Old London Road

Work in Progress 3

Before Stage 3

Before commencing with the third day proper of my observation of this road, I've decided to go over the last two days' text and pull out any details which have particularly grabbed my attention, or which rather, I feel might well lead somewhere.

I underlined the following:

puddles...
water...
reflections...
birdsong...
conversations...
a plane flies above cutting through the sky...
the tracks left by the wheels...
going somewhere for the first time...
considering the road in terms of the changes in transport over the past few centuries...
leaving...
the sense of leaving and going to a place which was evidently so much a part of this road is not something one finds so much on roads today. Roads today carry people through and around places, they are somewhat unattached to anywhere, whereas this stretch of old road is very much linked to places. It is very much a road which takes you away from somewhere and to somewhere else...
the undulating surface of the road…
the divots and bumps…
the stones, make it a slow road...
because the hills, trees and surrounding countryside move at the same speed as you, you feel more attached to the world....
generates thoughts...
a sense of going on and on...
never really ending...
the road is always the present...
I began to participate in the road's wider landscape, both physical and temporal...
the thoughts they had as they walked or rode along arranged upon the ground in the stones just as the magnets arrange the tiny particles on tape...
writing ourselves on the ground...
will all the sounds in the distance be covered or will they be replaced by other sounds, things we can’t imagine now...
when that road has gone everything will have gone with it...
you can see yourself and inevitably the weather will change the days will become warmer, drier the puddles will dry up and take their images with them...
the landscape is using us to draw upon itself...
every footstep is made, at first at least, consciously in this place. There is a conscious act behind the steps planted in the ground...
reason to walk there...
what were those first footsteps thinking as they were planted in the soil. What languages did they speak...
it would be the sounds of the wood and the forest, the birds and the human body which planted the footsteps in the first place...
and just as we record when we walk so we also play, play the ground which passes beneath our feet...
what drove people to walk here? What was on their minds as they did so? Were they excited, nervous, lovesick, jealous, happy...
when you walk along this road, you are adding to the thousands of fragments of thoughts left on the road...
what do the gaps tell us? Good litter, left on the road, not like that dumped in amongst the hedgerows...

Having returned to the Old London Road, I then began stage 3 of my observation; Seeing in Beholding. The aim of this part of the process is to experience the being of the phenomenon by holding back our own activity. In other words one is trying to allow the phenomenon to express itself by a gesture of self-dissipation. Such an activity requires the observer to change their everyday consciousness through what Goethe called the development of 'new organs of perception.'

Stage 3 Observation

Below is what I wrote as part of this exercise.

There is a sense as I walk and see the distant hills and the horizon that the road is waking as I walk. When no-one walks upon it, it sleeps. It uses our eyes to see the world around it. What lays beyond the hills? There's a connection between our feet and our eyes. What lays beyond the horizon is hidden from everyone who walks this road, no matter what the century. The road is the people who walk it or ride it. The road is not so much a physical thing but a short trail of thoughts. The road is whatever people who travel it were/are thinking.