I walk. People around. A lot. But are they there? Social roles, of course, keep us apart. Everybody is playing their part. You must behave. Yet, people are only seemingly there. Their bodies are there. But they are like frozen. Their vital energy is somehow absorbed elsewhere. It flows irresistibly through their eyes, hears, and fingertips towards little rainbow holes, which swallow every bit of attention while giving the illusion of vomiting on their horizon precisely what you would like to see and hear.
I also see people sporting around behind more or less fashionable windows covered in slogans about training and exercise. The body itself became such a remote and exotic object that it can be approached only as an image. The body is what you see in a mirror (or screen) and you manipulate it by manipulating its image. The body as a concept, an ideal, an illusion.
I walk. Nobody is there. Everybody has an alibi. Nobody is committing this crime against experience. Yet, it happens. Everybody seeks for purposes, goals, something to achieve or become. Intentions swarm like warms in the ground. Everybody seems to be kidnapped by this urge to do something—doesn’t really matter what. The issue is not the doing but the urge. The urge makes us blind by creating the hallucination of knowing what we’re doing and pretending to take it seriously, at face value.
I walk a little trail between the railway and a newly built neighbourhood. They forgot a stretch of nature there. Very little: some water, a few trees, random birds that colonised the new unexpected place. Nothing there is elsewhere, everything is present. Slowly but unmistakably, every leave reacts to light and warmth. Every living creature is always listening to what’s happening around them, ready to act accordingly. Sometimes to play, sometimes to chill, sometimes to run, sometimes to die. Every creature is present—except us.
Our perpetual alibi—our being always elsewhere—is our crime against nature—against our own nature. Learning how to walk in space as if walking in an energy field, ready to respond, available to move and being moved, is nothing but a process of renaturalization. We don’t need to go elsewhere. We only need to come back home—here.
Can we escape from the rainbow holes? Can we find new orbits that do not smash us into a colourful singularity of pointlessness? I do not know. I walk. I look around. From time to time, I do see other creatures moving along, playing, responding. Maybe this is the dawn of the age of sleepwalking. Or is it its dusk?
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