The Figure Skating Event

by Lawrence McDonald
Fall 1996

Extension of the body in space

A single shower of glittering spray, all that remains of the angels great fall. Down deep, a frozen descent, a realm of ice, a white void waiting to be conquered, waiting to be ruled. She ran her fingers along the black laces, smoothing them out perfectly,. Each end precisely twined through the holes, no hesitation. Like the most beautiful Lucifer, his image vanishing beneath a cascade of scales and coils that became his flesh, she too descended into new form. No sparkles, no vibrant hues, no medal winning smile with gleaming white inside. Black leather, bare legs. She set out to conquer the ice, to make it more than just a canvas, to make it her slave, a landscape that would absorb the slices, the grooves, the digs of her blades and would yield with each swift turn and spin. She would not offer it the devotion of grace, only that passion that erupts from some dark place in each of us...

"Chaos does not exist" asserts Deleuze; it is an abstraction, it is inseparable from a scene which makes something - something rather than nothing - emerge from it. Chaos would be a pure many, a purely disjunctive diversity, while the something is a net a pre-given unity, but instead the indefinite article that designates a certain singularity. a or an, that does not fix the identity of the noun modified. How can the many become the one? A screen has to be placed in-between them.

The Interface with Timaeus

...She breathed in deep at the gate. The cool air rushing down into her lungs and she felt it course through her body. She launched out onto the ice, a flawless, seamless beauty; so pure. It welcomed her to the challenge. Her blades cut sweetly and smoothly through the first slick layer, was flying to the center. In the heart of the rink, she dug her heel lightly into the ice; a hold that fixed her entire body still. First waming. She in turn was given her own. The buckles and straps that held the leather fragment against her breasts and groin were icy against her skin. But anticipation began to thaw her. The crowd waited silently, oddly. They watched a mistress, hair teased wildly, eyes rimmed again and again in thick black lines, her lips, thick and vicious red. A leather teddy wrapped tight, almost cruelly around the perfect, leanest body. DeRant! Almost dating the crowd to watch. A woman with black skates, more a raven than any preffy peacock that had previously skirted so daintily along the ice.

Leibniz has been able to ascribe several approximations to chaos. A cosmological approximation, chaos is the sum of all possibilities, all individual essences in so far as each tends to exist on its own account; but the screen only allows for the best combination of possibilities, or compossibles.

Leibniz's Monads Confront the Screen

She sensed the beat, heard it calling somewhere in her mind, instigating the power in her limbs and the madness in her imagination. She breathed in, knowing at the moment of exhale the beat would come and urge her on and on until the ice was a tatter of dust and shards and cuts and grooves. The bass was deep, she felt it kicking in her heart and began her trial. She gained momentum slicing around the corners in sharp and angry swift movements. Leaping up into the air, she spun and twisted wildly, tightly like some maniac left crazed in his straitjacket.

Chaos is composed of elements, each of which is extended over the following ones. This notion of extension is the first component of both Leibniz and Whitehead's definition of the event. "Extension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts."(Deleuze, p.77) This extension of parts to whole forms an infinite series that does not contain a final term nor a limit.

"Time and Space are not limits but abstract coordinates of all series, that are themselves in extension, the minute the second the tenth of a second."(Deleuze, p77) This now leads us to the properties of extensive series in the event, these too are in extension. But, extensive series, when saturated to there limits offer relations and conjunctions. These are no longer extensions! It has become something rather than nothing, but also this rather than that: no longer the indefinite article but the demonstrative pronoun. A demonstrative pronoun specifies or singles out the person or thing referred to: the demonstrative pronouns these and…that. The images below can be seen in this light as temporal sections of an event which contain intrinsic properties and characteristics unique to that particular moment -yet born in fluvia.

PREHENSION DATUMS

The Nexus of Prehension and The Individual

The crowd's whoops and whoas came and then descended into applause as she deliberately crashed her blades back into the ice. And then up again, thrashing and rigid, she beat her arms against the cold air. She caught a glimpse of a spectator's face, awe, surprise; in fact, confusion. She was attacking the ice, she was beating it down in front of their wondering faces, breaking their expectations of some pink lady with the grace of elegance and stance. She was raw energy, it surged through her muscles making them tight as she raced along. She leapt up, her legs kicking out. All of the power reaching out and out from the blades which she brought down and across on the ice. And there she looped and spun, bringing her body low approaching the challenger face to face and then brought herself back up. She brought her arms from above, flexed with fists clenched and sent them crashing down as she raced again...

The individual is creativity according to Whitehead. It is the formation of the new. It is no longer the indefinite article nor the demonstrative pronoun but a "personal mood." The individual is a concrescence of elements. Further it is a prehensions: "An element is the given, the datum of another element that prehends it by degrees. Prehension is individual unity. The vector of prehension moves from the world to the subject, from the prehended datum to the prehending one. Thus, the data of prehension are public elements, while the subject is the intimate or private that expresses intimacy & individuality. But, the datum, is itself a preexisting or coexisting prehension, such that all prehensions are prehension of prehension (See attached video stills). The event thus becomes a nexus of prehension. I.e. the entire sequence played as one continuous movement. Each new prehension becomes a datum. It becomes public." (Deleuze, p.78) We can see now that the event is the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification of another (the subjective intent/contemplation/planning of the next move, however slight) it is at once public and private -THE SKATER THINKS, THE AUDIENCE GASPS.

Teleological Records

. . . The bass and the beats pounded so loudly now, they bled into her ears, so profusely, she could hear nothing else. So loud, it became all she saw and felt and she no longer controlled her body. It was all bass and fury that moved her. She was blind beyond thought Only movement, simply spins and leaps and blades, she was the device of something higher, used to etch a bit of fire and insanity into the ice. She was numb, almost out of body, carried away by the passion. . .

Beyond the video still there is another element to the event, the Record. The record hear is a direct mapping of the skaters movements. It is the impressions and scratches left on the ice. It is an example of a physical prehension come eternal object. The scratch is a trace of what has been born in fluvia, a pure virtuality actualized in prehensions/datum's and recorded as eternal artifact and record. Figures, temporal sections and mapped traces on ice..

"determine extension and are inseparable from the process of actualization or realization into which they enter and gain a limited permanence, within the limits of the flux which creates them, or the prehensions which actualize them. They are eternal objects that have ceased becoming incarnate, just as a new thing, it has found its condition."(Deleuze, p.). The scratches represent a measurement. They are the intentional transmission of information onto the ice, albeit, a byproduct of the event, nevertheless these vectors of prehension are teleological, that is, they had a purpose and where brought about not simply by a causal relationship, but as man made artifact. Each skater, the identifiable source, will know his own record, the variance of different records is infinite.

. . . Then, agony. In full leap, in mid air, the light flooded into her eyes, hundreds of waiting eyes melted into her own. The beat had left her body, and floated somewhere above her. Her limbs felt almost sectioned off, parts amputated and sewn back in new places. Her blades, as if her claws, somehow detached from herself. The impending white god rushed faster and faster at her, its face absorbing all sense; devouring her as it gleamed its revenge for the blasphemy. Her body broke against it The crowd gasped, their voices drowning out the last of the beat The dark maiden acknowledged her defeat in front of this court's curiosity and concern. The thought of another day came in the instance before black out as peacocks and pink ladies alike glided mellifluous to lift her dark carcass from the ice.