I realise that I said nothing substantive about the walk up Mt Keira in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE_05. I said nothing about the initial walk up my driveway, which later I would discover was misrecognised by our next door neighbour as the gait of an escaping burglar. Particularly suspicious was my swift exit into the nearby bush. When I returned, he was quite convinced that it hadn’t been me, that I was wearing different clothes, that I was possibly bigger and more malevolent. Of course, I know quite well that it was me, while at the same time I very much regret that I failed to make a clean escape.
Leaving all of this out is perhaps understandable, but why no mention of the green and overgrown path, the fallen tree across the start and the bits of scattered pine where the insane mountain bike jump had been – the jump that had ascended in the air from the flat, continued along at head height and then just as abruptly ended where it was poorly supported by a broken branch? And why especially no mention of the steepness of the track and the dappled light in the forest? Why nothing of the stinging nettle that grazed against my leg, the tall greenery all around and the place where the rocks slid down away precariously from the road? Not to mention the closure of Mt Keira road; it is only possible now to drive up as far as the archery centre, though I tend to more commonly walk. I could have also mentioned the track work just after the girl guide camp entrance, with each step now nicely filled with fresh dirt and the surrounding few feet of plants whipper-snipped into submission. But this only suggests further omissions.
I could make an effort to describe everything. Perhaps I should. But I won’t. I should make an effort to be concise, to say very little, but I won’t.
Instead I will continue to represent what is essentially an iterative procedure in terms of a set of narrative events. That is, each walk will be described in rather prosaic subjective experiential terms, with the odd predicable poetic observation thrown in (I wonder, for instance, whether I actually even really noticed the sea in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE_04 or just cynically employed it as a convenient conceit for inconclusively ending the piece?). Now it is not altogether wrong that I adopt this approach, because I am interested in the problem of running embodied procedures, of setting myself a task and then dutifully following my own instructions. And this is really a straightforward process. There is nothing especially inspired or ecstatically phenomenological about it. It just has to be plainly and simply done and then just as plainly and simply described. No point also in writing too much because people get bored. I am thinking of people generally, but also myself particularly. What do any of us care about the actual process of my walking? Nonetheless, I will continue to describe it. There are another five walks to go. Who knows how similar or different they can be?
Mountain bike jump (prior to falling down)