It is November, which is rainy season in the Pacific Northwest. The daylight at this time of year never
achieves a full brightness, only dimly lighting the already grey pavement of the road and the drab concrete
structures. Everything is grey, somber and humorless, which makes it feel as though I perceive only a partial
opacity of the world, not fully illuminated, hue and saturation bars slid down so that the tint of the world is
barely distinguished. Pavement covers the earth, nature only appearing through the broken cracks of the sidewalk,
or in the weedy garden planters that litter the parking strips of the homes I walk past. Already the world is
mediated by our structures; my feet never touch real earth, only the hard concrete carpets rolled out for
humanity’s travels, built for wheels and not for feet. The walk I am on is entering its seventh mile, though the
radial distance in which I move is only a couple of square miles. I am thinking about how to write, with my feet,
the letter N. I have walked the vertical leftmost line, which comprises the letter, moving northward, and now I
must head southeast so as to write the downward diagonal of the middle portion of the letter. At the antapex I
will then turn and head straight north again, writing the final part of the letter. I chose to write a capital N
so as to be more readable, for the smaller case n when written into the block structure of the neighborhood loses
its subtle curves and becomes too obscure. Thus the word I write today becomes a necessary hybridization of
capital letter and cursive writing. The finished word, I can tell already, will be far from legible - I began my
walk too soon, and so the C is too elongated. I took a wrong turn after writing the letter I, and have had to
improvise the rest of the word ever since. The word has in essence bumped up a block, giving the word an
unevenness as if one were writing on a lined sheet of paper and suddenly mid-word jumped to the line below it. I
also forgot to complete the letter a, leaving a large gap. If I were being graded for legibility by a writing
instructor, the criticism would be heavy. I’ve mostly given up on the word being easily readable, though one I
hope might be able to work it out if they struggle through my mistakes. The thing is, this is not my word. The
word I am walking did not come from me; the message, idea, meaning, none of them are mine. The word comes from
someone else, and I am now walking it, trying my best to delicately carry this word in my bodily movement and
rolling it over in my thoughts as I write it through the urban landscape. I do not wish to put my own words
forward as an individual projection, for we are far too familiar with walking our own words, taking the standard
tropes one chooses to comprise the many-filtered lens of cogito through which to view the world and to define
others. This word I embody is a hope that emanates out of relation with others (not ‘to’ others), to allow myself
to be of service to the other, to be myself changed as I walk, recreated even in every step. If this recreation
can occur in the minute space of one person’s walk through the totality of an urban landscape, then perhaps the
world inherently carries the potential for recreation as well.
