top of page

Continuum

So we imagine some sort of continuum

Like for example, the sanity-insanity continuum

on which any somebody can be observed oscillating between

  • A now, closer to the insanity spectrum, for example because of a divorce or other emotional stress factor, or bio-chemical imbalance.

  • A then, closer to the sanity spectrum, keeping it all nicely together, Well
    inside the socially accepted modes
    of behaviour.

 

A continuum

 

Which we can picture in our minds eye

To be some sort of line a floating line on

a canvas or other confined two-dimensional space

Or, perhaps, in 3D, as a tube, stretched out yet spherical, a volume, an empty-full space. 

Itself contained within another space.

This sphere, like a cell with an inside and

an outside, and a membrane, functioning both to mark it’s limits and to exchange information between it’s inside and outside.

The inside of this sphere, a belly, both empty and filled with other spheres. As in, spheres within spheres. In this way, perhaps, mirror-ing the empty but filled vacuum of our galaxy, and the many galaxies beyond. Sphere within sphere. Micro as macro. 

 

However, this sphere still a metaphor.

A visual, nevertheless bodily felt, representation of that continuum.

 

A continuum of what?

Of 2 polarities existing usually within a same conceptual tension field.

Zum beispiel:

  • Solidity and fluidity

  • Movement and static

  • patterns and new pathways

  • repetition and singularity

  • meandering and channeling

  • Silence and sound

  • Gravity and weightlesness

  • Continuity and discontinuity

  • Stream and obstruction

  • Open field narrow field

  • Meaningfullness and nonsense

  • Musical and non-musical

  • Absence and presence.

 

Now imagine the word ‘YET’

As in

Solid YET Fluid

Silent YET Resounding

 

Can we also imagine a continuum of polarities in a cross-disciplinal context?

Across conceptual fields of knowledge?

Zum beispiel:

  • Rhythmical Pulsation and ‘discontinuity’

  • Thinking and drumming

 

And on this perpetuum continuum

oscillation between those polarities. 

Or would it rather be the continuum itself being created through oscillation?

What came first, the oscillation or the continuum as a concept? 

Can we separate the continuum from the activity of the oscillation? 

Does oscillation equals continuum?

 

Do we oscillate by nature, on the rhythms

of our in and out breaths, our circadian rhythms, our cardiac rhythms, the ebbs

and flows of our sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems?

Did our bodies create this complex internal network, this polyphony of systolic movements, based upon the blueprint of

our palpitating one-cell ancestors?

Now expanding and opening up to the world.

Then contracting, taking in information from outside, and processing what has been internalised.

Breathe in, breathe out. Open close.

Close open. 

​

Warm and cold.

How does that systolic expansion-contraction movement relate to us being both warm and cold beings?

Sometimes open to the world, then again closing down to it. 

Then, does this flow, this movement of pulsations, also regulates the rhythms of our intimacies?

 

Organs of perception.

Do we grow a new organ for each new perception, as Goethe imagined, or do we need a cognition of some sort, to be able to perceive in the first place?

Perceptions that completely fall outside of the reach of our perceptive organs are impossible. Yet, many creatures that we share our bios with, perceive differently,

and in a multiplicity of ways, depending on the existence and specific qualities of their organs of perception.

 

And who says, a rock can’t be aware of  

your presence?

Can we truly claim to know something, let alone someone, not in the least ourselves? 

How do we know? How do we know that

we know? 

Do things perform their full existence for us? 

Are we even capable of experiencing the

full existence of something, even if it would perform its totality to us? 

Does something reveal itself not also in the way it resists being known to us? In the way it retracts unto itself, in the way it does not perform its existence to us? 

Pulsating in the silent emptiness it creates. 

Cold to us. But there. Present in its absence.

 

Resonance.

Because we are resonant beings, with organs build to resonate with vibrations

both inside and outside of us.

Everything pulsation. 

The language of connection, resonance.

 

Resonance not only performed but left as

a trace, through our resistances to perform. 

We resonate in our invisibilities, our retractions, as much as in our presences

and performances.

In what way are our resistances and

frictions sources of information?

 

Can we be still, silent, static, unmoving,

yet resonating?

Can we just be merely receptacles? 

 

How do we regulate our wellbeing?

How do we create and maintain

psycho-emotional homeostasis?

  • Our bio-ecological (pré-)condition for wellbeing. 

  • Our reservoir, our mythological-biological-archeological basin,from which we operate, and collectively enact our realities and shared experiences.

 

Are we to be neutral multitools?

This Eastern idea of a hollow reed? Channeling before expressing?

Or are we not so neutral? Are the tensions we hold and keep, sometimes treasure, inside of us, maintain as a reference,

are those tensions, resistances, frictions, sources of information and articulation?

​

A constellation

Imagine an interplay of more than two spheres, so instead of a continuum,

we imagine a constellation.

A constellation of spheres, each sphere distinct, relating to the other spheres through magnetisms, physical forces that keep the constellation together, like gravitational forces in a solar system.

Yet each sphere distinct, with each its own bios and atmospheres, not necessarily able to communicate all those specifics with

the specifics in the other spheres, yet all interconnected, within a unifying resonance field.

 

Consider 

  • my basdrum and objects set up as

  • a constellation.

  • Any toolset as a constellation

  • A drumset

  • A violin with a bow, but also your

  • hands, ears, chin, skin.

  • Fingers, hands, keyboard, stream of thoughts, words, symbols.

 

Modalities of resonance

 

Now imagine weaving threads transversally, between spheres in a given constellation, connecting dots into a pattern.

Or let’s consider stitching, returning to

the same place, again and again, creating

a knot, a near-field pattern, a repetition,

a carving out by returning to the same place, again and again. Each return slightly different than the other, yet creating a multi-layered, often revisited inhabited sphere.

 

Can a given condition, experienced in

a sphere, on a given line or in a given constellation, be experienced simultaneously with a supposed opposite sphere at the same moment, on the same line or in another place in the constellation?

Like a yin and yang thing, the one extreme always containing a grain of the other extreme. Like the blackest colour black, containing some white inside of it.

 

Can we make an imaginative LEAP when we find ourselves in one sphere on a continuum or in a constellation, felt as a gestalt, to an opposed conceptual place, with it’s own gestalt, connecting by this leap, a break in our current continuum, a jump to another sphere or continuum, connected in the constellation we experience, and in doing so MERGE both gestalts for a more detailed and nuanced experiential field? 

Is this a way to look at experiencing multiple time-zones or time signatures, poly-tonality, micro-tonality, multiple patterns, simultaneously?

bottom of page