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.