Thank you for the warning not to stop and look up when that delicious voice calls down to me to come up for a good time, but I fear your warning comes too late. Resistance ("Lead us not into temptation but deliver is from evil") is joined at the neck and crop with desire and excitement, and curiosity as well as doubt and confusion over what is going on and what is possible, whether I should be stopping to look up or head down keep marching on. Am I supposed to resist, or is resistance resisting? Yes, as you can see, I am already – and have been for some considerable length of time, if not all my adult life – lost, impossibly well and truly lost.
We are, as I recall, in the process currently of making a list, and slowly ticking off the locations where resistance arises; curling up in a foxhole on a rain swept Dartmoor for one, or advancing into "the strange world of life beyond 60" for another. But even in those two locations, my perception of resistance is clouded. Even as I sink down in that foxhole, or count off the grey hairs on my ageing head, I seem to be reworking the story. So I may think of these locations as resistance but to others, to those who stumble accross me in these locations, I am more than an event. We are all implicated.
So we have our growing list of locations, (Yes, yes, be patient! I'll get back to that delicious voice in a moment… my feet are already on the creaking stairs leading up) but having a list is not the same as having a map perception of landscape. The list tells us the destinations, but it does not describe the intimacy of the route.
We have our growing list, and one of the locations is her (or should it be Her?) wherever she is to be found. Herumhuren! I am on the first floor landing now and wondering which door I should approach. I shouldn't, but I must.
In recent conversation with a male friend, who is an artist. "Now I am in my sixties, it is finally a relief that I have less sex drive. I get so much more work done," he said. At the time, to get out of disagreeing I sort of mumbled back without real words in a herumhuren (half-cough) kind of way, but my mind was far away elsewhere enfolding the film Walkabout (1971) which I had seen for the first time the night before on tv. If you don't know it, it is a film set in the Australian outback about being lost, and a boy and a girl meeting. I missed it when it came out in 1971. Just as well too – "While the boy goes hunting, she swims naked in a deep pool" – it would have thrown me into a complete crazed frenzy if I had seen it back then.
Reworking resistance in the wilderness in my sixties: what was possible in 1971 (How did Nicolas Roeg the director get away with it – "While the boy goes hunting, she swims naked in a deep pool" – and Jenny Agutter being hardly sixteen?) is not possible now. Less sex drive, but no less desire, and capacity for doubt and confusion. Resistance… meaning I shouldn't, but I must.
Of course, I agree there is commodification everywhere, and even the outback and wilderness has its share these days. But still whenever I hear that delicious voice I can't resist. Today it was the Amazon hooks which were in me, a crafty email offering me the chance to 'Look Inside' a delicious sounding new book by Tim Ingold Being Alive. Resistance. One click and I am by her side.