wondering about wandering and childhood

****attention! poorly-worded, cerebral, egg-head musings alert!!!

i'm at the stage where my map knowledge, visual knowledge and memory of norwich's streets all do not quite coincide; so it's a bit dream-like to wander around...an act of intuition rather than logic or planning. don't get me wrong, i do get around with intent...just not always in the way i wanted to...'oh, i'm here...'




anecdotally, i've found, in my wanderings through various medieval downtowns [norwich included], that there is a peasant roundness about the streets...and that, eventually, all roads lead to the center, whether it is geometrical, spiritual [cathedral], or social/commercial [market/square]. things are where you'd think---if you're thinking like a medieval city dweller...

so, here i'll risk a second adolescence and share my 'deep' inner thoughts. i scrape away some navel lint:

during a wander i came upon a place i remember not knowing from when i first arrived in norwich one month ago; before i even had a container, a context to put it in. here was a space that had yet to be formulated/represented in my mind and connected to other spaces that were already formed within.

then...i really felt that i was experiencing spatially what we all face temporally in trying to describe, re-live, make sense out of our distant pasts [childhoods]---within the same lifetime and even across life times, if you believe in reincarnation. the 'container' could, in this case, be called language with the 'spaces' and 'streets' being synaptic connections between neurons in the brain.

in the same vein, i thought of trauma victims being presented with difficulties that couldn't all be processed/understood in that moment [or even across multiple moments], thus creating a 'remainder' or overflow of free-floating experiences/memories which couldn't be understood [like a mental free-radical]; that didn't 'connect' literally, with other mental schema which would make them more 'processed' or more easily assimilated into the system [digestive-system style]...perhaps even becoming a 'not me' foreign invader that needed to be attacked [immune-system style]...

in sum, really i was reflecting on what happens when we're given any kind of experience before we are able to understand it, or even have the tools with which to do so...that's all...sorry! this chain of thoughts was much better in my head-----where it probably should've remained...