CHAPTER TWO
Part Six
I like how soft this way of noticing is
Centering my invisible bodymind becomes an implicit research positionality.
It is embedded in my noticing.
It is embodiminded in my noticing.
I like how soft this way of noticing is.
I like that I follow the slight and impermanent.
I like its delicateness of curiosity and responsiveness.
Every time I open up my multiple apertures, staying with this confluence with writhing spitfires and crip time and bodymind... the middles... bodymind centres have their own expanding experiential fluid atmospheres or ecologies or weather or expressions that offer me thick assemblages of noticing. Donna Haraway names this "thick present" staying with, and that this allows us to be "entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings" (2016, p.1).
I needed to notice and not name and listen and watch and stay with for days... for months... for years from my bed... because of my bed.
Bed was where I had once hidden everything.
Bed is now where I am sharing everything from.
My bed mappings expand as assemblages of accessibility.
"An assemblage is political to the extent that those who participate in it both experiment with and experience its fabrication, fine-tune it and feel its effects, and to the extent that this participation in both these senses is indissociable from the induction of a capacity for resistance" (Stengers, Massumi & Manning, 2008). This way of attuning has fallen out of my fear and my grief. Privileging this as the everyday atmosphere of my invisible bodymind has given me agency. Assemblages of attunement give me safe experiential transparency of the hows and wheres of my relational. Relative relationality. And all of this changes what I know of myself. Changes what I know of the unseen. Changes the way I know to notice.
Assemblages take me away from, and I unlearn, unsafe lenses I once accessed to understand myself: medical, psychiatric, social, professional, disciplinary, academic, "good" body, "good" mind, "good" industrial time, the visible, the material.
I needed bed voices and bed resistance and bed advocacy and bed radicalisation.
I needed permission to stay with and generate my own bed voice.
Bed grew my own accessible bed lenses and lens-mechanics.
My assemblages are in languages and sensory modalities that support my neurosensitivities, symptoms and neurodivergence. They are visual, spatial, fluid, relational, multitudinal. Expressive more than representative. Immaterial more than material.
My assemblages are giving me agency in what I want to happen or not happen and understanding into why.
I am beginning to trust myself.
My body... is beginning to trust me.
It is what happens when I honour care and the unseen and invisible bodymind movement and time in the everyday.
It is what happens when I invite care and the unseen and invisible bodymind movement and time in the everyday.
This is now something to move with... something to follow.
Where is this following taking me?
It is not about that.
It is about the invisible bodymind taking and the following.
The letting go into the taking and the following.
My invisible bodymind is a pied piper... surfacing fierce and gentle and stumbling desire line assemblages.
I have separated myself from the world for a long time.
I have needed space and bed and slowness and darkness and quiet.
I still need them... there is no way around this fact.
But I begin to want to be with parts of the world again.