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.