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.