feet…
Tallis says.. The human body is an ark filled with pairs.
His feet have never been the same ever since he had gout. This was not a singular event, like having sex with the Austrian medical student in her eyrie in Notting Hill. Rather its a long chain of minor events that demanded changes in our way of living, it began with the irregular chain; >> migraines >> blood pressure >> days forgotten because of the neuological microevent it caused >> wet macular degeneration of our right eye >> blood pressure drugs causing gout brought on by drugs/alcohol >> the end of drinking >> From the existental agony of migraine to the existential agony of gout. {It’s not the hand that pre<=>presents who we are, rather its our feet enabling us to stand and walk upright. When our prehuman ancestors were expelled by our stronger cousins from the shrinking forest onto savannah. It was our feet that enabled our survival. We recognize that the foot is the window on to the mind, seeing our nature as we limp down the stairs in the middle of the night, a glass of water in our hand in the dark, spilling drops of water onto your bare foot and floor. Taking pills. ‘I really do think with my pen’ Wittgenstein wrote in a note recorded in one of his texts, ‘ ….because my head after knows nothing about what my hand is writing…’ (in vermischte bemerkungen) But as I type these words with my fingers and hand I think rather that a person’s nature is written on their feet. That my hands work on the known whilst my feet can take me to places I never imagined going to as well as the places that I planned to walk to. My fingers tapping out this word then this one and this one, are thinking in alignment with my bare feet on the wooden floor… Who re about to take me away from this keyboard.
Late afternoon, late some month or other, I need air, exercise, after sitting at a computer most of the day, its afternoon, I throw a book, notebook, penroll and a notebook computer in a bag. My regular walk around the district is too long as I need to catch a train to a meeting; the construction of a walk to the station is too hazardous to navigate. I try to take comfort in the company of my own mind, but today I am a terrible person to be with. Wandering, uninspired, brain-stuck, I find myself in the middle of four lanes of traffic on a median barely wider than a balance beam. Standing by a lampost I wait for a break in the traffic and prepare to walk towards the station, reluctantly. I need to move, but I have nowhere to go. I wait and wait and wait. It’s an extension of drift or drifting, for this is a theory of urban encounter established by the Situationists International and I am walking across a field that is beyond the edges of the urban, even if it is a human made environment. You can walk, drift in any environment at all… step, step step pace, there is much more to the pleasure of any given geopolitical space, a desert, a a steppe, a field, a common, a garden, a street than the wealth of its inhabitants or its architectural style. I leave the field by climbing over a chained gate, emerging onto a tarmac pavement and walk down a street, that could be a suburban street anywhere, and then uphill to the station. Walk along the platform, a train, south towards the meeting. Step by step//\\ The afternoon of an ex-engineer. Repetition. feet repetition…
