Trajectory of Touch

Sheet metal that does not bend. Rigidity keeping a predetermined shape- a shape discovered by accident through all the recoils into hardened surfaces that also do not give. This strategic suspension, a moment's hesitation before the point of contact; holding into a laminate texture as if grinding up the pulp of countless lives now reconstituted into a smooth if buckled fabrication- like an indent to an explosive crash never felt; the shock waves of a spasm that comes before the disaster not after it. Some kind of contortion that has done with contorting and presents itself through this appearance as a protective shell; like a crab shell with the meat already hollowed out. A perfect vessel that rattles and echoes back every impulse of that which approaches the tap tap tap of an intruder who hears as if from the multiplications inside its own skull, the tap tap amplification of its own gestures. is this utter passivity in the crustacean turned in upon itself - and yet sounding out the gestures of  a multifurous beckoning environment as detail after detail is played out in the carbonated sounding chamber of this hollowed out tree. A fossil that rattles reflectively with the passing life shadows like the blinking blinds between light and dark- the on-off that is not given or driven from a supple belly but is an empty resonant chamber with infinite variation. The dance that dances out the aggravation of each prod- a febrile pulsation that meanders until its own to and fro of pulsation quivers on the wind and like an Eoleon harp transfigures the wind that we are blind to into resonant chambers of compression and expansion.

This sounding out is passive. It is effortless- the grasping/ungrasping of a hand like the pump chamber between left and right ventricles of the heart. So this heart  that is pre-figured on this loop of return, squeezes fluid out but this very exit becomes the in-door to its neighbor at a later date in the circulation of blood. Blood that is red because it is oxygenated so that another loop of exit/entry is implicated as air passes through a softened mouth held slightly open and exits through the nostrils at a later date. And this flow begins to transgress every known boundary as the transformation of elemental compounds warps the difference between space and matter importing through the ambiguity of what constitutes anything at all, across borders suddenly becoming porous-  the boundary of this and that a play on words that is confounded, betrayed and held as a laughable and rise-able joke as it floats through the inner and outer hemispheres of cells. Skin too that is breathing and air too that is feeling. This myriad meshing that is rinsing through an environment broken from the outset into a fragmenting cascade of unlocate-able forms. These forms never really existed apart from the distillation of all difference into a make-shift story that is unhinged before it reaches the first full-stop.

This is how touch, out of the impossibility of touch, becomes possible floating on its own lack of reason   between gravity and imaginary reach.

The boy who spasms even when his brittle body is lowered by degrees to a matted floor is not then in the position to gesture or initiate any kind of contact. He is concretized beyond the possibility of any livable existence; sent back into a heaviness of being that seems impossible to the tendencies of extortion into a more casual forbearance. So it is with absolute passivity and on the mere accidental that this loaded heaviness begins to dis-invest itself from itself. And all the collusion's of those around who, witnessing  these spasmic flexions, back off and so concertize even more this isolated form from real embrace; too present to approach from any angle, begin to open up a question- what if this was not the absolute case of this existence but something brought about one slice at a time until  the volume suddenly loomed up as if undoubtedly and always there; too austere now to approach or invade in any meaningful way?

And it is in the fall that the boy through negation begins this slide into contact like a rolling off a wall that has him  previously locked on a knife edge of total symmetry until through a casual absenting he falls one way or another absenting himself into the floor or absenting himself into the unpredictable happen-chance of  another form buffeting one side of his body as he lies there on his side on the red mat. So the contact is a kind of falling away- a loss of form melting into this gradual decomposition that has no intention- no beginning or end  but just a continuation.

This is how touch becomes possible and builds through its own distractions like the streams and trickles of a river gradually bursting out of  its given channel. So that it is this bursting apart that guides and encourages  the flow of reach not a kind of consigned goal of functional integration which would only further reify this  fossilized stone-body that has momentarily seized under the burden of its own existence this sense of impossible permanence within life's unstoppable course.

When I think of this incident of working with this boy I superimpose it with the recurrent image of  black-birds that lower their bulky forms  form out the sky into the bare branches of the trees below and into the nests built and stacked up around these branches. This is an image I watch from my window every day in the days and weeks leading up to the break of Spring where winter is still almost at its coldest. There is this high tone to these birds lifting up against the wind currents, bracing outstretched wings that are flayed and battered by the wind and then this slight giving way as they drop this resistance against gravity and allow themselves to descend by degrees until the position is calibrated in these small velocity shifts into the nests below. They are falling into place by letting go the effort that resisted this falling. So they become nested. It's the same with the boy and how he gradually falls into a place of touch and the receptivity and adaptation that this gives rise to not by effort or interest as an image aimed at before the event.

Perhaps this is also the condition of Autism; not a dislike of touch or contact but a learning to de-intensify the tone of heightened form against gravity. Learning to activate feeling response in each moment is then not a positive injection of sensory stimuli;  it is more an opportunistic lending oneself to these moments of letting go so that falling becomes buffeted and propelled back out into the possibility of wider patterns and thoughts about movement and pause. Touch as pause or interval is then an accidental lever that initiates a counter-intuition; expansion. This expansion is built out of a near seizure into compression, only then flipping back out into flight and the inter-connectivity of forms rinsing in and through one another. Space is experienced in this way- in this capacity to move freely with no given plan and to think about movement in the tiny impulses between the On touch and the Off touch that activate and code for this movement possibility.