Enquiry

Human acts will be looped as repetitions until the background affective context shifts or creates a contrast that registers as difference. The practitoner, tutor, parent, therapist can act as this background context for an autistic child so that they act like the ground or wider field feeding in and mediating sensory spectrum shifts that create micro levels of interest and sensitivity, contrasting base sounds with high frequency sounds, "On" touch with "Off" touch, spaciousness and wider peripheral movements with direct contact and physical dynamic supportive lifting, spinning and  setting back down. Concurrently the practitioner can become a site for more and more subtle energetic connections- micro touching-in through alignment down the spine with the pads of ones fingers and core body support through open palms that warm but are undemanding and with no agenda of their own. Sounds and melodies crafted directly out of the moment by moment response and interest of the child can begin to manifest almost as leanings that go so far and then fall into a paralel harmonic or a counter rhythm. Where gaps and holes appear these may become moments for pause and quietude or invitations for the child to jump in and fill the gap furthering or intensifying the pattern in their unique way from within its very texture and through listening and atuning to the conditions of its arising.

In this sense there becomes a listening contact where mediation occurs across the threshold of the contact itself as the child leans in or moves away from touch contact, settles into positions or stances or melds and adapts around the seeking out or avoidance of particular areas in a room. The practitioner becomes simply a series of surfaces that respond as they prompt into a series of certain shadings as  an escalation or diminishment in the affective space between one to another, where a gulf is bridged, beckoning flight or is curtailed as phases demarcating a staccato or even an intake of breath back in to a wider movement.
All objects, surfaces, textures, sounds- whether in the room or beyond the room- as well as the child and practitioner- become actors in this ritualised dance between relative placements and intervals and this starts to draw the pulse of  the interaction into a momentum that begins to take on a life of its own.

A thinking body of material arises and is shaped in the process of its beckoning into something usable, playful and balanced lightly between a memory and repetition of what has gone before; a framework that holds fast as an idea or as a room, a garden, a backyard, and the bending, scuppering and reinvention of these guidelines in each new and fresh moment of interaction between living beings.

Affect

Now's the time to link together the experience of fluctuating affect in auditory, light, touch and speed perception and the ritual practises and repetitions important for people on the autistic spectrum. The sensory alteration is key to why some movements and practises become important. It's the shifting landscape in the perceptual field that calls for a space of ritual mediation. This becomes a benchmark against which the fluctuation intone and colour each change. Therefore it is not the core interest or attentional field that needs to be curved or enlarged in order to give a greater scope of experience; and autistic people will fight tooth and nail against this, but rather the context in which this practise operates. If the context or atmosphere can begin to act like a looped resonance; that layers into different qualities of affect through duration and accumulative intensification or in a paring back down of input, then the attentional zone within the parameters of a given activity will alter and the relative ritualistic or story-board quality of this version will start to play out into a wider field of possible "Takes".

Autistics are said to lack imagination or an awareness that the activities they and others partake in are make-believe or relative. They are said to lack the ability to play. This is because they are triggered so totally by the rapid affect-response of contact that there is no or little patterning in or out of this momentary excitation which flares up and dies away again without a trace. And when it is repeated it is as if it starts up for the very first time.

Timing responsiveness through mediated touch and sound and light as a way to modulate environmental affect is therefore a key way to work into imaginative play. Because without this work into the conditions of affect, there is no chance for the framing of practises as a ritual space or for acknowledgement of this framing.
This is key to imagination and playfulness. So if the neurological problem is about stimulation and mediated receptivity, this must be addressed as the foremost area of interest and concern, rather than a prescribed technique and/or program of social skills or behavioural normative control mechanisms learnt as if they could be imposed on any situation as a blue-print.. Only when a person has the practical skills to physically time their responsiveness and the degree in which an affect meets with their reception can the practises themselves become areas for symbolic interpretation or psychological meaning.
         
Because foremost  the manifestations- whether lining up automobiles, singing a song, swaying and rocking or composing a sophisticated diagram, are directed as affective stabilisers or enhancers/depressors and engaged with as a way to manage and/or record fluctuations in conscious sensory receptivity. They are not in other words objects in themselves and only seem that way to outside observers who judge them either as genius or deeply troubled trace elements of the autistic "Mind". But they are rather barometers of  the streaming of many fluctuating frequencies of light, sound, temperature, velocity that become conduits through the autistic person's body and into their ritual practises. These practises then are like transducers or conductors that earth these streaming affects through the body practise. It's worth really following and staying true to these practises because they will guide a shared awareness into the affects that have brought them forth and so shared activity can be built up  like a threshold conversion as the trigger-affects are played out differently as a compositional practise between practitioners weather autistic or not. These compositions tell of unseen currents, weather systems, untraceable auditory buzzes and the culminating affects of minor compressions and releases through out the body as it adjusts. Working at this level of body integration the practises even as they appear to remain the same, become part of a demarcated ritual or play space rather than the only reality playing out over and over again as if for the very first time.

In the garden, (An Autistic arts project called Memory Gardens that I ran in Highbury, London between 2002 and 2009) autistic people would line up bricks and found objects and sometimes build them upwards into dense constructions or aerated hive-like breathing vessels. Air flowed through the bricks and even in their very real form that occupied a certain space on the ground of this outdoor practise space, there seemed to be a spaciousness in these sculptures that simply let the wind through rather than being knocked down by it. This was a construction modification that came out of this outdoor garden practise over time and was developed out of the conditions of weather and ecology and the recycling of waste products from the neighbouring children's charity whose land this was. All these factors and the political implications of our presence on that piece of land- an informal and mostly ignored arrangement- was all a part of this environment. The practise was not therefore a thing in itself. It was a cross-section of velocity shifts including people, animals, plants, debris and discarded objects, pollutants and weather fronts. Whether the constructions stayed upright or fell down swiftly or by degrees was part of the circumstances of these interacting currents and either outcome in itself was not that important.

Autistic people in the same way as every other living being, are the cross current of various affects gathering momentarily in the muscle, nervous and visceral potentialities of that life-form. They are compositions made from all the missing affects that may convert into hyper or hypo tension, agitation or relaxation, embracing in and bouncing out again.

Rather than seeing this outlook of co-involvement as justification for indulging autistics in inappropriate repetitions, demarcating a ritual space of operation allows for this key gauge between fluctuating affect and stable translation to play out. This becomes an important area for building up the rhythms and intervals on to which symbolic and imaginative play can later take hold. The processes of up/down, in/out , movement and pause are a micro reading device that can become manifest in infinite varieties of sound and form. And so whatever the special interest or tone of activity engaged in by an individual or group of individuals these polarities can begin to play into a deeper affective resonance within a wider field of contrast and difference. This is the shared affective field that is not only received by the nervous system but is actually co-created in order to pace our involvement and coordinate our experience as one.

I talk as one who has a strong experience of these fluctuating affects in day to day life and where art practises have become important ritual spaces that absorb, reflect and transduce these variable dancing and shimmering affects. Being a therapist marks out another practise space or ritual space of operation. A space then of co-creation that is pertinent to that particular place at that particular time and in relation to who is present at the time. How people are placed dynamically and in interaction with one another whether physically at close range or at intervals where sound variation and fleeting episodes of movement and stillness like flashes of light and shade, a pattern begins to shape itself. This becomes a living diagram enacted through this living ritual space telling of spatial and time realignments, in the varying confluences, delays and fluctuations of their showing. How interest and attention play out and drift or migrate across areas, occupations and resting points becomes the drama at the heart of which a sense of quietude may or may not gradually emerge.

Kings Cross Disaster

The ritual building and destroying of compositional niches that are fine-tuning. An itch that keeps moving.
We can not address this itch directly nor outline or determine its whereabouts. We can only allude to it prostethically through these augmented situations we find ourselves in whether in a building or outside.
Some things go wrong. Fire catches on to a straggling piece of paper beneath the ancient wooden escalator stairs of a central London underground station. It is Kings Cross 1989. Signals somehow work too efficiently and people are let through the barriers and down on to the platform just as they are dispatched off from bulging carriages into the smoke-filled pitch black alleyways. It is a death trap and the waves of smoke belch back on themselves at the top of the escalators, driven by the upwards surge of heat from the fire below creating a discreet climate there and then; a tornado-like thrust of fire that feeds itself around and around in the gulp of oxygen it takes from the top of the stairs before it plummets back down as a fire ball into the path of escaping passengers. So the disaster is born; a feedback system of organisational methodical routine; people going down from the barriers, people coming up from the trains that could not adjust in the altered details of this disaster. And so the disaster occurs where the order of an ordinary day on the tube meets the disaster of the unaccountable escalation of a fairly small-scale fire. The fire grows and people, put into harm's way, die or are incredibly burnt, remembering evermore this moment as the moment that changed their outlook on life. Compensation claims go unmet or are shoddily dealt with. People are wounded all over again and while the suffering grows, those in charge on that day seek therapy. No one is actually there to deal with  one another in the moment that is relevant. There is a delay and reconciliation around a DJ's radio program many years later separates each human in a bubble of their own injury, interest, longing and impossible meeting.

Precise

A gesture or inclination towards a certain tendency and how that plays out through the body is the feeling; the idea that reaches through the body. That is connection. Connection is not about a specific intention towards someone or about some issue already in our stock of memory and available imagery. It is something forging into existence there and then; a reaching through a touching into by going through the demarcation even as that borderline is alluded to. We are playing on and off from the there/not thereness of something both definite and untouchable. The fact that we go through these borderlines does not mean we do not reach towards or away from, solidify in condensation or dissipate through the breath. The push-pull of these polarities works together. They create the knot of a forbearance that is situated and shifted, unravelling through its own placement over and over. This is the there/not thereness of our lives where we fill and vacate, creating the circumstances for movement guided on a thread that is playing into countless directives like a game patterning itself though experiential and perceptual shifts that free up further directives by erasing over and over again every impression of momentary dwelling. These dwelling points and the directives they map out; between up and down, in and out, tilting this way and that, balancing on a precipice and falling or flying as an impulse fuelled by these vacancies, is the tipping and tilting circular directive that only knows itself through partial memory. So a tendency to go up goes so far and then reverse into down; a tendency to go forward backtracks in a looped reversal to go backwards. These polarities that seem so exclusive in the singular act of their journey always revers into their contradiction.  And in that word- Contra-diction; against speech, speech evolves in the fluidity of a metaphor that wherever it is placed always alludes to its background context- the twin opposite which will eventually replace it or further it into a differing dimension. As this pattern plays out triangulating itself into and out of each course, straight lines begin to bend and a spherical placelessnes becomes this journey/prohibition, bouncing and redoubling out of a deadlock into a  furtherance of this journeying.prohibition.  This winde/unwinde is a passage of effect that need not know itself  for there is no grand gestalt- no completion of the plan into which we can gaze down and learn by heart. Heart indeed is this willingness to enter into the patterning of the pattern. To get lost in the discomfort or ease that the details bring up and simply to remain until the reversal takes the pattern a little further.

We are swaying and necessarily pulsating between tendencies wrought to us as inclinations or flavours, images or points of recognition. These memory traces seem to reflect a whole that we are constantly alluding to, stretching towards. But they are more like small indications and prompts that are exactly what they are- fragmented and very specific interventions that call into a responsiveness either as a momentary seizure of a movement or as its continuation as repetition, inflection, reversal or re-calibration and that pose a question in us that is never finalized and impossible really for us to formulate. The idea to move, or make a gesture or communicate is bubbling up in these small  high speed affective pulses that are born and die on the wind of our unthinking responsiveness- to fold out, fold in, tilt forward or backwards, upwards or downwards. And this movement in itself powers directives that pool here and here and then here into moments of confluence that then give rise to dissipation and the momentary sense of a greater spaciousness. Over and over again these reversals of containment and release pulse between on/off, open and closed.  We gain a sense of mindfulness only as part of this pulsing dichotomy that somewhere indeterminate in between all that can be alluded to, begins to play out in the actual situation of its arising.

Gradually the body becomes unintended from itelf and is a series of connections between movements, gestures and momentary pauses that manifest in and beyond the body and through which the body shows its form. These are carried through temperature and light gauges, velocity and speed thresholds.Thought is the pulsing between emptied residue and reformulation as the body disintegrates and remakes itself on the cusp of this versatile connectivty

Catching in

What is the floor we arrive at? The surface ground upon which we touch in? How do we recieve it, enfold it into our dynamic journey and send it on its way? What ideas does it have and what ideas do we impress upon it? Is it a part of something else and are we a part of that something too? Are we the missing parts to each other linked in an unavoidable dance that we do not so much operate but rather that takes us into its patterning? Is the patterning of this dance an idea that enfolds random events into its texture? Where do we rest? Or are we resting even in the pattern that is always making itself; that we never know in full but which implicates us and through which we emerge?

Can we move through this floor whilst also impacting on it? How can we become such a floor to one another; transparent and yeilding but with definite momentary limits and points of impact? How would such an interaction inform the nature of address between practitioners and children or adults with neurological and motor difficulties? Is the nature of this address a constellation recognised even in the hit and miss tangents of our lived situation? How is this timed? Is this what care is? Alluding to the practice of pattern-making through careful timing rather than to fixed ideas of each other. This is an outline for the aesthetics of contact.

About forgetting

A pattern that makes itself, touching in. A prompt to what? A memory trace that has no content and no directive. Yet a semblance of some kind of journey- like an opening- a possibility with no end. How far will it go? When will it run out? Does it need to be formalised, formulated? Is there this trajectory that always looks and feels the same? Or does it wobble between moments of equivalences- strange deja-vus that never really fill out as an original model simply done again and again. Can we go backwards? Rewind the order of events- like a bit or two of info that simply inverts and plays out the given intervals back to front. The mirror- image that knows it is an inversion because there is something out there that is the real thing? I`m not sure about this anymore. What is this thing we call learning, aptitude or know-how? It's some kind of collectivity that shuffles through on the briefest of touches. A mere reminder with a missing content- like an empty frame, a transparent box that bursts like the bubble it is on touching.

Working now with children with highly sensitised nervous systems- who spasm and redouble back and forth into and out of any given limit on the briefest of landings- how do they learn? Unfold or unfurl some kind of reaching out- some kind of stillness within. A connectivity that is undone as it makes itself. This dropping away from the context of repetition is actually a gift for renewal; an enquiry that is never-ending.

OCD- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or the carrying out of the same thing in the same way over and over again. Or the ritualistic pattern-making of autistic people- placing, ordering and sequencing their landings here and there than walking away and glancing back. The trace elements of an absented choreography still glimmering in the reflectivity of a bouncing light. Where all sounds give rise to this echoing as they double and redouble cascading in and out of themselves. What is the original? Is there a demarcated zone to move towards or away from? To move in and out of?

In the garden, the patterns built up over time with bricks and pieces of wood heaped into a pile or straggling out like the roots of plants and trees seemingly absented under the earth. Worms burrowing through the mud making porous this heaped-in earth. A means to an end that cannot be seen, that is not intentional in the blind thrusting of the worm amid the particles of earth; mineral and decomposing life forms. A kind of reshuffling in the compost that is mimicked in these lines and swirls of execution above ground. The sculptures that seem almost to make themselves as the footballer is guided by the ball  between two possible landings at either end of the pitch that  is never really arrived at- just this detraction and interruption; this foreshortening and prolongation that is the game. So to create a group sculpture or a group dance is a process of taking away- of decomposition as sensory and muscle memory, kinaesthethic pathways and visceral potentials are pulsing open and closed through a composite quality of light, sound, temperature and neurological, chemical  and fibrous firings. This on-off computation is a lived experience not a code set apart. It isn't a device for composition or for feeling. It is more like an aggravation away from the slavic execution of given functional procedures; the techniques and stories of getting from here to there, of lifting, of setting down, rolling over or keeping still.

Attention then is this slippage between tracks rather than a staying on track. And the aggravation that tilts a tendency this way or that becomes the only given route at that moment full of the pulsation of every other affect. Not than a deviation from a norm or a well-known nursery rhyme somehow ruined but the only authentic movement possible under those circumstances. Desire and repulsion, they are always in the making and they are rather than interruptions to an ideal state, the very stuff of motion and stillness. This pulsing of tendencies that never quite gets going and never therefore finalise are the provocation that encompas the calm through all the minor and major eruptions of our motor, kinaesthetic and sensory networks. These networks span terrain and travel through air, water, walls and furniture. Bodies also come into it and become conduits for this passing pulsation. This is not so much an information network as an affective streaming that splinters and cascades, builds under the dam-like conditions of an obstruction and torrents down hill and upstream against gravity or towards a natural but unintended pool. This pool is not social- it is not meaningful- it is simply shaping and absenting on the brink of memory and forgetting. A memory that is un-localised and micro co-ordinated even as it is falling away from any semblance of organisation.

What is forgotten? What is prompted only to vacate all known semblance of a repetition? What is provoked, caressed, lent into, felt as a moving through, dissipated as a sense of freedom of breath or contained and catapulted out of a choking compression? These become useful or usable impulses not at a functional level of normative behaviour or sense-making totalities but in the very fragments and pieces that splinter like the debris from an explosion that is not original- not the one-off big bang we are all somehow recovering or rearranging around but the minor incidental and random firings that excite and dampen simultaneously enlivening and deadening in execution and decrease as a thinking pulse. An idea that has no origin and no place to land. A seizure that is calm and composed through and through. A rippling outwards and a containment within where centre and periphery is a liminal criss-cross in which the circle is made and remade like so many light spots on the cornea of our eyes; unseeing.

Something about the tragedy then that is always occurring- can never be tidied away within a media-friendly version ready for public distribution. There is no safe version. No life story or functional remedy for neurological over or under responsiveness. There is no cocktail of a sensory diet or program for behavioural fixity. There is no pill for attentional longevity or for staying on the case. We wobble and slip, fall and reorganise. In the gaps and in what is not remembered something that prompts us into momentary attentiveness takes us or drops us somewhere we could never prepare the ground for. This is the basis of the Care-connection that is unknowing. Not towards or about anything or anyone in particular, but open  to  what is occurring as a flow of specs on the wind or a person sitting next to us in the park on a rainy day. Where it is hard to remember or think about what the sun felt like until it actually comes out again and so momentarily changes the way we are.