Niche

To find a niche- not the limitation of a category of interest that one cannot go beyond. I mean an actual physical niche- something to work off- a foothold- a sticking point- some kind of jamming device- a choking reflex to the smooth run of affairs.


Autistic recursiveness is a kind of pondering around a selection of physical affects that begin to animate one another and so to redistribute the run of the affect. Like playing a riff on a guitar over and over again- that two bar section of a nursery rhyme- madness- infuriating.


To look in at that- of course it is self-referential going nowhere. But then there is a fault, a sticking point- a lull and pause for breath- a catchment in the fingering- the logical playing out of the rhythm is fractionally delayed- the conclusion obviated in the looped return.


A wavering. The notes pile up. Flavours that churn- salt and sugar. Jam mixed into porridge. The voicing samples itself as an imposition on the order of things. A glancing around. This sabotage. This is sabotage. But the tuning sticks, gathers weight- the lapsed return must work around that now. It catches and swirls, changing the river bed gradually, ponderously grinding into this groove, this catchment, making it so.


That is a making out of intensity that builds on its own limited affects at each turn, burrowing downwards to seize the ground- bouncing up out of that as a reflex spasm that is a shocked performance into the daylight and is then held there by the audience, the expectations, the collective focus, levitated and impossibly sustained. It is buoyed up by all surrounding. Its life is a triangulation of filaments holding it in place, making it perceptible- to be commended- “in spite of it all”, “the difficulties” “the disabilities”. But it is this riveting of attention on to a catchment that really gets it going. The disability a workable tool levering against behavioural consistency.



Innovation, the accident accounted for in the blanks of the program. The to-ing and fro-ing, the swaying and pondering, the walkabout and abrupt exits. The returns, the re-runs, the re-trials and a gearing back into the movement that was let up on. This is the engine that gets going with no point in mind- nothing to reach, except the limitation of its own perfect return again and again until something comes down- something is plonked in the lap of a “half-wit”. The inconsistency is made to count. A Message? No, a mistake.


We think and articulate around an infinity of such mistakes. No island of genius in a sea of limitation- the limitation is the catchment around which an idea- an idea of recursively thinking back to the idea of this warping event becomes useable rather than obviated. A point of stoppage around which something builds- congestion becomes rampant.


The public interest in autism of late is because in uncertain times we are all trying to work out this strange embrace between regularity and the jolting into innovation that we very nearly dump out with the rubbish- at least this has been the habit of certain ways of life for years. I hope the TV shows can get beyond magpie picking performance like a curatorial investor whilst leaving the repetition- the day to day living arrangements of these autistic “entertainers” as the separate conundrums of a freak show which the public stares at but never identifies with.


The performability organizes the gestures and repetitious manoeuvres which are continual. They are the backdrop, the context, the playable surface, the wealth of humus to be gone into. The regularity labyrinth of beat, melody, line, colour are the differential tools that begin to organize a flappable body- containing it in feedback that informs further output. Making the flap an extension – a kind of winged expanse- making the containment a useable energy source. Together enhancing the beat and working on and off that regularity, into a melody in counter point- a voicing that is channelled through these searing corridors, sharp bends and cuts. A tonifier in the body exuberance.


Facilitated communication can make the flapping work against a counter-point. Contact Dance can create body ligaments and jointing out of the wavering extremity of going outwards in an unstoppable motion or inwards into a turreted screw-driver drill. By linking opposites in bodily affects- physical points of hit, absorption, rebound- a vocabulary starts to evolve. A languaging is born on the brief of these opposed soundings. A change of direction mid-sentence is factored in. The factoring in of this point of traction that uses that feeling by continually seeking it out- becoming sensitive to that possibility as a working point of concern- something around which awareness takes hold-a fungus, a virus, a crystal formation- it evolves in the process not out of a mind set apart- set in advance. It could never know itself outside of the traction of its own felt moment of birth. Outside of its own arrival of immanence that keeps in mind that possibility- that space- at all times without knowing or trying to know the exact whereabouts or timed formula of how it will play out.

Seeing as devastation

14.5.10



Something about seeing with the whole body which is devastating because it affects and alters- a sort of caustic acidic redistribution which should be embraced. That destabilisation which is on-going a kind of petrifaction that is innovative because it kick-starts recovery at the same time as the devastation is going on.


Falling into a fall. Offsetting the angle of abrupt ending. Edging into the paragraphs of continued lull. The hurt not mended- but struck up- magnified- seized. These endings hurt. We grasp the hurt like a dot to dot- abbreviate it but also take it somewhere further. Stand with it- let it rinse through – like a stinging mouth-wash over the gums. Percolating it- keeping it there. Lingering with it. Living in the ravages.

In the Henry Moor exhibition it was like that. The abrupt endings and metal muscle palettes in torsion- seized and elevated- the pain palpable- the endings totally unsentimental. Coursing around these remnants and articles- addressing them wholly- was like striking percussion- hearing the tinging and thump and shudder of a body’s beginnings and ends. A life caught in the middle. This abbreviation pulled into an excess stretch that is a luxuriant release and the gasping death-throes.


At ease and ill at ease roll together. I work around these. The school kids are always one room behind me but they are getting closer. Bright sounds in the corridors. Then those figures, recoiling from their lost flesh, cautioned by their missing limbs, roughly sawn off trees and plaster casts twisted and bent in a last insult before the molten lava is poured in- they harden for good.


There is a woman in a wheelchair being pushed around by an older woman. She is tenderized, sensitive, alert to the too wide berth she is being given by the passersby, yet herself lingering, sketching, quipping in and out deftly with her hand, her light voice, her perception that quickens and cuts away as she ponders, stares- absorbs into- absolves, lingers. The school kids flood around the chair- the swash and back tide of the pebble-filled water swilling up against the rocks. A natural process. I stand still too and allow the same forces to swill over me and retreat. From that I get a sense of embracing- the permanence of staying in position. There is one small boy with a large square plaster on his forehead. I feel the give and take of the skin under the envelope of surgical material. I feel and tenderize the sculptures in the same way.


I am exhausted soon from this affinity with something that can not feel back. I circulate each piece- get up really close, swaying like an oracle pendant that has lost any position of interpretation. I am pummelled, ushered, drawn and pulverised. The pores in my skin expand like that of an orange- I feel the metallic scoring into me. There is an affinity. The shoulder is my shoulder, the leg, my leg, the stomach bunched here, protruding there is my stomach- its sickness, it’s pouting searching. The chest my chest, ripped open, a direct line to the air- brutal. The back- it’s knottiness- areas of strain and twist just off from a line of easy reckoning- of relaxation and flaccidity, are what I feel. An unsubtle poke riveting all in place. A disturbance. Disjointedness.

The knees, the knobbly-ness of those knees- sinews at the back- cartilage at the sides where bone and flesh are woven together. The bulge of the calf- slightly pulsing. The ankle jointing – all the striated ligaments- tension and release of the toes- that torsion. And the thick powerful muscles around the neck- the roll and lollop of my head- I mean of the head of the sculpture- its weariness- the vestibular balance in the ears- the eye sockets spraining and wounded- cartilage and air-passages of the nose- either nostril- the lips flaying, gripping.


But on the sculpture there are no lips, no eyes, no ears- just a round pin head worked into a ledge at the last moment at the front – to demarcate the sidedness that is the quality of a head.

Strange – is it my features or an affinity- empathy with the gathering and dissipation of the sculpture? Caught between expressivity and blankness.

The same goes on in a treatment that evening- body-work. How do I know where to go? How do I decide? some kind of resonance between devastation and re- constitution that builds up equally in me as in the receiver- one aspect opens up the scope of another – through areas of attraction, repulsion and a low level buzz that sounds out in a drift so that I feel the tenderised areas in my body and go to the body of the receiver as a righting- an alignment of offsetting and magnification- a double- entendre that can only be experienced in this doubling and unity- an intensification- a sustaining for long enough that something occurs- a line engraved.


We have to go with this devastation – willingly activate it- then take the recovery as is needed. But it is too often inhibited and replaced with the ready-made version of the completed body that cannot be real because we have not gone through the stages of perpetual devastation and recovery to make it so. You have to rip muscle to build muscle as a body builder will tell you. It is never a presentable fact to begin with. We turn away from one another because we cannot bear to go through the motions of this unwinding. Disability is the last vestiges of that process- projected apart from the real body- the complete body- the finished body- that never knows of this process of seeing and witnessing by opening to devastation. That is why the body stops thinking- stops being articulate. Sadness of that finalised and cling-wrapped state is in a sense more tragic than the ravages of dis-ease and disability that touch all of us on a zigzag journey between birth and death. That journey animates us between one incompleteness and another.

Any creative process works in strictures. Begin a single line- a mean self-referential single line- perturb it slightly- watch it unfold and play into another line, then another and another spilling out of its own narrow oaring. Each time setting a new gage exactly where it ends, escalating, magnifying like a pack of cards flickering between hands. The figure of a moving animate life will grow- or a song the implications of which cannot be known as it takes route in gut after gut after gut. Best thing to do then is to keep narrowly and stubbornly to a specific course. Play it out doggedly, endlessly- let the contagion of other facets or the spoils of other leanings gradually shuffle around this set piece until the gage of that settlement is up for bargaining- improvise from repetition and certainty into the gradual warping and scurrying of that certainty. Let a multitude unravel by staying exactly in the limitation until that crease has effect. Make spaciousness out of the hesitation of filling the gap and by putting off accomplishing a starter sense of the whole. Work with single attributes, leanings, tones, specialities- the breed of a certain curtailed whining attitude that has no choice but to launch or be lured into what it is not.

Bodily unravelling and being lucid

Watching a video of Lisa Nelson the other day who developed the Tuning Scores for Contact Dance as a way to feel into situations of receptivity and hone in an awareness of exchange and separation, I was struck by the stop-start stalling nature of her vocalization. The double bind of comfort-discomfort in her body- the jilting falling flickers and low level spasm that seemed to excite her body in to aliveness as it also exhausted it to pre-empt her vocabulary – her elucidation as if her speech were being burped out of her with each push and shove.


It gave her this awareness of process- a need to tool into a working address every instance in which the body could exist. A notion of invigoration that was physical, practical, brutal, caring- the jolt behind every moment of calm- every eloquence fought for.


The searing pain behind a fragile manoeuvre. The pulse under the skin. A wanton rampage, destructive and constructive in the same breath. It was only when she actually said that she has to keep moving to speak that one actually noticed that. Before one simply ruled out all those little moves incidental or irrelevant to the meaning and clarity of the words uttered. Yet her underscores are a grasping and playing out of this necessity of the low level buzzing underneath every utterance.


It is similar with autistic people but to a wider degree so that all the small manoeuvres make possible moments of lucidity rather than drawing attention away from that level. That level cannot be cut away from its source. It rests within the micro filiations although our perception and logic always tries to ring around the coherent utterances and to cut away the work of the sums and equations. The breathing adjustments and physical temperance that goes one way and another in order to offer up an immanence of songs completed, words phrased, dots circled and circles dotted.


The scourge of the dyslexic and autistic is that all the scaffolding- that which is needed for the thing desired to be in place- the centre of attention whether that is social mannerisms, eye contact, letter formation, physical dexterity is removed in many well meaning educational and therapeutic programs. Emotionally and so educationally they are left out on a limb- (we are left out on a limb- I am dyslexic) hanging off the roof tiles with no means of keeping a continual grip. The thing must be worked out from out of the details of approach- the push and pull of every grip and release. The method of attachment is different in each case and must be modified to the local circumstances in each instance. There is a book by an autistic boy (“Beyond the Silence” Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay 2000, NAS National Autistic society) in which he learns to talk by a system of push and speak in which his mother exerts pressure on to his upper back and literally exhumes the air in short bursts that escaped from his mouth like air bubbles from deep under the surface of the water. These bubbles appear as words. Though he speaks, people close to him worry about the supposed brutality and violence of his mother hitting him to get the words out as well as the “unnaturalness” of the event of his coming into speech. They needn't have as he points out in the book. For though it looks unusual it is a way for him to come into this bearing. This bearing is singular. The way it plays out is multiple; complicated.


Perception is not an indication or measure of uprightness. For on each movement there would be a doubling and rerouting; an overlay and glitch between one point of departure and another. It would never all sew up together as one. It would blur and skew and scatter leading to vertigo, leading to a continued state of nausea- the norm rather than the exception of simply a bad day if it were only this.


Uprightness is the idea of a certain state of address that exists long before and long after the body has departed from that mark. The topsy-turvy mobile reckoning of every slightest indication of life would rule out the picture perfect form that we cobble together and maintain stubbornly out of the value we put on co-ordinating levels, sharing views, addressing one another through the hit and drive of it all. Traffic that any unmediated perception would instantaneously overwhelm us with making relatedness in the never-ending volition, impossible.


Value for one another exists not in the way things physically or perceptually are but in the idea of a certain state worked up through the process of every occurrence and every sensory and perceptual event that plays out and is modulated by one another, never absolutely standing for any unequivocal certainty in isolation from that on-going adjustment; that constant and continual re-qualification that is our way of experiencing- our way of being.

The same thing applies to disability. It isn’t the body or the perception or the language and communication that sits in for this form of address- this sense of coherence in sensibility. It’s something beyond that, through which any wavering is continually coursing.


Uprightness can’t be disturbed by a physical or perceptual unravelling which plays on and off and through it. Only by the views of others who devalue some forms of life based on this surface level of momentary integration or disintegration and still it into an instant of formation- into the physical or perceptual determination of one solitary standing. Forms of address can be inhibited, precluded or ridiculed because outwardly the perceptual or physical norms do not seem to be in place to sustain it. But through the cracks the integrity of lucid forms of address remain. In the squared back glance of an eye, honing in on a certain realisation- a knowledge of a situation as it plays out and an adeptness of handling and of what is needed given the situation in order to allow something a way through, it continually re-starts itself even on the verge of disintegration.

UPRIGHTNESS

Uprightness seems to be an idea more than an actual body disposition that one aims for and more or less strikes on in the right way. It is more an idea of itself as a form of address or a facing towards or outwards from out of an on-going capacity of invigoration- a kind of forwarding or a sense of putting forward an approach which then becomes the body upright- exposed on the edge of itself- as a relational interface. It’s a precursor to something as yet unfinished and moves onwards out of this sense of filling in that is what it means to face another. That is not read in any particular kind of gait although it may be represented in the manner of a gait as a kind of snap-shot of all that this facing or putting oneself forward entails. Yet in reality it is not the body itself – the fact of the ligaments in a certain line with one another that composes this idea. Or only at least after the event- as a kind of depository of the idea of receptivity. The address is a compulsion that cannot be clicked into any single form. So then how could it represent the figure of an upright body? It is worked up out of many cuts and falls, -half-hearted attempts and refusals- only knows itself through this all manner of bombardment that it plows through.


What is a rebuttal? An invitation to work through a re-orientated manner of address. A pause, back-thread or counter-indication that complicates and busies the business of closing a gap. This interlude is the space for exemplification. A clarity tweaking the threads of infinite uncertainty. - a tightening and loosening and the difference between what those two states of relative torsion come to mean.


A sick person- a topsy-turvy person. An old man. The figure on the side of the pavement staring aimlessly, looking like any moment the pavement will offer up a solution to their perplexity and pull them down. Will they fall? Will they sway? Totter on the verge of something? Stutter? Look away? I approach this figure carrying whilst two plastic dustbins on the back of my bike, swerving up and down the ramps of the uneven paving stones- from road to walkway and back off again. She is standing on the pathway but I feel no sense of wobbling with this precarious load. A gap is opened up in a smile that stretches and sags her cheeks in a double movement that pulls in on one another. I curve around her and she bends slightly so that un-touching we orientate conscientiously.


Later further up on the road, a man is walking barrel- chested and yet from a great distance I feel him occupying the entire pavement even though the interlude between us, in times of how long it would take for us to be level- is several seconds away. The slippery surfaces of the bins inside one another and precariously balanced between seat and handlebars, swivels and nearly pulls me down with it. However an idea of uprightness prevails and by forging ahead rather than stopping and waiting for the momentum of the fall to catch in I managed to gather back through and continue this slow monotonous surge ahead, treading one step at a time, keeping with that stepping because I cannot afford to be anywhere else at all. The man stares through me and I walk through the stare so that the hardness of the eyes is not at all matched by the mutual concession at the last moment of the bodies. This is not body advantage. It is the idea of uprightness and facing even whilst not looking with the eyes and nearly falling with the body. The body is the least of our worries. It gathers or not- falls and re-groups like the ecology of particles that it is. It is the idea- the form of address that coheres or does not.


As I am writing this I look out my window and a small boy on a bike with a large girl propped up on the back holding on to his shoulders rolls down the centre of the street. They are both looking ahead into the near middle space, just past where they are, into the area they are entering but have yet to reach. It is changing. It is here and here and here. They are forwarding into the near distance, making it there’s. There is a sense of them smiling. The smile is one. Not of him or of her but both together- somewhere between them. Flickering. It keeps them balanced though all the odds point to a dramatic fall. That fall never exactly arrives yet in the slur and zigzag neither is it entirely ruled out.

There are as many different types of uprightness as there are practices that each in their own way break opens the possibility of that uprightness. In Contact Dance Improvisation, uprightness is the refrain or the middle space that one enters just beyond the body falling and swaying, collapsing and reconstituting on the mutual prop and aid of other bodies equally falling beyond any sense of absolute stability. In that sense Contact Dance teases out and extends the notion of what that uprightness is all about. For it is never absolutely established in the body composure so that it is taken completely into the sense of an idea- a way of addressing- a notion held on to and carried through from one slant to the next- a kind of slur between what is actually seen- a mediation and exchange that lasts fractionally in the suspense and in the continued momentum between one impulse and another. This staggering of phrases is the only sense of arrival and yet as soon as it is reached and executed it is over and already falling out of itself, swooning beyond any capacity for sustained exposure. Rather it is the idea that lasts. The sense of a continued value in each new recounting of this mystery of movements that come up against one another into coherence- a brief pause- a moving through into a centre gage even whilst there is this reckless hit and miss going on. An ordered lucidity that emerges through it all and is carried by the volition of every angle that comes into play.

YESTERDAY

 10.5.10



Yesterday I felt inert. Those floaters on the eye that fuzz everything over resting on a wad of jelly. Or was that me? No movement takes possession. Knees collapse. Sweat on the brow. Hard to know where to place oneself, lurching from corner to corner, grappling with the edges. The light is blinding today. Luckily it is cold which adds one frontier with a real affront to work against. My breathing is heavy, heaving to get going. Flesh slipping on the floor. I`m tired. The plastic bin-bags have been torn open again by the foxes. Food scattering on the ground. There is a fish head on the wall of my neighbours, eye-less. The top of the vertebra is still attached, white and exposed. In the park the colours levitated and distributed on the trees seize through one another, tempering and re-arranging on my hesitant step. I stop and start the way I have seen the old people do so in this park. There is a heron on the water still and upright its grey pulsing and quivering-a concentration in the body mass- arching out over the small pond, waiting. It’ eyes are the last to see. The fountain is running. A few people on the main lawn, colours jostling, bracing in the wind. A man calls a dog to heel. It continues running in the other direction away from the path across the lawn into the circle of friends.


On the bus a girl says to another girl sitting in the seat in front, “Hold your head still, I want to get something out of your hair”. The girl next to me freezes. The girl behind does something. Then she says, “It’s a leaf” The girl sitting next to me says. “You wanted me to keep my head still to remove a leaf? I`m going to slap you. I thought it was a bug”. I can’t help falling into the passersby on the road down below. Their situations of liveliness create a positive charge which quickly infects me. I feel the space under my ribs grow. My shoulders loosen and I sit back more in my seat. I am relieved to be out in the swirl. Where the bus parks up for a while there are a number of people facing inwards towards a shop notice board. Some have pens poised over notepads as they stare past one another’s back to make sense of the tiny scripts on the individual white cards. A large girl-child with Asian eyes is hemmed into a sitting pram. Her clear wide features look into the street. Like her mother whose back is to her but who keeps half turning silently to check on her, she wears a pink shawl with a bright green shirt underneath. This double-take captures my attention as I swing between mother and child. The colours are absorbent. They filter through in this double entendre. A reverb that is not allowed to drain off. Each time one does, its double feeds back into the thread building up the intensity. Thinking about it now, the colour is still having its affect on me.


There is a jamming up of traffic in congestion further along form the top of Manor Park all the way down towards Finsbury Park. I get off the bus and go into a small coffee shop where there is only room to stand with my back to the counter. As I drink my coffee a man comes in and tells the woman that there has been a murder in Finsbury Park. They are looking for the murder weapon which is believed to be a knife and have cordoned off an area. That and the fact that there is a match on at the Arsenal Stadium is the reason for the traffic build-up. I cross into the park taking my coffee which anyway is in a take-out paper container, with me. There is a small community garden at the side of the main park. It is overgrown but thoughtfully arranged with hanging trellises, a small platform over a tiny pond, even a pagoda. However everything is in miniature so that it is hard to walk around or even sit. The seating ledge around the small tree is narrow and too tightly against the surface of the tree to offer accommodation. It is choked and partially inundated with ivy from above and from the long-growing grass and nettles from below. Because of the traffic jam and the lessening of engine power, it is quite quiet in this garden which- in this position at the edge of a busy junction would usually be untenable for me.


In the drumming group down at the Arts Hut, my hands find the surface of the drum with relief. Everything else unwinds from there bolstering one another up, coursing through one another and attaching different kinds of significance to this emphasis and delay- the moving into place and holding back so that other elements carry on, re-collect, intensify. Meetings are orchestrated or put on hold, shaping this thing- a space of value or letting slip through other moments of impropriety. Each meeting comes into its own in a certain aptness, then is done with, but the question of putting this value into first this and then that articulation becomes an on-going endeavour. Where it cannot happen it does not happen.


A ball is kicked across the lawn that I traverse on my way toward a path that runs alongside the train-track. A couple walk along that path and though they are in grasping range of the ball they choose to hunker down and do not repair it back to the field. The man has to run over, and I look away distantly over at the passing train away from this lost opportunity that I am suddenly caught up in; the embarrassment of a matter that is not dealt with. We cannot linger in these lost accords, but simply fall into a connection where it is possible and circulates back around into a glancing articulation that in a broader sweep involves all that was certainly left behind in the rawness of the occasion that went un-acted on. So the occasion pushed down, resurfaces somewhere else.

The values sounded out and hit into place over and over in the Arts Hut carry the same nature of thinking on the edges- positing quality in the intersection where avoidances and lost occasions finally re-situate and meet the next time around on the in-breath or out-breath in reverse of where they were expected to be. Value is cobbled together in these provisional settings. Homemade holdings where rest and rebound create a double setting for reversed meanings that nevertheless live up close upon one another. Where touch and affinity should be unthinkable in the usual aggravation of every competing incident they are tethered together and harmonised in the spaciousness of the off-beat.


Articulations come through because the time of delay and hesitation is cheated by this double-take where every move has a twinned occupancy either projected or inverted as the bolstered support. Threads are played into repetitions where they are the coursing nerve pulsations- the liquid rush of continued circulation rather than a voice in a given story. Other threads in their very prevention create a firm boundary in that praecipe halt wavering where the cliff meets the sea; that releases the undercurrent charge in their halting absence. Voice emerges in counter-point to all that is done. It then lends itself to the swirl and is carried into the under-beat. The belly that quivers and rests, collecting and mingling- seizing ground- hunkering down. A low level brew of fermentation and untold smells. Contagion and desire building here. Not something that exists in its own right to be held in checks and balances or allowed out the bag. But those qualities are actually made in the small calibrated stops and starts in which meanings are contested- put underground- taken out from the pile of stuff that bury one another in stylistic options none of which matter on their own. The body of the thing is derived from all these exponents- the clothing-they are riddled through and through with intertwining threads that pierce into the depths of the body and spiral out like speeded up plant systems into the atmosphere surrounding. Tracing out holdings, wavering. Curling around themselves- around one another- redistributing on every touch. Spasming into counter-intuitive repulsions and desires.


Gradually speeds are brought up because the slow apportioned blocks of contrasting phases angle and superimpose. Day and night swing back and forth on one another. Eventually the many cuts are constantly and fractionally re-allocated and those tiny adjustments of cut affect the blocks of colour that filter through one another at an entirely different speed- so slow so as to be permanent composures- characterizations touched upon in widely differing circumstances, widely different material conditions to conflate the same feeling - a value permanence that is built up anew and differently between the rapid and the slow; these cross currents that sustain and interpolate one another; hold all in place in something so obvious that the slightest twitch becomes meaningful in the full room that simply redistributes and edges into a new configuration with each new insertion or absentee guest, equating the wholeness -a cohesion- out of whatever is to hand.


So our movements take on a certainty of deliverance- the gages between one emphasis and another play out a configuration of possible events- the hands follow the implications of these modules of feeling that are set up in twinned gages- a network of contrasts that become an over- exposure and an underexposure; an absolute tangible realm that is felt out in the affects it brings forth- that rebounds into brief exposure and continued undercurrent- that brings now my hands and limbs- my body and thought into some kind of an exposition, bolstered up and edged into precision and relevance by all that operates around and through and off of and because of each chance of placement, becoming so. A guidance system that is more than mere information or learning or of teaching. That is the physical impasse and concession- the push and pull according to which one knows the limit of that particular engagement- knows also –as a bat knows the physical environment by the time it takes for a voicing to rebound off nearby surfaces- how far to go with something before curtailing, letting go, dropping off, abstaining.


A definite attack and fade comes into coherence and forms build around these contested attributes- attributes or qualities that work in tandem with one another to define another dimension- one only known through the on-going affects that outline from one moment to the next, capabilities- unities- movement and pause.


My body comes into accordance with the sounds, and the gesturing organizes itself pooling into a unity of left and right- a forging through like running over the ground. There is a centrality of intent- a fixture of value that is derived out of the dissipative elements of all the soundings made into the room- a collectivity that becomes this community of music. Co-ordination arrives- voicing is situated- there is a face in which to face one another. Emotion rises up through this integration worked up in the off beats and the mismatches. A problem or question of unravelling posited and worked through in the aesthetic of the act- the technique and mechanics of the drumming rhythm- and what exactly that can mean- how it can be passed around back and forth from foreground to background, from one emphasis to another. The joy and euphoria of articulation- what was lost is re-applied- forged together – held in place in the cross current of this tensile system- a system of mutual and self-organizing traction that distributes affect and pools it into moments of intensity -of cohesion–of value- The event. Easily we sit with one another.