Movement ecology

23.4.10


How to see movement as a moment by moment shifting point of contact? Even a movement that seems like stillness- a breathing movement so that there are fractional points of impact at this slant and then that slant at the surface that bit by bit feel out a depth of that thing.

Can every fractional bond- each hit that becomes a sticking point- be seen in the rolling duration of what is occurring? A rolling compulsion- not of the thing, the object, the body, the motivational goal, but in the compulsing itself. This constant slippage from state to state- a dying as a leverage comes unstuck and a reapplication so that the contact is a tilting, swinging on/off. Yet snail-like, or tank-like there is always at least one molecule aligned with another around which all else falls and catches; around which all else turns. So that movement is a continuum and can only be understood through duration- an environment unfolding in this Rumble-on. A complex of occurrences insinuating into one another. (This is Whitehead who is influencing my thinking right now).

Am I stealing a term to call it an ecology? Movement as an ecology? Well of course I am. But pulling words into unlikely association aids the hijacked word as well as the new subject matter.

Movement as ecology. A habitus that is a tumbling of instances. The contactability at the heart of the shift. A way to address situations- a way to think.

If movement is an environment of duration then what particular environments elicit this kind of tactile movement? In other words not a movement where functions and tasks are executed- considered outcomes mapping in advance upon a given terrain. Rather the ground is tapped and prodded into existence through every contactable moment that spills into each other, bleeds through in a contagion that is never done with.

Of course the mismatch fracturing does occur between one noticeable event and another and that is how we determine it as such; as contrast; as change. Yet there is the level of tactile workability that is a continual state- in the crunching and churning over of what this actual experience is of movement and stillness when in stillness there is always a movement gradation and in movement there are always slight pauses.

To enter into this perplexity is to stay with the motioning that is not then decided between a before and after. Because each instant is circulated and flushed through to the next one. In this sinking down/rising up that pervades one another the distant regard has a touchable gesture at its heart and that place of sticking is already a bouncing out into the circulation of an aerated patterning.

The movement is the lean-to that spans across out of the drill-like meter of consecutive touch one point after another as an articulated arching- a stretching and redistribution- the thrust and torsion of a three dimensional state catapulted out into this ability through the miniscule and consecutive folding and unfolding, in order to stay present. This becomes the ecology of a body and the ecology that is an environment. Of course the two are intertwined- as a hand against a walking stick connects up a body moving and the environment it presses itself into. In this way the rivulets in the creases of the hand are patterned into the sticks. They are smudges but they speak of more than only that smudge of association.

Every point of contact; of constraint and a furthering in once more in letting go has the capacity to pop up this wholeness of integral participation. It is experienced not as a mind concept or a vision of a universe or a multiverse, but known through these on-going acts of momentary association where surfaces come up against one another that become intersections for the passing through and mixing up of many capacities or potentialities.

So it is not surprising that in each act that is not some kind of hesitation held back and spun back on itself there is a chance for sensing a body through this environmental complex. Out of that there is a placement- a fractional nudging into place at that very instant in relation to all else.

So a passage is cleared and there is a transparency through the paucity of what at another slant would be a reverberation of bounced out light and sound distortion that would become unbearable and so close down the faculty of languaging. All timings derive from this experimentation. These time jumps can spin to the outer edges language, emotion, thought, social address which are all mixed up in the layers and foldings of what this movement or event is to become. The imagined rotary to this movement which is so often the backdrop and generator to our thoughts and conscious states; that selects by the way things converge in an act is second nature so that we do not even realize it. But it is there so that without a body or the idea of a body it is questionable that we would be able to think or feel at all.

Why then do we stop autistic children from moving- jumping off surfaces, wobbling on the precipes between balance and fall?

How does this kind of considered articulation when allowed to play out allow a body to exist?

What kind of environment approaches this level of accessibility? I think more than the objects or areas of interest, or kinds of activity it is about a certain kind of attention that hold open a space of time for a certain amount of time. That becomes a considered listening space for all that occurs. Whether in a four hour contact dance score or an eight year garden project, a shared meal or sitting on a bench in the park (as I am now doing)

It’s an attention to how all that happens within that assigned time becomes of interest and so that the components brought up in a certain attention begin to interact with one another. It is like the thrust and fall of a constant bantering that acts like an intermeshing to bring in and out of focus certain aspects that relate consistently in the randomness of this shuffle. So, the quality of light and the air currents are unsettled; minutely disturbed, throwing up filaments of invigoration in the contrasts that become this patterning reworking itself- this sewn together ecology of occurrences.

This kind of listening space is more important than all the play equipment or educational programs put together because it is dissipated, everywhere apparent and yet able to turn to a precision of attention that puts together the body portion by portion and simultaneously the mutable environment that is the sounding partners of our bodies. Feeling occurrences require that level of shifting contact.

There may be a different kind of way to measure suitable learning environments for SEN. Not in accordance to various theoretical models or an analysis of deficits and what therefore needs to be done to make it right. But by asking, is the child or adult engaging in these moment by moment shifting encounters in order to further them on in movement-thinking? If not, why is that so?

It could be that with the best will in the world a program that seeks to give children various “Tools” for coping in functional life- certain words, picture cards and a strong guidance with positive reinforcements to encourage appropriate behavior, misses the point that this very application actually distracts the child from an ability to feel out the environment in a way in which they influence it and it influences them. Only this will give modulated response through slight impulses of feedback held open for long enough to take affect. Only that can be called learning.

What this also means is that what counts as “Learning”, “Engagement”, “Interaction”, “Feeling” for different people; differently “Bodied” and “minded” people is going to look and sound and be very different.

The standard is not a rational box. It is the means of application. The responsibility falls not only on the child to attend to certain things but on the wider learning and domestic atmosphere to notice when these conjunctions “hold” in whatever way they do so. When there is the presencing of an environmental space rather than a “type” or ideal form for a body or a typical self to aim for, slight connections build into accumulative states of awareness. That opens up a coherent space where different dramas and stories can play out; here the body, the emotion and our thinking take affect because they are entirely intertwined modes of each another. They are the sensibility of a resonant ecology.

This would question the whole notion of “disability” and ensure a serious re-think of what it means to therapeutically educate or re-habilitate various categories of people. We could no longer implement programs according to those categories of disability but would need to separate educational approaches out from the functional diagnosis. To find a definition of education, learning and creativity that did not rest on an outside model that was a deficit linked to a preferential goal of attainment. In that way we would ultimately deal with the diagnosis in a much broader way according to the approach of contact or the possibility of holding open an interest. This model would necessitate a time-based approach, seeing various contrasts and differentials of approach not as a progressive single directional ascent or a regression but as the variability that made possible any connection and built and deepened the quality and intensity of contact through repetition and change.

That interest in testing and on-going experimentation would involve looking towards the practices underway and whether they had the qualities of a learning feedback or the seeds of that possibility. We would need to question in what way strands of a certain practice could be extended and maintained in these feedback loops so as to become pacing mechanisms inherent to an ecology involving many associations perhaps remote from the practice at hand. This interconnection would be crucial even to understanding the simplest of acts. That ecology would need to be sustainable and endurable in every facet and at every scale of its multiple workings.

It would raise the question that much behavior considered fragmented and un-useful becomes this way in as much as it is left unincorporated into an optimal environment. The patterning in which a life can fit in and begin to tweak and work with and against a basic interactional frame of reference as a unit of composition needs to be there in order for every known capacity in the human repertoire to get going.

This needs looking at

Honing perception

 

Something about the glints of light that crack open upon dense surfaces that slide over one another in counter direction on the turn of a head, the movements of the eyes, the run of the body. We open up these shards and glints, widening and narrowing them as we see fit- or often simply for our amusement or stimulation.

Perception is about that working on and off those counter-points. We play with what is the background and relatively still and what is the foreground moving against that- but these are provisional. The churning of water by the canal- the froth from the rubbish, mixing up into a lather as it plummets through the gaps of the wooden dam that keeps a wedge of water at a higher level from which it rushes in wherever possible to the lower level where I am standing.

They have removed the benches that used to stand beside the fig tree brutally pruned back before the growth is even shooting. It’s to stop the feverish rooting system from sucking up all the water I guess. I stand there for a long time listening to the rumble which becomes the frothing before my eyes, the tumbling motion, the vortices that create pock-marks in the watery turbulence, the edges of which are almost smooth.

Like a drumming session it is impossible to stabilize the back ground from the foreground, because the mix-up is continuously turning one fixture inside out in relation to another. Nothing holds still to become a frame of operation or a geographical surface in which there is any contemplation of getting from A to B. Rather the only way to go is down into the depth that leaps up and vacates endlessly, filling and emptying becoming encapsulated air bubbles, mixing the worlds. The process – this on-going rumbling is a kind of thinking machine. The continual motioning creates a kind of pause-suspense where a pattern leaps up and clinches into memory an aspect of itself. That aspect could be rolled out almost endlessly- like a simple equation that could jump-start complexity. That in any case is what is actually happening so that it is hard to thin of it as an abstraction at all. Within that situation my focus becomes sharp- a discriminatory probe that is tutored in the act of being with the water, into going into more and more slender brackets of perceptual differentials. Slight shifts in light patches and shadow as birds take to the air or swoop down again or in which clouds mesh and separate endlessly, register on my consciousness before the “things” stand out or or become relevant. Sounds and smells get the same treatment. Not now as units or configurations of entities but only in this shifting colloidal bracing against one another- that is what becomes the exposure; the small crack through which attention is held. The very precision of a line a dot, a crease a fleck known not in and through any essence of itself, but in how it is placed in this dynamic dance that throws it into relief, occludes it back into a process of extinction, over and over again; this flickering that dances below and through form.

I think these kinds of differentials that we activate and that we consequently attend to, can begin to hone in a vision for noticing and emotioning human states and empathetic soundings in that there is a constant attention for disturbances and resolutions- harmonies and adjuncts in the composure and interaction of life-forms. In that regard I actually think it is misplaced to say that autistic people can not “see” or “read” emotion or states of mind as if these were integral units that stood alone on a clear cloudless horizon like distinct statues. Yet in practice I think this noticing is worked up through differentials. That it is occluded by the very totalizing language and terminology- the very tests and skill quotas that are meant to sign post it and measure its level of functioning. That is why I notice so strongly in the drumming group for autistic and Special Needs adults at the arts hut, a depth of vision and an emotional consistency that runs through the polymorphic mixed up beats that these adults ride- that never overload them because they are implicated all the way through.

The problem is a language- or more a narrative- divorced from the flickering canopy of unsettlement through which feeling states occur. Emotional overload come out of this mismatch between deep states of depth formation in the interplay of gradients of contrast and the enveloping of this complexity into totalizing schemes of Happy-Sad and facial recognition tasks taken from lines that slant upwards or downwards in order to demarcate complex states of becoming as if the becoming could fit such a graphic wobble on the paper and the graphic wobble could fit a facial expression of a human nature. Emotion must be worked up through the differentials through which it knows itself and effortlessly becomes what it is because at that instance that is the only thing it can be. It is not known through a test chart intermediary that can be ticked “yes” and “no”. If you have to ask such questions you can be sure that the compositions that would generate such emotional states have already gone missing.

Timed Response

16.4.10




I have been thinking about the quality and activity of this shaping that is taking place in the dance- where out of nothing- inertia or mismatch or awkward stagger something catches in. How this catching in occurs through a certain quality of listening. Listening almost to the rush of air between bodies. The way that air fizzles and snaps, bolsters up and flattens. And how at the heart of all this it is about timing- the hairs breadth closing and opening of a gap and how it is that quality of discernment- one that works through the panels of moving and differently gauged intervals, that the shaping occurs.

This working up of differentials needs to be the centre axis of any understanding of perception- how it is refined into a multi-scalar tool of discernment- or again how it is occluded- fuzzed over like a bear paw trying to grasp a pin.

Form and function must be understood as being worked up through this exercise in differentials that can be honed more and more – timed into bursts and flurries of address out of which a spinning apart furthers the pattern. When these patterns are being worked up, bodies have an agenda- not a program of outcomes or a wish-list for functionality and inclusion but a means of working through these resonances that even random activity when allowed to play out brings about; a charge and interest in this constant dance of association and dissociation.

I think autistic people have a difficulty in rendering the pattern outside of the movements that bring it forth. Without that dance of intervals, the pattern is collapsed into objects almost as an emergency place of safe-keeping. Yet there can be a fixation into those objects that render the body still and so misplaced in order to rev up this patterning in the intervals it creates.

Understanding objects and the placement of objects in relation to one another as a kind of archive for associations and patterns that only truly reveal a dynamic and renewable quality through a body’s motion is a way to let objects play a part as a holding place whilst considering them in a wider circuit of motioning. Objects could be known as movement slowing into form. The transformation of states through playing with speeds- movement and pause- therefore becomes crucial in dealing with the issues of patterning through which continual minor adjustment, insertion and an emptying out again create articulation through nuance and emphasis; something like a physical punctuation.

Language comes out of this system worked up in gestural punctuation- the on-off of gradients of pressure and the emphasis of pulling apart and tightening back up these elastic threads through which we press into surfaces or move relatively further away. This becomes a continuum of playing with gradients that in order to operate must have a way of composing through this entwinement. Split them apart- with a wish list of encouraging one set of behaviors over another- the cream on the cake without the dough- sociability without solitary reflection, and the party suddenly becomes macabre- a Willy Wonka affair because there is no on-off switch; no way of being able to modulate from the shadow of which is not in view. Too often programs of intervention tick off such a wish list through positive reinforcement and discouragement or simply ignoring the “negative”. Of course there will be island instances when the “positive” is replicated- by demand- and so a positive outcome is seen to have been achieved. But since there is no way to self-regulate this particular sought after trait by the child themselves who becomes almost a container for it rather than a spontaneous initiator, the physical or emotional intensity tethered as it must be in the physical, chemical, magnetic qualities of its opposite, is snapped off. And so the behavior spirals into extremes and then collapses. That may not be immediately apparent. Not in the school room. Not in the surgery or the therapy room. But later on- in the playground, at home, in the street. And so the deficit is put on to the shoulders of the individual- who has forgotten their good behavior or have been unable to generalize the rule form one place to another. Or it is put on to the parent who is seen to not reinforce the good lesson in the right way and in the way they should. But that is often not the whole story. Many times the way this island of goodness is set up, it is bound to implode because it has no sensible way of playing out in the long-term- of being felt and experienced and integrated by the child.

It is better to start with the tiny differentials of how states are arrived at- to follow that emergence with curiosity in the way it is always working on the cusp of what is seen and what is occluded. Working at the threshold of an occurrence, perhaps in another medium; with physical pressure gradients as a way of sounding, with passages of air currents and the quality of falling and bouncing back up to create articulated movement, and with thresholds of light velocities- almost as sensations of hot-cold- in order to jump-start or pop back up vision. That makes the spaciousness of very specific moments of attunement jump into areas of joint operation. It is immediately about relatedness but in a broad sense not just in terms of certain expectations of social sharing. Functionality – if that is what it is to be called, comes out of that- a wide and deep patterning of association, like a child’s “mindless” scribble that gradually solidifies into a closure of form, then is scrunched up for a new beginning. That ball of paper taken up by another child, and bounced back in something that is both a distraction and a momentary point of attention; not for the thing it was, nor the thing it was considered to be, but for the potential that open attention holds for the thing it is becoming.

*I notice after dance or drumming that afterwards I have a marked disregard for objects and the busyness of things that become to me a hindrance. I will even remove various pieces of stuff from around my living space, clearing away things to create passages worked up in the dance or music and held in resonances that fire up into complexes of motion in my imagination. Yet with time, as these motionings begin to fade or are superimposed upon with other patterns- adverts, news reviews, reports, form-filling, there is a slowing down and a resting in the certainty of these objects that stack up shards of patterning of their own so that the memory of how to navigate a movement, a thought or an idea does not totally leave me. The dynamic patterns that keep that memory afloat can be struck up through the juxtaposition of these objects or the internal dynamics and tensegrity that they offer in their very form. The motioning can be brought back into tangible use by following through these processes of structuring and letting them have an accumulative affect on sensory and neurological linkages that build up an assemblage of activation. Outside of that I lose the ability to language; to think conceptually and to string together words, sentences, ideas. The shapings that make that possible dissolve.

Ideas are forms- forms of association- resonant sounding matter that cohere through the gaps in frequency. That process is ideation. The words are the final cap- but they are not the most essential part and when brought in too soon can crowd out and occlude the pattern and in so doing consign themselves to a limited place.

Objects like bodies can be seen as the intersections of movements. And a wider scope of a perceptual field can be kept oxygenated by looping the intervals between things and people through these minute and gradated interactions rather than with an emphasis on essential substance. I hope in Special Needs Education as well as in aesthetics we have got beyond those kinds of essentialisms where we jam people into moulds with set tasks of performance where essentially they become stuck- land-locked, as if objects or bodies were ever unrelated to the people and things around them.

There is research evidence for this occlusion of communication potentials in Autistic pre-school children by over-loading an interaction with verbal usage (Whittaker and Potter, “Enabling Communication”, 2001 Jessica kingsley)

There is also documentation in this book, for the actual pulse playing out in real-time of different speeds of operation in an interaction. The shaping of a context through cyclical shifts between bursts of active engagement and periods of quiet removal. This is an attempt to situate what is done and how it is done in the actual and on-going responses as they are shaping up in the interaction. It is the feeling out of a form out of what is happening and an acceptance that this cannot be known in advance. A willingness to engage with the lull between events- to wait for things to build- to carefully follow a person into their readiness- to sense the tiny shifts in breath and gesture, in body posture, muscle tightness and the texture and musicality of soundings that explain to and key in a teacher, parent, therapist to a readiness or to an anxiety or to a need to simply stay with the situation and wait. This becomes a way to co-ordinate on a deep level with an autistic child so that events build as shared moments into crescendos; to then allow these thresholds to diminish and so become assimilated or to be moved on into other bearings.

My one question over this material is that there is still an emphasis on gauging a certain moment of optimal readiness for a type of certain communicative exchange involving specific and repeated eye contact, sound or tapping and that this communication is more often seen as being built up around a child asking for something that has stopped and that they like in order that it can be re-started. There is this deliberate withholding of complete engagement by the adult so as to nudge a child into initiating such requests.

However I believe that a communicative atmosphere builds into a pattern that encompasses everything that happens- the still inactive periods as well as the highly physical rough and tumble activities- what Whittaker calls Proximal communication- together with the more subtle musical and glancing exchanges.

As discussed in earlier entries I believe that all phases are linked and give rise to the pattern that holds the possibility of a joint regard. That regard builds in the very stops and starts so that the stops are not just moments in which to encourage further request for interaction. They are part of the interaction. Even without deliberate looking or doing, this shared space is emoted in the very spaciousness of this letting go and dissipation as well as the more intentional and active getting hold of things or calling for an adult’s attention. The glancing and the physical motioning when they come, often come as if out of the blue, from this pause gap and that sinking down and are not simply a child noticing that nothing is happening and therefore requesting in the only way possible, for something to be continued.

It’s the lull that energizes physically, emotionally, magnetically, this catching in. By allowing for these pauses the child can take up and read this patterning, then work it back through into physical engagement. From my experience with autistic children, a child is inventive with these transitions. The lull takes them back into a movement through which they initiate a certain resolution that sweeps up everything in the environment into their sphere including a re-charged capacity and often a dramatically energized momentum in a physically dynamic interaction. For instance there was one child, a boy of around 8 years old whom I worked with a great deal over a period of two to three years. Here is what occurred in one short passage of time within the sensory room as it unfolded one day towards the end of a session and nearing the end of my time at the school:

He walks back and forth, strikes a solitary note on an instrument, walks some more, brushes me lightly on the hand on passing, then on my shoulder on his way back across the room in the other direction. As he reaches the wall, he turns swiftly around, collapses his body on to the ground, gets up walk to the door turns, glances at me, makes an explosive sound with his mouth than pulls that out into a drone-hum, picks up a cymbal, drops it to hear it crackle against the floor, runs to the other side of the room, comes back over towards me, stops turns around, returns to the instrument, twangs another string, runs back over to the door, crashes his body explosively downwards, comes back over to me, then falls over my left shoulder and dives head down into the space just beyond me until that became an initiation of rough and tumble.

Trying to prize apart the useful from the un-useful episodes in this five minute episode is untenable. So too my part in it and really I think my whole bearing was important though for the best part I remained where I was, seemingly doing nothing. Yet there was a quality of attention- a certain focus in letting a process play out and the proximal moment of communication came into that scenario- almost walked in of its own accord. The focus was set up through far more removed scenarios. My emphasis was to stay with the boy and follow the interests like listening to a story unfold. I became more actively implicated in that story as time went on, yet my attention and involvement was equally there in every detail of what happened. All that occurred- the action and the pauses were completely distributed so that each element held every other element in place. The rough and tumble and the glance were important parts of this punctuation but they were not the culmination or the goal or the episode as such to be isolated and prized apart. They were a facet made possible by and through all the other wanderings.

Out of all these wanderings a nuance starts to develop like the stacking one on top of another of layering that interact within the folds. The sounds, the walking pace, the breathing, the giving into gravity, the startled crashes, the sweeps of body movement, the staggered turn, the look, the physics of falling over another body, softening into body parts, then separating out again.

I got to know this boy over many sessions. Words were kept to a minimum, but the quality of vocal expression became over time more resonant, tempered by all the physical excursions, repetitions and slight shifts in stopping and starting. There was an emotioning in the vocal attack and fade in which it was never entirely his or mine, but a taking up of a looseness at one point, a winding it into a tightening somewhere else. How we articulated sounds- the air pressure rolling and shaping in our mouths was intimately tied in to how we maneuvered and managed bodies; proximity and separation were the continual pump of this exposition and became a dramatization- an epic with no final outcome. Interruption as much as coordinated flow helped to shape this presencing and out of this a genuine affection grew up in the refrain of what at any cross-section of occurrences may have looked like mere burbling in the mouth and the repetitious pacing of an autistic boy back and forth.

Writing

15.4.10

In the same way by writing and continuously writing the words seem to jumble and interact and gradually I deliver them in an order where they begin to write themselves. Otherwise, with some specific tasks set out or – in particular to write something I do not believe in- my writing goes to pieces- literally- it no longer coheres. The deficit is put on my shoulders- or in my hands which become unstable and unable to grasp a pen or write complete figures, and the context or environment is occluded, exempted of blame. I forget because the writing no longer comes form a deeper pattern. The environmental scaffolding falls away. I suffer then from dizziness because the wording is not coming out of a sounding, a gesture that creates a sticking point for yet more words, more soundings. In the gap of hesitancy where I dissolve from a body placed in every aspect, I fall in the gap between buildings. Until the idea- the belief re-emerges and the flow carries the words that settle then into their own continuous perplexity. This questioning is language. It’s how words get to know their place and wonder what it feels like to be somewhere else instead. There is the breadth of time- the holding space in order to play around and let the argumentation and jostling get going rather than holding everything in place as a should- be or as something to be discounted. In that contingency there is room to notice where and when something feels right and where it feels wrong- to savor the gap that is the very pulse of the words, the sound-form that they make in the mouth. The juicings in adjunctions and abbreviations that bombard the palate. Passages felt out in the journey. That is how the whole thing gets going and the writing then occurs in the only way it can do. One is on the crest of the beat and it moves things on into variance and sense of rightness within a wider and necessary disturbance in the interplay of light and dark- with one thing and another and their being permanently entwined. It is this play of difference that keeps up the interest- fires wide open the idea whilst rooting it all the same to a consistency- making each twitch play into a tumult of centered affects- to further it- to make something of hesitant beginnings so that it unrolls pressed towards and against what it has been a moment before.

I write because it is one more placement in thinking- part and parcel of a continuous doing. I write to survive. To be able to move and think and hold many things together without closing down one in choice above another. I write to stay fair to myself and others because otherwise my perception and the inevitable slant into one emphasis or another, would close down the environment- stamp out a space in which to operate- put me on a precipe where all movement became too much to bare. I write as a displacement that opens up the way back through by re-inventing a necessary journey far from a place of absolute resolution- that can never know or rest easy in a single rule-book. I write to further things on. To keep them open. To mark a moment whilst leaving it where it was first set down.

The Garden

 15.4.10


The garden environment I set up between 2001 and 2009 was an attempt to play out a simple program and to let unfold various actions, associations, wanderings without any direct goal of making it happen and so determining it in a closed format according to skill, capacity, intent or even wishes. Rather the point was to set up various limit factors and constraints that should have been repetitive and perhaps should even have magnified the autistic “tropes” so popular and familiar with both professionals and the general public concerning the triad of impairments associated with autism:- deficit in communication, social skills and imagination- and through essentially non-verbal practices of how things were put together in the making of a garden and in accumulative balance sculptures, to see how various gestures and timings allowed for an ongoing passing commentary through this placement of objects and bodies. Could a memory space emerge that did not reside in the minds of the participants but in the environment itself which brought forth through affect the composite actions and over and over again reinforced certain ways of being that we did not aim for but simply arrived at because they worked in that context.

These ways of being, tenderized people to one another in brief exchanges that played out and altered over time to become countless versions of each other. It was that capacity for split-second changes and adaptations that became a thinking model- the beginnings of an idea and hence in the terms set out, a languaging intimately connected to emotion; emotion as an active verb- hence, emotioning. That language emanated out of a constantly revisited and reinforced atmosphere that was known in the small differentials set up in contrasting kinds of pressure and release through which materials were felt, handed from one to another, angled and settled back down into various juxtapositions.

The sculptures became a site of a kind of learning, molded over time to become wind-resistant whilst also being open to change; animal inhabitation and child wreckage alike. These contingent elements became as it were, written into the sculptures; embalmed as their background code and within that frame autistic people were un-phased by change- something that is always highlighted as a major difficulty for them- indeed it is a major factor in their diagnosis. Yet they came to expect these differences that played out in positions of sculptures that built up and fell down and they played inventively off of these transformations in the stop-start of their own positioning. That came to be an articulation that was only possible in the gages held open between each others presence within the wider sphere of what came to be the environment of a garden.

The environment was made by the actions – actions not usually considered to be emotionally loaded- indeed actions classically associated with autistic aloneness. Yet these actions held the key to creating points of reinforced joint actions, departures from these repetitions, and gradual piece upon piece innovative change. The three triads of impairment: deficit in communication, in social skills and in imagination were addressed not by setting up closed tasks with positive reward- such as is found in Applied Behavioral models but by simply holding open a space of on-going activity according to the tendencies already in play and letting those actions affect one another and meld into new possibilities, through a process of contagion and affect. In that sense practices usually associated with isolation and mindless self-absorption within the psychological rule book, became the key to playing out conjoint pacing through which fractionally differentiated states interacted and over time the garden came to exist. People- not through ideas in their heads but through the actions taking place through duration came to establish and reinforce affinities and an in-depth knowledge of one another. This grew as if a new species of plant had been cross-fertilized. Yet outside of an enabling environment how could that hybrid last? When the consensus is that these people are by definition lacking in emotional, communicative and social capacities that plays a part in any emergence which can not self-maintain in an island reservation.

What happens when the dance stops? When the garden goes? The affinities exist in the practice. Already, one year after the garden was closed down by a hostile charity who had the rights to the land, the link between garden members is vanishing outside of the practices that set it in motion.

One would hope for a loose network of many such related practices that can, as it were drum up particular and unique resonances – that we become adept at invigorating into make-shift habitations that come and go and yet that this capacity remains as a conjoint thinking tool. Outside of these loose structures- as perhaps we already are aware of, we do not have the chance to jump start our many repetitions into variation and therefore into something of interest. Is there a creative equivalent to the admixture that happens in conception? Do we need to mix up parts at every level and at multiple scales all the time as the very process of our individuation- as the conditions for the maintenance of any kind of life?

Yet surely this endless capacity to pop up and then dissipate is in itself part of the patterning- part of the resilience that never dies out completely even as it is passed on from one dying connection to another.

After-thought

15.4.10



Function is too limited a concept to explain the questioning that shapes falls, mistakes and slurs into useful and calibrated systems that work on and off balance, and find pause gaps or moments of precision and focal clarity out of the engine of noise and multidirectional contradiction that is the backdrop to any useful word, to any useable gesture- a gesture that is useable in a particular scenario, because it is placed, then again allowed to fly up or spin below the surface of that placement. Everything is an attunement in a wider resonance in which it influences the general possibilities of a condition of life. This is the idea. Language is a questioning. A bringing into the loop- into the fold all that appears irrelevant- that appears oppositional or distracted- all that allows, through those edges of contrast the conditional borders of any thing that at any time, we call credible. Then again spitting out that very semblance of coherence into a fractured lack of integrity. The credible and the incredible dance with one another bolting together workable frontiers between them. Then letting that slip.

Making and Unmaking: Part Four

Back to the dance in the dance studio set up through the refrain of Nancy Stark Smiths’ “Tuning Score”. At the beginning I felt clumsy and un-integrated in the dance. It was as if a common wind to carry the motion between us all was missing- at least in my experience. There were separately executed “moves” that worked or did not work. However through the actual process something begun to occur. In the playing with speed and the various points of suspension like a kind of intermeshing between falling and rising, turning one way and another the dance begun to shape itself.

We simply fitted in or playfully resisted this emergent pattern that nobody authored but everybody knew. In amongst this there was one particular dance that I had which seemed to make itself so that whether in close contact or dancing apart one state seemed to generate the other like a thrusting inwards and a spiraling outwards so that the contact could be touched back in and brought to bear as a leverage within a far wider patterning- something we pulsated in and out of. There was this flying calibrated stillness- a sending back in at the very moment of letting go- a wind-re-wind that became through the doing, an emotioning. It as embroiled in everything that happened and our avoidance of certain other possibilities rather than with any sense that emotion could stand outside of that momentum. It became an accumulated affect- a threshold of significance where something unexpected caught in and emerged. That’s when the dance started doing itself and we simply fell into place or at times resisted that place while simultaneously holding it there. It became a kind of joke –a humoring that allowed for depth of feeling without that disappearing down the fire escape.

Leaving that patterning can be awkward and Nancy Clark Smith even has written in to the score this feeling of disorientation and hesitancy after the intensity of partnering where there is a period of dis-coordination after extreme fluency- like the yolk of an egg spinning on disruptedly after a spinning egg has been stilled. That may be a time of vertigo, of forgetting and of emotional anxiousness. So a period of extreme integration can be followed- sometimes must he followed- with disintegration- clumsiness and mismatch. There is a sense of going back down- deeply into the miniscule arrangements of a composition- to feel out and sense the split second timings of doing and undoing that cohered in the dance at a certain and unique speed and set of circumstances. The same impulses may play out later as fears, euphoria, and physical, verbal or sensory slurs- where the light comes too brightly, or sounds overwhelm or movements are rushed and then halted. When divorced from the physical split-second coordinated movements that have generated the energetic spark that figures them out each second they explode into countless shards of possibility that can never be acted on exactly in the same way and so crowd in. Here in this storage or archive is the possibility for increased sensitivity that can be converted into language or action, or emotional depth… or overload. In that sense autism is perhaps intimately connected up with knowledge seeing, questioning, ideas, curiosity. It is one phase of a pattern. It may be dangerous to simply wash out the sensitivity. It may be better to use it. To convert it and move it on in a cycle of learning.



The next day after the dance, sitting at home, I have an intense awareness of the filaments of dust in my flat. Tiny specs that can be individually calibrated on the surface of furniture and on the floor. I am seized with a –probably- obsessive need to do some house-cleaning which I enter into with fervor as a new solitary dance revving up because it has to go that way. Yet it is summoned out of events far beyond itself. In that way the house-work eventually gets done in spite of myself.



P.S Today no planes are landing in British air-space because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the wind direction over the British Isles and the strong possibility of cloud ash in British air-space particularly between the hours of 11hrs and 19hrs on 15.4.10 which could jam up the engines of planes. The lingering affect of this incident will probably last for days.