Will Self: Walking is political

"She stumbles through the city streets, her eyes now unfocused – absorbing a confusion of grey, brown and red parallelograms, that she knows to be crushingly weighty, and yet which she feels to be as insubstantial as dandelion spores – and now locked on the faces of those others who pass by her with such fixity that, if she concentrates on a single physiognomy, she senses that with only a little further effort she would be able to deduce everything about that individual: his age, occupation, sexual history, political affiliations, the names of his family and friends. For milliseconds she is transfixed by the uniqueness of his personality – and then he is subsumed once more into the crowd. In the roadway beside her the traffic courses: buses whoosh, lorries grind, cars bounce, motorcycles swerve – yet there is no mechanical noise at all, these steely parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage to the accompaniment of electronic peeps, beeps, burbles and thrums – a soundtrack that our walker can choreograph all the traffic to, human and vehicular, her deft, darting eyes seamlessly stitching order out of the chaos so that everything around her skips to her divinely ordained beat. She is completely lost: she could not tell you the name of a single street or notable building.

She is disoriented – and yet her progress is a perfectly plotted trajectory through urban space: she looks into the glowing multifaceted jewel in the palm of her hand and here other parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage in response to the tweezer motions and baton-flicks of her fingers. It tells her where to go, the jewel, and when she places it to her ear it speaks to her, so that in turn she can command her own faltering legs to carry her to the right, to the left, straight ahead, until at last there is a face she recognises – or does she? Unbidden, his age, his occupation, his sexual history, his political affiliations, the names of his family and friends all come to her. And yet in the milliseconds before they intercept one another she is transfixed by an awful sense of the stereotypy of his personality – then he is mercifully released from the crowd and into her arms. "Sorry I'm late," she puffs – she knows she is precisely three kilos overweight. "It was miles to get here from the tube." She has, in fact, walked exactly 723 metres.

I hope the above will be taken for what it is: a lightly poeticised account of the mental state of an average young woman negotiating her way through the urban environment. Her responses to her fellow city dwellers, to the road traffic, to the business of finding her way using a handheld GPS system while listening to music on her MP3 player are all quite normal, and yet, set down like this they seem to me to be indisputably analogous to a clinically defined psychotic state. Like a sufferer from psychosis, our young woman's conception of reality radically diverges from her environment: she is surrounded by actual buildings, with a defined and apprehensible nomenclature; the people she passes are neither clones nor individually known to her but a mass of strangers; neither these people, nor their vehicles are moving in synch with the music she listens to; and finally: her perception of distance is distorted, while her ability to negotiate her environment is dependent on systems external to her own mind that, for all their technical efficacy, are as opaque to her as the magical rituals of a shaman. Indeed, so long as the rendezvous with her boyfriend is made, it would make no difference to our young woman if it were effected by her consulting a fetish, or flinging a handful of bones on to the pavement and directing her footsteps in accordance with their arrangement."

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A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/30/will-self-walking-cities-foot?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038