Timed Response

16.4.10




I have been thinking about the quality and activity of this shaping that is taking place in the dance- where out of nothing- inertia or mismatch or awkward stagger something catches in. How this catching in occurs through a certain quality of listening. Listening almost to the rush of air between bodies. The way that air fizzles and snaps, bolsters up and flattens. And how at the heart of all this it is about timing- the hairs breadth closing and opening of a gap and how it is that quality of discernment- one that works through the panels of moving and differently gauged intervals, that the shaping occurs.

This working up of differentials needs to be the centre axis of any understanding of perception- how it is refined into a multi-scalar tool of discernment- or again how it is occluded- fuzzed over like a bear paw trying to grasp a pin.

Form and function must be understood as being worked up through this exercise in differentials that can be honed more and more – timed into bursts and flurries of address out of which a spinning apart furthers the pattern. When these patterns are being worked up, bodies have an agenda- not a program of outcomes or a wish-list for functionality and inclusion but a means of working through these resonances that even random activity when allowed to play out brings about; a charge and interest in this constant dance of association and dissociation.

I think autistic people have a difficulty in rendering the pattern outside of the movements that bring it forth. Without that dance of intervals, the pattern is collapsed into objects almost as an emergency place of safe-keeping. Yet there can be a fixation into those objects that render the body still and so misplaced in order to rev up this patterning in the intervals it creates.

Understanding objects and the placement of objects in relation to one another as a kind of archive for associations and patterns that only truly reveal a dynamic and renewable quality through a body’s motion is a way to let objects play a part as a holding place whilst considering them in a wider circuit of motioning. Objects could be known as movement slowing into form. The transformation of states through playing with speeds- movement and pause- therefore becomes crucial in dealing with the issues of patterning through which continual minor adjustment, insertion and an emptying out again create articulation through nuance and emphasis; something like a physical punctuation.

Language comes out of this system worked up in gestural punctuation- the on-off of gradients of pressure and the emphasis of pulling apart and tightening back up these elastic threads through which we press into surfaces or move relatively further away. This becomes a continuum of playing with gradients that in order to operate must have a way of composing through this entwinement. Split them apart- with a wish list of encouraging one set of behaviors over another- the cream on the cake without the dough- sociability without solitary reflection, and the party suddenly becomes macabre- a Willy Wonka affair because there is no on-off switch; no way of being able to modulate from the shadow of which is not in view. Too often programs of intervention tick off such a wish list through positive reinforcement and discouragement or simply ignoring the “negative”. Of course there will be island instances when the “positive” is replicated- by demand- and so a positive outcome is seen to have been achieved. But since there is no way to self-regulate this particular sought after trait by the child themselves who becomes almost a container for it rather than a spontaneous initiator, the physical or emotional intensity tethered as it must be in the physical, chemical, magnetic qualities of its opposite, is snapped off. And so the behavior spirals into extremes and then collapses. That may not be immediately apparent. Not in the school room. Not in the surgery or the therapy room. But later on- in the playground, at home, in the street. And so the deficit is put on to the shoulders of the individual- who has forgotten their good behavior or have been unable to generalize the rule form one place to another. Or it is put on to the parent who is seen to not reinforce the good lesson in the right way and in the way they should. But that is often not the whole story. Many times the way this island of goodness is set up, it is bound to implode because it has no sensible way of playing out in the long-term- of being felt and experienced and integrated by the child.

It is better to start with the tiny differentials of how states are arrived at- to follow that emergence with curiosity in the way it is always working on the cusp of what is seen and what is occluded. Working at the threshold of an occurrence, perhaps in another medium; with physical pressure gradients as a way of sounding, with passages of air currents and the quality of falling and bouncing back up to create articulated movement, and with thresholds of light velocities- almost as sensations of hot-cold- in order to jump-start or pop back up vision. That makes the spaciousness of very specific moments of attunement jump into areas of joint operation. It is immediately about relatedness but in a broad sense not just in terms of certain expectations of social sharing. Functionality – if that is what it is to be called, comes out of that- a wide and deep patterning of association, like a child’s “mindless” scribble that gradually solidifies into a closure of form, then is scrunched up for a new beginning. That ball of paper taken up by another child, and bounced back in something that is both a distraction and a momentary point of attention; not for the thing it was, nor the thing it was considered to be, but for the potential that open attention holds for the thing it is becoming.

*I notice after dance or drumming that afterwards I have a marked disregard for objects and the busyness of things that become to me a hindrance. I will even remove various pieces of stuff from around my living space, clearing away things to create passages worked up in the dance or music and held in resonances that fire up into complexes of motion in my imagination. Yet with time, as these motionings begin to fade or are superimposed upon with other patterns- adverts, news reviews, reports, form-filling, there is a slowing down and a resting in the certainty of these objects that stack up shards of patterning of their own so that the memory of how to navigate a movement, a thought or an idea does not totally leave me. The dynamic patterns that keep that memory afloat can be struck up through the juxtaposition of these objects or the internal dynamics and tensegrity that they offer in their very form. The motioning can be brought back into tangible use by following through these processes of structuring and letting them have an accumulative affect on sensory and neurological linkages that build up an assemblage of activation. Outside of that I lose the ability to language; to think conceptually and to string together words, sentences, ideas. The shapings that make that possible dissolve.

Ideas are forms- forms of association- resonant sounding matter that cohere through the gaps in frequency. That process is ideation. The words are the final cap- but they are not the most essential part and when brought in too soon can crowd out and occlude the pattern and in so doing consign themselves to a limited place.

Objects like bodies can be seen as the intersections of movements. And a wider scope of a perceptual field can be kept oxygenated by looping the intervals between things and people through these minute and gradated interactions rather than with an emphasis on essential substance. I hope in Special Needs Education as well as in aesthetics we have got beyond those kinds of essentialisms where we jam people into moulds with set tasks of performance where essentially they become stuck- land-locked, as if objects or bodies were ever unrelated to the people and things around them.

There is research evidence for this occlusion of communication potentials in Autistic pre-school children by over-loading an interaction with verbal usage (Whittaker and Potter, “Enabling Communication”, 2001 Jessica kingsley)

There is also documentation in this book, for the actual pulse playing out in real-time of different speeds of operation in an interaction. The shaping of a context through cyclical shifts between bursts of active engagement and periods of quiet removal. This is an attempt to situate what is done and how it is done in the actual and on-going responses as they are shaping up in the interaction. It is the feeling out of a form out of what is happening and an acceptance that this cannot be known in advance. A willingness to engage with the lull between events- to wait for things to build- to carefully follow a person into their readiness- to sense the tiny shifts in breath and gesture, in body posture, muscle tightness and the texture and musicality of soundings that explain to and key in a teacher, parent, therapist to a readiness or to an anxiety or to a need to simply stay with the situation and wait. This becomes a way to co-ordinate on a deep level with an autistic child so that events build as shared moments into crescendos; to then allow these thresholds to diminish and so become assimilated or to be moved on into other bearings.

My one question over this material is that there is still an emphasis on gauging a certain moment of optimal readiness for a type of certain communicative exchange involving specific and repeated eye contact, sound or tapping and that this communication is more often seen as being built up around a child asking for something that has stopped and that they like in order that it can be re-started. There is this deliberate withholding of complete engagement by the adult so as to nudge a child into initiating such requests.

However I believe that a communicative atmosphere builds into a pattern that encompasses everything that happens- the still inactive periods as well as the highly physical rough and tumble activities- what Whittaker calls Proximal communication- together with the more subtle musical and glancing exchanges.

As discussed in earlier entries I believe that all phases are linked and give rise to the pattern that holds the possibility of a joint regard. That regard builds in the very stops and starts so that the stops are not just moments in which to encourage further request for interaction. They are part of the interaction. Even without deliberate looking or doing, this shared space is emoted in the very spaciousness of this letting go and dissipation as well as the more intentional and active getting hold of things or calling for an adult’s attention. The glancing and the physical motioning when they come, often come as if out of the blue, from this pause gap and that sinking down and are not simply a child noticing that nothing is happening and therefore requesting in the only way possible, for something to be continued.

It’s the lull that energizes physically, emotionally, magnetically, this catching in. By allowing for these pauses the child can take up and read this patterning, then work it back through into physical engagement. From my experience with autistic children, a child is inventive with these transitions. The lull takes them back into a movement through which they initiate a certain resolution that sweeps up everything in the environment into their sphere including a re-charged capacity and often a dramatically energized momentum in a physically dynamic interaction. For instance there was one child, a boy of around 8 years old whom I worked with a great deal over a period of two to three years. Here is what occurred in one short passage of time within the sensory room as it unfolded one day towards the end of a session and nearing the end of my time at the school:

He walks back and forth, strikes a solitary note on an instrument, walks some more, brushes me lightly on the hand on passing, then on my shoulder on his way back across the room in the other direction. As he reaches the wall, he turns swiftly around, collapses his body on to the ground, gets up walk to the door turns, glances at me, makes an explosive sound with his mouth than pulls that out into a drone-hum, picks up a cymbal, drops it to hear it crackle against the floor, runs to the other side of the room, comes back over towards me, stops turns around, returns to the instrument, twangs another string, runs back over to the door, crashes his body explosively downwards, comes back over to me, then falls over my left shoulder and dives head down into the space just beyond me until that became an initiation of rough and tumble.

Trying to prize apart the useful from the un-useful episodes in this five minute episode is untenable. So too my part in it and really I think my whole bearing was important though for the best part I remained where I was, seemingly doing nothing. Yet there was a quality of attention- a certain focus in letting a process play out and the proximal moment of communication came into that scenario- almost walked in of its own accord. The focus was set up through far more removed scenarios. My emphasis was to stay with the boy and follow the interests like listening to a story unfold. I became more actively implicated in that story as time went on, yet my attention and involvement was equally there in every detail of what happened. All that occurred- the action and the pauses were completely distributed so that each element held every other element in place. The rough and tumble and the glance were important parts of this punctuation but they were not the culmination or the goal or the episode as such to be isolated and prized apart. They were a facet made possible by and through all the other wanderings.

Out of all these wanderings a nuance starts to develop like the stacking one on top of another of layering that interact within the folds. The sounds, the walking pace, the breathing, the giving into gravity, the startled crashes, the sweeps of body movement, the staggered turn, the look, the physics of falling over another body, softening into body parts, then separating out again.

I got to know this boy over many sessions. Words were kept to a minimum, but the quality of vocal expression became over time more resonant, tempered by all the physical excursions, repetitions and slight shifts in stopping and starting. There was an emotioning in the vocal attack and fade in which it was never entirely his or mine, but a taking up of a looseness at one point, a winding it into a tightening somewhere else. How we articulated sounds- the air pressure rolling and shaping in our mouths was intimately tied in to how we maneuvered and managed bodies; proximity and separation were the continual pump of this exposition and became a dramatization- an epic with no final outcome. Interruption as much as coordinated flow helped to shape this presencing and out of this a genuine affection grew up in the refrain of what at any cross-section of occurrences may have looked like mere burbling in the mouth and the repetitious pacing of an autistic boy back and forth.