Sunday, July 13, 2008
WALK #2
Instructions: Go for a long walk. For this walk, you'll want to see people and you'll want to see life. If you can manage walking in a city, that would be ideal, however any place with an accumulation of people would be fine. Be, as Baudelaire said, "a botanist of the sidewalk." You may choose to follow the flaneur tradition and make yourself conspicuous by walking a turtle on a leash or wearing outlandish garments. Whatever you do, consider your relationship to the people in your vicinity.
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Dear Bay Area livers, lovers, visitors
Please look into Kate Pocrass and her Mundane Journeys.
Here, on her website, are weekly SF adventures. Many lead to neat little nooks with awesome signage, knick knacks, vistas.
http://www.mundanejourneys.com/2004days/jan5-04/jan5-04.html
Pocrass is a 21st century flâneur...she's folksy and engaged, introspective, AND female. (women weren't really allowed into the Wanderlust crowd of yesteryear)
Thank you, Sara! The 'Mundane Journeys' website is excellent. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pierre has found an article mentioning that San Francisco is one of the most walkable cities in the nation.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/17/MN3J11Q3N8.DTL
These results come from the Walkscore.com website, which allows one to calculate the 'walkscore' of his or her area. [My current address gives me an 88/100.] This way of assessing one's walking space is highly quantitative, though, and not very philosophical. Basically, it calculates one's proximity to restaurants and grocery stores and libraries and parks. That's an important calculation to make, I think, for environmental and efficiency reasons. But it doesn't speak much to the sensory benefits of walking spaces.
I was in Montreal this past week [in a neighborhood having a walkscore of 78, which is utter bullshit -- I give it a 95 at least]. Montreal offers itself to humans in a way that invites walking and public interaction like few cities in America. Sidewalks are wide. Parks are safe, clean, and abundant. Most restaurants have seating open to the street. There are countless bike lanes, reducing the emphasis on cars, which in turn creates a safer, cleaner environment for walking. In his book, "Space and Place," Yi-Fu Tuan discusses the concept of "front and back spaces." Different cultures choose to emphasize different things when they arrange their space. In America, there are countless neighborhoods in which the garage is the predominating, or "front," space in the house or apartment building. In Montreal, the stoop and porch and sidewalk prevail. This is no small anthropocentric distinction. In many communities, people have to make a special effort to counter the proclivities of their space to go for a walk. But in places like Montreal, people are encouraged to walk.
Montreal, The No School University of School salutes you!
Walking amongst people has been somewhat curtailed by the recent unrelenting rains, but The No School University of School was able to stroll the boulevard yesterday with much aplomb. In fact, many young gentlemen seemed to be strolling through town looking very alert, a phenomenon perhaps not unrelated to the presence of She & Him in our burg. Only my pal Lily saw the fantastically crush-worthy Zooey Deschanel out on the streets, the rest of us receiving merely the benefits of walking. I did, however, meet the equally crush-worthy M.Ward after the show while he was smoking, and shook his soft hand. I should have hugged him. I bet he walks.
The No School University of School has also recently discovered the non-transferability of walking skills to running. Yesterday morning I attempted a jog after 3 years of a jogging sabbatical, and despite all my walking, I proved to be a terrible, halting, sloppy jogger. I was not much helped by my decision to jog in a rainstorm. The much-rumored existential focus of jogging was, yesterday at least, lost upon me. Back to walking.
Foggy Sunday morning in San Francisco. Soundtrack: Franz Ferdinand's first album, which I under-appreciated until recently. At 11am Hayes Valley is still quite. People returning from yoga class, walking their dogs, getting their first cup of coffee. I stroll past the gold-encrusted dome of City Hall and down to Peete's for a latte.
On my walk back an hour later the beautifully-dressed multicultural young brunch crowd is out in full force. Gaggles stand in front of the more popular cafes and dinners. Smiling faces sit behind clean panes of glass recounting tales of Saturday nights gone wild, family drams best forgotten, work weeks sullied by bosses and underlings equally incompetent. But Sunday brunch cures all, at least for an hour or three.
Back down bustling Octavia Boulevard towards home. One of the local denizens without a fixed address sits on a chair, his four shopping carts piled meticulously high with small plastic bags full of belongings. Their middle-aged owner sits hunched over a chocolate muffin in the wind.
I marvel at all the bags. How does he keep track of them? How does he know what is in each one? Are they bursting with useful items, or old newspapers and shoes that don't fit his feet? Does he unpack and repack them, or do they remain stocked and static as he totes them around the neighborhood?
Back up Haight Street and my five flights of stairs, very happy to be blessed with a fixed address, running water, a stocked fridge and shelter from the elements. If only we were all so fortunate. Perhaps next year in Jerusalem.
(1 of 2)
I very nearly skipped this assignment all together, much to the chagrin of my imaginary instructor who saw such promise in me. My laxity has not, however, been for lack of walking. In fact, I already advanced the work of Walk #3, but I have struggled to find the right moment and context for Walk #2, living as I do in a place where one does not exactly encounter an abundance of people while ambulating outdoors.
But I can’t deny that last week my town was suddenly overtaken by a great swarm of people, and all of them were walking, sitting, lounging, even dancing and throwing projectile objects, in what can certainly be designated “the outdoors.”
The problem was, they were all concentrated in a relatively small area, and taking an hour-plus walk amongst them seemed almost too conspicuous. I tried. But I did not feel that my strolling about, sitting and listening to a band play, and watching drunken but surprisingly agile revelers compete in a bocce ball tournament, deserved the noble designation of “long-ass walk.”
Still, seeing no further opportunities to interact with anonymous streams of humanity on the near horizon, I have conceded that these short, discombobulated walks will have to do for my second assignment.
My choice of conspicuous prop, predictably enough, a puppy. Though less than provocative, the puppy did afford a much greater margin of interaction than I would have had otherwise.
A little boy and his mother who were making their way to the end of the pier saw me as I was coming back landwards, and the boy said, “Puppy!” while the mother said, “He kept saying we had to catch up with you.”
A young woman sitting on a bench on the same pier said under her breath as we passed, almost as if it were a mental note to herself, “The cutest puppy ever.”
The keyboardist of one of the bands who happened to be friends of mine thanked not me but my puppy for coming to his show. She entertained him the entire time by vigorously digging in the sand, then laying down in her handmade bed, then getting up and making further adjustments to the exact shape and depth of the thing, then repeating the cycle, and never achieving total satisfaction.
One young man called out, “I love you!” not to me but to my dog, and when I continued to encounter him on several occasions, he would say, “You have the most beautiful dog!” I reflected on how this is the only remaining politically correct form of catcalling. Dogcalling, I guess.
(2 of 2)
At one point as I sat on a bleacher with the puppy digging away, I turned around and saw a large, round woman with short, dark, feathery hair and a timeless face that shines like the moon with love, and I assumed she was beaming at me because of my puppy. Only after the set ended and I passed by where she sat did I realize that I know her, that she saw me do something she admired once. It was a wonder to remember that I could provoke such affection from someone, even though I imagine it is only a reflection of something beautiful she struggles to see and know deeply in herself.
I have been reading Baudelaire, and I tried to set aside those small, specific objects of my love and become one with the crowd. I tried to fling myself into “that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution of the soul which give itself totally, poetry and charity, to the unexpected which appears, to the unknown which passes it by” (Parisian Prowler, 21).
I can’t say I came even close to achieving it. Yet I suppose in a way the very fact of where I live and what I am doing here makes me a little bit like those founders of colonies or shepherds of peoples whom he talks about being “exiled to the ends of the earth” (22). Renouncing the greater renown and import that I could supposedly have if I lived a more mainstream life, I have embraced this little world as my own. I have found remarkable delights in this simple chastity, like cheering on a drunken women’s bocce ball team or receiving the radiant moonlight from the face of a woman I almost didn’t recognize.
Perhaps this choice to exile myself is part and parcel to my tendency to observe crowds not as an aggregate of individuals, not to notice how the girl with lime-green hair twisted up in little buns cheers on the psychedelic pop-rock band, or how the rumpled old couple sits back and eats caramel corn skeptically, but to feel the thing as one whole organism. I experience crowds as entities unto themselves. If I were a painter I would paint people Monet-style, in blurry splotches. Maybe this means I have some inner affiliation with Eastern worldviews, that supposedly prefer to see a fish tank as a whole, remembering the bubbles and the algae, rather than noticing the details of the individual fish (the perception study I am referencing is lost in the annals of my memory).
That’s probably why my favorite moment of this walk (or, really, walks) was when I went to the halfway point out on the pier, and I heard that the energetic drummer-led cover band was playing “Ophelia” by The Band, and the lights of the stage blinked in the distance but the sound carried crystal clear across the water to me, and I saw one great Humanity thriving on the rippling warmth of the music. And I did feel absolutely complete, and like I had absolutely nothing to do with it, for just a moment.
I would like to add, in an uncharacteristic interaction with ghosts of students past, that I wish N.S.U.o.S. would give jogging in the rain a second chance. There is nothing quite like desperately sloshing through puddles on the ground and the puddles inside your shoes, having your vision temporarily blinded depending on the direction of the wind, and feeling your skin electrified with wet aliveness (but hopefully not lightening itself) to take you out of your insideness and into the raw unpredictability of the outdoors. Having said that, I must now commit to jogging the next time it rains. Easier said than done.
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