...to limp the earth

The Basingstoke Canal

So we have returned having completed 70 miles in 4 days. I've wrecked the lower halves of both my legs but I have a head teeming with cool air and a reel of images I'm only now beginning to sort through. If I get a quiet moment, it feels as if the thing is unspooling by itself and I have to focus on something else or get lost in the deluge of images. It's a most odd feeling.

There is a kind of madness to a long walk, a madness built from repetition; and yet what returns is a true sense of time and distance, and how the two are inextricably linked. And what also returns is a true sense of geography and the shape of the reverberating land under roaring feet. Truly, this land we live in is a thing of wonder.

This entry was posted by poacher on Thursday, April 23. 2009 at 13:52. and is filed under place, nature, landscape. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog. All new comments are subject to moderation before being displayed.

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whispering dave says:
#1 2009-04-23 21:40 (Reply)
You seem to be indulging in a bit of Heidegerrianism here. The fact that you put this up on st georges day appears to be note worthy (maybe even slightly disconcerting).
I'd be interested too see where you go with this, if you are thinking of extending this piece.

Matt says:
#1.1 2009-04-23 21:58 (Reply)
You might have to expand on that dude - do you mean with a sense of grounding and coming back into contact with the soil? Yes, I suppose I am - though I would probably be a little cruder about it than Heidegger. It's a very simple notion of returning to what is important to Being (I can't cross through that, unfortunately) - Being in the double sense of becoming purely physical and reliant on the vagaries of the body and yet walking through that to another zone - a zone ripe with the smell of something older, more dense and primal.

whispering dave says:
#2 2009-04-24 14:26 (Reply)
It the elemental language that you use which drew me in ("land under roaring feet", "dense and primal"). The talk of grounding and coming back into contact with soil is also part of that I think.

I enjoy reading it, yet at the same time I find it disturbing. Something I would eventually find troubling to read.
I guess Heidegger game to mind due to the very strong sense you appear to have of groundedness.

Having known you for some time I realise Land/Place and its ability to channel some sort of memory occupies you and I admire that (in fact I would like to see more of it). Yet again I would say there is something in that type of 'being' which I would be wary of. I get a strong impression of what you are doing, and the reasons why you are doing it, but there is something implicit at work here which could get kind of messy.

Again, I would have to see more of these images and hear what you make of them before I can really make a vaild judgment.

Matt says:
#2.1 2009-05-08 16:20 (Reply)
I'd obviously have to take issue with where you're boxing me into here - the St George's Day comment and the Heidegger inference are trying to paint this as some nationalistic fervour for the land and for the soil. It might read that way (indeed, to you it clearly does) - my description of the process of walking and - if you must - being in the world - was intended to be much simpler: namely of an appreciation of the land and of being a senusal creature coming to terms with itself. That was it really - the roaring land was a geological reference if anything - a reference to a feeling of understanding the shape of the land again after spending so long looking at it through a screen (a window, a car, on the fucking telly), or simply not looking at it all - it's not some cheast-beating claim of heroism or pride.