Future in three metaphors: one step after another

“Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step.” Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.1

1st walk: the fall

I kept my grip on the spot, my feet firmly rooted, almost glued to it. I needed to propel myself forward, but I didn’t know how. As if my body had forgotten one of its capabilities. I couldn’t even understand if the urge I felt was rational or if it was coming from my gut, or from the voices I heard urging me to fall, because the body was resisting and, when the body resists, we must listen to it, accept that resistance, that insistence on self-preservation. Or not… sometimes the body – all bodies – simply resists because it knows the place it’s in. It’s used to it, it doesn’t know how to give it the push it needs to avoid stagnating, on the verge of running out of ground under its feet. It doesn’t know that not knowing is part of the gesture it’s about to make, which is to take a step towards the open.

I took a long time to take the step that resulted in the fall. My spine and waist rippled forward in an impulse, my arms pushed the air back and, finally, I abandoned myself. Then I entered. Tearing and opening space with my body and descending at a speed that was as much the result of my weight as the gravity that was pulling me towards the center of the earth. I crossed the air and entered again, this time into another matter. Inside, darkness and a vortex rippled through every millimeter of my skin. There, it was impossible to open my eyes or breathe, yet I keep in my memory the thousands of translucent, extremely luminous, shiny black spheres that accompanied me and traveled through space in the opposite direction to the one I was following, as if they were already showing another possible one. But I was still descending, while they were rising in front of my eyes, brushing against my ears, caressing my neck, quickly flowing out through my hair, in a whirlwind close to my skin and clothes. My ears immediately accepted the apparent ambivalence of a sudden, dense silence, with the swirling vortex of a low sound caused by a body that is rapidly descending vertically. At a certain point, encircled by my surroundings, which exerted a certain pressure on my body, like a gentle resistance to my entry, I began to feel welcomed. The fall became hospitality in that environment where it would not, in fact, be possible to carry on living. An impossible hospitality. It was at that moment that the echo of that first impulse began, and then the ascent. The resistance that opposed my body won out and forced me out. My lungs sucked in all the air they could as I came back to the surface. A scream followed, eyes opened wide, and I felt the rustle of the vegetation and the current around me. So many of us had fallen into this one body! We came back to the surface and were able to continue walking, leaving only the trail of two feet in the mud of the land flanking the river, which was then swept away.

photo by Liliana Coutinhophoto by Liliana Coutinho

I walk in the city, which leaves no trace, I walk in the rivers, I walk in the villages and in the countryside. The foot lands and feels the massage given by the earth from heel to toe, and vice versa. The breath aligns with the steps, the surrounding space opens or closes depending on the balance or the excess of stimuli. I walk in easy places and others that remind me that Walking, written by Henry David Thoreau over 150 years ago, was written by a man who never had to think about the caution in which women have been instructed. When he made his way into the forest (be it the forest of trees or of cities) or into the world, he didn’t have to consider, at least in the book, whether he would meet another man who would impede his path or perhaps even his life. Everything was there, and there alone, freedom without resistance. A tale. I walk down steep slopes that hurt my feet and break my nails for hours. I curse who encouraged me to walk but didn’t warn me that it would be like this, only to tell me afterwards. My body opens up during hikes, especially the riskiest ones where no thought can come between me and the terrain. There’s nothing more to it than putting my foot down there completely, attentive to the conditions of each step. Writers, philosophers, so many have already written about this simple task of putting one foot down after the other, on new paths or those belonging to a routine that unveils the place whenever it’s done. For example, I regularly walk down an unlit path in the countryside at night, between a family home and my house. I challenge the nocturnal wild boars to move away, and I see what state the stars and the constant hills are in. Always different, although no measuring tape or scale could prove the nuances of these differences. There is always a living calm, which never quite becomes silent. Nobody gets in the way of this routine.

2nd walk: passing dialogue

Once south, I walked to the beach. It takes about an hour to get there from where I sleep.  On the way back, as I was leaving the village, I saw a very old man, thin, with sunburned skin. He must have been in his 80s or even 90s, almost in the middle of the road, but he wasn’t lost. It was as if the space belonged to him, and he was signaling to a car with his hand. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a greeting gesture to the driver or if he was asking for a ride – it seemed more like the latter. I looked at him and felt him coming towards me. He started chatting, asking me if I was heading towards Luz, telling me that it would be a long way to go, especially in the heat! He was walking in the same direction. I almost answered him quickly, at the speed with which we hurry away from people we come across without knowing who they are, so that we can follow the path we had in mind as quickly as possible, rather than the one that lies before us. However, I soon sensed that I was neither in a hurry nor did I need to run away and that he, without telling me verbally, was a little distressed by the heat and the walk he still had to do. His pace quickened to keep up with me and mine slowed to match him. Between leaving the village and arriving at his daughter’s house, a route he took regularly, he told me that he knew every corner of the land. He asked me if I knew Cama da Vaca, a rocky place next door which the locals like to talk about. It’s about a 15-minute walk from the center of the village, but I know that for some of the older fishermen it was as if it was already far away, and they even tell stories of storms that took them there. I told him yes, but I pretended not to know that there was a beach there so that he could explain more, and he said “no, ma’am!” and told me about the fishing that goes on there, the various fish that come out of it, done by young people, with a rod, because it’s difficult for older people like him to walk on the rocks. He had been a fisherman. He told me about the boat he had, how the sea was rich in fish variety and quantity, I learned what an “Alcatruz” was and how they caught octopuses with it, about the wife he had and who had him, and the work she did in restaurants – then he stopped, looked at me and said she was like me, but with glasses – and that she had passed away, and that if a daughter hadn’t been born to him, “I’d be a wretch.” “No you wouldn’t, you’d find friends!” I told him. He was surprised: “Friends? Where are they?” Hardly anyone from the village lives in the village itself anymore, only people who come and go from abroad and don’t stay, and the friends he had are almost all gone, they’ve died. He said, still affirmative and enthusiastic: “They’ve died, but many people are born in this world! Many people! I see it on TV, every day many people are born!” I said, pointing to the dried plants on the floor: “Look, we’re like plants: they die and are born, die and are born… some have to go in order for others to come…” He said: “Well, ma’am, isn’t that right? Now you’ve really said something right, we’re like plants!” And he looked at the plants as he walked. Then we passed by an international school, which I know, but once again I let him explain: the long queues of cars that form there, the children coming from all the villages and even from the city, and him never having learned a word of English. I asked him if, even though he never learned any of these languages, he sometimes spoke to foreigners and he said that he did, but that they didn’t understand each other. So I told him about a man I met many years ago, the owner of a café in a village on the other side of the national road, further inland, whom I used to see, in his 80s, riding his bicycle everywhere and chatting at length with the English, Germans, French, etc., without speaking a word of their languages. I was fascinated by those long conversations at the counter or in the shade of the reed terrace, in which one spoke one language and the other spoke another. It was the pleasure of exchange, I think. The old fisherman said, identifying a missing friend: “But did you know him? But how long have you been coming here?” There was a kind of feeling of recognition in his voice, as if he had suddenly realized that someone else remembered what he remembered. As if the space had gained density. His friend died many, many years ago. I told him about the many family outings I’d been on since I was a child. We arrived at the door of his daughter’s house, said goodbye and wished each other a pleasant day. Early in the walk, I had sensed that, as well as feeling a bit fragile to walk in that heat, he was also a person from a time when you chatted to whoever you met on the street. He said: “Look, if you were from here, I’d invite you to the café in the center of the village for a coffee and we could talk more.” He was from there, but hardly anyone else was from there anymore. Once again, he warned me that it would still be very hot until I reached Luz.  Despite this, I carried on.

3rd walk: on arrival, turn your gaze

On a very cold night, I opened Carola Saavedra’s latest book, O Manto da Noite2, which she wrote from her dreams, and came face to face with this poem by the Chilean Gabriela Mistral: “Vienes, madre, vienes, llegas, / tambien así, no llamada. / Acepta el volver a ver / y oír la noche olvidada/ en la cual quedamos huérfanos/ y sin rumbo y sin mirada.” You come, mother, you come, you arrive, even so, unbidden. Accept returning to seeing, and hearing the forgotten night, in which we were left orphans, without direction, without sight. The memory immediately takes me back to a walk almost a decade ago. I arrive very early in the morning at Gabriela Mistral’s village. Although it’s summer, it’s not a tourist hotspot, so the shared cab van, which brought me from the one-street village where I sleep, left me alone in the middle of the central square, in the Andes. The driver asked if I really wanted to stay there, I assured him, and he left. The house doors were still closed, at first, I heard a lot of silence, and soon afterwards some metallic footsteps whose sound took up the whole square told me that I was not walking alone. It was a pigeon crossing the zinc roof of the church. I stayed there and watched the village wake up. 

I went to a street which, on one side of the road, had the elementary school that also served as the home of the poet’s teacher and mother. Mistral, who lived in Lisbon’s Bairro Azul as a poet and diplomat, grew up in a small school, which was also her home, watching her mother teach. The beds, the kitchen utensils, the books, the desk, everything that was her first place of gestation, were still there. I spent a long time looking at all those objects. Across the street was the small Francisco Varela Auditorium, whose entrance was shaded by a mat of reeds, in homage to the famous neurophenomenologist and philosopher who was also born there, and whose research and life partners I met at another stage of my life. I was no longer alone, the pigeons’ footsteps were no longer heard so resoundingly, but I still felt far away from everything. Surrounding the village were mountains that didn’t allow us to have a wide horizon, but which frame and open vertically onto an immense sky of a luminosity I’ve never encountered before. I’m at the beginning, to the south of the Atacama Desert. I learned that day that two great references of Chilean culture – and beyond – were born there, on that desert edge, that simple place, with such silence, far from what we think of as the centers – cultural, economic, social – or their busy peripheries. But that was a center from which something emanates or has emanated. The centers aren’t always the ones that shout the loudest, the cities and countries that attract the most attention, either because they try to make us live in fear of what is coming or because they show themselves as places to which we aspire. We need to rediscover the living centers that may be hidden in some nook of an inland desert, or on the outskirts of any out-of-sight place.

Besides this experience of a new telluric center, these colors and the birds’ footsteps are perhaps what stuck with me the most from this walk. The steps that perhaps belong to what the American philosopher Alphonso Lingis called “the murmur of the world,” an expression by which he implied that “language is not simply a code established by convention among humans, that levels our experiences such that they can be treated as equivalent and interchangeable, but that human language has to be seen as arising out of the murmur of nature-of animals and finally of all things that are and that resound. In the sonority of our codes we communicate not only with human decoders, but with the chant and the complaint and the cacophony of nature.”3

I hear from countries where words like woman, female, diversity, discrimination are banned from official writings4 and I think about the ways of opening the door to this cacophony of nature, which lets everything that exists speak. “O que aconteceu aqui?, ela pergunta, a cidade se transformou numa praça de guerra. Pois, é isto mesmo, isto é a guerra, diz ele, vinte anos lutando contra o fascismo que tudo engole, tudo destrói. Mas porque você não vai embora?, pergunto. Ele me olha indignado, não, nós nascemos na noite, nela vivemos, morreremos nela. Ficaremos até ao final.”5 (What happened here? She asks, the city has become a war zone. Well, that’s right, it’s war, he says, twenty years fighting against the fascism that swallows everything, destroys everything. But why don’t you leave? I ask. He looks at me indignantly, no, we were born in the night, we live in it, we will die in it. We’ll stay until the end.) What future will there be after this end, this aimless orphanhood, without sight? After, or during, this fall that makes it impossible to open our eyes? Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, unlike the bird that echoed its footsteps on the zinc roof of the church, doesn’t walk, he only flies, to a place “without sight,” since he flies backwards and what he sees is the destruction of the past, impossible to repair.  Behind him, the future, an orphan night, aimless and sightless, in front of him, that is, in the past, only debris, things that have died, remains, dead plants… What future movement is possible beyond this blind movement? Can the angel practice the gesture of turning his head back and facing the future with open eyes? One day, choreographer Steve Paxton6 was interviewed by journalists before a conference he was giving in Lisbon. He said of the arduous and painstaking work of artists, of poets who open the paths of words, images and the senses (the first to be left behind in all dictatorial systems) that is to… [silence replaced by a gesture]. The gesture that echoed in place of the words was that of turning one’s head back, daring to “accept returning to seeing, and hearing the forgotten night, in which we were left orphans, without direction, without sight.” Daring to return to seeing, and hearing, to emerge from the fall, to shout and whisper, to keep alive in the flesh all the words that may no longer be spoken, and to continue, one step after another.

Translation:  Ariana Neves Machado

by Liliana Coutinho
Vou lá visitar | 19 April 2025 | Carola Saavedra, fall, future, Steve Paxton, walk