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.

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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.

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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.