Vertego doesn’t answer questions so much as lengthen resonances of questions unheard. They spin whilst passing themselves on the way round. Bewildered self is more akin to feedback than hierarchy, which is to say, each description of an I is implied by another and in turn implies, or uncovers, another. To bewilder in this sense is to lose sense of where one is, where one hears, parts folding in the midst of unfolding, a nesting of larger in smaller holes. For Fanny Howe, bewilderment offers a walk into a wild place, on the threshold of love’s sanctuary which lies above reason. Another side of this experience is one that ejects preconception and normativity in favour of openness and experimentation.
A spiral can be an experience of perplexity and loss of bearing, when walking is full of falling, stumbling, and pain. Trying to get in deeper and to get safe at the same time, moving through one layer and becoming more and more lost in another. In this sense, to balance is also to listen, a subtly conjoined attempt to stabilise flux, or the opposite, to wrest one from another and watch them turn. For such a spiral walker there is no plain path, no up and down, no inside or outside.
To walk like sound walks, asymmetry of empty space in which there are strange returns and recognitions, but rarely a conclusion. The feeling that I’m full, metabolically and energetically speaking, leads to a question, how can I empty myself out? The only way I’ve ever known how to do that, is walking.
Each movement forwards catches and diffracts who is coming toward, which is also away. Intention reverses along attention. Spinning is central to centreless bewilderment. An approach, dizzying and repetitive, dissolving particularities into a solid hollow of sound, matching outwardly observed with internally heard.
These subtle contingencies of obliteration are worlds who encircle space, measurements beyond correlation. Howe developed her appreciation of bewilderment by assiduously living in world, ejecting attention out and into her poems, rushing back and forth within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.
Walking to empty out leads through such points of repose that I equate to unlistening (by which I mean, not locating, walking in order to try not to try and listen, listening in order to try not to try focussing on walking), wherein listening-walking-selves have split apart, recombined, ejected.