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.