The body multiple

The body doesn’t simply move as one- as a single plane of integrity that shifts from here to there. It moves as a multiple of co-affecting tendencies that intermesh, intensify and dissipate in constant re-distribution. Some kind of shuffling aeration that is never done with. It is an undulation of rippling admixtures. A wave within a wave surmounting and effacing, absorbing and subsuming in variously held depth readings that are really low level meetings or collisions of various consortiums that come together and come apart. How something gets going is a low level affair- a slight stirring, a fractional variable between variously held temperatures where difference is highlighted in a sudden clash of proximity, or sudden instances of compression-release, of heaviness and lightness of flow and interruption. Out of these incidental holdings the beginnings of a coherence ensues as something is made out of the line of contrast across which different qualities and our growing awareness of this accumulation of possible gradients becomes a workable force; a lever of some sort that is not initially functional in nature. It is simply a line where one quality of hardness breaks off into a contrasting quality of plasticity, or heat and cold meet, or compression and release. This is not a fixed line but something played out intrinsically and intimately as a differential at every point at which it is felt and so becomes real to experience. Mind works itself out of these differentials that accumulates and disperses – that holds onto mass and collapses again into rivulets of flow. At the heart of form then there are these shifting sands, these waves of wind that shape according to the redistribution of particles and the residue they leave behind. At the heart of movement too there is this form out of the utter stillness of collision where synergetic forces hold and complement one another as a negative entropy- a moment of perfect symmetry between all colliding forces which acts like a zero point, until another shift upsets the integrity of this vacuum and mass fills the gap or flows out to the periphery as that particular dwelling comes undone, its elements taken up in other assemblies.


Where is our awareness placed in all of this convolution? Actually it is a sketch between all possible variables and to stop it would see it run for cover or make out of mere constructive fancy something outside of the conditions that actually bring it into activation. For activation is a dispersive and shifting attention that follows in waves- in the stops and starts of accumulative dwelling and disappearance – in expectation and negation, in formulation and erasure a pattern of minute displacements- a series of tilting exposures that are partial evocations – momentary balance points on the cusp of insignificance. Item by item they never add up to much. For the pump of their exposure is precisely this- a device or process like a ceremony of conditional placements held tentatively by all that they are not, twinned in a network of backgrounds and disappearing horizons that are the body proper of what brings up this process into relief. We play out these series of attentions and erasures- of recognition and forgetfulness, just as we take in a breath, hold it to a point just before it would become a choking gasp, and then let go again. We create simply in the in and out breath entrails along which our bodies like multitudes of gathering crowds -a medley of disorganised colours and sounds, suddenly adhere to a line of going forward, gong backwards- a rocking presence that is the undulation at the heart of our bodies and of our tendencies towards and away from compulsions, attractions, compassions and fears. We are the wavering tendrils of our own blinking activation. The on-off fracture line of compression-release that is a low level shock that scatters and re-adheres like magnetic filaments, a patterning that is above, below and beyond any single source element of a composure. Composure, bearing, settlement is a kind of refrain out of all the points of endless agitation and reconfigurement out of which we draw the patterns in which our own bodies rest. There are countless actions, activations, adaptations through which forces become reckonings in relation to one another and a semblance of presence – a certain shape that is nothing more than a warm spot demarcated on the edge of coldness gets going.


If we do anything together we do this dance of low level agitation and redistribution in which we do not meet as enclosed units with defining and comprehensive levels of self motivation and agency but rather we open up this stream-line of multiple coexisting circulations that begin bit by bit to influence and set in momentary lines of stability, one another. These are our on-going reckonings. They are our dialogic interface that is reset indefinitely along a line that only exists at the fold of variously held differences. This is touch when it is adaptive; when it is a feedback system for continual re-composure. It may be proximal or it may be across the variance distances in space. It may be the warmth of a hand or the fluctuation of a voice, a slow turning or a momentary glance. Facility comes up from behind not in our features alone or the tool-box of our set faces between eye, nose, mouth and ear but even before this gets going in the slight tendency that is coming through the lines of recognition and disappearance in the transformation itself. It is in our moving compulsion before the movement is ever set in terms of an action, a gesture, a mood, an event. However this touch may play out it always plays out through the duration of time. Transformation marks this play of forces in the very composition of our bodies which meld and adapt together and in the alignments through which we address one another and hang together between ground and sky.


Between you and I there is an interim that is forging and coming undone – capacities come and go as subsidiary resonances out of this play of variation that is the compelling journey of our disruptive attention. Attention buckles and kicks. It bucks and freezes. It runs and halts. Attention lives and dies in countless mannerisms that startle, excite, terrify and absorb us. They are our motivation and our inhibitions- our running pulse and the blood clot of an immoveable constraint. We push and rebound off of them making something out of this very unsettlement- learning about reversibility-about twist, torsion and plasticity through the stoppages. Three dimensional space is lived out according to the law of opposites where we reach a limit and backfire into another vicinity. Similarly we break down the tendrils of filiations into narrower and narrower pathways of navigation where every detour becomes the point of a scalar shift- a moving into and through absorption or a minute fluctuation-detour that begins to weave a texture unknown outside the application of that specific encounter. So encounters are our activation point which guide us like a negative bounce into compositions through which our bodies coalesce, cohere and dissipate all at once, enfolding and out-folding as they live out the pump of this multiple assembly.


Disability is a limit factor created by co-environmental seizure in the midst of an on-going affect. At the other side of this capacity gulf, is an encounter where the moment of affect has been held at arms’ length. There are multiple non-players in that un-met medley. This gulf creates a hesitation and the problem is never resolved but a moment in time is held outside the process which is always a technical question- an utterance waiting for the feedback of this very particular resonance that somehow becomes un-received and un-fed back. Engagement is the way to re-orientate this thread of a half asked question. That can be done not by focusing on capacity, function and fixing in what is traditionally seen as a less than fully competent body system, but rather by aligning processes into wider patterns of tilt, dispersion, displacement, relocation. It is the wider pattern of attentions through which assemblies run in order to forge together and break apart that articulation is reimbursed across our mutual flesh-cognition-feeling brackets. We are dealing here with exposures and evocations- With tension and relaxation, compression and release, intensity and dispersal. We are dealing of course with the pump of a process that folds back and forth in order to integrate oppositional forces into a coherence of induction and reaching out. It is the in-breath and the out-breath, the holding and letting go, the hot and the cold, the slow and the fast, hard and soft. These differentials are not givens; they must be played out and forged out of the way tendencies comes together suddenly to create friction, force, torsion or gradually disperse to create accommodation, absorption and least resistance. All oppositional frames are useable but they dwell deeply and are made into something when these chance configurations are patterned into compositional memory maps; into far- reaching environmental and body maps, into intricate multi-dimensional sculptures of co-action where speed is suddenly slowed into form, form suddenly swirls into the rise and fall of its making- where holding and letting go become one and the same playing out on top of and inside out of one another- making what is up, down, what is down up, what is left right, what is right left. This tilting motivating accommodation resides at the centre – the centre being found only out of all the spiralling patterns of shifting disturbance through which it is engaged. It is built up as an intensity that becomes located only in its actual use. It is a common denominator for balance created through adaptation at the lowest centre-point of gravity- where disturbance is a life affirming activation which is reintegrated continuously, shifting, tilting and recombining the periphery of our every casual encounter inwards and outwards to travel in leaps and bounds swelling beyond any given demarcation into a depth of a unified milieu.