by Brooks Riley
Of all the secondary discomforts imposed by the pandemic, the most treacherous may be inertia. Life, interrupted, can be characterized as an absence of movement, like a stream that stops running, stagnating as the surface begins to cloud with algae and other still-standing detritus. Inertia that stems from the current situation can quelch any creative impulse. Even cinema, that paradigm of life in motion—the moving picture—isn’t much help if we expect our own lives to keep moving as well as movies do. They don’t, at least not right now.
Now we sit at home and consume an ersatz elixir of motion on our streaming platforms, and without quite realizing it, get our kinetic gratification by surfing a narrative, instead of going out for a drive or a walk and seeing our visual field alter naturally.
Movement in this case is not about physical activity, or what we do, but rather about what we see, the perception of changing location in one or another direction—forward, out, away, off, back. On a walk, we may be thinking about our muscles, or about the surrounding nature. But we are mostly oblivious to the subtle changes in our field of vision as we move forward—that constant progress of our steps which alters the panorama ever so slightly. Seen this way, movement feeds our perceptions at the instinctual level. This is where the brain boards a train, metaphorically, to exercise its ability to adjust to change.
I miss trains. I miss the way the scene outside the window rapidly evolves as the miracle of speed presses ever new images on my retina. I miss the way my mind comes alive and cranks out thoughts and ideas at a similar speed. That there is a connection between what we see and what we think, even if none seems to exist, can be explained this way: Motion embodies two accelerators of thought, energy and change, both of which are in short supply if we’re locked down somewhere. The more sedentary and static our lives become the more we depend on the illusion of motion provided by second-hand sources. As the pandemic wears on, I find myself spending less time reading and more time on YouTube, not chasing stories to get lost in, but seeking some kind of eye candy that moves. Read more »