Entropy

18.3.2010


The word Dissipation is maybe better understood and more useable as Entropy. Entropy could be a kind of aeration system- like the gaps between joints in which synovial fluid re-situates under the slightest of inflexions, buffering and creating a springing resonance- a bouncing rebound- to the fixity of bone shapes. The moving living body occurs then somewhere between the two- between this interaction and constant re-accommodation between hard and soft. Entropy could be a kind of check point- a lingering re-shuffling of paperwork to re-configure something that is in none of the sheets independently. That can not be found in a law, a rule, a way of doing things per se. Entropy is a lull where things re-configure. A storage point where information comes up specifically and uniquely according to the conjunctions that are on-going. In the dictionary this is what it says about Entropy: "A Measure of the disorder of the molecules in substances etc. that are mixed or in contact with each other, indicating the amount of energy that (although it still exists) is not available for use because it has become more evenly distributed instead of being concentrated" (The Oxford Paperback Dictionary). That shuffling laxity is a kind of letting go into a momentum- a neutralized drive that spins on past a point of engagement- taking one's foot off the peddle. A drunken stagger- the result of the consumption of alcoholic fuel. Something that will ultimately run to dry. A kind of falling into the spaciousness that presents itself. Is that redundancy, recession, a deadened no-hoper of a way to be in the world? Is that the life of a bum that more and more of us are experiencing today and having trouble in seeing as useful. Someone not fully employed or employable. An interesting figure maybe but a bit of an embarrassment when it comes to clear intent; presentation; putting ones point across or having a point of view.

Where the motor cuts out, things begin to run down, spread and disengage and the possibility for interactive assemblies swarm. That lull just before cut-out where we free-wheel is a happy time- though we may not admit it- that we could get used to going into. It could become a navigation primer. - a bracing slackness where timing is everything and that process of entropy can not be avoided- must be gone into fully, in order to catch into a down-current or an up beat- like the top of a joy-ride where we are held in suspension- before the downwards plunge- the autistic boy lifted on a turn and held for a moment before we collapse into the floor. Marbles spun around the rim of a dish before imploding in on one another or flying outwards until they hit a wall. Entropy is part of the pacing of things. It is an indicator of where and how to go in order to probe out a contact between letting go and engagement. It is part of the conditions of any kind of shaping.

It could be then that melt-down, overload, an accumulation of affective sensitivities that build and build into the brink of what is tolerable is such an indicator or probe that a certain run of engagement- of a certain kind of concentration or condensation has run its course; has run to its very limit on the in-breath- must now outpour and re-shuffle on the out breath- in order for us not to die.

I think that memory for pattern in movement, gesture, face, sound textures, articulation, feeling sense is mixed up in this build-entropy-release process.

Yesterday at the Drumming Workshop at the Arts Hut where it becomes a unique space for autistic engagement every Wednesday as bus-loads of people are driven to this small space at the edge of the park from all over the borough of Haringay. This same kind of shaping out on the brink of sensory and neurological limits is taking place in the building of rhythm and counter rhythm; musical refrain, and counter-claim in the shaping of song and dance.

When I am in the group I am constantly gauging input on the countenances and gestures of those around me- where the face is open and loose- released into the space of the circle, the refrain keeps going. At the point where the countenance turns back on itself, engaging with its own sensory limit, this run is cut and sent into a down-turn as if water were being flushed out of the system. A gradual indicator of positive and negative emphasis begins to sit back to back. The play has an almost physical or viscous aspect of density and aeration. In time the entropy shifts, sometimes seeming to be in the spacious repetition where more and more beats are left out. At other times the entropy seems to reside in the tumbling free-flow of a multiplication of reversals and spins which is pure texture that blatantly interrupts and walks right over the structure previously built into a memory. But the repetition does not die- it is a refrain that is caught back into over and over again just at the point where the rushes of texture would take attention and an ability to grasp a certain phase, to the very limits of neurological coherence. It is this playing of one against the other between repetition and re-appraisal, which links into energetic states a repetition that lulls and slides almost below consciousness and an invigoration in unexpected turns. It is the constant inversion of this referencing in intonations of different pressure gages that creates the up and down beat that primes and then follows into the lead of the dancing. Intonation in pressure and the sound that this extracts becomes a downward pull or an upward release and it is this that is cued in the falling and rising of a dancing figure- the irresistible pull of gravity and its momentary suspension in order to store and accumulate possible affects. These are suddenly grasped or caught into on the way to something else. They are rendered at a threshold between limit and release.

Dancing autistic adults initiating that dance together. A near continuous wall of sound made renderable by this building up of contrast out of the very conditions of a persons grasping and their point of letting go. A kind of silent felt Braille shared by everyone that sounds itself out once the bumps and indentations have been chartered. That takes place at the threshold between neurological limit and body extension. Feeling emerges from out of that conundrum. The rocking becomes more extreme. People chatter in repetitious loops yet simultaneously they play out strong and precise indications of the shared Braille of fill-ins and spacious pauses. There is a listening intelligence. It is not a noise filled space. People view each other fully from across the distance. There is a tensegrity to the sound. It builds and warms, then releases and aerates into buouncy re-engaging suddenly and unexpectedly at the point of free-fall, like a glider-pilot suddenly opening their parachute in mid-flight before their feet angle downwards to touch the ground. Sometimes they seem to continue into the ground. Then bounce up, supplied out of those conditions with a backlash of force they did not seem to have.

After the session, outside a man comes and stands face to face with me. We do not speak but just stand like that for some time, as if scanning a pattern obtained from the body emphasis in the particular state that it is arrived at in this moment. It feels to me like a kind of messaging. A recuperation of a state for purposes of a common archive. To be stored in the lull.