In general, it is walking through the streets of a city, un-named, overdressed, that I traverse the space between who I am and who I feel I can become. I tap into a specific freedom- the freedom from identities and narratives, from all I have and have not accomplished thus far.
When this all-important freedom is held from me I begin to panic, I begin to see cages everywhere. Perhaps it is because the freedom to walk is also, on some level, the freedom to transcend myself. In order to be better, to be higher, to be less anxious, to understand things deeper, I must change “habits, not only of thinking but of being.” To be unable wander is to be unable to escape a bad habit, an anxious thought, a bad mood.
I begin to see captors everywhere, I crave solitude like water- If I cannot be alone and free outside, at least let me sink into a cave of loneliness, at least let me find some city street inside of myself to linger on, some fantasy to take me away.
This morning my partner awoke earlier than normal and I thought- why are you awake! You have the whole world, if you need it! Could you not have given me at least the morning! Don’t you know it is all I have to call my own!
Desperate for ownership, for private property in the form of time, I left the house to go to a café- but as soon as I hit the street I was overcome with sorrow. I remembered that it was my body I wanted to escape, not her. I rushed back home, to say a kinder goodbye, so as not to start the day running from love.
Loneliness is not freedom, and I must remember that in months such as this, when freedom is difficult to achieve and I would accept much less in its place.
A while ago my friend Anna made a video review of Rebeccas Solnit’s “Wanderlust”.
They were disappointed by it, for its complete lack of disability awareness- How can you talk about the political and cultural significance of walking without any awareness of those who cannot walk?
The video was excelently argued and I appreciated my friend for once again reasserting the importance of recognising the reality of my body as well as theirs- and yet it saddened me.
As I read Wanderlust there was a tension in my mind- I was aware, of course, that I could not walk the Camino de Santiago, that my weekly routine does not involve hiking the hills, getting lost in wildflower fields, communing with the earth or the city through the patter of my feet for hours and hours at a time.
And yet, as I read, I believed that it could be my reality- I believed that there was no real difference between Solnit’s body and my own, that perhaps the reason I did not walk was because I had not yet read this book on walking, not yet understood what it meant to walk. That my problem had been ignorance rather than illness.
Just as women raised on men’s literature might find that they read all text in the voice of a theoretical man, or a person of colour might observe that the “reader” in their head is the voice of the hegemonic white person - I realise now that my ‘reading self’ is not disabled.
When I read a text, I do not bring my body to the experience, I do not bring the truth of my experience of the world.
I accept the premise of literature without question- that the character’s body will do whatever they ask it, and that I, the reader, do not need this explained to me, because that has been my experience too.
In other words, when Solnit says “You know when you walk for miles and you start to feel calm?” my mind says “Yes, Rebecca, of course I do”.
And then, more insidiously, my mind later suggests to me - “Rebecca says I would feel better if I walked more, I must do that, I must get the train to Greystones and walk all the way to Bray. Then I will make films about it, and write better novels”.
It is very difficult to see the facts of one’s life when your mind reads as another.
The tension is heightened by the fact that I really do love walking, that it really is a quick ticket for me to enter euphoria. Coming home from Spain to Dublin, at that special time when Spring is busting out all over this lovely city, I felt I was returning to a lover's embrace. I thought we would lie together, run around together, show each other with delight and intimacy all we have become in our time apart. On one of my few walks this month I listened to the song never my love, and felt affection swelling as if for a person. But it was for a place, a place that is as much a feeling of movement as a set of stones. A place that has been alluding me all month, driving me, frankly, bonkers.
Dublin is nothing if not a walkable city. Unlike the large car-filled cities of America, there are no “strip malls” or suburbs or widely dispersed neighbourhoods at opposing ends of long residential roads- nobody I know drives because we never really had to learn. It is a European city in its most typical sense, it is also a Viking city built on a river, it is also a Georgian city of brick houses and cobblestones. The centre is small and ancient and full of ghosts.
To be a Dubliner, said Frank Delaney in his series “Re:Joyce”, is to have James Joyce’s Ulysees as your birthright.
Like Fanon or Saïd, his life’s work was in taking language back for his own people, undoing the colonial brainwashing endemic in the english language by writing something profoundly Irish, profoundly Dublin, with long, meandering sentences and flights of fantasy- as though he was breaking away from the confines of language on foot, twisting and turning around our streets so as to lose the coloniser, always hot on his tails.
The freedom with which he wrote about Dublin (a city which was straining to be free- from British rule, from theocracy, from its own ambience of personal and sexual repression) was bound up in movement- he is free from the constraints of english grammar and traditional literary style, but his characters too are unbound, untethered, always on the move.
Dublin is an old city and in some ways a sad city- it has a misty quality, a perpetual autumn, a magic that is neither light nor dark- But it is also a euphoric city, an exciting city, a literary city; these aspects are better found on foot.
Years ago I visited Anna in London. I also spent much of that trip walking. We walked together, and when they didn’t want to walk anymore (or couldn’t), I walked alone. I walked with a journal. I walked in circles.
I walked the routes of Mrs Dalloway and Virginia Woolf herself.
It was September and I came upon a version of myself that I liked- out of context, in the city of The Bloomsbury Set and the portobello road market, where the light seemed so bright and where there was a wonder and beauty around each corner. I was one with that city and I was more beautiful and wonderful and ancient because of it. If London felt miraculous then I too felt miraculous because I was part of London. There were no boundaries between the woman walker and the city she walks.
It is a feeling I have heard people describe in nature- that among the trees one feels themselves melt into the ecosystem of things. But a city too is an ecosystem, in a sense.
Our bodies, perhaps, could survive without one another.
But who I am could not exist outside of the stylish old women and the coffee shops and the history.
In style and banter and inspiration-
Symbiosis.
I flaneuse-d around London all week long and had the time of my life.
And then I spent the rest of September, October, and November in bed.
I remember it well, it was one of the longest crashes I’ve had- it lead me right up to Christmas of 2018, when I finally rallied, and bleached my hair on news years day because I was sick of my sick self and my image and being a child and I wanted to be someone better and cut the ties and if I couldn’t walk away from where I was then at least perhaps I could look in the mirror and see a new place, a new person, and feel that I was getting somewhere.
The writer in my imagination wants to write a book of essays like Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust” or Peter Sir’s “Intimate City”.
I want to write something like Anais Nin’s “A spy in the House of Love”, I want to write Sabina flying through New York like a firebird- I want to write a Mrs Dalloway, I want to be Deborah Levy carrying a bunch of Daffodils through the bustling metropolis on her ebike.
Those are the books that to me are graced with the divine- I want to read not just about a character and a drama and a mystery but an ecosystem-
give me the feeling of wind in my hair! of harmony! of the sun shining on Il Fornaio as people pile onto the ha’penny bridge! of the woman who tells you she likes your hat! and the birds cooing in the Blessington street basin! and the music that used to sing in dissonance out of every window of the DIT conservatory before it shut down! before yet another piece of real goddamn life was removed from between the hotels! I want to read and write a city dissapearing! I want to love it! one day I will grow old and die! one day Dublin will just be multinationals and hotels!!! we are slipping away from each other, and we never even had the chance to be together, not truly!! not freely!!
Anyway, I want to write all that, but I’m deluding myself when I wax on about the city, because there’s the other bit. There’s the long fucking in between. when I am neither here nor there- when the flâneuse disappears, and only the flesh remains.
I want my soul to be with me always. I want to feel the narrator inside me, and I want her to know me, and stay with me, and narrate me home the way she narrates me when I fly.
I want her voice, mid-atlantic northside, gentle, to say and then I must go to bed.
I want her with me, noticing the light as it dies in my bedroom, feeling the rhythm of cities and peoples through the songs that waft in the open windows. The smell of spring that reaches the apartment.
Oh, friend, I am exhausted after a month of losing myself. Of every day having to find myself all over again. Knowing that sometimes I lie just around a sunlight corner- but one that I cannot reach on foot. That I am out there but “I” am in here.
My best shot is to hope that I can find through some sort of practice, a consistent feeling of that freedom, of that possibility, of me.
I cannot control my body, or at least not entirely. I used to think I could “fix” myself, now I see that this is impossible (the notion of needing to be fixed is also ableist; it is also however a reasonable thing to want and therein lies one of the great chasms between the politics of having a sick body and the actual reality of it, but that’s a topic for another letter). But one can take better care of their inner landscape. Pedestrianise, plant flowers, speak in dulcet tones.
I don’t know how to help my inner world become more beautiful- how to make it a sun filled piazza, how to plant cherry blossoms on the corners, how to make it the kind of place that makes me feel alive, free, propelling ever forward, a human with a life to live, that is my job.
What I love about walking in a city is how connected I feel to reality. I see my fellow human, I see the world, not as it is in the news or online, all bitter and despairing, but real, nuanced, fresh.
The greatest task towards a better self is better awareness. To see the truth in an era in which delusion is far easier. I want to be as unequivocally enchanted by the truth that lies before me on my meandering paths through life as I am of those I pass on the street.
If there is a writer who will teach me the philosophy of such attention, it may not be Solnit or Sirr. It may have to be me.
If there is one thing I know for sure, though, it’s that it’s a mistake to think freedom means walking that path alone.
I am grateful to have you here, walking beside me.
Yours,
Feargha