundred generations up the line are figures that can run and fall and roll and re-stand and playfully intertwine and come apart with one another. In other words they interact and “learn” a full repertoire of coordinated human movements based on interlocking patterns of stabilization and de-stabilization. A pendulum of falling and rising that becomes self-fulfilling as a manifestation of human physical, mental and emotional integration.

Making and un-making: Part Two

Entering the studio I had a sense of separation, through the tiny involvements that had come before- all non-verbal- which had disarticulated me from any sense of grouping- somehow taken me into the filaments of these patterns, trailing off in different directions. I go out on to the balcony- well really a ledge of rusted metallic red leading down a fire-escape the total length of the building. The ledge catches the sun- throws it back out in a kaleidoscope way from building to building, ricocheting and opening up London in this way from surface to surface. I re-enter the space and lie down. The score allows for this. For many things:-

Many states that can lead on from one to another. From activity to inactivity. Feeling into the miniscule of detailed touch with the surface of the floor. Sinking down. Walking around speedily or at leisure. Stopping, flaying arms and limbs, bouncing, twisting. Laying down again, rolling, tumbling and rising. Minimal encounters; glancings. Stoppages. Aversions. Moving on- small lean-tos, propulsion out. Turning on the core of these small propositions, in these glancings or physical contact. The one becoming the other or inhibiting the other. Played out scenarios. Facings and unfacings.

I at first feel uncomfortable. Disinclined. The stoppage and holding apart has gone too far. My vision, in the periods alone had poured out in the other direction, again too far. The elastic connection of falling in and bouncing out appears broken. Everything too loaded. An affray of short bursts and non-starters. How to use that? Emotionally I feel contorted by the fray of bodies. Like the swash of a tide churned into foam but effervescent- untouchable. I too feel this way. Too fast, or suddenly imploding on the spot into inertia. I lie down again. Wait. Do nothing. Even when someone approaches I bury my head in the sand. Nuzzle into the black cold floor. I am cold and burrowing into the conditions that make that so; make me colder. Exploring this as possibility. Strangely that becomes a link. The first viable linkage because it is a physical sensation and a feeling-pattern; one of contraction. I contain the coldness and wonder about the reserve.

All grouping would seem to push for maximum contact- for sociability and an openness to others. Not in this score- maybe Contact Dance is wrongly named, because it would seem to offer opportunities for staying in what is occurring however that may be positioned. It follows the way things build up and how opposites become generative of one another. It’s the core of stillness- the suspense of something that seems untenable to the dance- to association- to commonness that goes somewhere deeper, to situations that are not tidy- where groupings are not easily resolved into hard-wired parties. It goes to the ebb and flow of circumstances- the edge of how a space becomes made through ignition of parts and revulsion of parts- working off and on one another. Considering these things in ones own responses is a kind of border crossing- but is also only possible in the careful fostering of constraints. How could these opposing values be so intertwined? And yet they are.

Making and Unmaking: Part One

15.4.10




I come into the dance studio from the park. There has been much time to spare. A lull or interim, between an earlier warm up and the cooling off before the final score in the late afternoon- a score by Nancy Clark Smith which is pasted on the bare wall at the back of the space and runs the width of the upper floor warehouse adapted many years ago into a dance space.

In the interim when people were dissipated- some in the park, some making their way across London, others idly eating from the mass of supplies crowding a table in the room next door, I have been standing by the lake in the park. It became too cold to dance in the park as arranged and so I gave up even trying to find the group, then spotted them between some trees but did not make my way over because the cold put me off. Instead I watched the single stream of water spouting from this reduced water-feature and splaying out on the wind into a thin film almost like a partition across sections of the lake. Kids were throwing bread at the birds, sometimes whole slices. One child stares into the middle distance, resisting parent’s requests to move on, then glancing and burbling at a nearby child so that they time their throws of bread with one another. Other things play out. There’s a row of chairs. A child picks up the end one and drags it off; I sit on the next one then get up again. It is cold now even to sit down and be still. In the loo, a kid keeps repeating “It’s dirty, it’s dirty, it’s dirty” as she waits her turn with her mother. I’m about to go, then sit down on a high stool by the café that wobbles because of a dip in the tarmac. I am facing the man-made lake again. A small dog finds a strip of black plastic in the water picks it up with its teeth and deposits it by the foot of its owner. The owner ignores both the dog and the plastic. The dog keeps picking it up again, re-positioning it a little closer and backing off. The owner still ignores the dog. A man behind me approaches another man who is sitting down on a step off from the round café building. He has noticed a tattoo on the man’s arm of a famous surrealist artist and comments on it. The man explains in a deadpan and bored tone why he got it done. Later he disappears from the step, enters the café and re-exits with a large hamburger on a white plate. Kids run around him blocking his view of the lake, looking for sticks in the water to give the small dog that has the plastic strip. The man ignores them and continues to chew on his hamburger. I continue to wobble on the chair. I feel a bit out on a limb in my dance gear, feeling cold suddenly. I have not brought any money with me. I would like a coffee.

Earlier I had been watching foxes on a piece of scrub-land out the back window of the main reception area to the dance space at the base of the canal. Because it was a warehouse it was a long way down to where the foxes and cubs were. They were small moving animals in amongst the foliage, occasionally tumbling out across the pavement, tearing at old plastic bags, letting them fly up, then pouncing on them. Wrestling one another too, tearing the bags to shreds. I watched for the patterns they made, not really with any sense of why they did what they did.

Workshop with Charlie Morrissey

Chisenhale Dance Weekend



9.4.10

We begun on the floor- of course. Rolling and descending portion by portion. Finding comfortable zones to fall into on the black floor. Than moving into that a bit more. Settlement. Affinity. Surface to surface, giving way to depth. A falling containment. Black hole, flotation tank.

Lingering here and there, rolling some more. Something about stretching out yet containing within. A kind of rebound spring whereby the extremities- the fingers and toes calibrate the stretch-contraction torsion of the central junction points. The tummy that flops on to the floor. That gives and then minutely vibrates to push away. Between the two tendencies, something catches in and in the cross-over there is both leverage and an outpouring. Both focus a certain contraction of the body and an instantaneous falling and spreading through the ligaments, through the floor, through the atmosphere surrounding.

A dissipation and filtration system that is also all about the body holding to a position. The mark of enquiry- a questioning. The interplay of portions not one after the other but as a set point immediately exploded into multitudes over and over again. A decision. An idea. A sense of compulsion acted upon. A need. Intimate enquiry into the minutiae of a certain holding. The catapult out from here is instantaneous- multi-directional. Spherical.

Patterns that do emerge. In the space surrounding. In the space contained. Breathing- threshold between the two. Planetary systems that affect one another but of a very particular gaseous exchange. Small affects tumble into events. Cataclysm or staying put. Simply a question of these minute pressure gages. Containment, the body pulsed- stream-lined in hands feeling the area of resistance in muscle groupings on another body. Hands the last point of contact in a moving through of one body into another. From centre to centre. A falling though, catching and giving some more. Slow, ponderous, padding. A gradual disturbance. In affects that build out of this nothing into stretches, turns; a yawning body that rolls and pours, then curls and twines around itself to builds out of this fickle introversion upwards by degrees. I feel my body almost buckling with a slight touch, like a spasm that I stay aware in and follow into the ground. Into stillness, then rise up out of the pressure point of that very descent. A partner who tweaks this on the way up, like a branch suddenly twisting in speeded up growth towards a light source now revealed, whilst simultaneously rooting down. Now an admixture of this lean in/lean out as slight inclines of pressure give way to release and a spinning and buckling torsion into a sudden outgrowth. That followed through. Extended or curtailed. Here and then there, widening and containing again; a pump that is now the traction and release between the two of us- this furling and unfurling that makes pattern- it rolls out into the wider scope- our bodies are not always touching- they are following through the conditions of the patterns that they set in motion and that then we ride upon- slight brushes, collisions, near misses, turn-around, falling as one, splaying apart, splintering into shards sent out into the room, drawing the room into us- winding and unwinding continuously. Emotioning. Universes pulsating.

Over and over something builds. A capacity to breathe. To take in and let out. Opening/closing. Can you speak of one without the other? Meaning needs something to work against. Bodies operate through the same tendencies. They are that tendency. To spread and contain. To flow and to buffer up against. Or to shore up. Against surfaces. Now bodies, propping each other up from the hips back to back. The push-me-pull-you central ligament of two backbones articulated as one. A central pulley. And the lifts go up and down. That jamming in place- two directions coursing through and stuck- hips bound in unity, creates a light-touch in the feet, the hands, the breath, all the tendrils- each individual hair on the head, flying up, circulating around a face with open pores. Sweat, movement, coolness. Smell. Each turn and re-equation offers up new possibilities in this circulation system. The eyes are awake now- alive, fueling responsiveness in the shards of light the shadows of moving figures like cloud formations that we pass in the breeze. We go down together. Rise up. How do we know? What is it that we feel together. Some kind of transmission across the skin- slight indentation, a door-crack of aeration- almost between the cells. Nurturing that containment, that letting go. On-off pressure – an idea. A thought process. And so it gets going. Follows the pattern of this continual re-distributed weight. Really gets going into movement itself. Effortless. Who decides? The deciding of each new arrangement- the molecular jostling spins into momentum- looks from the outside to be a plan. But there is no maker. No made. We are not inventors. We are participants. Reading the messaging that culminates out of all the particular instances of settlement and unsettlement, the state of play.



So it moves on. From the sharing of burden as in a drunken stagger- two bodies heaved up on one another, giving in to this support. Now a lessening. A dissipative outreach, not in the hand; the hand on the chest. Not anymore this time as a follower and an instructor. This time a movement of particles that affect a shifting tendency. The a shoring up not as pressed bodies that can not get through but as a coming to rest. A lightness in this natural entropy. A dissipative stature, where the senses widen with an alert ease. A figuration of all the players in the room- conjunctions and compositions- avenues to move through. Vortices and nesting places. Tumults and spins. Lighter and lighter the contact becomes, fuelled by the patterning that is both something else and something generated between. Where is the point of exchange, the threshold? That is impossible to say- it is the playing with this threshold that makes the dance. The dance tat in the end makes itself. Riding on a Breeze generated by the physical sensation of bodies under pressure. That pressure diluted again and again like a homeopathic solution until only the ghost or memory or idea of that pressure remains- the body as falling, as bounding up again. This flickering between the two becomes the magnetism; a kind of spark constantly re-worked into the conditions of its firing up. Those conditions worked up as much out of negation, constraint, inhibition as out of flow, expansion, liberation. One without the other unthinkable. So we articulate a freedom- a kind of emotioning, out of the roles and rules that initially lock us to the ground.

Contact dance about using our human conditions- our limitations. Questioning and riding off of these from one tendency into the other. Never having to choose. Using the meshing of these differences. Learning from the generative propensity of the two in one. The one in the many.

Disturbance and clarity

Disturbance and clarity set each other up. I read a chapter form Deleuze’s book, The Fold. The chapter is called “Perception in the folds”. I guess I picked it up after my walk in the city yesterday. I read it after writing the piece, “Disparity” and before the piece, “Afterthought”.

Deleuze talks of differentials in the way that Whitehead talks of limitation, as that which sets up a clear marker as a point of contrast in molecular fluctuations and vibrations that are on-going and everywhere and that are a constant unsettlement to perceptual certainty and yet make up the very conditions out of which clarities are worked up. Deleuze discusses Leibniz and his idea of the Monad. The monads are instances of these conjunctions that subsume and envelop the resonant flickerings of dual states into perceptual ideas that are stable in those particular circumstances. For instance the color green that is a certain stabilization of the undecidedness of yellow and blue.

Clarity is not a replacement of disturbance, it is the working through of disturbance- which is an active and continual process of interchange- there to articulate certain states that are only the momentary balanced points of tension and release within that process so that those balanced points are never ideals or goals set apart. They are perceptual states. For Whitehead they are Feeling states. For Deleuze, thought states.

“A collection will have as much (more) unity as there are relations amongst the ingredients, relations carried out necessarily through thought.” P108 The Fold

These feeling-thought states are the working through of particular vibratory complexes to the point of a threshold- the brink of transformation where a flicker becomes a drone, a swaying, a figure arrived at precisely through this perceptual aggravation. Where shapes and bodies are the complex of feelings they give rise to until there is a point of satiation and some kind of alternation sensitizes a different appetite of holding or letting go.

These differentials are not only the mechanics of response sensation. They organize what a body is at any moment- where it has a capacity for absorption or projection. There is this continuing clenching and letting go in the swirls of dust and filiated light circuits before the body has the functionary idea of doing that too in the way that organs have storage and circulation functions and in the way that senses sustain or move on a certain regard or bearing.

Form is an idea- the thought of collection and dispersal, contraction and expansion, stopping and starting when these differentials are associated into a working bond. This is similar to ideas in Traditional Chinese medicine where organs are the idea of a certain vibratory energy co-opted within a wider potential of other vibratory tendencies. The demarcation of an organ such as the liver, kidney, lung is only the limitation of the otherwise continuous score of frequency possibilities. It is the differentials playing out in a certain way in order to hold to a certain shaping- a certain functioning within the body, within the environment, within the cycles of change and recurrence in the seasons. Liver then is the capacity to grow connected to spring. It is also the welling up of anger and impatience, when that capacity is inhibited. The emotions are connected to that- and the taste- sourness which is biting in to initiate movement but also the sourness of stuckness when that is disallowed. Yet there is never just one or the other. The edge of constraint is also the edge at which anything gains traction. Of course then body and environment can not be separated because the conditions in form, function, emotion are arrived at in the interchange through which circulation processes- the movement of the blood, the movement of sap in a tree flow or are inhibited from flowing to a greater or lesser extent. Difficulty in the liver create patterns of spasm, knottiness, joint and tendon restrictions, rheumatism, oedema, just as a trunk of a tree swells when the sap is inhibited from a too rigid protective bark. Yet so too do these constraints allow for directional changes; curves, bends, folds that are an on-going shape-making in the run of things. Here then growth and creativity and stuckness and emotional bitterness are two sets of tendencies that emanate from the same vibratory quality, playing out in different ways within a wider relational complex. (look at the series of books by Claude Larre and Elizabeth Rochat dela Vallee covering all the organs of the body as commentaries following closely texts from the Chinese Classics).

“Leibniz is not stating that perception resembles an object but that it evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ” Deleuze, The Fold.



Projective geometry

Pain-Treatments- bodily resonance.

Afterthought

 9.4.10

My afterthought is three encounters that pervaded the atmosphere of yesterday’s stroll in the city of London.

They were not mentioned in the run of things, because that run needed to get on- to build up speed in a particular momentum in order to become generative from one moment to the next on that day and in order to engage with the running process that led from word to word in the composition under the heading, “Disparity”. Yet embedded or occluded within that header were three associations; cohesive involvements; strange affinities that galvanized and spurred on the release in the journey into the overall theme of “disparity”. They are now there clearly, in relief on the following day. They have not gone. Rather the processual meshing which they gave rise to is shimmering into transparency, bringing these occasions up to the fore, whereas before they were too dense, too slow, too lingering even in their brevity, to remain consciously relevant. Yet they come up again and again, whatever the turns and twists and wobbles and perceptual infidelities. They keep being arrived at, reinvigorating the flickering scene with their permanence- a permanence that has arisen out of this very flickering and so it endures.

____

Three events- three human encounters- occluded before. Told backwards.

1. An elderly Sikh couple on the curb, holding hands. I’m already stuttering from the fragmented light- They are there- a certain absorption- a density in their body matter- the affinity that reverberates between them, idling there on the curb. Momentarily I settle into this presencing, absorbing into their body matter between going one way and another. A pause that extends beyond that time. I backtrack. Evade moving bodies by speeding and then slowing through the sweeping criss-crossing. I am between one direction and another, hesitating. Again, there they are, now just ahead on the crossing. Suspended as if the only thing unmoving. The centre of a kaleidoscope. From that base I glance out down a side street and that’s when I catch sight of the Gherkin building. In the last written account it is that gherkin building that I record though it is the presence of the Sikh couple that grounds and set up that perception. In that moment they become the gherkin building. They are subsumed in it. They are both invisible and axiomatic to perception at that instant. Now as I think of them on the curb, the gherkin building is shimmering through them, the glass panels reflecting light as they absorb it. I cannot take the two apart anymore. (Is that what Whitehead means by “Prehension” rather than “apprehension”?

2. In the courtyard where I eat my sandwich in front of the building with the external lifts going up and down. I get up and cross the courtyard to the fountain sculpture and place my hand in the running stream of water over the surface of the metallic silver. There is a man standing just behind the sculpture speaking into his mobile phone. I orchestrate my approach and he his conversation so that we are fractionally adjusting our angles in relation to one another so that we never meet. Yet there is this high level of on-going bodily accommodation that allows the smooth running of my necessary action and his necessary phone call in parallel yet separate spheres of operation. Yet in order for that to unfold flawlessly there needs to be this high level of perceptual-bodily configuring so that these operations are actually one event. That choreography is blanked out in the recounting of my sandwich stop in that courtyard but is the main event in my mind and of the most significance on the following day when I look back at the day’s events. There is a presencing so that my actions in the way they played out and his as he spoke in that way would be unthinkable without the twinned shadow of one another that created in both of us, propulsion and demarcation in the way the actions took place. We never met. The encounter was one of absolute avoidance or negation. Yet somewhere in there, there is the use of “we”; the use of “Us”.

3. Coming out of the green just beyond Tower Bridge where I have managed to crush my glasses whilst slumbering along with countless office-workers over the lunch time period who are also creasing their clothes. The light hits me starkly and I can not avoid the charge of elation that this brings. Then it is snapped out as the shadows of the tight streets take hold. Some workmen in fluorescent yellow jackets lie out on a portion of pavement where the light is still captured. I am drawn into a church courtyard in an adjacent street where there is a gap in the wall. The courtyard is entirely in shadow. There are grave stones and well tended flower beds just coming into leaf along the short curved pathway towards the church. The church doors are closed. I can see this before I get to them so I don’t bother. There is a tree in the middle of the grass in the centre of the square with purple buds still wrapped in leaves that have not yet opened but are just on the verge of doing so. In one or two the purple of the top-most petal has just begun to unfurl. I touch one, then feel slightly foolish for doing so. Back at the entrance to the courtyard that leads back out onto the street again a woman walking very fast stares at me for a sustained amount of time without changing her pace. I cannot read her face at all. It appears to me entirely blank. Even when she passes she looks back at me and continues staring. There is a sort of taking hold and it is not only resting on that final stare although the stare seems to me to become axiomatic. Something about these three consecutive occurrences collapses them into one another- the men slouching in yellow jackets in the spot of light, the feeling of touching the purple bud and the slightly resistant abrasion of the outer leaf, the woman staring and holding me there, puts in relief all three in relation to one another. The next morning I only think of the woman and that pause in the stare that becomes a lull before my turning back outwards into the road. Again I can not think of that event without it somehow subsuming the feel-color-scent of the bud in the darkened courtyard. That courtyard was somehow brought into relief by the light attack of the fluorescent jackets that still shimmers and holds the bud in place, the still attention of the woman that lingers.

Disparity

I am thinking about this word and how it becomes an effective kind of slippage where the very thing unuttered takes up occupancy between two poles set apart. Of course this is not a spatial housing complex or a sleep in the park, though it can come to be this. It is how we leap the distances between un-matching parts. How our ears bend the note between this mis-match slurring it to fit by widening the gap. This kind of acoustic spaciousness somewhere bares in mind the absolute fit-Whitehead’s Eternal objects?- but the body is lolloping and dragging, stuttering and compounding itself with all the riff raff of passers by that we hang on to or tear past. That we become. All the stuff taken in, in impromptu sandwich stops and omitted again in unsolicited uses of toilets in coffee shops and pubs along the way where we never place an order. Riff raff is passing through us all the time.

listening to the radio later- a reggae Channel where certain notes are got at in a round about way almost as though the revolutions that created a particular frequency were being staggered and hiccupped along the way- a certain hesitancy yet with a mind set so clearly on what is not altogether reached or got at- trying to find ones way through the streets- passages and slim entry points through the cascading channels of shadow and light, flickering off and on the building surfaces, the moving and seated people, the buses and vans that do not stop or suddenly halt so that you feel the wind on your face. I am blind like a bat having rolled on to my sunglasses and broken them lying on the green. I only see in the searing discrepancies of one figure tearing away from another surface that is relatively stable. What moves and what stays is forever changing, jumbling- a complex mix of filaments and shards of light lengthening and containing again like the close of two hands suddenly snapping out the light. I put my hand in the stream of water that runs endlessly off the shiny polished metal sculpture in the courtyard, then put my hand to my face. I am in this courtyard where I have just eaten an egg sandwich listening to the lifts exposed on the outside of buildings go up and down. Levers and pulleys working the ropes. People come into and out of the building. I am not sure if it a public place. If I can be there. I continue on my way and glimpse the Gherkin building through a back-street in the city of London. There is no way to get to it and soon I am ferreted away on a bus I have only just boarded in time.

The music plays on, on the radio at home. Before that in the street opposite some people turn their music up to the limit and dance around their car. There’s real heat in the air for the first time this year. (Yesterday was so cold.) Their white long-haired dog sits exhaustedly in the road as they dance about, taking pictures of one another on their mobile phones. The man does a kind of head-stand back flip off of the wall. There is exuberance in the air. I don’t know where it comes from.