In this text I attempt to re-experience as much as re-think and re-work approaches to sound, walking, and soundwalking. One way I have tried to do this is by developing an account of what I call vertego, a portmanteau of vertigo and ego who connotes implicit and densely entangled relations of self with environment, and of listening with walking (held together, and pushed apart, by balance and gravity). Their propinquity is accompanied by various theories of the human ego (as if such theories were akin to different environments, topographical maturations and imaginations), who I here consider as vessels breaking even as they are being formed.
Underlying this process, and in concert with my ongoing reading of the works of microbiologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, I try to move away from such polarised terms as cooperation and competition, working instead with a spectral vocabulary of ejection and emergence, trying to get closer to a practise of listening akin to unlistening (or not locating), within which, in a manner similar to vertego, listening-selves fall apart.
By necessity I have engaged with certain anatomical details, and in mind of such, I have written a brief introduction to vestibular labyrinth of human inner ear. Anyone interested can also find a number of the notes, including those on the auditory labyrinth, that have quietly fed into the metapattern formed around the conjunction of a series of essays in which Throwing Stones at Nothing is part.
During the research and writing of this text I fell over numerous times. As a child I fell down the stairs so often that my mother stopped coming to see if I was okay. Most of my childhood memories revolve around falling, an event that has leached into my adult life, the debilitating and mirrored sting I feel whenever I see anyone fall over. It’s interesting to think about the ever present threat of falling whilst walking and how over the years it has changed not only who I listen to, but how I listen and what I think I mean by listening.
Throwing Stones at Nothing is an essay of fecund speculation, but also of experience, moving away from, as Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan put it, a myth of the completely self-contained individual, in the hope of helping to extend this with a more flexible description. This text is implicated in the myriad possible levels of emergence and incorporation in which composite ego, self and selves, can come apart, de-personalise, resonate, integrate, drift, and reintegrate. In this case, such states are felt and considered through soundwalking, or what I call in relation to my own experience of such a practise, vertego. This is a term that relates to ambiguity of space created by the distention of place (a location you can’t tell you’re ‘in’ until you perceive over a distance), one that I understand to merge, block, scatter and correspond in between possibilities of walking and listening; falling and shaking; rushing and splitting.