desire lines
route maps | walking by tim cresswell
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There’s tracks across the park to the gap in the fence through the carefully planted hedge
Irresponsible passions take us wayward when snowfall blanks the waysigns. Ignoring the planners’ paths, strollers’ shortcuts contour our utopia, until angels, made by children, turn to water.
I’m grinning
they’re everywhere: on floors of palaces the hotel atrium foyers of hospitals and headquarters transecting terminals linking arrivals with departures. In Finland, planners rise before dawn to map the footprints in snow’s blank geography.
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Up on the common where the bracken’s thick they criss-cross the land revealing the settled will of sheep.
Unauthorized – these voyages we make our days are detours linking A to B second turnings taken by mistake pathways traced by trespasses of feet. We explore the cul de sacs and alleys sing down sewers, dance along the drains squat on ledges, stand on top of chimneys climb the rungs to sit in sleeping cranes. Then stop. Exhausted with excursions take the highway – fly as straight as crows make a bee line – inhabit a direction ignore distraction – trace a Roman road. These lines connecting maybe, no and yes unauthorised, yet authored nonetheless.
One, somewhere walked that line first a maverick in terra incognita.
And then the first follower
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