Korea flaneur

5.30 am – beneath a pale shroud we step into the unknown city, pass tile shops and lanes, breakfast stalls setting up, evocative silhouettes in this dank light so dificult for my camera. We are anonymous, curious and uncool. Unlike standard flaneurs we were friendly, greeting people along the river bank, flickering quark connections, photographing its stream of light cascading over stones, its shadowy carp and families of sparrow, the river captured, canal-like, graffiti free walls.

The morning rain and early hour placed us inside George Simmel's anticipation that the eye will dominate the ear in cities.

Everyone seems charming, smiles breed smiles, though nothing changes - the young guy selling t-shirts in an alley was here late last night and his is the first stall to open, his ancient father prerparing it for a day's trading. “Long hours”, I say and look through the merchandise, but the T-shirts of skulls with diamantes, Damien Hirst for the young ladies do not seem likely for my two young nieces.

Jack the Ripper

Dandy

6.50am - Walkers are the “ordinary practitioners of the city”, an ordinary daily practice that embodied freedom for Michel de Certeau ( 'Walking in the City', The Practice of Everyday Life). It lists both an ocular and kinaesthetic experience, the traffic is getting busy, the pavements crowded with umbrellas jostling Jane Jacobs' ‘art form of the city’. Friedrich Engels was impressed by the dynamism and energy of London, worried about its anarchic “bustle”, yet noted its golden rule, "that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement, so as not to impede the stream of people moving in the opposite direction." People are walking on the left though they drive on the right.

Nature

See Innisfree August -"And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow . . .

Two women call us back from behind a counter, asking if this was our first time.

They gave us a fresh round walnut cake to taste, fresh and as warm as on the farm. They point out the kitchen, back of the narrow shop, have been making cakes here fot over 80 years, but it was bean paste, not to my taste – I had to explain that I am an addict to chocolate. I point to the invisible sky, a month of rain they predict.

A man above is running towards the mountains. Flaneurs never run, never exercise, never eat healthy feed and without routine, most would have an early death. So are flaneurs Stoics? What philosophy suits the flaneur? I guess Pragmatism: “a philosophy of embodied, situated experience. Rather than relying on a priori principles or seeking necesoorsary truths, the pragmatist works from experience, trying to clarify its meaning so that its present quality and consequences for future experience may be improved. Experience is inevitably contextual, since it involves the interaction of an experiencing subject and the environing field, both of which are in flux and are affected by their interaction.”

Richard Shusterman continues, “Though poets like Blake and Wordsworth attacked the city (in their poems on "London") for its grimy grid of oppressive political limits, the small-minded greed of narrow "chartered" streets in contrast to Nature's vast bounty, the city could nonetheless be valorized as a site of unlimited growth, endless activity, boundless variety, and infinite possibilities. Logically, a town or village would lose its status by growing too large and thus becoming a city. But the city, at least in principle, knows no limits to growth and variety.”

The girl from tourist information is proslytising in the street, I needed her last night; she's spent a year in Melbourne and Brisbane, another girl, wearing an apron in superhero colours, strapped to a high-tech sandwich board picturing a burger, plys me flyers.

Walter Benjamin was too romantic: “Like a roving soul in search of a body, [the flaneur] enters another person whenever he wishes." ('On Some Motifs in Baudelaire'). I am no flaneur in wanting to connect, just briefly, freely to chat to everyone with Whitman's electric connectivity.

Across the street a young man dressed for work, gives a monotone Bible reading through glasses mouth close to the mike in a small white tent with red text - Beast Mark666 Hell. A revelation may develop be that no-one is listening and that his professional success long term will be hard to evaluate.