Movement ecology

23.4.10


How to see movement as a moment by moment shifting point of contact? Even a movement that seems like stillness- a breathing movement so that there are fractional points of impact at this slant and then that slant at the surface that bit by bit feel out a depth of that thing.

Can every fractional bond- each hit that becomes a sticking point- be seen in the rolling duration of what is occurring? A rolling compulsion- not of the thing, the object, the body, the motivational goal, but in the compulsing itself. This constant slippage from state to state- a dying as a leverage comes unstuck and a reapplication so that the contact is a tilting, swinging on/off. Yet snail-like, or tank-like there is always at least one molecule aligned with another around which all else falls and catches; around which all else turns. So that movement is a continuum and can only be understood through duration- an environment unfolding in this Rumble-on. A complex of occurrences insinuating into one another. (This is Whitehead who is influencing my thinking right now).

Am I stealing a term to call it an ecology? Movement as an ecology? Well of course I am. But pulling words into unlikely association aids the hijacked word as well as the new subject matter.

Movement as ecology. A habitus that is a tumbling of instances. The contactability at the heart of the shift. A way to address situations- a way to think.

If movement is an environment of duration then what particular environments elicit this kind of tactile movement? In other words not a movement where functions and tasks are executed- considered outcomes mapping in advance upon a given terrain. Rather the ground is tapped and prodded into existence through every contactable moment that spills into each other, bleeds through in a contagion that is never done with.

Of course the mismatch fracturing does occur between one noticeable event and another and that is how we determine it as such; as contrast; as change. Yet there is the level of tactile workability that is a continual state- in the crunching and churning over of what this actual experience is of movement and stillness when in stillness there is always a movement gradation and in movement there are always slight pauses.

To enter into this perplexity is to stay with the motioning that is not then decided between a before and after. Because each instant is circulated and flushed through to the next one. In this sinking down/rising up that pervades one another the distant regard has a touchable gesture at its heart and that place of sticking is already a bouncing out into the circulation of an aerated patterning.

The movement is the lean-to that spans across out of the drill-like meter of consecutive touch one point after another as an articulated arching- a stretching and redistribution- the thrust and torsion of a three dimensional state catapulted out into this ability through the miniscule and consecutive folding and unfolding, in order to stay present. This becomes the ecology of a body and the ecology that is an environment. Of course the two are intertwined- as a hand against a walking stick connects up a body moving and the environment it presses itself into. In this way the rivulets in the creases of the hand are patterned into the sticks. They are smudges but they speak of more than only that smudge of association.

Every point of contact; of constraint and a furthering in once more in letting go has the capacity to pop up this wholeness of integral participation. It is experienced not as a mind concept or a vision of a universe or a multiverse, but known through these on-going acts of momentary association where surfaces come up against one another that become intersections for the passing through and mixing up of many capacities or potentialities.

So it is not surprising that in each act that is not some kind of hesitation held back and spun back on itself there is a chance for sensing a body through this environmental complex. Out of that there is a placement- a fractional nudging into place at that very instant in relation to all else.

So a passage is cleared and there is a transparency through the paucity of what at another slant would be a reverberation of bounced out light and sound distortion that would become unbearable and so close down the faculty of languaging. All timings derive from this experimentation. These time jumps can spin to the outer edges language, emotion, thought, social address which are all mixed up in the layers and foldings of what this movement or event is to become. The imagined rotary to this movement which is so often the backdrop and generator to our thoughts and conscious states; that selects by the way things converge in an act is second nature so that we do not even realize it. But it is there so that without a body or the idea of a body it is questionable that we would be able to think or feel at all.

Why then do we stop autistic children from moving- jumping off surfaces, wobbling on the precipes between balance and fall?

How does this kind of considered articulation when allowed to play out allow a body to exist?

What kind of environment approaches this level of accessibility? I think more than the objects or areas of interest, or kinds of activity it is about a certain kind of attention that hold open a space of time for a certain amount of time. That becomes a considered listening space for all that occurs. Whether in a four hour contact dance score or an eight year garden project, a shared meal or sitting on a bench in the park (as I am now doing)

It’s an attention to how all that happens within that assigned time becomes of interest and so that the components brought up in a certain attention begin to interact with one another. It is like the thrust and fall of a constant bantering that acts like an intermeshing to bring in and out of focus certain aspects that relate consistently in the randomness of this shuffle. So, the quality of light and the air currents are unsettled; minutely disturbed, throwing up filaments of invigoration in the contrasts that become this patterning reworking itself- this sewn together ecology of occurrences.

This kind of listening space is more important than all the play equipment or educational programs put together because it is dissipated, everywhere apparent and yet able to turn to a precision of attention that puts together the body portion by portion and simultaneously the mutable environment that is the sounding partners of our bodies. Feeling occurrences require that level of shifting contact.

There may be a different kind of way to measure suitable learning environments for SEN. Not in accordance to various theoretical models or an analysis of deficits and what therefore needs to be done to make it right. But by asking, is the child or adult engaging in these moment by moment shifting encounters in order to further them on in movement-thinking? If not, why is that so?

It could be that with the best will in the world a program that seeks to give children various “Tools” for coping in functional life- certain words, picture cards and a strong guidance with positive reinforcements to encourage appropriate behavior, misses the point that this very application actually distracts the child from an ability to feel out the environment in a way in which they influence it and it influences them. Only this will give modulated response through slight impulses of feedback held open for long enough to take affect. Only that can be called learning.

What this also means is that what counts as “Learning”, “Engagement”, “Interaction”, “Feeling” for different people; differently “Bodied” and “minded” people is going to look and sound and be very different.

The standard is not a rational box. It is the means of application. The responsibility falls not only on the child to attend to certain things but on the wider learning and domestic atmosphere to notice when these conjunctions “hold” in whatever way they do so. When there is the presencing of an environmental space rather than a “type” or ideal form for a body or a typical self to aim for, slight connections build into accumulative states of awareness. That opens up a coherent space where different dramas and stories can play out; here the body, the emotion and our thinking take affect because they are entirely intertwined modes of each another. They are the sensibility of a resonant ecology.

This would question the whole notion of “disability” and ensure a serious re-think of what it means to therapeutically educate or re-habilitate various categories of people. We could no longer implement programs according to those categories of disability but would need to separate educational approaches out from the functional diagnosis. To find a definition of education, learning and creativity that did not rest on an outside model that was a deficit linked to a preferential goal of attainment. In that way we would ultimately deal with the diagnosis in a much broader way according to the approach of contact or the possibility of holding open an interest. This model would necessitate a time-based approach, seeing various contrasts and differentials of approach not as a progressive single directional ascent or a regression but as the variability that made possible any connection and built and deepened the quality and intensity of contact through repetition and change.

That interest in testing and on-going experimentation would involve looking towards the practices underway and whether they had the qualities of a learning feedback or the seeds of that possibility. We would need to question in what way strands of a certain practice could be extended and maintained in these feedback loops so as to become pacing mechanisms inherent to an ecology involving many associations perhaps remote from the practice at hand. This interconnection would be crucial even to understanding the simplest of acts. That ecology would need to be sustainable and endurable in every facet and at every scale of its multiple workings.

It would raise the question that much behavior considered fragmented and un-useful becomes this way in as much as it is left unincorporated into an optimal environment. The patterning in which a life can fit in and begin to tweak and work with and against a basic interactional frame of reference as a unit of composition needs to be there in order for every known capacity in the human repertoire to get going.

This needs looking at