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.