WALK ONE


1

. . .I leave the apartment and turn onto the busy street where I’m roused suddenly, rudely, from the domestic realm. Just a couple of blocks that’s all that separates me now from the province of a reassuring privacy – my home, a self-curated, pliant domain whose walls hold and retain the mundane traces of my rests and beats.

I start walking and my movement plays off against the street’s; I merge and intertwine with pedestrians, give in to a hidden order of unconscious corroboration that’s mysteriously personal yet distinctively shared. The pavement’s the pedestrian’s medium, the fulcrum around which internal and external urban rhythms come together. My footsteps find their natural cadence – pulse transposed to pace – the flow of my perception regulated. A metronome, but flawed, its regularity undone by the vagaries of the animated street.

I walk ahead keep moving, and conceive an unwritten unwritable sociology exploding the categories it builds – boom statistics – boom types – boom structures; an indecipherable irreducible inconceivable mess, an infinite rat-a-tat of neither/nor, of both/and; what is shared breaks up on contact, loses or gains at the moment of reception; it leaves no residue, no remainder, no pattern or model, just apparently, in what looks like normal social conduct.

Look at walking as a linear sequence, a choreography composed on the fly, through chance and encounter; the mundane presented by fleeting glances, overlaps, occasional intensities; the beads of ephemeral incidents strung out along the taut strings of consciousness. . .

 

Journal entry – November 2nd, Recife

Recife wasn’t how I expected it to be; funny the contrast between ideas and reality. Maps can be the fountain of desires and expectations feeding the imagination. Strange too that the rational and ordered can provoke its opposite, awaken supposition, wistful promise etc. We think, imagine, dream, but have to face reality sometime. Guess at some point the two should coincide. Thoughts that run ahead only end up tethered in the end.

Recife’s informal sector thrives; everyone trying to make a living, get by somehow. An economy on show turns the city inside out – opportunists and meagre opportunities laying its guts bare; its human surplus just too big, too overflowing to be accommodated.