walking and falling
Crutching around the apartment the other day, I noticed that it was really a controlled process of falling forward (as opposed to the uncontrolled backward fall I did to accomplish the breakage). And that, of course, put me in mind of the second half of Walking and Falling, from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. (I’m still very tedious on crutches, which leaves lots of time for random notions.)
You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
but you’re always falling.
With each step you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time.
Comments
A top favourite, and today the podlette shuffled it up for me on the way to work. Maybe this is my manifestation of sympathetic slippage. I'd much rather that than break my ankle!
Posted by: qB | March 21, 2005 3:39 PM
Cool. I've never known anyone besides me who could cite that from memory. I used it in Datacloud (the dead tree edition), and I had to scramble to track down the full citation in December during the galley stage before the book went to press.
Posted by: johndan | March 24, 2005 11:17 PM
Congrats on upgrading to crutches!
I'm happy to report that I'm back from my Lake Tahoe ski trip with no apparent breakage, so hopefully the contagion has finally been contained.
Now to catch up on everyone's blogs!
Posted by: AnnaBanana | March 27, 2005 11:01 PM
Oh, I'm not upgraded to crutches. I just use them to get around the apartment. I'm still very much relegated to the wheelchair for the next few weeks.
Happy to hear you're not broken!
Posted by: Krista | March 28, 2005 8:06 AM