Moving in the world

I saw a short, middle-old woman in a rough blue coat walking on the street with hands behind her back. Each step she took was carefully placed, first one then the other, feet sheathed in dull-silver flats. When crossing the road she raised her hand in request to pass – a reflex, for the light was green and all car-bikes had halted. She stepped off the curb with gentleness, twisting her body and planting one foot firmly, before the other came down to meet it. From here her steps continued across the tarmac, across the street, where she stopped once more to lift herself onto the curb. I watched her proceed along the road for a short while, her back towards me, hands still clasped behind her back. Her blue coat wove in and out of the throngs of greys and blacks, a promise of peace on a stormy day. Soon enough the sight of blue was gone.

There’s a way each and every person moves through the world, restricted by both body and mind.

The body determines the base, inarguable restrictions on movement. Healthy or sick, short or tall, wide or slim, these shapes determine how one foot falls after the other, and how our arms swing by our side, or how we turn our heads at strange noises.

The mind enforces its own constraints. We turn our heads so as not to stare and keep our heads stiff, frozen, signalling ‘normal’, in case our eyes had lingered too long. Or we swing our legs wide and cast our arms about, decrying weakness and timidity – look, I’m in control. Otherwise we hunch our shoulders and keep eyes locked on the pavement, centipedal shuffling of legs carrying forward our bodies to point B as fast as can be.

The limits of mind are different in that they aren’t inarguable. They change sometimes. They change, but often they do so outside our will, or even against it – or with it, but only in some insipid way that ultimately works against it. Our actions these bounds dictate, but who dictates them?

As hackneyed as that statement is, it poses a valid question. What sits in our heads and constraints our movement? I think for a moment… then imagine a storm of concepts, ideas, affects and biases. These all whirl together and self-assemble into what seems a multi-limbed arbiter of motion. Every piece is crucial in shaping the whole, and the whole itself moves as more than all the bits put together.

What would it be to see this creature clear and plain as day? What would it be to see every bit of its body and, what’s more, understand it all? Would it be to know ourselves, and what good would that do, beyond satisfying old Socrates? What would it be to have true sight?

The voice that asks insists: if only you’d see, you’d see and all would make sense; or if not with sense your mind would fill with peace, at least, in knowing the working of things. For of late all I see is that I’m blind, so painfully blind. I see and know nothing. Not why the man across the street is hunched over and half-broken, nor why the girl with trousers flicks her bangs every so often, nor why a stranger’s eyes escape the touch of mine, and mine that do the same every time. I see nothing, I know not of anything. Everything’s muddy and mixed, much confused, twisted about with everything else and stubbornly stuck with glue. I see no one thing clear.

I realise now, writing this, that life’s a lot like post-jazz. Things happen. They’re always happening. Beginning, end, and middle – wherever, they’re always happening. Most times they happen without rhythm that’s longer than a couple beats: the pattern appears then sinks back into the mud of atonal sound. This goes on for a while and seems to be the natural state of things. But sometimes (and who knows why?) the patterns seem to last a little longer. They come, recur, and – important – they mix and reflect with each other. They twist and vary, teasing dissolution, dancing near chaos with no promise to stay, yet sometimes they do. They stay and mix in ways that make new, and new that itself has rhythm and rhyme. The effect cascades and the pattern grows, and grows, and shifts and grows, and next thing you know: it’s music.

How marvellous
How cheeky and clever
For meaning in life
To sneak up on you
Like dark before night
From shadow to light
From holding my breath
To deep breathing in
Realising that all this time
I’ve been choked, that
I’ve been blind
But now I taste air and
Feel colour on my eyes
Yet only, for a moment