The Limits of My Legs

To paraphrase the Austrian language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The limits of my legs are the limits of my world.

Now you may think that this is not quite true. That many, in our increasingly obesogenic societies, having given up on the body and decided to go full automaton, whilst being ferried here and there by electric carts, cars, planes, and machines in general, still, however, manage to see much of the known world. But do they really? How much can you really see when your own vital energies have been outsourced to a screen or a machine? 

There's nae movement in this warld like your own, writes Hugh MacDiarmid somewhere.

I am my body, writes Gabriel Marcel. And at about the same time, Martin Buber talks of 'bodying forth into the world'. Then there is Alan Watts: the body is the world. And Merleau-Ponty: 'the flesh of the world' and le corps geographique.

All this being based on one's own ingenious self-propulsion.

Then there is the artist Robert Delauney:

Every man distinguishes himself by his personal movement [...] movement which gives birth to decisive moments which permit the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth.

The great ecological crises that beset the planet today can be traced to man's own abandonment of this 'personal movement'. Man no longer moves, rather, he is moved. Technically speaking, an entity that gives up its fundamental life-force, its locomotive... trajective... automobilic... energy, is not really alive. Which might explain the proliferation of the zombi within contemporary (counter) culture.

Enter man. Exit the human.

Disconnected at an essential level of being-in-the-world (with one's vested energy removed), the world now becomes a lumber yard, a distinct standalone commodity and product, un-alive and up for grabs, whereby man cannot realize himself on earth. How can he if he considers his self separate from it?

The human (of which 'world' is an integral and essential part) will only emerge when he re-ignites his self from the essential oblivion he has allowed it to become. The ignition key is the body.

The Dead can't walk (physically, metaphysically); rather, they are conveyed by machines, by media, by technology and conventions. There is nothing 'original' about the 'Dead' meaning that nothing originates within them. Everything is super-imposed from without. Aliveness is the first casualty in those unable to move or think for themselves.

Anyone familiar with Glasgow's petite 'clockwork orange' metro line (two lines in fact, the 'inner' and the 'outer') will immediately notice the logo above. SPT (Strathclyde Passenger Transport) however, leave an unseasonably large space between the 'S' and the 'inner' part. The 'inner', furthermore, is painted in grey as opposed to orange, making it very difficult to spot the obvious (and slightly droll) elision.

The point here, however, is not entirely frivolous. It is to emphasise that transport (other than our own bodies and internal engines), though it may appear handy and helpful, is actually counterproductive. I firmly believe that a large part of man's troubles began when he began outsourcing his own organic engine to that of machines. As Colin Wilson, rather more eloquently states, in Religion & The Rebel:

'It is not original sin which keeps man unaware of his own godhood, but his failure to connect himself with his own powerhouse'. 

So many 'arts' have been lost to technology and to 'progress', especially the art of the body. This powerhouse begins with the body, with the legs, with walking, with cycling. The world reveals itself to those who move across the earth under their own steam. World, furthermore, becomes a verb and not some concrete noun. We begin to waltz and welter, to truly travel by putting the work in ourselves, instead of being toured, being travelled ourselves.

Our legs launch us forth, not just once as we clamber in through the car door, but again and again, and again. Movement gives birth to momentum, and momentum in turn gives birth to moment.

And moment, as we all intuitively know, is everything.