Veins
Written by Indigo Walker - August 30th, 2024
I have not yet decided whether the goal of my dérive is to study this terrain or emotionally disorient myself. Debord insists that these aspects of a dérive overlap (Debord, 1958), but I am not sure that I can adequately capture them both. I’m afraid that my phobia of boredom has ruined my ability to do anything justice through observation. Perhaps I should walk out of my head more often. Forgive me the absence of any description of birdsong, traffic, or wind. What other sounds are there? They have fallen on deaf ears for too long for me to recognise them all.
It’s close enough to Spring now for the sun to be rising at this hour. I wonder if I can describe my dérive accurately enough for you to feel it rising with me. I will certainly try, but my mind may wander. It is 5.46am, the dark grey of the sky is growing lighter and I can’t see any stars. It’s dark enough that they should still be visible, but it’s as if they flee at the barest touch of the sun now. I wonder when they became so sensitive to light. Or when I became so ignorant to the sky that I forgot to miss the stars.
The emptiness of the sky is particularly jarring this morning after the rain last night. The air feels colder, dryer, evasive as I attempt to fill my lungs. The ocean had been over us in the shape of the clouds, rippling like the break of a wave. I could swim in the air, feel the water through my hair, and around my body, and find a different way of breathing. It's disappointing that it’s over now, as a storm or precipitation is favourable for a dérive (Debord, 1958). I feel I have failed somehow as the rain haunts the streets in pools on the side of the road and hollows in the pavement, giving the colours voices that I cannot translate. I am reminded of the conversations with nature in Alice Oswald’s “Dart” (Oswald, 2010) and I fight the urge to give up my dérive when the world does not converse with me in the same way.
Supposedly, the weather is only significant to a dérive if it makes one impossible (Debord, 1958), but I think that last night’s rain has drastically changed everything this morning. The dampened colour of the grey pavement contrasts violently with the protest of moss and grass and small weeds that crawl between the cracks in the cement. Fallen leaves are now transparent where they litter the path and I wonder if my dérive would work if I traced the veins of a leaf onto my map. I wonder if I would have the patience to walk each line.
Perhaps I could use the veins in my body as a guide. Stretch myself to embrace the Earth and let the leaves blow through my lungs, the birds build nests in my ears and the animals take shelter in my arteries. I wonder how my body would be immersed into nature if I left it there. Is this what it would feel like to walk a place into the body? (Chinna, 2000) If the place existed within me? Would the trees feel at home in my lungs? Would they uproot me? Would other humans splinter my bones, build me into their houses for practicality, or aesthetic? Would it be a challenge or a study to take apart the 27 bones in each of my hands and jigsaw them back together? Perhaps my body would be left alone, everything moving around me as though I am an exceptionally large fallen tree that has collapsed over the Earth. A hindrance but nothing exciting or disturbing enough to not ignore.
I stare at two motionless birds and feel ashamed of myself for assuming that I am important enough to be used. One bird’s white and black feathered wing is bent up, as though it were still mid-flight, beginning to cast a shadow larger than its body, which is no longer distinguishable beyond its one bent wing. The other bird merely a metre away is completely flat, consumed by the tarmac. No one was unsettled enough to move them, and now they are too deep to be mourned. In Dart, Oswald describes being able to see light through the skin of a ghost (Oswald, 2010) and I imagine the gold, orange light of the sunrise pouring through a glass magpie, fracturing into rainbows as it continues its flight.
I have made it to the curve of the lake. The one place in which my dérive is successfully a circle. I hadn’t noticed before how fixated we are with straight lines until I drew through them. I reflect on my uncertainty on how to follow what I perceived as the ‘rules’ of a dérive and I think that this obsession with structure must sit in the same place in all of us.
If one place were to exist inside my body, it would be this lake. I have now realised I couldn’t find it blind. The birdsong would disorient me, different species calling in different ways no onomatopoeia could replicate, birds don’t make sounds associated with letters, not in any language. For us, being lost in translation is inevitable. I place them high in the trees and attempt to catch them in my line of sight, but they are too high up and the sun is disguising them in shadows. As if the sun knows I do not deserve to witness creatures I have so determinedly ignored.
Everything is delicately reflected on the surface of the lake, the watercolour orange and pink sky, the reeds, the waterbirds, the outline of the trees is so exact that they appear to be traced in fine line. I am too far away for it to capture me. I wonder if the evasion is mutual, we share an unspoken understanding that I belong on the path.
References
Chinna, Nandi. (2002). Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain. Fremantle Press.
Debord, Guy. (1958). "Theory of the Dérive". Visual Culture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith 3: 77-81.
Oswald, Alice. (2010). Dart. Faber & Faber.
“Veins” was inspired by my own internal monologue as I went on a dérive through the neighbourhood I grew up in. A dérive encourages one to pursue an unplanned journey through space, attending, in as much detail as possible, to their surroundings. This specific attention to place enhanced my awareness of an area that I had potentially begun taking for granted. It also allowed me to explore the distinct separation between people and nature that is apparent particularly in suburbia.
- Indigo Walker