The Hills of Venice

Try this simple experiment.  First, find a comfortable chair. Sit in it. Really feel the sensation of being seated - the pressure of the chair on your back, on your haunches, the weight of your hands in your lap.  Relax, feel the shoulders drop under their own weight, feel yourself flow into the chair.  Now wait: thirty seconds, perhaps a minute; think about anything.  Then begin to think - don't do it - about getting up.  Think about the action required, how it will feel. Now try to observe yourself thinking, and start thinking about the sensation of thinking about getting up.  You should find yourself sinking into a pleasant loop: thinking 'I could get up any time - this very instant...but instead I'll wait a little longer and just think about it.'  And you wait a little longer, and think the same thought, and you realise that you could stay like this forever, trapped in the loop, unable to get up. And then, suddenly, you get up.
 
Why? Why at that particular moment, and no other, did you get up, when you had been sitting thinking about getting up just a little while before?  The more you try this exercise, the less it becomes obvious what triggers the final breaking out of the loop.  At various moments you are aware that you could get up, but don't; then, perhaps because you have noticed something around you, because you remembered something, for whatever reason, at that moment and no other, you got up.

Sometimes, when you are climbing a hill, you become very conscious of your feet and their placement, one after another.  You watch yourself just as you did in the chair, but this time the body is active, and part of you is making decisions every second.  Why did you put your foot exactly there next to that stone rather than on it?  Partly because of where you put your previous step - it limited the range of options to perhaps two or three positions.  Then you somehow made a quick judgement about which was best, which one you ‘wanted’.  And so it goes on, each foot determined by its past along with some internal values about where a 'good' foothold is.

A similar but less constrained experience can be had walking round Venice.  The unusual labyrinthine construction of the city means that your path becomes one of simplified choices: shall I turn down this alley, shall I take the left or right path at this junction?  What exactly it means to walk without direction in Venice, trying to walk 'at random', simply choosing the paths you 'feel' like taking, can be tested by noting your route on one day and then returning on another to repeat the experiment.  If you have observed yourself carefully as you made your previous choices it is instructive to watch how often the same basic thought processes seem to occur as if by themselves: I'll turn left here because there is an attractive gateway over there; now I'll go right no, left again, there's a puddle to the right, and so on.

In effect you are still on that hill, your choice this time limited by the streets and junctions you encounter, themselves outcomes of your past selections, with that choice narrowed down by applying a few judgements about which way is 'better'.  Whatever you do, whether you are sitting in a comfortable chair or poised on the brink of a life or death decision, you are always climbing those hills of Venice.

(27.12.93)

See also Moody Sonnets - Invisible Citizen

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