Streets, 2020 and before

1

In the pandemic he took to drifting around the local streets. Never being able to walk very far, three perhaps four kilometers at most, usually walking, step by step over tarmac pavements. Occasionally being able to walk into the local woods, but never to far. His sense of responsibility and accountability was too great for him to break the terms of the quarantine in which he was living…. The rules being (Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home, If you go out, stay 2 metres (6ft) away from other people at all times, Wash your hands as soon as you get home, Do not meet others, even friends or family.) He put on his battered raincoat and turn turned right from the house onto the wet road. It was gently raining as he walked along the narrow pavement before stepping into the road and walking, looking down at the multicolored road surface. His feet seeking out the puddles of rainwater, splash splash splash. He studied the dead frog lying on the road. Killed by a car or one of the ubiquitous delivery vans that were the only regular vehicles on the streets. After he had walked about a kilometre he managed to leave the stories and characters that were haunting him behind, the streets of tokyo, the bars and bookshops of seoul, the vodka in warsaw, all vanished along with the women and meetings in hotel bars on R. , even the belvedere vodka martinis with strange women leaning against safe space bars in texas all disappearing between the footsteps along the old lane which at times was more of a stream than a road. The trees were mostly green now, the light greenness of spring beech tree leaves. left, right, left, right, left. Puddles reflecting the light grey of the sky. He recorded the sounds of his walking along the wet roads with his phone. As the stories vanish he begins to slow down. All that’s left is the soft thought that all politics began for him with a walk down a road, a path like this. The purest moment of politics, walking down a wet road avoiding people. Where the tarmac ended and the oldness of Old Shire lane became immediately apparent, the rain water running down the ruts in the road caused by people, horses and their dogs. He stopped looking down the hill before turning back and walking along a footpath through the orchard. The sheep sheltering under the apple trees. At the end he walks past a an estate of small bungalows for geriatrics his left left left. A closed community building that distributes meals on wheels to the residents. He pauses by a large puddle and looks at his phone, a set of meaningless messages which gave him no idea when he would be able to resume work. He drank some more coffee when he got home and searched through the Rabelais for the references to the 14th C plague he’d remembered during his walk. Later he put on his coat and stood next to his wife as the funeral cortege passed carrying the body of the first person to die of the plague in the close he lived in….

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2

[He had a long time to wait. It felt like a few years had passed, chaos had descended on the country in which he had lived, he left and moved to another city and now he was sitting in his house and looking out into the green, he almost found it difficult to imagine the difficulties that the old city was suffering from. ] This new city had made him learn to speak and live again, determined by the space and time of the environment. As spacetime passes he will find that the more he follows the new demands the more the socio-political and technical silences of the years before he arrived will be broken. The new capital city slowly becomes alive, the glass, concrete, brickwork and hedges begin to answer some of his latent questions. And then there are the matters relating to the woman who adopted him translating his everyday life into something unrecognizable in comparison to what was before. Perhaps she is as determinant as the city itself. What for others might be a hole in the wall has become an open invitation to investigate deeper into the day, a causal semiosis appears from the space to challenge the (public and private) neuroses that he brought with him from the east. He had brought his public neuroses, his original social imaginary with him; all the irrational moments that constituted the remnants of the society he was brought up in. In the making of these new places his own he had deliberately attempted to discard his old imaginary moments, at best he had managed to infect his imaginary with the new ideologies and instincts. It is the making up for the things that he never managed to discard, the alienness that haunts him and which had made him an occasionally useful member of the group of the secret society that he worked for and belonged to. He often felt when talking to other members that he still used language that referred to his old social imaginary, language that he couldn’t quite leave. Perhaps he would not live long enough to leave his old social imaginary behind. With the usual mix of members and friends he has occasionally embarked on an exploration of the city based on going to an agreed on street and at a given time beginning to investigate the area. Whether its Store Street or Long allay they always appeal in a diverse set of ways, it always begins with lists of businesses and purposes, classifying according to the symbolism that exceeds the lists. The words and icons on the signs matter more than the meanings the reader of the signs can imagine. Ideologies drip slowly from the Acme gallery signs, the Big data corporation sign surrounded by people leaning against the concrete wall smoking cigarettes. The number of shiny brass plaques attached to the walls strikes him in the way that the more colorful signs, in red, green and black so not. The meanings he identifies are haunted by the things that affect his new everyday life. The strangest of these districts are the virtual ones, standing in a white room with head sets wandering around the historical streets never knowing when he is walking. The signs matter more than the places they refer to, the meanings as untranslatable as the smile on the woman’s face […] In this new place the woman and the city began (a/the) process of stripping them away. Over the years he sheds his old neuroses. Though when talking with her he occasionally still uses the old proscribed language as he does with friends, over time the new forms have changed him.

3

He is in Paris and wandering around after the meetings of the day, the evaluation isn’t going well and he is looking forward to leaving tomorrow. It’s still light and he is looking at the stone and concrete walls of the houses and courtyards. The office is behind him and he has a single meeting in the morning before catching a midday train. He can see the sighs and signs of dying businesses, the end of skills wafting past him on the breeze […] The icon for the old post-office on the wall outside the bookshop seems a bizarrely unnecessary way of announcing the void that driftworks its way out of the bookshop, whose only things of value are a few books that smell of newness, values and the scent of new weapons being offered glinting in the shadows (the shop window has a display made up of terrible bookstall novels that will be discarded into charity shops within the year, still he will remember it for years because of the word KORA printed on the wooden stand) The few patches of sunlight reflected onto the window display from the metal on the entrance, all that remains, a temporary reference to time passing, things are always bound by entropy. (Any account of a visit can only begin to detail the mysterious and temporal nature of the things) […] He walks, walks, walks, the concepts and directions he gathers only provide the superficial aspects of his walking. He was hiding within the maelstrom of everyday life, passing through the events that affect these places and practices, the contents are instances of the division of labour, viral activities. He reacts badly as the technology messages him, the raw materials of the signs don’t help him recognize the meanings of the contents, the external meaning vanishing; the route he takes is untraceable with the touch of the off switch, the route he takes, like his thoughts are dictated by his mood which changes. Besides, he thinks that the value of these things is not in the results that may be achieved but rather in the walking itself, which changes his relationship with the world itself and touches on the limits to his ability to communicate. The secret codes that take him further away from the things around him at all times, the moments become more distanced, shrinking. What makes him feel the most pleasure at this moment are the points during his walk when he stops analyzing the everyday and instead reacts to it, using the everyday as a reason for acting, for doing something; no longer creating lists or identifying things but instead seeing things in a new way. He smiles at a woman walking towards him, he doesn’t know why, making her look startled, he wonders if she looks cautious as he dances briefly as he’s passed her by. He leaves a book on the steps of the closed church as an offering to the non-existent father. Moments that only exist in the fleeting present, that passes as he redirects his path back towards the district the hotel is in. He imagines concentrating only on the present, and yet in the autumn as things begin to collapse, only the memories of the summer remaining as jumpers and coats become heavier he finds that he is becoming sadder. Having to learn about the world again step by step as his present becomes a line of flight across cities away from a difficult and dreadful past. The signs he comes across on the way. are refraction(s) of his internal world in the glass of windows and polished brass, facades that are written into him as much as his abusive father wrote onto him. Is that why he is walking through this city whilst a few streets to his left a riot or protest is taking place ? At this time however he’d like to let them go, so that he could live with his memories in a less harmful way. He is solely interested in the present, becoming present, and acknowledging the futile nature of his past, he imagines this is an optimistic view. […] Does anything emerge from, this divergent range of memories that bounce back and forth against the buildings on this narrow street, the drunken walk of molecules passing fleetingly down the street. He stands still on a white dot painted on the street, what does this dot signify her wonders. “everything begins with a dot” kandinsky said somewhere he remembered. He steps off and walks on, his solitude will be over soon, a train ride back home, passing through the industrial farmland of northern france, solitude ends on the dot he thought. Water is running down the side of the building from a broken overflow pipe 3 or 4 floors up. It hits the stone pavement and flows quickly into the gutter and drain.

4

He wonders if the streets were laid out more to his tastes what it would be like ? Wider streets with the additional spaces for trees and hedges, small parks with more adult trees would appear instead of the concrete and stone. Today he is walking down the wilderness of Saffron Hill — in fact its where he is supposed to find an office to attend a first interview for a job — he looks up above the canyon of concrete and glass walls, to see suspended between two buildings a large led digital clock, it has london and shanghai times displayed, the third clock face has broken and contains a blinking blue image of an eye, he feels liberated by the rhythm analysis and feels he could ask for nothing more. He walks down the hill and never attends the interview. He is staying in an AirBnb studio flat rented by the travel secretary (he has made a note that he will not blindly accept her corporate policy recommendations again, he never does.) In keeping with the AirBnb aesthetic that is filling the world it has Ikea furniture and perhaps some of the owners castoffs. The corridor and stairs between the landing and the ground floor transforms the empty corridors into a territory ready for exploration. The combined living room, bedroom and kitchen is big enough to dance and sing in, as long as its reasonably static, is dominated by a large bed, a table with four ikea dining chairs, that doubles as a desk. and a dark blue sofa that is a bit too small for someone as tall as him, and a chair that sits in the window. There is a radio and cd/dvd played beneath the television fixed to the wall. He’d bought a few jazz and modern classical music cds to listen too whilst he’d been here from a music shop he’d come across whilst walking. The sound of the music made it into a more private place that enabled him to live more easily, he had managed to avoid having anyone from work, colleagues local or from London in the studio flat. They instead had met in restaurants and brasseries after-work, or in cafe bars near the office drinking coffee and eating croissants standing chatting at the varnished oak bar with brass corners. A few nights ago when he was finally alone he had paced up and down whilst trying to write a particularly difficult report that he needed to send to London, a half drunk bottle of white wine he’d inherited from the restaurant besides the cd player, as he pivoted at the end of pacing he noticed that there were no boundaries in the space of the studio, it was all a fuzzy space, each of the three areas have only a fuzzy porous boundary between them, one which moved according to his mood and need. This recognition of the fuzziness released him from the bureaucratic hold of the days meetings, (which had lasted from 9 till 5,) and enabled him to write the fuzzy negation that the proposals they had been discussing , been briefed on required. It was the first time that he ever used the term in a semi-public space. Outside the windows he can see the brick and windows of the buildings across the street, with masts and ariels on the roofs and balconies. The external walls are either shades of brick, white or grey much as they are in any major western city. He makes tea and thinks about packing for his morning trek to the station, the tea distracts him and he leans out of the window when a car noisily crashes into the building opposite. A woman on the first floor opposite dressed only in her underwear leans out of the window to see what had happened. The driver gets out of the car, grabs a bag and runs off down the street. The ideals and places that people share fade in the potential of situations. The few days he’s been living there have passed and he’s pleased to be escaping from the cramped space. When he returns to his house, the life with the woman and the children he will have unknowingly shed another neurosis, left behind on the streets of the city..