Running is Life by Fleming Bruce;

Author:Fleming, Bruce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Directional

What overwhelmed me later in the day, when I allowed my mind to go back to this moment, was a consciousness of the directional nature of things. I saw again the motorcycle helmet of my mugger, protecting him against what he was about to inflict on me; felt the eerie split-second of the sense of nearness of another man, tight behind me and ready to do me harm. In the center of the helmet I had seen the small window of his face, shrouded in the almost-darkness of the square itself and of the shadow cast by the brim. Suddenly, there he’d been there behind me, taking advantage of the fact that we none of us have eyes in the back of our heads. Nor did he, the back of his own head cradled in the protection of his helmet.

There was a whole blind world behind the back of my head. The threat had come to be within this shadow world; only by turning did I make it suddenly enter the light. There had been none of the gradual smallness-to-largeness of the way people usually, gradually, enter our field of vision, the softness-to-loudness that announces imminent contact, allowing us to turn so gradually that we are rarely conscious of our repositioning to meet the thing we meet. Even the exceptions to this more usual coming-into-consciousness seem to prove the rule: Oh! we exclaim as we look up to see someone standing before us. You startled me! And the other person apologizes; we laugh a heh-heh, perhaps put our hands on our chests, and then go back to what we were doing, feeling the thumps of our heart subside.

People aren’t supposed to surprise us; they have to give us fair warning of their approach. We teach people these rules, and they know they must abide by them: make some noise as you approach, cough a bit when you’re near the room, begin to speak a few seconds earlier than you need to in order to give the other person time to re-orient, to come to terms with your presence, to re-assume the face-to position of interaction. If the offender to the rules is a child, as it frequently is, we explain that this was wrong, they need to knock, or somehow make their presence known. Don’t startle me, child! we say. Or: you’re too quiet! We deal with the envelope of blindness that surrounds us by stringently enforcing the elaborate rules for avoiding it, and allowing people to forget it’s there. In the world of light and civilized interaction, we can minimize this blindness, even be unaware of it.

This encounter in the otherwise deserted square brought out the fact of the weakness we try so hard to hide by the simple expedient of leading with our area of strength. It’s as if we were all snakes that capture our prey by bringing our fangs around to a frontal business position, are feared for our venom and our deadliness, and yet can be rendered impotent by a pair of human fingers squeezing us behind the head, a boot on our spine.

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