Series of 9 pics on movements website
(Blog list)
Look under heading, Critical Twist
For want of anything else
10 years ago
Saturday, 18 September 2010
Disappearing boy
There’s a sense of him slipping away. Diminishing and recoiling back into a start point that is never reached. This cauterisation of every outer extremity. A tucking in the edges of all flaying parts. It is this incredible politeness that is killing him. The silence of unutterable lips. Coldness in the hands that writhe or lay discarded by the sides of his body but do not touch. Do not touch back. His chest is prominent a rising hill around a collapsing landscape. There are landslides in every direction. Only the sudden startle response and the pulling and torsion of the neck, ankles and wrists supplicate an antagonism to entropy. Otherwise this hermetically sealed package remains where it is. Providing no input and no reason to delay an errand or interrupt an on-going thought or procedure that the casual passer by may harbour. It is hard to look at such a reversal. Growth turned into a deforestation. A collecting into the essentials of shrinking inner organs. All else white skin- a mere covering, stretched in parts, blackened in places like under the eye. The brow of a young boy, wrinkled, the smooth new hair wispy and dry, floating over his face by the rustle of life that is all around.
There’s a sense of needing to literally plug in. To affect a fuselage connectivity not at the surface that is cold but at the next layer or the layer behind that delving through the rice-paper thinness of these multiple layers, questing for a fickle warmth that rumbles like a distant indigestion that is only the ghost of a meal recurring on itself. It’s important not to chase away this warmth- not to harden out the fickle movements that are the only internal combustion system to hand. It is incredibly delicate- at a knife edge of response and breakdown. How does such a body read touch? Is it invasion? An impossible speed of approach bearing down on the relative tranquillity in a body that is approaching stillness, approaching absolute balance. This touch needs to interpolate, warming into the next layer before fractionally moving there. There is this idea of contact that is sewn out through the atmosphere of a never complete arrival. A mimicking and gesturing into the folds of this stillness that seal the boy in the last barricade to complete dissolution. So touch also needs to dissolve and fix, then dissolve and fix again, melding the extremes of interface and projection beyond that stopping point.
What is a barrier? Only something felt as an inhibition where two planes swivel into an impasse. The parallel sheeting from a differently placed equation pivoted around itself. A point of very slight resistance. The very first breeze of a leverage. The heat of a response that is the involuntary gasp of one surface cleanly wrapped around another, spreading into the grooves and ripples of that front-line, then evicting itself-reconfiguring as if now propelled or distracted so that there is a rush of air, a vacuum suddenly acquiring proportions- the negative space of a vessel suddenly becoming apparent in the contrast of temperatures that a hand placed, lingering, remaining, deepening and then removed, brings. A very slight invigoration in this going down and coming back up. Still a gasp- a long way from being a grasp of any kind. Yet this pulse of a deposit- a slow inhabitation- even the virus contagion of a warmth that spreads from one unit of life to another gives into and creates through repetition, the beginnings of the harmonics of responsiveness. It is a gage in non-consciousness that becomes crowded with variables in moments of delay, anticipation, filling and emptying- the breath squeezed at one instance by the downward motion of the hand, then pushing back at another instance, ejecting that hand. The chest, the tummy, the feint pulse in the wrist, in the neck, under the knee at the Achilles tendon, at the lower back, between the shoulder blades, at the root of the cranium. The muscular ripple between the individual rib-bones that all begin to operate as feint points of leverage- of drawing in and pouting out again. The discordant nature of these multiple throbbings which is beginning to play into a cacophony and that dialogue spreading and darting over the entire surface of the body reaching out from the layers of fascia that are warming and cooling into on–going reliefs and shadows of one another. The circularity of a body begins to evolve-a spherical looping of affects that are the negative indications of a furthering into environment.
The interface of hand on body- almost like a hovercraft that hoovers up just above the area surface creating a warm buffer of air in-between that then invades the very restlessness of the body, warms and lets stay this body in its constant adjustment.
The armour must be taken off. In the case of the boy this is a very literal armour; metal laced arm pads and leg straps that incarcerate his body, beetle-like into a mould of positionality roughly equivalent to the stable straightened aspect of a human body. Like this he is propped up to resemble the position of a standing boy and the folding, unfolding of his arms and legs are frozen into the lengthened bone structure of straightened and immobile limbs. The support, insect-like, is wrapped around his outer body as if all the jell of his inner disappearance were simply bypassed, boiled down to a regulated synchronous liquid substance and poured in this mould. But this was never going to work because this hermetically sealed boy could never feel nor anticipate the impending nature of an address that might call for a matched response and for the collecting and resistance of opposed forces that would call for a true stand.
At first the touch response is a dream. It is all the boy’s experience of the pulsating of organs against flesh. The liquid run and set of systems that keep percolating around one another; holding one another up in jams and enclaves then redistributing as the dam breaks. Yet this viscosity in the disappearing boy needs to be got going through the contactibility of body to body- of human to human. The boy learns to live with these interventions- to not immediately dispel them, throw them out as foreign matter- but to use them as a point of friction, of invigoration, of warmth. His body calls out of that warmth. So he uses whatever surface comes his way. The dialogue and minute adjustment ensues even as the boy receives them and engulfs them more as a part of his own internal organisation. Yet they are a series of affects, of internal perturbations and re-accommodations. That is the point.
In a walking, seeing child, every surface- the ground their feet press in and out of, the walls, the smooth-roughness of shelves, seats, carpet, cushions, wood, metal fixtures, the bounce of light off of reflective windows, the shimmer of it in-between leaves or its sudden displacement as figures approach mid-centre and play off in constant rebound upon the meshing faces of the child that learn to manoeuvre around this mobile flesh as a party game and a deep yielding into this eruptive compelling permanence. They learn to push off of bodies, lean into them, absorb and bounce out of various meetings. They learn to touch and touch back. And this is not only a perceptual thing that they do, not the social alone. It is shored up on the physical working of points of interface- of surfaces on surfaces at every level of their meeting. It is the warming of the body, the breath and circulation, the food intake and excretion. It is digestion and it is the mediating of what and how things are received and reattributed. The boy is disappearing because without this feedback he does not remember to take in another breath, to continue with the peristalsis of food breakdown, to push out all that is wastage from the anus. The body is a system of massaging parts that warm and invigorate one another resetting by way of their interruption with other organs, with other systems of travelling viscera that are embracing and coming apart all of the time.
The conversation with the boy is about insinuating into this level of visceral interface. The hand must become another organ, pulsating and jostling in the midst of what it is not- what it is constantly wrapped around. What it then, by way of affinity, becomes. In these folds, systems of affordance come into being, then dissipate only to take hold in other fleeting capacitates. So peristalsis ensues, ripple-like, and then one time out of the blue the boy maybe will or maybe will not, with only the slightest of indications- more a continuance of staying with a warmth than anything resembling a gesture- touch back, unless he already has done this, without our even noticing.
____
Note* I have begun working with this boy as a Shiatsu Interaction therapist. I have never before worked with a child who appears so fragile and weak. It is important to add that I was so concerned about this child that I insisted on full medical transparency between all those involved in the boy's care.
____
There’s a sense of needing to literally plug in. To affect a fuselage connectivity not at the surface that is cold but at the next layer or the layer behind that delving through the rice-paper thinness of these multiple layers, questing for a fickle warmth that rumbles like a distant indigestion that is only the ghost of a meal recurring on itself. It’s important not to chase away this warmth- not to harden out the fickle movements that are the only internal combustion system to hand. It is incredibly delicate- at a knife edge of response and breakdown. How does such a body read touch? Is it invasion? An impossible speed of approach bearing down on the relative tranquillity in a body that is approaching stillness, approaching absolute balance. This touch needs to interpolate, warming into the next layer before fractionally moving there. There is this idea of contact that is sewn out through the atmosphere of a never complete arrival. A mimicking and gesturing into the folds of this stillness that seal the boy in the last barricade to complete dissolution. So touch also needs to dissolve and fix, then dissolve and fix again, melding the extremes of interface and projection beyond that stopping point.
What is a barrier? Only something felt as an inhibition where two planes swivel into an impasse. The parallel sheeting from a differently placed equation pivoted around itself. A point of very slight resistance. The very first breeze of a leverage. The heat of a response that is the involuntary gasp of one surface cleanly wrapped around another, spreading into the grooves and ripples of that front-line, then evicting itself-reconfiguring as if now propelled or distracted so that there is a rush of air, a vacuum suddenly acquiring proportions- the negative space of a vessel suddenly becoming apparent in the contrast of temperatures that a hand placed, lingering, remaining, deepening and then removed, brings. A very slight invigoration in this going down and coming back up. Still a gasp- a long way from being a grasp of any kind. Yet this pulse of a deposit- a slow inhabitation- even the virus contagion of a warmth that spreads from one unit of life to another gives into and creates through repetition, the beginnings of the harmonics of responsiveness. It is a gage in non-consciousness that becomes crowded with variables in moments of delay, anticipation, filling and emptying- the breath squeezed at one instance by the downward motion of the hand, then pushing back at another instance, ejecting that hand. The chest, the tummy, the feint pulse in the wrist, in the neck, under the knee at the Achilles tendon, at the lower back, between the shoulder blades, at the root of the cranium. The muscular ripple between the individual rib-bones that all begin to operate as feint points of leverage- of drawing in and pouting out again. The discordant nature of these multiple throbbings which is beginning to play into a cacophony and that dialogue spreading and darting over the entire surface of the body reaching out from the layers of fascia that are warming and cooling into on–going reliefs and shadows of one another. The circularity of a body begins to evolve-a spherical looping of affects that are the negative indications of a furthering into environment.
The interface of hand on body- almost like a hovercraft that hoovers up just above the area surface creating a warm buffer of air in-between that then invades the very restlessness of the body, warms and lets stay this body in its constant adjustment.
The armour must be taken off. In the case of the boy this is a very literal armour; metal laced arm pads and leg straps that incarcerate his body, beetle-like into a mould of positionality roughly equivalent to the stable straightened aspect of a human body. Like this he is propped up to resemble the position of a standing boy and the folding, unfolding of his arms and legs are frozen into the lengthened bone structure of straightened and immobile limbs. The support, insect-like, is wrapped around his outer body as if all the jell of his inner disappearance were simply bypassed, boiled down to a regulated synchronous liquid substance and poured in this mould. But this was never going to work because this hermetically sealed boy could never feel nor anticipate the impending nature of an address that might call for a matched response and for the collecting and resistance of opposed forces that would call for a true stand.
At first the touch response is a dream. It is all the boy’s experience of the pulsating of organs against flesh. The liquid run and set of systems that keep percolating around one another; holding one another up in jams and enclaves then redistributing as the dam breaks. Yet this viscosity in the disappearing boy needs to be got going through the contactibility of body to body- of human to human. The boy learns to live with these interventions- to not immediately dispel them, throw them out as foreign matter- but to use them as a point of friction, of invigoration, of warmth. His body calls out of that warmth. So he uses whatever surface comes his way. The dialogue and minute adjustment ensues even as the boy receives them and engulfs them more as a part of his own internal organisation. Yet they are a series of affects, of internal perturbations and re-accommodations. That is the point.
In a walking, seeing child, every surface- the ground their feet press in and out of, the walls, the smooth-roughness of shelves, seats, carpet, cushions, wood, metal fixtures, the bounce of light off of reflective windows, the shimmer of it in-between leaves or its sudden displacement as figures approach mid-centre and play off in constant rebound upon the meshing faces of the child that learn to manoeuvre around this mobile flesh as a party game and a deep yielding into this eruptive compelling permanence. They learn to push off of bodies, lean into them, absorb and bounce out of various meetings. They learn to touch and touch back. And this is not only a perceptual thing that they do, not the social alone. It is shored up on the physical working of points of interface- of surfaces on surfaces at every level of their meeting. It is the warming of the body, the breath and circulation, the food intake and excretion. It is digestion and it is the mediating of what and how things are received and reattributed. The boy is disappearing because without this feedback he does not remember to take in another breath, to continue with the peristalsis of food breakdown, to push out all that is wastage from the anus. The body is a system of massaging parts that warm and invigorate one another resetting by way of their interruption with other organs, with other systems of travelling viscera that are embracing and coming apart all of the time.
The conversation with the boy is about insinuating into this level of visceral interface. The hand must become another organ, pulsating and jostling in the midst of what it is not- what it is constantly wrapped around. What it then, by way of affinity, becomes. In these folds, systems of affordance come into being, then dissipate only to take hold in other fleeting capacitates. So peristalsis ensues, ripple-like, and then one time out of the blue the boy maybe will or maybe will not, with only the slightest of indications- more a continuance of staying with a warmth than anything resembling a gesture- touch back, unless he already has done this, without our even noticing.
____
Note* I have begun working with this boy as a Shiatsu Interaction therapist. I have never before worked with a child who appears so fragile and weak. It is important to add that I was so concerned about this child that I insisted on full medical transparency between all those involved in the boy's care.
____
Friday, 17 September 2010
Following Unease
(Written after a Women's Eid Festival in Stoke Newington, London 16th Sept.
Many fast treatments- many people with physical pains.
Treatment- two handed Shiatsu. Inhabiting two disparate areas with contrasting feelings of going in, bouncing out. Residing there. Letting the affects of these differences mix as the hands stream back through the arms back into your one body. Even as they remain outstretched on the body of someone else. A momentary feeling of oppression. Like a tightness at the chest. Than a series of shifts that come to be felt as different qualities of emphasis. A continually re-grafted depth reading. Calibrated between two bodies.
An expansiveness in the chest and throat that travels out from the disruption in all directions whilst allowing one to stay put. The sense of driving or walking through a space so that the hands operate together as a push-me pull-you pressure and release. Honing in - like a remote probe or sensor- with one hand deepening and the other lessening off. Following the settlement /unsettlement of this breathing that becomes one in recipient and you. Their chest, your chest, rising and falling. Your hands slack off as the belly expands. Accomodating it. This breathing could be the body forwarding, turning, reversing, pausing as it has many times before and now even as it lies there it goes about these calibrations. Certainly they are of a temperament of a body in anguish, joy, fear, relief, contemplation, dreaming and waking. Interspersing one with the other to build into the fine nuances of expression, response. An engaged affect as an on-going state of changing.
Twist and torsion of your own body the steering wheel of fractional adjustments in your hands relating to the bulk of a body turning, aligning, aggregating with the redistributed circulation- of flows and stoppage. Utilizing these oppositions as the differentials of a moving system. Making this vehicle between you. That being operated in the slight pull and twist between chest, rib-cage and the flesh just below the umbilical. A slight resistance like the prizing apart of a too rigidly knitted form. Tenderizing it. The seperation and coming apart of the two hands in this slow twist and torsion of an opening. The dropping of stitches and the pulling of certain single threads that span the body and tighten at the mid-point as the body pulls away in two directions, to be a reinvigorated breath.
So the oppression in the chest becomes the guide for a recalibration and a re-tunement of the way in which you configure your own body in relation to the recipient. The way their breathing alters. How this relates again to your placement. And so it goes on.This placement the tweaking of a dial which to begin with is the certain angling of your whole body in relation to the recipient. An opening like a valve is constructed - a gateway between a certain address that becomes a workable device- a way through. Until another seizure of pain or constriction; of all too sudden release or a thought about situation suddenly dawns and a reconfiguration is pending as another area becomes emotive like a sudden giveway point that then drains away and floods into another remote place. As the thing gets going the recipient becomes the active force, the breathing punching in and out your hand from which your whole body is attached. Recipient is a moment of reception not a fixed role, an actual person. It is the logging in the pulse of the blood, the holding together of flesh, the letting go of air, of a body's responsivenes. A spasm and flickering with each minute in-take and out-take of breath. Then firming into place certain exposures, certain pauses that put on hold, detour and make into an accumulated response, the drama. It is their body. Their drama. Their contours. But it is happening also in your body catching into it as the rapid darting of a messaging going back and forward. The messaging is not unwrapped. Can not be interpreted because it is building and breaking in upon itself on the spot. It is pure affect forcefully there and equally subverted on to something else shaping what it can be according to the responses held in the balance and tipped this way and that way over and over again by everyone present on the day.
Addressing the specific is a way to create these lines of association that run through from head to toe, from body to body. There's this compulsion in chasing the aggravation- like a mouse set loose and on the rampage- areas of pain, emergant bumps and dips that ripple over the body in order to course through admixtures where these assaults finally cancel one another out. The mouse is not destroyed it is brought into the light. It panics and darts for cover. But there is none. Then moments of calmness begin to build out of these very distractions and the rapid coursing back and forward of opposing tendencies at last begin to relate. So a dialogue that is sporadic and can not be kept in one place ensues. That dialogue being nothing more than this attention to unease spread out between the two or more bodies and conjoined at the interface and the multi-directional fine tuning it aggravates in order to ride that unease into various air-passages, parallel lines of reserve, a certain ease about and in the situation. That state exists right on the verge of a catastrophe that is touched in and out of and is tentatively let be. It is dramatized with remote but not disengaged attention. So the dialogue is about states of awareness that are arrived at through bodies constantly distilling out of each other's frissure. Another name for that could be environment.
Many fast treatments- many people with physical pains.
Treatment- two handed Shiatsu. Inhabiting two disparate areas with contrasting feelings of going in, bouncing out. Residing there. Letting the affects of these differences mix as the hands stream back through the arms back into your one body. Even as they remain outstretched on the body of someone else. A momentary feeling of oppression. Like a tightness at the chest. Than a series of shifts that come to be felt as different qualities of emphasis. A continually re-grafted depth reading. Calibrated between two bodies.
An expansiveness in the chest and throat that travels out from the disruption in all directions whilst allowing one to stay put. The sense of driving or walking through a space so that the hands operate together as a push-me pull-you pressure and release. Honing in - like a remote probe or sensor- with one hand deepening and the other lessening off. Following the settlement /unsettlement of this breathing that becomes one in recipient and you. Their chest, your chest, rising and falling. Your hands slack off as the belly expands. Accomodating it. This breathing could be the body forwarding, turning, reversing, pausing as it has many times before and now even as it lies there it goes about these calibrations. Certainly they are of a temperament of a body in anguish, joy, fear, relief, contemplation, dreaming and waking. Interspersing one with the other to build into the fine nuances of expression, response. An engaged affect as an on-going state of changing.
Twist and torsion of your own body the steering wheel of fractional adjustments in your hands relating to the bulk of a body turning, aligning, aggregating with the redistributed circulation- of flows and stoppage. Utilizing these oppositions as the differentials of a moving system. Making this vehicle between you. That being operated in the slight pull and twist between chest, rib-cage and the flesh just below the umbilical. A slight resistance like the prizing apart of a too rigidly knitted form. Tenderizing it. The seperation and coming apart of the two hands in this slow twist and torsion of an opening. The dropping of stitches and the pulling of certain single threads that span the body and tighten at the mid-point as the body pulls away in two directions, to be a reinvigorated breath.
So the oppression in the chest becomes the guide for a recalibration and a re-tunement of the way in which you configure your own body in relation to the recipient. The way their breathing alters. How this relates again to your placement. And so it goes on.This placement the tweaking of a dial which to begin with is the certain angling of your whole body in relation to the recipient. An opening like a valve is constructed - a gateway between a certain address that becomes a workable device- a way through. Until another seizure of pain or constriction; of all too sudden release or a thought about situation suddenly dawns and a reconfiguration is pending as another area becomes emotive like a sudden giveway point that then drains away and floods into another remote place. As the thing gets going the recipient becomes the active force, the breathing punching in and out your hand from which your whole body is attached. Recipient is a moment of reception not a fixed role, an actual person. It is the logging in the pulse of the blood, the holding together of flesh, the letting go of air, of a body's responsivenes. A spasm and flickering with each minute in-take and out-take of breath. Then firming into place certain exposures, certain pauses that put on hold, detour and make into an accumulated response, the drama. It is their body. Their drama. Their contours. But it is happening also in your body catching into it as the rapid darting of a messaging going back and forward. The messaging is not unwrapped. Can not be interpreted because it is building and breaking in upon itself on the spot. It is pure affect forcefully there and equally subverted on to something else shaping what it can be according to the responses held in the balance and tipped this way and that way over and over again by everyone present on the day.
Addressing the specific is a way to create these lines of association that run through from head to toe, from body to body. There's this compulsion in chasing the aggravation- like a mouse set loose and on the rampage- areas of pain, emergant bumps and dips that ripple over the body in order to course through admixtures where these assaults finally cancel one another out. The mouse is not destroyed it is brought into the light. It panics and darts for cover. But there is none. Then moments of calmness begin to build out of these very distractions and the rapid coursing back and forward of opposing tendencies at last begin to relate. So a dialogue that is sporadic and can not be kept in one place ensues. That dialogue being nothing more than this attention to unease spread out between the two or more bodies and conjoined at the interface and the multi-directional fine tuning it aggravates in order to ride that unease into various air-passages, parallel lines of reserve, a certain ease about and in the situation. That state exists right on the verge of a catastrophe that is touched in and out of and is tentatively let be. It is dramatized with remote but not disengaged attention. So the dialogue is about states of awareness that are arrived at through bodies constantly distilling out of each other's frissure. Another name for that could be environment.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
An open question
Something about the tilt and pour of a gesturing body under inclination and going further. Somewhere in the mid-space into a set of patterns that are built into the grip and dissolution of muscle tone. A viscosity that is continuing on its way through the air we are entering. The shouting out into this mid-space, the throwing back into our apparent place. Where is it we are at? Never entirely of the body or out the body. A probable threshold that we are wavering through. On the brink, this tilt-point like an axle that grinds a bearing along a plum-line coursing down and simultaneously throws us into a near flight. Perception is that travelling. The surface to surface activation that acts like a springboard. The grit and gristle that gets the thing going. It is also our breathing, our digestion, our circulation.
So with the child in the therapy room- gripping my hands to pull himself up-that action can just as easily loop down into a reversal of those muscle groupings- that pressing down to go up winding to some degree back on itself - so that there is a lessening of pressure to go down- like a neutralization of the process. This double entendre is how we come to experience our selves enmeshed in a collective of activations that are all influencing and tweaking constantly the outcomes of a recipe of admixture. Patterns on patterns on patterns. We are compositions of and also in the process of composing through this constant involvement and that is how miniscully we hold together or come apart.
The leverage- point of leverage- becomes the play of outcomes- thrashing around one another and induced into predictions or the oppositions of those predictions. This becomes play- the beginnings of dialogue which is a viscous and tenable interlocking that is not a flat pack but keeps turning around one another- a multi-dimensional quest of surface on surfaces so that a turn, an angle a, holding, a falling and catching in begins to shore up upon one another and to forge point of impact, compression, affect and period of flow, travel- a vacuumm to which the potential of the body as dispersal is drawn . Form as movement follows.
Playing with the expectation of grasping to pull up which if it goes unmediated intensifies into a thrusting forward- a fast forwarding and explosiveness/ excitability of the chest, the breath, that sends the boy plummetting forward. So that unstead it is tempered by an inversion of the very usability of this grip. A lessening off so that the grip catches and then folds in on itself sending the body back down and through his own centre weight- through the sacrum and hips and the belly weight into the legs. So that there is a minute contraction of the muscles in the thigh, the leg, a small accommodation in the knee and ankle bones. A pulsing of the toes into the carpet- some kind of landing there where you are. The boy lingers. He wobbles. Then out of this letting go comes another stabilisation; a concretisation. Hardening into the grasp of the body; pushing down through the legs into the ground beyond its evident surface and pulsing up through that constraint. The arm jammed into place so that the bones of the wrist are set and configured for a moment- trapped- as the flat of the hand pushes against your palm- a driving force of right angles. A leverage. A levelling between falling down and pulling back up, the interuption into one another becoming a firm stand. So between the two fixed and unequivocal directives- of grasping and letting go, there is this balancing brink- this wavering lull of suspension that is a pause-gap - a hushed moment. A thought.
It becomes a holding together in this elastic space between getting somewhere and resting here that is neither completely one or the other. That is a kind of rapid and mediated coursing back and forward. A fast pulse that contains also within it, slowness. There's a moment of motionlessness. It is filled with potential because it is made up from so many counter-indications; emotive tendencies like colours that are never set into ultimate discrepancies but play on one another cancelling into white light.
That is the beginnings of dialogue. A dialogue with the environment- with the surface to surface of material and human interfaces. Interactions that compose out of one another. Conjoined phrases that become our living environments that are constantly flowing through one another- cautioning and letting pass impulses that are jointed and newly worked up even as we breath and think and present ourselves as varying images to one another. A continuing pronouncement through which we engage.
So with the child in the therapy room- gripping my hands to pull himself up-that action can just as easily loop down into a reversal of those muscle groupings- that pressing down to go up winding to some degree back on itself - so that there is a lessening of pressure to go down- like a neutralization of the process. This double entendre is how we come to experience our selves enmeshed in a collective of activations that are all influencing and tweaking constantly the outcomes of a recipe of admixture. Patterns on patterns on patterns. We are compositions of and also in the process of composing through this constant involvement and that is how miniscully we hold together or come apart.
The leverage- point of leverage- becomes the play of outcomes- thrashing around one another and induced into predictions or the oppositions of those predictions. This becomes play- the beginnings of dialogue which is a viscous and tenable interlocking that is not a flat pack but keeps turning around one another- a multi-dimensional quest of surface on surfaces so that a turn, an angle a, holding, a falling and catching in begins to shore up upon one another and to forge point of impact, compression, affect and period of flow, travel- a vacuumm to which the potential of the body as dispersal is drawn . Form as movement follows.
Playing with the expectation of grasping to pull up which if it goes unmediated intensifies into a thrusting forward- a fast forwarding and explosiveness/ excitability of the chest, the breath, that sends the boy plummetting forward. So that unstead it is tempered by an inversion of the very usability of this grip. A lessening off so that the grip catches and then folds in on itself sending the body back down and through his own centre weight- through the sacrum and hips and the belly weight into the legs. So that there is a minute contraction of the muscles in the thigh, the leg, a small accommodation in the knee and ankle bones. A pulsing of the toes into the carpet- some kind of landing there where you are. The boy lingers. He wobbles. Then out of this letting go comes another stabilisation; a concretisation. Hardening into the grasp of the body; pushing down through the legs into the ground beyond its evident surface and pulsing up through that constraint. The arm jammed into place so that the bones of the wrist are set and configured for a moment- trapped- as the flat of the hand pushes against your palm- a driving force of right angles. A leverage. A levelling between falling down and pulling back up, the interuption into one another becoming a firm stand. So between the two fixed and unequivocal directives- of grasping and letting go, there is this balancing brink- this wavering lull of suspension that is a pause-gap - a hushed moment. A thought.
It becomes a holding together in this elastic space between getting somewhere and resting here that is neither completely one or the other. That is a kind of rapid and mediated coursing back and forward. A fast pulse that contains also within it, slowness. There's a moment of motionlessness. It is filled with potential because it is made up from so many counter-indications; emotive tendencies like colours that are never set into ultimate discrepancies but play on one another cancelling into white light.
That is the beginnings of dialogue. A dialogue with the environment- with the surface to surface of material and human interfaces. Interactions that compose out of one another. Conjoined phrases that become our living environments that are constantly flowing through one another- cautioning and letting pass impulses that are jointed and newly worked up even as we breath and think and present ourselves as varying images to one another. A continuing pronouncement through which we engage.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Instrument
Just before I write there is this buzzing of elements in the environment. Then they begin to slow and settle. To take on significance in relation to one another. The angle at which they are set becomes exacting, crucially binding them in an array that little by little can no longer be taken apart.
I go around tweaking corners off-setting the minute flecks of expression that make up this new tuning fork. For it is the circulation of light and shadows as they absorb and rebound. The filaments of dust, the morsels as they come and go. The tread and shuffle of itinerant animals, birds, strangers and passer-bys. The hurrying steps, the lulled recurrence of a back treading footstep. The side glances and taxied journeying of synchronised feet, dogs and insects. The worms burrowing. The wind seeking passage taking with it dirt and fluff, seeds, smells, germs, a cool breeze on the skin, weaving in and out of the heat of the sun, creating patches of hot and coolness that pass over one’s seated body or propel one into momentary wanderings- out into the middle of the grass, the wasteland, and back again- that makes this place useable.
It is the place for the recording of events. Events that would not happen unless all these preset signatures bound up against one another.
There is this rising and falling. This growing up and this crashing down that maybe should be in different passages, different time-frames, altogether different events. In stories that never meet. But here they do cascading into one another. Interlacing like fingers seeking out the backs of one another’s hands. But it is the same body somewhere down the line. At some further point less diversified, more integral to the root of the thing. A person walking on the land sitting on a bench. Passers by nodding or avoiding. A dog pre-empting the moves that are made, insulting or enticing.
I am looking out over the thicket and the waning yellow flowers mostly turned to bristle these days. The slip of wire from a telegraph pole looped from building to building then across one of those metal braces that rise like a lost child’s bracelet next to stations and works and other industrial developments. Superimposed over this are other poles; industrial stalagmites that push up through the vacancy of a toothless smile filling in here and there a small section of emptiness- aligning with the top-most loop of this empty cage, the rigid bracelet thrust over a portion of land.
Figures are weaving their way in and out of the thicket, secluded here and there by bushes, trees, unruly growth only to reappear through the covering zigzagging but remaining before my eyes like corn flowers that are growing and dying so that the progress is the progress of a genotype not of a single flower. I am the same fazing in and out of credibility. Swimming and sinking in amidst this buzzing landscape.
Yet there is the moment when these elements- the metal against metal- the wire drooping and ascending again like a script in the sky; that single scant yellow flower, that straw cemented growth. The beetle coloured luminance of a discarded blue beer can. When they all take hold and root firmly into one another. That is when I too become like a tattoo burnt into the bench where I sit.
When I look out across the area there is no distance to cover. Just this resounding thrill of significance interlocking and exposing one another glistening in the shock of a torsion. A bustling traction that runs through everything as the workability of a vibration comes through in the midst of staying put resting and flowing on the wind.
___
Someone walks past looking down. I am eating a banana. Nothing happens. There is a gradual coming into a smile somewhere in the mid-space between chewing and walking, where the rhythms merge.
I go around tweaking corners off-setting the minute flecks of expression that make up this new tuning fork. For it is the circulation of light and shadows as they absorb and rebound. The filaments of dust, the morsels as they come and go. The tread and shuffle of itinerant animals, birds, strangers and passer-bys. The hurrying steps, the lulled recurrence of a back treading footstep. The side glances and taxied journeying of synchronised feet, dogs and insects. The worms burrowing. The wind seeking passage taking with it dirt and fluff, seeds, smells, germs, a cool breeze on the skin, weaving in and out of the heat of the sun, creating patches of hot and coolness that pass over one’s seated body or propel one into momentary wanderings- out into the middle of the grass, the wasteland, and back again- that makes this place useable.
It is the place for the recording of events. Events that would not happen unless all these preset signatures bound up against one another.
There is this rising and falling. This growing up and this crashing down that maybe should be in different passages, different time-frames, altogether different events. In stories that never meet. But here they do cascading into one another. Interlacing like fingers seeking out the backs of one another’s hands. But it is the same body somewhere down the line. At some further point less diversified, more integral to the root of the thing. A person walking on the land sitting on a bench. Passers by nodding or avoiding. A dog pre-empting the moves that are made, insulting or enticing.
I am looking out over the thicket and the waning yellow flowers mostly turned to bristle these days. The slip of wire from a telegraph pole looped from building to building then across one of those metal braces that rise like a lost child’s bracelet next to stations and works and other industrial developments. Superimposed over this are other poles; industrial stalagmites that push up through the vacancy of a toothless smile filling in here and there a small section of emptiness- aligning with the top-most loop of this empty cage, the rigid bracelet thrust over a portion of land.
Figures are weaving their way in and out of the thicket, secluded here and there by bushes, trees, unruly growth only to reappear through the covering zigzagging but remaining before my eyes like corn flowers that are growing and dying so that the progress is the progress of a genotype not of a single flower. I am the same fazing in and out of credibility. Swimming and sinking in amidst this buzzing landscape.
Yet there is the moment when these elements- the metal against metal- the wire drooping and ascending again like a script in the sky; that single scant yellow flower, that straw cemented growth. The beetle coloured luminance of a discarded blue beer can. When they all take hold and root firmly into one another. That is when I too become like a tattoo burnt into the bench where I sit.
When I look out across the area there is no distance to cover. Just this resounding thrill of significance interlocking and exposing one another glistening in the shock of a torsion. A bustling traction that runs through everything as the workability of a vibration comes through in the midst of staying put resting and flowing on the wind.
___
Someone walks past looking down. I am eating a banana. Nothing happens. There is a gradual coming into a smile somewhere in the mid-space between chewing and walking, where the rhythms merge.
Friday, 20 August 2010
A play of distance
Can you run the line and run past it too? What is a line? A delimitation. It does not appear to be forward thinking but maybe it is. A marker that you trip past. A catch in the road that becomes your propellant. Maybe in the run of things you would land on your face. Some kind of catastrophe or defacement in any case. But it never gets resolved- the arrow never reaches the target- your face stuck to the ground is never even forwarded as an idea. Because each trip and the fly it provides- the shove from behind is certainly a jolt but it is collected mid point and mid point to that at a point between a point, then let go of again- a kind of hammering of stop start drill. So that the convulsions it throws up are actually you walking. You on a good day. Tumbling down the street, using the slight incline to your advantage, to get somewhere you have never completely arrived at. Throwing yourself past the line is an act of defiance, an ideation. Because there is nothing concrete that you are heading at.
So in that moment of suspension- a strange regurgitation of breath as the intake and the outtake get mixed up, do you really know where you are going? You swing round on the principle of your own forgetting- levering off the line, the foot-hold, the obstacle- some kind of surface of resistance and flying out, expansive after that intensification through the impact- the squashing of areas into one another and the bolt out of the blue. This is happening through out your body that modulates, shudders and re-distributes in the space surrounding.You are gliding like a bat sending out cries in the dark that bounce back at you off the walls so that the empty space begins to configure and differentials of loud/ soft, hard/soft, drive and release begin to thump against each other. So becomes the line. An interface.
It is a marker. A start in the composition of something. Something that you move through. Those momentary locks and openings create a kind of traction of affect- you swing along in and out of resistant niches. Some kind of curvature between the two that is impossible to describe because the bearings are always changing.You are the departed, the returned, gliding between those holds that swivel orientation and it is that which you are thinking through, that your body is forming through, squinting through, reconstituting through which is all it ever is and is and can be. Not the fully formed residue of a day out, a body in full view; shock of the stature but the actual workability of it that is not available up front. Only that you know, you feel it in the way your body works, this grasp, release, this jamming and setting free, this working up of thresholds that are used for locomotion or for agitation in one place or in more than one.
You are thinking these thresholds as you are doing it but it is in that split second- actually half a second- where there is a glitch in control. A mismatch between something caught on to, collided with and the repelling out from that. That double move so loaded with positive and negative on the social scale could be an embrace when looped into an on-going moveability that is so on-going that it appears still.- backed on to itself. An embrace that is never recognised or called as such in the social ( as a bracketted animal) though the social is really a derivative- a kind of on-going tincture- of all these mutual and dissonant levels of activation. Of this unsettlement. There are these whirls and shapings that glide ever onwards as one area is affirmed, another erased, a swing from tree to tree. From touch to touch.
And it is the idea of the passage that really gets us going- not the individual moves broken down into anatomical compartments, oiled and limbered into contortions as a still life that are then meant to equate with the up and running version. Yes every possible trajectory of the arm raising the knee bending the hip swivelling have been practised and gone over. The pieces must equate a running body- a walking body. Nothing is missing in the jigsaw.Except the mis-match. The fault of lines. The glitch in getting from here to there where there is a black out- where the body is sent on, through the thought of it, the idea of it. The interest to see what becomes if it. This could be called play. The implications for learning are very strong for where this mis-match is effectively closed, the lines brought together in a harmonic clasp that is too fully choreographed, more and more bodies will find themselves thrust outside of that charmed procedure of recapitulation and their flaying attempts to re-institute some kind of innovative delay will be taken as malfunction or in any case perverse.
Moving on. Moving is an ideation and ideas come from the open-ended nature of the workable lives in which this roaming attention exists that only in the glitches describes the value which is unlocatable- somewhere between one point and another. This is another way of saying that preemptive representation is not always a means to an end but an impossible opaqueness that attracts flight like moths to a light sticking them there so that it does away with all movement in the instantaneous burn-out affect that that carnivorous attraction involves. Trying to grasp everything all at once in one plane of integrity-filling the body up with light- with impossible visibility-substancing it at every turn with all that is seen to be missing. Adding compulsively all this stuff even as it drains away. More icing on the cake. Doing away with the pauses, the glitches, the minuscule half seconds that indeed do add up in the collectivity of an action filled with holes. Each hole is a fractional delay in which a skewed bearing is the thrust of the conscious into the unconscious, of the unconscious into the conscious. Of the multiple flexing of an intelligent multi-bodied and variable bodied system. Doing away with all that is doing away with the traction that keeps distant things at play. Those holes that individually do seem dispensable one by one as the clearing away of symptoms of lost time could be the jolt in time- the trigger for a thought-movement; the sand particle around which the crystal is growing*.
Perhaps autistic people in some of the more populist behavioural "cure" programs of targeted functionality where reward and discouragement try to shape actions as a hand shaping the maleable body, overload for that reason. Actions without ideas can't sustain themsleves. A question.
A problem. Create a problem- a stoppage; activate an action. The body will begin to envisage itself around those actions, thickening by degrees like a tongue licking away at toffee, coating itself. Acumulating.
There is always the play of differentials between where we are and where we might get to. It is never resolved because it is a juncture of slowness performed where many possibilities of direction, of response, of bounce, of absorption come up against one another and for that indiscernible of time measures create a lull, a cancellation, an incredible slowness right in the speed of it all. It is out of that that actions find a course sustained by the novel idea of that stillness at the heart of an on-going life. A life that is lived differently at every instance- that calls for split second choices faster than we could arrange our limbs, decide on what is appropriate. In the pause, the glimmer, the stand-off out of which actions run. For we are weaving designs in the virtual space beyond our moves as delimited acts, beyond our bodies as sealed entities, beyond our thoughts as scripts of definite authority. These occur in an interaction- in a wider depository-a shifting field of influences that are occurring simultaneously and recalibrating the choices we appear to be making even as the act is being carried out. That is our inter-relating impossible to trace except where it runs out on itself. Our positionality in and through everything we touch- everything we pass through. Everything that re-aranges us.
Awareness is this tension of ends that do not stack up. So that a problem is being continuously posited and the affects out of which that problem hold are re-distributed in the looseness between falling and holding. Something that catches in differently each time through that jolt of uncertainty that is coupled through and through with the certainties we hold so close to us and that plays on and off of these. A constant dialogue, a constant interest- an activation re-performed with the material that comes to bear in order to further the pattern. Our lives- our communicability- and the worry and wonder that wrap around one another- that fold in and out of one another- to make thought patterns with trajectories of flight and return. This uncatchable value that bleeds into all of life out of the moment just before landing impossible to inhibit, to delimit. Because it is not of any single habitable location. Not in a body. In no known dwelling. Bodies no longer move without that. Indetermination cannot be deleted. It is crucially already the missing factor.
____
This piece is written whilst being in the middle of reading Brian Massumis book, "Parables for the virtual"
*This is a reference to Simondon's theory of Individuation where a problem or interuption in the running of something- whether organic or inorganic- is an excuse to recalibrate it within and out of that fault-line. That engagement in the midst of a problem of continuity is what furthers the uniqueness of a pattern as a spontaneous composition or becoming. It is upon that niche or fault-line that the recursiveness of an awareness takes hold.
So in that moment of suspension- a strange regurgitation of breath as the intake and the outtake get mixed up, do you really know where you are going? You swing round on the principle of your own forgetting- levering off the line, the foot-hold, the obstacle- some kind of surface of resistance and flying out, expansive after that intensification through the impact- the squashing of areas into one another and the bolt out of the blue. This is happening through out your body that modulates, shudders and re-distributes in the space surrounding.You are gliding like a bat sending out cries in the dark that bounce back at you off the walls so that the empty space begins to configure and differentials of loud/ soft, hard/soft, drive and release begin to thump against each other. So becomes the line. An interface.
It is a marker. A start in the composition of something. Something that you move through. Those momentary locks and openings create a kind of traction of affect- you swing along in and out of resistant niches. Some kind of curvature between the two that is impossible to describe because the bearings are always changing.You are the departed, the returned, gliding between those holds that swivel orientation and it is that which you are thinking through, that your body is forming through, squinting through, reconstituting through which is all it ever is and is and can be. Not the fully formed residue of a day out, a body in full view; shock of the stature but the actual workability of it that is not available up front. Only that you know, you feel it in the way your body works, this grasp, release, this jamming and setting free, this working up of thresholds that are used for locomotion or for agitation in one place or in more than one.
You are thinking these thresholds as you are doing it but it is in that split second- actually half a second- where there is a glitch in control. A mismatch between something caught on to, collided with and the repelling out from that. That double move so loaded with positive and negative on the social scale could be an embrace when looped into an on-going moveability that is so on-going that it appears still.- backed on to itself. An embrace that is never recognised or called as such in the social ( as a bracketted animal) though the social is really a derivative- a kind of on-going tincture- of all these mutual and dissonant levels of activation. Of this unsettlement. There are these whirls and shapings that glide ever onwards as one area is affirmed, another erased, a swing from tree to tree. From touch to touch.
And it is the idea of the passage that really gets us going- not the individual moves broken down into anatomical compartments, oiled and limbered into contortions as a still life that are then meant to equate with the up and running version. Yes every possible trajectory of the arm raising the knee bending the hip swivelling have been practised and gone over. The pieces must equate a running body- a walking body. Nothing is missing in the jigsaw.Except the mis-match. The fault of lines. The glitch in getting from here to there where there is a black out- where the body is sent on, through the thought of it, the idea of it. The interest to see what becomes if it. This could be called play. The implications for learning are very strong for where this mis-match is effectively closed, the lines brought together in a harmonic clasp that is too fully choreographed, more and more bodies will find themselves thrust outside of that charmed procedure of recapitulation and their flaying attempts to re-institute some kind of innovative delay will be taken as malfunction or in any case perverse.
Moving on. Moving is an ideation and ideas come from the open-ended nature of the workable lives in which this roaming attention exists that only in the glitches describes the value which is unlocatable- somewhere between one point and another. This is another way of saying that preemptive representation is not always a means to an end but an impossible opaqueness that attracts flight like moths to a light sticking them there so that it does away with all movement in the instantaneous burn-out affect that that carnivorous attraction involves. Trying to grasp everything all at once in one plane of integrity-filling the body up with light- with impossible visibility-substancing it at every turn with all that is seen to be missing. Adding compulsively all this stuff even as it drains away. More icing on the cake. Doing away with the pauses, the glitches, the minuscule half seconds that indeed do add up in the collectivity of an action filled with holes. Each hole is a fractional delay in which a skewed bearing is the thrust of the conscious into the unconscious, of the unconscious into the conscious. Of the multiple flexing of an intelligent multi-bodied and variable bodied system. Doing away with all that is doing away with the traction that keeps distant things at play. Those holes that individually do seem dispensable one by one as the clearing away of symptoms of lost time could be the jolt in time- the trigger for a thought-movement; the sand particle around which the crystal is growing*.
Perhaps autistic people in some of the more populist behavioural "cure" programs of targeted functionality where reward and discouragement try to shape actions as a hand shaping the maleable body, overload for that reason. Actions without ideas can't sustain themsleves. A question.
A problem. Create a problem- a stoppage; activate an action. The body will begin to envisage itself around those actions, thickening by degrees like a tongue licking away at toffee, coating itself. Acumulating.
There is always the play of differentials between where we are and where we might get to. It is never resolved because it is a juncture of slowness performed where many possibilities of direction, of response, of bounce, of absorption come up against one another and for that indiscernible of time measures create a lull, a cancellation, an incredible slowness right in the speed of it all. It is out of that that actions find a course sustained by the novel idea of that stillness at the heart of an on-going life. A life that is lived differently at every instance- that calls for split second choices faster than we could arrange our limbs, decide on what is appropriate. In the pause, the glimmer, the stand-off out of which actions run. For we are weaving designs in the virtual space beyond our moves as delimited acts, beyond our bodies as sealed entities, beyond our thoughts as scripts of definite authority. These occur in an interaction- in a wider depository-a shifting field of influences that are occurring simultaneously and recalibrating the choices we appear to be making even as the act is being carried out. That is our inter-relating impossible to trace except where it runs out on itself. Our positionality in and through everything we touch- everything we pass through. Everything that re-aranges us.
Awareness is this tension of ends that do not stack up. So that a problem is being continuously posited and the affects out of which that problem hold are re-distributed in the looseness between falling and holding. Something that catches in differently each time through that jolt of uncertainty that is coupled through and through with the certainties we hold so close to us and that plays on and off of these. A constant dialogue, a constant interest- an activation re-performed with the material that comes to bear in order to further the pattern. Our lives- our communicability- and the worry and wonder that wrap around one another- that fold in and out of one another- to make thought patterns with trajectories of flight and return. This uncatchable value that bleeds into all of life out of the moment just before landing impossible to inhibit, to delimit. Because it is not of any single habitable location. Not in a body. In no known dwelling. Bodies no longer move without that. Indetermination cannot be deleted. It is crucially already the missing factor.
____
This piece is written whilst being in the middle of reading Brian Massumis book, "Parables for the virtual"
*This is a reference to Simondon's theory of Individuation where a problem or interuption in the running of something- whether organic or inorganic- is an excuse to recalibrate it within and out of that fault-line. That engagement in the midst of a problem of continuity is what furthers the uniqueness of a pattern as a spontaneous composition or becoming. It is upon that niche or fault-line that the recursiveness of an awareness takes hold.
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