Welcome, students of self-motion. It looks like I'm marginally able to use the plural when addressing you, which is a great feeling. I hear more students, though, are on the way. When that happens, I will invent the Suplural Verb Tense. Look for it.
Anyway, walking. Prior to posting the first assignment, I thought I'd clarify what The No School University of School means by walking. Each assignment, as mentioned, will involve a walk. For the purposes of The No School University of School, a walk will be considered a lengthy excursion made by a single person. You should decide what "lengthy" means, but for me I'm thinking at least an hour. Also, if you choose not to walk alone, please consider walking with someone who doesn't feel the need to say much. The point is to be observant and contemplative.
Also, it has come to my attention that some people want to know WHERE they should walk. From a geographic standpoint, you may walk ANYWHERE. Some walks will be announced with special instructions, but the creative walker/interpreter should be able to participate in the entirety of the assignment without much trouble from almost anywhere in the world.
Finally, a note about reading assignments. Although the walking instructions posted by The No School University of School will refer to the readings, you need not read certain pages by certain times. In fact, The No School University of School would be very happy to hear that you have reconsidered the western notion that time is comprised of finite and knowable measurements. Read whenever you want.
EXTRA CREDIT: Once you've come to understand walking, you may also find it germane to tackle Julio Cortazar's 'Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase.'
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(part 1 of 2)
I am determined to continue my strange, thus far companionless educational journey in what I have come to regard as the internet’s equivalent of an abandoned building. It never occurred to me until now that such a thing could exist, but here it is.
This blog is not the variety of abandoned building you would find in a city that’s fallen from its former glory. It is not boarded up and has not been overtaken by squatters, drug dealers, or graffiti artists. No, this is more of an abandoned stone farmhouse or sawmill in the middle of the forest. It’s the kind of building you stumble across unexpectedly in a clearing or around a bend, like an article of clothing or a notebook that human life absentmindedly left behind while out on a walk. You wonder, even, if no one else but you now knows it’s here.
So there is something vaguely melancholic about this place, but not sickening or tragic. It seems a sad loss of such a sturdy, friendly building, with tactile contours that facilitate invention and relationship in a way that most modern buildings (or blogs) do not. I wish that No School University of School had, in fact, been obligated to invent the suplural tense, and that this contemplative and organic way of blogging had become a global movement. What a tense it would’ve been.
As I delight in the nostalgic possibilities of this thing I have stumbled across on my virtual walk through the internet-forest, I have also begun to prepare seriously for my engagement with the curriculum itself. Nothing can replace the physicality of walking.
I am testing the waters by trying to walk to places I would normally drive, as I previously mentioned. However, I do not count these walks yet as part of my course work. I agree with No School University of School’s perspective on walk length. Anything under an hour could be chalked up to mere exercise, and fit comfortably into a daily routine. I think I need to go out of my way to take these walks.
My endeavor has been facilitated by the fact that I find myself caring for a small but rapidly growing creature with lots of fur and sharp teeth, who is one of the kinds they say you have to keep busy and provide with “puzzles.” I cannot imagine this dog ever solving a puzzle, but she does have an unnerving intelligence about her at times. I have noticed that she grows particularly anxious and starts gnawing at my hands or clothing whenever I am arguing with my significant other, even if I am just silently fuming over text messages.
I once swore I would never be one of those people who argue over text messages, or indeed use them to communicate anything at all. Alas, how our ideals crumble under the weight of convenience! My puppy seems to understand all of this, and she tries to remind me that I am making a terrible mistake by doing anything but breathing in this present moment.
She is right, of course. So instead of driving her to her 3-month vet check-up, I walk her there. The vet is just outside of town down a flat highway, surrounded by fields. It is very close in a car. I realize now that distance is relative, and if vehicles had not been invented by the time I’d been born, maybe I would’ve married someone only from the next village over and settled down to live out my days there, unless I was an amazingly prodigious walker. As it is, I live about 160 miles from my hometown, a 48-hour walk (according to Google Maps). And this is one of the closest places I’ve lived in my adult life.
(part 2 of 2)
This world is full of possibilities. But the one I am relishing the most right now is leaping and skipping (this is the ambulatory mode of a puppy) along the shoulder of the highway to keep my dog “busy” and simultaneously to make it to our appointment on time.
The great thing about walking with this creature is that she loves everything. Plastic bags, blades of grass, dandelions, murky ditch water, cigarette butts, shards of glass (no animals were harmed in the making of this scene, but pangs of guilt about my decision to walk the puppy on the highway were felt), and just about anything else you can imagine along the side of a highway are all brilliant to her. What a great idea! she seems to say as she looks back at me in a defiant whole-body wag, Whoever thought of making wood into paper so that you can shred it quicker is a GENIUS! The world is a wonder, and it is only those of us who think we understand it that fail to enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed.
We did make it to the vet’s office eventually, and then a few shots and some Cheez Whiz later, made the long walk home. We stopped at the Dollar General to buy groceries (that’s the kind of town I live in), and I wobbled my way home, heavy with plastic bags and puppy.
I am also considering the course texts in the following ways:
1. Baudelaire is on order via Amazon, though I wish I could say I had walked to a bookstore in a bustling city to acquire it.
2. The Songlines has been taken down from the shelf and proverbially dusted off. I read it some years ago, and am now trying to remember the ways it may have shaped my thinking as I look back through the notes I scribbled on scrap paper and stuck at various intervals like tiny bookmarks (not my usual way of note-taking, and I can’t remember now why I was so careful not to write marginalia directly on the book’s pages). One, for example, stuck between pages 58 and 59, says: “You can only walk a path if you know its song. It’s like a map, but it’s also like a right (sic) of passage—indeed, a title to the land, or a borrower’s agreement. Trading songs is trading land and, as a consequence, the resources that go with that land. But it’s also participating in the act of creation. It is keeping the cosmic order—creation and preservation simultaneously. Beautiful!”
I am not sure how any of my decade-old observations about Aboriginal culture will apply to the task at hand, nor am I very hopeful about feeling like a flâneur in my small industrial and agricultural town while wrangling a puppy, but I shall walk on.
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