Colating

22.3.2010 9.30am




I woke up this morning with a phrase in my head: "When the heat of June subsumes into the heat of August". Subsumption- a merging. A kind of going under. Something hidden but not replaced. Certainly not deleted. Must be an intensification. The joining together of forces as one. The heat of June builds until the month has gone and the one after and so it becomes the intensity of August. Not merely the sun from above but a heat shimmering from out of the ground. Captured in the atmosphere like fold upon fold and given back out.

Heat does not know the paradoxes of choosing this months heat from that. There is a pooling into the one experience. For us the building of the quality of what it is to move in an atmosphere of critical heat. That is not a given temperature. It is the limit of how accumulative heats merge and how we become that heat in our movements and in the actual heat that our body mass takes on. It is the limit point at which our associative rise in body temperature becomes tenable, survivable.

Just beyond that point everything changes. We become ill or our body homeostasis ups a gage and we are cooled with perspiration- adjusting into a slowing down like moving through an ever-more viscous atmosphere.

Then again perhaps the season again shifts. There is a cloud-burst; a down-pour, leaves begin to bristle in the heat, then to turn shades of brown. The morning chills. Autumn comes. Just before this everything reaches its extent of fullness. Fruit is sourced.



If vision acted on behavior as a heat sensation- as maybe it does when we let it- or when we have no other choice- then there would not be duplicates of anything in this world. There would only be this subsumption- the enfolding of doubles in upon each other into intensities (again ref. Deleuze for stuff on folds and intensities). These intensities would embed and ground aspects of this shimmering heat that is never entirely level- is always a grafting of former heat or the envelopment of that very heat in colder rushes that create distortions and ripples in that uniformity, complicate it into viscosities of retention and openness that reshuffle the priority of accounts, mix bloods in shafts of temperature plateaus, that fall off or mount on the back of one another. That is the gymnastics of temperature gear changes cutting in and out of one another- augmenting, disturbing, damaging and inflecting. Destroying and mending until neither term entirely finish.

That is happening too in the inflexions of sound- in the pressure gradients we build and release; in the dance where the easy and the awkward are invading, ricocheting off of one another and rinsing though one another in a play of speeds.

How can we work intervals into a palpable substance? Something that offers resistance or that crushes that resistance in a sudden contraction that may be an affinity or may be an affront. That is both of these; mediated in the endless versions of an interval and its collapse as it is played out. Karl Frost a Californian American is looking at these points of attraction-collapse-repulsion in his www.BodyResearch.com and the emotional ambiguity of these enfolded states that work on and off each other. What if the tension of the meeting- of the seeing eye as a situation of bodies once removed from one another, is suddenly collapsed and it is the head directly that investigates another head, the chest that runs over the surfaces of another body, plunging down, until there is nowhere else to go. Waiting, rising on a wave of an almost incidental current, wrought from a distraction that a certain limb despite itself, follows. That may lead to the whole trunk curving, the body as a roller coaster that then embraces, meets face to face within that intertwining, catapults out from there, pushes and shoves at another body in the insistence of a fractional interval; as specimen. Then enfolds back around and through as a leaning back into exhaustion and a recuperation that creates a sudden elastic charge as two bodies propel each other outwards like a log splitting; the sulfur of a match burning.

In drumming, playing with the wedges of these differential heats, enticing the growth of intervals, then slamming into those- forcing the spring back into the box- using the catapult of that restriction to fire up and linger. Then half closing and jettisoning a mere fraction away from that point of impact. Each differently directed velocity becomes a measure of time- waiting or closing the gap. Yet so too is it felt as a sensation that offers so much resistance or spreads and dissipates in the opening pores of the hand. Heat suddenly cooled to liquid- a thin film of perspiration- or bubbling up as water blisters that cushion the contact; another kind of interval.

Lisa Nelson an American Dancer from New York, one of the first to practice Contact Improvisation in the early Seventies, is looking at this level of experiential gages and how they articulate and pace movement inclinations that almost pop out of their own accord as an atmospheric charge and release that is set up at a far more implicit level- in the folds that build and pattern out of sensitizing practices- in the gravitational shifts, temperature gages, pressure adaptations. For what is heard, felt, moved through, smelt, tasted, breathed and known in the gradients of on and off balance and the radius of those orbiting practices. She calls these sensory practices Tuning Scores or Underscores, because they are the implicit conditions that build into perceptual awareness- built often out of constraint so that "Seeing" becomes a multi-facetted probe through qualities of response and counter-point. (look at www.movementresearch.org for an article written by Lisa Nelson.) The interval in this respect becomes a useful sensing practice- like the underwater frog who blows bubbles and uses the distortion of shape in those bubbles as a probe with which to "see" the environment and source out edible encounters or possible situations of caution.

How can we use the whole body surface and the winds that we stir up out of encounters to "see", collate, redistribute and organize ourselves through?

What might that lead to in our ability to act with emotional insight through the moment to moment responses of our bodies as a collective sensing intelligence?