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.