Category Archives: Random Walk

The walker is both tactile and tactical; he feels his way through a fog of strategy.

The tactical space the walker inhabits within a strategy is larger than the physical space in which strategy is confined.

The walker crosses lines and steps into cracks. The walker has no plan; whim is a weapon.

The walker can draw you a picture, but only on his hand, or in the air.

The walker strolls, in no particular direction. The needle of his compass spins like the carnie’s wheel of fortune; always a winner.

Take the walker’s picture, he can’t be IDed with it. The pictorial image is not the operative image. The strategic picture is not the tactical picture.

The walker’s path is an operative wave, capable of assuming any pattern within a territorial strategy.

The walker’s gait is a labile rather than a static equilibrium. A footstep is a presentiment of the fall.

The walker cannot be impersonated because he cannot be personated.

The lazy meandering stroll of the walker is the true mother of invention. As Virgil wrote, the goddess is known by her footsteps.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, Be passers-by. The walker is only and always passing through.

The walker recorded by surveillance is not the walker that walks the street.

The walker captivates space within the institution where he is confined; he can be institutionalized but not captured, surveilled but not seen.

Walking is a method, not a product. The method of the walker cannot be codified or commodified; a particular walker has a peculiar walk.

The walker is an asyndeton, not a synecdoche, of the panoptic map of territorial strategy.

The walker practices the ellipsis of conjunctive loci by the tactical metamorphosis of space.

The walker is a singularity within a collective of interacting singularities, a walker among other walkers.

Belated note: I originally posted the text of The Walker to indenti.ca, a microblogging platform I was on back in the late aughts (joined sometime after 2005? can’t remember precisely), before decamping to Twitter. I met simsa0 there, I’m pretty sure. The accumulated text that comprises The Walker was inspired by, and derived from, by a chapter in Michel de Certeau‘s book The Practice of Everyday Life, called “Walking in the City.” It took me a minute to recall that. That scrap of memory was slid under the door of my forebrain sometime during the night, and I found it on the floor in the morning. File that delay under This Old Brain.