Being constantly on the move between the country and the city, I have come to perceive them, not as opposites, but as places along the same vital continuum, generating different rhythms and body practices, but abounding in ancient, subterranean connections and converging flows between them.
'Nature' is still pretty much around, if one keeps one's senses alert, and even the city can be 'a fecund and diverse domain of natural life', as Nigel Clark, evoking Walter Benjamin's flaneur, so cogently puts it.*
And it is reassuring indeed to find a long-time perception of mine thus confirmed: that the allure of the city is its potential for dis-orientation. Again, Benjamin phrased it most eloquently in these terms:
'Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal, but to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling'.
And herein lies the deepest meaning of what his 'botanizing on the asphalt' is all about. A practice that will always be reserved to the happy (?), discerning few, I guess.
*Nigel Clark, "'Botanizing on the Asphalt'? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies", in Bodies of Nature, eds. Phil Macnaghten and John Urry (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 12-33 (p. 13).
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