Tilt

Malki's Enquiry

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With Malki who is blind there is this slow affinity like bleeding and absorbing into forms and objects. This is because there is no distance of aperception where one collates different viewpoints with the occular eye and scratches them together into three-dimesional wholeness. Rather that wholeness is given from the first encounter; lent into and tested for give, bounce, collapse that is only ever known according to discrete involvements that build up in the layers of volume as ones body impacts against another volume. It is a practice of resonance or chiming together whilst pulling back in disonance at the same time- like a push-me-pull-you set of running tensions and give-way points that pulsate in the object, in the body, through various sets of accomodations and counter intuitive reversals. There is a definite withdrawal, yes, but also a familiarity that is durational- about resting in the embrace of this all-encompasing enfoldment and then leaning  in more or less, breathing in and out more or less andconstricting/expanding more or less. These are not absolutes- not polar opposites but are the pump of enquiry that is in the girl and the objects that she sets in motion as they set her in motion in the inward and outward enfoldment and through their morphed involvement.

This manner of enquiry gives to Malki an attitude of softness that is like a pervading forwarding through tiny manoevres of shufflement and re-organisation. Gradual almost imperceptable intensifications of pressure and than sudden distilations at various interfaces- opens up a depth that is no more dealing at the contour of surface visual outlines but in the the actual fibre and knit of the object and body as it plays with coherance and unravelling- a constant wind-unwind in which air and object permeate. It's the intervals between the knitted texture that is being performed- not their movement in space as discrete objects surrounded by absenses but in the way they are drummed, flicked and burrowed into in a gradual softening and hardening that is known as ease.

Malki is now sophisticated enough in her navigation as a 9 year old girl that she does not need to use just her hands outstretched before her as she crawls over the floor surface to bang and tap out the existance of what lies before her. This may indeed be an initial rough guide- but then she hones in on these depths- moves into their inner labrynth - refines her testing by easing her body around the hard cushions, the carpettd swing, the drum lying on its side. She is lingering longer- residing in the affectivity of these surfaces that are now acting  through their very own withdrawal, into volumes thta also meet her withdrawal. These are volummes that her body synchronises with and so she takes a ride tummy down on the swing, than flips off at a certain speed using the volition  and spin of this abrupt speed cauterization to fall on to her knees, then lean back intot he L shaped cushion that she had tapped into existance earlier in her initial rough draught. She enfolds back into its negative shape, then lets her body pour over the right-angle extension and simply adds one degree at a time, increasing pressure in her tipping fall that acts not like pressure at all but more like an intensified presencing that jams together running out all sense of seperation until at a very precise moment the cataclysmic buckling of the cushion fibre sqaushes in upon itself and she falls into the folds of its own collapse. This altered shape is only known, felt, experienced because her body takes a ride into the moment where the volume resistence gives way and her body too gives way into this partial collapse.Her practice is to be able to work the moment of that collapse and so stay completely present and alert within this shift.

So Malki is learning to take a ride into the depths of a volume's undoing. This is never just the decimation or resistance of an object but is always necessarily twinned with her own body decimation and resistance.

Movement and rest is composed through  this kind of slow motion embrace into the pulverisation of forms.
Malki smiles at these moments of optimal coherance thresholds that then give way in tthe impossible resistance and torsion of a stretched or provoked encounter, that  then suddenly, dramatically buckles. This is the event- Similar to the quantuum idea of an Event Horizen where - as if going over the brink of a waterfall, one reaches the point of no-return. All the laws and norms alter in this area of pulverised meshing.

There is another practice that Malki is mastering- related to this waterful analogy. She is learning a technique of jetting out very fine vapours of spit between the gaps in her teeth that she then catches on her fingers as if it were an alien substance- not of her at all. In a sense this is correct for she has mastered a way of transforming her inside spit into this fine spun web that almost lingers in the air, suspended and hovering until she discovers it anew as if for the first time.

Small indications

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There are small indications not actually of themselves but of what they are not. Like a lull after pushing into an object when the body falls back and feels lighter- more aerated somehow. As if the gaps between the cells had grown and the space between bodies and surfaces creates a thin layer beyond touch like the jets of air of a vacuum cleaner that allow it to glide so smoothely. The gravitational weights of giving into something- of merging and collapsing into mass are held minutely apart from this sure tendency and there is this moment of suspense. That's when the body begins to collect and seperate in a kind of meshing of voluume and levity. Posture is this reverberation between two sets of tendencies colliding and bouncing back through one another.

Working with a boy with Cerebral Palsy today it was like that. I did not have a plan of what to do- actually felt abit ill and groggy in myself so that any momentum or attitude of achievement in this or that respect could  not be imposed from my side because I literally didn't have it in me. But in that slight ineptitude as a therapist, there was this sense of taking a ride with these small indications, without being able to jump ahead to the end of the equation and realise a useful outcome in the jointings of bone and the correct usage of muscle ligaments.

Unstead there was this leaking consciousness where everything done was only done in the matter of factness of what it was and a following of where that led to without necessarily being able to see it coming or even stop it coming.

The boy is sitting on the floor pushing a swing that is hung from the ceiling. Each time he pushes, his body is stabilized, jammed between the natural leverage of this move before the swing parts company and launches out on its own. In the split second before its return something strange happens. The boy gains a buyouncy and I see his body literally swell to fill out into this aerated mass. What this means for him- between the pushing and the waiting, is uprightness. But this has nothing to do with  the deliberate learning of posture- of arduously mastering the ability to sit up straight and correct the head in relation to the cocyxic etc.. It is just this hairs breadth between the pushing and the return- known in the timed release of the swing that than knocks back at the boy as the direct reflection to his push- a push made tangible in its return thta each time jolts him slightly.

I feel sure that the problem of standing, of walking- of getting to grips with gravity and the weight of ones body in relation to that gravity can only be known in the reflective mirror of this buyouncy. The black-hole or anti-matter is never seen or known directly- but only through the circling planets and their various orbits around this ommission, like the swing bouncing on and off the body of the boy. The body can only be known in the buyouncy or timed suspension through which it experiences posture. Otherwise we would be consummed by our own heavinness or simply fly apart- as at times is the case.

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Dream Objects- Workshop

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/02/2012
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
 
Location  School of Ideas, 57 Fetherstone Rd, Islington, EC1Y Near Old St Tube


Workshop Facilitator: Ruth Solomon

DREAM OBJECTS:  A Collective Composition done in an Afternoon.

We will use the moveable objects around us to create a design sculpture on the floor.
This will be a turn-taking exercise that unfolds at its own pace much as a game of dominoes does – only on a much larger scale.

This is an interesting excercise in learning to not think too far ahead; Simply place an object in a way that pleases you and see how the next person adds to this.

In this project we will work together to create a composition that is not designed to last forever.
Unlike many learning forums that rely on verbal speed, this one will rely on spatial skills and the art of right timing.

It is open to anyone.

As far as possible the project will be done without speaking.

schoolofideas.org.uk

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The problem is a good thing to get into

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The problem.The problem of the defunct body. Of the wandering attention, the wandering body. The limbs that struggle to be still. The wavering arms and the convulsing spine. The problem. The problem of inattention, of distractiion and a widening series of articulations, half-met and half stacked to one side. The problem of enunciation that chews sounds like pebbles and sucks them into flavours that are agreeable or not. The touch that jolts away and realigns slightly to the left or right, running up alongside a movement and breaking off here and there in a surprise stuccato that works off the pattern that is there- the schedules and programs of a  school with its curriculum and statement recipes of one or two doses a day that is Government backed and so authenticated as correct remediation for this or that problem. Is this a cure or a way of dealing with somthing that cannot be dealt with in a standard classroom but needs more of a one to one approach?

None of this actually matters. The child is just there. And attends to surfaces of connection or not. These may describe patterns that carry themselves forward, reinstegate a move meant as a request or an attack or a therapy of sorts but never actually becoming any of these in the moment in which it occurs. And as it occurs it is changing, being invigorated into an angle, a tangent, a tilt that is a lever off from the main concern- with limited or gandiouse intentions, benefits and authenticity depending on how the case is argued.

The child can't be helped in that way. Because the child is already o.k.- can only be o.k according to a situation of adaptations not according to a bench-mark of norms but in and of themselves as a line drawing itself out of every single aggravation and/or softening- of all the depth readings- the moments of absorbtion and bounce through which action and reaction are melded before they become either of these. In Aikido, the attacker comes at you dead straight seeing you as a target in order to deal the blow. The aikido move is not a technique but an absorbtion and proliferation of this move into a wider conjoined moving where the blow and defense dance into a raising up, turning around an invisible point that is an axis with no extention and then refolding back on itself to create the lever and the downward plunge. Nothing in the original move could have notified this result- which the attacker would never have believed in had it not actually taken place. Yet  in terms of expansion, torsion, constraint, levity and gravity there is absolutely nothing that is contrary to the original move. It has simply been joined, re-ignited into a unity that is a larger pattern than the solitary command of abrupt confrontation. There is no mis-understanding of intent. There is just a lack of interest in focusing according to the limited conflict in which the movement first sets out its terms. In a sense it is the movement itself that has been freed- freed from a limiting and totalising regime in which "This means That" and must be responded to according to the dialogic anti-part of an equation that already maps out the events and the characters of violence and subjugation; of command and rebellion; of authority and individual repression.

But the body is teeming with possibilites on the verge of discovery that only exist in this enfoldment of practices where one directive, rather than being faced squarely and understood or received for what it is, is tagged like running alongside a moving train than leaning out and letting the the anti-gravity carry the body upwards. It is an effortless borrowing of volition to take a ride and use the pivotel point between any meeting in orderto use momentunm and sudden stoppage to create real interest. Then there is something really occuring right at the heart of the problem that is apt for the occasion.

Special needs children are profoundly skilled in these apt moments where collisions melt and become something else in the atmosphere and deeper feelings that these energies procur.

Clinic

                                                          

I knock on the iron door. My knuckle bounces off the cold surface sending the sound back into the cutting air. I wrap my coat sleeve around my knuckle and I bang it again, thud, thud, thud, trapping the sound at the point of contact, muffling it into place like squeezing a mouse against a wall not to kill it just to keep it there. The thud becomes a boom echoing inside.

Then a sound like someone falling downstairs. The metal door cranks open- a slit- then widens and I enter. I climb the stairs. There are vases of dead flowers on the table. People like shadows glowing in the half light to slowly reveal aspects of colour; the red sleeve of a jumper, a knitted blue and white hat, fingerless navy mittens, a yellow shoulder of a kaftan. They are moving around a blue flame which is intermittently covered and revealed by cooking vessels. There are utensils, crockery, uncut vegetables such as turnips, leaks and potatoes in a large cardboard box. There are packets of unopened sushi all in a row and the lingering smell of bananas slowly melting beneath their pulverising skin.

The tap in the corner is dripping into a puddle of water in a bowl. Cooking utensils cover the grey office carpet around this puddle that is bouncing off the dim light from the window.

At the other end of the room a man is having his hair cut. He has grey hair that curls around his neck and a placid face and he is sitting upright on a hard backed chair with a bib over his chest tied at the back of his neck. The whirr of the electric shaver is busy at the back of his head where a small young woman is guiding it like a miniature lawn mower.

I am ushered into the side room. There is ash on the carpet and rows of packets of meat on the window sill where a crack of air gets in because the heavy sill has been wedged open with a brick. My stomach turns. There is no smell because the meat- large wedges of red and brown the size of small loaves, is smell-less in the vacuum packed plastic that seals it from all contact. Nevertheless my stomach leaps and I think I am going to throw up.

I back out and say to the first person I see,

“Please can you remove the meat on the window sill in that room”

Someone comes in and the meat is taken out.

I sweep the floor with a broom while a man puts up a cloth over the inner glass partition of this office cubicle. He stands on a chair and dislodges the white ceiling slates one at a time in order to tuck the cloth into the gap and then let the slate fall back into place. Soon the room is self-contained- a vacuumed space in this wider building.

I look out the window and see office workers working in an adjacent building glancing up and down back at their fingers on the touch-pad.  Another man, maybe an architect is standing over a map spread out on a low table. His finger is pointing to one place on the paper and his whole body is leaning too, over in that direction.

I unroll the mat and put it in the middle of the room, then take out the halogen heater from my bag and plug it in. Its two elements glow orange.

A woman comes in with a crooked neck. She has fallen down a flight of stairs whilst carrying a sofa up to the top of the building. She limps in and lies down.

Another body between others

MALKI: Enquiries

She taps her teeth with her fingers and thumb. Patterns of sound are coming from deep within the chambers of her skull. The echo machine of bracketed panels criss-crossing seam-lines that once were floating free like arctic rafts then in the force of their meeting buckled to form two concaves riveted as one are now her skull.

In this vault, sea sounds rise in a swirl of brain matter. The music persists in the emptiness pocketed everywhere. The child draws on the forensic grittiness of her distant form playing it like a Jews harp, her skull the amplifier though which she hears back emissions doubling and redoubling into one another because this tapping never stops. No sooner is one beat fading than another is meeting this ghost chiming in sympathy until what is lost is built up on the memory of a dying sound. Past and future play back and forth until this syncopated mismatch reaches deep inside the chamber of her head.

She is smiling the kind of smile of someone digging at a discovery that was always there. This form-object clasped in her living body is the first object of her composure. She has not touched the snacks placed before her on the table, her Learning Assistant sitting earnestly watching first the dish than the eyes of this small child whose optical vision was always missing. The reverb box of her skull is expert at holding together the small calculated melting gestures of her tapping motion, amplifying and distorting them into waves.

From the outside it looks like self absorption. But it is not the self but the object-instrument glancing back at a once remove in this practice of enquiry. The sounding sinks before it rises, invisible to the ears at any distance away from this skull. The reverb of the amplifier comes face to face so exactly as to cancel out all audible traces. Only the wetness of the brain acts as an interference pattern that dampens as it bears witness to a composition in which it is an accomplice.

For the children sitting across the table it is quite inaudible. For the Learning Assistant close at hand it is also inaccessible. Even the one sitting side by side to the child brushing shoulders with her, cannot get inside. This is not because there is an interior so immaculate as to cast all others away but because there is an object in there with practical implications for how it conveys the echo, distortion and buzz of its own provocative throes.

To be included in the band one would need to be placed in the middle of the milieu whether that meant straddling millimetres, miles, countries or worlds. Scale is not the issue here but rather how to enter into a unified distortion at the heart of equanimity. Human enquiry begins at the level of object performance. It is of a practical nature nothing more.

The child breaks in two to provoke the object as an alien deep within her registered form. This dance of the human and the non-human must play itself through. Whenever ripped from its game, the social will always be an empty gesture; something learnt by rote to please others. This social is so highly prized that more and more surfaces are ripped up on the way to some missing trump card that is never there because it doesn't persist independently in humans. There are surfaces running all the way through in the very texture of this ecological world so that forms only ever converge out of these junctions that have crushed or folded together over millennia. The rapid sound-waves that beat in upon one another relentlessly; a distant hum that is not a voice but is the atmosphere arching back and bellowing over and over upon itself in order to lean forwards a fraction. Actions are not intentional-they are insertions into a multiplex- a sudden seizure or downward emphasis in a complexity so dense that often the mark is made through omission not addition. That frees up a surge that rides the occasion as any opportunistic object would in the current of a strong enough wind.

All that may be spoken; all that is laughed about or cried about- the silence through

the music that is not really silence but is crowding in on us; the high frequency interference patterns of the big bang coming across the air-waves as static that keeps coming, crossing lifetimes over the coming and going of countless forms that will never meet. Do we ride it or not? That is the choice- not what we want to do or who is included in the doing because it is already happening anyway.

Later when she is swimming across the dry floor speckled with cushions and other tilting surfaces, Malki meets the dry skin of a drum. She usually rejects all moveable objects that disturb her passage, throwing them to either side after a quick examination. The expanse of dry stretched skin held taught over the bulk of a wooden frame extending still in the shape of a tree acts like a surface not a thing. It beckons her. With the slightest of contact it begins to below out mournful deep and permanent tones that resonate both in the body of the drum and within the echo chamber of her skull.  Between dry skin and living hand it arrests her attention. The sudden contact reverberates in each added beat the faster her aversion. It jumps out so suddenly almost by mistake into the space between walls and buildings and objects in which it is audible to other people too.

The sound feeds into her alien object practice where each contact interrupts and negates each other. The beats pop out as a delicate weave they can not observe because they are part of it. Each stress is a barrier that is felt in sudden stoppage so abrupt that it bounces out almost as shock into a pattern it was not expecting to meet. That is the signature of the blind whose physical passage is experienced as acoustic feedback.

Forensic objects are buried at the heart of living forms. They are drummed into audible exchange; a human translation within a deeper atmosphere. Malki’s music pre-exists in non-social, non-communicative and non-audible practices between the object aspects and the human aspects that she is.  She plays the drums like a professional with no former contact, no former inclination towards such objects only because the resonance of a chance encounter chimes at the right interval with the echo chambers of her skull. The music is built upon the still living remnants of other practices that are assessed by many care professionals to be obsolete, inappropriate and without use but out of which this sound draws.  The sound came when the practice became audible to others. For the first time other people could apprehend Malki’a music making from the inside. They could not get inside her skull but the skull as a resonator could be expanded as a drum, as the acoustics in a room and so could finally reach their auditory channels that could resonate in sympathy too.

Objects buried deep within human practices deep within human bodies are the non-human forefathers; the hidden teachers of practices later claimed as the sole domain of human culture, of ceremonial exchange.

This has wide implications for the treatment and teaching of children with sensory or neurological differences that seem to be “In a world of their own” caught up in “Special Interests” that detract them from social participation. Rather than ruling these Special Interests out or trying to de-incentivise children from such behaviours, these enquiries could be paramount to what it means to be human- where objects are in valid partnerships with humans and are actually embedded deep within our composition like insoluble metals or fools gold. They are equals. Just as there is no absolute order or lineage that set apart dryness from wetness so skull as an object and Brain as liquid must be reconsidered as a unit. From the ecological to the cultural this applies. Things and what is done with things becomes of utmost significance in reconfiguring responsiveness as an alignment that does not cordon off any special category that either belongs or does not belong in this mesh of cross-currents. Nothing blocks this. Nothing is too hard or too soft. There is no cement door- no inside or outside. The mesh is simply re-translated according to every level of contact.

Some say there must be more to it than this, this constant mixing and separation of objects. Maybe not, but this is not a materialistic dead-end or the end of thought. Awareness always does exceed a limited definition of the human as a social and cognitive set of skills played out on objects as mere conveniences. There are some things that come before any idea of grasping or enveloping in this sense because they exist where surfaces come into contact with one another as equals. This encounter then builds into certain reverberations and significances that at some levels are called sentient and others are called non-sentient. But there is a meshing far more subtle than we could perhaps ever imagine. Try to unravel it and we literally come apart.