Muddling the chronology
Freedom is here not linked to human volition, nor is it allied to internationality or agency. Freedom is instead allied to the in-act, to the decisional force of movement-moving, to the agencement that opens the event to the fullness of its potential. Freedom is how the event expresses its complexity, in the event.
Manning, 2016, p.23
The dock in Woodchip Forest offers precisely the kind of vantage point that lends itself to beautiful nature photography. It is also entirely ignored by children, who lay on their bellies at the edge of the dock to poke at the iced-over wooden planks.
After a few minutes, the children move from the dock to nearby shrubbery, and begin to walk in circles around the small trees.
Once, twice, again, again. The line of children stretches, muddling the chronology of who first started this ritual. Speed slows, as children hesitate in search of already-made footsteps to step in.
Heads duck, and bodies bend as pom-poms and hoods get stuck on branches. There is improvisational choreography orchestrated by a moment.
I am returning again and again to Erin Manning (The Minor Gesture, 2016) speaking of the pull of the terminus, improvisational quality of responses, affective complexity of event: “the dynamic intensity of the event’s unfolding <…> affects us, moves us, directs us, but it does not belong to us. Freedom is transversal to the human: it cuts across human experience but is not defined by it” (p. 25).
The inception of the work, that mysterious stage… a feeling begins to connect itself to an image that will express it, and that image leads to an idea, until now half-formed, that begins to find words for itself, and the words lead to other words that make new images,.. characters of a story, who are doing things that express the underlying feelings and ideas that are now resonating with each other…
Le Guin, 1987, p. 8
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