Does it all feel right?

The city is now past the pangs of a new season's birth; spring is alive! The parks are crowded at lunch time, every bench and patch of grass inhabited for at least an hour now each day. It is Friday, and I am writing at my desk with the balcony door open. The lyrics from one of Washed Out's trippiest songs are coming into my mind:

"Leaving heading eastbound

Weekend’s almost here now

It’s getting warmer outside

It all feels right

Call your friends, I’ll call mine

We’ll head out for a long ride

Sun is coming out now

It all feels right."

I want to write in this entry about exactly what feels right, and why that feeling seems so contingent to me.

In a bookshop a few weeks ago, I found a new hardcover print of Virginia Woolf's essays on London-which I did not buy because it cost £15. When I opened the book, I found this quote on the first page:

I read this on a day structured only by aimless wandering around West London. I agree, it is restful to amble at my own pace, for nothing more than my will to do so. I do not think this is true for everyone, but I really enjoy taking off with a vague idea of where I will go and finding whatever manifests along the way. 

Woolf's notion of the city attracting narratives reminds me of a concept I have been studying in my cultural criticism course, that everyone who walks in cities engages in the act of writing the space. This idea is attributed to a French philosopher, Michel de Certeau, who writes this, as he looks down on the streets of New York from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center in the early 1980's:

"The ordinary practitioners of the city life 'down below,' below the threshold at which visibility begins... they are walkers, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read." (from "Walking in the City")

He is saying that the miracle and the frustration of the city is that it produces infinite narratives that are all unreadable. Whenever someone takes a wrong turn, or discovers a shortcut, or recognizes a street name for the first time, or just treads the same tedious way as yesterday, some kind of revelation is brought to the surface of reality from the depths of the imagination.

Often something practical will structure a walk, like this day when I read that quote of Woolf's when my ultimate purpose was to meet a friend at a pub in Kensington. Along the way, other purposes subvert my plans: the levity of aimlessness is burdened by the infinite possibilities of encounters with other people, with historical sites, with fate or contingency. As I made my way to Kensington, I located the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851, now a barren field; I stumbled into a peacock sanctuary; I thought someone behind might be following me; I found Ezra Pound's old flat which a neighbor told me is selling for "much too much" [with the unspoken implication: "for a peasant like you"]. These things happen.

Site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park

10 Kensington Church Walk

What remains to be considered is the narrative constructed by such incidents. It all seems so random and not at all cohesive. I think this post itself is starting to enact my walks; aimless rambling with no declared purpose.

So I will write about some more concrete happenings. My friend Delaney visited London last weekend. I took her around to some of my favorite spots: Camden Lock, the Regent's Canal, Primrose Hill, then later Borough Market. On the canalside, we saw a soccer ball fly over our heads; it came from a garden nearby where kids began to cry (in the poshest English trills you've ever heard) "Oh no!" We tossed it back over the fence and they carried on playing. On the way back, we walked along the Southbank, where there were a few live musicians playing and a sun setting brilliantly over the river.

At the market I bought Mozzarella di Bufala, made with buffalo's milk, which turned out to be a great decision, and one that I hope to make many more times. I ate it on tomato slices with some balsamic and pepper.

There have been many moments full of wonder in the walks I have taken around London. When I write them out, they seem to me more like individual sketches rather than a continuous experience.

I am always thinking about how contingent an experience walking can seem. This sort of question was on my mind last night, when I read the Evening Standard:

"Locals told today how they rushed to save the life of a man stabbed outside a cocktail bar in Dalston. The victim, 20, was knifed by a suspected lone attacker... A witness said: 'There was a kid bleeding out. People rallied to help'... The man is in critical condition in hospital." (Evening Standard, 12 March 2015, page 6)

Contingency is what determines how we live. While the randomness and arbitrary encounters might seem exciting on the walks I have taken through London, its potential to determine mortality is terrifying.

So the conclusion of Washed Out's song seems especially relevant here-perhaps the best way to paraphrase an answer to the question I posed earlier about how walks construct narratives:

"What’s it all about?

The feeling when it all works out." 

When it does all work out, I am grateful, but I think I have to remind myself that there always remains that possibility that it will not.

But Woolf tells the reader in Mrs. Dalloway:

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun  

Nor the furious winter's rages." (lines from Shakespeare's Cymbeline)

Today, beyond my window there is a city whose heat and furious rages seem more apparent than ever, so I will go for a walk now.