A Tendency

A Tendency



He's wheeled in and left at the door. His carer disappears called to another duty.

I unstrap him. As each strap comes off the limbs begin to waver. His hand reaches towards his mouth. He stuffs it in and bites down. I lift him out of the body-hugging padded chair. Close to my body I swing around so that our body mass becomes one. I crease my lower limbs and he is carried to the floor through the drop of our joint gravitational weight, succumbing to gravity in one full sweep. As his small body touches the mat, it inevitably sends small shocks through his alert nervous system. The difference in temperature between the flat mat and his over-worked arching body is enough to register small shock waves of affront. it is this affront that I begin immediately to work off, warming form the belly a contact that through duration could not be called exactly touch- something with connotations of suddenness and a certain level of external infringement- but is more a sense of enfoldment which is as much an attentional zone as a skin contact. Through outstretched hands- as if warming and adjusting so as to create an even sense of heat through tiny tilts and realignments that then send down further, than come up by degrees, there is an accommodation- like moving into a room- working out the co-ordinates- registering body motility, arm expansion, and even such uncertainties as emotional timbre, gestural inflexion that becomes possible in the space given. This space is not a finite bounded object. It is the body as re-vamping of impulses, motivations and micro affects-responses that are always twinned affiliations- always relational tones cobbled together in real time and the ongoing and interlacing composure of context. The context is quite literally the time it takes to take a breath in and expel it again; it is the small manoeuvres that float boundary constrictions to create push-me pull-you alignments across bodies. I am a Braille reader or a pianist waiting for the indentions to sound out and resonate as articulations through the palms and pads of my hands and fingers before they ever reach outwardly audible sound, language or expression. Or perhaps he is the pianist playing me into different composures by the slightest of breathes. Yet both ways together we intend and set up an expectancy/potential that plays out in tendencies that to all intents and purposes, have a life of their own.


The warming is a belly to belly contact- of deep guttural motivations- wells and ponds that in raising their temperature even minutely begin to stir and pattern in an entirely different way. The hands are an intermediary- simply a prosthetic outreach that is both there at the point of contact but is also all the way through in this shared anatomical abdomen that is then a capacity to move forward- to tilt, to adjust as I in fact do every time that M breathes in and breathes out, spasms and relaxes, condenses and dissipates an area of emphasis so that the point of contact is maintained through this joint co-regulation that is on both sides of the machine a derivation of one another- a continual re-shaping so as to stay with an easy contact that is so light at times that it seems to hover on an air current and even when the contact sinks deeper into the fascia it is because it is let in and it is as if there is space made between the muscle groups, the blood, the bone- a gaseous exchange in the heart of solid matter.


This porosity at the centre of flesh is material and dispersive- a parting of the waves- an effortless journey so that the most interior of places become expansive- a wealth of tributaries and pathways that make/find themselves and become known to themselves on this slightest of aggravation- the touch slowed into duration until it becomes a permanent feature- the sand particle that disturbs the current around which another form perhaps coalesces for a certain period of time. These interruptions that than lead to further dispersals begin then to create a diagrammatic map that is a circulation network and a record of visitation- low level intrusions that become useable- the point at which something begins to turn- a spin- a capacity to re-orientate- to envelope and to diversify out from these whirlpools of intensity.


The child uses the touch sensibly and together there is a playing off of one tendency as if a levy breaks and is them shored up differently in the very process of it pouring away. This levying creates a makeshift lever in which a point of constriction becomes an opportunity to push against- to internally feel the organs, muscles, swelling and sinking in these waves of on-off pressure. It's the variable that works on every count- the subtle contrast that creates this variegated texture that is made as if in a workshop or artists studio- out of bits and pieces and what actually comes to hand in the moment of looking and assembling. More and more of the child's body is implicated until the one sticking point- the jammed up foot and ankle; the crooked neck; the grinding teeth; the mitten hand thrust into the mouth becomes the last moment of release once all the other circulations through abdomen, hip , pelvis, sacrum, ribs, chest, back bone, cranium, cheek, forehead, thigh, knee have been articulated in a natural furling and unfurling that is an on-going process of flourishing that can at no instance be divorced from receptivity, relational admixture, the tilting realignment of my body in relation to each small impulse. So that the tendency to spasm itself becomes a useable trail and the leg taken into the spasm and then woven back through in the opposite direction becomes an opportunity for a stretch. Similarly the abrupt cautioning of a loose falling away held in an uncompleted suspended state begins to re-work its own outcome and to feedback/flow-back into muscle intelligence in which counter-directives hold together as tonality. Simply this levitation mid-point- as a slight pause in an on-going affect- becomes a point of reflectivity in which the body in space begins to think itself- in the details of blood flow, valve opening and closing, breath expenditure from core vital organs to the ever more refined tributaries and cell formations that create this labyrinth of gathering and dissipating formations.


Neither is ever done with and so the boy lying there becomes an intensively multiplying multi scalar figuration which begins at a certain point to read back these minute pulses. The practitioner sends through these pulses before they disappear beyond the range of the known body back into the body reading map until wider and wider circuits of involvement become possible. Form and movement in which form is renewed hinges around these diverse articulations that span out beyond the extremity of limbs into a reach ability that is an attentional zone. This is where focus, perception and recognition become expressive compositions within an ecology of co-existing influences. And yet there is so much before that drives in small tendencies that either play out or are re-implicated into a parallel flow an another admixture so that every expression is the buoyant flotsam on this sea of turning.

Such turning configuration is relational but not initially in the social-mind-cognition-intention sense but in the direct sense that hot affects cold, hard, soft, liquid affects dry, gaseous, material. These are real qualities that determine one another and inter-relate to forge countless subtleties of material-imaginative-movement possibilities further down the line.


Contraction and expansion is the coupled tendency out of which a child in constant spasm gradually organises a pulse into rhythmic and a-rhythmic expectancy and innovation that is than played with, reattributed and becomes further down the line- as a secondary affect- according to the appropriateness s of the situation, a grasp, a smile, a sustained look that is quite different from the wavering head and swimming wooden limbs of before. This totally still point whether in a state of momentary internal calmness, or in a certain humanly recognizable expressive state or sound; perhaps even a yawn, is a moment that becomes useable and deeply ingrained in human experience/body memory. But it is never a social, cognitive goal to be mapped out in advance in a compartmentalized and sought-out manner. Rather it is the end point of an emergence out of the many beats, pulsations, disturbances and inflexions that drives resolution as a continual harmonic resonance in a co-environmental field.

Frontiers

Frontiers




Skin after all is a membrane that lets in the vacuous and treats it as its own or propels like a drum the flotsam that sprays and bounces upon its surface to create patterns of attraction and repulsion in a snow-storm- a magnetic pull that in its certain aspect of responsiveness becomes a push. Nerve endings, heart beats, the pull and thrust of the lung, expressions flickering like rivulets gathering, popping and redistributing like mice under our skin make for the feckless activity of a living system. Adaptation is all of this and more. This wavering question of whether to absorb or whether to bounce out again. Senses coalesce around these possibilities becoming in part the hearing that hears a crafted sound, the sight that sees a crafted conglomerate of light intensities. And touch too is only this. To play itself out into a rhythmic flourishing that is never only this or that- an embrace or a holding tight- but is this minute flexion amassment of valve modulations- the crafting itself of a thoroughfare, a threshold bolted in the moment between absorption and bounce, between enfoldment and exteriorization, between compression and extension.

A spasmic riveting in the knot of the belly or a yawning release into the tendrils of our most distal parts- the mitten hands furling and unfurling like new growth where plant-life and sensate life become imbued in this same tendency.

And what of intention- that hikes a ride on all these variously propagating furling and unfurling; the machine assemblage of push-me-pull-you in the spontaneous autonomic cascades of pulling in and sending out. A touch; the body temperature, the sweat glands, the speed of a tendency- a motivation building, a leaning and an off-setting of that leaning- this wavering pulsation that is like the flicker of a strobe light- so fast- so totally modulated with the bodies’ impulses to going into and offsetting in the next glance, the next breath, the next heart-beat, that all play into a semblance of stillness- a poise that is the fast patterning of all contagions, absorptions, ejections and reintegration’s into constancy. The crisis of contact- the trauma of invasion off-set in this near constant plasticity that is all the way through; the body changing shape, shaping to think, to move, to feel- a constant metabolic shuffling like a highly adapt gambler who creates every possible tone and innuendo of actual countenance and hidden possibility in a limited deck. We are at every level in the business of this magician act, not as deceit or as in a closed hand, but as the rippling whirr of the cascading cards as they vibrate through a widening and closing interval of two hands that play them like an adept accordionist.


So the cripple learnt to stand- the distortion becomes the impulse to a leaning, to a slight displacement of attention, to a new resolve that spirals around a certain curtailed oaring and flies off at the very moment of abrupt endings into the insignia of all that is valued- a metaphor, a dream, a myth, the conjurers adeptness- her adaptability- the flaying out of a peacock's feather beyond the bird ending. We are followers of these patterns- sunk and swooning in the need for this something more- the lost script of the cripple who once slowed to simply standing and nothing more, simply moving from here to there and nothing more and so at that moment, fell- coming undone- is all of our broken stories.

Instead we craft stories upon stories- little epitaphs - insignia and adverts that carry with the wind and become our transcript- the invisible guy-ropes upon which we fly


across stage, swoon into and away from one another in this compulsive aversion, this aversive compassion that adjoins one to another so that there are no curtailments- only this leakage and this bleeding through of vessels and sinews, blood and bone and air admixing and separating in its own multiple intelligences.


We walk and face each other and communicate because we create scenarios past the functions that would itemise capacity and let drop off impossible feats of limited perfection. By elaborating this mesh of entwinement- our feeling responses are mixed up already with every other- and the gaps themselves are the part of the pulses, the beat of a throbbing strobe in which we activate and rest- hopelessly lean and fall back into. Uprightness is nothing more than this- a slim loophole between a tendency to fall one way or another- attunement into any position, any posture, any semblance of a gathering and meshing of muscles, skin, bone; a release of breath, an articulation and reverberation deep in the guttural passages of a throat, is only these thin wedges of random suspension- between one tendency and another- these zero points of resonance that begin to build until they are an escalation that effortlessly pulses back and forth; a feedback that takes on a life of its own. In this sense our capacities are that point of effortless dropping; of giving way; even of deletion or forgetting. They are not a goal orientated skill set. They are happy times- the holiday in amongst the coming and going. Laziness is useful- the only useable thing because it is primed in amongst all the other tendencies hidden or exposed which filliate out into this environmental ecology in which at every level there is a twinning and separation over and over again. Every point of attention at whatever scale is a holograph of every other replicating association scaling up and down into endless conurbations. Structure and flow is this- a pulse of stopping and starting- a pulling together and a widening out again.


That this replication and slurred redistributed admixture happens simultaneously over and over again at the level of cell, fibre, fascia, bone, human composure, expression, relatedness, and global climatic tendencies is only to say that the meshing of hard and soft, hot and cold, wet and dry, brittle and smooth, gaseous and contained is a single necessity in the coming and going of form as ideation and ideation as form.

Human interest and attention is the next area of research for delving into what is usually thought of as physical, sensory and neurological complaints. Rather than erase these complaints they must be the starting point for building a wider attentional zone of variable impulses and tendencies. Disturbance or irritation is the point of activation for a re-settlement – a continual re-organization at every level imaginable. And to imagine these finer and finer thresholds of difference is to modulate them- to adapt ever more rapidly to the circumstances of our bearing.

This is the creative work to be done as environmental concern and as an inventive language/thought process rather than as individual pathology and therapeutic intervention. Our curtailments are the point of unknown sudden growths whether imaginative, prosthetic or as a total re-working of what it means to move, to articulate to further and to look back. Somewhere in all that is a re-conceptualization of present experience that is a meshing with no particular inside or outside. For that reason it is relational but not as a set of socially acquired know-how bullet points but as an ecology of intertwining metabolic, physical and nervous tendencies.