Figures in a Landscape, updated

I was walking along Desborough Road this morning, past the little shops and into town. You see every kind of person, it seems, from anywhere on earth. Something struck me about one man, the way he glanced at me as I passed. It seemed to say “My soul soars, but here I am stuck with this body.” He had a well-worn face, and his glasses were slightly askew. I judge him to be four-foot nine (145cm), about fifty years old; and a man who wants to walk tall and not be seen as short. He wasn’t strutting defiantly like some of the others I often see, the ones who are shorter still.

I’ve been preoccupied with writing a post to say why I’ve not been writing one. An excuse note. “Please excuse Vincent, he’s been working hard on the site, but you can’t see the results yet.” So I dreamed up another voice called Ian the Curator, and actually set up a WordPress author able to contribute guest posts, so that he could say what all this “curating” is about; how a blog extends itself to become a site—and a living museum. But Vincent would have to introduce him first, otherwise it would seem like a coup. And he might explain that Vincent is his middle name. I seriously had it in mind to separate the roles of creating and curating. As I said in a comment the other day, “All I have to do now is make every post accessible and worth the visit.” That “all” involves a sprucing-up of 640 posts. An elephant could get pregnant and give birth in less time.

One of those posts was “Cover Story”, which now begins like this:

Brian Spaeth’s been helping me design a front cover for Wayfaring. His style tends to be low-res—or even ultra low-res. I respect that, but I wanted a picture you could enter, so as to walk the paths it depicts, and see every detail. Up till June 2005, I could only gaze at enticing landscapes, and imagine wayfaring amongst them. Then in a single moment I was cured from a decades-long illness.  . . . I can do it in real life now, and the picture gave me a yearning to go there again.

Yesterday I was still editing the paragraph when K rang me from town after her shopping, to come and have lunch at the pub. I walked as usual through the playground at the back of our house and along the derelict school playground, which the County Council has now protected with high fences and left as a wilderness, theoretically awaiting redevelopment when the right buyer comes along. I was still rewriting the paragraph in my head. It came to me that I should add something: that a day will inevitably come when I can no longer walk within any landscape. Life is a season. If we are lucky, it offers a brief flowering.

And then I had to pass a point on the sidewalk where such big weeds hang out through the fence that there’s only a narrow space to pass. You could step off the kerb when someone comes the other way but cars often like to speed round the corner with reckless disregard. I saw a tall man coming the other way, walking with difficulty, supporting his weight on a stick. I hadn’t yet reached the narrowest section, so stopped while he got past the stinging-nettles. He was grateful and said it was a nice day; and then in very halting English started to talk about his affliction. He had a name for it, I think, but couldn’t pronounce it, something beginning with M. He made a hand gesture which seemed to implicate his whole body, especially his head and right wrist, which looked misshapen up to the elbow, as if poorly mended from a broken bone. He says he cannot read and write—he surely means no longer, because he gives an impression of being cultivated,  to use an old-fashioned word—and points to his right eye, or perhaps his brain. “Four months in hospital, no work any more now”. I feel there is much that he wants to tell me, though not about his damaged body and diminished circumstances. He mentions those merely to have me wave them away as irrelevant; and then to share that which still blossoms in him, and which he and I hold in common, despite the lack of language to express it.