Stretching

19.5.10



Stretching out past the tendrils and nerve endings, the adjunct buds and finger pads. How to elongate, testing out give way points and the snapping shut and rebound. The knot of our bodies triangulated and folded and tied. Can we follow the thread? Leaning back in counter weight to the rope-end of a sinewy arm? A chest heaving. A belly tightening and softening under the impulse. An impulse sent through at the extremity- tied and loosened. Pressure is the same- never in and of itself as a localized affair- presence –absence a padding pulsation- on-off that opens the escape route, feeds back through- a remote probing through a tilt and swivel so that a two-handed treatment is always a making of gages- the playing out of intervals- impact and absence that occupies and vacates portions of space so that there is a conjoint spasm of filling and emptying in counterpoint. A push-me-pull-you making of accounts across distance- in the time it takes to respond.

So many people lie down on the mat. They are coming from down the hallway out of the main crèche area where mothers and toddlers fill a play-space. They have stories- half told- about racist neighbours, car-accidents, sudden jolts to the system that whiplash like lightening a certain disposition, a certain strain that does not go away. It is incarcerated in their bodies. They work around this stream-line. Shirk the contactability of this fault line that wobbles and stutters and rearticulates the body- a broken body. There is pain- soreness and angled jilted heads. Breath is high up in the chest. The solar plexus is hard like a drum. Ankles are in a state of continual torsion. Toes are hardened piercing the floor. There are others whose backs are smouldering with snake lines that harden, only to be deposited with more dust. Abdomens beat in, retracting into a disappearing centre. Necks are full, pulsing under the responsibility of carrying the head in a constant state of alert. Others who have bodies like war heroes- militarily primed for battle- worked up and worked out in the prediction of every kind of contingency. They want to know the meaning of the contact I am giving. Why it is like that and what it will achieve. I can’t tell from that point of questioning. But as the treatment goes on, an area of evasion comes to light. The body perfected around an isolated point of fear- of irritability – stubbornly refusing to melt into the suppleness of the idealised body. There is an absentee counterweight diagonally distanced yet joined like a conjoined twin around the perfect body and meeting at the centre of that the twinge of pain – of irritability that is a form of consciousness that is a human concern. It is all that is left to hold onto.

How to work in the intervals of opposing qualities?-a gage of spaciousness where one extreme begins to affect, inform and so pose questions to the other. In that dialogue issues come to the surface played out though the body and the pulsation of quivering muscles caught between sustainment and collapse, of breathing patterns caught between a fullness and a lapse, that begin to redistribute one another.

There is a third element a missing link between those extremes. Something that cannot be named outside of that interaction that has its own time-scale. A needling double- edged concern and repulsion as an environmental factor, coalesced into the figure of a certain person- an irritant and strong motivator- a person not known to me but to them left unnamed in this written medley.

Afterwards I sit in the park waiting for the rush-hour to drift away. On the way to the station my body is slowed down, quivering, vacant. My coordination is woven outside the texture of any immediate task. I am needy-hungry, but indecisive about what to eat. Restless but tired. Aware but streaming every action without being able to meet it wholly through my bodily response. The gage I suppose is wide – through the treatment process- so that I am waiting for affects that otherwise would be closed in perceptual or action based nuggets of information all sewed back up together. A man descends the stairway of the station carrying a see-through bag with rubbish. I see through to the items both as separate and as combined – how together they jostle and squeeze against one another punching out the sides of the bag. The bag in scrunched at the top by the hand of the man. He heaves one hip up slightly above the other as he descends the stairs so as to yank on the weight a little and clear it from the step.



He walks past me along the platform, then passes again still with the bag which is bulging ever more. He looks and half smiles but because my face does not respond immediately he grimaces, then let’s go that grimace before it completes and simply walks by. I cannot totally believe that it would have been better for me to have smiled back within the time frame allowed for that response. It is just the way that it is on that day.

I have a long journey home on the tube but at least I have missed the rush-hour having let pass several trains already.

Buckling

17.5.10



Buckling- coming out of something melded or burnt into place. Collision with no set point of impact. Not a crash. Pervasiveness. Rinsing through. Affective. A temperature rising through this fusion. This moving through the limits in touching. Temperature increase in the thickness of this wedging down and through one another. Interlocking, than as it takes effect, a heat intensity, a gripping hold as one. Blasting of impact giving way to smoothness- the rippling effect of metal raised in temperature to liquid. Ease of passage. An opening of options. But before the effusion is complete- irreconcilably mixed as one, there is a cooling. – an arching back out, a splintering apart, a buckling.


Torsion of the spine, rebound of a quivering resonance. Harmony and disharmony, symmetry and asymmetry, parallel lying and vertical right angle, gravity and impetus, descent and recoil, attraction and repulsion. These play out in the temperature gages that work through a process of intensification and a lessening off.


Forms manifest and die away in that timed release. Opposites abound as heat and fusion gives way to cooling and separation. Yet these two moves are not procedural- they are enwrapped and evolving out of one another, interpolated, gnoring in and extinguishing one another, minutely over and over again, here and there.

I saw a program about the Blitz. A piece of shrapnel blasted, twisted, contorted, spun around itself, melded and shot apart out from the main body of the projectile form. Embedding itself into the brickwork of a terraced house punching it outwards as it too detonated.

The man holds this piece of dusty shocked shrapnel and holds it up against the smooth surface of a complete missile, glossy and smooth with green paintwork- trying to find the place where it may have fitted. It is guesswork. A hypothetical non-starter. The piece of shrapnel has been forever altered. What it has gone through has constituted it in a different way. Its intimacies and points of contact in the contained intensity of a blast sent its exterior into new forgeries, different paths of action and possibility. It twisted like a living growth in its withering away in the heat and chill of its own detonation. As affected as the building it implanted itself in.


That word -buckling- that piece of shrapnel, dusty and bleached from the heat of a certain moment of detonation. The smell of it, the touch of it- rough smouldering, dry, parched, dusty. This buckling now abstracted from the reactions that made it so. And yet I take that word- the sensations of affect from out of which that word in turn has been exhumed and play it out in the two practices in which I am familiar with at the moment- Contact Dance and Drumming ensembles. It plays out equally in the drama and process of both. It enlivens and brings into a bearing, opposed manifestations of closeness and separation, affinity and rebuff. It works these, according to the workings of a temperature gage, into diverse affects, divergent formations that are time-bound within this process that has its own internal agenda.



To set up the conditions for these temperature gages through speed and refrain, pressure gages and their continual miniscule alteration and the loud-soft, hard-soft temperance that these then imply, pops out all the manifestations of performance like the flip side of a certain season or climatic encounter of wind direction, humidity count, uninhibited light source, cloud coverage. It is the embedded precursor to a weather report. The implications play out, a Shakespearian drama that unfolds from a core set of oppositions. The drama and suspense comes in tweaking those low lying imperceptible circumstances- the temperature gages and forecasting dials that create out of that composition, certain moments of fusing and buckling.


I am working with the image of this buckling- an image wrought from an entirely different scenario- a World War Two missile explosion over Shoreditch, London which, sixty years later, is being dug up by local school children and residents who still remember the vibration of the blast in a park as proof of a moment of devastation- of the transformation of matter into gas, jnto liquid and then into aa reconstituted matter. That interval between the seizure which is an event and the evidence of that event can be used as a creative image that holds and patterns other creative processes- puts them into a sequence of attention, waiting and witnessing as the emergence of disparate states comes to rise.

The dance and the drumming ensemble can evolve out of that process of dramatic fusion and separation- even whilst the medium and the results end up being of a different material. A third or outside metaphor- the buckled piece of steel- can act as an organiser for grasping the shockwaves and speed of such occurrences. It can hold in an extended stillness a configuration whereby moments set apart play into one another through repetition and change and come apart differently on and on over time. It provides a moment for pause and hesitation – even in the midst of an on-going rush of colliding events. It creates a spaciousness of reckoning in and through the run of things.

Can we hold ourselves separately any more? like a piece of shrapnel up against the smooth body of an ideal form- to try and imagine a time before trauma, before relatedness. Aren’t we all inextricably blasted, melded and buckled around one another- dispersed and reconstituted on every lean or intention that gradually takes hold? Isn’t it purely hypothetical to speak of these perfect bodies, before the moment of impact? Yet so much in therapeutic programs tries to return people to this paradise of unity and self-sufficiency. Is it probable, desirable? Is it healthy to seek for that by the use of outside readymade models of desirable attributes? Like the body of a missile that will never be launched and that will never undergo transformation?


People are inextricably altered by the circumstances of their birth, by the circumstances of their parenting, their upbringing, their neighbourhoods. Yet even before this the cellular composition of every aspect of the body is an inextricable alteration of cells meeting, combining and splaying apart. Melding and buckling goes all the way through- at every level of grasping and holding together there is the propensity and inclination towards splitting apart and separation. One can scarcely talk of the one without the other. They are twinned through and through.


The body is the intertwined acting out of these oppositional tendencies. The interrelatedness of people in practices considered to be cultural, educational, therapeutic, political (as the recent coalition government in great Britain has shown) and considered to hold together certain integrities-certain ideals, is only the continuation of this on-going process of mixing up and continual reconstitution. It’s important to trace through the formations that seem in any era to be integral and substantial within an ideal or an ideal form, into this undercurrent of perpetual movement. They are pauses- specific time-related solutions to this traction between redistribution and formal recognition. Individualities continuously are made and unmade through those gages of multiple focus.

Shock-waves into movement

16.5.20



In the Contact Dance class I am struck by the body organising on contact, living out a possibility or curtailing it in prohibition and a confrontational impasse.

The psychology of either state comes in after the event of that process, acting and redistributing minutely. The on-going procedure thumps out a tuning- an accord or discord in this hit and miss- a conceding to a quality of impact and a leading it out from there or else its holding and stiffening.


When we got going early on with a whole sequence of things to be done one after another in order to tumble into place something resembling acrobatics the crushing impasse set in. I could not place the first incline the right way and all else fell away. I had no memory of the procedure to be done and in that blankness I could not even talk and fumbled my words trying to explain to a newcomer what it was we were to do. I was caught in an entrapment of looking at the procedure as a second hand demo done by the tutor and another participant and could not re-enter into the feel of the thing- find the niche where the thing flickers open like a multi-facetted pocket knife. Rather all the selection of different blades was apportioned in a regimented order of appearance and I could not make that happen. I landed rather awkwardly on the shoulder of my partner who backed away in pain.

Contact Dance seems to me to be about going into the point of abrupt contact and where the natural inclination is to tighten and set up a clear boundary, to instead receive that impact and take it further into a continued conjoint movement- In other words to learn from the impact about a sense of speed, volition, texturing and to enact and pattern those impulses arrived at within a charge of other impulses and to sweep them up into the formation of a process under way. A kind of hoovering up and reformulating a consistent paste out of the sweat and particles of a generalised direction. A rough sketching that gets to a gist of the thing- an atmosphere or temperament that is built upon portion by portion. Not the bricks to a house but the depth of land mass that cakes together and amounts to something of its own.

So there cannot be an outer authorship or only a very crude and make-believe level before the atmosphere of the piece breaks through and carries the movements into this smooth pasting.


With each different partnering, different capabilities and different set-backs break to the surface and become the visible psychology – the relief and stutter of the occasion. Characterisations are grasped – an invitation carried over- tweaked and aggravated into response then rested with. How can this animation and body organisation rear up like a beast on the slightest of touches? - a known responsiveness at the filiations of skin to skin which is more than this- it is the flesh tenderising or not, pulping into one another or cutting and hardening as bone on bone- then a sentiment coming through out of this testing into some kind of anguish and hope – between tiredness and invigoration- lethargy and exuberance- anger and tenderness- sympathy and doubt. These terms are not

Stand-alones. They are dealt through the paste of this mixing and the factory of becoming that certain cuts, certain engagements, rebuttals and back-spins- like churning one way and then threading backwards into a verticality reaching its limits and swamping back down again. It’s a drama acted out knowing itself at each point of contact. Yet contact is always mixed up with deflection- deferment- a breaking off- a gasp for air in the watery substance of this embrace.

The music too soon may jar with the technicalities of sequences and body mechanics, of waiting and falling. An awkwardness- the motion played into a formula too soon. Later it catches into the catchments of the small spaces between meeting and bouncing apart. It percolates and furthers this rinsing through and so is open to affect as another discrepancy or extension- another angle of configuration- of slowness and speeding.


So bodies begin to organize around these pulsations and there is an open questioning where the thing is held over- the rudeness of a wake-up call. Exhaustion –tendrils stretching out- ligaments on the ground – tapped and perturbed by another body. The habit of recoil out on hold and a going into this adjunction –internalising it into a movement- configuring against an invitation to extend than the limitation of a counter force- two bodies pushing and pulling –levitating and levering off of one another and a collapsing into the ground until weight is taken up in to continued momentum- then a catching in and a jamming into a locked anchorage- a hinge. Gradually the two bodies move in the body-as-one, the breathing capacity redistributed over this doubling of systems that become simply an intensification. A jointing working itself into signatures then unravelling and extending as if they would escape such capture in obliviation and at the last moment, the tendrils pulling back through into the body mass feeling a passage through in the filaments of conjoined trunks, conjoined bellies, bordering, arching and twisting back off of one another. The dance makes itself. Before formulation again sets in and learned responses kill this entwined receptivity. The comic ridiculously takes over from a passion of energy and tenderness that is unsustainable.- yet not adequately discharged this time.

The dancing raises an emotional threshold. That once in place allows for easy conversation- off from this tangible bar-level built up in the folds or minute distances of co-relational responses across bodies. Only after it has evolved can it talk about itself and spin off of those levels to talk about other situations- historical, psychological, immediate, environmentally related. For the ground has literally arrived out of which all other considerations- all other measurements unfold. But try to inject words, dialogue, narrative too soon before this level threshold has become attainable-tangible and all slips and slides off of one another. Nothing is held in place for long enough to provide a secure foothold in which to place anything else. Everything dislodges off the back of everything else. There can be no presence or permanence. In that state language absolves- It become non-verbal -goes back on itself. Words that are spoken by others lack legitimacy. Their traction of dialogue breaks apart.


After the dance was made, there is a resting in the relief of these contrasts- they continue to play out like an after-glow. Words slip out in a jovial-seriousness of that state of conjoint consideration- an intimacy- attention that is rooted in the physical, mental, emotioning jointing of this occasion. Words formulate as the last thing to position patterns, juxtapositions, impulses, momentums, resting places that are anyway already worked into gear. The words are affirmations of an idea already got going in physical propensities enticed and disinclined. The body is the outcome of this imagination let loose in the dance. Affinity- empathy- emotional relationship is worked into a pitch of resonance from multiple angles according to small local gauges of mediation- through touch, speed, sound, smell- sticking and letting loose again- intervals continually shifting. That is the building of an emotional landscape- the intensity of that landscape gears into presence the animate body, the animate thought process- the shared interlinked imaginative landscape- an enchantment of convivial living. Words like sweat come out of that .


It is not the acrobatics- the physical dexterity of a body as a separate unit catching a ride on another- it is this temperament of co-ordinated affect- the continual way bodies reorganize in the pitch of that moment around one another- redistributing the way the flesh falls and folds; the passage off and on the floor – through the space that is popped into significance out of these holdings and their momentary escapes.

Tightening and release. That is not about the image of the body- its weight or age or even its flexibility- its habitual living or eating patterns- the way it proceeds in the morning or at night, the clothing or hair coverage- the composure of the skin- the sweat glands or breath tincture. It is this quality and capacity for enfoldment and redesign on the verge of every meeting- the giving way at the very point of a resistance- the recalibration of the shock response to contact resisting habitual separation and the ideal of individual perfection to a more dis-eased state of intoxication- yet whilst also remaining lucid and coherent. The dance is the emotioning of this state of an idea of collapse and reformulation. It is engagement- taking something and doing something with it. A grasping by opening up the entire surface of the body as interface- the operation of intelligence calibrated and brought into actuality on each touch whether that is up against the surface of skin or as an interval affect through sympathetic rearrangement or enfoldment of a rhythm of movements and a way of being on the threshold of consciousness, on the periphery of what is usually let in as relevant. Experience then opens to the inclusion and the double entendre at the edge of every “normal” limit. Capacity for listening grows. The organs of reception splay out beyond their visceral reach- lingering in a conjoint atmosphere. It’s an idea- an emotion made into a tangible experience. An occasion for all.


To realise something keep doing it, through the faults and wide range deficit to either side of the supposed mark. Broaden the appeal and let it linger in that spaciousness.

Over this continued rough grafting, something of an atmosphere of what is to be got at will emerge- the lines will grow more stable- an establishment will become asserted in this arrangement and joint consideration that over time comes to gradually right itself – cohering into something that just feels right, through this continual trial and error.

Niche

To find a niche- not the limitation of a category of interest that one cannot go beyond. I mean an actual physical niche- something to work off- a foothold- a sticking point- some kind of jamming device- a choking reflex to the smooth run of affairs.


Autistic recursiveness is a kind of pondering around a selection of physical affects that begin to animate one another and so to redistribute the run of the affect. Like playing a riff on a guitar over and over again- that two bar section of a nursery rhyme- madness- infuriating.


To look in at that- of course it is self-referential going nowhere. But then there is a fault, a sticking point- a lull and pause for breath- a catchment in the fingering- the logical playing out of the rhythm is fractionally delayed- the conclusion obviated in the looped return.


A wavering. The notes pile up. Flavours that churn- salt and sugar. Jam mixed into porridge. The voicing samples itself as an imposition on the order of things. A glancing around. This sabotage. This is sabotage. But the tuning sticks, gathers weight- the lapsed return must work around that now. It catches and swirls, changing the river bed gradually, ponderously grinding into this groove, this catchment, making it so.


That is a making out of intensity that builds on its own limited affects at each turn, burrowing downwards to seize the ground- bouncing up out of that as a reflex spasm that is a shocked performance into the daylight and is then held there by the audience, the expectations, the collective focus, levitated and impossibly sustained. It is buoyed up by all surrounding. Its life is a triangulation of filaments holding it in place, making it perceptible- to be commended- “in spite of it all”, “the difficulties” “the disabilities”. But it is this riveting of attention on to a catchment that really gets it going. The disability a workable tool levering against behavioural consistency.



Innovation, the accident accounted for in the blanks of the program. The to-ing and fro-ing, the swaying and pondering, the walkabout and abrupt exits. The returns, the re-runs, the re-trials and a gearing back into the movement that was let up on. This is the engine that gets going with no point in mind- nothing to reach, except the limitation of its own perfect return again and again until something comes down- something is plonked in the lap of a “half-wit”. The inconsistency is made to count. A Message? No, a mistake.


We think and articulate around an infinity of such mistakes. No island of genius in a sea of limitation- the limitation is the catchment around which an idea- an idea of recursively thinking back to the idea of this warping event becomes useable rather than obviated. A point of stoppage around which something builds- congestion becomes rampant.


The public interest in autism of late is because in uncertain times we are all trying to work out this strange embrace between regularity and the jolting into innovation that we very nearly dump out with the rubbish- at least this has been the habit of certain ways of life for years. I hope the TV shows can get beyond magpie picking performance like a curatorial investor whilst leaving the repetition- the day to day living arrangements of these autistic “entertainers” as the separate conundrums of a freak show which the public stares at but never identifies with.


The performability organizes the gestures and repetitious manoeuvres which are continual. They are the backdrop, the context, the playable surface, the wealth of humus to be gone into. The regularity labyrinth of beat, melody, line, colour are the differential tools that begin to organize a flappable body- containing it in feedback that informs further output. Making the flap an extension – a kind of winged expanse- making the containment a useable energy source. Together enhancing the beat and working on and off that regularity, into a melody in counter point- a voicing that is channelled through these searing corridors, sharp bends and cuts. A tonifier in the body exuberance.


Facilitated communication can make the flapping work against a counter-point. Contact Dance can create body ligaments and jointing out of the wavering extremity of going outwards in an unstoppable motion or inwards into a turreted screw-driver drill. By linking opposites in bodily affects- physical points of hit, absorption, rebound- a vocabulary starts to evolve. A languaging is born on the brief of these opposed soundings. A change of direction mid-sentence is factored in. The factoring in of this point of traction that uses that feeling by continually seeking it out- becoming sensitive to that possibility as a working point of concern- something around which awareness takes hold-a fungus, a virus, a crystal formation- it evolves in the process not out of a mind set apart- set in advance. It could never know itself outside of the traction of its own felt moment of birth. Outside of its own arrival of immanence that keeps in mind that possibility- that space- at all times without knowing or trying to know the exact whereabouts or timed formula of how it will play out.

Seeing as devastation

14.5.10



Something about seeing with the whole body which is devastating because it affects and alters- a sort of caustic acidic redistribution which should be embraced. That destabilisation which is on-going a kind of petrifaction that is innovative because it kick-starts recovery at the same time as the devastation is going on.


Falling into a fall. Offsetting the angle of abrupt ending. Edging into the paragraphs of continued lull. The hurt not mended- but struck up- magnified- seized. These endings hurt. We grasp the hurt like a dot to dot- abbreviate it but also take it somewhere further. Stand with it- let it rinse through – like a stinging mouth-wash over the gums. Percolating it- keeping it there. Lingering with it. Living in the ravages.

In the Henry Moor exhibition it was like that. The abrupt endings and metal muscle palettes in torsion- seized and elevated- the pain palpable- the endings totally unsentimental. Coursing around these remnants and articles- addressing them wholly- was like striking percussion- hearing the tinging and thump and shudder of a body’s beginnings and ends. A life caught in the middle. This abbreviation pulled into an excess stretch that is a luxuriant release and the gasping death-throes.


At ease and ill at ease roll together. I work around these. The school kids are always one room behind me but they are getting closer. Bright sounds in the corridors. Then those figures, recoiling from their lost flesh, cautioned by their missing limbs, roughly sawn off trees and plaster casts twisted and bent in a last insult before the molten lava is poured in- they harden for good.


There is a woman in a wheelchair being pushed around by an older woman. She is tenderized, sensitive, alert to the too wide berth she is being given by the passersby, yet herself lingering, sketching, quipping in and out deftly with her hand, her light voice, her perception that quickens and cuts away as she ponders, stares- absorbs into- absolves, lingers. The school kids flood around the chair- the swash and back tide of the pebble-filled water swilling up against the rocks. A natural process. I stand still too and allow the same forces to swill over me and retreat. From that I get a sense of embracing- the permanence of staying in position. There is one small boy with a large square plaster on his forehead. I feel the give and take of the skin under the envelope of surgical material. I feel and tenderize the sculptures in the same way.


I am exhausted soon from this affinity with something that can not feel back. I circulate each piece- get up really close, swaying like an oracle pendant that has lost any position of interpretation. I am pummelled, ushered, drawn and pulverised. The pores in my skin expand like that of an orange- I feel the metallic scoring into me. There is an affinity. The shoulder is my shoulder, the leg, my leg, the stomach bunched here, protruding there is my stomach- its sickness, it’s pouting searching. The chest my chest, ripped open, a direct line to the air- brutal. The back- it’s knottiness- areas of strain and twist just off from a line of easy reckoning- of relaxation and flaccidity, are what I feel. An unsubtle poke riveting all in place. A disturbance. Disjointedness.

The knees, the knobbly-ness of those knees- sinews at the back- cartilage at the sides where bone and flesh are woven together. The bulge of the calf- slightly pulsing. The ankle jointing – all the striated ligaments- tension and release of the toes- that torsion. And the thick powerful muscles around the neck- the roll and lollop of my head- I mean of the head of the sculpture- its weariness- the vestibular balance in the ears- the eye sockets spraining and wounded- cartilage and air-passages of the nose- either nostril- the lips flaying, gripping.


But on the sculpture there are no lips, no eyes, no ears- just a round pin head worked into a ledge at the last moment at the front – to demarcate the sidedness that is the quality of a head.

Strange – is it my features or an affinity- empathy with the gathering and dissipation of the sculpture? Caught between expressivity and blankness.

The same goes on in a treatment that evening- body-work. How do I know where to go? How do I decide? some kind of resonance between devastation and re- constitution that builds up equally in me as in the receiver- one aspect opens up the scope of another – through areas of attraction, repulsion and a low level buzz that sounds out in a drift so that I feel the tenderised areas in my body and go to the body of the receiver as a righting- an alignment of offsetting and magnification- a double- entendre that can only be experienced in this doubling and unity- an intensification- a sustaining for long enough that something occurs- a line engraved.


We have to go with this devastation – willingly activate it- then take the recovery as is needed. But it is too often inhibited and replaced with the ready-made version of the completed body that cannot be real because we have not gone through the stages of perpetual devastation and recovery to make it so. You have to rip muscle to build muscle as a body builder will tell you. It is never a presentable fact to begin with. We turn away from one another because we cannot bear to go through the motions of this unwinding. Disability is the last vestiges of that process- projected apart from the real body- the complete body- the finished body- that never knows of this process of seeing and witnessing by opening to devastation. That is why the body stops thinking- stops being articulate. Sadness of that finalised and cling-wrapped state is in a sense more tragic than the ravages of dis-ease and disability that touch all of us on a zigzag journey between birth and death. That journey animates us between one incompleteness and another.

Any creative process works in strictures. Begin a single line- a mean self-referential single line- perturb it slightly- watch it unfold and play into another line, then another and another spilling out of its own narrow oaring. Each time setting a new gage exactly where it ends, escalating, magnifying like a pack of cards flickering between hands. The figure of a moving animate life will grow- or a song the implications of which cannot be known as it takes route in gut after gut after gut. Best thing to do then is to keep narrowly and stubbornly to a specific course. Play it out doggedly, endlessly- let the contagion of other facets or the spoils of other leanings gradually shuffle around this set piece until the gage of that settlement is up for bargaining- improvise from repetition and certainty into the gradual warping and scurrying of that certainty. Let a multitude unravel by staying exactly in the limitation until that crease has effect. Make spaciousness out of the hesitation of filling the gap and by putting off accomplishing a starter sense of the whole. Work with single attributes, leanings, tones, specialities- the breed of a certain curtailed whining attitude that has no choice but to launch or be lured into what it is not.

Bodily unravelling and being lucid

Watching a video of Lisa Nelson the other day who developed the Tuning Scores for Contact Dance as a way to feel into situations of receptivity and hone in an awareness of exchange and separation, I was struck by the stop-start stalling nature of her vocalization. The double bind of comfort-discomfort in her body- the jilting falling flickers and low level spasm that seemed to excite her body in to aliveness as it also exhausted it to pre-empt her vocabulary – her elucidation as if her speech were being burped out of her with each push and shove.


It gave her this awareness of process- a need to tool into a working address every instance in which the body could exist. A notion of invigoration that was physical, practical, brutal, caring- the jolt behind every moment of calm- every eloquence fought for.


The searing pain behind a fragile manoeuvre. The pulse under the skin. A wanton rampage, destructive and constructive in the same breath. It was only when she actually said that she has to keep moving to speak that one actually noticed that. Before one simply ruled out all those little moves incidental or irrelevant to the meaning and clarity of the words uttered. Yet her underscores are a grasping and playing out of this necessity of the low level buzzing underneath every utterance.


It is similar with autistic people but to a wider degree so that all the small manoeuvres make possible moments of lucidity rather than drawing attention away from that level. That level cannot be cut away from its source. It rests within the micro filiations although our perception and logic always tries to ring around the coherent utterances and to cut away the work of the sums and equations. The breathing adjustments and physical temperance that goes one way and another in order to offer up an immanence of songs completed, words phrased, dots circled and circles dotted.


The scourge of the dyslexic and autistic is that all the scaffolding- that which is needed for the thing desired to be in place- the centre of attention whether that is social mannerisms, eye contact, letter formation, physical dexterity is removed in many well meaning educational and therapeutic programs. Emotionally and so educationally they are left out on a limb- (we are left out on a limb- I am dyslexic) hanging off the roof tiles with no means of keeping a continual grip. The thing must be worked out from out of the details of approach- the push and pull of every grip and release. The method of attachment is different in each case and must be modified to the local circumstances in each instance. There is a book by an autistic boy (“Beyond the Silence” Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay 2000, NAS National Autistic society) in which he learns to talk by a system of push and speak in which his mother exerts pressure on to his upper back and literally exhumes the air in short bursts that escaped from his mouth like air bubbles from deep under the surface of the water. These bubbles appear as words. Though he speaks, people close to him worry about the supposed brutality and violence of his mother hitting him to get the words out as well as the “unnaturalness” of the event of his coming into speech. They needn't have as he points out in the book. For though it looks unusual it is a way for him to come into this bearing. This bearing is singular. The way it plays out is multiple; complicated.


Perception is not an indication or measure of uprightness. For on each movement there would be a doubling and rerouting; an overlay and glitch between one point of departure and another. It would never all sew up together as one. It would blur and skew and scatter leading to vertigo, leading to a continued state of nausea- the norm rather than the exception of simply a bad day if it were only this.


Uprightness is the idea of a certain state of address that exists long before and long after the body has departed from that mark. The topsy-turvy mobile reckoning of every slightest indication of life would rule out the picture perfect form that we cobble together and maintain stubbornly out of the value we put on co-ordinating levels, sharing views, addressing one another through the hit and drive of it all. Traffic that any unmediated perception would instantaneously overwhelm us with making relatedness in the never-ending volition, impossible.


Value for one another exists not in the way things physically or perceptually are but in the idea of a certain state worked up through the process of every occurrence and every sensory and perceptual event that plays out and is modulated by one another, never absolutely standing for any unequivocal certainty in isolation from that on-going adjustment; that constant and continual re-qualification that is our way of experiencing- our way of being.

The same thing applies to disability. It isn’t the body or the perception or the language and communication that sits in for this form of address- this sense of coherence in sensibility. It’s something beyond that, through which any wavering is continually coursing.


Uprightness can’t be disturbed by a physical or perceptual unravelling which plays on and off and through it. Only by the views of others who devalue some forms of life based on this surface level of momentary integration or disintegration and still it into an instant of formation- into the physical or perceptual determination of one solitary standing. Forms of address can be inhibited, precluded or ridiculed because outwardly the perceptual or physical norms do not seem to be in place to sustain it. But through the cracks the integrity of lucid forms of address remain. In the squared back glance of an eye, honing in on a certain realisation- a knowledge of a situation as it plays out and an adeptness of handling and of what is needed given the situation in order to allow something a way through, it continually re-starts itself even on the verge of disintegration.

UPRIGHTNESS

Uprightness seems to be an idea more than an actual body disposition that one aims for and more or less strikes on in the right way. It is more an idea of itself as a form of address or a facing towards or outwards from out of an on-going capacity of invigoration- a kind of forwarding or a sense of putting forward an approach which then becomes the body upright- exposed on the edge of itself- as a relational interface. It’s a precursor to something as yet unfinished and moves onwards out of this sense of filling in that is what it means to face another. That is not read in any particular kind of gait although it may be represented in the manner of a gait as a kind of snap-shot of all that this facing or putting oneself forward entails. Yet in reality it is not the body itself – the fact of the ligaments in a certain line with one another that composes this idea. Or only at least after the event- as a kind of depository of the idea of receptivity. The address is a compulsion that cannot be clicked into any single form. So then how could it represent the figure of an upright body? It is worked up out of many cuts and falls, -half-hearted attempts and refusals- only knows itself through this all manner of bombardment that it plows through.


What is a rebuttal? An invitation to work through a re-orientated manner of address. A pause, back-thread or counter-indication that complicates and busies the business of closing a gap. This interlude is the space for exemplification. A clarity tweaking the threads of infinite uncertainty. - a tightening and loosening and the difference between what those two states of relative torsion come to mean.


A sick person- a topsy-turvy person. An old man. The figure on the side of the pavement staring aimlessly, looking like any moment the pavement will offer up a solution to their perplexity and pull them down. Will they fall? Will they sway? Totter on the verge of something? Stutter? Look away? I approach this figure carrying whilst two plastic dustbins on the back of my bike, swerving up and down the ramps of the uneven paving stones- from road to walkway and back off again. She is standing on the pathway but I feel no sense of wobbling with this precarious load. A gap is opened up in a smile that stretches and sags her cheeks in a double movement that pulls in on one another. I curve around her and she bends slightly so that un-touching we orientate conscientiously.


Later further up on the road, a man is walking barrel- chested and yet from a great distance I feel him occupying the entire pavement even though the interlude between us, in times of how long it would take for us to be level- is several seconds away. The slippery surfaces of the bins inside one another and precariously balanced between seat and handlebars, swivels and nearly pulls me down with it. However an idea of uprightness prevails and by forging ahead rather than stopping and waiting for the momentum of the fall to catch in I managed to gather back through and continue this slow monotonous surge ahead, treading one step at a time, keeping with that stepping because I cannot afford to be anywhere else at all. The man stares through me and I walk through the stare so that the hardness of the eyes is not at all matched by the mutual concession at the last moment of the bodies. This is not body advantage. It is the idea of uprightness and facing even whilst not looking with the eyes and nearly falling with the body. The body is the least of our worries. It gathers or not- falls and re-groups like the ecology of particles that it is. It is the idea- the form of address that coheres or does not.


As I am writing this I look out my window and a small boy on a bike with a large girl propped up on the back holding on to his shoulders rolls down the centre of the street. They are both looking ahead into the near middle space, just past where they are, into the area they are entering but have yet to reach. It is changing. It is here and here and here. They are forwarding into the near distance, making it there’s. There is a sense of them smiling. The smile is one. Not of him or of her but both together- somewhere between them. Flickering. It keeps them balanced though all the odds point to a dramatic fall. That fall never exactly arrives yet in the slur and zigzag neither is it entirely ruled out.

There are as many different types of uprightness as there are practices that each in their own way break opens the possibility of that uprightness. In Contact Dance Improvisation, uprightness is the refrain or the middle space that one enters just beyond the body falling and swaying, collapsing and reconstituting on the mutual prop and aid of other bodies equally falling beyond any sense of absolute stability. In that sense Contact Dance teases out and extends the notion of what that uprightness is all about. For it is never absolutely established in the body composure so that it is taken completely into the sense of an idea- a way of addressing- a notion held on to and carried through from one slant to the next- a kind of slur between what is actually seen- a mediation and exchange that lasts fractionally in the suspense and in the continued momentum between one impulse and another. This staggering of phrases is the only sense of arrival and yet as soon as it is reached and executed it is over and already falling out of itself, swooning beyond any capacity for sustained exposure. Rather it is the idea that lasts. The sense of a continued value in each new recounting of this mystery of movements that come up against one another into coherence- a brief pause- a moving through into a centre gage even whilst there is this reckless hit and miss going on. An ordered lucidity that emerges through it all and is carried by the volition of every angle that comes into play.

YESTERDAY

 10.5.10



Yesterday I felt inert. Those floaters on the eye that fuzz everything over resting on a wad of jelly. Or was that me? No movement takes possession. Knees collapse. Sweat on the brow. Hard to know where to place oneself, lurching from corner to corner, grappling with the edges. The light is blinding today. Luckily it is cold which adds one frontier with a real affront to work against. My breathing is heavy, heaving to get going. Flesh slipping on the floor. I`m tired. The plastic bin-bags have been torn open again by the foxes. Food scattering on the ground. There is a fish head on the wall of my neighbours, eye-less. The top of the vertebra is still attached, white and exposed. In the park the colours levitated and distributed on the trees seize through one another, tempering and re-arranging on my hesitant step. I stop and start the way I have seen the old people do so in this park. There is a heron on the water still and upright its grey pulsing and quivering-a concentration in the body mass- arching out over the small pond, waiting. It’ eyes are the last to see. The fountain is running. A few people on the main lawn, colours jostling, bracing in the wind. A man calls a dog to heel. It continues running in the other direction away from the path across the lawn into the circle of friends.


On the bus a girl says to another girl sitting in the seat in front, “Hold your head still, I want to get something out of your hair”. The girl next to me freezes. The girl behind does something. Then she says, “It’s a leaf” The girl sitting next to me says. “You wanted me to keep my head still to remove a leaf? I`m going to slap you. I thought it was a bug”. I can’t help falling into the passersby on the road down below. Their situations of liveliness create a positive charge which quickly infects me. I feel the space under my ribs grow. My shoulders loosen and I sit back more in my seat. I am relieved to be out in the swirl. Where the bus parks up for a while there are a number of people facing inwards towards a shop notice board. Some have pens poised over notepads as they stare past one another’s back to make sense of the tiny scripts on the individual white cards. A large girl-child with Asian eyes is hemmed into a sitting pram. Her clear wide features look into the street. Like her mother whose back is to her but who keeps half turning silently to check on her, she wears a pink shawl with a bright green shirt underneath. This double-take captures my attention as I swing between mother and child. The colours are absorbent. They filter through in this double entendre. A reverb that is not allowed to drain off. Each time one does, its double feeds back into the thread building up the intensity. Thinking about it now, the colour is still having its affect on me.


There is a jamming up of traffic in congestion further along form the top of Manor Park all the way down towards Finsbury Park. I get off the bus and go into a small coffee shop where there is only room to stand with my back to the counter. As I drink my coffee a man comes in and tells the woman that there has been a murder in Finsbury Park. They are looking for the murder weapon which is believed to be a knife and have cordoned off an area. That and the fact that there is a match on at the Arsenal Stadium is the reason for the traffic build-up. I cross into the park taking my coffee which anyway is in a take-out paper container, with me. There is a small community garden at the side of the main park. It is overgrown but thoughtfully arranged with hanging trellises, a small platform over a tiny pond, even a pagoda. However everything is in miniature so that it is hard to walk around or even sit. The seating ledge around the small tree is narrow and too tightly against the surface of the tree to offer accommodation. It is choked and partially inundated with ivy from above and from the long-growing grass and nettles from below. Because of the traffic jam and the lessening of engine power, it is quite quiet in this garden which- in this position at the edge of a busy junction would usually be untenable for me.


In the drumming group down at the Arts Hut, my hands find the surface of the drum with relief. Everything else unwinds from there bolstering one another up, coursing through one another and attaching different kinds of significance to this emphasis and delay- the moving into place and holding back so that other elements carry on, re-collect, intensify. Meetings are orchestrated or put on hold, shaping this thing- a space of value or letting slip through other moments of impropriety. Each meeting comes into its own in a certain aptness, then is done with, but the question of putting this value into first this and then that articulation becomes an on-going endeavour. Where it cannot happen it does not happen.


A ball is kicked across the lawn that I traverse on my way toward a path that runs alongside the train-track. A couple walk along that path and though they are in grasping range of the ball they choose to hunker down and do not repair it back to the field. The man has to run over, and I look away distantly over at the passing train away from this lost opportunity that I am suddenly caught up in; the embarrassment of a matter that is not dealt with. We cannot linger in these lost accords, but simply fall into a connection where it is possible and circulates back around into a glancing articulation that in a broader sweep involves all that was certainly left behind in the rawness of the occasion that went un-acted on. So the occasion pushed down, resurfaces somewhere else.

The values sounded out and hit into place over and over in the Arts Hut carry the same nature of thinking on the edges- positing quality in the intersection where avoidances and lost occasions finally re-situate and meet the next time around on the in-breath or out-breath in reverse of where they were expected to be. Value is cobbled together in these provisional settings. Homemade holdings where rest and rebound create a double setting for reversed meanings that nevertheless live up close upon one another. Where touch and affinity should be unthinkable in the usual aggravation of every competing incident they are tethered together and harmonised in the spaciousness of the off-beat.


Articulations come through because the time of delay and hesitation is cheated by this double-take where every move has a twinned occupancy either projected or inverted as the bolstered support. Threads are played into repetitions where they are the coursing nerve pulsations- the liquid rush of continued circulation rather than a voice in a given story. Other threads in their very prevention create a firm boundary in that praecipe halt wavering where the cliff meets the sea; that releases the undercurrent charge in their halting absence. Voice emerges in counter-point to all that is done. It then lends itself to the swirl and is carried into the under-beat. The belly that quivers and rests, collecting and mingling- seizing ground- hunkering down. A low level brew of fermentation and untold smells. Contagion and desire building here. Not something that exists in its own right to be held in checks and balances or allowed out the bag. But those qualities are actually made in the small calibrated stops and starts in which meanings are contested- put underground- taken out from the pile of stuff that bury one another in stylistic options none of which matter on their own. The body of the thing is derived from all these exponents- the clothing-they are riddled through and through with intertwining threads that pierce into the depths of the body and spiral out like speeded up plant systems into the atmosphere surrounding. Tracing out holdings, wavering. Curling around themselves- around one another- redistributing on every touch. Spasming into counter-intuitive repulsions and desires.


Gradually speeds are brought up because the slow apportioned blocks of contrasting phases angle and superimpose. Day and night swing back and forth on one another. Eventually the many cuts are constantly and fractionally re-allocated and those tiny adjustments of cut affect the blocks of colour that filter through one another at an entirely different speed- so slow so as to be permanent composures- characterizations touched upon in widely differing circumstances, widely different material conditions to conflate the same feeling - a value permanence that is built up anew and differently between the rapid and the slow; these cross currents that sustain and interpolate one another; hold all in place in something so obvious that the slightest twitch becomes meaningful in the full room that simply redistributes and edges into a new configuration with each new insertion or absentee guest, equating the wholeness -a cohesion- out of whatever is to hand.


So our movements take on a certainty of deliverance- the gages between one emphasis and another play out a configuration of possible events- the hands follow the implications of these modules of feeling that are set up in twinned gages- a network of contrasts that become an over- exposure and an underexposure; an absolute tangible realm that is felt out in the affects it brings forth- that rebounds into brief exposure and continued undercurrent- that brings now my hands and limbs- my body and thought into some kind of an exposition, bolstered up and edged into precision and relevance by all that operates around and through and off of and because of each chance of placement, becoming so. A guidance system that is more than mere information or learning or of teaching. That is the physical impasse and concession- the push and pull according to which one knows the limit of that particular engagement- knows also –as a bat knows the physical environment by the time it takes for a voicing to rebound off nearby surfaces- how far to go with something before curtailing, letting go, dropping off, abstaining.


A definite attack and fade comes into coherence and forms build around these contested attributes- attributes or qualities that work in tandem with one another to define another dimension- one only known through the on-going affects that outline from one moment to the next, capabilities- unities- movement and pause.


My body comes into accordance with the sounds, and the gesturing organizes itself pooling into a unity of left and right- a forging through like running over the ground. There is a centrality of intent- a fixture of value that is derived out of the dissipative elements of all the soundings made into the room- a collectivity that becomes this community of music. Co-ordination arrives- voicing is situated- there is a face in which to face one another. Emotion rises up through this integration worked up in the off beats and the mismatches. A problem or question of unravelling posited and worked through in the aesthetic of the act- the technique and mechanics of the drumming rhythm- and what exactly that can mean- how it can be passed around back and forth from foreground to background, from one emphasis to another. The joy and euphoria of articulation- what was lost is re-applied- forged together – held in place in the cross current of this tensile system- a system of mutual and self-organizing traction that distributes affect and pools it into moments of intensity -of cohesion–of value- The event. Easily we sit with one another.

Waiting

 11.5.10 2.pm



Strange day yesterday. I went to Tate Britain. Then walked up along the Thames to Parliament where the media tents were pitched like strange unworldly bird-houses with concentrated halogen lights shining through the glum day-light and cameras poised with the stalactite houses of parliament rippling, melting into soft focus in the background. Mostly not much was happening. Presenter’s staring back at themselves into hand held mirrors, applying lipstick, drinking Fanta out of plastic bottles stowed away by their feet. A bit of heckling from the crowd when someone suitably groomed did mount the aluminium staircase from the back end and appear from the balcony theatrically though with nothing to say. ”There is business to do, mess to sort out when are you going to do it..?” comes a voice form below. Mostly people were waiting. An informality allowing me to meander in the crowd, visiting the various media tents as if they were stalls at a farmer’s market. Only thing on display was the wire and hardware of the media equipment, furry mike heads like a kind of decapitated ventriloquist doll. Glum reporters with angular elbows on the hard of the wooden table, creasing their jackets from the shoulder to the raw bone of the elbow knobble. Nothing to say. Bored in this suspense dragging on hour after hour. Susceptible bait only for the sandwich boarded “nutters” down from the camp further up the road directly opposite the parliament buildings who have set up home there indefinitely and are doing better at keeping their finger on the button of the times than anyone else who has the regular bodily functions and sleep needs of the socially adaptive and so who are intermittently off the case that anyway never offers up anything more tangible than to say, “The talks between the parties continue to work towards the formation of a workable resolution for the good of the national Interest”. Over the road a man up on a scaffolding ledge is touching up the paint work in black and gold along the edge of the gates that barricade and level off the arched entrance inset into the body of the parliament buildings. It is a recess like the entrance to the interior of a never ending cave. I take a picture by crossing up the double row of traffic flowing first one way and then the other so that I am up against the hefty black steel reinforced barriers that are there to stop explosive laden vehicles from ramming into the building and detonating themselves. The barrier reaches up towards the top of my chest cutting me in two. When I look back at the picture I have taken on the camera screen I read the words, “Sovereign’s Entrance” to the right hand side. The lettering is worked into the metal of the gate itself. Crossing back over proves perilous. A matter of continual hesitation and re-navigation stitching one way and then the other through the flows. Everyone is busy and reckless on the road these days trying to get somewhere.

Value

People can appear to drop off. Capacities can float off. Movements grow stiff. Eye movements diminish. There is a lessening of activity. Of the connections that play back and forth propulsing out of any set of series, leaning into a new manoeuvre- arching like the back of a cat, snapping through, firing up a volition in this lazy slow contortion. Like priming a bow,  the catapult outreach completes itself. We set up the gage- the doing occurs and we arrive within the mood of it. It catches on- burns, shimmers- prolongs itself in its very absorption. Dwells there, nudging into the details- a saccade of re-formulations that angle and pose one another- bring all into the loop- a lasso of activity that widens and closes- a viability test- a poising before the break of it- a rinsing through- a yawn that embraces all, then closes with thumb and forefinger precision, honing in by degrees to be there. And still. Before the motion revs up, reverberates, and grows again out of this sheer nothingness.

But people can drop off from that. And mostly they do. I do that too. Forget my lines and became caged in the entrapment of individual sequences that bare up rudely upon one another, inhibiting expansion, like the nose to back tidiness of a row of parked cars, gasping to tuck in their back ends or hefty bonnets. We go for big then suffer the consequences.


I visit an old man yesterday to drop off his birthday card and present. He is sunk into a chair, absolving himself from the air, sinking into the fabric that encompasses him from all sides. Sucks him into its embrace.


He whispers on my arrival, “Don’t get old”. He is 101 years old. He tells me he spent four years in Rangoon in Burma in the war- any of the wars. He says. “I was a bastard”. You had to be to survive. He says the men teased him for going into the jungle every morning for a shave. But you have to keep yourself together, he says, wherever you are. He is in this Care Home. It is obviously a Care Home but each flat has its own front door painted in glossy dark blue like a real front door in a street. However the team of Care-Workers can walk in without knocking with a swipe card and the turn of a handle.

The woman walks in, in front of me to announce my arrival. What can he say? He lapses into repetitions, but through the repetitions he is saying that most of his living connections have drifted away and he is asking whether I have living connections around me. “Family”, He says. “People are so greedy these days” and continues to say that intermittently. The thing he likes saying most is that he was a bastard in the jungle and then later on as a boxer. There is a sparkle to his eye as he says that and he is lucid, confrontational, thoughtful and gentle.

He says his life now consists of the photo display on the central wall between the bed and the chair. I get up to take a look. There is a picture of him smartly dressed in a black suit and white collar in the 30’s. His marriage photo. Other photos from around the 70’s from Australia where most of his relatives are. One of a ruddy faced man with a snake around his neck.


He grapples with the card I have brought- a small portion of the glue catches and holds in place a sliver of paper and because the action needed to break apart that seal is separate from the regular sweep of thumb around the crevice of the seal, he cannot manage it. It is an innovation he cannot deal with and I need to help. It is a card of the Houses of Parliament because it is Election Day. The T.V is on and the candidates are piling on to the screen to give indications about power sharing arrangements for a Hung Parliament. They flicker on and off one after the other and barely register as separate in the run of things. He is holding the card of the houses of parliament upside down. Where is this? He asks me. I describe Big Ben, the clock, the Thames, The houses of parliament as if recounting a fable and no picture of the fact had ever existed let alone landing in his hands. There is too much detail in the picture- it does not allow for discrimination- for one main pulse to be got a hold of and to mean anything. Like the Thames water it eludes capture. Watching the old man with the picture, the only reality of which is the edges of the cardboard in his hand, I feel angry with myself for my presumption and for giving him this illegible document.

____


I watched a programme on TV the other night- “Autistic Disco-Kid” about an autistic boy who learns to dance and pull his capacities together around the heat of this co-ordination loop. It entraps rivets and frees him into other neurological, emotional and social outlets. It brings everything with it and in the continual flicker between minute emphasis and continued dislocation there is a quivering presence like a low level twitching of areas of contact- a slight and unobtrusive flexion and release of fingers, Achilles tendons, stomach muscles and neck torsion- a near continuous stretching and containment that keeps everything compulsed and reactive within a tensile co-ordination network that is much wider than any of the contained techniques that it finally brings forth. Outside of the dance this wide circuit is almost set free beyond the specific application of a dance number and there is a sense of freewheeling on the momentum and buzz of these configurations that splay into alertness. A restful melody from the fragments of all that is done and even past any presentable fact to become a low level barely registered activation that is continuously responsive.

It is as if an open question has been set loose and this tumbles into yet another open proposition and then another. In this tumbling momentum the body turns as if around an invisible helter-skelter and the attributes visited along the way- capacities in reading, number recognition, communication, emotion; the registering of joy and pain- the hope and the dashing of hope, are the incidentals within this wider atmosphere; an environment or milieu that sketches possibilities for sweeping rushes of figuration that only out of this giddy rush learn the stop-start visitations of self-contained attentional zones. Function comes out of the wide mass that is a texture- a feeling of rush and halt. Something beyond the simple doing of a task or remembering of components orders or choreographs that momentum. That is more like a mood of hope or positivity. Equally it is a coming up against the limitation of a certain inhibition that one then works against. Those jointed tendencies literally tone the body.

It is the same with the old man shaving in the jungle. His account of himself- “I was a bastard” A figuration going forth in the world- grasping the moment, condensing it around that one notion that brought forth countless aspects of co-ordination; an on-going conception. A boxer using timing to affect. Even until last year this old man was going on the bus to the local supermarket- a habit that kept him mingling in the world- that kept a certain jostling of the elements that in connection created reactions of seizure, grasping and moving through. An activation towards a propensity for response. Now in the chair his grasping of second-hand facts- Elections, governing buildings, photos of him as a young man, barely register. He asks me- “was I that man in the picture? It is hard to believe.”


The autistic boy in the “Disco kid” TV dance program according to his mother was uncoordinated and not coping at all at school or at home before he began dancing. “It is as if the light was switched on” she says referring to when he started dancing. The boy shows with the flat of his hand the level he was at before he started dancing and the level he consigns himself to since beginning. “It was not immediate” he says “..but it came”.


Watching him dance he is like a fireball of activity, turning and riveting around selected orbits around which his body mass constantly collects in accumulative density and then spirals out again drawn as if magnetically from one concentration to another. As if different areas were being lit up and by a process of osmosis he is arriving, a collectivity suddenly drawn in on itself and allowed to remain for an instant before scattering. His body pumps open and closed between the markers of a certain gait, a certain pause in a beat, playing with the discipline to move in and out of this regularity- to know a sense of freedom by playing off against these fractional markers of regularity and standardisation.


Autistic people are said to like regularity. Anything outside of that regularity is not diagnostically given credence and is treated more like a kind of white noise- a fall-out that should not be given attention. A kind of slippage. But here in this dance the boy is playing the regularity and the dislocation back and forth into one another. This slanting is the composition. It becomes composure. It is made to matter. It is a language emanating past either strictures seen in simply contradictory terms in which the one occludes the other. It is the mismatch of a slippage between the two that gives originality, character, Life to the event.


The self containment exploded. The explosion grasped and brought into the fold. Emotion comes through. The presence of acting off every circumstance revealed in the process of the dance that sends out responses that are then of the body and that in a very real sense make the body.

____





In the garden, (an autistic arts garden project that I ran between 2001 and 2008 on a piece of disused land off from a national children’s charity in North London.) people would come in with limp loose hands after long inert train journeys. But a pattern would begin to pattern itself through simple repetitive motions.

Dripping paint out of the nozzle of a plastic pipette. Watching it take affect- explode upon landing on to the wet surface of a cloth to journey beyond the minimal motion of squeeze and release- to become animate- have a life apart- draw out of the affect of that running level of light absorption, another idea of colour, to be mixed and applied whereby now the whole body would move into the dance of application and affect and with paint loaded brush the whiskers would be splayed apart on to the matt of that surface, sweeping along on the momentum and taking the body with it. In that sense it was the brush that organized the body; The garden that organized the brush; The street that organized the garden; The situation of many fragments of compulsion and inhibition that organized the street.

The garden was no haven. No island. It was the grasping of certain tendencies onto aesthetic or compositional dramas that played out like a fable that possibly, in the end, entrapped itself too much in the sense of its own individual identity. What else could it do but self-explode- dissipate these intensive practices back into the streets surrounding?


There is something about the idea of the garden, the idea of the boy as a dancer, the idea of the old man when he was a Sergeant shaving in the jungle as a “bastard”, that becomes self-sustaining and around which capacities; bodily, cognitive, social, emotional intensities gather. They become self-fulfilling and offer back up the idea of themselves in further actions that accumulate to create a dense mass. That becomes the body of the dancing boy, the flora and fauna of the garden, the hardness and perfunctory habitual motions of the blade scraping the chin of a man in the jungle who is a sergeant, a bastard, a survivor and now an old man in a care home in upper Clapton remembering that event with a twinkle in his eye, registering the loss. Giving up from that stance but playing off of that stance. “People are so greedy” “Now all I want to do is sleep”. Ending the consistency of this life behind the fake blue front door is his last decision of lucidity. An unravelling that he has decided upon. An idea of what it means to stay intact and what it means to unwind. A composition that he is still playing out- between life and death. This man of 101. “Don’t get old”.


It isn’t only that an autistic boy dances and cures his autism- learns to make leaps and bounds cognitively and emotionally by altering the wiring of the brain as he moves his limbs. It is also that the canopy under which he resides has reconfigured. He is a dancer under a collectivity of many other dancers and many other people. There are costumes to buy, schools to visit, competitions to attend. The stretching of leg muscles, the double-jointedness of the limbs hold in each fractionally sustainable assemblage a possibility of membership to this club. There are conversations between parents and teachers, grades to hand out, trophies to polish, musicians, dance-floors that need constant upkeep, car routes, timetables, food arrangements, practice groups, pep talks, ambitions and disappointments held on to as prospective markers within a time scale between here and there. The drama of a certain resolve, a certain dream is played out between winning and losing which it never entirely is but lives instead in the grey area of all the other things that it might come to mean and that indeed it touches upon.


The choreography is far wider than the dance moves learnt and performed on that day under the number sewn on to the costume of that dancer- that boy. The boy is using capacities that under other circumstances would be part of his autistic diagnosis. This flitting from one thing to another, this loose-limbed turning inside out. The tip-toe walking that at first was seen as a problem to be fixed by wearing splints and holding in ,lace a preset alignment of bones like a script – a certain configuration of lettering that could only be made in a certain way- set through plaster cast at a certain right angle. The dancing is a playing one way and then another. The set pronunciation is embedded within this wider play of possibility- can only be known within this wide arc of extreme suppleness. Suppleness is not a lack of attention. It becomes useable- going one way and then the other way to gage a certain current. A set mark chosen this time within a variable range that is visited- given credence on the way through.


Timing is everything and a mark is set in the timed relief that it gives both to the dancer and to the audience in this refrain. The experience and the event merge and the boy feels free in the dance “... normal, just like everyone else” he says. The autistic elements are re-jostled into a composition that is framed in the dance.


Is he cured of his autism or is he a re-configuration under a certain whispering, a certain muttering that offers up the possibility of the dancer that now subsumes and partially integrates the former dominating label of the autistic child? It is agreed. It is official. So co-ordination and dis-coordination play into and out of one another. One does not replace the other. Simply one re-constitutes or organizes the other. The limbs merely play out what is already made in the circumstances of the occasion, stretching to the very extremes what that occasion can mean. That is the creativity now open to the boy. The freedom that he feels when his time has finally come and he is clapped along by his family from the side-lines.


They are clapping for the ideal of the dancer that he now envisages. The ideal beyond self- beyond detail- that Whitehead speaks of and which is where Value comes in. The ideal of the Deity.

Environment

6.5.10



Some detailed reading of whitehead has seen me copying and pasting in the last blog from the website: whiteheadresearch.org


My understanding is still hazy and not all of it is obvious or useable to me. But the general slant is relevant. It’s about exacting precise connections or details of interest within a wider, broader, deeper context. About the specificity within an interconnection that brings these details to relevance but is itself occluded- at least by our magpie attentional gaze. Yet that gaze of selection and expulsion is the process itself of grasp- of working up contrasts whilst holding to a wide durational frame in an altogether indistinct manner.


This melting through or inter-penetration is what ultimately works up the contingent edges according to which we find our bearings from one moment to the next. This is never finished with. It is a pondering – a perplexion that we literally find ourselves in the midst of and yet, from one surface encounter to the next we work up the meaning of what that can be through the timing of this approach-a conjoint multitude of timings that come together and mesh to cohere into a grip or knot, a certain sense or value of what that event can be.


If this all sounds vague, well that is the point. It’s in the vagueness that the movement continues, sketching over and over the same ground until an agreement of what that something is that is recognizable, comes through. Already it is vanishing at the point where we entered it because it is only the limited encounter of where our interest is put, that a clarity patterns itself. That is the value that it then holds. A certainty that holds our integrity to that place at that time. Yet our experience is of cohesion through and through- because it is supported by a far wider environment- defined by the very nature of these expulsions that set into relief a certain level view.


For something to come through we must remain in this haziness- tolerate the messiness that brings up the tangible level. That level is never fixed- it is no bench-mark, but a wavering striking up of scales that hold together at that pitch but give way to another level of cohesion- a new grip of interest in which we strike up a resonance that expands. It expands because we have put ourselves into that constellation so that it becomes relevant and useable- apt and applicable in the humanness of our endeavour.


This would mean that abilities- physical co-ordinations, sensory perceptions, emotional certainties, gestures, utterances, signs, symbols are second order events bolstered by the intermingling of on-going re-workings.

Coming together and coming undone is about the timing of these multitudes that swarm in excess of any set border.

The borders upon which we feel a limit; measure a sensation, push against a surface, configure intensities of light or sound into recurrent recognizable patterns; make out of this the metaphors of our values, are only there within the process of these involved practices.


Values through and through penetrate our grasping and cohering of sense data, co-ordinate physical missionaries that we become. It turns out that it is the wide and unfathomable canopy of propulsive interconnections that never entirely close off to a further conglomerate- a further assemblage, that is the atmosphere of every distinct move or thought, utterance or decision upon which the facts of life are built.


We cannot get a hold of that canopy which houses us. It is our environment- our habitus and we as much as anything else grow like a crystal out of the medium of this chemical soup. But that is not something outside of our values, meanings, intentions and the coming and going of emotional states. These are active compulsive forces in the stirring of that mix- out of which our bodies in this specific faculty or that, come into a purpose of some sort, or dissipate in order to partially cohere- partially dissolve into another motioning- another matter of concern or of importance as Whitehead will call it.


From the sweep of a movement comes the possibility of placing a pause- of grasping an attention towards a specific notch of consideration; what we may come to call a substance. That substance is nothing but a cut, deep or shallow, variable in any case, in the process of this churning of possible admixtures. We articulate by building up movements in and out of phase with other revolutions- creating fixed holding patterns of recurrence through constraint, then loosening and widening the orifice of our attention- physically relaxing the grip of our own particular integrity in that one juncture; letting the net slip through our fingers- timing the catch. Not that fish, not that one, but there, now: hold, close for a moment. A quality of sensation- smoothness of a moist body writhing in our hands, before again the motioning continues, the fish jumps free. We are all slipping through one another. We are catchers and we are fish. Sensation is that- an attention and a going into the slow motion of an apprehension- what Whitehead calls prehension. It’s a quality of involvement- a quality of control or limit within the limitless; the infinitude.


This all seems vague and wide and non-committal except in purely philosophical terms. Yet Whitehead is clear to point out that it is the philosophic level that can address together, what in any era would be contradictory categories of attention that are already second order exclusions. At a more penetrative level those categories would create a working assemblage for prehension- pulsing on-off between an attentional pendulum that at a different speed of revolution would cohere into a unity; an on-going buzz or hum. In that sense philosophy is always an historical investigation and a practical investigation- it looks at the speeds of approach in which certain frames of reference cohere and others dissolve. It looks at the composite winding-unwinding motioning of our attention behind and yet giving rise to any specific details relating to facts as we see fit to describe them. It also forewarns against various closures that are taken as self-limiting prequisites for thought or functionality or humanness or emotion and situates these frames into a wider contingency that must be allowed to play out in order for a wider set of possibilities to play out.  It  performs these variable renditions that convert sameness to difference and back again testing the crackle and buzz of points of immanence as compositins slurr in and out of lucidity- a lucidity contingent upon the environmental factors of a particular period of time; the values that hold within that time-frame.


There is a danger- a real danger which Whitehead warns against- that definitions of what it means to be human or what it means to be aware- to hold to a conscious state, to bring forth language and to grasp emotional states, is ringed and cut out from a liveable context of eminence that actually drains the life blood of those particular states by recursively determining their credibility back on to these self-selected limitations. Yet the limits grow out of a wider circuit of coming and going- a pulsing configuration of this area of interest and then that. A process. In a very real sense language does not speak out of itself but out of all the acts and ways of being that did not make it to that particular table; because it was delayed or in a hurry or not invited. The same goes for physical co-ordination, intention, goal, sensory focus particularly in sight and sound. It is bolstered, partially submerged, buffered, propped up, limited and defined to that sliver of attention that sets it on a particular course by all the tactile, kinaesthetic, swaying and motioning dances that are not completely upright, not completely lateral but describe a spiralling winding and unwinding on the way through but never finally concluded in any set position. Somewhere in the interval between a beginning and an ending that is more an idea- a value than an actual place of permanent residence.


Yet learning is so often about abstracting these ideal places, states, forms. An autistic child is given a picture of a “happy face” and a “sad face” to teach them about emotion. Physiotherapy seeks to break into small parts the mechanics of knee bend and joint rotation in order to teach an injured or disabled person to take a step. Speech therapy creates exercises in which a person vocalises perfect OOOs and PPPs and feels their breath on the back of their hand or on a piece of glass as the sign of life. Reading programs create phonetic sound-bites then sewn together bit by bit into more and more complex units. Always the building blocks are taken as having an existence outside of the wider building or pattern in which ultimately they are placed like the missing pieces to an already existant jigsaw puzzle.


But what if we start with the idea of the building or the whole even outside of any material? What if the units only even exist as glints and shards where the light gets in or the shadow deepens within the complex of contrasts set into motion out of the idea of the whole? This idea is not something that can be sensorially integrated all at once because it opens out over time, in the process of various engagements and insertions and re-arrangements- almost as a domestic preamble. But there is something like an atmosphere or a milieu which is more like the Occasions that Whitehead describes in which varying concentrates emerge as contingent compositions that define and hold each other. These seize attention- they place us- they co-ordinate limbs and sensations. These vague atmospheres-a rising resonance that builds like a dissipative gas- is the canopy in which particular functions come together. It is a society of occasions, to use again Whitehead’s terminology in which we are all bound to exist in the only way that is possible right then.


What then is disability, social mal-function, disengagement, redundancy of purpose, - weakness in limb or mind. An inability to connect with others; autism, phobia, paranoia, panic, isolation? Perhaps again these are already second order semantic terms. It is more practical to look at the circumstances where these envisaged human foreshortenings that seems to be the validated symptoms of a diagnostic certainty outside of time and unaffected by situations, become something different- something unexpected.

All I can do is gather a selection of situations- random moment of noticing. A certain quality coming through in connection that creates different kinds of jointing through the body, between people, across the distances of rooms and through the separate episodes of different meetings strung out between school curriculums, bus-journeys, meal-times, home-times; conformities and non-conformities in short succession.


How to describe when something goes one way and then all of a sudden it goes a very different way. How to pin-point the cause, to reapplicate it, to create policy out of it, to communicate it, when it is the traction of both directions that count? What is noticed are moments of connectivity- where something disparate and uncoordinated; the flaying of limbs the scramble of words, the push and pull against bodies resolves or re-orders into something that seems impossible to have built out of the elements present. Yet it is out of those discrepancies- the pure text-book autistic spinning and flapping of limbs or words in repetition, the stiffened spasm reflexes of twist and jarring upon touch- the leaning forward and backwards above and beyond any gage of normal gait, the breathless breathing back and forth into gasps of air sunk down and bubbling up again, the scrambled story-book circular world that it would seem impossible to go beyond within the borders set out, the spinning of marbles until they jolt out of their container and launch themselves into the air. The eating of sand.


Surely this stuff is irrelevant. Un-useful and not to be encouraged. Yet it marks time; performs time in a particular way. There is push, shove, momentum, fall, spin and lift; a going down and a coming back up again. There is contrast. There is a certain gage between varying levels of intensity held open, played out. It is enough. There’s nothing in the details themselves to be saved for later. Nothing of value in the objects or even necessarily in the use they are being put to.

What is of value is the context for these occurrences- a context that does not exist outside of the actions- the stops and starts of this rhythm of action that plays out.

A process. The details cannot be itemized, taken apart. There is no choice to be made between this and that. Between the appropriate or educationally valid and the inappropriate- the autistic fragment that needs burning out to contain and secure the purity of good human contact; the real stuff of being human. It’s all muddled up together and so it must stay. The value is not in any portion just like emotion is not in the heart. But it is certain things that play out that come to mean or be valued as affecting the heart or as expressions of heart.

That also happens within these strange or classically pronounced sub-normal standards of behaviour. Another element arrives but it is dissipative- perhaps immanent to the very process underway- the rhythm of stops and starts that suggests a pulse that then further orders the actions until a certain interest and value is put on that procedure and it is carried further. It is the atmosphere of the sounds that are the peripheral or collateral offshoot of the actions. They then become the main thing. That then lends itself to a body motion and literally sends the body into a variously altering series of sways and staccato stops and starts. It is a dance. All the time, the objects like the beads looping through the hands of a Greek man are running and circulating- hardly counted, hardly positing a position in themselves, but running on, keeping a certain circulation of tempo, evolving a course of ;procedure that now and again is interrupted, sent back on itself. There is a running to and from between bodies- dispositions that are bleeding out of any containment yet defined and shored up into certain felt limitations by the presence of one another. A certain feeling of connection through the actions. A formality of environment that is neither yours nor mine but falls beyond, falls between. Co-ordination is this and the girl who splays and collapses and kicks out is charged through and through with the musicality of this encounter with another small autistic boy across the room. The blonde haired boy gazes into non-space and she catches and gathers these shards in the atmosphere through her lolling swaying gait. It becomes the resonance – the off shoot of every up-down motioning against floors, walls, bodies and with the use of the random objects- object against objects to rattle and tap and crash down upon one another.

The boy looks on. He listens with his eyes. He presses one foot down and then the other, compensating one drift with another, circulating around this rotational core between one kind of leaning and another. By lifting his arms up as he rocks, his body automatically turns- He falls into the turn and spins. His head moves forward as his body arrives. He is grasping the moment with his body. Here, then here, then here

The atmosphere is everywhere – the gaze, the attention-the entrapment, enchantment- the story told and the world lived in. It is everywhere. There is no specific place on the body and in the landscape for signal and reception. Yet out of this quality of dissipation- the non-verbal utterances that are textures spread into light-dark, on-off pressure, in-out breath, forward-backward motioning, some kind of transference occurs; something like a spin, a recursive seizure and back-thread, an assimilation and letting go. Recognition is there. Compassion, empathy, emotion. Happy-sad, yes- the emergencies of partial connections, incomplete, throttled, reattributed in their making, held open in their incompleteness. Harmony if it ever exists comes through on the rebound of all of its doubles- all of its shadow discordances.

If teachers don’t values this coming through, the conditions for this coming through will never occur- will never be held in place- will not cohere from one fraction of an occurrence to another. In other words the multitude beneath any situation of integrity will not be allowed to play out- or if it does so it will go unrecognized as if it never really happened. In that sense it will not have happened. How to describe an event that does not take place? Only in the negative- as a lack of individual functioning. For the environment in which it would play into a connective set of functions that cohere only through that assembly, is disallowed. Only the disassembly beneath the bounds of any held area of interest is seen and surprisingly seen to matter. This disassembly comes to define humans carried over like a loose number out of the context of any equation, in to a kind of negative equity.

Everything is worked out in one instance; seize the moment. All coheres around that point played up to a certain speed in which value comes through. That is something precious that is found in every moment and is only of itself- not a metaphor for something else.  It arises out of a context in which the peripheral and the central concern are one- like a moon travelling over the sun- the full impact of the sun is known at the edge of its occlusion. The edge is made useable - made to matter and regarded in thought, pattern and affect. That is how using the body as a timer for stops and starts of affect is an excercise in thought and value and attention in the very way that it becomes a discriminatory tool. The emotional and cognitive and perceptive and sensory state is not in an area of function or in a certain way of presenting or signalling. It is in how we use these timings to discrimminate and to connect. The practice of those timings brings up or foreshadows other faculties by degrees and in stages like filters that affect a generalised character that fine-tune endlessly sets of characterisations acting on one another. These dispositions are open networks that work on and off further connections and further foreshortenings. The life of these medleys is more vital than any one point of interest though it gives life and vibrancy to every point of interest. We embody different facets of that pulsing interest in life and death choices and reconfigurations of how we positon ourselves between such  extremities. What we experience is never either/or. We embody the admixture of abstract opposites lived out and being alive by their very incompleteness. Movement is the momentum and backlog between the pull and break of these forced out opposite states. We fill a vacuum of our own making.

Creating the conditions for that vacuum or entropy is what causes the rush of filling. That 's how we seize the moment- between emptiness and fullness collapsing one into another continuously- moulding possibilities- turning through straight lines and the near or actual collisions that these bring- bouncing out of jams caused by limiting sums and eroneous calculations that add the impetus. Re-inventing space by envisaging lines of traction through our body's instantaneous affects upon the surfaces of this environment. An environment that we lay out through our conjoint actions. That we dance into credibility