Tilting as deep ecology; the diagram of our movements.

29.3.11


There is an alignment that courses through the body, channelling our receptivity.

It bends and turns, swoops and soars. Our dynamic movement and the systems and circulations that rinse through us re-constituting every aspect of our bodily composure are one and the same; an ability to align and match up disparate points that become thoroughfares, thresholds, valves in this constant aeration; this continual validation.

Connectivity is happening at every aspect through and between bodies, objects, surfaces, ground and sky as a limit factor- a propulsion off or a passing through; a deep affect in adaptation that splinters and channels from a locally precise presence to an ever-evolving patterning of affects that journey and navigate as each point catches on to a new point, bellowing out like a wave carried by its own rising and falling momentum. This is a consciousness- an awareness that makes itself from the most insubstantial activation ever on in a series of displacements, accommodations, jumps and parallel run-ins. Patterns begin to set up their own internal dynamics- their own propositions that insinuate a bearing in us as fragment by fragment an integral position is reached and no sooner has that been done than it is let go of again. So we move and stop, circulate and pause with this ebb and flow of all the tributaries that enmesh into mass and filiate back out into the tendrils of our senses, our limbs; our reach-ability; our imagination. Feeling catches on to that patterning. When we run with it that is joy. Our connectivity acknowledged is a deep acknowledgement of that joy found in a shared presence of this human life.

This is a deep ecology of co-involvement that occurs at the physically constituting matter of our bodies- the actual dialogue that is being made between heaviness- lightness, fast-slow, up-down, left-right, back-forth, density and aeration, collision and bounce, obstruction and absorption. These are qualities of affect and actual compositions that are mediated and held in countless checks and balances by one another. This is why all of matter and the orientation of our limbs, our muscles, our bones, the fluid in our body, our nerve synapses, sensory endings in eyes, nose ears and mouth, skin porosity, the way we hold and let go of postures in countless abbreviations between flexion and loosening, playing into micro fine thresholds of mediated leanings and re-runs, hesitation and propensities towards movement create in our deepest kinaesthetic bearings an accumulative repertoire of micro timings, slight leanings and tilts.

Actively engaging with and using this tilting mechanism is to work speed variables into slight mismatches, - creating a disequilibrium in bearing and using the very pull of gravity which when allowed to run indefinitely would create collapse, a fall, an extremity unchecked in one direction or another- and holding the tension of that leaning for just long enough for a spring-like rewind to catch in. In this stored tension- the torsion of a twisted spine, a momentary hip displacement, a bracing and pause in the run of things, something catches in like a re-bound and there is a near automatic wavering into a wider balance in which connectivity, environmental support, communication and imaginative bearing creates leaps in song, visual glancing, echo, resonance and the continual reverberation of a series of dispersive affects set into some kind of co-influence that run a context for a wider and deeper placement- a co-involvement that can not exist in an autonomous symmetry but must lean and tilt and probe across boundaries into linked up networks; device- organisms that pulsate and pick up where one another end into a wider and more far-reaching co-equilibrium that mutually off sets one another’s potential point of over-run and collapse.

Co-ordination, timing, accommodation, adaptation mark this place of threshold and re-invigoration at a deeper level of integration without which there would be dissolution and no possibility of renewal. It is at the very point of near disintegration that renewal catches in and so it must be allowed to play out and to bend or tilt into this aggravated point of inconsistency- of potential unsettlement out of which a wider circuit of flows, embraces and mutual supports takes shape. The spiral movement is the outcome of these ever reconstituted displacements- and the willingness to stay engaged to these potential slippages and disaster places and improvises a new position on and on out of the conditions of that moment that is a direct feed into and out of the potential crisis of every instance.

At the root of this improvisational mode which is a physical activation of the body composure at many co-operative levels is the ability to wholly rely on new points of support away from a more confined and static sense of coherence and self-defensiveness; to give into the tilting and the momentary sense of falling; to tease out new compositions in affiliation to the ground, the sky and to one another both as necessary constraints and as imaginative, physical extensions. Environment is nothing more than this- a probing beyond and through ones own given boundaries which are frequently insufficient for the full range of movements, thoughts and feelings that are only constituted out of points of co- activation.

Without these, the alignments of all our circulatory, physical and communicative systems are in held contortions and the thoroughfares are misconstrued. More and more of our body composure becomes stultified as a bracing in parts, a flaccidity in other parts that no longer match up as a timed and coordinated pump into compression and flow and can no longer be a rhythmic renewal into and out of one another but instead are held statically as either/or in opposition and under attack of one another.

So, crucially the slight yet immobile misalignments between sacrum and cerebellum, between ankles and shoulder, or upper back and the backs of knee’s, between wrists and lower abdomen, hips and toes are an indication in diagrammatic form of the mismanagement of this mobile fluid system of renewal and circulation. The tilt becomes a static distortion rather than an angled lever that plays into a speed variance and affects a seismic change in direction and emphasis between deepening and lightening pressure gradients to involve an interplay of forces that becomes a bounce, an absorption, a waiting suspension, an aerated disposition; a porosity at the very heart of matter, density and so-called material physical bearing. So by attuning into these held and stiffened areas of spasm that are enveloping and hiding shadow weaknesses and flaccidity in other areas there is a biting through as an alignment is reinvigorated and between two disparate points- the sacrum and cerebellum- a mobile back and forth charge of variegated adjustment- like a pilot light, is reignited. The mobility is re-enveloped into a wider order of things so that when the sacrum tilts, the cerebellum also re-sets and in the interim back bone there is a nervous vitality of all the liquid diffusions as too in the chest cavity there is this aerated rising up when the foot and ankle probes deeper into the ground, sinking like a versatile buoy the sacrum, hip and abdomen that tilts and rocks and floats in order to create a level bearing for the upright body as it moves across uneven terrain, pushes down and pumps up to speed in running, walking, jumping, falling rolling, standing, sitting and rocking.

These alignments in the body run through and are activated through points of modulated touch interaction with the surfaces of ground, and human to human contact so that in a sense, alignments map and run their course through bodies, through space and through objects as a deep ecology of co-composition. They inform our bearing and our bearing inform the arrangement and management of this wider circuit of association which in order to be meaningful and useful and aesthetically consistent with our sense of balance, well-being, peace and interest, need to create a direct line in and line out through our own body alignments. In this sense our engagement with everything we come into contact with and the co-adaptation of all that we would call an affect must be diagrammatically consistent with the very deepest physical recesses of an alignment- between sacrum and cerebellum, ankle and shoulder, chest and lower back etc… Again the alignment is not something static or visually symmetrical at all times. Rather there is this consistent dynamic equilibrium so that slight mismatches, tilts and displacements- the very incoherencies that would seem to be problematic on one plane, aggravate or activate a translation of a speed reading – which becomes at a dynamical level, a creative and physical use/expression. In this sense out of the traces of an environment- just as out of the diagrammatic traces of a static body- the potential of usage can be read back like a time messenger, of this continual becoming- this necessary adaptation in the midst of constant involvement through which the use and co-composition of every level of our body, from cell to gross matter, comes into affect.

Realignment can than- like a battery- re-charge the wider context of an environmental co-worlding so that physical, mental, relational levels of engagement can be back-performed out of this reignited physical bearing.

Body work- Shiatsu, Sotai, postural alignment etc is this re-tuning of the dynamic possibility inherent in our co-adaptation. It is a primary dialogue that in a sense can underwrite all more complex language, sensory, symbolic and physical capacities by re-sketching the diagrammatic foundation out of which this wider patterning evolves.

Similarly an environmental creative project can work through dispersive affect to embed organisms in co-activation in which internal alignments can gradually reach a bearing in relation to one another and so begin to interact and balance one another. This could be a highly dispersive informal holding space in which gradual levels of resonance and atunement, through on-going running movements, casual gestures and sound textures as a variously patterned background hum, come into certain resonances in order to build up layer upon layer memories of expectation, recognition, displacement and reconstitution. Out of these memory maps built as textures through time from the ceremonies and rituals of co-action, consciousness and unconsciousness play in and out of one another in scalar shifts of engagement and disengagement, emphasis and letting go.

Dynamic usage in a given context and physical alignment through touch receptivity are but two sides of the same coin where ecologies either side of the skin barrier meet and diffuse through one another constantly and uninterruptedly. At the heart of that admixture is our potential for adaptation- for affect as an on-going low level diffuse yet coherent awareness. That is our ideation- our imagination, our improvisation; our deepest and most tenderly held value. It is an attention that comes and is held between us out of a sense of on-going ease. This is only operative through physical kinaesthethic receptivity as an on-going co-constituting dynamically engaged concern.