CHAPTER TWO

Part Five

Morphology in expansion

Around a year after my invisible bodymind mappings begin, I am curious about the word history of slow.

When learning of slow etymologically, I come across the word "dilatory", a term for deliberate and strategic slowness. I can't remember ever knowing this word. At its earliest origins, dilatory's Proto-Indo-European root is "to carry" and also "to bear children". As a noun, dilatory means dilation, morphology, expansion.

I reflect on these words for many weeks. I reflect on how strongly I feel that (un)action/(in)action are vital "actions", valid movements.

I think with the idea of ""non-trivial interactivity", conceived as an open-ended and infinite interactivity capable of accommodating always new variables" (Giaccardi, 2003, pp.7-8). I reflect on "congressive strength", strength due to flexibility, "like a river altering its course to wind its way through a contoured landscape as opposed to a waterfall that just pours out" (Cheng, 2020). I think on a soft question of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, "what if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies, but rather the shape of our motions over time" (2015). I reflect on how the word growth makes me feel uncomfortable... but the word expansion doesn't.

Expansion... how I am experiencing movement in stillness feels more like a fluid duration... a growth without force. It is not movement from force (toward, away, against) but slow, soft intervals over time that creates my motion (Figure 1).

Attuning through long exposures... a slow closing of simultaneous interconnected apertures in the lens... a slow holding open of noticing is... attuning with complex bodymind affects, effects and relationships. A way of attuning that is not about keeping or owning or pinning down or solving or fixing or knowing or reducing experience. A way of noticing where experiences expand with each other and into each other and over each other. The blurring edges and intra-dimensional layering through long exposure expansion affords a diffusion of boundaries, binaries and singularities. A way of noticing complex integrations and intersectionalities and effect and affect. There are multiple moments of inflation and deflation of affect and effect. Expansions and sudden changes and sudden loss. Nothing solid or stopped or ended.

This is the movement within the paradox of solitude. Sensations of slowly filling newly emptied spaces with the affects of solitude. The bulbous, uneven expanding of the lovely and not so lovely of isolation into the now slack form that once held the rest of the world. This is how a year ago when I began centering my invisible bodymind... even though most days I could not move... I have never been more aware of and felt so much movement within me. This attuning is gently exploding tightly bound experiential aggregations into vulnerable, fragile, loose assemblages.

Assemblages.

These mappings are assemblages.

An attuning that is a gathering of all bodymind tenses, no rigid specifics.

Cripping the acts and rituals of noticing.

Beyond a binary spectrum.

More than body singularity or mindfulness control of a restricted present. 

If noticing is a lens, invisible bodymind centering is altering the functions of my lens.

I have been growing an invisible bodymind research lens within me.

Illness makes a research lens within you.

The aperture of a lens is where the light comes in.

Invisible bodymind noticing grows multiple apertures.

My invisible bodymind centred lens grows multiple lenses inside of it.

My growing invisible bodymind lenses are relational.

I notice through and with the interdependent.

Assemblages... of attunement.

I like naming things.

Rendering  dilatory strategic slowness as an expansive and morphological quality affords me nuanced delicate elasticity into my interpretations, understandings, actions and possible explorations of my invisible bodymind and everyday unseens.  I embraced slowness, my crip time, as a bodymind membrane of self-defense... but slowness makes it possible for me to start really absorbing the reception of invisible bodymind complexity. My assemblages of attunement affords me a complex pulsing place of access to my full often overwhelming self. A self... myself... is a body that is still. A body that is in bed. The scale of the bed is the scale of the body. But it is not the scale of the bodymind.

All of my expansions emerge from centering a very  small, tiny, almost unseeable dot in the middle of the big moving visible world. 

Centering my invisible bodymind has given me so much.

It was not meant to.

It was a way to embed invisible bodymind as an onto-epistemology inside myself.

A way to eat it and metabolise it.

Make it part of my gut flora.

Make it spread throughout my micro-organisms.

Leak into my blood, my heart, my eyes, my brain, my hands, my tongue. 

And all of these are in-movement.

In-movement.

In-movement.

Within my invisible bodymind, I sense and feel many interrelational movements that are not traveling inbetween two opposites but are experiential entanglements that have intense simultaneous multi-biological and metaphysical confluences  that join and collapse and affect and effect and reconfigure severely. Thresholds and  boundaries that are erupting and dissolving all of the  time. A centre that is in-movement (Figure 2).

Deleuze writes that "[...] it's not beginnings and ends that count, but middles. Things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle, and that's where you have to get to work. That's where everything unfolds" (1995, p.160).  In centering, it is not the centre that is meaningful. It is the movement within the point, place, middle that is meaningful.

My centre is a writhing pile of spitfire caterpillars. My centre is intangible, loosely orbiting murmurations. My centre is emerging living ecologies: organic and generative.

I am a vague, uncertain, unstable, invisible bodymind.

I am an uncertain variable.

A non-binary, unpredictable, fuzzy logic.