THE BOOK

New Shapes of Reality

Aspects of A.N Whitehead’s Philosophy

Michael Jordon

This book has interested me. I have just finished it. The languaging. Whitehead makes language work. Nothing is just a category- because categories, things, people and what they get up to are known in their inter-relatedness. So there are Occasions and events and societies- clusters of stuff that jostle into sticking patterns for so much time- durational clumps where value is gotten at because of this resonant association- the harmony of these factors jostling – their affinity, flow and stoppage. It’s that limit factor or constraint that makes something into an appearance or value-(Whitehead actually sees that as a kind of God) otherwise it is not apparent and is non-existing- an indeterminate flow. That flow is the churning mix that keeps going endlessly. But the limitation is what makes something graspable- and we to one another of any significance.

Feeling is this juxtaposition of movement and stoppage- this pulsatory working between a continual becoming and the pre-selection of – and here’s where it gets whacky- “Eternal Objects”. These are the likelihood of anything and everything happening all boiled back down to one instance. A point, a thing, a person, a gesture is just such a cross-road between this wider indeterminate flux- here there is something of Simonden- where Individuation is the local and temporary resolution of a dissipated mixture of affects, their collisions, their re-combinations.

What is interesting here is that there is a constant interchange between this dissipated reactivity and the holding or stilling of this into temporary holdings- a “harmony” that coheres for just so long, according to the conditions of the situation- all the factors and players that make it so at that time in that place.

That is the playing out of “Feeling” which is basically the holding in a single scope of a contrast between flux and stoppage. Here change is felt from one state to another and this detecting of change is always an assemblage according to the environment or milieu of a certain set of contributors. That is what makes the Occasion, or event and the semblance of value is arrived at within that particular interplay. So, a stone rolling a distance down a slight incline has the cobbled together conditions of such a feeling event, between one instant and the next- so too does it allude to a wider sphere that is not the focus of the actual movement but is elastically or tenuously connected as part of the environment or society that occasions that event. This is not an outer “Atmosphere” or “field” through which the stone or anything else progresses form here to there, it is the generation of this sense of contrast actualized in the moving from one set of conditions to another in that stone.

The difference between this and a human social event is then in terms of the contributing factors and the degree of change. Yet, wherever there is repetition and then an alteration there is in affect the conditions for this kind of feeling event.

What is interesting here is that Whitehead is looking at the small interstices between one state and another relative to the considerations of a specific occasion. Each occasion where there is this relational and cohesive association going on qualifies as a feeling event at that scale and in that context of operation. So, meaning is forged by the actors that carry it forth- like an internal combustion that nevertheless spreads, through that association to a distributed pattern wrought within a continual flux. The stoppage is more then to be seen as the measuring up of counterweights that begin to act locally and minutely on one another to create affects- a shoring up in mutual support- a resonant equality of otherwise colliding compulsions, a lull in the rhythm where intensity builds and redoubles into a presenting- a form, an idea, a value. That value, instantaneous and provisional nevertheless is situated within a wide past and future and within the admixture of every kind of operation and perturbation that could set it this way and that way off of this one mark and from which for now it holds to and towards which, it is constantly flowing.

Because Whitehead starts with feeling affect, this becomes the measure of presence and it is internally generated within the atmosphere that creatively adheres into any arrangement. It is in the dissipative nature of this arrangement that local affects- between movement and pause happen simultaneously everywhere at once rather than in any cause-affect linear time line. Value arises spontaneously out of this process and hence Whiteheads association with this word, “Process”.

Two things become especially relevant in looking over this material with regards to Special Needs and non-functional usage. Value can be drummed up in the on-going workings of any process as long as this has duration- i.e. the hindsight to know one state in terms of another by building up instances of contrast between repetition and alteration, movement and stoppage. This becomes a society of value.

It can be made to seem that such activities hold no such value, feeling, moral cohesion, sense by interrupting this process of rhythmic interchange. This would be the result of morally classifying certain behaviors as retrogressive, unworthy, not to be valued, not of a human order, aesthetically without issue. It is not the Judgment that in itself has the power to outright de-sanctify certain practices or modes of being, it is the interruption of a process of an occasion- the disruption of an environment.

Invisibility is a condition that is demanded of certain types of curiosity and interests in marginal and subtle states of difference that these bring up and play out by obfuscating this on-going patterning.

Identities and languaging are built on these collectivities or multitudes of resonant occasions. They are mythic event-makers that operate on thresholds of climatic build and release, constraint and expansion, movement and arrest. They hold the conditions and enact the circumstances for complex sets of values and languaging to take place. They are the Occasions, distributed and symphonically scattered through which a kind of cohesion of wide attention and distributed awareness take place. They are an associative network never complete and always open to re-making. It is the affects of each condition of a particular compound that make it so. This is feeling. An on-going emotioning.

Because this patterning is essentially multi-scalar, it can be reinvested, re-formulated, migrated and begun all over, with the slightest of gestures, the flick of an eye-lid, the slightest of skid marks in the turn or posturing from one emphasis to another. The knot where two states come up against one another and so define one another in their affect is all it takes and it is everywhere.

____



Further thoughts:

I think Whitehead’s notion of feeling as this internally generated gage between one state and another; the drumming up of the conditions of contrast through what is actually done, is quite similar to Rancieres’ ideas in the “Ignorant Schoolmaster”, where it is not any kind of outside “Standard” of over-arching intelligence or a certain subject matter that is deemed to be cultivated and appropriate that matters but the intelligence that is actually generated out of acts of looking, comparing, re-formatting upon any circumstance, material, surface that presents itself. That interlacing of associations becomes the material, the environment, the matter of concern and such an address provides the situation for attention and learning capable of generating every kind of possible questioning. Ranciere takes the example of a Cobbler who can learn all the permutations of contrast through the material at hand in the form of an old boot.

In a sense, all sense become interlinked and interchangeable, linking in and drawing out one another through this power of association. It is the questioning that elicits the value. ( After the Drumming session at the Arts Hut yesterday where we work on a certain encasement of a rhythmic sequence, then break it up or jostle it into a different category through its association in a single mis-beat with a different grouping, creates a widened sense awareness. Rather than being discriminatory- this bloc or that bloc- it is associative and creates linkages that cross-cut these blocs into patterns within patterns. The patterning in affect makes itself, out of these momentary holding back or letting though of on-going passages that then bunch up differently into clusters and streams. It’s like wading through mud- stop and the mud clusters around the skin giving a certain definition of leg according to this resistance and an awareness of skin sensation as if the mud were a tight fitting boot. Keep moving and there is this push-me pull-you gripping and letting go that is neither one nor the other- more a frame of working that elicits a certain force out of this opposite pulse on the verge of letting go that nevertheless staggers the process- draws it out- makes it into an occasion of some sort.

Synaesthasea is not really the right term because it is the depth of engagement that mixes up the senses before the senses ever really get going as separate experiences. After drumming my entire motioning is drawn into the certain patterned engagements through which it is both resistant to and emoted towards. The two work as one- an enfolding in the flaps of a concertina. – air is caught-yes but it is utilized and so becomes a force of resistance- a charge in its own right in this working up of a state of play. Afterwards I’m on the bus. A kid is working the mouth of its mother, open and closed, speaking it for her with its two hands clumped on her cheek and lower jaw. She allows this but at times offers some resistance and so the engagement never entirely fluid, is assured. That very stickiness- the hold is what keeps the engagement- the association locked on. It takes the one function into something more than this single itemization. I suddenly realize that I know this woman and the child- every day I face them across my kitchen sink over the distance of two back gardens. They are in the row of houses adjacent to me. But it is only in this motioning of the child’s hands on the mother’s jaw – the condition of a skin rash all over the child’s hands and arms and face that I notice up close, that a million separate instances of us being neighbors yet never exactly recognizing one another, come into mind.

After the drumming I see across to the lights over Waltham- stow Marshes. The train signals, the line of the train snaking through the land. I am intuited into the landscape. In the pulses of the stopping and starting. The signaling, the delays and the rush-on. I am seeing it but I am feeling it through a body tenderized through intensive cycles that I have recognized and helped to make so, in the delays and rushes of the drumming circle. I would not have had these ideas outside the beats that arose there and then between us all, together on that day, Easter Sunday, where a few of us gathered nevertheless in the shadows of the Funfair that hoisted people up and down on elasticated levers that shot well above the multi-floored buildings on the opposite side of the road, then down again to nearly touching the earth of the park.

At first- in the small hut where the day’s sunshine did not reach- we felt embarrassed by our piecemeal gathering. Than something took hold bit by bit almost as an afterthought but building on the decision, however half-hearted, to actually stay; us being there. Staying with that inclination the event built, becoming real. The value was composed.

It feels to me like a kind of freedom- that freedom to stop and start that is as much a part of inhibition- limitation as it is of flow. I think of Whiteheads connection of Limitation with Value- not something in and of itself- an idealized form separate from our living that is always somehow lacking- but something worked up through the conditions we find ourselves in. This, our only environment- not a separate garden- a gated community, but the stops and starts in the interstices of day to day existence- a becoming.

“New Shapes Of Reality”

4.4. 2010


I have been reading this strange book called "New Shapes of Reality". It's a book I picked up under the arches down by the canal that feeds into the River Lea just past the Anchor and Hope pub opposite Walthamstow Marshes. It is at the bottom of the Hill from where I live. Just down the hill from Springfield Park. There's a small market that sets up in this patch of land most Sundays and has been selling off equipment, books mops and clocks associated with a now defunct art college where a Scottish man, one of the stall-holders and a former student at the College, seems to have a line-in to the entire contents as well as the structural fittings of this institution- now gradually unwinding in individual purchases.

There is even a length of plastic piping- part of the plumbing system- being sold off, as well as countless microscopes- I put my finger under one of them and it comes out as a translucent pink blur-, potters wheels, refrigerators, Kilns, a high-powered electric saw that the Scottish man tells me he has hidden under a blanket because he will only sell it to a specialist who knows how to handle it and already has a buyer in mind. And that book; "New Shapes of Reality" in the old bashed up blue cover. Turning the hard-back out on to my palm, I read the date of publication as 1968. The Author is Michael Jordon and the small-print reads "Aspects of A.N Whitehead's Philosophy". I get the book together with one of a number of large plastic Clocks. I have already bought one of these clocks before. I really like the tick- it is not invisible but it is unobtrusive and somehow comforting- a regulated sound to which one is drawn to add one's own counter-rhythm. I buy it for a Complementary Clinic where I sometimes work and where I have had to remove the clock several times because of its invasive tick.

There is a small fire burning in a barbecue grate at the side of the market around which a group of men stand with their arms outstretched. Their hands are spread towards the flames. It was the smell of the fire that drew me towards the market in the first place. As I pass back out to where my bike is tethered to the Metal railings, just past one of the newly completed canal developments that stretch all the way along the canal from here to Stratford, Site of the Olympic Park, one of the men turns and glares at me. I dump the purchases in the front basket, turn outwards to take in the Marshes; the train; running towards a more distant bridge, unchain the bike and bactrack towards the pub.

Transport System

29.3.10


On the bus today. Rolled up futon in the blue holder I got made up at my local launderette after buying the jean material from Dalston Market. I got the bag I borrowed for a week from the Clinic, cloned in this way. Between Thursday treatments- from one week to another. Now the new bag has come into its own. There it is up front, in the baggage rack- a ridiculously elongated bag, tipping over the end of the rack, nearly into the lap of the woman in the adjacent seat. I am terrified I will forget it so I concentrate on aligning myself to the blue expanse as if it were a living body; the way I would align myself to the breathing pulse of a body in a treatment adjusting the distance according to this living accommodation; between the two of us. Remaining connected through my own breath-in my chest, my throat sensitizing, opening.

I am tired because of the hour change. We pass along the Marylebone road. A trail of waiting people queuing to get into Madame Tussauds wax museum, wrapped around the building and doubled up in folds. Then under the labyrinth of Junctions, tunnels and underpasses into the Harrow Road. A figure emerges diagonally across the paving stones, short cutting the long way round over the over-pass, before our bus tears off again at the change of the lights.

In this drifting state of journeying and the pulsing. Of this on/off traffic, the circulation systems of blood vessels and valves, breath expended and inhaled again in the limited space of the bus, my eyes stop actively joining up the short takes of attention into a waking person's on-going commentary. Instead they just fixate at one spot until the blur intensifies and deepens like a taste in the mouth that builds from one aspect to another and through no effort of mine, things come to pass. Through that flavor, an action or event suddenly manifests. A boy running with a skateboard under his arm. A baby in pink in a pram staring out. A certain jump in an even motion as a stick lowers a stiffened hip on one side of a walking step, a hand pressing around the top-most part of that stick. There are many glints like this rushing through the haze that summon up a presence. Rushes of life. That kind of hazed distributed attention, in which something then walks in and just occurs as a kind of seizure or flicker or a ripple of the flesh that begins somewhere and just pans out. That is also what it is to give a treatment where the story starts to unfold itself between a gage held in an almost disinterested way and the eventual disruption of that gage as it flickers on somewhere else. It is like a place- the garden for instance- where not much is done, just drinking tea, soft eyes following the light fragments. The fractions of a ruffled sound; a slight turn of the head. A faint sweet smell wafting past on the thud of an electric digger in a far-off street. Where a distant and un-introduced alignment just walks right in and through the bodies and the space and out again like a cat that can pass through fences.

That can occur in any venue. Even the basement sports hall with the white lines and circles taped and zigzagging across the wooden struts where today’s' Event takes place. I unroll the futon on to this surface, roll up the bag that it was in and place it at one end as a head rest. I am next to another practitioner who works with a group of people sitting on fold-up chairs around a round plastic table. At first they look almost unreal because they are so still, seated together and unspeaking. Then to look closer one can detect the slight glimmer of the metal acupuncture needles protruding at angles out of the thin almost translucent flesh of their ears. They are blissfully mellow in that cold basement. Meanwhile I have my two palms face down on the back of a person, finding out the curiosities of a portion of spine and the indentations and moving pulse that can never be spoken of outside of these almost fossilized ridges. Different ages are brought together in one life showing themselves in counter-point between the hard and the soft.

Later I will reverse the trip along the Harrow road down Marleybone road, past Madame Taussauds and then the park- Regents park, which I turn around awkwardly in my bus-seat to glance at.

Between Seeing

28.3.2010



Between holding and letting go- something on the verge. A wavering. Something that shimmers. The paintings of Van Gogh that solidify into things and landscapes and people at a certain distance, but where the pigments fight, seperate out, mix and re-settle, embrace and shout as something compelling and disturbing, up close. Even when the paint runs dry the swimming momentum continues. A swirling rush of affects that perturb our nervous spinal column- set us into a flow of reactivity and counter-balance. It is hard to get a one right gage. We know the gage in which everything gels and blinks out the unsettlement of moving particles. But we can't help ourselves- we go closer. Too close. We look into the dizzying momentum. Are seized by it. This is as much what the picture is about as the tidiness of cohesion. We seek out the disarray of our fragile mobile displacement. We expect the arrival of the vertigo to know of this mutual viscous space. Until it is the very viscosity- the crowds of people in the gallery in the mid-space wedged between picture and picture on opposite walls- the crowds of pixels that disintegrate before our eyes, eddying around our bodies, reaching almost into our gagging response. Something of the disgust and compulsion, where we smell the raw disintegration of flesh affected by time. The tenacity of a painter long dead painting moments of holding together and coming undone, precipitating both. Quiet insubordination, shouting outside itself, silently. Witness the unutterable. Terrible, glorious.

My father on a bridge- vertigo- seeing beyond- the body entrapped. Stoppage and impossible running potential which is our undoing. Flimsy sides, atoms exploding from bodies without tensegrity. Imploding into disarray-slow leakage. Between galleries on a boat in the Thames. Debris, backing onto the paint scarred wooden vessel- with each swash and backlash, more morsels- utility pieces, toys and cartilage, decomposing tarnished plastic bags and the rare finds drop to the clay- plugged and partially immersed, resisting the pull and swash of the water, rinsing through grains of lighter sand, mixed into the atmosphere of the liquid medium- churning and un-churning over and over again.

In Contact Dance, Steve Paxton talks of Entrainment- that which happens in the minutiae of contactable propensities- and the resistances and marginal reallocations that ensue when there is this low level hum of engagement and disengagement running through one another. He talks about the details “at a low level of perceptual consciousness", "so small" that they are "almost slipping away" within "fragments of time", "fragments of impulses of the body". (All this on You-tube, sparing me the book- references.)

How do we practice this entrainment, slipping between coalescence and dispersal? Using a moment of affront and near eruption as the levying into a different outreach, - the build up of silt on a different shore only to be imploded by its own weight and the utilization of the vacuum around which another circulation evolves. The moment before reactivity there is a slight wavering where a two way pulse is measured, abstaining the readable volition of one in regard to the other. That measuring of directional forces is a kind of occlusion- an invisibility in the shimmering there/not thereness of a perfectly matched split attention. That absenting is an occasion. A lull before unidirectional action sets in to move the story onwards- narrate a turn of events; make it so.

In the details of that fragmented matching other levels of coordinated notation are arrived at. In the session with M, is his head touching my hand or my hand touching his head? Small adjustments and on-going reallocations across the speed impulses that are set up to create thoughtlessly, a meshing. In that meshing different intervals are played out between what a contact is, by constantly tipping the balance of angles in which that contact meets. This perturbation begins to play out a schema that is a repercussion of every instance of stopping and starting. The contact is a means to describe this pulse- or rather to enact it. But all this is at a quite invisible level if one were to describe M as from a certain distance.

At a glance, he appears a slanted figure being enticed along a bumpy road between point A and point B. The slight remodeling of head movement that ricochet through his body and affect the alignment of other points of contact that floss through and redistribute other bodies including that of an irritant and hurried Carer, would be irrelevant. Then all one would see would be the jerk and spasm of a head in perpetual motion- a kind of continual blur against upright stature that makes it hard for any observer to focus on.

CLINIC DAY PART 2. QUESTIONS

24.3.2010




What is the pattern-forming-pattern of a useable feedback playing back on itself and furthering the implications of that pattern? It is of a different nature to the breaks and mends described above. It never goes so far in either direction to call itself catastrophe or to call itself a resolution. It is of the nature of an enquiry. A question posited and held open in suspension without the urgency of closure in sight. It is a frame of mind. An attitude of posture that runs in counter-point to the points of resistance and imperative. It is the idea of something that is distracted and yet of itself. An idea of a distributed presence in many places at once. It is the affect of a circulation system. An Idea posited by M. held in his motioning, his briefest reflexes; the counter-weight of a re-alignment and exactly what that comes to mean for me/for him- a simple messaging that affects the whole structure of his body and mine- a kind of falling back off and on a line of enquiry and its slight scuppering. A playing with the qualities of resistance and imperative without at any time completely becoming either. It is the telling of a story that could be this way or that- of a body frame that could go tight and hit back on itself or could go loose and unfold outwards. A kind of body that at every move is both these extremes simultaneously- that finds humor in this splitting of ways- the winding and re-winding of a catapult release and retraction that encircles a rotational core. A core around which every direction of implementation whether it becomes actual or not is playing. Experimenting with what does become actual and what remains a tendency grasped and let go of before the moment of its deliverance is a way to play through the buffering delays of resistance and the time it takes for a felt affect to mean something.

All in all the only way for that to occur is in actual bodily sensitivities and the fractional re-anglings of bodily position that move on that sensation from one area to the next. Over time this begins to describe a pattern in relief of what is actually being done. In that sense I am not working or journeying over the body of M in a Shiatsu treatment. He is re-angling my point of impact as if his body were a bat and my hand the ball. He is bouncing that hand into different points of connection, letting that connection linger and deepen or throwing it almost instantaneously off into a different realm. He becomes skilled in this way and I get used to picking up these slight signals of absorption and rebuff. For instance it might be that I am addressing areas of his neck and head with the palm of my hand. He begins to use a series of short turns to bounce off my hand and have it land somewhere fractionally different. Alternately there are places where he organizes the lingering of that hand, leaning into it to deepen the contact. Gradually the head-hand begin to move as one, describing a series of contact pause gaps in this on-going relay that operates on more and more slender arrivals and departures between a capacity for absorption and reflection on and off a surface or interface of contact. Time is played out in this staggering and multiplication of affects and plays out into a consciousness of warmth and coolness as the contact generates heat or its rebound circulates more air and organizes the conditions for movement in both the head and the hand as they come away from the mutual site of cohesion.

Something else begins to be described in the mechanics of these altering arrangements. A kind of pictograph that is felt out in the rhythm of its stops and starts like some kind of Morse code that unfolds itself and in some ways knows itself apart from either him or me- my mind or his mind and the intentions of a compulsion to do something or to resist that specific goal. There are no goals or action plans. Simply this conglomerate addition according to the digits of on-off. Out of simplicity something quite complex begins to emerge. That addition is something totally taken up in this interaction, working at the interface where that interface is sensitized into an assembled intelligence of pressure-release that comes to mean movement, stillness, hot, cold, spatiality, constriction, rapidity, slowness, expansion, locality, - a whole Itinerary of gages that are never realized in total but are always worked up into contingencies that promote and then re-direct tendencies so as to shape complex multi-dimensional capacities. This is the way things come together, meet, filter though one another and create brief containments. In these brief containments a certain pause in a tempo holds me in regard to what this man becomes and holds him in regard to what I become. So a kind of knowledge of what we are each about in that association becomes possible. A mobile sculpture that becomes the condensation of a tendency towards a certain organization. Together we become simultaneously active and responsive and are only known- can only be "seen" through that interactional feedback fold.

Than something begins to happen out of all those derivatives as if a certain plateau had been reached in the topology of pressures and releases, stops and starts. He starts to generate a whole schema of sounds and textures with a buzzing between the lips and a deep guttural sound from the chest and diaphragm and he is playing with these vibrations much as we had been playing with small differentials of pressure and release with the hand against the head. He is experimenting with sound sources and how they change in this generative contingent state between intentions, moods, humors, emotions- a kind of sound palette that he is mixing and churning creatively, endlessly as they evolve. They begin to affect his sitting stature. The knottiness in his back and chest, through into his hands, wrists, ankles, tendons are breaking apart, redistributing, dissipating. It happens all on its own. In the turns and complexes of those combinations I get a sense of a thinking tempo in the resonances that this throws up. These do not have a specific symbolic meaning- they are the texture or atmosphere of the build up of all the turns and twists that have gone before. A level of collation through which other affects will react in turn, on and off in an on-going and continual feedback. Yet I believe until this level of complexity is arrived at nothing can really get started. It is the pre-conditions for all subsequent recognitions- for a common ground of inter-subjectivity. These chattering, burbling, buzzing sounds are the start of something precious we begin to recognize in one another. We cannot help but do so. That in turn affects the forms we come to see in one another, and so affects the actual forms we are able to take up in our on-going responsiveness to mutual accommodations.

Even the following day and many days later when I think of M, it is not the image of him tugging against a hauling conflicting arm that I see. It is the resonant sound of that buzzing churning experimentation full of life, open to possibility, that I am immediately immersed in and that actually lifts my mood even by the thought of it. Some kind of sensibility that he has transmitted to me without even trying to communicate anything. Because when engaged attentively we can not help but create these joint and mutual holdings that are not traps; positional holding devices, but are circulation junctures we are immersed in.

We think about them easily because we insert our bodies into a place of affect within these assemblies in order to think about ourselves too. We take our place as associates of these junctures in order to adhere to, to complete or alter in countless ways those possibilities of aligning. Out of these alignments naturally flows pattern common to us all. We are all derivatives of such patterning between the simple and the complex. They become our chosen moments of combined attention between holding and letting go and for that reason are precious to us.

CLINIC DAY PART ONE

Clapton, North East London 24. 3.2010



I go to the Clinic where I have a session with M. booked in for 11.am. C, the Manager, is setting up a new sound system in the therapy room. Blue lights flash when it is operational. She talks me through the options on the menu and shows me how that corresponds to the panel on the small remote control device, presumably so that you can change track whilst in the middle of a treatment without walking away from the person you are with. None of this really matters to me because M. hums his own songs and I need the slight changes in the pace and thickness of his breath as an indication that will guide the way the treatment goes. There is a direct feed-in from these humanly made sounds-the vibrations of the breath in the chest and diaphragm and when these are sent over the larynx into hums and so forth and the pressure-release of what becomes contactable; the space intuited through that process. Without that direct feed-in, the linkage to the feedback is interrupted and there is no way of describing these jointly held shapings. There is really no place for the mechanical rotary of the sound-system. We would be forever second guessing it, accommodating our pulse to it rather than creatively making that pulse between us.

When I work with tightness in M. I work with this daily aggravation of the loop that lingers on in quietude – in the still forms that that liquid quelling takes. They are the staggered holding onto place that is a protestation and the yanked enforcements past these bracings so that stuckness leads then to a loping fall out of place driven by an outside factor- the impatience of a hand- the need to get somewhere or other according to a time-tabling Rota not exactly of that body or that place.

I am working detective-style into the patterns of his every day life, between one staff Rota and the next, and the hand-over that is the handing over of M from one person to the next. Some staff members have time on their hands and they pass on that sense of spaciousness to M with the briefest of contacts. Others are hard-pressed before they arrive- through the conditions of their work- the sense they have of themselves living a life on the margins embroiled together with those on the margins. Their resentment of this fact and their perceived near invisibility causes them to expend too much energy against a growing resistance; to stagger and then force a current of movement that they negotiate distractedly between a hand-held mobile phone and the arrival of a taxi. M is just an adjunct caught on the end of their free hand. He resists and so do they. M uses his arm to hit himself at such times. Consequently, when there is the slightest jolt to his metabolism in the rush of on-going sound or action or touch pressure or verbal cross-messaging it is seized by him as assault in a breath that is not expired so that events and motions seem to flow around him - almost missing him- and he remains where he is. His arm remains stuck then to his side when it is not an active weapon against his own inertia, and so that arm becomes an added bulk to his side; a kind of swelling jamming shut his arm-pit and loading up the constriction in his back and chest that captures and crushes the nerves in his lower back and whip-lashes them into a neck jolt permanently askew. He is falling away and buckling between shoulder and ankle. His hips carry that continuous resistance by becoming immoveable. Consequently any movement becomes a jolt to that frame, ricocheting down the spine, damaging the nerves further. Wind is caught in that swollen buffering up against things happening to him. He bashes himself to expire that wind, or it escapes in gasps and burps. The fingers of his hands kneed into the palms of his hands indenting the flesh, turning and grinding around themselves, flexing and un-flexing the sinews up his arms. His wrist bends back and forward on itself. His shoulder is raised almost to his ear, the sounds from that left ear dulled and muffled.

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That is one way of describing M. It is not everything there is to know about him. It is the conditions of his life that has a tendency to build into certain muscle compulsions, certain ligament frames of reference, certain breathing tendencies. That starts to become M- what he is about, what is to be expected of him. A certain resistance against the day's occurrence. A certain stubbornness of nature. A bracing against those who are there to bring about the day’s sequence of events within the time allocated to these individual events. M gets in the way of the logical and systematic deliverance of the details of his own life the completion of which now becomes the responsibility of countless sessional staff. They are constantly working against the grain. Pulling into the future, a body holding back with the present, straining to catch them in the past. Holding out against them. That is how, over time the issue of how to get M to live his life gets personal and turns into one body against another. In this sense M becomes a distorted body, bent into a curvature of the back until he is less than a third of his true height. His hips are no longer accommodating the uneven surfaces of the ill-kept paving stones and tarmac that stretches from the car to the Clinic so that his joints- his knee joints, calf muscles and ankle tendons, lock and harden to stop his frame from collapsing on every imperfection in the surface he goes over, jamming him into the tarmac here and there that he is sent over with a tug from the arm that leads him on. He is constantly outside of his own momentum- outside of his own centre of gravity. Soon, bone, muscle and sinew have coalesced into one hard bumpy mass; the site of continuous crash collisions, breakages and further layers of adjunct cartilage that build hickeldy pickeldly covering one event with the next. M appears to be a person armored against the conditions of his on-going life trauma. Broken and hastily re-glued time after time.

Intervals

22.3.2010 10.30am




Intervals are not just there until you close the gap and meet. They are set up- worked up under a regular meter that becomes incorporated- like the foundations upon which other tangents sprout. The meter becomes the invisible point of reference even when it is entirely subsumed under the counter-rhythms that only have an edge to work off from out of that implicit level. The relief builds on exactly what has just gone before even when that appears disregarded and in the shadows. More and more the shadow is implied rather than extended yet every superimposed level however brief or resounding would be wavering in midair and would fly off before it reached perceptual attention if it were not anchored loosely at least, in that residual layer- perhaps the crushed up fragments of former building statements, now the hard-core.

Intervals between different levels of attention- between the relief and the shadow- are what intone the languaging- and therefore our placement and consciousness. We work up those differentials attributing them a variegated significance as a way of situating ourselves though nuances that we forever strike up.

The clock is there in the background. I play on and off the beat. Then draw out beats, intending them by jumping a beat so that the mind joins up two incidental markers into an extension- a pause. That affects my breathing. I go down. Something catches in- takes up occupancy- I ricochet up from that paucity- seem to bounce and rebound in the minds eye through this body of thought which is inflected into a rush of counter-rhythms. They punch off and on adding to the momentum but now spacing it into bunches of runs and then an inflection like ducking for cover here and there. A further bunch of runs and then a reverse inflection. Off and on it stabilizes my virtual body in motion. My actual body at rest is performing that run between my two hands coming up and down alternatively on the side of a table and regulating my body as I would go down and push off from off of the ground between propulsion and landing.

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Autistic kids inflect a certain kind of rhythm by creating wide intervals between their bodies and others at certain times. There is a spaciousness. A slowing down of movement. A spreading out of elements. A lengthening of the time in which a relay runs its course. Rather than seeing this only as a separation or more dangerously as a lack of interest in contact, how can it be "read" back into an on-going process of making and articulating intervals? Sensing-thinking-communicating through local points of repetitious meter and the distancing and playing off of these contractive spaces in patterns and easy articulations that spin out of them both intensively and spaciously- off and on contact and refrain; the body enacting counter-point. Are they learning inflection? Is this a languaging like deaf people spacialising the intervals between their hands igniting the language areas in their brain through this physical gage? There are all kinds of organizations of multiple inflexions/inflections that meet and gather pace and gather heat and dissipate and cool, out of which language then quite effortlessly emerges. (The French Philosopher Gilbert Simonden talks of Individuation in these terms, as a kind of bubbling to the surface into instances- or resonances of resolution out of a far more dissipative process. (Look at website, www.fractalontology.com.wordpress for some translations of his work which to this day (His work was published around 50 yrs ago, is still mostly in the French original. Why?)

Co-incidentally Akinobu Kishi who teaches Seiki- A listening form of body-work, more like a contact witnessing (like Shiatsu but not Shiatsu) that stresses on/off touch through following the breath as a way to gage the rhythm of that contact. He also uses the word "Resonance". Kishi uses that word to describe the way in which at certain moments two people come into an alignment where response is easy through this kind of listening engagement. One of the preparation warm-up exercises that we do before practicing Seiki is called "Gyoki" which is translated by Kishi as meaning "Breathing between the hands". In this practice we open and close our hands in front of our chests to gradually bring in more and more movement throughout our bodies. We breathe in to widen the gap and breathe out to close the gap. It is a preparation for working with another person where again- closing the point of contact and opening it as on/off touch is a way to articulate on-going intervals that are always being modulated between containment and extension. In these terms, contact and separation does not make sense as seperate or opposed conditions or categories because all gages between closing and opening are part of the same process- an on-going modification according to the conditions in the moment between contraction and expansion. Together they create the working diagram that is both an invigoration for action and an ability to let go and do nothing. That is what Kishi means when he talks about touching without touching.



*Waraku is a practice, configured out of some of the principles of Aikido by Maeda Sensei, another Japanese contemporary teacher, which takes this playing out of intervals into the moving body in patterns of synchronized meeting, bounce and spin. Sometimes it uses special wooden sticks- called Tsurugis- with a partner. The sticks become an extension of the body. More on this some other time.