A note comes over the transom from Jane Freeman, one of my regular correspondents, also walker and top artist (she did some extraordinary pictures inspired by Jane Eyre) like this,
“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.”
I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried.
Jane reminds me about William Burroughs' ‘psychogeographic practice’ described as ‘Walking on Colours.’
Let Old Bill explain,“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness. I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.” This is James Arness:
(The Thing of course is a Volkswagen Type 181, and if you think that sucker is amphibious, well good luck)
A lot the time I think I’m ‘over’ Burroughs, but then I reread something like that I think I’m not so over him after all. That passage is from “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” and appears in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985. This is a man with an actual Burroughs adding machine:
I’ve never done the walking on colours thing and I suppose I’m unlikely to, being red/green colour blind. I’d be following what I thought was a red fire engine and then I’d suddenly realize, or somebody would tell me, I was actually following a green bus. I exaggerate, but only a little.
Admittedly blue and yellow should be less of a problem.
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