Then I fell

I can hardly drag my foot up the stairs. It isn't the foot, it's the muscle in the left calf that won't engage and hold in place in order for me to lift the foot. I can slide the foot and going down stairs is easy if I edge it to the end of each step and then kind of throw it over. But to raise the foot even a fraction I need to grab the muscle of the upper thigh, supporting or more like cradling the knee joint as well and hoist it up. Once the foot touches new ground I can sway forward through the hip joint, then hoist myself up using arm strength and a good deal of hand pressure on the bannisters and rock myself into place, lowering down on the outbreath. Than again I need to raise up and let fall back down the leg and it's dangling foot in order that a further placement becomes possible. Thinking through this manoever as I am doing it makes of the usual rotary a series of planes that come up against one another but never actually bend into the on-going trigger-release of walking. The overlong stoppages make it doubly exhausting to generate the momentum in order to get going once again. Consequeently my upper back and chest seem to seize up quite regularly. My neck is taught from straining forward and the muscles in the back of my neck are churning over on themselves into a thick rubbery mass. On my brow there is sweat. I begin to laugh at myself. Yesterday I was skating over smooth ice at incredible speed with my niece to the sound of chart hits. There was an old man dressed impecably in a dark blue velvet suit and a white bow tie teaching ballroom dancing on ice to a woman. Than I fell.

Custom

It's the bouncing out again of the light that hits my eyes so suddenly so that the paddling pool and the bird cage are no longer relevant but gradually return in time because that is where I stop. It's the white suit, well really a track-suit that radiates an almost ultra-violet glow that is part in itself and part what is made of it out of the sunlight. There's a scattering of dogs and children underfoot as I stop so that the wheels of the two bikes are now at right angles on the path. It's Shakespeare.

The traffic underfoot moves around us readjusting like a stream around a pebble. 70's Soul Music comes from the handlebars where a compact speaker is taped. There are birds within the cages and I begin to be aware of the colour blue and the colour yellow constantlly shifting. The water from the pool is crinkled and blue. No one is paddling.  He has been around the park three times already.


I`m in a shop on the Holloway road buying an umbrella. The woman is tired and keeps losing track of the transaction, repeating parts or leaving other things out. On my way out the alarm goes off. It is a small high pitched siren. I need to empty out all my purchases on to the floor and search through my bag for my pay slips. Meanwhile another woman walks past me and approaching the door the alarm goes off again. She looks behind her, looks at me, shrugs and keeps going. The shop-assistant keeps picking up different items and walking them over the threshold to see if that activates the siren. It isn't actually the umbrella after all but something bought form the household department upstairs which was probably not swiped. One woman apologises on behalf of the shop for causing me this "Humiliation". The words turn the episode inside out for me and I see it for the first time from another angle, from another customer's view across the shop- floor noticing the event unfold. Looking out across the expanse of that shop-floor there are many glass containers upon the surface of clean glass counters all sparkling.
A woman sits in an easy chair made of lightly woven fabric with her face turned up towards the many lights having her eye-brows plucked.

I am entering a market. There is Eloina and she greets me. She is coming out of the market with a blue bag. She wants to show me what she has bought. Amongst other things there is a small glass container that we hear break from within the bag and that she takes out in pieces and puts at the side of the road.
I apologise. There is also a tiny fold-up chair that she now takes out and unfolds. She sits down on it though it is a  long way down to the seat and a long way up again in order to stand. I tell her that ever since the garden went -a fence went up, the key confiscated forever- I try to make a place out of wherever I happen to stop. She says, yes she can take a rest whenever she wants to now with her new chair. I tell her about my Japanese guest coming in two weeks time whom I have just bought towels for and that some people she knows from the garden will be coming to his presentation nearby and why doesn't she? She says, yes she will come and I write down the address on the back of one of the payslips that I tear in half before giving it to her.

The park

I am in the park sitting on a bench. An old man is walking past, leaning heavily on his stick, twisting his body one way into the pole of that support so that, using his hip as leverage, one foot barely touches the ground- only brushes over it. One portion of the ground seems to be porous, absorbing in total his leaning weight, whilst another portion seems reflective- just the semblance of a surface like water that bounces out as mere appearance what touches it and breaks it apart. In this lolloping fall and ejection there is a walking man who notices me noticing him and whose countenance on being touched in this way, very slightly softens. Or so it seems to me. I’m feeling unwell.

The man is also not in the best of health. Here is understanding in that breaking apart of a rhythm- a metre that never perhaps exists except as a grid that never in entirety realises itself but acts, like the ground as a surface on which counter rhythms can play out. That is the day to day life of getting around, doing things as best we can. And it’s through that that we get to know each other.

Is that a language? No words have been spoken, yet there have been minor adjustments in light of the fact of noticing one another. That noticing is on going and is played out in the very slippage between feeling well and feeling not so well, between a function and its adaptation away from and off of the repetitious beat that it never entirely becomes. Between a mismatch that catches itself between disaster and uprightness knowing only one in terms of another. This kind of mediation- a give and take is also how we meet one another- across a distance not in a locked in correspondence of parts with parts. It’s the tiny holds, the wavering, the staying in situ just too long that we waver on the brink between one path and another, the making of choice through that very indecision, the knocks and indentations that causes in expressions that are part disaster part relief, between meeting and a missed occasion, that we find our domain, crafting it out as a user friendly park of dog-walkers and drinking partners, pram pushers and serious walkers and old men who take their time between the runners. We could be all these things at one time or another but only occupy one place at a time. We need therefore a range of different paces to fill in a landscape to any one manoeuvre. Like a drumming ensemble, we squeeze in between beats, in order to propel out of fixtures and swim for a while in a wide expanse before nudging into a repeated and limited anchorage once again. This squeeze propulsion device we are doing with our bodies, with our breath, with our place in a crowd, on a beach, at a station near to where we live or far away. We are all finding voids, filling them and then propelling out of them again making landscapes out of encounters and fashioning these encounters by running simultaneously our passage through these landscapes even far from where we are now so as to feel out implicitly the changes that are occurring in our bodies as a shaping of language, song aesthetics. Our bodies are an environment, to one another that adapts through unarranged affinites- there is a plasticity of this organism-environment which is our thinking and our languaging that cannot be taken apart but can not be associated as continuous. There is rupture that sends things onwards, progresses the horizon or lets fall motions over the edge into a sheer descent. That we hold things on the brink is all we ever do with one another before all those neurological cognitive issues of relationality, intention or understanding come into it. The very process of this filling and emptying- of this shaping around presence and absence, pressure and release is what allows the story of who or what we are in relation to another to unfold a little bit more. But the story is a second thought that suddenly presents itself. The shaping the issue that keeps coming.

That man in the park is all that is needed to feel a whole lot better when I am down or a whole lot more grounded when I am running over the limits abit. He can answer any therapeutic question, because we reset the balance in alignments, off setting one tendency with another that we identify in relation to any present situation. I`ll go into the bounce beat of the old man when I`m down and the descent mode of his collapsed position when I’m up almost as a magnetic coupling of opposites that find one another to off-set a tendency in any one extreme. But for either to make sense of course that give and take between the two is apprehended as one- only that the emphasis is a little different. Of course then I’ll give back to the old man, offsetting the burden of his heavy leg or the phantom quality of his light leg in my own process of adjustment. All this in a fraction of a second so that it is really the form of the man and the form that I take that seem to stretch and contain in a pulsar echo that expands beyond my body and his body, to the park itself and all the figures so near or so far from this encounter that bend with it as we bend to them. This formation of a landscape occurs through forms and the coherence of continual adaptations that set up vibrations not contained within speach patterns or learnt actions or co-ordinated postures or visual markings, but in nudging into place on the way up and down to these other gages; between going about one's business and being unable to go about one's businness.

The human body is impoverished, diseased, dying and pock-marked. Therefore it is breathing, living, light and full of joy.

Human forms are living systems that at any one moment create a semblance of themselves because they incorporate and play out the many dilemmas of so many weaving proliferations of directions and compulsions and inhibitions and reformatted curves that then seem to hold together into one tight object or body so that we forget that there is this constant procedure going on and that there is this languaging in every kind of leaning into or falling off of one another. And that that language is anyway really completely taken up with that jostling into place and spilling beyond each given place- of the contours of what makes it recognizeable but impossible to hold still. a mismatch that we craft in our every encounter, an encounter being nothing other than this pumping mechanism between location and dislocation.


Maturana could be saying the same thing- the shaping of the shape that adapts on touch- the inner working of the boundary closed in upon another boundary as a seam in the autopoetic conjunction that is adaptation and that is the state of being alive. But the synapse is only the threshold between bodies that line up in a conjoint elasticity. The door way is met and continuosly refashioned in bodies that pulse part-completed shapings between them. They synchronise even in their mismatch by bending unlikely holdings into warped dimensions of space. The pulse gets through by turning, riveting, splintering and somersaulting. The mis-match is in fact the diagram of an implied acrobatics. All form and the gaps and puddles between continuums is a manoevere possibility. An invitation to adept living. Falling is part of that manoever. It is the winding turret of a water jet, cut off from a more obvious route, forced into intensity. All the things we do when noticing but seeming not to notice and the automatic flicks and rivets that, coursing though our bodies lock in or loosen to straggling threads portions of our limbs is part of that process- flow and interruption in every gesture, every breath, every handshake or blank stare that suddenly, embarrassingly changes to recognition or not.

A difficult neighbourhood, an autistic child in a mainstream school, a stopping too long as the crowds mount up on the highstreet. All such things, invitations to a remoulding as body shapes enact the possiblites and impossibilities of intelligent life-forms.

“What we distinguish in daily life as we distinguish emotions are kinds of relational behaviours not particular doings and what we connote biologically as we speak of emotions referring to ourselves or to other animals are body dynamic dispositions ( involving the nervous system and the whole body) that determine what we or they can do or not do in what relations we or they can enter or not enter at any moment” Biology of love Maturana p.96

Consensual living. What does that mean? It means warping together.

The autistic girl whom I used to know couldn`t carry on living with her step-dad because his body form wouldn`t change. “There is something horrible about his body-form” she said. I think what she meant was that his body was set on a rigid grid that never adapted or engaged with her pulsar life that was her thinking living, emoting self. So she reflectd off upon this hardened form that appeared as an image not a life form and so round him, there was no cue for an on-going mutual affectivity- a languaging that was a shaping and literally an in-forming. She simply bounced and ricocheted off from this shiny surface that seemed to all intents and purposes more like a wall than a body to her. Thrown back as if from a mirror, the images of her own unmet tangents began to mount and grow escalating into an unviable metre that was not interrupted, not considered at all in any kind of mediation. That behaviour blinded for the lack of a modulating surface, became a symptomatic panel of evidence for derangement, an inability to feel, to express oneself, to give or take. It bounced back upon the girl as a qualifying verdict that reiterated the fact of her being autistic.

But what of the man with the impossible body? The closed panel onto which there could be no qualification- no lived out duration of events unfolding. Which was simply there, statue-like and that judged the other, the girl, to be lacking in that quality of presence. To be empty, lacking or at best morally questionable.

She turned that verdict round as any mirror is apt to do and accused her step-father of abuse. The police were called and statements given by family membes in isolation from one another. The girl went to live with her father in Brighton. The play of lights on the pier constantly threw up new kinds of alignments that created points of interest for a while but there was no school for her and she got bored living in the tiny flat over Christmas where the Christmas tree took up nearly all of the space. Later she retracted her allegation saying unstead that she feared her step-father; the inconsistant way in which he moved and stopped. She returned again to live with her mother and step-father and then into a group home with assisted living. Several more homes followed. Since then I have lost touch with her.

The issue, whilst it became one of whether she had "lied" or "told the truth", was as much about what is possible and impossible in any arrangement of living beings. In that sense she was right that she was at risk in that her ability to align herself to the world through vision, sound, touch and smell was linked to a positioning of bodies always in movement, always in exchange, as an on-going emotioning. When that did not happen she was less than human, simply autistic.
_____
We are never actually there except when we are filling in the mismatches of one another. When we are not doing that we are stilled into a distillation of the absence that we generate as a reflective outsider that we then view from our own supposed interior. That is where the autistic person is then placed. The idea of a person who is not a person. Of an absence of interiority takes hold in the imagination.

There is no absolute interiority. It is summoned up through interchange and can be stopped just as suddenly in its tracks when that interchange at a cellular, bodily, gaseous level, becomes prohibitive.

The question is not what warrants a description of being human or not, sentient or not, conscious or not but how and why does an allowance or prohibition on the molecular level of these various interchanges become a recurrent pattern in certain lives at certain times.


End


Quote:

“There is no center or localized self and yet the whole behaves as a unit and for the observer it is as if there was a co-ordinating agent virtually present at the centre. This is what I meant when referring to a selfless self- we could also postulate a virtual self: a coherent global pattern that emerges through simple local components appearing to have a central location where none is to be found and yet essential as a level of interaction for the behaviour of the whole unity” p.10 Autopoiesis and the Biology of Intentionality, Varela

Occasion

FIRE

We’re standing round the fire. It has been raining so we sent the kids home. The parents all turned up together after I’d rung one of them on their mobile saying it was raining heavily and all the kids were wet. One man who was visiting the garden had an umbrella but didn’t much like the one kid standing in front of him and falling back on him so as not to get rained on from the drips of the umbrella. He tried walking him over to the Gazebo saying, “I’m going over here. Are you coming too?” Then he walked together with the boy who now stuck to his side, linking arms, and then tried to unravel himself from the boy and deposit him under the gazebo which he then walked quickly away from. The boy just followed him out again. The parents had been in a café together. They collected their kids and the dripping garments here and there lying around the garden and one by one went.

It was a miracle that the fire was still burning in all that wetness, but we’d lit it before the rain had really come down and now it was established, though smoking a good deal from the wood closest to the surface which was wet and getting wetter.

The area around the fire is mud with ingrained footprints of various sizes. The man with the umbrella has also gone by now, some time after he’d been bitten by another boy because he didn’t know about keeping a particular distance from this boy and had overstepped a mark without even realising he was doing it. Though he’d been bitten through a heavy tweed trench coat, somewhere on his shoulder, I think later more than when it actually happened it was beginning to affect him. I think he felt marked.

A man who recently started as a volunteer- who was quiet with his hood up, buried into his own body that day in august- the day of the street festival that we all attended, but since then, since coming to the garden, has talked and moved a great deal and now begins again, whilst walking up and down, collecting more wood, to speak. There is time to listen. It is early and wet and we are all gathered around the fire. I don’t remember the exact words that this man used so tied in with the gestures were they as if he were sewing them together with his own body motions. But I will try to describe the images and scenes that he conjured up in his brief account, spurred on by the fire, the warmth within, that we leaned into, towered over, the mud and spitting rain all around that we drew our backs up against.

He was one figure caught into the movement of a swelling crowd outside the gates of Buckingham palace. He’d been going down there every day and when not directly outside the gates was walking with the throngs around St James park, drifting along the side-lines of the river, with the birds, pigeons and over weight squirrels that every one was feeding. People were crying, holding hands tightly until the blood was squeezed from the fingers and palms, gathering, kneeling in groups, whispering to one another. Fresh flowers at the gates of the palace were piling on top of older ones, cards with countless different personal messages, scrawled signatures, bodies giving way to gravity, collapsible but with a lightness. Tom was entrapped in the folds of such enchantment. There was the magic of a feeling written on the surface of things that he had never experienced before in his writerly academically grounded parental home even though his journalist father had been exiled by the Croatian government for his left wing writing. Yet such matters had never been discussed in terms of how it impacted on the body, on the nervous system, on ones ability to stand or fall, cry and remember. All in all for Tom it had been a bit of a blank because without that impact on the body, on the organs, on the digestion, in that push and pull of an intertwined mobility- of a heaving crowd that locked one in to something, released one out, only to come back the next morning for more- a crowd that possessed you and that you possessed, no memory could catch on- nothing anymore could burn which in his household had become a kind of melancholic letting go- a normalised stretching of the rationalised arguments like dry parchment over a body that had led to this or that being known even whilst going about ones daily life as if nothing much had happened.

Tom grasped the mood that summer of 1996 around the time of his 21st birthday. The summer of the catastrophic car-crash in the tunnel of a Paris ring-road in which the princess, the princess Diana died. It affected Tom like nothing before. He caught on to the mood and felt like he had never felt before.
One day, in the mass of this shared heaving spasm Tom was spotted by his uncle and his uncle took a look at Tom’s pale yet flushed face, his stinking clothes, the euphoric sparkle of eyes drifting well above the body and said, “you don’t look quite right” What is the matter with you?” Soon that phrase took hold and everyone was asking, “What is the matter with Tom?” It got so that even Tom was asking that and in that question, the crowds’ momentum at Buckingham palace halted. Its ability to take him with it halted, and the expression of that very question was re packaged into a curt diagnosis that related to Tom alone, not the crowd, the vehicle of his then expression.

Without that mobile reactive crowd of which Tom was a part he felt washed up, half-dead, unable to express himself. He still remembers the doctor who diagnosed him, a balding man who would not look directly at him but only at his mother, his father or other family members who attended the sessions. If Tom made a gesture it seemed like that gesture was sectioned off, marked around, and examined like something to hold in ones hand. If Tom moved forward in a gesture, using that gesture as a point of convergence as with the palms of the hands pressed tightly between strangers in St James Park, his psychiatrist moved away, his image becoming progressively more and more blurred around the edges. Tom was pronounced psychotic. Then in the conversations that followed- meandering chats and discussions between the doctor and his mother about his childhood or with other family members- out of these “little conversations” he was given the label of autism.

For around six months he was taken to a place where he lived and stayed- ate and slept. It was a frightening place in which were housed other people with strange and explosive behaviours. Tom became caught up in avoiding upsetting what could not be monitored. He began not talking. Some of these people looked strange to him. There was something not symmetrical about their features or their eyes. He looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was large, that his jaw was very pronounced or so it appeared to him right then, more pronounced than the jaws of his family members. He began to see himself as different; as the result of some terrible mistake for the first time in his life.

We begin talking about the session at the garden. How it had nearly been a catastrophe but somehow hadn’t been. No one had fallen, slipped or been injured. However it did touch on a kind of madness or intensity with the fire in the middle of the ground, left over from the Guy Fawkes night and lit again on request in which everyone was drawn into this central magnet, adults and children, workers and visitors in which some kind of quiet tangible distance between children in entirely different areas and through different practises which at most other sessions mark out their ability to casually touch one another was somehow collapsed into the noise and furore of that centre-stage sucking us into a limited but tangible warmth and organising actions accordingly. It was more then just a spectacle; it was a new pacing device which somehow brought to the scene a heightened rhythm that spun into relief the opposites of hot and cold, rain and fire, in which and through which all dramas, all cataclysmic episodes could possibly emerge and out of which finally came that story about the crash and in its telling our listening stillness.

In the events in the garden of that day we hardly noticed Edward, a boy of 13 who was systematically throwing glass and ceramic bowls, jars and flower-pots against a nearby whitewashed brick wall in the far corner, far from the warmth of the fire, in the driving rain. Consequently that event became as natural as the rain itself; a backdrop to all that was occurring. It was neutralized. We knew it only from the smashed remains of jars and containers found later and pieced back together into the small recollections, sightings and alignments that various people made in relation to Edward’s whereabouts during the course of that session. Never in fact were they known or seen in the event itself.


Nov 23 2008



Ruth Solomon

TURNING OVER

There’s a constant redistribution of weight when we move. So much so that there is a kind of permanent flicker and to stop that flicker would be to lose the form that is doing the moving. It’s not as easy as saying that we are here and we go there. We are not vehicles at all, that cart around our inner organs from place to place. Even though the word locomotion may sometimes be used to describe one mode of our transportation when we visit relatives or go to work it is the after effect of this tumbling, turning state, not in itself the mode of movement. Perhaps in a sense we are more like amoeba, pressing in to surfaces; shaping and reforming according to constantly reworked indented negatives that in each instant we become. But the journey is never over. The position never stable. We use surface as a shaping tool. As a pressure point that then bring about release in a new, never to be totally known direction. Falling then is our mode of operation; of working out positions. Not simply an unmet fall but a falling into positions; a melding and becoming part of them; sometimes a bouncing off from them again. Are we also this to one another? Do we fall in on one another as well as on ourselves? Is this what language is doing to us and through us all the time? Are we articulators even before separate words, separated bodies are coined?

It is awkward and a little over strained to talk about one’s own body moving as if that could ever take affect on its own. Could we ever conceive of the complexity of procedures to get the simplest of things done if we had to refer to notes in order to execute the task. For notes remain outside the body; a memory appendage to be overlaid like an embalmer dealing with the seen affect after the event, the deed, the life has been lived. Similarly we can siphon off information about joint rotation and muscle leverage not in that specific body there doing the movement but in order to provide notes on what is happening in another body and another body and another body. Ad infinitum, we lurch from one abode to another; pre-fabs with the same slot for meter readings; gas, electricity, phone. What works here works there, until all distance is collapsed in this similitude of applicability. We can diagnose, tap, look into the radius of the iris, smell the breath and test the urine. We can figure out the workable credentials and, according to what goes missing or wobbles out of line from the notes on human physiology, we can work things out. Of course the patient must be static in order for any procedure to be carried out. How else would we apply treatment?

Yet in these parallel physiologies that come into the treatment room one at a time and never meet; many models on the same theme, there is only ever the one body. The body. The human body. In that one, is everyone. And so everyone does not meet. Or only in notes that indicate resemblances and differences according to our prototype.

Would there be some kind of multiple personality disorder in such a meeting? Yet such meetings are continuously arising. It is just that they cannot be recordered in the notes. Sequentially and grammatically the task is far too complicated for text.

So what exactly is this impossible feat of the human body?
This magician versatility. It is simply the act of the everyday.

Stage

The body slams into the ground; lies inert until the watching audience has nothing particular to focus on and the body simply becomes another mound or undulation in the landscape. That undulation loses all sentient reciprocity as the gaze of the audience has nothing to hinge its attention on. Than there is a wavering of an arm like a branch suddenly moved by an unseen wind. The arm is held up by the elbow and sways inertly back and forth. Eyes deep in the sockets of a powdered face dart to one side and begin mechanically to follow the ebb and flow of the hanging arm just above the level of the ground. There is a line of attraction that attaches the eye ball of the left eye to the elbow of the right arm and they begin to move in tandem faster and faster in contrast to the utter stillness of the rest of the body which has sunk out of view; out of the performance. Suddenly and quite casually, the whole body brings itself up to standing and the swaying, jilting everyday motions of a woman at work, totally absorbed in domestic preparations; enfolded in a personal space; driven to acts performed by rote is underway whilst a single hand seems distracted and sways like a child freely scribbling life-dreams that it only knows as they appear. Yet the body of the slowly moving mature woman with the hand of the child is caught in the flesh of an old man who is not adopting postures to describe these subjects but is taken into their on-going moment by moment responsiveness. Another seizure and the body freezes, draws itself to great height and keels over slamming on to the ground. It becomes a riveting mass of electrified magnetism between horror and enlivenment; between life and death, between abhorrence and desire. These modalities gradually become an internal flicker until the countenance of the face is smooth. There is a plastic gaze of non-descript calmness; a vacancy and absence. Yet something else indescribable is rising through from this absence; A feeling of solitude which just at that moment reads as a relief. The eyes look out directly at the audience.

Factory

In Scotland growing up as a child, she used to live on top of a lemonade factory. The factory was a building that was also built into the rock of a hill so that part of the wall was natural rock face and part of it was brick. Ivy and other plant life grew up over parts of the sloping surface. Her family’s home was at the very top of this natural-man-made foundation, in some ways another floor of the building but in some ways discreet and separate because it spanned into its own separate foundation at the rear side where the steep slope was built up with earth into a gradual gradient where there were pathways, gardens, allotments and other buildings. The children of that neighbourhood were free to ramble where they liked on the hill and surrounding areas and in the evenings, would go down into the grounds of the lemonade factory and play with the crates, building huge structures out of the pallets to climb in or temporarily to live in. The lemonade bottles caught the sun and there was always a lot of lemonade either given, stolen or bought.

Proof

I saw the black kite again outside my kitchen window plummetting down against a grey sky. Moments later it was up again moving radically from side to side, proof of a turbulent sky

WORKING SURFACES

Knowledge has to be situated in order to be rendered. It is situated between people, between surfaces, between buildings; frameworks that both allow movement and inhibit it and so redirect that movement. The hard and the soft happen as a continuous interplay.

An imagined situation: I am visiting a school. I am an unknown. I want to do research in this school. How is this research of interest to the teachers there? To the drama of day to day life in the school? Why should they let me do it? They are suspicious of the word research- so far from the details of getting things done and administering to situations on the run. I need to make an immediate impression or I will be dismissed with the first words I utter.

I say that I am interested in how children – in particular autistic children – use surfaces. They look perplexed. The image is static. I try to enact it as the children do a surface. I say that the kids I have witnessed turn things around with their bodies in order to have ideas. That it’s only in this re-emphasis of use, from surface to surface, a continuous re-grafting, that many directions come together. That therefore movement, erratic or subtle, is also about staying put; making ends meet; bending the line; making a holding. It`s something that must be continuously enacted; a sensory excavation on which to found any still position. Internal thought is based upon this incessant bodily weave because it plays with distance and proximity; the space in which surfaces are seen and met. In that constantly changing pause-gap, an interval of time occurs. That is the positionality in which memory occurs.

If this tumbling over, on to and through surfaces does not occur, there is an impossible density. A contraction of all the spaces between, as if organs collapsed in on one another, a contracted substance like a black hole that simply sucks in all matter. Absolute stasis in the collapsing of all distance is the immediate availability of surfaces to one another.

Teaching then could be about this playing around with the distances between meeting. Not a socialising programme that distracted children from what they seem taken up with but an extension of this concern into the main process of learning. Letting the bodily movements play out to their logical conclusion. Seeing where the shifts in scale take place, the movement between disintegration at one level and utilization at the next. Allowing then for the very moment of indeterminacy- the place between over-excitation and diminished return, when something else bites in and the interface of surfaces occurs in an entirely novel way.

The preparation is activated through a scrutiny of local detail; in acts and effects that are made tangible piece by piece as they are touched in on; systems that unfold as a kind of double activation or echo from each instance of impact or delay to the next. The knowledge base comes from the sparks of collision or from their continuous re-routing; a movement pattern that is continuously extending forwards and backwards in order to mark out new borders; new separations. A logo of intervals.

LEAPING BETWEEN CERTAINTIES

23 Oct 2008


How can we begin with the minutiae of what people do and not use it as a distraction but as a fundamental component of learning?

How do people learn? How do autistic people learn?

Are they manually activating a synaptic leap- leaping into the unknown with the faith they will reach the other side- half flying half propelling- using surfaces like parkhor experts who gain footholds on railings, slopes and banisters- feeling out the landscape according to utility in a mobile navigation.

Response is about responsiveness but this needs to be activated- it is not up and running but needs to be practised. The brain and the body is not a self defining unit. Nor is it fully formed at birth. There is a learning interchange where our endings become the open circuit to something else. Systems are forged together- slammed together- cobbled together- conjoint systems that create momentary vacuums like the air trapped between the clap of two hands- impossible to know or elicit that sound without the ensuing action- the speed of this coming together- the bounce or a coming undone- two directives exploding into sound- that is a crafting immersed in the moment.

Autism is a learning program- the questions it opens up is about how we learn. It is an enactment of a process of activation. The techniques of autism- spinning, flicking, bouncing- stimming- momentary explosions of sound – composed sensory overloads that create threshold responses and send the parkour leaper into oblivion and over to the other side. A monitoring of synaptic firings that otherwise never get going or double and redouble into a labyrinth that if unchecked would tangle into immobility.

How to use that excess- the never-ending multiplication to go somewhere- or else to cobble together resonating chambers- informational pockets that reverberate and echo and harvest their own bifurcations.

Interesting. How do we learn from our own learning- from the strata of responses in between the chosen and accredited pitch frequencies or the colour red or blue? How to mix the palette and have it mean something even when it is not translatable into a chronological scale?

Memory- How to mix up events- rotate ourselves into different composite support structures that somehow lean up against one another and before collapsing, or moving on into a different sculpture, recognise position.
This has to be done from within the situation itself- from the practices already underway. Physically enacting ones own synaptic firing system can be exhausting as the testimony of any autistic person and their periods of over bearing tiredness, irritability, anger and melt-down will tell you.
Environments need to be sounding boards- open circuits for momentary inclusion that activates not only one synapse, one person, one surface but a network of inter-activating responses that can hold one another in a certain charge, and then allow for rest, for a period of release from a necessary but provisional constraint.

Sensitivity can be used when navigation is an on-going enquiry into multiple dimensions- objects are never closed- nor are persons- they come into existence and become what they are as the seal of a contact is made- like the articulation of the vocal chords through a certain pressure chamber in the labyrinth and the elastic mobility of the lips that seal, purse, puck and then allow in to the body a fresh trail of air at just the right moment. Soundings are crafted, sculpted in this way, in tandem with our need to take in air and redistribute its components according to what is most useable by our systems.

From gesture to sound to thought to expression- an interflow that is not causal but a simultaneous generation of one to another- the pressing into place of a haptic patterned circuit- a modulation of depth through an active gaging that is mediated from opposing sides.Where is the surface- the wall, the skin, the organ of apperception? It is situated through alignments which is a staged forging of space.

Perspective is a meaningless abstraction that depends on our pretending that the body could ever be still.

Waiting at a platform for a train- bodies jostle, sway- accommodate a further jet of passengers from the stairwell. The signal lights, rumble of the tracks- we sway from foot to foot, not together as one unit but accommodating one another into sudden absences and fillings. The on-off pump is enacted at every level from the infinitesimally small to the gross and through it all we realise our presence- a molecular adaptation of indentations and incursions- fingers, eye-brows, slight rockings from the balls of our feet to our toes- ankle bones bracing and giving way- hips re-angling into minute tilts and inversions reapropriating the bulk of our standing weight. Gasps of air flooding systems and transgressing borders to bond with blood and become, what essentially they are not. But just because it is not that outside our bodies does not mean it is not that inside our bodies. We are systems of negotiation spanning impossible islands. To be upright- to be more or less still is a continual set of tiny tectonic shifts and compromises. We are crafting that integrity all the time through near falls, by sacrificing the integrity of impossible categories.

Boats on the river Thames- muddy water in the dark, picking up and reflecting out lights from the towering glass buildings all around. The bridge that spans a section of the river- lit up red on one façade- that red tumbling into the water- colouring it without ever penetrating it.

Could the boats be stilled- manufactured never to move even with the distractions of continual ebbs and flows, currents and jetties that constantly pile up the water in localised enclaves and cause it to crash and collapse in on itself? The idea is ludicrous to create an absolutely still boat. The only still boat is a sunken boat- one lying at the bottom of the muddy river where the water fills every space – caresses and wears away the very outline that describes it as a boat until it barely resembles it- certainly does not function as one.

Into City Hall- a conference on Autism hosted by the TV presenter Jon Snow who finally gets up from behind the table and whose mobile presence encourages debate, along with the chromatised colour tie- that is more of an activation than the material of some of the speakers.But it is hard to still a debate in this way between the polar opposites between a “Cure” campaign and a “We exist” campaign.

Hosted in the name of a school, it is in the name of schooling that the debate needs to configure. Not “cure us” or “accept us for who we are” but engage in the minutiae of the practices that are undertaken as a way of activating on-going awareness; on-going presence. There needs to be a questioning of what it actually takes to be present- of the price paid for a kind of immobile myth of distance learning- of concepts before experience, of uprightness before modulation. Of the impossible dream of a presentation of functionality with everything else erased or discouraged in the schooling process. Would we be left with any kind of adaptable system if this were the goal? Can we abstract sociability, sitting behind desks, asking for what we want, without the complex and mediated interface of a haptic negotiating- an on-going plasticity of word and deed and thought and form? Of an always bargained for presence?

If we look at this level of activity, even in the supposedly non-normative we may find the filaments of a system that can work and adapt, renew and alter- in other words of a learning system. When it is recognised as such, encouraged and furthered as such it becomes this.

How do we employ the countless acts that are put outside of learning- the distractions when we are looking out the window at the play of lights on the river, the feel of the soft pad of our fingers against the grained wood of a desk, the rise and fall of voices that do not agree as a kind of musicality, the tensile muscles, slightly aching in the small of our back and their connection to our neck muscles keeping our head up. Our chest, our breathing pattern, our air passages. The gravitational shifts as we tilt our head from side to side to try to stay awake. And through all this a reattribution of our sense of looking- a perception that goes all the way through the body and shifts and adapts between muscle and bone and organ as we too adapt and shift between ourselves even far from the point of touch.

How do we let these things in as meaningful without every interaction becoming so intense as to be unbearable? Here is the crux of the debate- a question of consciousness. Of how we honestly manage ourselves and others. Of how we behave and acknowledge the connections, even across vast chasms of identity and of people and of ways of being seemingly different from ourselves.

How much more would the debate shift and modulate to accommodate and make use of these differences if we were all moving- constantly arriving like a never ending influx from the stairwell that is a curvature a continual arrival as people descend, wrapping around the glass interior of city hall in order to occupy their chosen and fixed seats.

Is that final arrangement workable for the leap that is needed between the “cure us” and the “we exist” camps? Would not a different configuration work better- one which mirrors the practices of activation so necessary and literal to autistic people and at every level to all forms of creative and mobile learning?

What about making a learning environment within the flowing spiral inside out-ness of city hall, which lets in the river whilst embracing passers by on the river bank? Which lends itself to this poetic composition. Surely this inside-out approach that inspired the special practice of the architect who proposed such a building could be part of the learning experience as an on-going proposition. No longer a distraction of boats passing to the inner workings of focused utterances, but a literal metaphor for turning things over, navigation, mobility of course through constant adjustment and a working with environmental shifts as a way of guiding perception. Rather than spending energy locking out the random passing ship, the autistic heckler in the crowd, why not make such an element central.

What about a market place? Small sites of special interest known to autistic people in their art practices, spinning practices, haptic formulations, sculptural and bodily configurations displayed as a casual conglomeration of stalls where the space between the walking between stalls- grouped sitting areas, areas too to move in and move through are equally important.

To have that open space would mean that many more people who would be excluded from the seating arrangement and the need for verbally tuning in whilst continually and exhaustively repressing the activation from other sources of input could be involved- indeed central to a present research environment of actually happening practices.

Not only John with his coloured tie could move around, or the camera man, crouching, hopping and stooping to perceive but not to be perceived. Suddenly the entire environment could be put to use as a roaming pacing device for activating conversation in its broadest meaning. The camera and the reporter would roam as well picking up elements and engaging practitioners, autistic and not autistic, within this necessarily bubbling and chaotic market-place.

Fragments would be picked up, other things slip through. Autists would present not their pathologies but their techniques for activating thought, meaning, memory; their special interests; their roaming focus. And research would be the conjoint coming together of these practitioners, neurologists, care workers, doctors, teachers, siblings. The definition of who the heckler became would constantly shift, from autist, to researcher, to teacher, to sibling in a democracy of dispersed practices that represented very many different takes on expertise. They would need to thrash it out together by entering into very many different platforms of experience. That would necessarily put different views of the world at a disadvantage and at an advantage at different times.

A working method would be developed through such encounters, rather than two already closed camps arguing their corners in static verbal exchanges that already discredit the foundation of certain types of mobile learning by the very seating arrangement.

Over the duration of such working practices, rather than pitching words against actions, “cure” against “let us be”, the them/us factions would become less clearly defined in an investigation of what it means to learn and how different learning systems have been fashioned from out of every day practice within the neurological, social, physical, environmental condition that each person find themselves belonging to would open up a discussion that implicated every person’s subjectivity- where the observer and the observed coincided.

This might open up the debate about how we can learn about learning and take ideas about awareness- about what it means to be social, to be thinking, to be feeling, to be human, out of their rather jaded boxes. For these do not do credit to any of our capabilities.

In this age of networked involvements, autism and haptic learning styles could be a way of exploring dispersed knowledge systems, not of re-enacting Wild West clean-up or shoot out programs between the untamed “Indian” and the law abiding “citizen”. Surely that particular story line has got us into enough problems already.

Autism is an excuse to open a discussion about how we develop rather than to close it up into criteria of those who can and those who can’t develop. It is a chance to ask questions about why and how we learn differently and given that we do learn differently ,how best to support learning in all its various capacities, formations and growths. It is at this recognition of differences in perception that learning necessarily deepens into various techniques for approaching age old human questions that we all share. In that sense we must all become continuous researchers of our own methods and practices and to use this as a basis for perceiving other practices and the ways of knowing that they open out.


Ruth Solomon

Room

I am standing on the other side of the road, to the interior room that is hinged on the outside of the building. The room I am facing is pinned out to dry, the landscape picture adjusted with a single nail on the wall. I am too far away to see clearly what that picture is about. Maybe sea. Some trees. There is something of mountains too. Two easy chairs in yellow fading upholstery are situated around a small round high table too high for anyone seated at those chairs to reach. But there's another chair- wooden and straight-backed which slots only just under the rim of that fraying table. The corrugated roof tilting high above the picture and slanting down to create a lid just over the chairs that continues beyond where the floor ends has also an adjunt like a continuing motif down the flight of steps to one side. This would lead anyone down to street level or there again up onto that balcony again. They would not get wet climbing the stairs. Green wood pillars, cut to various sizes, long at the back, short at the front support and angle the roof above this visible room. Two additional pillars angle in towards one another creating a V just in front of the shelving against the whitewashed wall to the left and above the landscaped picture. There are an odd assortment of bottles, jars, plastic white tubs and nick nacks put on to these rungs of shelving. They are all hobbly cobbly hanging there above the plush but faded yellow chairs. The paint is peeling off the green pillars which are painted a lime green of a type not often seen nowadays. Down below on the street moving by degrees closer to the area over which the room hangs- it's contents spilling out- is a large boy walking besides a petite woman. He has fair hair and is wearing a pink T.shirt. He is shaking his head back and forth in a rhythmic way which almost becomes a circular motion. It contrasts to the more measured steps of the woman which however never pre-empt the boy's movements; are actually in perfect alignment with his steps. As the woman and boy reach the area below the out-turned room, she glances over to me. I rub my shoulder which aches whilst looking from both of them to the room and back again. She is reassured. They seem to have fallen out of the room as if bleeding into the atmosphere and graininess of the space in front without using the stairs. The woman and boy progress towards a nearby pub where many people sit out with drinks, crossing a road in the process. As the boy gets further away I realise he has a large head. He is carrying a transparent bag in which objects are vaguely apparent. They jostle and rattle by his side as he moves. The woman and boy walk past the people seated outside the pub in the street very close to the chairs because the street is so narrow. I look back at the room. The green lime pillars. A single piece of paper folded in half over a line running across the room. I am killing time before an interview.

Commentary

I'm in a small square just off from a main road. I have wheeled my bike up some stone steps into the central square where there are benches around a flower display with a tree in the middle. The flowers are red with plenty of low-lying green leaves that are sometimes dark and sometimes light. The leaves on the tree droop as if moist. There are green pods attached to some. None have turned brown. Sun dapples the seats on the other side. I am in the shade. A woman on a mobile phone with blonde short hair, shorts, tanned legs and jewelley talks into the machine as she walks back and forth looking into the square, over the low lying wall, her back to the small playground where a climbing frame, slide, ropes and hang-bar are all condensed into the same one area. Everytime someone walks in or out the gate creakes, the jumble inside rearanges and everyone in the park looks up. There is an outer perimeter too with more benches and odd depositeries of flowers at regular intervals built into the wall itself as if bricks have been intentionally left out, the gaps filled with earth. Two black men sit on a bench behind and to the left of me in the outer rim. Their legs are stretched in front of them. There is a constant commentary going on between them. A couple moves from one side of the park to the other, stretching out a blanket and laying out with their packages of food. The man has on a purple T.shirt which contrasts with the grass in the sunlight. A chinese man picks a child from off of the slide in mid-descent and lifts her outwards before pressing her to his body. She cries out, then concedes. A small black boy is by the side of the bin by the wall. My bike is next to the bin on the other side. Then comes the bench where I sit. He is watching me. When I look back he moves towards the centre of the square with his back to me. He flips up a coin and lets it fall on the paving stone. He does it again, throwing it up high and then moving back suddenly to let it fall and catch the full impact as it almost bounces before settling again. It is a pound coin and because of its density and compactness makes a thud rather than the clang of a thinner, wider brass coin such as a two pence piece. He does it again. And again. A pattern is begining to emerge. "Heads" I say. He throws "Tails" he says. Then again, throwing it less high so that he is bent over it as it lands to see the result and again and again so that he is crouching over it now, it barely leaving his hands before falling; He alone speaks; "Heads, Heads, tails, Heads, tails, tails tails, Heads, tails" faster and faster until the coin barely stops for a reading. It is only just landing, his voice sometimes pre-empting the fall. It is spinning in the air, he commentating on it like an anouncer at a horse-race where horses are neck and neck each craning beyond the other, no defintie position established. Winner and loser is arbitary. Suddenly in the freneticness of his own commentary he is literally, bodily, blown out of this centre court and swiftly he moves through the bracketted spaces of the two rings of park which are broken in places where the benches lie and the steps join up until he vacates the park gates and crosses the road by a block of flats. The woman is still talking on the phone, pacing back and forth. An old man crosses the outer rim of the park and goes to the bench next to the one taken by the two black men. A woman reads a book, resting it on the wall as she sits on the steps of the outer perimeter just where the lawn starts. Every now and then she glances up, noting the scene, including my position over from her in the inner circle. I notice three large shoots dispersed evenly amongst the red flowers and green foliage of the central display. Gradually it dawns on me what they are. They are corn, not yet ripe but already under way. I go over and feel one of them; the individual pieces of corn under the sheaves of leaves.

Now the boy is back. He is on the wall between the outer and inner perimeter and is picking his way past each interuption of clusters of flower. He stops before each one, as if trying to work out a difficult problem. Then tentatively tries out a route, around and over, edging on, one way then the other, making of each crossing, an occasion. He is doing it for us to see but the game is that he never looks up out from his activity. Half-way round, where there is a gap in the wall where the steps follow through from one level to another he jumps down. I supose he is going to resume where the wall follows on but he doesn't. He leaves the park. A motor bike with no sound dimmer goes round the ring road that encloses the park. It thunders through distorting it's own emanation as the speed of it tears ahead of its own sound. The sound keeps getting layed one on top of another though not quite catching up so that there are jolts where it dies away, then interupts itself, tripping on its own spectacle. All the people in the park follow it through. For the first time we look at each other. A man with a bottle of beer lounges in the outer circle opposite me. His form is blocked here and there by foliage. He gets up with his bottle half-finished and goes. A squirrel crosses the wall where the boy had been, in reverse, jumping the obstacles in a continuous move. A woman in a luminous yellow jacket sits down across from me in the inner circle and lights a cigarette in the sun-shine. Her bike lays across most of the seating so that she is squashed in a corner.

I close my eyes. Think about the corn. Open my eyes to see the woman with the book looking at me. By now I am directly in the sun. The boy returns, calls towards the playground and three small children emerge out of the gate and follow him out the park, across the road and towards the flat. Half-way across the road they all stop to turn and look at a man and a dog crossing in the opposite direction. When the man and dog have passed and are someway along the road going into the other direction, they resume their walk and then disapear inside the flat-fronted building. The woman with the blonde hair has entered the playground where a small child hanging on to the legs of a tall man, turns at that moment. Five adults come in with one small child who seems to be floating. Adults and children are moving around the coloured structure. Children are fed in and out of it. As I go down the steps a boy glides in front, his stomach flat against a skateboard. I wheel my bike out and disapear.

The colour red

I am lying on my back in the park just where the sun cracks on the tree. It is windy so the light keeps going on/off on my face. I look up between the other trees that give way to one another down the slope, either side of the path. The black kite is up again. It's white trailers fluttering, unevenly cut, in the wind. when I get up to walk diagonaly over the grass until I am finally back on the path, I need to step over the string. I follow the string through with my eyes over to the green lawn in the middle where the kite is now laid out. Looking down the grassy slope where I stand watching the trains go past one another in the distance there is a man carrying a bed on his head by the side of the canal. I think of the colour red when I think of him but cannot remember if the colour is from his shirt or shorts. People are playing tennis down in the courts. It seems slower than would actually be possible in order to keep the ball in motion. Maybe that has something to do with the low lying sun sinking through the trees. Now that I think of it I think the colour red comes from one of those players down there, not the man with the bed hoisted up over his shoulders after all.

The near and the far

I am on the end of a peer looking out to sea. The sea has receded far form the original coast line so that it is shiny mud-flats that absorb more light and take up a picture of some sort of the inverse sky. That is not like the moving sea that bounces straight out again the fractural light, magnifying that beam where it immediately bends back on itself. There are a group of kids to one side. Hindered by their own intelligence and lack of a place to go, they start picking on one another, backtracking on plans for the moment and expectations to come. It's only when one of them gets up to go, that they grip on to one another, hugging, with fists clenched around pulled down sleeves. A man and a woman are lying out to my right trying to judge the distance of boats that are tilting over because the bottom is toucing the mud through water that still only just swirls around them. "Four Metres" says the man. "No, much further than that" says the woman.
I`m leant up against a pole and it's uncomfortable because it's a square metal colummn and my back meets it where one side converts into the next. I need to sit like that to get the right view. Right out across and to the land far away on the other side. Music is coming from the empty bar down at the other end of the peer where a boy served me my drink. There are some Spanish people half way down the peer with sunglasses on, not looking out to sea but facing inwards along the walk-way. They look back at me as I look down that way.
A rumbling can be heard from a crane which is dredging up large quantities of sand and shingle just past the pub in a cordoned off area. Every once in a while, some kind of coversion takes place in the inwards of the pillar I am leant up against. Something between the wind, the crane working and the music in the bar creates a tone that resonates and ciruculates in that limited internal hollow space and all the sequential items laid out here seem to ring together not as given distances on a certain plane but as harmonics that must also be in place for that sound to exist. I hear it now and it summons back up the music, the rumble of the crane and the smell and taste of the salt air. A deep thud that however chimes for an instance even as it cuts out. It is like striking something into existance all over again. I cannot predict when that sound will re-emerge. As I sit there on the cold concrete of the peer, my body still hot from the sun of the day, my ear pressed against the cold metal of the pole to catch the thud when it comes, my back straining to position on the edge of that square pole, still uncomfortale, I hear a hurriedly rattling sound speeding towards me. I stop breathing and my lower abdomen contracts. Then the plastic bag scuttles off the edge of that peer with incredible speed, at odds with everything else so far, and for one instant I nearly follow it. It would be simply for the sake of completing a pattern; resolving a sound with it's evidential movement. And it is so compelling a thing to do. Such an incredible lightlness and ease in doing it. There is no current of wind once it begins to drop past the level of the peer so gradually it descends and I lose sight of it as it goes towards the mud-flats.
I realise then that imperceptively I have adjusted my posture; I am pressing in to the corner of that square bar until it hurts and now when I remember the feeling of that pressure I also see the floating plastic bag which seems to go up momentarily before it goes down. This is not a visual memory. It is a sense I have of my body re-organising. That organsiation is on-going- not a before or after- but a re-application every time the chime comes through. A re-accomodation of the near and the far.

Limb

The land is straining out of itself and before it even arises, there are those who anticipaqte it. They have learnt it by heart and they know that now is the time to take a stroll. With me on the mainland I can see them sinking through the mud, shimmering on the horizen, stepping through the water that parts to leave the muddy mirror that meets them with their double with such precision. The boy with the double jointed limbs is lying like a swivelled cross-bow on the land or is enfolded into the belly of his mother, peering out so clearly over her shoulder at the figures scooping out wet sand by the fist-fulls. But when they stop what they are doing and look over he rolls backwards and tumbles down the shingle until he meets the mud that he grows out of all over again. His mother goes down with a bucket and spade and I can no longer differentiate them from the others. I lie in the hot stones and wait for the heat from below to work its way into my dislocated shoulder. On the tube, going from tunnel to tunnel I walked behind a woman with a straggling arm that she no longer bothered to protect against the knocks and brushes along the way- it was no longer held intact as part of a body but blew loosely to and fro subject to a thousand unrelated breezes. I have never seen such playfulness before. Then I go down to the mud flat which is seeping into the sea gradually invading it. A girl who suddenly looses two metres of natural growth exclaims, "It's quick sand. It is unbelievably soft seducing the foot into its depths. But on the shingle limb, now quite visible as one long extensoin into the midst of sea, children are pricking bare soft feet, edged on into this walk of pain by exuberant parents so that they can glance back at the mainland from somewhere else.

Slippage

I am on the tube. A woman rushes in as the door is about to close. Though it's packed the layers part as she comes through not exactly walking but escalating forward or drifting on the current of a younger woman's stride. Yet there is a crankinness in her bones and in the way she stops as if she could go no further as a seated passenger is literally upturned from their seating, mumbling an invitation as a back-hander to the woman who sits down earnestly. She arranges her dress around her body, staking the boundaries of that small body as she does so. Yet she seems to be escaping from that spot, somewhere mid-air in the already stuffy corridor of that carriage.
She has oriental features, her grey hair swept back loosely from a scrubbed face. Something in her chest seems to be heaving, building up to something that has yet to emerge as if caught or battling in some way. There is a tension around her because the passengers do not know what this turbulant state may amount to. I am sitting opposite her focusing on the floral patterns of that dress. She wears a silver chain draped and fastened loosely around her waistline where the dress seems to be cut in two and sewn back again so that the floral pattern does not follow on exactly but seems to jump. I feel the focus of my two eyes seperate and mesh again at a slightly forced pace, as if each followed a different momentum. There is the stirrings of a halucination.

I`ve noticed from the beginning but now am made more aware of the black mitten over the woman's right hand, bobbbling from wear. On this already hot day in the stuffiness of the train carriage, it is at odds with the necessities of dress and with the generally summer outfits of all, including the woman, on that train. The woman begins hitting this hand with her other hand, thumping it over and over in a persistant rhythm that never lets up as she parts her hands above her bony chest and then returns them to this brief grip as in a seizure. It is like watching a boxer warm up before a fight. Gradually she turns her gloved hand so that the point of impact changes from moment to moment. Her features are concentrated, narrowed but alarmingly also wide and unstoppeable because whenever any one passes she voluntarily halts her activity; puts on hold her thumping and shifts a little her bag by her feet as if to make easier passage for the passer-by. Then she resumes this rhythmic thumping- this continual limited extension and compression. The absorbtion compels everyone around her whether they stare at her or look away. A man with limp wrists drinks coffee and puts his cold water between his legs. He then puts the water on the floor. I am becoming disturbed by that constant motion that is becoming more fraught, more persitant, more insitant by the second. I glance sideways where an opened book is being read by a woman. I read the word "pain" and immediatley feel it. But when I look to either side of that word the text is indecipherable. I realise that after all it is in a foreign language. Maybe Polish. I look at the woman reading the book and yes she could be from Poland. I find the word again easily in the book and realise it did not say "Pain" but "Pan". A visualisation suddenly grips me. I see my mother moving very fast, then suddenly jamming to a stop and hurtling forward, jolting into the air where her feet jam with the ground. It is very sudden, very violent. It has no duration at all and no extension- just a sudden reality. I am overcome with an indescribable heaviness and sorrow. My heart literally sinks and goes cold even on this hot summer morning. Shortly after this the woman with the oriental features gets up and moves to a seat at the far end of my row of seating to my left. I see the silver waistband briefly slipping as she gets up and re-positioning on her waistline before she sits down again. Then I no longer see her yet again she seems to be extending forward leaning out in to the passage now emptied of people. I see her through the reactions and concentrations of the people now faced towards her on opposite seats. I study their faces in amazement because these keep changing; growing and diminishing in parts there in front of me as if something were actually being lived out. At the next stop she leaves seeming to just pour away very suddenly. The platfrom is full with people and even if she were there amongst them she would be unrecognizeable. I feel embarassed for even having looked behind my seat into the station in such an obvious way. I am left with a feeling of despair prompted by that encounter but which is entirely my own. For the remainder of the journey I no longer try to read in to the faces around me. I have a sense of my own privacy.

Point of return

Notes on Shiatsu Treatments

Points as portals do not exist as permanent states but as time-specific avenues where energetic movements are stirred, giving rise to cross-roads the epicentre of which is the point.

These energetic movements are dialogue. Motivational leanings between organisms on many levels. Belief is the aptness of the time of meeting which gives rise to the stirrings of a movement and consequently presence of being.

The relevant portals resonate and strike a correlation which makes what is opaque, transparent. It is a shift in dimension like the wood in a door tilting on a hinge. A mere blink. It is this shift that comes about through contact that gives rise to diagnosis in a treatment. A concentration at areas of the body in polar opposites; Kyo-Jitsu.

There is a story to follow and a drama begins. But it is the contact that creates the story. Portals are only relevant when there is a combined concentration of attention. Yet ultimately this is a passing through because any form is only part of an on-off pump that is lit up and then returned to shadow like cat`s eyes on a high-way.

This is how movement occurs. Through attention and then moving on. The emphasis of relevance shifts and with it a wider whole is recognised. The organism that renews its energy is this moving whole. The points, reactive or needy, are the punctuation; the bi-polar system; the pendulum and catalyst for a deeper and more sustaneable level of unity. In stillness the pendulum is stuck. In movement, the clock ticks.


Ruth Solomoon
Jan 2007

Islands of seperation

Notes concerning Olives’ Treatment and more
generalised, the Garden and Kayahan. Nov. 2006


Islands of seperation. They are distraught. They have no rooting. They can not move like that. Not intentionally, to become part of a wider pattern. Can not adjust towards or away from anything. Time stands still. There is loneliness. A fractual seperation of parts to a whole. There is isolation.

These parts must be reintroduced to one another. There may be motion that creates tumults. Even cataclysms. These will come and go. There is the streaming of a course to find the mainstream, into which all flows. Through prolongued seperation, this pouring together is initially hard to monitor. There is a gradual alignment – even a superimposition of the top and the bottom, the left and the right. A folding over like the ends of a cloth, meeting in a wrap-around embrace.

The heart is the emptiness within. The breath rises – a gasping. Then plummets down. A plumb-line converging into gravity. The central pivot of motion in the Sacrum/Abdomen. This creates a grasping, which then springs outwards.
A flourishing back through the breath and heart; the extremities and their expressiveness in fingers, feet, face made viable at all possible levels.
The junction lines; the creases of wrists, ankles, neck are operational, as mini- emblems of the central pivot. Resonance is this. A transferance of effectiveness. The body as an echoed metaphor of one to another. Each part a holographic seizure of the whole.

Our connection of one living entity to another, is the charger. Emotion, the spasm of continuity. The catalyst for this intake and outpouring which is simultaneous and allows for integrity. Love, the simplest and greatest of them all.

So for the islands of seperation there is a cascading of scenarios locked in their different realms, into a form which is the stacking up of these many cards. When emotion ignites movement, form is borne and there is then no seperation.
The fire is lit, anchored in a deeper stream of water. Enactment; the drama of living, is this flourishing out that comes anew at each reinvigorated grasping.
Then there is redistribution of parts that roam and are free but are motivated and responsive to a central intent.

The central intent is a listening within. An environment. A connectedness to all else. Summoning that emanation out and out and sending it back within.
A reverberation. A recall. An acknowledgement from one to another. An interflow. Connection is sweet. It is our life-blood.

THRESHOLDS


There are thresholds that we pass through. But only by changing. By somehow
Refining or thickening. The passage is a contact. An adhering to the walls which are not set but are plastic. We mould together like marble. The moment before it sets, a slow stream that patterns itself anew at each instance yet appears the same. A gateway. A crux in our on-going life. Place of interchange.

These thresholds are when one mode of aperception gives way to another. There is a melding – until every parameter in one mode finds its equivalence in another. What is smelt is felt. A tenacious weight becomes a vision. The sequential numbers of things stretched out upon a landscape are spun into music. Music is sent back through the body into dance. We are the conductors of this interchange. We hold apart and together these differences which at heightened points of interchange come together as one and pass out again so that the one becomes the other. There is a narrowing of focus. An intensity of purpose, then an emergent flourishing as a trigger response to this. Almost an automatic catapult out from the frame of our holding.

Our attentive and puposive care to the threshold represents our human value system in life. This holding space is our community endeavour. It is a dwelling-ground. A place of change. A restful suspension of all flux before the jolt, into a new mode.

These thresholds as actual places are our on-going attachment to this world.
Our home-making in relation to others. They are the basis, that at the moment of interchange, are flung out as images, representations, symbols of the thresholds we pass through. They are rooted so deep that they carry us across the “before” and “after” of this cataclysm. They are the bridge. Based in material matter they break through into our human value system. This interchange between ground and sky is the energiser in the transformation needed at any threshold.

The fast spin of these opposites of up/down, left/right realises the moving dynamic of any system of living renewal; The human body, the changing seasons, the orbital pull of contraction and expansion, our own breathing vitality. It is a pilot light to the lived-in experience. A kick-start as opposites merge, translate and start up again, enlivened by one another.


The centre is still. It spins until an outer periphery is drawn. As the speed changes, this periphery breaks apart at certain intervals. Here, exchange with a wider environment is utilized and stream-lined. This is a time of wider knowledge. Wider than would be tenable outside of this energetic roulette – since it is this which conducts how an energy normally too great to process is used.

In the moving roulette wheel, a ricochetting is intuited. It is the speed of the turning that makes credible this ricochetting into a patterned imprint that can be used like a code of conduct even when again we are outside of the special circumstances of the threshold.

Before we enter the threshold, there is a crisis of consciousness. A necessary dispersal as we usurp our boundaries into the flux of this interchange.

At the epicentre we are almost completely taken up with the movement. Unavailable for comment. This is an altered state where we are the music, the colour, the space, the somatic pulsing.

when we leave this parity again there is a crisis. This is a volatile moment when we could bleed or leak out of any contained integrity or else condence into non-entity. Here we need to re- group in the natural significance of an on-going dwelling; the natural basis of the symbolic threshold. Time must be lived out in domestic task. Gradually we will integrate the knowledge of the threshold, and place it in the mundane landscape of our human interchange and day to day contact with the basis of our existence. Here is peace.


Autummn 2006

Epilogue

April 2008

Writing, even when describing the errant, is a discipline of making words ring in a certain way so that it creates a kind of just-so-ness. Chaos. The indeterminate, the daily back-breaking grind of making do and meeting things on the run, is cobbled into a world-view that could be seen as a contradiction of terms. Even a betrayal.
That contradiction and the potential dangers of being caught in a luxurious swash of words that make the irritant and the steamy end-pieces of our nerves sound on the page like the thrill of the new, is the constant angst between what is felt and what is remembered. Writing is always a glance back and in that sense in itself it doesn’t have to deal with domestic duties but leaves that to the bodily sensing which it serenades from a distance. Once removed who could not be seduced by the gift of proximity in the stark spacing of letterheads? But maybe that is the job of writing; to describe and complete yet to show itself up in the presumption of that completion.

Yesterday I arrived to the Garden which had been trashed. Stuff literally thrown from one end to the other. Trees sawn down, all structures apart from the occupied and now “homely” shed, rendered unworkable. Useless. Fragments of broken glass, smashed flower pots, earth and brick scattered. It was the scene of pure abandonment yet in direct contrast to the careful and rather self-consciously placing of selected items in the shed. It was a statement of territorial regime change, which had probably begun with a half hearted experimentation with cutting through one piece of wood with a saw which I had left out in the garden by mistake, and had then escalated from place to place. Each place became another opportunity for cutting through.

Actually we had a good session at the Autistic club later that day. One man, having such a clear and unambiguous task ahead, applied himself to stacking and ordering scattered objects in a way which began formally but then branched into all kinds of special piles, hangings and lean-tos.
The cleared space then provided a new platform for making another kind of simple structure, with poles in the ground, string between and the broken struts of furniture hung at intervals like a necklace.

Still later on that day the kids turned up. They promised in every kind of best language they knew that they hadn’t done it and had only arrived to find the mess and had then worked hard at making the shed at least nice. I don’t believe that but I worked on the assumption it was true and asked them to help me cut up and stack the branches from the young trees cut down. They worked hard but would then lose concentration, start giggling and begin cutting down other trees.

We built a huge fire to burn all the broken furniture and I could see their leaping expanding energy when the task itself was destruction. There was a kind of calmness in everyone, including me, when the flames were at their highest. And a kind of coming full circle in that.

Maybe the garden has always been about what you do with excessive energy which in this society is stopped, internalised or squeezed out in explosive energy or violence.

The garden is a place for using excessive force so that it does not run out on itself. Is it any wonder that it should ultimately succumb to that force?

I think those kind of energies need to be utilized at each moment. Form can only be a temporary stop-gap. A sandwich stop which may last a moment or years. But sooner or later things have to turn over in order to go down. The kids, when they cut wood, call that “chomping it”.

The final phase of the garden will be using it as a mirror to witness the affects of all that is disallowed or turned back on itself, in the surrounding area of Finsbury Park. What does it actually mean to grow up as a young male in this area, thrown out of school, with Attention Deficit Disorder and with nothing to do with the thought of that going on year after year indefinitely. Are these the boys that grew up to become men in the mental health project next door who keep themselves to themselves, many of them on high medication, because any gesture catches onto the dry timber of so many inclinations that have nowhere to take them except over the edge and all the trained professionals are trying to prevent any kind of contact with that edge.
Maybe the garden, in its most recent incarnation, has become exactly the island outside of jurisdiction, or surveillance where battling tendencies have become readable in every partial object, smashed or reconstituted. That is not the battle-ground of the original autistic members, stereotypically seen in this society as “islands”, who have ritualised chaos into elaborate procedures of object arrangement- almost as a kind of joke on all the systems in place for ordering things and people- but is enacted at a far more formative and fluid state, before diagnosis and before allocation on one side of the wall or another has set in. It’s at this level that the untouchable nature of what schools, local authorities, police and national Charities alike come to see as a raw and unprocessed state almost as if it were sewage, becomes an anomaly. Yet that anomaly is a situation built into the very systems of categorisation where there are gestures that cannot or will not be seen.
The sheer level of murders and violent crimes in the area means that between the occupation of the shed and the dismantling of the garden, we are interned within our own domestic disputes with state control effectively taken up at a different level of violation. That means that we exist in a buffer zone between established regimes of schooling, recreational activities, moral guidance and punishment; a low level brewing of anarchy within the refuge itself.
This fluid state that is normally invisible and thrown back as unrelated incidents of individual “trouble-making”, must become the area of attention in the final phase of the garden, putting the autistic systems of mark-making and trace reading to use in this continuous and high speed morphing between the “tamed” and the “wild”, between “exclusion” and “inclusion”, which operate as a refrain and as such allows the playing out of a poetic paradox on this specific piece of land.

Situated knowledge

Situated knowledge can occur anywhere because it is about an alignment. Place is rendered through the practice of a quality of contact; a certain consideration in the implications of contacting that surface at that time in that way and an attention to the details of whether there is a sinking down or a bouncing up. Events are made by allowing a gage between opposing tendencies to play out. What happens, happens in the space held open. Place then is anywhere one concerns oneself with and situated knowledge is the listening in to the feedback of one’s own presence in relation to others. Surfaces are activated and can become the site of accounts, stories, inscriptions, dances, performances. They run through buildings, terminals, tracks, dead-ends, falls and beginnings because they trace the progressive indescrepancies of conscious and unconscious states and all the possibilities that lie
in-between. They make a language out of what is placed between words. Words then are spoken before their meanings are known and are understood as sensory impressions of hot/cold, proximal/distance.
April 2008

Counter-flow

In an autistic unit the reallocation of the school break to fit into an extra science slot for the children in the mainstream school, sends into counter-flow the prescribed rituals of every child in the unit. But because the change in mood and the change in time-tabling are not explicitly linked, the political element of autistic behaviour is emptied of its true bearing. That is why you are left with separate encampments. Autistic “otherness” and mainstream lesson allocation which supposedly grow from entirely different rooting systems and so the justification of that separation is endorsed.
But what if the method of teaching and how it impacts on the biological metabolism and nervous impressionability of each pupil is researched as a systemic process of gear change and that this process becomes the main subject matter of concern? Not the given population contents generalised and collated from test readings of standard performance and variation so that behavioural difference is hardened into the school’s very architecture; its bricks and mortar and the potential for movement is entrenched at an earlier pre-selection stage where everything and everyone has a given place.
What if the very mode of presentation; how something can and can’t be seen, read and announced becomes as important as what appears to be there? What if that process; the distribution of the sensible, was what we looked at and looked for, adjusting our vision in order to notice what is moving by moving with it? Buildings could be made and unmade as part of this process of weight shift. Not a shoring up of change regarded as the ultimate insult to form but an informed translation of that movement.
April 2008 (extract)

Continuation

How to hold in the balance the possibility of dissolution from all sides as a state in its own right that does not appear to resolve?

A method for this gradual and ceaseless unfolding could be found in continually redistributing the area of operation. Every small confined space under certain conditions is extendable as a bouncing out to where it is not. That may be a potential; a continued propensity that carries with it the experience of duration beyond any given event. By simply staying put for long enough, this change of emphasis will occur and continue to occur between engagement and counter-flow. Within such a device, events will come and go.

April 2008

Extracted

Extracted from "Working Surfaces" Essay.
April 2008

To the Charity that owns the land we are that stranger- the autistic “strangeness” - through which no meeting could occur. Yet it is a lie to consider that strangeness unuseful. It is our very difference which lends to them a certain delimitation of their grounds; a sharpening of their procedural protocol whilst at the same time, behind their backs, a small piece of their land is being weeded and cleansed. But this is not a story about victim and persecutor; about bringing things to the light and telling the truth to the world. For in the administrative fog we have a tactical position in which to feel, know and gage how different surfaces meet and react with one another and to notice according to what medical, social and legal protocol these accidental collisions are filtered. Should that fog ever clear it would slow things into solid form, bringing the inconsistencies of “Rights” to the surface so as to make our position and theirs, unsustainable.
In the end it will come to this. The irresistible urge of affinity always beckons to close the gap and in one way or another it will probably end badly. But playing around with how long surfaces can waver on the brink of a knowledge before becoming catastrophically entwined with one another and how more subtly, they are constantly being done and undone along the way, brings into play a whole series of behaviours and incidents; of indescrepancies, brutalities and unforeseen acts of kindness that would not have come into being and would have therefore remained unknown forces; the mere threat of violence or wish for affinity, outside of these strange structural couplings.

Rendering Places

April 2008

Maybe we need to render places in which different kinds of operations occur or can occur. This could involve setting up rather inconspicuous practices in one frame and allowing them to warp and readapt through perhaps unpredictable uses into other kinds of operation. Or in the holding of multiple operations and uses in the same location so that it becomes one thing for one person or group and something entirely different for another. These heterogeneous uses would not rule out one another but would play on the spaces that operate between the seen and the unseen for different workings of the surface by different arrangements and speeds of approach. Therefore the area all around these hubs of operation start to become implicated within networks of movement that are what make a place what it is at any one moment. A place would begin to act rather like an oracle, striking up correspondences according to the very questions asked.

Working Surfaces

(Extract)
April 2008

The body turns because it goes one way, stops, sinks weight down, presses in to the ground with an emphasis of one foot or another, and propels up and therefore out. The sudden change of speed which would induce a fall or inertia at a slower speed, catches in through minute muscle contraction that holds in place momentarily, a caught speed which is somewhere between falling and bouncing back up.
This reattributed surface, workable at a specific moment in a sequence of procedures, is a spiral. A linear progression turned around into a spin in a fraction of a second in the displacement of weight around the hips, which is the articulation and coming into being of the spine.
That is a magical instant that turns a dead-end into something useable.

WHEN IT RAINS
Feb 2008


When it rains, buildings become specially angled surfaces for directing liquid flow. The roof is a slicing machine cutting the deluge in two. The gradual tilt of the roof filters the milimitre thin water down either side.
Glistening screens that seem constant but are really a perpetual re-working, shimmer like silk-worms. Rain descends and is replenished from above.

The water gathers and pools in the guttering running alongside the roof, then rushes on until a bend in the pipe creates a slowing. This sends the water into a spiralling of counter-directions that builds into a pressure until the vacume in the drainpipe pulls the water downwards. It now runs down the piping, the length of the entire building and out the gutter.

______


Attaching a water-butt to the side of a building is an act of sabotage. The device that redirects water into the water butt is a jamming device inserted into the deliberately cut ends of this final length of vertical piping. The water redirection device holds one end of the cut pipe on tiny plinths that prevent it from making a matching connection to this inserted device and then introduces a tapered channel built inside the wider diameter of the other end. What this means is that when a torrent of water courses down the piping, some of this water falls into a vacumed overspill area between the original piping and the narrowed insertion. It then bounces out of that holding area as an organized overflow and is forced down a seperate and much narrower feed-pipe that ends as a side-incision into the barrel of the water butt.

_____


This discussion is intended as a way of speaking about how systems lend themselves to one another, converting or subverting usage from one domain of operation into another.
I would argue that this system of organized deviation or the capitalization of “spillage”, happens at every instant and in every category of seperation; of people, of communities, of States, of neurological zones, questioning how we draw boundaries and more interestingly how these boundaries or limits are put to use, in a series of spiralling pressure-points that are what drives things on and makes then what they are. This driving on not only cuts blatantly through any idea of contained “Place” but uses the very restrictions of endings, border and boundaries as a kind of compression pump where restriction and expansion are played into a complex and responsive syntax of movement, delay and counter-movement.(1)


To hold, grasp, encounter this syntax is like trying to hold the wind. It is a system of asymmetrical velocities and the intersection points and cross-currents that these give rise to are what gives us the windy day. Ultimately however it is our experience of that windy day as the currents intersect on the surface of our body, that makes it recognizeable to us. How we are placed and the way we modify that alignment as the wind plays out its course across our face is how the wind comes into operation for us on that day. Our skin is the litmus paper to the windy day just as the surface of the building records, interprets and affects the passage of the rain. As time goes on our features are engraved with these currents that build up like sediments just as if we were a piece of land onto which could be read the weather fronts of passing years. Through constant observation and surveilance from afar the dynamic trends that are “us” are hardened into facts and the landscape turns to Atlas. Who holds the Atlas in their hands depends on who holds the power of this distant gaze but has this any relationship at all with the man and the wind?
(Preamble to an essay)

Levels

Water splaying on a demarcated patch of ground. A man walks over the thread of knee high tape pinned at four corners to make the square to get to his friends. Two girls stand facing each other in the flood which is put off beat by a wind picking up from underneath. I am cycling along a tow path by the side of the canal. The wind behind me. I reach a hand written sign that says that from the 18th of august passage is restricted because of work on overhead pilons. I don not know what the date is. I see a barrier shimmering in the distance but need to get closer to know whether it is actually locked or not. It is locked. It tells me the date. I turn around into the wind. It's hard going whereas before I was just nudged out, a small tendency or inclination becoming a pattern without effort. Hardly really able to call it my own. Now I need to consider the execution of muscles against a wind force. It is one thing up against another. There is dust blowing up past the factory road just after the overhead bypass. Buses that run along streets in central london are being craned up in the air in open faced wharehouses. There are never any people on the ground in the whatehouses- just drivers of vehichles on the roads.
The canal ripples with light in its centre-flow. Towards the edges it is slowed with detritus and green floating moss. A heron is poised, aligning itself at an angle with something it sees and waits for through the surface of the water. I haven't got a clue what that is and haven't time to see the stillness turn into anything else. Not that I am gong any where except back to the park, but the light is burning at my eyes reaching dangerous levels.