Charles Baudelaire, it's probably relevant to know, believed that getting outside and walking brought him closer to the possibilities of life: "For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite."* Baudelaire's walks were predominantly urban, and he conceived of them as new artistic statements in the context of a rapidly changing 19th century Paris, but we'll get to that later. For now, let's think about the instinct to go out and walk versus the instinct to stay in and not walk. What is the difference between these two acts? Is there a difference at all? Do we get closer to the infinite by walking and experiencing the varieties offered by the larger world outside? Or, following the example of Proust and Dickinson, can we get as much from the indoors and stasis as the outdoors and movement?
Let's walk and think.
*Baudelaire, Charles (1972) Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. and ed. P.E. Charvet, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Good morning fellow scholars,
As you begin your walk today I encourage you to consider the following mindfulness meditation to help you relax and focus on the experience. Or you can just focus on your breath, Vipassana style.
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. --- Epictetus
Begin:
Now Hit Da Dance Floor
Now Bend Your Back Low
She Do It Wit No Hands
Now Stop Pop And Roll
Im Smokin Bubba Hoe
Now Ya'll In Trouble Hoe
I Like Da Way She Move
An Undercover Hoe
Now Everybody Leanin
I Make Da Crowd Rock
Now Gone And Walk It Out
I See Dey On My Job
She Like Dat Bubble Gum
Is Dey Da Double Ment Twins
2 Hoes Choosin Me
So I Know Dat Imma Win
It's On Once Again
Patron One Again
I Threw My Head Back
Then I Froze Like Da Wind
West Side Walk It Out
South Side Walk It Out
East Side Walk It Out
North Said Walk It Out
Good Afternoon,
Thus far I have not walked. I drove up to Loudoun County. I saw a Church with kinda stark modern design--but also strip mall design. I drove to a mall and bought two t-shirts. Last night I did walk out on to the back porch where, without any sense of direction, I proceeded to "walk" all over my Mom about her recent behavior. Today I feel horrible for this.
Well, I was chuckling over Baudelaire's hatred of women. The Parisian Prowler was a throwback. I wish someone had delivered it to my bitten fingers back in highschool. This would have been perfect literature for the young self. In deed, my past few weeks in the city, I did wander around plenty. A little examination of the parks, a little of our neighborhood. There are streets I never knew.
Tomorrow off to the other coast. Plenty of walking prognosis.
God bless The No School University of School.
I walked for 3 and 1/2 hours, beginning at my apartment and reaching the ultimate destination of a carnival-style soft serve stand located in the middle of some fields across the river from my town, before returning home on a similar route. I did not contemplate the infinite because it seemed more than evident that the outside world had more shit going on than my apartment, even considering the vastness of the internet.
Along the way, I passed by the porch of a friend who was deeply involved in "reading interviews." Upon hearing of my activity and route, he recommended I sample the blackberries, newly evident in our area, along the way. I did, and they were promising and free.
I mostly walked along the side of the road, even when sidewalks were available to me, and said 'howdy' to a bunch of people along the way. Generally I say 'hi, there.' The idea of the walk, then, must have brought out some weird folksy traits in me.
Near the end, I trespassed mildly onto the property of an old, boarded up motel, peeked into the windows, and urinated luxuriously in the open air. The stream was good, strong, and infinite.
In addition to increasing my options for urination, walking put me in the mode of seeing and grasping rather than responding. Even though I responded to my environment in a variety of ways -- said 'howdy' to people, moved from one side of the road to the other, took a few photographs, ate a vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles -- the great majority of my mental efforts were dedicated to looking at trees, a creek, different lawn configurations, the asses of bicyclists who rode past me, the get-ups of older couples going by on Harley-Davidsons. I really enjoyed not having to do anything about the trees, the creek, the asses, and the couples.
Also, yes, Baudelaire, for all his contributions to modern writing, didn't contribute much to the dignity and agency of women.
And thanks for the savvy crunk mindfulness, Shannon!
This week I walked, but not for the sake of walking. This was no contemplative stroll through the well tended fields around my home, nor was it a jovial jaunt through the sanguine neighborhoods of my town. No, this was a hot sweaty slog across our nation’s capitol, hauling the various accoutrements of modern business travel – my numerous communications devices, suit jackets and slacks, notepads and an inordinate amount of pens, cards, articles. The weather was hot and wet, painting me with a layer of sweat that challenged the promised plastered across my deodorant’s label.
However, even weighted down by my own inelegant packing, and weary of the southern summer humidity, I enjoyed the walk. Emerging from the shuttling subway, which seems somehow the antitheses of self propulsion, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and appreciated the opportunity to stroll.
I was actually retracing the daily route my friend walks from this subway stop to his home which is up the hill behind the station. I was following his directions, trusting his advice, trying to see what he might see, what might catch his eye, to trace his landmarks. On both sides of the street I see the suited soldiers of our political system strutting up the steep slope, their thumbs twirling around iPod dials and tapping on Blackberry keyboards.
That evening I was reading a history of walking (“Wanderlust” by Rebecca Solnit) in which the author writes “The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between… The rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued – that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing more than voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced.”
On my own march up the hill I had checked my email, pulled up a map on my phone, listened to voicemail, and checked a favorite blog. What had I missed? How many steps had gone unnoticed?
The next day I walked back down the hill to the subway, glad for the cool morning air. My phone stayed turned off in my pocket and my eyes stayed turned upward at the houses and side streets, the manicured gardens and old trees, the other people on their way to work… But I also saw the hydrologic arms of road machinery tearing up the concrete, the garbage collected in the gutters, the lost pet posters taped to lampposts.
I did not come away from that walk with any great realizations to report, no epiphanies today. But I do have a better feel for the place, a bit of an understanding I otherwise would have missed. Gary Snyder suggests that we “learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the space of place must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.” I think this learning continues far past childhood, anytime you engage a new place, if you can remember to let it.
Wonderful, thoughtful response, Josh. I love the Gary Snyder idea of measuring a place against our bodies, as well as the Solnit assertion that we are increasingly correlating our experience with production. It's funny how little people realize that if you fill your time with certain activities (cell phones, email, etc.), you displace other activities, some of which are probably very meaningful. I suppose there are ways of knowing a place that do not involve seeing all the gardens and trees, but I personally think it's not a good idea to be unaware of what's undeniably present.
Again, thanks for the contribution to understanding.
So, I have been having trouble taking my contemplative walk. My girlfriend and I go for long walks all the time. We have a few favorite walks and hikes, mostly in the many beautiful natural spots nearby. But we don't contemplate. We chit-chat and process and discuss and sing and goof around. Which is awesome. And is definitely better than sitting inside. But it's not alone, so I don't think it really fits within the syllabus.
I like to walk around the city. I walk about four blocks from my office to my favorite cafe for my midday latte. And I walk about 1.5 miles to my video store. Partly because I really like the store, but mostly because I enjoy the walk.
I was planning on going for a contemplative bike ride this evening through Golden Gate Park and down to the beach, rocking out to some new tunes on my iPod and letting my consciousness stream. But I forgot that someone stole my bicycle seat while I was in yoga last night. So I had to bike down to the shop, where a helpful dude set me up with a new seat, post, and seat-lock. But then I realized I hadn't brought my wallet. So I had to leave my iPod there as collateral and haul ass home and back before they closed. So by then I was way too taxed to do anything besides bike home and start doing laundry.
What have I learned from this experience? That sometimes it is difficult to find time for contemplation in my life. I have to set aside time for it, and then hope that nobody steals anything which I will then have to spend time replacing when I could be instead walking and thinking.
And I suppose that is a lesson with some value (although I suspected as much already).
Well, I did get a brief walk in this evening after vigorous laundry folding. This involved listening to REM's classic album "Fables of the Reconstruction" while walking down Octavia Boulevard on a muggy night, down to my local liquor store where I purchased a pint of Ben & Jerry's Half-Baked. Yum.
I also have my daily four-block walk to and from work. If I go straight down Market Street I walk though perhaps the most intense scene of homelessness in America. So there are lots of interesting people, conversations, actions, smells, ambiguities, and tragedies that swirl in a kaleidescope of social impotence that changes daily.
If I instead go down Oak Street I walk down a busy through-way for commuter traffic and past a very fancy private school. Or if I take the middle path down Page I pass by a school for autistic kids. Usually they are all standing around in the yard not looking at each other, lost in worlds of their own.
More to report later. Right now, it's time to eat ice cream and see who won the All-Star game.
I haven't taken any long walks lately. I could say I am too busy, which is a form of truth, but this is an absolutely unacceptable excuse. Especially considering Solnit’s excellent point, brought up earlier in this discussion, about the multiplication of technologies and the destruction of idle time.
Long walks formerly played a critical role in my life. I spent almost the entire span of my teenage years on the outskirts of a small, liberal university town. During a time when I was pushing the boundaries of my soul into the unknown of becoming, I also was extending my reach of knowledge into a very tangible outer environment. I would take long-ass walks in order to understand the tactile, neglected crevices of the world around me, and I would intentionally get lost to prove to myself that I was clever enough to find my way home again. I hardly need to point out the symbolic connection here to the perils and triumphs of coming of age.
During this time, I lived in a one-street subdivision quaintly named "Hunter's Crossing" in honor of the hunter whose hunting grounds they destroyed in order to build it. (I met the hunter down the adjacent dirt road, and he seemed perversely proud of the fact--I suppose it gave him something to hold on to.) My house was, in essence, just past the condominiums and Lowe's hardware stores and just before the forests and farms. While initially I longed for the evening strolls to the cafe and the carefree everything-ness of downtown, I eventually came to deeply appreciate my bland suburbia, which as it turns out, isn't so bland if you look closely enough. My location allowed for the development of ingenious and multifarious shortcuts and longcuts through the grounds of private recreation centers and questionably private forests where a squatter nonetheless set up his tent one year; into peoples' backyards, farmer's fields, and country clubs’ golf courses; up against the fences of suspicious black mothership-shaped buildings hidden from view as if they were top-secret government labs; and across Meijer's and strip malls' parking lots. If there's one thing I love about the power of ambulation, it is trespassing. I have always felt that the world is far too generous to be owned by anyone. Each stone and field furrow and forest path has so much to offer each human being, always a different experience according to the receiver. Likewise, as my teenage discoveries eventually began to take shape from their murkiness into the marginally clearer composition of adulthood, I became convinced that the ultimate spiritual truths humans sought after were generous enough to encompass all aspects of the human experience. I became an incorrigible trespasser and combiner of particular truths, never letting the claim that "this truth is the only one" stop me from basking in its beautiful glory before moving on to the next truth that flatly contradicted it.
That is how walking taught me that I could, for example, perhaps be an Episcopalian bishop and a practicing Buddhist at the same time. Such is the limitlessness of youth. I hope to never let the multiplication of technologies--or anything else, for that matter--suppress my expansive thinking into something more "practical." Which probably means, if I truly care about the state of my soul, that I should get outside and reclaim the practice of utterly impractical, long-ass walks.
Famnsync has anticipated the direction of the curriculum! Trespassing, in fact, will be encouraged in the third walk! After all, if trespasses are to be forgiven, as the pater prayer says, there must be trespasses to begin with. More detail on this matter will follow in a few days.
There also seems to be an accreting theme of people not being able to find time to walk in the manner prescribed by The No School University of School. Perhaps in my next post I will comment on how spatial planning alone can greatly incline people toward ambulatory contemplation.
Finally, I'll mention that tonight I walked my neighborhood with a staple gun in hand, putting up flyers for a yard sale (called a 'tag sale' in these parts). If anyone here gets the opportunity, I highly recommend walking with a staple gun. It feels good to give specific thought to each utility pole, and to convey information broadly using nothing but a piece of paper. Nothing but paper! It's just crazy enough it might work.
I embarked on my first No School walk at 11:40 AM last Monday, my only day off. The day was hot, but not enough to wilt me. By the time I got home, it was 3:00 in the afternoon, and I had walked approximately 6.5 miles, eaten an Italian sub, and peed in a campground bathroom. The puppy, who is becoming a model for the virtue of self-abnegation, trudged along with no complaints about missing her regular lunchtime.
I had two unexciting missions to accomplish on this walk, which I worried would be bending the rules a little. Finally, though, I decided that excluding all practicality was a sort of decadent romanticism that would be foreign to those who build their lives around “the fundamental usefulness of walking,” whether these be members of traditional subsistence-based societies or Parisian artists.
Rereading The Songlines, I was struck by a passage in which Chatwin describes Aboriginal men who are “working happily on cattle-stations one day,” and the next would “without a word of warning and for no good reason…pick up stick and vanish into the blue. They would step from their work-clothes, and leave: for weeks and months and even years, trekking halfway across the continent if only to meet a man, then trekking back as if nothing had happened” (10).
This sounds utterly unpractical and not useful to our context. Yet I wonder if the opposite is true. Getting up and walking around like that is a practice of living in the land with the freedom necessary to respect its integrity. It is a use of the land, and one’s own body and life, that continues “singing it up,” recreating it, so that it continues to be real and not abstract or commodified. This is really living.
I, too, have urges to walk off, not to escape reality but to move deeper into it. This has something to do with freedom. But it also has to do with interdependence.
So I start small: walking a mere 3 ½ hours to pick up papers in one place and drop them in the mail in another.
First, we walked west to a doctor’s office at the edge of town, where the first step of the Unexciting Mission was accomplished. Then we cut north, parallel to town, along a highway surrounded by alfalfa fields.
On this road, at one of the only homes along the way, I passed a girl who looked to be about 8 years old and a young woman with dyed-black hair whom I imagined to be her bored older sister or her weary, too-young mother. The girl, who was lithe and serious, was in the driveway bending over some kind of contraption that I couldn’t make out. The young woman, whose was heavyset and detached, was poised at the driver’s door of a car, as if she were ready to get in and high-tail it at any moment. I have the image of the young woman smoking a cigarette, but now I think she just looked like she wanted to be smoking one.
As I looked at them, the first thought I had about the choice to walk was how this kind of walk would not be as possible or at least as likely if I had children. I have often struggled with an inertia that keeps me inside, taking too long to produce useful sentences, checking things off lists, and sweeping floors, when I could very well be walking. I suspect that this tendency would increase if I had children, who would add observing contraptions, cleaning up bemusing messes, and cutting the crust off of sandwiches to my list of things I must do before I choose to walk.
Yet I wonder now if being a parent would in fact push me out into the world to walk much more often, both literally and metaphorically. Perhaps my fear of walking into unknown, uncontrollable, and potentially inefficient territory is precisely what keeps me from both things—parenting and walking. There is a difference between efficiency and usefulness. That may be the great lesson to be learned from walking. Or at least my great lesson.
(2 of 3)
Near the end of this road, I turned into a wooded nature trail that crisscrosses a creek and comes out at a campground. Once inside the sun-dappled, frond-full woods, I started to feel a little less angst about my life choices. This kind of woods is my native habitat. I took the puppy off the leash and kept calling her back to me with treats, teaching her how to roam at least a little bit wild. I remembered a time when I did choose to walk, when I was a child, and would amble through the forest giving names to things and places—my own intuitive walkabout.
When I came out to the campground, I expected more fanfare for the puppy, but the people in RVs and the children on the playground were all caught up in their own worlds. I dragged the poor creature into one of the bathroom stalls with me—to spare her being tied up outside—so I could take a leak.
We crossed the highway and I stopped at a diner to fill my empty belly. There I did have to leave the puppy tied up to a bench. A biker who came in at the same time wanted to engage me in conversation: “Did you walk from a long way with the dog?” And this would have been a perfect moment to ask him what he thought about the decision to stay inside or to walk, and if he knew about the Aboriginal walkabout. But I’ve always been an improbable social scientist. I pretended I didn’t hear him—there was an awkward 5-second delay before I had realized he was talking to me anyway—and I went back outside to sit on the bench with my dog. I just sat, without doing anything or thinking anything useful. That is another thing to choose to do.
I ate my Italian sub out on some rocks at the marina, looking at a vast expanse of blue. The puppy sat, for the most part, calmly at my back, panting her self-abnegation up at me until I’d drank half my ice water, and then lowered it for her to lap up the rest. I also saved her a few pieces of salami. Every saint deserves some moments of relief from her austerities.
From there, we headed north on a road that runs parallel to the highway, on the water side. I had always wondered where this road looped back out to the highway, since I knew it must. At first it was paved, and then it was dirt. There were sprawling vacation houses and poor matchbox houses. There was a hunting area and some private drives. We walked for a very long way, and I kept thinking the next bend would take us back out to the main road.
(3 of 3)
I thought about what makes us decide to keep walking one direction. Or to keep walking at all. And what makes us stop and turn around. In a metaphorical sense, I have often decided to keep walking in the same direction by default: degrees, relationships, jobs. I think that’s what most people I know do. Yet I have also had my share of exhilarating upsets (like Germany vs. South Korea last week).
The strange divergences I almost never regret. The continuing to walk in one direction I only fear I will regret someday. But I do have regrets about when I have stopped and turned around. What this means, I think, is that I regret what I didn’t do and experience more than anything I did. When I can at least see something through to its end, good or bad, I grow in the practice of love and find a sort of peace. But when I stop mid-road, for fear or weariness or even ethical imperative, I always wonder if I cut off a pathway where life could have flourished—where more worlds could have been sung up.
Even still, what I did the day I walked was just that: I stopped and turn around. I was afraid of how long it might take to come back out to the highway, I was weary of walking, and I had an ethical imperative to get home before the arrival of a friend who was coming to visit from out of town.
We made our way back along the same road, used the bike path to get to the post office, and bought extra postage for the papers I had to mail. We got home a couple minutes before my friend arrived, and the puppy lunched gratefully.
After heading out on foot a second time that day to take my friend down to the water, my left foot started aching terribly whenever it bore weight. I was afraid I had injured it from so much walking. Even after my friend, a massage therapist, tended to it, and I iced it, it still hurt just as much. So much for disappearing into the blue on a walkabout.
But the next day, the pain had all but vanished. Now I am thinking I might still walk that road to its end.
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