THE HARD AND THE SOFT

The repeated turn gets undone bit by bit. No need to rush it. Let it rest in the familiar. In the comfortable. Then in time the tables will turn. Up will be down and down, up and the disaffected left side or right side; the raised shoulder and the lowered hip will redistribute. Even when the brain so tapped into certain procedures that avoid these visitations, it will be half enticed, half duped by the sheer rhythmic lull of it all and the tap tap tap of this episodic merging will become an intensity- a habitat- a place to sit down; camp out and notice the sweeping rush of other visitations which oneself we will be host to. Hospitality is that. Turning the tables on who comes and who goes and the brush of air in all that passes. Birds on a wing; fragments of voice and cloth swelling on the airwaves and trickling back down to nought.
These swells and falls- the rise and descent of all that interests us are our attention.

An attention to detail- the fine motor procedures of thumb and forefinger; the graspability of all that is within our reach is fore-mostly this yawning stretch- a lull in the reverberations of the echoes of our own sounding- in amongst all that charges us; all that diverts; this confluence of up and down, backwards and forewords, inside and out. And there where the one breaks ranks and tumbles into another and yet another configuration- fractional equations that keep multiplying as any stringent directive- it leans out of its bracket into another run-way and another and another. So there is this side-jump of procedures- the multiplicity swells; figures on figures on figures which is our motioning and furthering over and over again.


We fill the sides we have forgotten, the angles we no longer seem to take account of through this kind of slippage. There's this arching of an opening, this yawning of a closure as the bracket intervals shift. Yet they do not lose the coherence of the journey - of the fraction by fraction disparity to this side or that for they are hinged or jointed around a deeper bodily integration. Where all slides, shifts, opens and closes; where there is this never-ending muffling of original contours. This knot out of which all else flays and scatters is a collecting point. The dualities of our two armed, two legged, two eyed, two brained leanings is pinned upon this bodily counter directive. A pin-point of on/off pulse, of open-closed, pressure and release that then hiccups and animates in our lurching this way and that way into the pockets of our own disparities. Yet rhythm makes of this asymmetrical lurch; this constant fall into one side and the mismatched extremity of a fall the other way, and picks up the slack just at the point of inertia and memory loss as we begin to tumble relentlessly into one enclave of our physical neurological bearing or the other. And this rhythm threads it back the other way- so that the pulse of on/off pressure begins a walk, a run. And the very asymmetry itself, by opening up vacuums and glitches in the fibre of repeatability enacts reversibility.


Speed escalates and then halts in a sudden downward pressure to become a turn, a spin, a jump or a halt as we keep on forwarding down into the ground whilst simultaneously our bodies remain where they are. This is thought as possibility that is performed on the counter-directive of a body in motion.


How to use these yearnings? The tendencies of directives not fully played out into their optimum exclusion. How to cut into this self-fulfilling worlding of one dimension, one sidedness, one aspect that would cauterize it's twin rival and parasitically thrive on the other one's loss if appeased in its relentless excess? How to halt mid-aspect these derivatives and branch them like the tendrils of lung tissue into an endless differentiation? Each direction is mediated, softened and spun into the haze of atmosphere that no longer simply crosses the terrain- hovering in its haste above the contact that would alter directive, complicate opinion but is entangled like hair driven by a ceaseless wandering into curls; into vegetation that is a canopy to a whole ecology of counter-intuitive tendencies that allow it to thrive; to set up conversations within its parts and so to go just for the ride with any concept or story of a whole.

How to use this counter-intuitiveness; the sabotaging of any single directive so that it does not renegade into habitual certainty but is freshened in this very halting and questioning of its fundamental rooting system. To find that anchorage not in the limb itself; not in the eyes, the ear; the pocketed attribute with its disposable outcomes and functional preferences, but more deeply at the level of the pulsing between opposites- the metaphorical shifting from fact to story, from organ to vibration. This is always a dyad relationship; the breathing in and out, the stretching and compression; the reaching and the containment. Arms are not just there to pick something up dangling until they do so at either side of a trunk. They are the extension of that trunk through a stretch that explodes out into the atmosphere that is a reaching through and a connecting up of all life. These are not competing twins. They are a composite and durational intensity that root all further patterning- all difference and all exclusivity back into nebulae capable of regenerating the lost-ness of our forgotten aspects into and through the visibility of those interests that we give credit to. It is to notice that reaching is anchored in a drawing back and that all embodiment splinters into the atmosphere that holds us there. So that at every level of our being there is this relatability.

Take a tendency and let it travel through its comfort zone. Where ever it locks, drop off from this motioning and wait. Put a slight traction on this point that could be an arm held mid-air or a breath that seems to halt itself between filling and empting. Something will shift- redistribute and run through like a trapped air-bubble in a radiator system that suddenly shifts like a burp. The running through may reverse on itself so that the motioning, the breath, the thought, the area of interest and attention runs at a different speed, in a different direction, at a minutely varying angle. This is how a different dimension is crafted out of the old, using these established practices, rituals, habits and repetitions as the very context out of which the disparity, difference and change is accounted for. Out of the contrast, aspects of visibility; a shifting staggered continual re-emphasis shows up in relief as the thrust of our attention forged in the movement rather than as bounded visual contours.


They are the thresholds of a depth reading- of pressure/release, pulse and pause worked into different intervals that gradually become coherent maps through which splinters of detail shine through. They shine through against the predictability that runs a course and is then experimentally tampered with; tweaked in time-specific ways. It’s these glitches showing through that become the jewelled treasures of our noticing- our awareness- A redistributed attention that is both selective and peripheral- that hums into a vibrational field of multiplicity interpenetrating and simultaneously selecting moments of detail on the verge between anticipation and reformulation.


The model is continually broken and tampered with. Yet in order for that to mean anything- to show up as difference at all a frame like a background chant must first be worked up. This working up of a frame of anticipation as a kind of refrain is the habitual context of co-practices out of which all events then come and go. So between the background and foreground new limbs, eyes and sensory turns are swung out. They become this fanning of gestures, feelings and bodily experiences; a hairs’ breadth away from what was done before and yet acting together as oppositional holdings to create a locking in this melding cross-current of joints.


So the practitioner reads into these differential roles continuously to become the push me pull you counterforce to any tendency that begins to feel itself; to know itself through this encounter mid way between one point and another breaking into and out of every angle of approach to what seems otherwise to be a road of continuation - of compulsion.

Between one compulsion and another- one spasm and another, one drifting and another there are continuous fractional alterations of subtle stoppage, re-anglement and re-vitalised flow. This must be forged, made, collated, composed and drummed into being relationally through every encounter between bodies, between muscles, between fibres between the gaseous exchange that is on-going and everywhere.

The hard and the soft is a condition of reconfiguring what exactly each comes to mean; of constantly staying alert to the possibility of the one in the other.