It's windy. No sun . Just a level brightness. That changes remotely by degrees shifting up or down a gear but never creates those simultaneous contrasts of light and dark. No shadow. My eyes hurt. They are small slits against which this white wash crashes down. Beats its way through in to far off capillaries. Angles a way through in which I have no say. It's cruel. And the traffic is cutting up from behind. Riding on the end of that glare. Everyone is a little bit mad today. I can not look at anything directly today. Because if I do, it burns out and turns to white. There's a chemical reaction going on. And rubbing my eyes doesn't help. It just gets further in and when I look again with red smarting eyes everything either bends out impossibly or inwards into an intensity like the pip of a transparent grape. So there is no problem reaching people. I am reeling from one to another, tripping on the flatness of the paving stones that I suppose to be curving up or down. Level ground has never been so dangerous. There is no stalling. No gripping. No traction. Just a slipping through.
I seem to slip through bodies. Things that would phase me- Cars, looks, certain postures, don't. I simply slide by. I am I think getting faster and faster. It's a way to catch up with the light. To out-run it. Or at east to play against it like a wind-surfer. Because crashing into it, swerving against it, creates that missing traction. My body becomes the blotting paper to that streaming white light.
Because I can not look directly into the bulk of bodies, I am noticing the tiny peripheral manoevres. The swaying, tilting of the arms or head. The torsion of the trunk. But it is not seperated out into these parts as the words suggest. It is simply a levering away from a mid-line that is always happening. That is human play. I'm in love with it. The little adjustements that are made. And I manage my approach to coincide with these evolving and strange bodily yearnings that I equally follow. It is a forest where this constant growth towards the light is percievable. Suddenly the speed itself jumps into this filter of minute to minute slowed-down formation. It is like a slow yawn. The shopping trolleys, the moving pedestrains, the vegetables, the bodies. That person, that person. The stillness of the girl looking back. The man behind the counter, weighing the vegetable that fall out and mix back through one another. We are moving in this subteranean under-water life. We can not jump the distance with any kind of sensory device. We have to wait until we are up against one another, in this melee. Falling and catching so that neither entirely happens. Suddenly distance is anticipated and closed and proximity is dotted with holes, spread out and dissipated. Everything happens in good time. People move closer whilst not seeming to.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Procession
Bricks collapsing in upon one another inside a window frame. Beyond that frame the pile of bricks mounts up all around clustering around that entrance. I crane my neck out the upstairs window on the bus rudely past the passenger on the inside of me, staying with the bricks for as long as possible. In the background, Alexandra Palace, shimmering on the hill. At the carnival I go down a side-street where multi-coloured animals fill the space between the buildings from pavement to pavement. People are enmeshed within the drapes and foam, preparing, standing this way and that, adjusting head-gear, taking pictures of one another.
I take some pictures and it looks like an animation on my screen with only the glint of eyes hinting through at the real-life aspect. In one animal- some kind of white lizard, there is no head at all. Just the odd motion or swaying from within. Then the head pops out and rolls to one side. A sleepy child sitting on the pavement waiting to begin.
Later in the thrall of people I try to make my way down a side street but am blocked by police. Suddenly that gateway is opened and I am literally pumped down that channel. I want to cross the road and get into the park. The swim of people are pressing in. I step on to the road where the parade is moving but a woman holds me up. I say I want to get to the park. She says I need to go around to the end of the procession. I look out into the distance at a shimmer that fades but never ceases. It just keeps coming. She looks as well. Finally she brushes me through. In the park a man is doing body moves with the children and throwing out hand-fulls of sweets which many eyes watch searing through the sky, then pounce on. A large woman tries to get them too but the kids are on them before she has even bent over. She straightens up again quickly. There's a basin where children run, holding on to the rim so that very suddenly you are face to face with one of them. Then letting go and falling down, turning and running on to the bumps and mounds in the centre they become smaller.
A small boy with a barrel chest, shorts and stick out hair keeps low to the surface feeling out the smoothness with his hands, clambering up a bit, slipping down, falling on to his bottom, turning on to all fours, jumping up, then propelling onwards again until the next slope or curve slows him and positioned now onto one of the small mounds in the centre, he is jumping up and down, working up a rhythm with his whole body raised and lowered in tandem so that a jolt seems to rivet through his frame each time his feet slam into the concrete. When he runs back through to the steep part of the slope a mature woman with blonde hair, a salmon pink ruffled skirt and a white blouse bandaged around her breasts, moves unevenly to the top of the rim and hoists the boy up with his outstretched arms. At the top he jumps up and down once again and then rolls back down on his bottom with his hands to either side of him, and his feet scrambling, slowing him. Another child rolls his trycicle to the rim and when it rolls back down towards him he sits down on it. A skinny girl, older than the others, does cart-wheels back and forwards continuously up on the rim near a group of adults.
The music from the parade is making the park throb. People lie out on every patch of available space. The smells of chicken cooking are everywhere. I eat a piece of cake. The air is full of smoke and as the sun lowers, light cuts through these wafts of haze between the trees, revealing a limb, a hand, a gesture, a breathing stomach a chair-leg or dis-used polystyrene container. A man buys corn where it is being cooked on a large grill. It is put for him into a brown paper bag which he pulls half-way down immediatly as he is walking away so that his mouth can make contact with the sweet burnt corn.
Old people line the edges of the park facing outwards to the gay paraphenelia of the parade. They have deckchairs, easy chairs, stools and hard-backed chairs. Some carry umbrellas and most have elabrate sun-shades attached to their hats. Some of the women wear multi-floral headscarves which hold in place wrap-around glasses. A young black man who is very skinny and wears a neatly pressed checked shirt tucked into his belted jeans and who has on his face heavy rimmed black glasses calls down to some people from the top of the slope next to the concrete basin where the kids are still running and jumping. A thin tall elegant black woman and a fair haired man with blue track suit bottoms and a T.shirt with foreign wording on it make it up the slope holding hands and stand a little distance apart from the other man, with arms around each other.
I go down to the street again where the parade is on-going. There is a man across the road in an immaculate white suite standing by the sporting club. With all the commotion in the street -the comings and goings of trucks, sound-systems and winged men and the red head-dresses of dancing women- I am transfixed by this apparition shimmering in the distance. He is so completely still. In the park again I watch the police using a very specific hand-gesture with an open palm which looks more like an invitation but is used by them almost like a flipper to direct and/or inhibit the flow of people. A young officer with reddened cheeks and his helmet crushed down too far over his narrow head is trying to execute this gesture effectively. He keeps stopping and adjusting an earpiece. As it happens, perhaps because the command keeps changing so regularly, the special flipper gesture floats a certain section through and all of a sudden, almost randomly inhibits the entry of this person or that, who simply flow around the edges of his flipper hand or wait a moment until the order reverses in on itself and helplessly he lets the built up surge flow through. He looks hastily from right to left at his co-workers who are busy becoming gates and levies all of their own. Then suddenly a rigid panel up ahead is formed with layer upon layer of uniformed bodies that seal off the top of the road as the truck rolls to a halt and again the procession is jolted out of any continuous motion- compartmentalised into short "takes". One man in a puffer jacket rheels against the obstruction he faces. He reverses into a backflow through the crowd which he bombards his way through. Time passes and a back-log builds up behind the truck, of people on people. The police now begin to seperate out again streaming out from the centre line like a knot unravelling. The engine of the truck engages.
Across the park by the side of the canal there are black metal steps that spiral up to the level above where the road just past the junction spans across the water. These stairways are blocked off from ground level with a large wooden board tied to either end of the bannisters and resting on the grass. Up above on the bridge a policeman has his back to the black metal gates. People are entering and leavng the park through a tiny slit in the greenery. I pass through as well and stand watching people trailing off along a narrow path in single file next to the water on which some boats are also moving.
Walking back down a side street far from the parade I stop outside a pub for a guinness. There is a woman sitting by the side of the road with her head in her hands. She stays like that and does not change her position all the time I am there. Her hair is over her face. As I pass her later on I see a transparent tube coming out from a square blue hip bag by her side and feeding across her chest into her mouth.
I take some pictures and it looks like an animation on my screen with only the glint of eyes hinting through at the real-life aspect. In one animal- some kind of white lizard, there is no head at all. Just the odd motion or swaying from within. Then the head pops out and rolls to one side. A sleepy child sitting on the pavement waiting to begin.
Later in the thrall of people I try to make my way down a side street but am blocked by police. Suddenly that gateway is opened and I am literally pumped down that channel. I want to cross the road and get into the park. The swim of people are pressing in. I step on to the road where the parade is moving but a woman holds me up. I say I want to get to the park. She says I need to go around to the end of the procession. I look out into the distance at a shimmer that fades but never ceases. It just keeps coming. She looks as well. Finally she brushes me through. In the park a man is doing body moves with the children and throwing out hand-fulls of sweets which many eyes watch searing through the sky, then pounce on. A large woman tries to get them too but the kids are on them before she has even bent over. She straightens up again quickly. There's a basin where children run, holding on to the rim so that very suddenly you are face to face with one of them. Then letting go and falling down, turning and running on to the bumps and mounds in the centre they become smaller.
A small boy with a barrel chest, shorts and stick out hair keeps low to the surface feeling out the smoothness with his hands, clambering up a bit, slipping down, falling on to his bottom, turning on to all fours, jumping up, then propelling onwards again until the next slope or curve slows him and positioned now onto one of the small mounds in the centre, he is jumping up and down, working up a rhythm with his whole body raised and lowered in tandem so that a jolt seems to rivet through his frame each time his feet slam into the concrete. When he runs back through to the steep part of the slope a mature woman with blonde hair, a salmon pink ruffled skirt and a white blouse bandaged around her breasts, moves unevenly to the top of the rim and hoists the boy up with his outstretched arms. At the top he jumps up and down once again and then rolls back down on his bottom with his hands to either side of him, and his feet scrambling, slowing him. Another child rolls his trycicle to the rim and when it rolls back down towards him he sits down on it. A skinny girl, older than the others, does cart-wheels back and forwards continuously up on the rim near a group of adults.
The music from the parade is making the park throb. People lie out on every patch of available space. The smells of chicken cooking are everywhere. I eat a piece of cake. The air is full of smoke and as the sun lowers, light cuts through these wafts of haze between the trees, revealing a limb, a hand, a gesture, a breathing stomach a chair-leg or dis-used polystyrene container. A man buys corn where it is being cooked on a large grill. It is put for him into a brown paper bag which he pulls half-way down immediatly as he is walking away so that his mouth can make contact with the sweet burnt corn.
Old people line the edges of the park facing outwards to the gay paraphenelia of the parade. They have deckchairs, easy chairs, stools and hard-backed chairs. Some carry umbrellas and most have elabrate sun-shades attached to their hats. Some of the women wear multi-floral headscarves which hold in place wrap-around glasses. A young black man who is very skinny and wears a neatly pressed checked shirt tucked into his belted jeans and who has on his face heavy rimmed black glasses calls down to some people from the top of the slope next to the concrete basin where the kids are still running and jumping. A thin tall elegant black woman and a fair haired man with blue track suit bottoms and a T.shirt with foreign wording on it make it up the slope holding hands and stand a little distance apart from the other man, with arms around each other.
I go down to the street again where the parade is on-going. There is a man across the road in an immaculate white suite standing by the sporting club. With all the commotion in the street -the comings and goings of trucks, sound-systems and winged men and the red head-dresses of dancing women- I am transfixed by this apparition shimmering in the distance. He is so completely still. In the park again I watch the police using a very specific hand-gesture with an open palm which looks more like an invitation but is used by them almost like a flipper to direct and/or inhibit the flow of people. A young officer with reddened cheeks and his helmet crushed down too far over his narrow head is trying to execute this gesture effectively. He keeps stopping and adjusting an earpiece. As it happens, perhaps because the command keeps changing so regularly, the special flipper gesture floats a certain section through and all of a sudden, almost randomly inhibits the entry of this person or that, who simply flow around the edges of his flipper hand or wait a moment until the order reverses in on itself and helplessly he lets the built up surge flow through. He looks hastily from right to left at his co-workers who are busy becoming gates and levies all of their own. Then suddenly a rigid panel up ahead is formed with layer upon layer of uniformed bodies that seal off the top of the road as the truck rolls to a halt and again the procession is jolted out of any continuous motion- compartmentalised into short "takes". One man in a puffer jacket rheels against the obstruction he faces. He reverses into a backflow through the crowd which he bombards his way through. Time passes and a back-log builds up behind the truck, of people on people. The police now begin to seperate out again streaming out from the centre line like a knot unravelling. The engine of the truck engages.
Across the park by the side of the canal there are black metal steps that spiral up to the level above where the road just past the junction spans across the water. These stairways are blocked off from ground level with a large wooden board tied to either end of the bannisters and resting on the grass. Up above on the bridge a policeman has his back to the black metal gates. People are entering and leavng the park through a tiny slit in the greenery. I pass through as well and stand watching people trailing off along a narrow path in single file next to the water on which some boats are also moving.
Walking back down a side street far from the parade I stop outside a pub for a guinness. There is a woman sitting by the side of the road with her head in her hands. She stays like that and does not change her position all the time I am there. Her hair is over her face. As I pass her later on I see a transparent tube coming out from a square blue hip bag by her side and feeding across her chest into her mouth.
Sunday, 30 August 2009
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 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.
Friday, 28 August 2009
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
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
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.
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.
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