Fine-tune

FINE-TUNE



Absolute pitch like any navigational chosen spot is edged towards out of an infinite series of variables that precede or succeed it, or play out simultaneously as background harmonics or low level buzz.

Any positional leaning, any tone, any tincture of a colour gradient is situated in this held myriad of complex differentiations. Some of these make it to the table. Others do not. Awareness flickers on and off glinting through specific frequencies that become the quality of an on-going gesture, expression, posture, song or story; or simply the countenance of all that is there. Yet each fragment that glints onto consciousness is so set in this myriad of possible tendencies. These are literally the pulls and pushes- the compressions and release of the physical body as it tilts and pivots around a tendency to turn that is forever offset by a counter tendency so that it becomes executed movements or lingering stillness- a pause-gap that can last seconds, minutes hours and is only known as something other than that which got stuck at the point of perception or filmic unravelling, because the plant at the side of the speaker/mover is still arching and curling in the wind of a nearby but unseen open window that gives light to the scene on that particular sunny afternoon.


The natural curvature of all life forms creates in an act of effortless change all one needs to go on with. These tilting tendencies present themselves to us as opportunities to rely on for short instances of optimum worth. It's our special niche to be able to time these attachments and detachments so as to take a ride on these larger currents and than to drop off again at just the right moment. All language is carried up into longer and more intricate trails and tales according to this adeptness of jumping on an off. We follow the current of the wind that is a larger pattern - a pattern of becoming that we do not exactly know or anticipate but that we simply give into and gain a particular composure around- as a bird is carried by the wind without ever becoming the wind. There is differentiation and affinity at every moment. How we hold and release muscle sets, viscosity, breath, and affinity with other life forms whether human or non-human is about this proximity and release; an involvement together with a non-involvement.


The voice too is a construct of this interior negative forming that is about the elasticity of the throat lining, the air circulating in and out – in this squeeze-release that gives it shape and push and the minute adjustments of constrictive, expansive tendencies that play into sound loops that cascade over one another, interrupt, cancel out and reinvigorate in turns and swoops. This air caligraphy carves out a space that is indeterminate; always caught into a moment yet reliant on a deeper sense of grounding through the shifting accommodating centre of the body, the earth, and the environ that is our surround and our release. Tilting is how we get to the ever changing yet constantly followed point of alignment through many different scales and tempos that calls and re-calls differently at each moment our being present. This deep set orientation is the method of coming into action, into speech, into address in the most effortless manner without having to recount the details one by one of how we got there. It is a broader shaping – a broader sweep of the brush. Something felt in the on-off balance between falling and catching in again, primed in the tiny thresholds of compression and expansion that we generate between brief associative leanings and between the intervals we articulate in these measured timings.

Torsion as feeling

TORSION AS FEELING



Torsion hits the back spine cradling the lumber, pelvis, sacrum and abdomen and keeps on splaying out- unravelling and tightening by degrees in hypo and hyper flexion/release that are a semblance of one another- converting off each other's extreme as a continual modulation that never ever breaks into one or the other.

The differing gradation is an on-going project- a matter of degrees that is time-specific; definitely consecrated in this bracket of this or that and so becomes a concretized attention zone to be dealt with through a physical accommodation.

Yet it is a part of an on-going story with myriad textures woven back and forth in this unbreakable depth. Every startle response is placated- soothed and re-dressed as a moment of entwinement before partially jolting free again. Inter-relatedness occurs all the way through as the knot splits into the two and interconnects re-bonding like a rope continually winding and unwinding round its own coils. This labyrinth coil is not a thing it is a situation so that it becomes a coiling movement emblazoned into the execution of a permanent low-level hum.

The viscosity of the body fibres that knit and arch into knots of holding create at another level, as an opponent composition, a lengthening, release and unwinding. That may be sudden as in a jerk or cataclysm or gradual as in a stretch or yawn.

So the levity of one arm is given in the compression at shoulder, hip, wrist, ankle, belly; wherever. These twinned responses of compression and expansion are the touch syllabus that is equated into movements that seem to be automatic spins out of specific localized and time-engaged holdings. This on-off pulse is the degree to which we feel and know the feeling of that feeling. Yet it percolates all the way through from the low level hum- the buzzing non-even beat that is life's fascination with continuity and change- or variation. It's in small degrees of contrast that any kind of momentum and stillness know themselves. So that movement and pause as different degrees of pressure and twinned non-localized release become a self-rendering combustion.

Torsion is self evident in what appears as stillness and in what appears as movement. It is read not at the surface but all the way through in the thickness of the skin and the way in which viscosity bears down on itself according to environmental probes and influences and as an outcome or symptom, lightens up again. Those symptoms can become useable- they can become our most effortless movements and on-going accommodations within a wider pattern.


Torsion occurs too in the affability and repulsion of seemingly disparate objects, surfaces, contexts. It is the flesh-machine that percolates in simple manifestations of play; a ball poked under a bowl with a dip in it's outer perimeter- that ball emerging in a concordant dip at the other side, taken over the back by one hand, passed back around to a different hand from a differently placed body who re-winds the process so that body-bowl-ball-body-bowl-ball is a continuous running process-torsion that links the internal working and external affability of two bodies through objects and ground-sky in a loop that plays out until it alters of its own accord in the hesitation, disturbance, friction and re-routing that is any running system. Consciousness becomes part of this torsion that follows the body adaptation in tiny thresholds of compression/release and the degrees of depth-expansion that assemble in this ensemble that is both simultaneous/sculptural/symphonic and narrative/sequential/episodic at varying levels of engagement.


How we posit our bodies and orientate them in this dance of combined elements that create a continuous torsion of engagement across time and distance is how we ecologically play out from the bounded and unravelling centre-spine outwards and simultaneously back inwards again. We are one and we a relational and so more than one and neither can be known without the other so total is this admixture and separation at every pulse of our lives. Language occurs out of this orientation that is forever making itself- recombining and falling away over and over. The diagram of this torsion is felt and apprehended- created as image and sensed all the way through in our ability to adjust or to imagine adjustment as a bodily and ongoing tilt between falling and stature. Torsion is the fine–tuning that is mobile but seems to be a point of permanent twist and flexion because it is flickering in this pulsation of contraction-release or on-off movement and hesitation.

Touch is more than discovering an object/person through surfaces and the qualities of rough-smooth, hot-cold that they offer to pre-established senses. It is the primer to this movement in space that articulates this reshaping of body-environment as a continuous re-invention so that what is there is always apt yet always slightly slewed so as to be on-going and contageously generative. Never simply a narrative played out immune to the context in which it quite literally takes hold and becomes what it is, reflective always of a wider situation in which it can not know but in which it is bathed.

___________________


*The above notes are in relation to my therapeutic/creative experience of working with a boy in a school with limited language and on-going interest in his surroundings in very specific processes involving his body, objects, sound textures, touch as pressure-release, facial mirroring. These relational sessions occur for roughly 45 mins per week.

The sessions act as a pacing device through body-environment-thought-image-articulation.

They are a creative investigation of body as Space-Ecology where every attentional matter becomes relevant and a part of this evolving diagram. He becomes the central investigator in the making of this diagram in which his body can orientate as it continuously adapts and re-shapes itself. Language begins to concretize around this pacing mechanism that he is creating with my facilitation/inclusion. Words are the last pieces- the pauses-punctuation that marks certain points of emphasis- like certain resonances in colour-sound-pressure found initially in the experience of these feelings and equated with fixed measures; as in near-far, up-down, fast-slow as relative terms that only come to mind and speech through the prior playing out of the event as process. He becomes week by week more assured in the making and re-making of this diagram-story with me that is always adaptive and agile to the situation- always apt. He is demonstrating his intelligence through and because of his increased body sensitivity- his ability to accommodate and adjust in ever more subtle variations so as to keep the contact- the torsion- the line of consistent enquiry through on-going change. He is six years old.

___________



Ref:
Antonio Damasio: The feeling of what happens
Vintage Books 2000

A Tendency

A Tendency



He's wheeled in and left at the door. His carer disappears called to another duty.

I unstrap him. As each strap comes off the limbs begin to waver. His hand reaches towards his mouth. He stuffs it in and bites down. I lift him out of the body-hugging padded chair. Close to my body I swing around so that our body mass becomes one. I crease my lower limbs and he is carried to the floor through the drop of our joint gravitational weight, succumbing to gravity in one full sweep. As his small body touches the mat, it inevitably sends small shocks through his alert nervous system. The difference in temperature between the flat mat and his over-worked arching body is enough to register small shock waves of affront. it is this affront that I begin immediately to work off, warming form the belly a contact that through duration could not be called exactly touch- something with connotations of suddenness and a certain level of external infringement- but is more a sense of enfoldment which is as much an attentional zone as a skin contact. Through outstretched hands- as if warming and adjusting so as to create an even sense of heat through tiny tilts and realignments that then send down further, than come up by degrees, there is an accommodation- like moving into a room- working out the co-ordinates- registering body motility, arm expansion, and even such uncertainties as emotional timbre, gestural inflexion that becomes possible in the space given. This space is not a finite bounded object. It is the body as re-vamping of impulses, motivations and micro affects-responses that are always twinned affiliations- always relational tones cobbled together in real time and the ongoing and interlacing composure of context. The context is quite literally the time it takes to take a breath in and expel it again; it is the small manoeuvres that float boundary constrictions to create push-me pull-you alignments across bodies. I am a Braille reader or a pianist waiting for the indentions to sound out and resonate as articulations through the palms and pads of my hands and fingers before they ever reach outwardly audible sound, language or expression. Or perhaps he is the pianist playing me into different composures by the slightest of breathes. Yet both ways together we intend and set up an expectancy/potential that plays out in tendencies that to all intents and purposes, have a life of their own.


The warming is a belly to belly contact- of deep guttural motivations- wells and ponds that in raising their temperature even minutely begin to stir and pattern in an entirely different way. The hands are an intermediary- simply a prosthetic outreach that is both there at the point of contact but is also all the way through in this shared anatomical abdomen that is then a capacity to move forward- to tilt, to adjust as I in fact do every time that M breathes in and breathes out, spasms and relaxes, condenses and dissipates an area of emphasis so that the point of contact is maintained through this joint co-regulation that is on both sides of the machine a derivation of one another- a continual re-shaping so as to stay with an easy contact that is so light at times that it seems to hover on an air current and even when the contact sinks deeper into the fascia it is because it is let in and it is as if there is space made between the muscle groups, the blood, the bone- a gaseous exchange in the heart of solid matter.


This porosity at the centre of flesh is material and dispersive- a parting of the waves- an effortless journey so that the most interior of places become expansive- a wealth of tributaries and pathways that make/find themselves and become known to themselves on this slightest of aggravation- the touch slowed into duration until it becomes a permanent feature- the sand particle that disturbs the current around which another form perhaps coalesces for a certain period of time. These interruptions that than lead to further dispersals begin then to create a diagrammatic map that is a circulation network and a record of visitation- low level intrusions that become useable- the point at which something begins to turn- a spin- a capacity to re-orientate- to envelope and to diversify out from these whirlpools of intensity.


The child uses the touch sensibly and together there is a playing off of one tendency as if a levy breaks and is them shored up differently in the very process of it pouring away. This levying creates a makeshift lever in which a point of constriction becomes an opportunity to push against- to internally feel the organs, muscles, swelling and sinking in these waves of on-off pressure. It's the variable that works on every count- the subtle contrast that creates this variegated texture that is made as if in a workshop or artists studio- out of bits and pieces and what actually comes to hand in the moment of looking and assembling. More and more of the child's body is implicated until the one sticking point- the jammed up foot and ankle; the crooked neck; the grinding teeth; the mitten hand thrust into the mouth becomes the last moment of release once all the other circulations through abdomen, hip , pelvis, sacrum, ribs, chest, back bone, cranium, cheek, forehead, thigh, knee have been articulated in a natural furling and unfurling that is an on-going process of flourishing that can at no instance be divorced from receptivity, relational admixture, the tilting realignment of my body in relation to each small impulse. So that the tendency to spasm itself becomes a useable trail and the leg taken into the spasm and then woven back through in the opposite direction becomes an opportunity for a stretch. Similarly the abrupt cautioning of a loose falling away held in an uncompleted suspended state begins to re-work its own outcome and to feedback/flow-back into muscle intelligence in which counter-directives hold together as tonality. Simply this levitation mid-point- as a slight pause in an on-going affect- becomes a point of reflectivity in which the body in space begins to think itself- in the details of blood flow, valve opening and closing, breath expenditure from core vital organs to the ever more refined tributaries and cell formations that create this labyrinth of gathering and dissipating formations.


Neither is ever done with and so the boy lying there becomes an intensively multiplying multi scalar figuration which begins at a certain point to read back these minute pulses. The practitioner sends through these pulses before they disappear beyond the range of the known body back into the body reading map until wider and wider circuits of involvement become possible. Form and movement in which form is renewed hinges around these diverse articulations that span out beyond the extremity of limbs into a reach ability that is an attentional zone. This is where focus, perception and recognition become expressive compositions within an ecology of co-existing influences. And yet there is so much before that drives in small tendencies that either play out or are re-implicated into a parallel flow an another admixture so that every expression is the buoyant flotsam on this sea of turning.

Such turning configuration is relational but not initially in the social-mind-cognition-intention sense but in the direct sense that hot affects cold, hard, soft, liquid affects dry, gaseous, material. These are real qualities that determine one another and inter-relate to forge countless subtleties of material-imaginative-movement possibilities further down the line.


Contraction and expansion is the coupled tendency out of which a child in constant spasm gradually organises a pulse into rhythmic and a-rhythmic expectancy and innovation that is than played with, reattributed and becomes further down the line- as a secondary affect- according to the appropriateness s of the situation, a grasp, a smile, a sustained look that is quite different from the wavering head and swimming wooden limbs of before. This totally still point whether in a state of momentary internal calmness, or in a certain humanly recognizable expressive state or sound; perhaps even a yawn, is a moment that becomes useable and deeply ingrained in human experience/body memory. But it is never a social, cognitive goal to be mapped out in advance in a compartmentalized and sought-out manner. Rather it is the end point of an emergence out of the many beats, pulsations, disturbances and inflexions that drives resolution as a continual harmonic resonance in a co-environmental field.

Attention-Attention-Attention

Attention-Attention-Attention




What is an attentional zone? What is a bite-sized quota of gaze after which there must be a blink for refreshment, the watering windscreen wiper over the surface of the eye and a near seamless sewing together of a similar gaze? What about a gulp of air- or the dilated nostrils flaring up with the intake of a scent- perhaps the body odour of a plumber caught in a small back closet from a job nearly ten years before who worked his fine motor skills with the bulk of his body caught and overheating. How do we pass these disparate scent readings over the thin blood vessels inside the nose cavity that is the only part of our brains open – albeit in a vacuumed tunnel, to the elements of what we call our “outside world”? More than any other question is the one that probes this durational timing technique- the micro timing of the in-breath and the out-breath, of a gaze and a blink, of a stance and a shift of weight, of the slight whiff of a scent and the shifting of the neck muscles- to somehow modulate the impulse where between full on-collision and aversion there is some kind of wavering that perhaps keeps the impulse coming precisely by switching it on and off in duration and intensity; a variable where contrast can be registered. And sound too; perhaps we do not so much as hear a certain pitch or timbre as modulate between differences and organize the intervals between these differences in the way we rearrange our bodies so as to create a precise peak- a very fine line between this and that – a resonance that gurgles on its own unsettlement- this very aggravation the cause of our attention- our alertness- perhaps even our consciousness and registration of any such fact of experience. The body is in constant motion not only as a locomotive vehicle that goes from here to there but also in this way to modify- to modulate impulses – to filter and hold in the balance variables so that they do not rule out one another but co-exist- percolate- interrelate and diffuse through one another. This than is the first frontier of affect – before there is anything like a you and I to pick up and put down a shopping list of sensory and cognitive exhibits. More we are cobbling out of these peaks and slopes- attention on the very verge of intolerances, intolerances on the very verge of an overwhelming attraction. This threshed is extremely refined- more like a brink that we situate ourselves on- that we know our experiences by. What is a spasm to one is an activation and awakening to another. What is docility and near muteness to another is a tempering of impulses- the holding in the balance the moment of action in a process that is never done with; the quality of a reflective state.


So that all this of course opens up many questions about functionality, coping and at the other extreme ineptness, lack of function, failure to respond in the appropriate manner; disability.


Could there by multiple possibilities of pulsing the beat between an in breath and an out breath? Are attentional zones of duration in themselves mutable- open to plasticity- to stretching, bending and sudden curtailment? Are these ways to micro manage an articulation of experience and worlding in which our bodies are inextricably woven into this languaging- in which body shape is in-dissociable from speed, spin, pause, suspension, reinvigoration? Is this performance?


How then could mediated experiences such as touch, co-movement, shared attention, and humour or play that intentionally disrupts attention at the same time as it rough plays the body become a way of crafting articulations through body plasticity as a pre-emption to metabolic, cognitive, and feeling plasticity. Is it a pedagogy for learning that is not prescriptive but is inflective- a responsive co-adaptation in the moment of how we blink, how we breath, how we move and stop? The pulsing on and off of an attentional zone; the invigoration, seizure, disturbance and re-implication of an emphasis that can not remain known in stasis- that needs to probe at the edge of what it is not to come into a bearing at this very pint of impossible feedback- otherwise it is a washout of white light- or a long dark sleep.


Perhaps a longer sustained gaze can create the conditions for a deeper amassment of co-influential tendencies- a multiplicity that begins to seize the moment as if they were single celled animals given a democracy of influence in the shaping of a grosser mass. Could one draw conclusions from the pulse of gestures, the immanence of breath and languaging potential that differs when the gaze is held open with no intentional sequential story to verify the next caption in the blink of an eye?


What would simply emerge under these eclectic ecological conditions where any passer-by rather than being ruled out as a distraction to the main point of occupation becomes a bit player in an open scene that is only as much and as little as what traverses and impacts that zone of attention, until the windscreen wiper again comes down. So that this would be a radically different kind of articulation or story-making process- not one of narrative sequential story lines but something more multi-dimensional like a holographic blossoming of connotations upon every tiny impulse that is not blinked into separate categories but forms a continuance that grows more like a plant subject to the conditions of moisture, light and heat and cold than to a pre-given structure of a popular story with a beginning, middle and end.


How then would personality emerge and be arrived at under these circumstances where associative assemblages become more important than historical lineage? Where circumstance and affect in the moment becomes the guiding principle to a gradually ballooning and elastic shape that depends on the motivation, volition and speed of chance multi-scalar encounters rather than to individual integrities. Rather that integrity depends first on these more pliable and reversible sets of tension.


Could this create a very different political landscape- where context creates form personality beckoning in due course as secondary individuations after the process is well underway?


Could this be a different kind of languaging that stretches across bodies and minds as effortlessly as tracks across an uneven landscape – where articulation is the constantly extending and atrophying circumstances in which we find ourselves at every moment? Is this now what it means to have a body- to have a language that is still vital?

Frontiers

Frontiers




Skin after all is a membrane that lets in the vacuous and treats it as its own or propels like a drum the flotsam that sprays and bounces upon its surface to create patterns of attraction and repulsion in a snow-storm- a magnetic pull that in its certain aspect of responsiveness becomes a push. Nerve endings, heart beats, the pull and thrust of the lung, expressions flickering like rivulets gathering, popping and redistributing like mice under our skin make for the feckless activity of a living system. Adaptation is all of this and more. This wavering question of whether to absorb or whether to bounce out again. Senses coalesce around these possibilities becoming in part the hearing that hears a crafted sound, the sight that sees a crafted conglomerate of light intensities. And touch too is only this. To play itself out into a rhythmic flourishing that is never only this or that- an embrace or a holding tight- but is this minute flexion amassment of valve modulations- the crafting itself of a thoroughfare, a threshold bolted in the moment between absorption and bounce, between enfoldment and exteriorization, between compression and extension.

A spasmic riveting in the knot of the belly or a yawning release into the tendrils of our most distal parts- the mitten hands furling and unfurling like new growth where plant-life and sensate life become imbued in this same tendency.

And what of intention- that hikes a ride on all these variously propagating furling and unfurling; the machine assemblage of push-me-pull-you in the spontaneous autonomic cascades of pulling in and sending out. A touch; the body temperature, the sweat glands, the speed of a tendency- a motivation building, a leaning and an off-setting of that leaning- this wavering pulsation that is like the flicker of a strobe light- so fast- so totally modulated with the bodies’ impulses to going into and offsetting in the next glance, the next breath, the next heart-beat, that all play into a semblance of stillness- a poise that is the fast patterning of all contagions, absorptions, ejections and reintegration’s into constancy. The crisis of contact- the trauma of invasion off-set in this near constant plasticity that is all the way through; the body changing shape, shaping to think, to move, to feel- a constant metabolic shuffling like a highly adapt gambler who creates every possible tone and innuendo of actual countenance and hidden possibility in a limited deck. We are at every level in the business of this magician act, not as deceit or as in a closed hand, but as the rippling whirr of the cascading cards as they vibrate through a widening and closing interval of two hands that play them like an adept accordionist.


So the cripple learnt to stand- the distortion becomes the impulse to a leaning, to a slight displacement of attention, to a new resolve that spirals around a certain curtailed oaring and flies off at the very moment of abrupt endings into the insignia of all that is valued- a metaphor, a dream, a myth, the conjurers adeptness- her adaptability- the flaying out of a peacock's feather beyond the bird ending. We are followers of these patterns- sunk and swooning in the need for this something more- the lost script of the cripple who once slowed to simply standing and nothing more, simply moving from here to there and nothing more and so at that moment, fell- coming undone- is all of our broken stories.

Instead we craft stories upon stories- little epitaphs - insignia and adverts that carry with the wind and become our transcript- the invisible guy-ropes upon which we fly


across stage, swoon into and away from one another in this compulsive aversion, this aversive compassion that adjoins one to another so that there are no curtailments- only this leakage and this bleeding through of vessels and sinews, blood and bone and air admixing and separating in its own multiple intelligences.


We walk and face each other and communicate because we create scenarios past the functions that would itemise capacity and let drop off impossible feats of limited perfection. By elaborating this mesh of entwinement- our feeling responses are mixed up already with every other- and the gaps themselves are the part of the pulses, the beat of a throbbing strobe in which we activate and rest- hopelessly lean and fall back into. Uprightness is nothing more than this- a slim loophole between a tendency to fall one way or another- attunement into any position, any posture, any semblance of a gathering and meshing of muscles, skin, bone; a release of breath, an articulation and reverberation deep in the guttural passages of a throat, is only these thin wedges of random suspension- between one tendency and another- these zero points of resonance that begin to build until they are an escalation that effortlessly pulses back and forth; a feedback that takes on a life of its own. In this sense our capacities are that point of effortless dropping; of giving way; even of deletion or forgetting. They are not a goal orientated skill set. They are happy times- the holiday in amongst the coming and going. Laziness is useful- the only useable thing because it is primed in amongst all the other tendencies hidden or exposed which filliate out into this environmental ecology in which at every level there is a twinning and separation over and over again. Every point of attention at whatever scale is a holograph of every other replicating association scaling up and down into endless conurbations. Structure and flow is this- a pulse of stopping and starting- a pulling together and a widening out again.


That this replication and slurred redistributed admixture happens simultaneously over and over again at the level of cell, fibre, fascia, bone, human composure, expression, relatedness, and global climatic tendencies is only to say that the meshing of hard and soft, hot and cold, wet and dry, brittle and smooth, gaseous and contained is a single necessity in the coming and going of form as ideation and ideation as form.

Human interest and attention is the next area of research for delving into what is usually thought of as physical, sensory and neurological complaints. Rather than erase these complaints they must be the starting point for building a wider attentional zone of variable impulses and tendencies. Disturbance or irritation is the point of activation for a re-settlement – a continual re-organization at every level imaginable. And to imagine these finer and finer thresholds of difference is to modulate them- to adapt ever more rapidly to the circumstances of our bearing.

This is the creative work to be done as environmental concern and as an inventive language/thought process rather than as individual pathology and therapeutic intervention. Our curtailments are the point of unknown sudden growths whether imaginative, prosthetic or as a total re-working of what it means to move, to articulate to further and to look back. Somewhere in all that is a re-conceptualization of present experience that is a meshing with no particular inside or outside. For that reason it is relational but not as a set of socially acquired know-how bullet points but as an ecology of intertwining metabolic, physical and nervous tendencies.