Waiting

 11.5.10 2.pm



Strange day yesterday. I went to Tate Britain. Then walked up along the Thames to Parliament where the media tents were pitched like strange unworldly bird-houses with concentrated halogen lights shining through the glum day-light and cameras poised with the stalactite houses of parliament rippling, melting into soft focus in the background. Mostly not much was happening. Presenter’s staring back at themselves into hand held mirrors, applying lipstick, drinking Fanta out of plastic bottles stowed away by their feet. A bit of heckling from the crowd when someone suitably groomed did mount the aluminium staircase from the back end and appear from the balcony theatrically though with nothing to say. ”There is business to do, mess to sort out when are you going to do it..?” comes a voice form below. Mostly people were waiting. An informality allowing me to meander in the crowd, visiting the various media tents as if they were stalls at a farmer’s market. Only thing on display was the wire and hardware of the media equipment, furry mike heads like a kind of decapitated ventriloquist doll. Glum reporters with angular elbows on the hard of the wooden table, creasing their jackets from the shoulder to the raw bone of the elbow knobble. Nothing to say. Bored in this suspense dragging on hour after hour. Susceptible bait only for the sandwich boarded “nutters” down from the camp further up the road directly opposite the parliament buildings who have set up home there indefinitely and are doing better at keeping their finger on the button of the times than anyone else who has the regular bodily functions and sleep needs of the socially adaptive and so who are intermittently off the case that anyway never offers up anything more tangible than to say, “The talks between the parties continue to work towards the formation of a workable resolution for the good of the national Interest”. Over the road a man up on a scaffolding ledge is touching up the paint work in black and gold along the edge of the gates that barricade and level off the arched entrance inset into the body of the parliament buildings. It is a recess like the entrance to the interior of a never ending cave. I take a picture by crossing up the double row of traffic flowing first one way and then the other so that I am up against the hefty black steel reinforced barriers that are there to stop explosive laden vehicles from ramming into the building and detonating themselves. The barrier reaches up towards the top of my chest cutting me in two. When I look back at the picture I have taken on the camera screen I read the words, “Sovereign’s Entrance” to the right hand side. The lettering is worked into the metal of the gate itself. Crossing back over proves perilous. A matter of continual hesitation and re-navigation stitching one way and then the other through the flows. Everyone is busy and reckless on the road these days trying to get somewhere.

Value

People can appear to drop off. Capacities can float off. Movements grow stiff. Eye movements diminish. There is a lessening of activity. Of the connections that play back and forth propulsing out of any set of series, leaning into a new manoeuvre- arching like the back of a cat, snapping through, firing up a volition in this lazy slow contortion. Like priming a bow,  the catapult outreach completes itself. We set up the gage- the doing occurs and we arrive within the mood of it. It catches on- burns, shimmers- prolongs itself in its very absorption. Dwells there, nudging into the details- a saccade of re-formulations that angle and pose one another- bring all into the loop- a lasso of activity that widens and closes- a viability test- a poising before the break of it- a rinsing through- a yawn that embraces all, then closes with thumb and forefinger precision, honing in by degrees to be there. And still. Before the motion revs up, reverberates, and grows again out of this sheer nothingness.

But people can drop off from that. And mostly they do. I do that too. Forget my lines and became caged in the entrapment of individual sequences that bare up rudely upon one another, inhibiting expansion, like the nose to back tidiness of a row of parked cars, gasping to tuck in their back ends or hefty bonnets. We go for big then suffer the consequences.


I visit an old man yesterday to drop off his birthday card and present. He is sunk into a chair, absolving himself from the air, sinking into the fabric that encompasses him from all sides. Sucks him into its embrace.


He whispers on my arrival, “Don’t get old”. He is 101 years old. He tells me he spent four years in Rangoon in Burma in the war- any of the wars. He says. “I was a bastard”. You had to be to survive. He says the men teased him for going into the jungle every morning for a shave. But you have to keep yourself together, he says, wherever you are. He is in this Care Home. It is obviously a Care Home but each flat has its own front door painted in glossy dark blue like a real front door in a street. However the team of Care-Workers can walk in without knocking with a swipe card and the turn of a handle.

The woman walks in, in front of me to announce my arrival. What can he say? He lapses into repetitions, but through the repetitions he is saying that most of his living connections have drifted away and he is asking whether I have living connections around me. “Family”, He says. “People are so greedy these days” and continues to say that intermittently. The thing he likes saying most is that he was a bastard in the jungle and then later on as a boxer. There is a sparkle to his eye as he says that and he is lucid, confrontational, thoughtful and gentle.

He says his life now consists of the photo display on the central wall between the bed and the chair. I get up to take a look. There is a picture of him smartly dressed in a black suit and white collar in the 30’s. His marriage photo. Other photos from around the 70’s from Australia where most of his relatives are. One of a ruddy faced man with a snake around his neck.


He grapples with the card I have brought- a small portion of the glue catches and holds in place a sliver of paper and because the action needed to break apart that seal is separate from the regular sweep of thumb around the crevice of the seal, he cannot manage it. It is an innovation he cannot deal with and I need to help. It is a card of the Houses of Parliament because it is Election Day. The T.V is on and the candidates are piling on to the screen to give indications about power sharing arrangements for a Hung Parliament. They flicker on and off one after the other and barely register as separate in the run of things. He is holding the card of the houses of parliament upside down. Where is this? He asks me. I describe Big Ben, the clock, the Thames, The houses of parliament as if recounting a fable and no picture of the fact had ever existed let alone landing in his hands. There is too much detail in the picture- it does not allow for discrimination- for one main pulse to be got a hold of and to mean anything. Like the Thames water it eludes capture. Watching the old man with the picture, the only reality of which is the edges of the cardboard in his hand, I feel angry with myself for my presumption and for giving him this illegible document.

____


I watched a programme on TV the other night- “Autistic Disco-Kid” about an autistic boy who learns to dance and pull his capacities together around the heat of this co-ordination loop. It entraps rivets and frees him into other neurological, emotional and social outlets. It brings everything with it and in the continual flicker between minute emphasis and continued dislocation there is a quivering presence like a low level twitching of areas of contact- a slight and unobtrusive flexion and release of fingers, Achilles tendons, stomach muscles and neck torsion- a near continuous stretching and containment that keeps everything compulsed and reactive within a tensile co-ordination network that is much wider than any of the contained techniques that it finally brings forth. Outside of the dance this wide circuit is almost set free beyond the specific application of a dance number and there is a sense of freewheeling on the momentum and buzz of these configurations that splay into alertness. A restful melody from the fragments of all that is done and even past any presentable fact to become a low level barely registered activation that is continuously responsive.

It is as if an open question has been set loose and this tumbles into yet another open proposition and then another. In this tumbling momentum the body turns as if around an invisible helter-skelter and the attributes visited along the way- capacities in reading, number recognition, communication, emotion; the registering of joy and pain- the hope and the dashing of hope, are the incidentals within this wider atmosphere; an environment or milieu that sketches possibilities for sweeping rushes of figuration that only out of this giddy rush learn the stop-start visitations of self-contained attentional zones. Function comes out of the wide mass that is a texture- a feeling of rush and halt. Something beyond the simple doing of a task or remembering of components orders or choreographs that momentum. That is more like a mood of hope or positivity. Equally it is a coming up against the limitation of a certain inhibition that one then works against. Those jointed tendencies literally tone the body.

It is the same with the old man shaving in the jungle. His account of himself- “I was a bastard” A figuration going forth in the world- grasping the moment, condensing it around that one notion that brought forth countless aspects of co-ordination; an on-going conception. A boxer using timing to affect. Even until last year this old man was going on the bus to the local supermarket- a habit that kept him mingling in the world- that kept a certain jostling of the elements that in connection created reactions of seizure, grasping and moving through. An activation towards a propensity for response. Now in the chair his grasping of second-hand facts- Elections, governing buildings, photos of him as a young man, barely register. He asks me- “was I that man in the picture? It is hard to believe.”


The autistic boy in the “Disco kid” TV dance program according to his mother was uncoordinated and not coping at all at school or at home before he began dancing. “It is as if the light was switched on” she says referring to when he started dancing. The boy shows with the flat of his hand the level he was at before he started dancing and the level he consigns himself to since beginning. “It was not immediate” he says “..but it came”.


Watching him dance he is like a fireball of activity, turning and riveting around selected orbits around which his body mass constantly collects in accumulative density and then spirals out again drawn as if magnetically from one concentration to another. As if different areas were being lit up and by a process of osmosis he is arriving, a collectivity suddenly drawn in on itself and allowed to remain for an instant before scattering. His body pumps open and closed between the markers of a certain gait, a certain pause in a beat, playing with the discipline to move in and out of this regularity- to know a sense of freedom by playing off against these fractional markers of regularity and standardisation.


Autistic people are said to like regularity. Anything outside of that regularity is not diagnostically given credence and is treated more like a kind of white noise- a fall-out that should not be given attention. A kind of slippage. But here in this dance the boy is playing the regularity and the dislocation back and forth into one another. This slanting is the composition. It becomes composure. It is made to matter. It is a language emanating past either strictures seen in simply contradictory terms in which the one occludes the other. It is the mismatch of a slippage between the two that gives originality, character, Life to the event.


The self containment exploded. The explosion grasped and brought into the fold. Emotion comes through. The presence of acting off every circumstance revealed in the process of the dance that sends out responses that are then of the body and that in a very real sense make the body.

____





In the garden, (an autistic arts garden project that I ran between 2001 and 2008 on a piece of disused land off from a national children’s charity in North London.) people would come in with limp loose hands after long inert train journeys. But a pattern would begin to pattern itself through simple repetitive motions.

Dripping paint out of the nozzle of a plastic pipette. Watching it take affect- explode upon landing on to the wet surface of a cloth to journey beyond the minimal motion of squeeze and release- to become animate- have a life apart- draw out of the affect of that running level of light absorption, another idea of colour, to be mixed and applied whereby now the whole body would move into the dance of application and affect and with paint loaded brush the whiskers would be splayed apart on to the matt of that surface, sweeping along on the momentum and taking the body with it. In that sense it was the brush that organized the body; The garden that organized the brush; The street that organized the garden; The situation of many fragments of compulsion and inhibition that organized the street.

The garden was no haven. No island. It was the grasping of certain tendencies onto aesthetic or compositional dramas that played out like a fable that possibly, in the end, entrapped itself too much in the sense of its own individual identity. What else could it do but self-explode- dissipate these intensive practices back into the streets surrounding?


There is something about the idea of the garden, the idea of the boy as a dancer, the idea of the old man when he was a Sergeant shaving in the jungle as a “bastard”, that becomes self-sustaining and around which capacities; bodily, cognitive, social, emotional intensities gather. They become self-fulfilling and offer back up the idea of themselves in further actions that accumulate to create a dense mass. That becomes the body of the dancing boy, the flora and fauna of the garden, the hardness and perfunctory habitual motions of the blade scraping the chin of a man in the jungle who is a sergeant, a bastard, a survivor and now an old man in a care home in upper Clapton remembering that event with a twinkle in his eye, registering the loss. Giving up from that stance but playing off of that stance. “People are so greedy” “Now all I want to do is sleep”. Ending the consistency of this life behind the fake blue front door is his last decision of lucidity. An unravelling that he has decided upon. An idea of what it means to stay intact and what it means to unwind. A composition that he is still playing out- between life and death. This man of 101. “Don’t get old”.


It isn’t only that an autistic boy dances and cures his autism- learns to make leaps and bounds cognitively and emotionally by altering the wiring of the brain as he moves his limbs. It is also that the canopy under which he resides has reconfigured. He is a dancer under a collectivity of many other dancers and many other people. There are costumes to buy, schools to visit, competitions to attend. The stretching of leg muscles, the double-jointedness of the limbs hold in each fractionally sustainable assemblage a possibility of membership to this club. There are conversations between parents and teachers, grades to hand out, trophies to polish, musicians, dance-floors that need constant upkeep, car routes, timetables, food arrangements, practice groups, pep talks, ambitions and disappointments held on to as prospective markers within a time scale between here and there. The drama of a certain resolve, a certain dream is played out between winning and losing which it never entirely is but lives instead in the grey area of all the other things that it might come to mean and that indeed it touches upon.


The choreography is far wider than the dance moves learnt and performed on that day under the number sewn on to the costume of that dancer- that boy. The boy is using capacities that under other circumstances would be part of his autistic diagnosis. This flitting from one thing to another, this loose-limbed turning inside out. The tip-toe walking that at first was seen as a problem to be fixed by wearing splints and holding in ,lace a preset alignment of bones like a script – a certain configuration of lettering that could only be made in a certain way- set through plaster cast at a certain right angle. The dancing is a playing one way and then another. The set pronunciation is embedded within this wider play of possibility- can only be known within this wide arc of extreme suppleness. Suppleness is not a lack of attention. It becomes useable- going one way and then the other way to gage a certain current. A set mark chosen this time within a variable range that is visited- given credence on the way through.


Timing is everything and a mark is set in the timed relief that it gives both to the dancer and to the audience in this refrain. The experience and the event merge and the boy feels free in the dance “... normal, just like everyone else” he says. The autistic elements are re-jostled into a composition that is framed in the dance.


Is he cured of his autism or is he a re-configuration under a certain whispering, a certain muttering that offers up the possibility of the dancer that now subsumes and partially integrates the former dominating label of the autistic child? It is agreed. It is official. So co-ordination and dis-coordination play into and out of one another. One does not replace the other. Simply one re-constitutes or organizes the other. The limbs merely play out what is already made in the circumstances of the occasion, stretching to the very extremes what that occasion can mean. That is the creativity now open to the boy. The freedom that he feels when his time has finally come and he is clapped along by his family from the side-lines.


They are clapping for the ideal of the dancer that he now envisages. The ideal beyond self- beyond detail- that Whitehead speaks of and which is where Value comes in. The ideal of the Deity.

Environment

6.5.10



Some detailed reading of whitehead has seen me copying and pasting in the last blog from the website: whiteheadresearch.org


My understanding is still hazy and not all of it is obvious or useable to me. But the general slant is relevant. It’s about exacting precise connections or details of interest within a wider, broader, deeper context. About the specificity within an interconnection that brings these details to relevance but is itself occluded- at least by our magpie attentional gaze. Yet that gaze of selection and expulsion is the process itself of grasp- of working up contrasts whilst holding to a wide durational frame in an altogether indistinct manner.


This melting through or inter-penetration is what ultimately works up the contingent edges according to which we find our bearings from one moment to the next. This is never finished with. It is a pondering – a perplexion that we literally find ourselves in the midst of and yet, from one surface encounter to the next we work up the meaning of what that can be through the timing of this approach-a conjoint multitude of timings that come together and mesh to cohere into a grip or knot, a certain sense or value of what that event can be.


If this all sounds vague, well that is the point. It’s in the vagueness that the movement continues, sketching over and over the same ground until an agreement of what that something is that is recognizable, comes through. Already it is vanishing at the point where we entered it because it is only the limited encounter of where our interest is put, that a clarity patterns itself. That is the value that it then holds. A certainty that holds our integrity to that place at that time. Yet our experience is of cohesion through and through- because it is supported by a far wider environment- defined by the very nature of these expulsions that set into relief a certain level view.


For something to come through we must remain in this haziness- tolerate the messiness that brings up the tangible level. That level is never fixed- it is no bench-mark, but a wavering striking up of scales that hold together at that pitch but give way to another level of cohesion- a new grip of interest in which we strike up a resonance that expands. It expands because we have put ourselves into that constellation so that it becomes relevant and useable- apt and applicable in the humanness of our endeavour.


This would mean that abilities- physical co-ordinations, sensory perceptions, emotional certainties, gestures, utterances, signs, symbols are second order events bolstered by the intermingling of on-going re-workings.

Coming together and coming undone is about the timing of these multitudes that swarm in excess of any set border.

The borders upon which we feel a limit; measure a sensation, push against a surface, configure intensities of light or sound into recurrent recognizable patterns; make out of this the metaphors of our values, are only there within the process of these involved practices.


Values through and through penetrate our grasping and cohering of sense data, co-ordinate physical missionaries that we become. It turns out that it is the wide and unfathomable canopy of propulsive interconnections that never entirely close off to a further conglomerate- a further assemblage, that is the atmosphere of every distinct move or thought, utterance or decision upon which the facts of life are built.


We cannot get a hold of that canopy which houses us. It is our environment- our habitus and we as much as anything else grow like a crystal out of the medium of this chemical soup. But that is not something outside of our values, meanings, intentions and the coming and going of emotional states. These are active compulsive forces in the stirring of that mix- out of which our bodies in this specific faculty or that, come into a purpose of some sort, or dissipate in order to partially cohere- partially dissolve into another motioning- another matter of concern or of importance as Whitehead will call it.


From the sweep of a movement comes the possibility of placing a pause- of grasping an attention towards a specific notch of consideration; what we may come to call a substance. That substance is nothing but a cut, deep or shallow, variable in any case, in the process of this churning of possible admixtures. We articulate by building up movements in and out of phase with other revolutions- creating fixed holding patterns of recurrence through constraint, then loosening and widening the orifice of our attention- physically relaxing the grip of our own particular integrity in that one juncture; letting the net slip through our fingers- timing the catch. Not that fish, not that one, but there, now: hold, close for a moment. A quality of sensation- smoothness of a moist body writhing in our hands, before again the motioning continues, the fish jumps free. We are all slipping through one another. We are catchers and we are fish. Sensation is that- an attention and a going into the slow motion of an apprehension- what Whitehead calls prehension. It’s a quality of involvement- a quality of control or limit within the limitless; the infinitude.


This all seems vague and wide and non-committal except in purely philosophical terms. Yet Whitehead is clear to point out that it is the philosophic level that can address together, what in any era would be contradictory categories of attention that are already second order exclusions. At a more penetrative level those categories would create a working assemblage for prehension- pulsing on-off between an attentional pendulum that at a different speed of revolution would cohere into a unity; an on-going buzz or hum. In that sense philosophy is always an historical investigation and a practical investigation- it looks at the speeds of approach in which certain frames of reference cohere and others dissolve. It looks at the composite winding-unwinding motioning of our attention behind and yet giving rise to any specific details relating to facts as we see fit to describe them. It also forewarns against various closures that are taken as self-limiting prequisites for thought or functionality or humanness or emotion and situates these frames into a wider contingency that must be allowed to play out in order for a wider set of possibilities to play out.  It  performs these variable renditions that convert sameness to difference and back again testing the crackle and buzz of points of immanence as compositins slurr in and out of lucidity- a lucidity contingent upon the environmental factors of a particular period of time; the values that hold within that time-frame.


There is a danger- a real danger which Whitehead warns against- that definitions of what it means to be human or what it means to be aware- to hold to a conscious state, to bring forth language and to grasp emotional states, is ringed and cut out from a liveable context of eminence that actually drains the life blood of those particular states by recursively determining their credibility back on to these self-selected limitations. Yet the limits grow out of a wider circuit of coming and going- a pulsing configuration of this area of interest and then that. A process. In a very real sense language does not speak out of itself but out of all the acts and ways of being that did not make it to that particular table; because it was delayed or in a hurry or not invited. The same goes for physical co-ordination, intention, goal, sensory focus particularly in sight and sound. It is bolstered, partially submerged, buffered, propped up, limited and defined to that sliver of attention that sets it on a particular course by all the tactile, kinaesthetic, swaying and motioning dances that are not completely upright, not completely lateral but describe a spiralling winding and unwinding on the way through but never finally concluded in any set position. Somewhere in the interval between a beginning and an ending that is more an idea- a value than an actual place of permanent residence.


Yet learning is so often about abstracting these ideal places, states, forms. An autistic child is given a picture of a “happy face” and a “sad face” to teach them about emotion. Physiotherapy seeks to break into small parts the mechanics of knee bend and joint rotation in order to teach an injured or disabled person to take a step. Speech therapy creates exercises in which a person vocalises perfect OOOs and PPPs and feels their breath on the back of their hand or on a piece of glass as the sign of life. Reading programs create phonetic sound-bites then sewn together bit by bit into more and more complex units. Always the building blocks are taken as having an existence outside of the wider building or pattern in which ultimately they are placed like the missing pieces to an already existant jigsaw puzzle.


But what if we start with the idea of the building or the whole even outside of any material? What if the units only even exist as glints and shards where the light gets in or the shadow deepens within the complex of contrasts set into motion out of the idea of the whole? This idea is not something that can be sensorially integrated all at once because it opens out over time, in the process of various engagements and insertions and re-arrangements- almost as a domestic preamble. But there is something like an atmosphere or a milieu which is more like the Occasions that Whitehead describes in which varying concentrates emerge as contingent compositions that define and hold each other. These seize attention- they place us- they co-ordinate limbs and sensations. These vague atmospheres-a rising resonance that builds like a dissipative gas- is the canopy in which particular functions come together. It is a society of occasions, to use again Whitehead’s terminology in which we are all bound to exist in the only way that is possible right then.


What then is disability, social mal-function, disengagement, redundancy of purpose, - weakness in limb or mind. An inability to connect with others; autism, phobia, paranoia, panic, isolation? Perhaps again these are already second order semantic terms. It is more practical to look at the circumstances where these envisaged human foreshortenings that seems to be the validated symptoms of a diagnostic certainty outside of time and unaffected by situations, become something different- something unexpected.

All I can do is gather a selection of situations- random moment of noticing. A certain quality coming through in connection that creates different kinds of jointing through the body, between people, across the distances of rooms and through the separate episodes of different meetings strung out between school curriculums, bus-journeys, meal-times, home-times; conformities and non-conformities in short succession.


How to describe when something goes one way and then all of a sudden it goes a very different way. How to pin-point the cause, to reapplicate it, to create policy out of it, to communicate it, when it is the traction of both directions that count? What is noticed are moments of connectivity- where something disparate and uncoordinated; the flaying of limbs the scramble of words, the push and pull against bodies resolves or re-orders into something that seems impossible to have built out of the elements present. Yet it is out of those discrepancies- the pure text-book autistic spinning and flapping of limbs or words in repetition, the stiffened spasm reflexes of twist and jarring upon touch- the leaning forward and backwards above and beyond any gage of normal gait, the breathless breathing back and forth into gasps of air sunk down and bubbling up again, the scrambled story-book circular world that it would seem impossible to go beyond within the borders set out, the spinning of marbles until they jolt out of their container and launch themselves into the air. The eating of sand.


Surely this stuff is irrelevant. Un-useful and not to be encouraged. Yet it marks time; performs time in a particular way. There is push, shove, momentum, fall, spin and lift; a going down and a coming back up again. There is contrast. There is a certain gage between varying levels of intensity held open, played out. It is enough. There’s nothing in the details themselves to be saved for later. Nothing of value in the objects or even necessarily in the use they are being put to.

What is of value is the context for these occurrences- a context that does not exist outside of the actions- the stops and starts of this rhythm of action that plays out.

A process. The details cannot be itemized, taken apart. There is no choice to be made between this and that. Between the appropriate or educationally valid and the inappropriate- the autistic fragment that needs burning out to contain and secure the purity of good human contact; the real stuff of being human. It’s all muddled up together and so it must stay. The value is not in any portion just like emotion is not in the heart. But it is certain things that play out that come to mean or be valued as affecting the heart or as expressions of heart.

That also happens within these strange or classically pronounced sub-normal standards of behaviour. Another element arrives but it is dissipative- perhaps immanent to the very process underway- the rhythm of stops and starts that suggests a pulse that then further orders the actions until a certain interest and value is put on that procedure and it is carried further. It is the atmosphere of the sounds that are the peripheral or collateral offshoot of the actions. They then become the main thing. That then lends itself to a body motion and literally sends the body into a variously altering series of sways and staccato stops and starts. It is a dance. All the time, the objects like the beads looping through the hands of a Greek man are running and circulating- hardly counted, hardly positing a position in themselves, but running on, keeping a certain circulation of tempo, evolving a course of ;procedure that now and again is interrupted, sent back on itself. There is a running to and from between bodies- dispositions that are bleeding out of any containment yet defined and shored up into certain felt limitations by the presence of one another. A certain feeling of connection through the actions. A formality of environment that is neither yours nor mine but falls beyond, falls between. Co-ordination is this and the girl who splays and collapses and kicks out is charged through and through with the musicality of this encounter with another small autistic boy across the room. The blonde haired boy gazes into non-space and she catches and gathers these shards in the atmosphere through her lolling swaying gait. It becomes the resonance – the off shoot of every up-down motioning against floors, walls, bodies and with the use of the random objects- object against objects to rattle and tap and crash down upon one another.

The boy looks on. He listens with his eyes. He presses one foot down and then the other, compensating one drift with another, circulating around this rotational core between one kind of leaning and another. By lifting his arms up as he rocks, his body automatically turns- He falls into the turn and spins. His head moves forward as his body arrives. He is grasping the moment with his body. Here, then here, then here

The atmosphere is everywhere – the gaze, the attention-the entrapment, enchantment- the story told and the world lived in. It is everywhere. There is no specific place on the body and in the landscape for signal and reception. Yet out of this quality of dissipation- the non-verbal utterances that are textures spread into light-dark, on-off pressure, in-out breath, forward-backward motioning, some kind of transference occurs; something like a spin, a recursive seizure and back-thread, an assimilation and letting go. Recognition is there. Compassion, empathy, emotion. Happy-sad, yes- the emergencies of partial connections, incomplete, throttled, reattributed in their making, held open in their incompleteness. Harmony if it ever exists comes through on the rebound of all of its doubles- all of its shadow discordances.

If teachers don’t values this coming through, the conditions for this coming through will never occur- will never be held in place- will not cohere from one fraction of an occurrence to another. In other words the multitude beneath any situation of integrity will not be allowed to play out- or if it does so it will go unrecognized as if it never really happened. In that sense it will not have happened. How to describe an event that does not take place? Only in the negative- as a lack of individual functioning. For the environment in which it would play into a connective set of functions that cohere only through that assembly, is disallowed. Only the disassembly beneath the bounds of any held area of interest is seen and surprisingly seen to matter. This disassembly comes to define humans carried over like a loose number out of the context of any equation, in to a kind of negative equity.

Everything is worked out in one instance; seize the moment. All coheres around that point played up to a certain speed in which value comes through. That is something precious that is found in every moment and is only of itself- not a metaphor for something else.  It arises out of a context in which the peripheral and the central concern are one- like a moon travelling over the sun- the full impact of the sun is known at the edge of its occlusion. The edge is made useable - made to matter and regarded in thought, pattern and affect. That is how using the body as a timer for stops and starts of affect is an excercise in thought and value and attention in the very way that it becomes a discriminatory tool. The emotional and cognitive and perceptive and sensory state is not in an area of function or in a certain way of presenting or signalling. It is in how we use these timings to discrimminate and to connect. The practice of those timings brings up or foreshadows other faculties by degrees and in stages like filters that affect a generalised character that fine-tune endlessly sets of characterisations acting on one another. These dispositions are open networks that work on and off further connections and further foreshortenings. The life of these medleys is more vital than any one point of interest though it gives life and vibrancy to every point of interest. We embody different facets of that pulsing interest in life and death choices and reconfigurations of how we positon ourselves between such  extremities. What we experience is never either/or. We embody the admixture of abstract opposites lived out and being alive by their very incompleteness. Movement is the momentum and backlog between the pull and break of these forced out opposite states. We fill a vacuum of our own making.

Creating the conditions for that vacuum or entropy is what causes the rush of filling. That 's how we seize the moment- between emptiness and fullness collapsing one into another continuously- moulding possibilities- turning through straight lines and the near or actual collisions that these bring- bouncing out of jams caused by limiting sums and eroneous calculations that add the impetus. Re-inventing space by envisaging lines of traction through our body's instantaneous affects upon the surfaces of this environment. An environment that we lay out through our conjoint actions. That we dance into credibility

Alfred Whitehead: Modes of Thought

Understanding: Chapter 3

Para 75-76

Now process is the way by which the universe escapes from the exclusions of inconsistency.
Such exclusions belong to the finitude of circumstance. By means of process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite. Process is the immanence of the infinite in the finite; whereby all bounds are burst, and all inconsistencies dissolved.

No specific finitude is an ultimate shackle upon the universe. In process the finite possibilities of the universe travel towards their infinitude of realization.

________________________________________

( 76)

In the nature of things there are no ultimate exclusions, expressive in logical terms. For if we extend the stretch of our attention throughout the passage of time, two entities which are inconsistent for occurrence on this planet during a certain day in the long past and are inconsistent during another day in more recent past—these two entities may be consistent when we embrace the whole period involved, one entity occurring during the earlier day, and the other during the later day. Thus inconsistency is relative to the abstraction involved.


The sense of advance, of penetration, is essential to sustain interest. Also there are two types of advance. One is the advance in the use of assigned patterns for the co�rdination of an increased variety of detail.

But the assignment of the type of pattern restricts the choice of details. In this way the infinitude of the universe is dismissed as irrelevant. The advance which has started with the freshness of sunrise degenerates into a dull accumula-

________________________________________

( 80) -tion of minor feats of co�rdination. The history of thought and the history of art illustrate this doctrine. We cannot prescribe the pattern of progress.

It is true that advance is partly the gathering of details into assigned patterns. This is the safe advance of dogmatic spirits, fearful of folly. But history discloses another type of progress, namelythe introduction of novelty of pattern into conceptual experience. In this way, details hitherto undiscriminated or dismissed as casual' irrelevances are lifted into co�rdinated experience. There is a new vision of the great Beyond.

7. Thus understanding has two modes of advance, the gathering of detail within assigned pattern, and the discovery of novel pattern with its emphasis on novel detail. The intelligence of mankind has been halted by dogmatism as to patterns of connexion. Religious thought, aesthetic thought, the understanding of social structures, the scientific analysis of observation, have alike been dwarfed by this fatal virus.

84 .There is one whole, arising from the interplay of many details. The importance arises from the vivid grasp of the interdependence of the one and the many.


Perspective:



The emphasis upon the higher sense-percepta, such as sights and sounds, has damaged the philosophic development of the preceding two centuries. The question, What do we know?, has been transformed into the question, What can we know? This latter question has been dogmatically solved by the presupposition that all knowledge starts from the consciousness of spatio-temporal patterns of such sense-percepta.

6. The study of human knowledge should start with a survey of the vague variety, discernible in the transitions of human experience. It cannot safely base itself upon simple arbitrary assumptions, such as this assumption of spatiotemporal patterns of sensa as the source of all knowledge. There is something very special about such spatio-temporal patterns, and also about arithmetic patterns. Speaking from my own frame of mind, I revolt against this concentration upon the multiplication table and the regular solids: in other words, against the notion that topology, based upon numerical relations, contains in itself the one fundamental key to the understanding of the nature of things. Surely we should start from principles which are larger, more penetrating. Arithmetic and Topology are specialties.



_____

( 115) finite existence refuses to be deprived of that infinitude of extension which is its perspective.

Again we require to understand how mere matter-of-fact refuses to be deprived of its relevance to potentialities beyond its own actuality of realization. The very character of concrete realization—that is to say, of historic fact—is suffused with the potentialities which it excludes with varying types of relevance. In the present fact there are the various characteristics of the past, partly reproduced and partly excluded; there are the characteristics of concurrent facts in the present, partly shared in and partly excluded; there are the possibilities for the future, partly prepared for and partly excluded. The discussion of present fact apart from reference to past, to concurrent present, and to future, and from reference to the preservation or destruction of forms of creation is to rob the universe of essential importance. In the absence of perspective there is triviality.



Forms of Process

We must first examine the notion of Process. The comprehension of this notion requires an analysis of the interweaving of data, form, transition, and issue. There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural pulsation, each pulsation forming a natural unit of historic fact. In this way, amid the infinitude of the connected universe, we can discern vaguely finite units of fact. If process be fundamental to actuality, then each ultimate individual fact must be describable as process.


Every detail in the process of being actual involves its own gradation in reference to the other details. The effectiveness of any one such factor involves the elimination of elements in the data not to be reconciled with that detail playing that part in the process. Now elimination is a positive fact, so that the background of discarded data adds a tone of feeling to the whole pulsation. No fact of history, personal or social; is understood until we know what it has escaped and the narrowness of the escape.


We have here the basis of the large scale preservation of identities, amid minor changes. The planets, the stones, the living things all witness to the wide preservation of identity. But equally they witness to the partiality of such preservation. Nothing in realized matter-of-fact retains complete identity with its antecedent self. This self-identity in the sphere of realized fact is only partial. It holds for certain purposes. It dominates certain kinds of process. But in other sorts of process, the differences are important, and the self-identity is an interesting fable. For the purpose of inheriting real estate, the identity of the man of thirty years of age with the former baby of ten months is dominant. For the purpose of navigating a yacht, the differences between the man and the child are essential; the identity then sinks into a metaphysical irrevelancy.

Coherence

A holding to integrity

A pattern that keeps re-patterning itself

A recognizable set of associations that play out in a process.

An awareness of familiarity

Return

Revisit

Re-immersion

Sustenance

Accumulated bearing that builds a depth of practice through time all of which are understood as reformulations of one another.

Wholeness in the portions that play out and associate

A grasping of a sense of remaining

Habituation

Constancy- re-envisaging

Reversals of sinking down into habit and a bouncing back up out of the ground of that habit into unknown contingencies.

Copies and copies building into an atmosphere where many small interactions forge together and come apart in certain timings.

Intervals that hold through the pattern of association

Extension by going into the depth of a practice.

A sense of what could appear disparate and separated by intervals of time and space as belonging together.

The value held and communicated.

Quality of sustained attention, re-enlivened in the act of doing that re-invests coherence to various elements and details.

Holding open a focus to what occurs within the bounds of that chosen gage over time.

An arrival or putting oneself into an active engagement or disposition in which a core being is felt around the everyday practices that repeat.

A sense of difference in this quality of emergence at each instance in which it emerges.

Seiki: On returning from Aberdeen workshop

London 3.5.10



Seiki is in the interstices.

It is in the gap between what we come up against and that which melts away on the touch.

It is cutting meat when the timing makes the flesh part on the slightest of touches. The knife does not come down hard. It does not push. It glides.

It is the heat between the hands in Gyoki. The hands come together. Sweat forms in the fold. It expands and dissipates into the graininess of the atmosphere. This is environment. A canopy that holds together as one. A body connection that becomes a movement unfolding from a hidden point into a bearing.

It is automatic like a catapult. A spontaneous evolution like a leaf unfurling. This time of when to go and the going with it in a total commitment brings responsibility. It brings two directional response. It leads to change. Because a certain phase in the way things are- a situation that one is in; the ripple of the flesh; it bunching up and slipping away again, has been noticed.

The eyes follow through from the alignment of the body that moves as one like a single snake vertebrae- from sacrum to occiput- through the pores of the skin opening out-

The smell, the breath- the small muscular groupings- the clenching of the anus- the hara, the throat, the valves of the heart, the lung, tendons in the knees, the muscle calves, the ankle and wrist tendons, the scapula jointing. All are orifices that open and close as a gage to wider association.

They work in conjunction with one another.

In that way we also course and filter though one another- through a reverberation of tendencies that work like a pump. The on-off of contact is this. It is Gyoko or breathing between the hands. Building up the heat of proximity then allowing it to unfurl in the off touch; the in and out breath.

To feel a constraint, go with it into its wringing turn like a spring tightening. To go with the disease or aggravation until at its extremity the re-wind catches in.

This is automatic release when the body moves and the conscious human association follow.

This is thought-tendencies through and through with feeling response at every minute level of interest.

There is an intermingling and a conjoint intelligence which comes through. A deep compassion lasting.

There is a gathering and spreading simultaneously. A filtering system that nourishes every cell as each turns and jostles around another.

The body breaks and is re-made. Not only once in a single trauma and total cure but endlessly.

Life and death meet in the moment. In this gap there is every kind of human possibility playing out. Seiki is about following a story and then another and then another. until they merge and talk to one another. It is a lucid and mobile time that cannot be held back.

Seiki Notes from Aberdeen

Like cutting meat

Ditch

Space in the ditch

Opening out

Nudging through

Trail that appears as the feel of it gives and holds.

Staying in order that it re-situates

Re-coalesces

Grip of it.



Direction- directness

Builds

Patterns itself

In the interstice

Twisting: coiling and uncoiling

Wringing a cloth

Holding taught through the body

Sacrum: neck

Breath: arm

Hand twists through turn of the body

Ripples through flesh of receiver

Collects at certain spots

Builds; attraction

Attention



Steered through this single snake line

Through body-body back out again

Mirrors breath

Collecting and re-forming

Throughways and constraints

New by-pass



Gripping together, letting unwind

Different speeded spins- going one way and the other

Coil and recoil

Area where something bites in

Same thing felt in body of practitioner as receiver

Difference: of coming undone, re-aligning

Mismatch

Creates edge to work on



Touch so slow that it merges in and out of on/off contact.

No one place of going in or going out

Cascades

Tendencies- capacities

That evolves and became re-consigned

As a reaction bites in



A mobile alertness through change

Using point of change to create

Consciousness of contrast



Connection

Resonance

Process

Tenderness

Tenderize.

_____