On:Off

Maybe we set up spaces of opportunity by how we fill things just before. That filling and the emptying it implies as a counter balance could be another word for touch. Touch is not a thing that one body does to a surface or to another body- It is  a proposition that cannot know a specific intent which would be another way of closing the loop before it had got started. We set up these distances by committing to a point of usurpation  This jumping in is an occupancy but it doesn't claim possession but simply hangs around enough for that occupancy to be registered  Only as such- as an indent, a mark, a sensation, a slight brush with another at just this precise point at just this precise time can the vacuum suck of an absenting be felt with true force. Can we speak of force in terms of absence? Or nothingness or silence or space as a kind of substancing? That all depends on what went before and what is to come after. We are talking here of thresholds of difference, so slight as to be almost imperceptible where a grander pre-prepared narrative of a life, a person, the holding or the absence of a functional integrity is put to the fore-front of our minds. Deeds somehow get  lost  in the bulk of this march of a life. So that the small  interspersing filaments that weave in and through one another, rinsing  into parallel and suddenly jumping into relief as a directional tangent inter-ups the smooth surface of these occurrences, seems like so much detritus spoiling the view of what we face as a given.

But it is not given- it is made; made by the timing of how things come together to be what they are, and how they come together to carry on being something different through the movement that these brief points of contact activate as if without thought. Rather the thought is not governed by a cranium encased in hard bone, it is felt and lived all the way through so that intelligence is this adaptive coming together and coming apart at the micro level of on-off contact. What is this on-off? It is  a pulse, a pattern and  a code. It can manifest  between form and movement, energy and bulk, air and ground  but it can only formulate into these polar extremes because it shares at both ends of its possible manifestation a similar structure. It is the algorithmic knot that is also the grasp just prior to dispersal. There is no dispersal without the knot and the knot becomes an impossibly dense intrusion without the possibility of dispersal at its fringes.

Having difficulty with "reading"  gestures, movements  words or with stationary objects each with a name  such as car, sheep, pram or body is also having difficulty with the pulse between contraction and expansion, compression and release, density and the tendency or possibility of flight. These are not divided states, they are unitary markers of  a transitory life that pulses between activation and non-activation; between "On" and "Off".

This "On-Off" guides movement and cradles sleep before we ever learn the particularities of the Tango let alone the more difficult task of how to tie our shoelaces or simply to stand up without falling over again. And "Rest" is the state of unraveling between a certain tension that is there, not there, there, not there through-out our waking lives meshing together different transparencies like see-through color slides that tint one another indefinitely according to this or that combination. The purely make-shift nature of these combinations is another way to talk about Interaction which is far less a social rule book of guided turn-taking and etiquette rules on smiling and making eye contact at opportune moments to add gravitas to a word or statement and is more the opportunistic making of something out of nothing and in inverse logic, of making nothing out of something. Filling and emptying- that is all we ever really needed to know. The dance makes itself. Even the concepts of "Up" and "Down" are simply scheduled to take place though this pulsation of pressing into and jumping back out. Touch or no touch is the difference between the speeds of this dyed that becomes one spinning around its oppositional potential into a thread of pure arrival, separating to become a boundary as surface to surface jump out against one another,  or melding and  creating the consistency of glue as the warming and absorptive affect of this slowed down contact creates dispersal through the filaments of the thing itself rather than through an ulterior realm we call air, space or sky. So spaciousness may be an internal component that is manifesting and dissolving minutely moment by moment. Similarly form may become the pockets of air and their openings into a wider movement that is barely touchable in its excitation and swift adaptation to what is before it.

We could go on and on and we do simply on a whim which we may even call an aggravation. This is enough to disrupt the barely palpable sense of unity shattering it into an endless array of splinters and the splinters of splinters and so on down the line that roots upward and downwards like an impossible tree on a misty morning where the invisible roots actually feel more real than the branches that disappear at the mid-point of their journey in the white opaqueness all around.

In that whiteness we can barely see our own hand outstretched before us let alone plan for an executive function in which tendons are tightened and lengthened like the pulley systems at a mad inventor's bequest.
There is nothing to head towards in the mist. And there is nothing that we can remember leaving for as we glance behind us even our eyes seem to roll away across the oceans of mist. All we are dealing with then are affects; the immediacy of the on-off contact that is specifically local and joins entities or bodies which rather than being separate a moment before were non-existent a moment before and are simply called into arrival out of the consequences of this contact. Yet the patterns that they give rise to proliferate outside the boundedness of this moment alone. So that the touch catapults back out into a wide and vast canopy of cross-references, depth-readings and exploratory meanderings in which the body is taken up. These are the imaginings that do not rest in the cranium or in any one place at all but are lassoed out like an endless stream of party-poppers absorbing one another and than collapsing and reemerging as another touch catapults out another eruption. And these threads can go through bodies, through walls, through buildings and bones and into the soft earth below. They can spiral up a tree, became the tree and become the hair or mane of an impossible beast with its head lost in the cloud and its feet luxuriating in the mud. They are an undulation, an approximation that is never definitive as "This" or "That" but simply take hold of myriad assemblies unifying bodies through ideas and gestating ideas through people.

People are the carriers of these idea-threads and these people are only ever manifest and in robust health when they are movement-ideas. These are spontaneous outpourings; automatic sky-writing, births and deaths in the blink of an eye. They are you and they are me. They are the child who says "Cookoo" over and over again,  the politician with his slogan or catch-phrase, your neighbor when she is out of sorts because the telephone cables are all mixed up so that your messages go next door but next doors' messages end up in Peru. It is the internet and the crashed video of a Jazz trombonist from fifty-eight years ago. It's the misspelling of this blog address so that one ends up at an entirely different blog-site; a better one. And it is the crazy dance to the episodic "Stop- Start" of a toy xylophone in a sweaty matted room in East London in the roof space to  a desanctified church.