The contours of any form are the glide-marks of an entry point or exit point in a sounding that ricochets through, ringing out in one aspect or another. There are gaps in the contour- non-aligned suspended appendages, broken off or burrowing into or out of tunnels, the rims of which alone can be seen. It doesn’t matter. These objects are all jostling in their departure or affinity to one another and the perspective of the sounding lays entry in the mismatch gliding un-bespoken through the limitations of these various angles and handles. Thoroughfares emerge like valves in the slight tip or tilt of a body. This body is a collection of objects that do not entirely square up. The objects have a tendency to float or sink, to be wayward in one direction or another, to break off and play at being single. But that is not really the full aspect. There is the silence pervading, the note so pure it blasts into sheer exteriority or holes so deep that it is the blank nonentity in the massed crowd that any body is.
But these omissions are a sign- a time signature following through every rattle into the pause and back and forth into the rattle again. Each gains composure from the other. The time-line is the speed of passage, its hesitation, stultifying sulk and inflamed rush performed in looped and broken cycles. The build up of cycles over and over again create depth which is sometimes seen as form, sometimes as space. Yet there is no separation- space is in form and form in space. It is the disconnect between these cycles that allows for ease of action- a movement that is not an executed movement but more like the fizz from removing a cap off a bottle of fizzy drink. Effervescence is a constraint suddenly removed- just as lightness and ease of composure is compression or the body perceived as volume suddenly translating into a void or an absence of that volume. It leads to a moment of levity. Uprightness is this play of on-off variables- not a “how to stand, how to walk” manual. Non-human objects including rocks and buildings are the same. They must be teased into existence. They are self-teasing. The mood is contagious. It must be played out in a moment of physical aptness and in the humorous mismatch that this allows. It is the tilting inflections of counter forces that are always already up against one another that allows for this buoyancy. Similarly falling is a freedom from this intimacy and can become movement, gliding or flying if it is caught mid-way and earthed back into an implicated mesh of co-existence.
Learning to tolerate intimacy with sentient and non-sentient surfaces is a way to move into the depth and volume of form and non-form. Touch is non-touch in that it can move through form or deflect before a gap has been closed. It is an attunement more in line with musical improvisation than a static convergence. It plays with distance and with the freedom to move uninhibited that any distance or interval brings. The touch part is half of an on-off performance where the intonation is constantly shuffled between seemingly irreconcilable opposites. It plays with a contradiction inhabiting one end in order to gain passage into the other. In this respect it is un-thought execution. The hand touches through the hand by touching through the body it is touching so that the hand is absent and so is the body. Touch becomes distance and distance, touch. In this reversal there is spin and in that a shuffling realignment or object reversal as performance performs itself within and through objects at micro and macro levels.
This is the flickering waver of a spectrum short circuit. It is an instance made out of difference slammed into one, than unravelling into subsequent instances that are never where they are because they are a forwarding. Every aspect that is still is the absolute balance point of this unfurling sent back through into a tension so exact it is on the verge of extinction. Equanimity is the embrace of this overall possibility of collapse. It is the split held in wide focus whilst residing in the specificity of a partial seizure that is binding and unbinding simultaneously. Form as composite interaction that is never stable except when past. Attention is always attenuated, spilt, smudged and bleeding through into lost cousins, distant influences, un-noteworthy passers by, bushes and bracken. It is fixated on a disparate atmosphere at the cut between light and dark, the crack of sound in a gulf, the reflective blind spot of a doubling and redoubling of frequencies as they spin over on one another duplicating as mirror intensifications without end. How much circularity can we withstand? Just enough to keep us erect, before motion tips the balance and in falling we go somewhere. This is drive, plans, stories, narrative. The poem is more like the ricocheting light off the surface of a polluted lake where blinding stasis is only saved through the chemical filter of pollutants that block out partial frequencies of the distant sun. So we stay- amidst the madness and beauty, destruction and pain of it all. A body dying, a body living nonetheless because it is dying and knows itself in this process of buoyancy through the sinking of substance that stabilizes it. Form remains perhaps as memory perhaps tenaciously despite the tendencies that are pulling it apart. It only ever exists out of these tendencies, forged in reverse of a sending out, this interiority is the joke of its constant usurpation.
Never to cut attentional meanderings. Never to bracket off the flickering spasms and eidetic waywardness of our out of control systems- neither here in the body interior nor there in the body exterior. We vibrate between here and there, sent out and sent back in collusion with otherness that is our attention depository. We are one moment in the composite interaction of on off pulses that course through objects both living and non-living. At a high enough frequency the pulse levels into a smooth running contour and all is background settlement. At another frequency all is falling, splitting apart and erupting in seismic shifts that throw bodies to the wind, clap oceans into the sky, rearrange town and cities like molten rock candy arrested half way through its manufacture. At another frequency we are separate and totalising entities with profiles, targets and deadlines that take us from birth to the end of life in one single decree.
The civilisations that come and go; the life styles that envelope us and let us slip. The illnesses we avoid and that meet us again or differently. The slim line between standing and collapse. Of meaning and non-meaning, of words and patterns. We are attendants to all of these actualities whether they play out or not. One is embedded and implicit in the other despite our every effort to keep them apart, to siphon off the good from the bad, the upright from the fallen.
The child in school who has an attentional sensory processing deficit, the one who turns to a miniscule variation in pitch or the half beat rhythmic mismatch in a distant conversation rather than to the objective lesson plan. The one who falls when standing because he forgets to hold up his body but in motion is functional. The touch sensitive child who leans up against a leaning person, anticipating them straightening and the exact amount of feedback adaptive to this straightening up that they borrow a ride on, yet to touch him out of the blue is to cause confusion, toxic reactivity, and emotional melt-down in a matter of seconds.
That is because objects are not only larger than we imagine but smaller than we imagine. In that sense they are more adept, more flexible, spontaneous and versatile than we would imagine. Objects get under our skin. They are our skin as well as the Formica table that our elbows rest on. They are any point of contact between one surface and another. For it is here at the site of any activation that the objects come into being in order to shuffle, dance and re-congregate according to the unique circumstance that every occasion of their meeting brings. This is called adaptation. In this sense the play of objects involve a coupling at a micro level in which awareness becomes an on-going dance of accommodation, involvement and re-synchronization and a decoupling at a macro level in which objects play out of their own accord undeterred by any totalising schema or meta language either at a personal, historical, social, psychological or political level.
The dance of objects has its own haptic intelligence that is bound up in the particularities of a certain aspect of contact or interaction and how that floats or spins into a wider set of influences and tendencies. These cascade and simultaneously resonate and default on one another, nearing pitches of absolute affinity only to swerve out and displace before the moment of destruction. So that the pattern becomes a continuance that is made in the reactivity and adept presencing of its own distortion according to engagements that it bends to or straightens towards magnetically as a process of sensitization. Tensegrities are forged in that instance from objects that converge into makeshift forms that can never in that same moment know themselves or stand outside of this forwarding of a pattern that they are in. Form in that sense is an atmosphere of many objects apprehended into one another, implicating through one another and uniquely synchronised for a certain plateau of affect to stabilize momentarily.
The object could be the body, a wall, a chair, a finger, the sinews in the back of a heel, a point on the chest, a light switch, a gap in an open door, an eye crevice, a quivering muscle at the side of the throat, dust, a pneumatic drill from a neighbours house resonating through a set of barriers and interior spaces, the soft fleshy point where the skull meets the top of the spinal cord, a lamp, the wind against a window, a broken fence, a swivel chair, the bone in the coccyx, the dial of a radiator, carpet, the protruding bone on the outer edge of the wrist, the fleshy part of the stomach, hair. These things are discreet but they never exist alone.
Connection is life. This forward, halt, rewind, tilt is the playing out of the gaps between the contours. The swerve, ricochet, throb and buzzing of a pervading atmosphere that is a resonance in that it holds a continuance aside from effort, doing, goal or objective. It simply bounces up like the effervescence of an effect that is apart from any intimacy of the objects involved yet somehow involves them, places them, even brings them into being. It balances itself for a moment in the mess of directions brought back down to nought. It is un-minded, deeper set than plans, configurations and conceptual chit chat. It’s the linking diffuser that also holds real bone and wood, muscle and lino, plaster board and hair, plastic and skin into their continual adaptive engagement. Song sings object and object holds in residue the traces of this sounding passage that it dances. Dance leaves footprints and skid marks that are diagrams of its passage, works of art. Bodies leave heat marks or sweat deposits on surfaces they are only briefly involved with. Walls collapse with the weight and force of objects moving at high velocity or hold firm and bounce out projectiles made soft because their advance is mediated or inflected like a reflection that plays out in tangible forms.
Bodies embrace reallocating the objects within and bursting forth to mingle and converse as adjustments in the tiny tilts of a larger form. This localised reemphasis discharges through the objects of our bodies. They are retuning to a different pitch by plummeting up wards and downwards in a double take that pulls through a centre that can never be located discretely and only exists in the unutterable nuance of this wider act. We sound out other utterances as the traces of this friendly fire that we can temper through interruption and convergence. Rhythm is this slant and slice of drawing out and drawing up short- the variables of repetition and sudden seizure- affinity and bounce which is playful composure and maybe the only possibility for composure or taking a stance at all.
We are collectibles that only converge momentarily in the passages held briefly in alignment and that activate through and because of one another. What is left is the wrap-around contour that turns back on itself, bends out from a given line, tilts and wobbles off from a plumb line, is earthed as one straggling line disappears and winds back into and through another not because they actually match up but because they do not and so a higher or more complex dimension of feedback and delay must be read in the blanks; the spaces and gaps of any composure. In our near falling we stand. The ground that is on the brink of eruption or catastrophe reads back the smoothness on the verge of extinction. A contour that runs out on itself, supposes interruption and in that a dance of rhapsody comes through on another plane as a meshing or interference pattern. This pattern is only ever partially engaged. In turn it only ever really exists through each aspect of an engagement that is continually displaced. One could say that this is the mark of openness; this impossibility of total coherence whilst playing at the borders of coherence. Movement is energised on the spin between alignment and mismatch. So it goes on and the body in fact is only ever the movement and play of this unsettlement. The body is indeed a set of compulsions but compulsions that rattle and re-tune one another. They are open to influence. The body is a tuning score that is comfort and unease- a pushing out and a falling back through. Objects are forged and blown apart through this never ending process. We are the multitude of objects playing in and through one another. In this aspect within and without we play with the border. Objects multiply and in doing so, they interact bringing forms into and out of an organization.
Letting this play of occurrences play out seems all too simple for conceptual discussion but it may be the only way through for ecological, educational and co-living- a practice of living that generates objects and thoughts in passing. The act of doing anything produces its own affects, not a hindrance but the glow or the after-glow of the objects themselves.
