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.