Emotioning

20.3.2010 2.40pm

I am still not clearly putting across in this writing how the emotioning is actually happening and how it is intimately intertwined with the physical connections and the pressure-release points that they activate. I think the emotion enacted piece by piece in stages through points of contact is a way of presencing. It is experienced initially as a kind of relief.

Relief in the dictionary has many seemingly un-connected meanings. One is to relieve oneself or defecate/urinate. Another is to relieve someone of their post or duties. In other words to let them rest. Another is used to describe the physical contours and protrusions from a level surface in order to tell a pictorial story that has a physical and tangible presence. It is the distinguishable marks- the Braille- that is read as a series of hills and mounds, giving meaning also to the negative space- the indentations and valleys that are the intervals where the higher and more prominent range is cut away back to the level surface. This cutting away to create nuanced meaning in intervals of different levels is what a sculptural relief is. It is an expression that is sought in an emptying out. What is inside the level surface; packed tight, is let out- rendered into something tangible- allowed to speak. That speaking is not an effort- it is the relieving of duties- the ridding of tight congestion. A dissipation or spreading out. A defecation. This is all beginning to sound a bit Freudian. But it is a practical matter relating to its own process. Not standing in for something else.

The relief is a physical engagement between differentials that are usually set at opposite poles. It could be the left and the right, moving forward or backwards, communicative expression or sensed feeling, contact or no contact, autistic absorption or social know-how, proximity or distance.

The relief of the situation, like the sculptural relief, crafts tangible sense out of the interval between different levels of contact. There is no choice to be made- as in Bob Rafel's experiment of left and right hand-held objects,( ref earlier blog entitled “Seeing as Verb”) because the directions are mediated as they are approached, bringing into relief one another as one specific point of contact after another- a rolling point of contact that rolls into one the paradoxes of left-right and grasps them not with one hand or another but as a synchronization through the whole body. That occurs as a moving through an environmental space that the edges of these obstacles- their very limit factors define creating a dynamic and contingent point of impact for the moving body- the journeying person- of a landscape in relief. That relief becomes the emotioning body in its every minute intervention and interaction; a re-apportioning of the lines of flight (if we want to bring in Deleuze here).

This is done because as we move forward intentionally or actually, we re-angle the point of focus to create an alignment that connects up to our own moveable centre of gravity. The point of alignment at any one time may be in an object/person or in the space between- the passageway through which these objects /forms in continual dynamic re-alignment become door-ways, hooks and primers in our on-going navigation. The centre of focus then is always a kind of floating virtual ghost that is cobbled together as a resonance between all the peripheral markers in this journeying. As we turn and grasp and make points of contact and rebound off from this and reconfigure through voice, gesture and the physical tilts and changes of stop-start, pressure/release that punctuate the difficulties, struggles and flows, this central point of focus re-configures in line with our tilting shifting centers. The faster we turn, the further out this twinned centre is thrown and so the space of connection and the relief territory expands. The slower and more considered our bodily movements and re-orientations are, the closer this twinned centre comes to us until it is a pivot off of which we work in almost continual contact either as another body or as another surface that we absorb into or propel off.

Emotioning comes in the playing out of these various reliefs so that two opposing directions meet and reconfigure in a dynamic interaction like a potter whose two hands are crafting out of the slump of the clay and the squeeze of the opposing hands a vessel in the space between. It is that which works in relief from all these counter-intuitive forces when there is a momentum and spin of the potter’s wheel; the body moving to make itself; thrusting outwards as an upright entity of awareness between all these falling and collapsing tendencies. It is fashioned out of these tendencies.

Left-right never becomes an issue of conflicting choice that therefore cancel one another out in a single visibility and a consequent extinction of the other. They are never defined in that way because they are constantly re-situating in line with a moving body which is moulding differentials into a flickering presence that is what a vital living body becomes and how we arrive at being persons. The war is not deadly in this way. It is compositional in that these multi-directional tendencies interact from the outset running through one another and playing off of one another in tension and release. This release of tension in a manifestation or a gesture is never stable but tangibly present and wholly known in that moment. That is a state of relief. It can only know itself because of the tension that it builds to an untenable threshold and then releases. On-off contact is that mechanism for creating reliefs. This is where the emotioning kicks in through a practice and it is what links together what would seem to be contradictory worlds: autistic tendencies, a tangibly shaping co-awareness, inter-subjective communication, Soundscapes made from fragments of other compositions possibly already degraded, the sharing of emotional states. These are built up though the practice which begins in repetition and simple addition ad infinitum and a paring away of that state almost simultaneously. Yet through the meshing of those tendencies it slips and reinvents itself continually on the contingent folds and turns implicit in that process.

Emotion is not simply an internal condition to be decanted like a rare wine or announced as gone missing by a professional who knows the diagnostic criteria by heart. It is something to be composed out of the seemingly random occurrences of our proffered or incidental actions- and the pause-gaps between these that we draw out and let linger.

I still have not quite discussed the occurrence of this state of emotioning. It seems to evade description. Maybe for a good reason. I think it will slip in and out of conversation as an occasional visitor, sometimes un-named and sometimes blatantly obvious until it is crushed or runs for cover so better to emerge the next time. I will let it do its own thing.