Fallen leaves
sound the rhythm of my walking as a recurrent surf. Each movement blends into the other. No single footsteps, just waves. I adjust my gait to its sound and deliberately exaggerate the stretched-out continuity. Searching for more pools of leaves I avoid naked pavements exposing my tread, preferring instead to stay in the shadow of my sound. It is a sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold. It sounds the idea of autumn as an “iconographic” sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation and thus is clearly not an icon at all; eschewing the concept of distance and idolatry. Instead the sonic emblem is subjective and reciprocal. I activate it and hear it sounding us together, as a socio-symbolic relationship that creates the time and place we are in not as an ideal but as a moment of coincidence, until the pavement turns grey and empty and on my footsteps pound the monotone of swept streets.
