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.

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*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.

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