02 April 2006

Texture is scale invariant

I suspect this natural law is a consequence of nature being made up of a seething plethora of discrete events – explosions, if you like, of activity. Each event has to start somehow – has to be triggered – and what we find in our work is that the energy that kick-starts an action/event is a tiny template or embryo of the whole action. The very final stage of the event is similar – a review or recapitulation of what has transpired, bringing the event to satisfying completion with enough power to resound into the environment and generate other events. The beginning – that tiny pre-echo – is in fact the yield – the part that catches spirit – from the air, from the earth, from the heavens, from yourself, from the other, as well as from the action itself, even though it has not yet quite happened. The event itself – the meat or body – is the celebration and flowering of this mingling or union of spirit, and the final consolidating shock at the end is the unsentimental shaking apart – the energy of the event settling into each component, leaving each the richer but also changed.

All this is natural, and has nothing to do with having an action firmly in mind before its acting out (although as a way of practising this may be a very temporary first stage). A natural action happens because of connexion – things coming together. Connexion is inevitable – and yet the consequences of this connecting are never predictable – especially if they are not resisted or manipulated. This is what we mean by joining and becoming.

The most important point I can make here is that natural means “of spirit and not of thinking.” “Texture is scale invariant” is a natural law of spirit. When spirit is roused and involved then this is how things are – richer and beyond the imagination. Real creativity has nothing to do with imagination or imagining or imaging – it's just what happens when every so often you get it right.

My teacher lives so much in this world of spirit that he's forgotten how to turn it off. This often makes his company almost unbearable – its trembling immediacy bites into one's own back-foot reality with such ferocity that it becomes difficult to breathe. Spirit is always a call to arms, the teacher's spirit especially so. What bites into you is that pre-echo which presages both the body of the interaction and the brutality of its completion.

What's interesting is that the field of an interaction – the common space – distorts a little before the actual coming together, facilitating the connexion. Almost like an air of anticipation. This is something that far precedes the pre-echo which is just the beginning of the interaction. If you can begin to connect with and feel this then your knowledge becomes fore-knowledge – what my teacher calls real intelligence.

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