For Exercise 5 write a walk poem which either takes a trajectory through
the city you are familiar with, or invents one. Be specific about place and
time, and include sensory impressions of the city. But also use the city to
trigger thoughts, memories and ideas which take you into other spaces.
You may want to try some contemporary variations on the walk poem,
such as driving or taking a bus through the city.
BODIES AND CITIES
As the previous exercise has shown, a very important aspect of our expe-
rience of the city is the way our bodies interact with it. In this section I
want to take that idea even further. Exercise 6 asks you to create a text
which engages with the interface between body and city, but breaks down
the unity of both.
Cultural theorist Elizabeth Grosz outlines three different models for the
relationship between city and body (1995, p. 108). In the first, the self and
city are in a causal relationship, that is, subjects build cities which are man-
ifestations of human projects, desires and achievements. The second is one
of parallelism or isomorphism between the body and the city, so that the
two are congruent with each other and mirror each other’s characteristics.
In the third model, which Grosz suggests is her preferred one, both city
and body are broken down and realigned. Grosz argues that this is a model
of bodies and cities that sees them ‘not as megalithic total entities, but as
assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often
temporary sub- or micro-groupings’. Seen in this light, the interrelations
between body and city ‘involve a fundamentally disunified series of
systems, a series of disparate flows, energies, events, or entities, bringing
together or drawing apart their more or less temporary alignments’ (Grosz
1995, p. 108).
Each of these models can be a stimulating starting point for writing.
The first might lead to texts about building communities, but also to the
creation of imagined and allegorical cities. The second might lead to texts
in which the city is a metaphor for the body, and vice versa. However, the
third model particularly interests me here, because it allows for a discon-
tinuous and cross-genre approach to writing. It projects neither body nor
city as unified entities, but as multiplicitous and fragmentary parts which
interact with each other in continuously changing ways.
An example of such a text is The City and the Body, part of which was
included in Chapter 9, and which can be viewed in full as a hypertext and
hypermedia piece and entitled Wordstuffs: The City and The Body (Smith,
266 The Writing Experiment