in separability
what, when, whenceforth, who, why, which, without
The vibrant life of tying, rusting, salting, friction resolving it's need due to loss of molecular elasticity. Energy is dissipated and forms solidify until stormed upon. The salt crystals on the rope bite into the rope and each other. We may attend to the presence of the act of human tying in one telling of the maritime location of the knot, but the rope remains salty to the tongue, it is the telling of an other. Failed galvanization frees oxidation. But no matter how many alternatives are named or promoted at the expense of others, the rope remains salty.
The direction of the working ends of the tamper are dictated by the multiple twists and turns in the braiding of synthetic threads. A loop joining wire and rope, holding old and new, tensioning material between wooden posts set in the earth's soil. The rope's coherent tension activated by the farmer knowledgeable about the form at a time when the rope's salty character was not yet. But in terms of cognitive effort and richness of attention, the knot just ties. That is enough. It does it's job and plays its role in keeping the sheep in the right place. One sentence. A statement about why it is there. What it does. Nothing about salty any more. And that's ok.
What is of interest to me is the holding between doing and knowing. During my career of practice I have participated in extreme situations of co-habitation, in early neurosurgical rehabilitation following severe traumatic insults, where capacities of doing and knowing have severely and catastrophically altered central, peripheral and social processes engaged within material engagement and agential matter. It is from that hinterland that my inquisitiveness, troubles, worries, hopes and visions about the doing of doing and the knowing of knowing repeatedly echo and return.
Although I have experienced a phase lasting nearly a decade (c. 2002-2012) during which oppositional perspectives in terms of detail versus overview, single versus multiple, and fast versus slow durations of immersion, I have learnt about a fundamental difference in stance between i) spending effort thinking about what different narrators say or write about each other's and their own commitments and ii) (my preference) attempting to take a anthropological view of what and how the collation of diverse voices and enactments look/sound/feel/alter (and so on...) and how these embarrass (increase blood flow, awareness and insight) all too strong dominances.
I am encouraged by an open acceptance of incompleteness of views and feel sensitive to the negative effects of 'othering' and ulterior (attempted and temporary) power use. I am beginning to develop a way of conceptualizing how doing and thinking are characterised by different individuals at different times for different purposes through dynamic links - narratives, portrayals, signs, enactments and so on - that are temporarily functional, whilst never ever being exclusive or innocent of motive. Right and wrong belong to this collage. The invisible and the in visible. The inaudible and the in audible. The incorporeal and the in corporeal. These all, and many others, compel me to consider what lies beyond contemporary convention. This is a workspace on The inseparable and the In Separable, this is a workspace for inseparability.
Image: Fencing on Runde, an island hosting a bird sancturary for thousands of marine birds, hundreds of marine orthonologists, tens of farmers and their sheep, and individuals like me - momentary visitors. Twists and turns, rust and galvanisation, salty and spiky surfaces, motion in gusts and grass, immobility in knots and posts, surrounded by the North Sea, taken with one lens from one precise position and covering distances from c. 1 to 5000 meters maybe. Copyright Simon Gilbertson 2016