Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety by Dylan Trigg

Author:Dylan Trigg [Trigg, Dylan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-12-14T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

Two Ocular Globes

Everybody who passed by looked at him, stared at him, all those faces, pallid in the evening light. He tried to concentrate on some thought, but he could not. All he felt was an emptiness in his head. His whole body trembled and sweat ran down him. He staggered, and now I am falling too. People stop, more and more people, a frightening number of people.

(EDVARD MUNCH)

The bus journey

It is two o’clock on a grey Tuesday afternoon and you are standing at a bus stop on Boulevard Henri IV waiting for the 86 bus. The bus will take you over the Pont de Sully, through the hustle of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where you will get off before connecting to the 39 bus. Once on the 39, you will travel deep into the southern edge of Paris. Along the way, you will cross Sèvres-Babylone, which delineates one edge of Paris from another. There, you will twist gradually into the depths of Rue de Vaugirard, before reaching Rue Lecourbe in the abyss of the 15th arrondissement. Having arrived, you will then walk along the Boulevard Victor before coming to your destination: the now disbanded Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée.

Perched on a seat, you scan your immediate field of perception, giving special attention to places to retreat to, should the anxiety escalate. Although you are unable to visually see your home, you detect its proximity on Rue Saint Paul as a reassuring warmth in your body. When you stand up to gain a better view of incoming traffic, you experience a surge of dizziness pulse through your head. The dizziness is only abated when the bus approaches. You exhale slowly. When it arrives, you are reassured that the bus is comparatively free of passengers. Those passengers that have boarded the bus are either gazing out the window or otherwise buried in newspapers. You take a seat by the window, focus on the outside world and continue to breathe slowly.

The electric doors close and the bus recommences its journey. At the next stop – on the Quai de Béthune – a flux of passengers enters the bus. Despite your best effort to will them away, one of the passengers sits next to you. He is a middle-aged man carrying a suitcase. He takes his seat and begins reading a newspaper. Experiencing the person as trapping you in the seat, you immediately tense your fist and feel a thrust of hostility directed towards the passenger. A transformation is beginning to take place in your experience of the world. Every heterogeneous marker that you pass – a square, a monument or a notable building – becomes further evidence of your distance from home. Indeed, you measure space less in geometrical terms, and more in respect of how anxious your body has become.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.