"The means to pass safely through the majority of the most perilous encounters that all large cities throw up in some of their quarters involve the
gaze and the
gait. The stare of
others must not be met; instead the
walker looks through and beyond
others. The
walker walks with rapid
steps, but the steps must be driven not by
fear but by '
something else,' the walker must show themselves pulled to some awful
destination: hell,
home,
bottle, ward,
others. The walker does not connect with the now of the place they are in, but they
walk through it, as if it and
everything in it were their medium. Potential aggressors are reduced to an inert backdrop. The walker should cultivate a
haunted look; lips twitching in
complaint to something
unearthly;
onlookers should be left uncertain as to who this inner demon might destroy
first if the walker were challenged. There should be no
sense (and certainly no mime!) of violence; the
desired impression the walker should give is one of irrelevance. The walker slips by in a parallel reality. But it is a play for high stakes; one
momentary loss of concentration, one sly
glance... The price to be paid for the success of this tactic is the dislocation and disenfranchisement of the walker from the
street. However, this can be turned to the
dérivist's advantage: they can invert the
survival tactic (once out of areas of immediate threat) as a means to walking with an unfocused gaze, collating peripheral and blurred information."
Mythogeography: A guide to Walking Sideways, Complied from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectuses, records and everyday utopias of the pedestrian resistance, Axminster, Triachy Press, 2010
