INTERVIEW

Invisible bodymind witness
If you are invisible, is your practice invisible too?

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[silence]

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Invisible bodymind
Losing the visible body... was losing the seen and understood creativity of me.
As I felt I had known it.
“Known” it. Owned it.
Expected it to be.
Where and how I expected to find it.
Where and how I expected it to move and behave on behalf of me.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
Losing how... we controlled it?

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Invisible bodymind
Yes, controlled it.
How the visible is to be controlled.
How the flesh is to be controllable.
So... losing the visible... it is a continual awareness of how I do not control.
Rupturing open wide into my invisible embodimindment is an everyday attunement of no control.
Constant relational borderless, temporal, unseeable multi-movements and responses within and of myself and Self.

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[silence]

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But... these elastic flux base experiences become deeply woven into my everyday body and brain and emotional ecology.
Invisible bodymind becomes a space of delicate and complex personal access for meaningful understandings of my experience of being alive... and I anchor it deeply into my everyday.
Invisible embodimindness... becomes a bio-ontoepistemology for me.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
“Bio” here is “biology”?

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Invisible bodymind
Yes.
But not at all bio-determinism.
And not bio-essentialism.
Bio as in my biology affects how and who I am.
Bio as in biodiversity.
As in how we are all continually many molecular scales, pluralistic systems and in-process organisms.
How these many molecular scales and pluralistic systems are interdependent, relational ecologies.
That we are interdependent, relational ecologies.
And I “centre” my constantly moving invisible ecologies.
I... place my invisible bodymind in the middle of my everyday.
I centre invisible embodimindment.
I decentre everything that is not this.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
We do this to stay safe.

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Invisible bodymind
Yes.
And to stay honest.
To my invisible bodymind needs.
This centering is born out of fear and desperation.
And now it is cultivated out of curiosity and celebration.
And from this honest weighted place I experience how, more than anything else, illness and creativity share my invisible bodymind.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
I remember.

                   

Invisible bodymind
If invisible illness is invisible embodimindness, then invisible bodymind creativity is invisible practice.
Just as my bodymind dissolved, creativity did the same.
Creativity that is told it is invisible is a social, cultural, conceptual disintegration of practice.

    
Invisible bodymind witness
And we centred this.

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Invisible bodymind
And... we centred this.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
To stay honest.

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Invisible bodymind
Yes.
And to stay safe.
Because the invisible is easy to ignore.
It can be easy to lose touch within the everyday.
I felt that I needed to embrace the invisibles.
To centre them. To notice them. To be with them.
So I could keep them.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
It... it was our first act of practice resistance.

 

Invisible bodymind
Yeah.
I take every last bit of energy I have and use it to move myself and place myself in the middle of everything.
And this centering of invisible embodimindment and creativity... dissolves learnt and implicit voices, scripts, methods, theories, disciplines and paradigms of visible practice alongside my dissolving visible body and mind.
With this disintegration went traditional disciplinary lenses, vernacular and lexicons, industrial and institutional productive time.
It dissolves loyalties to be in control and to material and materiality.

Invisible bodymind witness
Control and material is so much energy for us.

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Invisible bodymind
It dissolves the shame and worry of having no energy to control.
It dissolves the shame and worry of having no energy to form concrete, shareable creativity.
No energy to make or demand visible.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
No shiny visible practice.

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Invisible bodymind
I had learnt that creativity is most valid once seen.
Practices are validated, celebrated, once their final assemblages are seen.
But there is so much time when I am all unseen.

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[silence]

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I'm feeling a bit... too weak to keep talking.
Can we stop for today?

   

Invisible bodymind witness
Of course.
Of course.

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[many weeks later]

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Invisible bodymind
There are many types of invisible.
The invisible affects of an invisible bodymind. Of their invisible illnesses and disabilities.
The invisible of bed-boundness. House-boundness. Behind doors and walls. Never seen.
The invisible of doings that never form into shareable seeable dones.
The invisible of de-material and un-material biological labours.
The invisible of de-material and un-material and immaterial creative practices.
The invisible I once rendered myself as through the internalised decades old mantra of “hide the sick”.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
HIDE THE SICK!

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Invisible bodymind
Hide the hidden.

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[extended silence]

It is very difficult to think about that time.
To talk about that time.
The times of hiding.
I feel... so ashamed.

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[The Invisible Bodymind and Invisible Bodymind Witness hold each other for a long time]

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[silence]

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Invisible bodymind witness
The invisibility hasn't changed though?

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Invisible bodymind
No.
Not at all.
I spent most of yesterday in a dark bed.
I spent most of last week in a dark bed.
I will spend most of this year in a dark bed.
 
Invisible bodymind witness
So... what happened was…

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Invisible bodymind
What happened was the moment... movement to centre my invisible bodymind.
To critically occupy the centre... is to tear through the concept of a traditional, fixed authority or structure.

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Invisible bodymind witness
They dissolved too?

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Invisible bodymind
To critically occupy the centre dissolved hierarchies of the “well” body and of the visible body of creative practice through and with care and tenderness.

[silence]

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Moving, shifting, into invisible after visible, or through a once visible... is a kind of revealing.
It is revealing the through or behind or underneath or inbetween of the visible.
And then... embracing this as... as an embodiminded positionality for creativity... revealed how invisible embodiminded my practices are.
The more creative agency I lose of the visible, material, the more I find in the immaterial.
And I extend this towards exploring, saving, my sense of creativity.

   

Invisible bodymind witness
Because... even when we are our most invisible bodyminded... we want to practice.

 

Invisible bodymind
When I am at my most invisible bodyminded, I still want to express and create.

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[silence]

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Creative practice... is not a special place where only creativity exists or is somehow momentarily apart from who we really are.
It is always in relation to the ongoing, the constant, the everyday of us.
I want to meet myself where I am.
Where you actually are is meaningful.
How you actually do is meaningful.
Seen or unseen.
I... commit... to attuning to my constant biological shiftings and their unmutual affects.
A way of practising that is guided and connected continuously by an invisible bodymind.
Scavenging, gleaning, for agency unseen by the world, within my bed.
If my invisible biology is fragile, unstable, unpredictable, unseen... then I will create this way.
I will move towards a destabilising invisible Bodymind Event as possible creative expression.
 
Invisible bodymind witness
This has made me think of Keller Easterling's thinking with virtual action as a possible form.(1)

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Invisible bodymind
You knooow I love that thought.

 

Invisible bodymind witness
I know.

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[silence]

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Invisible bodymind
Extending... the soft Meta Design mechanics of the virtual into invisible embodiminded creativity... invisible, immaterial actions, movements, motions, flux of creativity, are, becomes... a... the form.
Intangible forms of loosely orbiting murmurations and impermanent anchorings.
Organic and generative; emergent living ecologies.
And the invisible informs me like a trans-immaterial mediator for surfacing knowledges, movements and moments of synthesis of the unseen.
The liminal is transference.
The invisible is an overlooked wild.

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Invisible bodymind witness
It is delicate, careful work.

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Invisible bodymind
Invisible embodimindment expression feels somewhere around promiscuous pluralistic navigations, asymmetric instinct and playing-by-ear.
I end up moving and noticing in the same way I feel my bodymind moves.
I only want to spend time here now, with my everyday unseens.

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[silence]

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I would say, yes.
My practice is invisible too.