Walking Commentary
Thoughts while waiting to walk from Manchester to Rome in 2022
Evidence of absence can be hard to find. Since our minds are endlessly inquisitive and infinitely creative, belief doesn’t have to mean an absence of doubt. Agree or disagree, David Farrier suggests our signatures will remain when we will be absent. Maybe those fossilised traces will be concreted radioactive waste among middens of chicken bones wrapped in plastic but what about narrative, myth and metaphor?
I created this chapbook after my van’s side mirror was clipped and broken by a passing truck. I cursed its crossing into my lane on the narrow suburban road. Then I exchanged shards of mirror-glass tidied up from the tarmac. Perhaps I should have exchanged insurance particulars. My thinking was that the delivery truck company would have recorded the incident, establishing their driver’s culpability beyond doubt.
This chapbook started with oat milk sweetened coffee. Truth and consequences took over.
The fundamentals of graph theory, the mathematical structures that model relations between paired objects, may only have been formalised recently but lattices have been recognised since humans started to trap, build and weave.
A question like “Why have there been no great women artists?” implies inadequacy in the 50% of the human population that births everyone. One wonders if perceptions have improved since Linda Nochlin posed the question in 1971.
That a circle can’t be squared was proven in 1872. That gave rise to the metaphor of ‘squaring the circle’ to describe the impossible. You’ll recall that 22/7 aka π is transcendental and irrational; it’s a number that neither ends nor repeats. Forgetting their maths, media and politicians often talk of squaring circles when discussing crises, crises that never end but do repeat.
