BETWEEN ACTIONS

Where the action stops the movement continues in the thought of it. The stop is the trigger for this furthering- it’s the jolt of hesitation that sends shock waves or at least flurries of reverberation into a splintering affect of all the tenure surrounding. That is how we know or remember it is there. In this diversification and flooding into channels and rivulets from a main source- the directive under way- there is choice about how exactly to place this on-going way. There’s this tempering- a tenderisation that allows the journey to feel itself out in the up-down dynamics of minute gradations of going into and coming out of a level of support. That level support is always changing- erupting and sinking on our every contact so that the level is always a non-existent average out of all the extremes that actually play out. It’s through persistent engagement and re-adaptation that the level and the interior – the passage and the dwelling- mediate as the terrain we occupy. Are we within it, on top of it, floating above it? We are all of these- in the intricate interpolations in which organism-environment mesh into disparate views of the same connectivity.


It’s then the action that arranges the idea. Even as it is halted in its tracks and the idea like the yolk of an egg carries on spinning once the outer shell has been inhibited. The generative aspect of the thought is the physical motioning or rather the friction of surface against surface that sets into revolution the turns from one point of contact to another. So this constant matching and twinning of the body as a revolving surface is the actual engagement of the feeling or experience of the weightiness of our bodies. That of our going up and coming down that is never exactly only this.


Engined in the temptations for interruption, usurpation, pause, detour and delay, these are actually the tools of our consciousness. In the tendency and the anticipation of the furthering of that tendency into bodies in motion, a ritual chant is drummed up. In its delay a single directive becomes a flurry of patterning. All that needs to happen is that a stick be thrust in the moving waters for us to feel the force of that motion as we go with the flow, than irresistibly hold up that flow in a sudden flash instance of sabotage. A localised and instantaneous on-off affair; in this there is a reckoning with these forces of continuation and inertia. It acts like a sounding out- like an instrument interrupting the wind and so interpreting that soundless colourless wind in terms of durational notes of harmonic colour and rhythmic frequency- it’s the staccato of intervals and pause-gaps that thrusts the disposition into its sudden negative image. Between the continuation and its stoppage something of our speed is read back to us. We read this against a momentarily stable context- the ground we push against, the hand we press back towards, the wall we lean against and push off from.


This interruption may be a piece of paper that stops the forwarding of the ink and catches it in splatters; a piece of derelict ground the growth of which is temporarily stopped and curtailed by a pair of pruning shears. And so it becomes a picture, a garden; a diagram of use in the actual use and the time it takes for that use to go on using.

The filling of a space to bursting point – no more. These are the indicators of a limit- the stiffening of a boundary that we push against and make happen- that we feel our own push in terms of.


A boy manically fills an empty box with pieces of coloured felt. Then with a long piece of string- it pops out the box and I pull it by the end making a long pathway out of it which I follow back through and into the box. I do not fit in the box. Only the tip of my left shoe does. The boy looks at me- but gives up on the idea of trying to stuff me back into the box. I hide round the other side of a blue plastic tube that is boy- sized but not adult-sized. I pop my face in the far end entrance partially blocking out the light and catching the attention of the boy in this drop of luminosity. He follows my face at the end of the tunnel until bodily he is in the tube. Once there, there is a sudden realization of where he has got to. He backs out quickly and tries to pull me through by the hand with him. I will get stuck so I back out like a reverse image of him and bang my hands on the roof of it. He does the same and the container extractor suddenly becomes a hollow drum. We conceptualize its volume by hearing back the thud and the resonation of our every point of impact.


He sees a balloon partially deflated so that the sides are thicker than usual; rubbery. He pulls it every which way but it bounces back into its slightly oval misshapenness. He punches it, bangs it then sinks his teeth into it and crunches down. The rebound of the balloon pops his jaws back open. He crunches down some more at a different angle- again his mouth flies open in to an uncomfortable large rebuke forced upon him and the balloon bounces away. He grabs it and rams it with all his effort into the plastic container. He makes sucking thudding noises with his lips to indicate that he wants the lid stuck on top. I hand him the lid. It pops back out. He hands it to me and makes the same thudding blipping sounds between his lips. I slam it down and it bounces back up at me. He is getting desperate and angry wanting to stamp on, to crush, to hide and destroy the troublesome mass. He wants the air inside demolished- brought under control, released from its imprisonment where it pumps and distorts a stubborn body with a substance that is there but is made up of air- of nothing. This nothingness is hard to conquer- it gets away each time- redistributes. The elasticity of the balloon rubber simply contorts- squashed in one place to pump up and balloon in another. He finally tucks it under his legs. He can feel it under his thighs. He knows it’s there but he pretends otherwise. Yes it’s gone. It isn’t there at all any more. He looks this way and that past his body with the knees raised high up for-shadowing the balloon mass that he hides below and that has dislodged his own body composure with all that trapped nothingness so that his knees bunch up towards his chest. He throws out his gaze this way and that, pitching it out like the guy ropes of a tent that must get away from the void of the tent in order to stabilize it. So he learns about attentional displacement- a way to distract in order to do away with what can not be physically concealed. He learns the trick of the material body from the void of a half filled balloon.

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The ground; it is the way we test it out that gives it its credence- makes it legible. It is the sudden halting of our bodies on the ground that gives us the variations of turn, bounce and absorption- this playing with speed and how that impacts on weight.

We literally become different entities in these many facetted and mixable practices. We stir up recipes of what it means to congeal and what it means to break off- of brittleness and pliability, of impulses for travel and homing instincts. We make it so in the way we work in the immediacy of the interruption and delay- in what it brings on and how we adapt provisional rules that enfold and disappear and reconfigure in the indents of one anther.


So it is the movement that gives us pause and the pause that gives us the idea; the notion; the pattern of a movement as it reconfigures and shifts a little in dimension like layers in layers of transparency that rinse through different versions of emphasis that let through or temporarily inhibit the flow of one another. Light becoming colour. Legibility- the reading of marks on a surface comes and goes out of this tempering of the ground with our drumming bodily invasions and ejected flights.



The marks are the dark vaults that do not get filled- the negative spaces where tendencies balance and negate one another. They become the lulls- the truly void that are legible in terms of the accumulation of directives that crowd and seize one another on the verge of these chasms. At last when all of that is done, there is a negative space- an enduring out of the context of a depth where intermeshed layers create the brackets from out of which resolves seem to appear and disappear again.