the search for unconsciousness

Everything I wrote last time was untrue, especially the things that are true. They may have intellectual validity, but they don't represent what I believe, they're not what I think. At best they're a half-digested collection of gestures derived from a pretty sketchy knowledge of situationism and psychogeography. Yes there is a kind of phantom city, but I have as little interest in that as I do in the actual city. I don't participate in the actual city, and I'm only a dilettante of the phantom city. I have no passion for it, no interest in it. Besides which I'm smart enough to know that beyond the physical city, the economic city, the historical city, there are more subjective cities than people. Each community, however grossly or finely defined has its own city. And within those cities there are further divisions. And each of those cities is different on a hot sunny day in July than it is under ice in February. And anyone could tell you that.

In truth the city doesn't play much part in why I walk so much or what I find. It's the location, yes, and it's the context, but that's all. In fact, although it's like admitting defeat, or accepting age, I'd almost prefer if all my walking was in the countryside, if I could dispense with the city altogether. But even then the countryside wouldn't add any to the experience. What I'm really looking for when I walk is exactly what I look for when I write or perform. It's that fugue state where self-consciousness falls away and you become a part of the environment.

This should be a familiar theme to attentive readers. The reason I keep coming back to it is that it's so hard to describe, because the experience is always retrospective. That is, the parts of you that formulate a response to situations, that start the process of constructing memory, are switched off. It's a dissolution. You are not you any more. You are the stones underfoot, the flies, the houses, the bus on the road, the sunlight, the woman and her baby and the pram. You see and hear and smell and feel and taste, but you are not aware of these processes. Only after the fact, when your self has reasserted itself, defensive and afraid, are you aware of what just happened. It's a beautiful thing, but that beauty is solely in the recollection. It's a construct of the self, the self that was not present during the experience.

There is of course more. It is continuous with the fear of death, another consistent theme in my work. That fear of not being, that all my consciousness, past and present will stop. That there will, for me, be nothing afterwards, and that no one will ever know what it was like to be me, let alone experience anything I have. No matter how much noise I make, how articulately I convey what I feel or see, however long my words last after I'm gone, I will never experience again.

These two positions can't be reconciled. If I said that because the fugue state is experienced even retrospectively, and is therefore both an experience, and a reaffirmation of my continued existence, that would be a lie. The point of the fugue state is not that it ends and is experienced, the point is that it removes all the negatives of existence. The anxieties, the selfishness, the thoughts. No intellectual sleight of hand can get round the fact that what is desired is in effect exactly what is feared. To be, or not to be... except that one of the fears exercising Hamlet is that there might be something waiting after death.

So I walk, and I write, too often conscious, searching for unconsciousness. At the same time afraid of it.

But that's not everything. I walked for 6 hours solidly today, Friday. Last night, and even this morning, since my feet felt so battered I wasn't sure I wanted to walk at all. On Sunday I walked 5 hours, on Monday 5 and a half, on Tuesday 4 and a half, on Wednesday 6, on Thursday 7 and a half. On each day there was no choice but that at least an hour's walking was in overfamiliar places, on every day since Monday my feet have been painful for the last hour at least, and painful even after a bath and sitting down for a time. But I wouldn't change it. Although I have chores to do I'm not sure that I won't walk at least 4 hours on Saturday. I don't know why I keep doing this while I'm on holiday, and able to sleep in, read in the park, visit galleries, or who knows what else. I only know I've always walked, and that anything less than 2 hours doesn't really register as much of a walk. It's not the landscape that keeps me going. I thought it was when I lived in the countryside, but living in cities I still like to walk. Getting bored with overfamiliar places isn't the same as walking for spectacle, it's more that when things are familiar you stop engaging with them and your focus moves inwards. Novelty takes you out of yourself, and helps create an environment where fugue state is possible. Familiarity blinds you to detail, makes you generate your own stimulus, and in that self-conscious state make a fugue state so much more unlikely.

Possibly I'm only writing this for myself. Possibly because so much of this is subjectively true for me, written in terms I understand it will make no sense to anyone else. If that's the case then maybe the lies of my previous post make more sense. I believed them at the time, but then I was quite tired. I quite like my truth though. Painful facts and difficult admissions and all.