pulse #1

// this is a pulse journal //


i took several walks around the village, trying to pay attention to what things attracted me. i found myself being reluctant to follow any paths that i know well or normally use. my mind ran in front of me and comptemplated where i was going before i was going there, and what the route would be. my directions started to loosen themselves from the places i was heading, but became dependent on steps i had not yet taken. whether this meant walking a little further into the road than i normally do down a particular street, or turning left when i usually turn right, to force myself to think of another route to get to my eventual destination that would be very different than the one i am used to. this process of navigation lead me to think much more about the village as a whole; but more specifically, it got to me thinking about the process of carving out communal pathways, around which narratives are built.

as i walked around, i meditated on the history of the gound upon which i was traveling, ground which up to that point had had very little interaction with my feet, and the moments during which that space became part of many people's life stories. what each place means to a multitude of people was a thought that struck me: several moments, all simultaneously existing within a space, are fixed, and fluid, within the memories and histories of individuals and groups of people.

i thought about the dirt on the ground, and how much the earth has absorbed from the generations of people living up on it. i am wondering about how the earth keeps record of our involvement with it, and how we keep record of our involvement with others in certain places.

i started to think about the actual records of places, the visual drawings of the spaces we inhabit and how these images become standardized in our mind's as ways of locus representation.

i then attempted constructing local maps in my mind's eye using this experiencial knowledge supplementation for the construction, and specifically trying to disregard my previous knowledge of actual maps of the area. the images created in my mind's eye were very different than how i know the land "actually" is (supposedly)... this simply drew my attention to how our experience of moving within a space is apperceived differently than our representational constructions of that space...

/// this is to be continued ///