Malki's Enquiry

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With Malki who is blind there is this slow affinity like bleeding and absorbing into forms and objects. This is because there is no distance of aperception where one collates different viewpoints with the occular eye and scratches them together into three-dimesional wholeness. Rather that wholeness is given from the first encounter; lent into and tested for give, bounce, collapse that is only ever known according to discrete involvements that build up in the layers of volume as ones body impacts against another volume. It is a practice of resonance or chiming together whilst pulling back in disonance at the same time- like a push-me-pull-you set of running tensions and give-way points that pulsate in the object, in the body, through various sets of accomodations and counter intuitive reversals. There is a definite withdrawal, yes, but also a familiarity that is durational- about resting in the embrace of this all-encompasing enfoldment and then leaning  in more or less, breathing in and out more or less andconstricting/expanding more or less. These are not absolutes- not polar opposites but are the pump of enquiry that is in the girl and the objects that she sets in motion as they set her in motion in the inward and outward enfoldment and through their morphed involvement.

This manner of enquiry gives to Malki an attitude of softness that is like a pervading forwarding through tiny manoevres of shufflement and re-organisation. Gradual almost imperceptable intensifications of pressure and than sudden distilations at various interfaces- opens up a depth that is no more dealing at the contour of surface visual outlines but in the the actual fibre and knit of the object and body as it plays with coherance and unravelling- a constant wind-unwind in which air and object permeate. It's the intervals between the knitted texture that is being performed- not their movement in space as discrete objects surrounded by absenses but in the way they are drummed, flicked and burrowed into in a gradual softening and hardening that is known as ease.

Malki is now sophisticated enough in her navigation as a 9 year old girl that she does not need to use just her hands outstretched before her as she crawls over the floor surface to bang and tap out the existance of what lies before her. This may indeed be an initial rough guide- but then she hones in on these depths- moves into their inner labrynth - refines her testing by easing her body around the hard cushions, the carpettd swing, the drum lying on its side. She is lingering longer- residing in the affectivity of these surfaces that are now acting  through their very own withdrawal, into volumes thta also meet her withdrawal. These are volummes that her body synchronises with and so she takes a ride tummy down on the swing, than flips off at a certain speed using the volition  and spin of this abrupt speed cauterization to fall on to her knees, then lean back intot he L shaped cushion that she had tapped into existance earlier in her initial rough draught. She enfolds back into its negative shape, then lets her body pour over the right-angle extension and simply adds one degree at a time, increasing pressure in her tipping fall that acts not like pressure at all but more like an intensified presencing that jams together running out all sense of seperation until at a very precise moment the cataclysmic buckling of the cushion fibre sqaushes in upon itself and she falls into the folds of its own collapse. This altered shape is only known, felt, experienced because her body takes a ride into the moment where the volume resistence gives way and her body too gives way into this partial collapse.Her practice is to be able to work the moment of that collapse and so stay completely present and alert within this shift.

So Malki is learning to take a ride into the depths of a volume's undoing. This is never just the decimation or resistance of an object but is always necessarily twinned with her own body decimation and resistance.

Movement and rest is composed through  this kind of slow motion embrace into the pulverisation of forms.
Malki smiles at these moments of optimal coherance thresholds that then give way in tthe impossible resistance and torsion of a stretched or provoked encounter, that  then suddenly, dramatically buckles. This is the event- Similar to the quantuum idea of an Event Horizen where - as if going over the brink of a waterfall, one reaches the point of no-return. All the laws and norms alter in this area of pulverised meshing.

There is another practice that Malki is mastering- related to this waterful analogy. She is learning a technique of jetting out very fine vapours of spit between the gaps in her teeth that she then catches on her fingers as if it were an alien substance- not of her at all. In a sense this is correct for she has mastered a way of transforming her inside spit into this fine spun web that almost lingers in the air, suspended and hovering until she discovers it anew as if for the first time.

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.

Glide-Marks: Object bodies

The contours of any form are the glide-marks of an entry point or exit point in a sounding that ricochets through, ringing out in one aspect or another. There are gaps in the contour- non-aligned suspended appendages, broken off or burrowing into or out of tunnels, the rims of which alone can be seen. It doesn’t matter. These objects are all jostling in their departure or affinity to one another and the perspective of the sounding lays entry in the mismatch gliding un-bespoken through the limitations of these various angles and handles. Thoroughfares emerge like valves in the slight tip or tilt of a body. This body is a collection of objects that do not entirely square up. The objects have a tendency to float or sink, to be wayward in one direction or another, to break off and play at being single. But that is not really the full aspect. There is the silence pervading, the note so pure it blasts into sheer exteriority or holes so deep that it is the blank nonentity in the massed crowd that any body is.

But these omissions are a sign- a time signature following through every rattle into the pause and back and forth into the rattle again. Each gains composure from the other. The time-line is the speed of passage, its hesitation, stultifying sulk and inflamed rush performed in looped and broken cycles. The build up of cycles over and over again create depth which is sometimes seen as form, sometimes as space. Yet there is no separation- space is in form and form in space. It is the disconnect between these cycles that allows for ease of action- a movement that is not an executed movement but more like the fizz from removing a cap off a bottle of fizzy drink. Effervescence is a constraint suddenly removed- just as lightness and ease of composure is compression or the body perceived as volume suddenly translating into a void or an absence of that volume. It leads to a moment of levity. Uprightness is this play of on-off variables- not a “how to stand, how to walk” manual.  Non-human objects including rocks and buildings are the same. They must be teased into existence. They are self-teasing. The mood is contagious. It must be played out in a moment of physical aptness and in the humorous mismatch that this allows. It is the tilting inflections of counter forces that are always already up against one another that allows for this buoyancy. Similarly falling is a freedom from this intimacy and can become movement, gliding or flying if it is caught mid-way and earthed back into an implicated mesh of co-existence.

Learning to tolerate intimacy with sentient and non-sentient surfaces is a way to move into the depth and volume of form and non-form. Touch is non-touch in that it can move through form or deflect before a gap has been closed. It is an attunement more in line with musical improvisation than a static convergence. It plays with distance and with the freedom to move uninhibited that any distance or interval brings. The touch part is half of an on-off performance where the intonation is constantly shuffled between seemingly irreconcilable opposites. It plays with a contradiction inhabiting one end in order to gain passage into the other. In this respect it is un-thought execution. The hand touches through the hand by touching through the body it is touching so that the hand is absent and so is the body. Touch becomes distance and distance, touch. In this reversal there is spin and in that a shuffling realignment or object reversal as performance performs itself within and through objects at micro and macro levels.

This is the flickering waver of a spectrum short circuit. It is an instance made out of difference slammed into one, than unravelling into subsequent instances that are never where they are because they are a  forwarding. Every aspect that is still is the absolute balance point of this unfurling sent back through into a tension so exact it is on the verge of extinction. Equanimity is the embrace of this overall possibility of collapse. It is the split held in wide focus whilst residing in the specificity of a partial seizure that is binding and unbinding simultaneously. Form as composite interaction that is never stable except when past. Attention is always attenuated, spilt, smudged and bleeding through into lost cousins, distant influences, un-noteworthy passers by, bushes and bracken. It is fixated on a disparate atmosphere at the cut between light and dark, the crack of sound in a gulf, the reflective blind spot of a doubling and redoubling of frequencies as they spin over on one another duplicating as mirror intensifications without end. How much circularity can we withstand? Just enough to keep us erect, before motion tips the balance and in falling we go somewhere. This is drive, plans, stories, narrative. The poem is more like the ricocheting light off the surface of a polluted lake where blinding stasis is only saved through the chemical filter of pollutants that block out partial frequencies of the distant sun. So we stay- amidst the madness and beauty, destruction and pain of it all. A body dying, a body living nonetheless because it is dying and knows itself in this process of buoyancy through the sinking of substance that stabilizes it. Form remains perhaps as memory perhaps  tenaciously despite the tendencies that are pulling it apart. It only ever exists out of these tendencies, forged in reverse of a sending out, this interiority is the joke of its constant usurpation.

Never to cut attentional meanderings. Never to bracket off the flickering spasms and eidetic waywardness of our out of control systems- neither here in the body interior nor there in the body exterior. We vibrate between here and there, sent out and sent back in collusion with otherness that is our attention depository. We are one moment in the composite interaction of on off pulses that course through objects both living and non-living. At a high enough frequency the pulse levels into a smooth running contour and all is background settlement. At another frequency all is falling, splitting apart and erupting in seismic shifts that throw bodies to the wind, clap oceans into the sky, rearrange town and cities like molten rock candy arrested half way through its manufacture. At another frequency we are separate and totalising entities with profiles, targets and deadlines that take us from birth to the end of life in one single decree.

The civilisations that come and go; the life styles that envelope us and let us slip. The illnesses we avoid and that meet us again or differently. The slim line between standing and collapse. Of meaning and non-meaning, of words and patterns. We are attendants to all of these actualities whether they play out or not. One is embedded and implicit in the other despite our every effort to keep them apart, to siphon off the good from the bad, the upright from the fallen.

The child in school who has an attentional sensory processing deficit, the one who turns to a miniscule variation in pitch or the half beat rhythmic mismatch in a  distant conversation rather than to the objective lesson plan. The one who falls when standing because he forgets to hold up his body but in motion is functional. The touch sensitive child who leans up against a leaning person, anticipating them straightening and the exact amount of feedback adaptive to this straightening up that they borrow a ride on, yet to touch him out of the blue is to cause confusion, toxic reactivity, and emotional melt-down in a matter of seconds.

That is because objects are not only larger than we imagine but smaller than we imagine. In that sense they are more adept, more flexible, spontaneous and versatile than we would imagine. Objects get under our skin. They are our skin as well as the Formica table that our elbows rest on. They are any point of contact between one surface and another. For it is here at the site of any activation that the objects come into being in order to shuffle, dance and re-congregate according to the unique circumstance that every occasion of their meeting brings. This is called adaptation. In this sense the play of objects involve a coupling at a micro level in which awareness becomes an on-going dance of accommodation, involvement and re-synchronization and a decoupling at a macro level in which objects play out of their own accord undeterred by any totalising schema or meta language either at a personal, historical, social, psychological or political level. 

The dance of objects has its own haptic intelligence that is bound up in the particularities of a certain aspect of contact or interaction and how that floats or spins into a wider set of influences and tendencies. These cascade and simultaneously resonate and default on one another, nearing pitches of absolute affinity only to swerve out and displace before the moment of destruction. So that the pattern becomes a continuance that is made in the reactivity and adept presencing of its own distortion according to engagements that it bends to or straightens towards magnetically as a process of sensitization. Tensegrities are forged in that instance from objects that converge into makeshift forms that can never in that same moment know themselves or stand outside of this forwarding of a pattern that they are in. Form in that sense is an atmosphere of many objects apprehended into one another, implicating through one another and uniquely synchronised for a certain plateau of affect to stabilize momentarily.

The object could be the body, a wall, a chair, a finger, the sinews in the back of a heel, a point on the chest, a light switch, a gap in an open door, an eye crevice, a quivering muscle at the side of the throat, dust, a pneumatic drill from a neighbours house resonating through a set of barriers and interior spaces, the soft fleshy point where the skull meets the top of the spinal cord, a lamp, the wind against a window, a broken fence, a swivel chair, the bone in the coccyx, the dial of a radiator, carpet, the protruding bone on the outer edge of the wrist, the fleshy part of the stomach, hair. These things are discreet but they never exist alone.

Connection is life. This forward, halt, rewind, tilt is the playing out of the gaps between the contours. The swerve, ricochet, throb and buzzing of a pervading atmosphere that is a resonance in that it holds a continuance aside from effort, doing, goal or objective. It simply bounces up like the effervescence of an effect that is apart from any intimacy of the objects involved yet somehow involves them, places them, even brings them into being. It balances itself for a moment in the mess of directions brought back down to nought. It is un-minded, deeper set than plans, configurations and conceptual chit chat. It’s the linking diffuser that also holds real bone and wood, muscle and lino, plaster board and hair, plastic and skin into their continual adaptive engagement. Song sings object and object holds in residue the traces of this sounding passage that it dances. Dance leaves footprints and skid marks that are diagrams of its passage, works of art. Bodies leave heat marks or sweat deposits on surfaces they are only briefly involved with. Walls collapse with the weight and force of objects moving at high velocity or hold firm and bounce out projectiles made soft because their advance is mediated or inflected like a reflection that plays out in tangible forms.

Bodies embrace reallocating the objects within and bursting forth to mingle and converse as adjustments in the tiny tilts of a larger form. This localised reemphasis discharges through the objects of our bodies. They are retuning to a different pitch by plummeting up wards and downwards in a double take that pulls through a centre that can never be located discretely and only exists in the unutterable nuance of this wider act. We sound out other utterances as the traces of this friendly fire that we can temper through interruption and convergence. Rhythm is this slant and slice of drawing out and drawing up short- the variables of repetition and sudden seizure- affinity and bounce which is playful composure and maybe the only possibility for composure or taking a stance at all.

We are collectibles that only converge momentarily in the passages held briefly in alignment and that activate through and because of one another. What is left is the wrap-around contour that turns back on itself, bends out from a given line, tilts and wobbles off from a plumb line, is earthed as one straggling line disappears and winds back into and through another not because they actually match up but because they do not and so a higher or more complex dimension of feedback and delay must be read in the blanks; the spaces and gaps of any composure. In our near falling we stand. The ground that is on the brink of eruption or catastrophe reads back the smoothness on the verge of extinction. A contour that runs out on itself, supposes interruption and in that a dance of rhapsody comes through on another plane as a meshing or interference pattern. This pattern is only ever partially engaged. In turn it only ever really exists through each aspect of an engagement that is continually displaced. One could say that this is the mark of openness; this impossibility of total coherence whilst playing at the borders of coherence. Movement is energised on the spin between alignment and mismatch. So it goes on and the body in fact is only ever the movement and play of this unsettlement. The body is indeed a set of compulsions but compulsions that rattle and re-tune one another. They are open to influence. The body is a tuning score that is comfort and unease- a pushing out and a falling back through. Objects are forged and blown apart through this never ending process. We are the multitude of objects playing in and through one another. In this aspect within and without we play with the border. Objects multiply and in doing so, they interact bringing forms into and out of an organization.

Letting this play of occurrences play out seems all too simple for conceptual discussion but it may be the only way through for ecological, educational and co-living- a practice of living that generates objects and thoughts in passing. The act of doing anything produces its own affects, not a hindrance but the glow or the after-glow of the objects themselves.