This Apparent Life

There is a shift. Not exactly a movement- a displacement. A far reach or yearning.- an inclination like a yawn or a tendency to arch a distance not through ordinary locomotion but as a kind of embrace. The near and far is held proportionally in that embrace which is like an interval sensitive to the miniscule incidents-filaments- the flossing and filtering of stuff amidst stuff that is not exactly movement, not exactly stillness. It is both. The quality of the breath and its propensity to widen and close.

A never exacting interval that is always perfectly attuned to the conditions of its holding and is yet never complete- not yet finalised as this or that.

How we find ourselves of a day- in one temperament or another- subject to a mood or inclination or affected by this or that nervous, physical or thought condition, is likewise never closed- yet also it is a perfectly formed interval, arching from one physical location to another- patterning in that arch, a tendency to both displace but yet to keep a connection through that initial place.

In this way our conditions are our opportunities- the boundary or limit condition is the moment of leaping or ejecting out of that area- like a blind person that reaches the curvature of a room through its negative sensory impression and ascertains the possibility of what is beyond that room by careful examination of the details at her finger tips and modulated in a thousand beckonings and retreats, according to the very texture of give and take between her body and the constitutive responsiveness of the wall. How very much more intricate and what a possibility for yet further thresholds of difference and variance in the touch between one body and another who find corridors, rivulets and pauses of relative absorption and bounce not according to any single material bearing but according to how the play of surfaces in speed, volition and stoppage bring about qualities, values and potential constraints-flows through which substances emerge and recede again. A kind of dance struck up between two otherwise inert and separate bodies that in actuality are never apparently separate for they only emerge as what they are in and during that dance.

Even in supposed separation the dance continues- intertwining filaments and fissures that course around one another through the breaking and grinding down of traces of sound, volume, temperate, and some sort of value system that is a co-mingling of every other into each other like a semblance that can no longer be taken apart; that is cherished through this intermeshing responsiveness so that in this tumbling, what is inside is then outside and what is outside enfolded back into the inside. These folds upon more folds begin to flake and absorb, break off and melt back down so that it is not anything in particular that is there to be cherished- only the process itself- a composition-decomposition so intimately entwined that the evolution and devolution is totally indistinguishable and only the pattern of coming and going remains. That alone is the embrace- an embrace without hands, without fingers, without inner organs or outer skin- an atmosphere that pervades and through which all else occurs only as secondary attributes.

A disability- an inability at one level or another to engage in the consigned manner with these secondary attributes- to pick up this or that- to go there or here carried on the regular bending and flexing of the lower limbs- the heart carried into an overt energy on the slightest touch, pumping and thundering out of it's cavity, the balance swinging back but not forward, forward but not back, the upper body spasming ‘till the hands are tight mittens with brittle turned in fingers, the head swimming and un-locatable in the flash of body parts, the glare of lights that break up into a splintering as if the cornea over the eyes was being itself teared to shreds.. the breath expanding indefinitely but never refilling until it is nearly too late, or holding down like each gulp was another stone in the pit of one’s stomach that one can no longer spit out- the sounds that do not disperse or that accumulate to become a timpani of thunders that set in motion yet more thunders in the reverberations of echoes so that no original clear sound is anywhere decipherable out of the accumulation of copies on copies.

Disability as disturbance and the putting on hold of responsiveness- the arch of that pattern outwards against the limit factor of our own consignment. We are all partial and modulate this partiality in ever more refined levels of response. It makes sense then when addressing any kind of limitation on response to go into the detail - to fine tune the precise intricate moment when this becomes that- when touch as absorption, touches back and becomes propulsions, bounce - where flaccidity ignites into a flickering grip or simply the propensity for flow to condense against a momentary constraint. There again for rigidity and the spasming of over excitation to distribute into easy channels that may be convoluted or multiple or looping reversals of the initial directive that becomes blocked and so can only recurs over and over on itself in the wavering stutter of back and forth played out again and again.

So to follow the easy way- to learn this route that can never be pre-planned because it is subject to an infinite distribution of contacts and reversals. Where is dwelling possible? Where must it back up and give way? How to follow this stream between boulders, surfaces, densities- creating even within and through the hardest of substances, porous avenues and even where there is only apparent vacancy, a sense of pushing back, like ringing a cloth one way and another to gain traction out of our ease. We begin to define these higher order compositions- of smoothness, hardness, smooth, rough, movement, containment, light , heavy out of the way we play with sudden meetings, collisions, avoidances that pattern into multiple ripples of coming together and coming apart.

Thresholds are made in this way, out of the limit factors that would seem to make autonomous boundaries of partial capability out of a too fast or too slow meeting where attention, response and feedback is somehow usurped and we are left bereft in a mistimed vacancy with the impression of passivity in ourselves or others.

Co-dependence when attuned into the infinite capability of response at every moment becomes a fluid re-grafting of form and the capacities we attribute to these supposedly limited forms. We create this wide variable composition out of the very basic gross forms that we come to expect and recognise, and so begin to mix meaning out of hardly exposed stories and narratives that cut in, fill in , undo, rearrange and playfully admix in order to dwell in the very centre of what they are not. Identities begin to parody, curtail, elongate, spin out and abruptly redirect at the very junctures of co-independent growths. Sensitivities come and go like the tending of a plant life where sun, water, light, soils composition, pruning, wind, atmosphere all become intermingling events and the plant itself as it grows upright, bends, swivels, stunts, then suddenly blooms, fruits and dies only to re-emerge when new conditions present themselves, is only the inverse area of all the movements, collisions and interferences through which that body is given life.

Play with these compulsions, tendencies, disturbances, and interruptions and you create living systems through relational responsiveness whereby the pattern is greater than the limit factors of either you or another. Disability grows into a different pattern of capabilities not by healing or fixing the problem or creating specific treatments for dysfunction or sensory distortion, but by following the patterns of these limits into their natural co-dependant tendencies in the environment, in a song that is composing, in a movement tendency or a muscle tone tendency- in the very atmosphere of a resonance that is un-locatable either in this body or that but that the limit factor somehow jolts into manifestation. It is this manifestation and co recognition of the conditions of it s bearing that need to be enacted in shared processes of ceremonial play, action, work, rest that brings up the right way to live - and so the embracing and enfolding of value systems evolve at high levels out of these supposed limit factors in human capability or form making. For we can not find any kind of completeness or symmetry in one form in isolation but only through the running through of processes based on responsiveness and the awareness and feeling this seeds- That’s the embrace, both disparate and intimate at the same time- never static- always in a constant arching process of lengthening and curtailing- of redistribution at every point of its apparent life.

GAGING THE NEAR AND THE FAR

In the mesh between meetings- between expectation and result, there is a never-ending engagement. A pulsar on-off engagement that keeps on modulating at ever more impermanent discrepancies. This is the play of force. The miniscule working out of this in relation to that. The widening of a hairs' breadth of difference in which some sort of interest gets going. That is our attentional zone. Not some concentrated interface or speculative example of a quest for sure-footedness. Some specified zone of intensity or concentration. The absorption of what we are doing to the total exclusion of all that lies to the left or the right, the up or the down, the back or the forward. For these divergences are the spaces of operation- the garden of our memory that we build up- cobble together, work up into a viable texture. It pulls tight whilst stretching far apart into the distance where at last it is lost to the atmosphere of this common space we share with others as simple degrees of concentration. There is no single border-line. Or rather that border as threshold is being continually mocked up like a compositional program that holds according to all the influences of hard matter, dust particles, sounds, light frequencies, moods and muscle tone that go into this particular mix.


It is a take on life spectacular in its individuality. And once got going it cannot be broken into, interrupted or lost. It is a phase construction. it carries a momentum of its own- like a popular uprising that is not orchestrated anywhere in particular – or if it was that brief initial exposure quickly evolves out of its original oaring. It has no organisers but has a tendency that bleeds like ink into a soaked piece of paper, veining it, bringing up the intricacies of a substance that is really a pattern and that never exactly exists in this way until articulated through that process of absorption. This viral affectivity of growth that builds and so pushes into the next row of people, cells, filaments. Yet this is not exactly how it goes. For it is more of a resonance from the core outwards that is simultaneous and dispersed. There is this adjoining through that process of deep reverberation so that it is the expression- the voicing or doing- that seems to be the affection or infection of the joining up of singular pieces. Yet in the movement there is more a spontaneous thrust that joins instantaneously by affecting together a sensibility that grows into ideation, value and exposition.


The same as could be said for popular revolution could be said for the learning of a skill- functionality, advancement in any way- integration of physical, corporal, imaginative and emotional attributes. These are only called attributes because we see them as demarcated within the body of an individual. But they emerge as the threshold breakthrough of affects that at lower levels of activation are got going as countless runs and re-runs of compositional pulsar contrasts. These small level pressure-release modules are never actually separated out into specific localised limbs or organs or sensory capacitates. They are always already distributed because they only get going across levels of recognised difference. These recognised differences have to be literally worked into existence in on-going low level practices that repeat and differentiate. They become the residual context- the habitat of an ecology of pronouncements and tendencies that begin to hold and shape attention between the one tendency and the other- the on-off pressure- the slight tilt and the rebalance, the relative speed and pause, the certain timbre of a pitch and its slight descent or ascent. Between one level of volume and another there is already something of interest and there again between these two, a third and a fourth and a fifth until indefinitely there are variable s on variables and what at first became two indistinguishable compact extensions of one another becomes a slight rift- a separation - the sliver of a difference in which consciousness carries through on this physical-sensory propensity to gage one texture, speed, heat or sense of luminosity against the very slight variation.


So intensity builds up on this level on level like the rock face that builds on each previous face and that packs one set of circumstances against another. Memory dwells here. How does that come about? Only initially by playing with the possibility of a constancy - of a slight extension of a period of something maintaining itself- a rhythm, tone, pressure that repeats and joins up into a momentary presence- a gage like drawing a line in the sand or a plumb line through that sand that is almost immediately re-grafted, shifted, swerved or interrupted against that very line of demarcation. So that in doing so there is a contrast. That is what alights the attention- activates an interest in which discrimination becomes a discerning quality around which form and language, articulation of body and sound can hinge. This of course is a play of bearing - not an indisputable fact for all time. More a proposition which can then be reversed , argued against, tweaked and recoded indefinitely to create the intrigues through which we as persons relate- move towards/away from, wait, beckon, ignore, encourage, attend and re-investigate. That is the play of life in which capacities come and go- whether walking, talking, breathing, listening, whistling, singing smiling, crying, needing , not needing, laughing, resting. These are passing emblems into a wider context of significance that we work up and disrupt together as an intermesh of everything that touches us and confirms us from here to there and then explodes us in a new exposition of what is possible in yet another kind of distributed-compact composition.


Note: Written after working with M- a boy of 6 who learnt to walk not through localised tasks of leg functionality- but by widening his attentional field through shared practices of kinaesthetic and sensory-speed variations over time.