Waiting

Violence exists when an act is cuaterized from the wider fold of influences and co-emergencies in which it finds itself specifically placed. Every tangent is a touching in- a stroking of a portion of a face it never sees in full. It is intuited or invited out into a series of affective screenings that glimmer and wane on the edge of one another reconstituting and furthering on the tail ends this journey that makes itself from within its own questioning. These are pools within pools where the interferance patterns of these residual echoes breaks into new forms that are both mirages and real situations that we face out of our own making; our own imaginings.

Perspective is a sinking into each address and a letting go again. It is following a disapearing point that can never be met but that tunes our own beckoning and waiting; an  invitation of open address and the timing of our opening out, merging together and unravelling back into the wave.

We are nowhere but where we are and that is a place already vacated. Yet there is a crossing over like a slight pulling of the threads taught that creates a reverb "twang" that sends into reverse all that brielfy touches it. That is the energizer of contact; a turn-around at the moment of complete intimacy that can hardly be placed before it is transformed into a latent directive executed and emptied in the same instance. That is the joy of effortless motion out of the calm centre of a total meeting.

It does not matter if that meeting began as an act of projected violence. For it is in and through the moment of contact that the dynamic plays into its own unique settlement and so there is a merging; a rinsing through as with the living matrix of crystal formations that re-settle inside a forged blade of steel even as it cools from intense light and heat; a labrynth of material density and porous carbonated holes ringing out in dynamic counter-balance; holding in relationship this fullness and emptiness that is permeating and patterning through and through. This is forged by use as a single projective which holds like a hologram at every aspect of its hidden and explicit revealment, this art of keeping still; the art of waiting.
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( This was written after reading The Art Of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba. He was the founder of Aikido)

Empty Diagram

The image is not stable. It is re-settling as it reaches the paper. It is making itself. In this sense it echoes the human capacity for self-reflection though in a more impersonal and dissipated form. In that sense it has a different kind of intelligence not tethered to narrow self-definition but more open to an enquiry about a wide field of inter-penetration across duration. It is an intelligent form that in this very form is curious about the conditions of its own emergence. In that sense it must also be curious about its interdependance into realms not contained within the graphic or pictorial setting. It may alude to sounds, smells, velocities, kinaesthethic waves of movement and to the vast swathes of open space that run through the prohibitions of buildings, bodies and objects and yet use these as the conduit and reflexivity of its becoming. In the silence and containment of the picture lies a realm made untouchable, non-coherant in that exclusivity. Yet reading back from the form to the conditions of its arising, these unacknowledged primers that halt and so than allow to flow with increased force directives that are uni-directional and on-going, a wider realm is aluded to even in the silence of a wordless diagram.

Opportunistic Enclosures

Each point to flower out into unforetold stories not as the revealment of anything more essential that lies up until then covered. But by creating a connectivity that is apt in that moment. Allowing the timbre of its sounding to strike open and move freely as the splaying out of many tendrils at once. This is automatic- a touching in and a release. So that the feeling tone of receptivity is the perceptual field that splays out like the scent from a dispersive field of wild flowers filled with the yet more distant fumes of a large busy city of engine fuel and fragrant body odour mixed in with ungraspable conversations  that wane on the wind. And the body fills and is filled in and emptied in this swaying momentuum that meets and empties by degrees each tangent and turn of this multi-directional regard.

The chest and solar plexus opens as the lower belly and sacrum settle into a breathing pulsation rooted from top to bottom to make one single line cut into mid-sections that only align through the momentum of the lived space, leveling and binding into one, this ever-present tendency to go up and down indefinitely. And in the balance between these tendencies an axis is borne between the neck and the lower sacrum in which the flowering of the senses are free to sway back and forth, rooted as they are deep into the earth. There is an opening of the throat, a maleabilty of the lips and the nostrils flair slightly and quiver open and closed as the atmosphere travels freely over the small hairs attached to blood vessels deep inside the nose cavity. The arms flay upwards and the ribs seems to move in tandem away and towards one another, creating small velocites of stretch and relaxation as minute levels of local tension are built and folded back into and out of one another, concertina-like. The hips begin to turn around the softened belly that like a liquid pool which is well ordered by the tight containment of the banks at either side, dips downwards like water pouring into a fold and cauterizes at a binding dip into the lower back that open back out and becomes the bones of the pelvic girdle radiating forcefully downwards into strong bones, muscles and sinews of the thighs and legs. These then swirl around the knee junction, than continue into the tendrils at the back of the foot; the ankles, where the whole capacity of swivel in minute degrees of cessation and release;  found like reverberant reflections in the body torso, the shoulders and neck, is funneled now into this small arena just before the probing and planting of the feet. These splayed out coursers of th ebones of the feet  thta then sperate and continue to grow into the toes, are both on the surface and probing deep deep down into the labrynth channels of the unseen earth below; the potential for growth.

For the rising up and flourishing of a human being rests here, guided as it is by this very life-form; the swaying tilting re-calibration at every minute tangent of existance, reformulating the tilt of the hips, the torsion of the rib-cage and all the organs it contains. The gentle pulsing re-alignment of the neck muscles, the throbbing inside the throat that widens ever further into the full vocal range expressed in a call and the attendance to the reply and the opening out through the eyes of vision and regard that fine-tune our placement in relation to the axis of the sky-earth and all that reveals itself to us in the space between.

For it is in this firing out into the reach of this and that as momentary excitations that come and go, that this spherical episodic unlocatebale presence comes to gradually arrive even as it retreats far faster. It is in the cascade and the meshing that this allows into the very fibres of this breathable flesh-environment; into the idea of a movement yet to be completed, that this two-way pulsation locks and unlocks like the ventrilces of our own heart, this partial and opportunistic enclosure that we are.

The section of a journey

To begin where it feels right. To settle into a dip, cradled in the crest and to rely on the cessation of this prolongation of movement by settling where one rests. Travelling over the land and sitting down in the long grass ragged at the end of summer, the split-ends of random growth seeding; splayed out in the wind that paces back and forth. This restlessness plays out upon our faces the lids of our eyes folding back over to half blinker from the even day-light while our lips fold in dry like the folds of an envelope yet to be sealed. And with the movement of the winds it appears that we are talking or mumbling though the sound is wider and deeper spread across the fields; rising starkly into the rows of houses teepering up on the hill as if the reflectivity of each cut-out window, stung radiant and white in the facing sun, would be beckoned by degrees into the watery depths below. The slim line of a section of canal laced with the eclectic paint marks of a margin of house-boats buffeting one another from head to toe in the current.

Cessation

When is it enough and when is it not quite there? A moment later, a fraction more and it would be too much. But there's a very finely tuned sensor that monitors the colouration of the coffee; the muscle contractions and releases in the chest, upper arm, forearm and hand and the discrete multiple ripple of flexion /release that allows the fingers to dynamically clasp and unclasp the plastic half litre of milk as a continuous slow pour in this wave-like action of ebb and flow. But there comes a time; an instant in the activation of space as movement, where the thin stream of milk funnelling in one continuous arch from the bottle into the cup below, must cease.

What is this slow ceasing that is in preparation at every connective instant where the action still occurs. Put like that it is not really apt to call it an interruption. Because it is written into the act from the very beginning, monitoring and containing the stream so that its halt is a foregone conclusion. We foresee this stoppage even in the full flow of an activity. This pact between expansion or doing and containment and the cessation of doing is far more nuanced then it is often portrayed in words where action and halt cut a dry line between two polar opposites that seem to sit alongside one another as clear demarcations without ever touching or really having anything to do with one another.

I think the action and cessation are rinsed through and through like breath particles in the air that may manifest as liquid where the right conditions of joint volition and the potential for cessation are there. This is more like a clasp around which the patterned thought that takes shape around our physical and practically induced pacing arrives and departs simultaneously.

There is something to enquire about in this simplest of acts of judging how we like our coffee or tea and making it so. How anxiety-inducing this would be if we worked off a colour chart similar to the ones we find in a household paint shop to match what we remember to be the hue on our bedroom wall with these strips of tonality that jostle at minute gradations next to one another. It would be near impossible to work off such a stored bench-mark of desired tone. No it is in the very act of the pouring when muscle groups and breath in the lived body are symphonic patternings around minute thresholds of eye-hand-muscle coordination that the cessation locks in as if it had a life of its own. So then what is this lived body that is deciding the details of our coffee preference and somehow reaching the soft spot like in a good game of tennis where the ball effortlessly reflects back off the players' bat and the shot plays itself simply because all the details of court, player, hand, racket and ball are momentarily aligned to make use of  this one optimum contact.

We do not usually think of the cessation of an action as this kind of sweet sensation but maybe there is a deep pleasure; a kind of sensory- neurological stroking into a feeling of rightness that this cessation brings, just as  the racket held in the optimum position then comes to rest and simply waits for the ball to impact and bounce out again. In that sense then the action is automatic without any particular agency. It is simply the staying put in the details of a multiple and dynamic field pf action; the working through duration into a deeper and more disparate sense of pattern-making. Action only really has an impact- is felt and known to itself- when in these cessations or pause-gaps it is allowed to linger as if in total suspension; between here and there, this and that. These intervals are like breathing buffer zones that give nuance and articulation to movement and are as much a part of movement as the manifest exhibition or end result they bring forth.
They are the timing; the commas and semi-colons that mark out a new intake of breath in the explication of  a phrase in a story, a news bulletin, a personal narrative.

There is always a great deal of skill in these pause-gaps but they do not; cannot know themselves in the immediacy of their occurrence or even when they are reformulated over and over again. Because they are dissipated through and through within the action that when read back simply omits to see the gaps as anything but glitches or interruptions in a near continuous flow.

Without containment there can be no movement. But this containment like a good mother must be invisible to the action outside of its simple practical executive functioning of bringing forth or pacing what are perceived to be end-results.But the real value is in the pacing as it takes place in its details and particularities and in the fine-tuning of human-environment in to a co-emergance that has a particular resonance or flavour unmissable but unrepeatable. If the containment or cessation started to be a thing in itself or even to take on a kind of personhood with agency and decision making powers of its own it would sabotage the action and the automatic settlement in the sweet spot of the game out of which un-foretold stories might effortlessly emerge.
The cup of coffee speaks back to the coffee maker but it is a sign, a symbol of multiple actions that could never be reduced to that cup of coffee alone let alone to the bench-mark preferences of that drinker who may state as a gross overstatement to a third party; "I Like it milky" or "I like it strong". Yet it is in the continual monitoring and resetting of the threshold between too much and too little that the power of cessation; the embracing quality of a breathable containment comes through allowing foreground to shimmer on the waves of a darkened background and allowing this interplay between stillness and movement to coordinate and co-define one another as an integrated action: a literacy that evolves its own grammar in the moment of its making- never as a thing set apart.

Enquiry

Human acts will be looped as repetitions until the background affective context shifts or creates a contrast that registers as difference. The practitoner, tutor, parent, therapist can act as this background context for an autistic child so that they act like the ground or wider field feeding in and mediating sensory spectrum shifts that create micro levels of interest and sensitivity, contrasting base sounds with high frequency sounds, "On" touch with "Off" touch, spaciousness and wider peripheral movements with direct contact and physical dynamic supportive lifting, spinning and  setting back down. Concurrently the practitioner can become a site for more and more subtle energetic connections- micro touching-in through alignment down the spine with the pads of ones fingers and core body support through open palms that warm but are undemanding and with no agenda of their own. Sounds and melodies crafted directly out of the moment by moment response and interest of the child can begin to manifest almost as leanings that go so far and then fall into a paralel harmonic or a counter rhythm. Where gaps and holes appear these may become moments for pause and quietude or invitations for the child to jump in and fill the gap furthering or intensifying the pattern in their unique way from within its very texture and through listening and atuning to the conditions of its arising.

In this sense there becomes a listening contact where mediation occurs across the threshold of the contact itself as the child leans in or moves away from touch contact, settles into positions or stances or melds and adapts around the seeking out or avoidance of particular areas in a room. The practitioner becomes simply a series of surfaces that respond as they prompt into a series of certain shadings as  an escalation or diminishment in the affective space between one to another, where a gulf is bridged, beckoning flight or is curtailed as phases demarcating a staccato or even an intake of breath back in to a wider movement.
All objects, surfaces, textures, sounds- whether in the room or beyond the room- as well as the child and practitioner- become actors in this ritualised dance between relative placements and intervals and this starts to draw the pulse of  the interaction into a momentum that begins to take on a life of its own.

A thinking body of material arises and is shaped in the process of its beckoning into something usable, playful and balanced lightly between a memory and repetition of what has gone before; a framework that holds fast as an idea or as a room, a garden, a backyard, and the bending, scuppering and reinvention of these guidelines in each new and fresh moment of interaction between living beings.

Affect

Now's the time to link together the experience of fluctuating affect in auditory, light, touch and speed perception and the ritual practises and repetitions important for people on the autistic spectrum. The sensory alteration is key to why some movements and practises become important. It's the shifting landscape in the perceptual field that calls for a space of ritual mediation. This becomes a benchmark against which the fluctuation intone and colour each change. Therefore it is not the core interest or attentional field that needs to be curved or enlarged in order to give a greater scope of experience; and autistic people will fight tooth and nail against this, but rather the context in which this practise operates. If the context or atmosphere can begin to act like a looped resonance; that layers into different qualities of affect through duration and accumulative intensification or in a paring back down of input, then the attentional zone within the parameters of a given activity will alter and the relative ritualistic or story-board quality of this version will start to play out into a wider field of possible "Takes".

Autistics are said to lack imagination or an awareness that the activities they and others partake in are make-believe or relative. They are said to lack the ability to play. This is because they are triggered so totally by the rapid affect-response of contact that there is no or little patterning in or out of this momentary excitation which flares up and dies away again without a trace. And when it is repeated it is as if it starts up for the very first time.

Timing responsiveness through mediated touch and sound and light as a way to modulate environmental affect is therefore a key way to work into imaginative play. Because without this work into the conditions of affect, there is no chance for the framing of practises as a ritual space or for acknowledgement of this framing.
This is key to imagination and playfulness. So if the neurological problem is about stimulation and mediated receptivity, this must be addressed as the foremost area of interest and concern, rather than a prescribed technique and/or program of social skills or behavioural normative control mechanisms learnt as if they could be imposed on any situation as a blue-print.. Only when a person has the practical skills to physically time their responsiveness and the degree in which an affect meets with their reception can the practises themselves become areas for symbolic interpretation or psychological meaning.
         
Because foremost  the manifestations- whether lining up automobiles, singing a song, swaying and rocking or composing a sophisticated diagram, are directed as affective stabilisers or enhancers/depressors and engaged with as a way to manage and/or record fluctuations in conscious sensory receptivity. They are not in other words objects in themselves and only seem that way to outside observers who judge them either as genius or deeply troubled trace elements of the autistic "Mind". But they are rather barometers of  the streaming of many fluctuating frequencies of light, sound, temperature, velocity that become conduits through the autistic person's body and into their ritual practises. These practises then are like transducers or conductors that earth these streaming affects through the body practise. It's worth really following and staying true to these practises because they will guide a shared awareness into the affects that have brought them forth and so shared activity can be built up  like a threshold conversion as the trigger-affects are played out differently as a compositional practise between practitioners weather autistic or not. These compositions tell of unseen currents, weather systems, untraceable auditory buzzes and the culminating affects of minor compressions and releases through out the body as it adjusts. Working at this level of body integration the practises even as they appear to remain the same, become part of a demarcated ritual or play space rather than the only reality playing out over and over again as if for the very first time.

In the garden, (An Autistic arts project called Memory Gardens that I ran in Highbury, London between 2002 and 2009) autistic people would line up bricks and found objects and sometimes build them upwards into dense constructions or aerated hive-like breathing vessels. Air flowed through the bricks and even in their very real form that occupied a certain space on the ground of this outdoor practise space, there seemed to be a spaciousness in these sculptures that simply let the wind through rather than being knocked down by it. This was a construction modification that came out of this outdoor garden practise over time and was developed out of the conditions of weather and ecology and the recycling of waste products from the neighbouring children's charity whose land this was. All these factors and the political implications of our presence on that piece of land- an informal and mostly ignored arrangement- was all a part of this environment. The practise was not therefore a thing in itself. It was a cross-section of velocity shifts including people, animals, plants, debris and discarded objects, pollutants and weather fronts. Whether the constructions stayed upright or fell down swiftly or by degrees was part of the circumstances of these interacting currents and either outcome in itself was not that important.

Autistic people in the same way as every other living being, are the cross current of various affects gathering momentarily in the muscle, nervous and visceral potentialities of that life-form. They are compositions made from all the missing affects that may convert into hyper or hypo tension, agitation or relaxation, embracing in and bouncing out again.

Rather than seeing this outlook of co-involvement as justification for indulging autistics in inappropriate repetitions, demarcating a ritual space of operation allows for this key gauge between fluctuating affect and stable translation to play out. This becomes an important area for building up the rhythms and intervals on to which symbolic and imaginative play can later take hold. The processes of up/down, in/out , movement and pause are a micro reading device that can become manifest in infinite varieties of sound and form. And so whatever the special interest or tone of activity engaged in by an individual or group of individuals these polarities can begin to play into a deeper affective resonance within a wider field of contrast and difference. This is the shared affective field that is not only received by the nervous system but is actually co-created in order to pace our involvement and coordinate our experience as one.

I talk as one who has a strong experience of these fluctuating affects in day to day life and where art practises have become important ritual spaces that absorb, reflect and transduce these variable dancing and shimmering affects. Being a therapist marks out another practise space or ritual space of operation. A space then of co-creation that is pertinent to that particular place at that particular time and in relation to who is present at the time. How people are placed dynamically and in interaction with one another whether physically at close range or at intervals where sound variation and fleeting episodes of movement and stillness like flashes of light and shade, a pattern begins to shape itself. This becomes a living diagram enacted through this living ritual space telling of spatial and time realignments, in the varying confluences, delays and fluctuations of their showing. How interest and attention play out and drift or migrate across areas, occupations and resting points becomes the drama at the heart of which a sense of quietude may or may not gradually emerge.