Displacement of the centre of attention

20.3.2010 5.30pm



Best way to begin the question of emotion is to maybe look into the management of emotional states- so that they do not tip into overload-extinction. To look at how small displacements in the perceived and felt centre of gravity in the body can be made to work as an emerging pattern as a kind of shifting roaming re-allocation in a correlation to environmental encounters and as an ability to stay with that engagement. That begins to make a circulation system so that focus/attention does not build and build in one confined location and then explode but dissipates out of any one holding. These small shifts are a way to intuit the on-off pump of contact-release, movement-pause enacted through the physical body and its tactile sensibilities and taken into a kind of pressure valve of constriction-expansion that actually uses these same dynamic alignments. Yet uses the tension- release to hold in a frame of reference a perceptual-awareness as a felt experience whilst having already moved on to a different emphasis and point of comparison. So memory through a different kind of timing of attention and cut-out begins to work up into a pulsing order to create a spatial referencing system. Therefore multiple frames are popped open with none taking precedence so that they themselves begin to interact rather than consume attention. The conversation becomes multiple.

Working on this spatial perceptive field but actually feeling that as pressure-release in parts of the body becomes a way of organizing- i.e. displacing the centre from the head to the abdomen and then to the chest. Having the initial contact in any of these areas as a very condensed point of focus. Than releasing that and letting it dissipate across the chest to the throat, shoulders and ribs, or from the abdomen outwards across the flanks, sides, lower back or at the head from the eyes to the ears and the back of the head. Then on into the extremities of limbs that are loose and spreading as the affect of this filtering system reaches them.

Perhaps these kinds of managements of states of affect through displacement and dissipation in the way one would experience touch as compression and spaciousness, can be internally engined as organs and muscle groupings press in on one another, than relax. That becomes a way of moving and of holding together- as if against the constriction of water that takes on the quality of a force. Using these states of self-induced consecutive constraints to move against is an exercise in consciousness and a means of staying for longer in the co-presence of others.

I’ve noticed that many autistic children have unusual patterns of holding and release with the breath, with food intake, excretion patterns. Also with stopping and starting movements, with sleep and wakefulness and with facial clenching and release of groups of muscles. Using physical interaction as a pacing practice can be used for managing internally orchestrated rhythms of stop-start- engagement/letting go. It becomes a way for a child to notice the act of creating these devices of contrasting states of activation and relaxation and of widening the choices and possibilities of how they are played out and used so that rather than being played into critical extremes that resemble near death scenarios that become palpable in the extent of their discomfort, they are modulated and become a practice of synchronizing patterns into workable shapes and in so doing of utilizing affects.

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There are various other practices- BHUTO, WARAKU (Both Japanese Practices) where states of possible trauma or overwhelming affect are re-distributed in cyclical and ritualistic physical practices. The states of mind they induce as a discipline of location and dislocation and as a way of staying in the positive and negative of a situation by following with interest the physical repercussions of those encounters. By letting the emotion come and go and become an engageable point of physical impact and dissipation that play across the body as they might play across land.