Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Walk #4
Instructions: Go for a long walk. This being the final walk of the official curriculum, let's end with some amplification. Let's sing our way out the door, letting the tendrils of voices or glockenspiels or kazoos or Telecasters carry us over hill and dale. It matters not whether you listen to The Muppets or The Modern Lovers or Mahler or your own damn whistling self. Just walk with a tune, and think about what it means to augment your interactions with the world. Does music heighten the act, or complete it? Does it distance you from some things, or bring you closer? Walk on.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
(1 of 3)
I went on my non-semester’s final walk yesterday. I felt a soft melancholy about this ending, small as it may be in the grand scheme. I felt similarly melancholy when I first read through this blog and discovered that no one had written anything in response to the final assignment. I hope, at least, someone took the walk. Maybe they haven’t written only because they are still too busy singing on the hills and dales out there. I prefer to believe that.
This assignment was a perfect finale. Finales always need a soundtrack. It also dovetailed with a finale of sorts in my life. I took so long to get around to this walk because I had spent nearly all my time in the past few weeks pouring an enormous amount of intellectual, physical, spiritual and creative energy into a work-related project that had to be finished by September 1st.
I woke up early on that long-awaited morning yesterday, well-rested for the first time in weeks, with only a few finishing touches left to make on the project. I decided it was time for Walk #4.
I happen to be on vacation in a place that is not far or famous or new to me, but I still consider it is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I might add that I’ve seen quite a few places. I came with my significant other and my stepchildren. They are consummate night owls, so I left them to trundle peacefully through their dreams until I returned.
A couple of days before, I had finally figured out how to download songs on my cell phone for the express purpose of taking this walk. Though listening to music on a cell phone constitutes something of a breach of my ethical-aesthetic values, I gave up on my snobbish technological puritanism somewhere around the same time I had my first argument by text message. Besides, I could think of no better reason to break form than for the purpose of going forth singing on a contemplative, long-ass walk.
Given the opportunity I have here to walk in certain extraordinary places, I couldn’t walk just anywhere. I broke another protocol of mine and drove to the location of my walk, at a preserved natural area.
It was about 8:30 in the morning when I set out. I walked 3.5 miles and returned to the car at 10:20. I carried the following items in my hoodie pockets: a cell phone, headphones, the key to the car, and two painted rocks, found by my family in various locations, which I was given the task of hiding in new locations.
I began climbing a very high sand dune with “Heroin” by Lucy Wainwright Roche playing, the same song I previously shared on this blog in relation to trespassing. For continuity with previous themes, for rising higher and higher above sea level, and for sobering beauty, it was a perfect beginning.
When I reached the top of that dune and looked over a small lake in the distance, my cell phone started playing “Fidelity” by Regina Spektor. I realized, then, that this was the theme song of my walk. I identify with this song in an ironic way: because I love everyone too fully, I never love anyone fully. Because I get lost so completely in love, I forget how to love properly and instead get lost in the sounds. I hear in my mind all this music, and it breaks my heart. But I keep on singing love songs just to break my own fall.
(2 of 3)
I kept climbing up to a lookout point, maybe the highest one on these dunes, and on a bench there I left a rock painted like a sandy beach with waves coming in.
In general, the songs I selected to download on to the cell phone betrayed my strange infatuation with melancholy. Even the upbeat songs have some undercurrent of dreams deferred or loves lost or poignant resignation when I think of my personal connections with them. My favorite kinds of songs are the kinds that make you feel like your heart is being ripped out of your chest.
So I was perfectly happy in my world of sad sounds as I trekked across the dunes, up and down and drawing ever closer to the big blue in the distance. My legs and lungs grew tired but I kept up a fast pace. Sometimes I was roused to dance a little in rhythm with the reckless revelry of a tinku fight song called “Para que la vida” by Llajtaymanta or the precise soul-pop of Sam Smith’s “One Last Song.” Other times, even the slow ballads, like “Cleopatra” by the Lumineers, pressed me forward to discover what it is in my heart that is so vulnerable and so hungry for the deep blue waves that lay before me.
Somewhere along the way, I found a trail marking post that was lower than most and placed on top of it a small black stone with a painting of a red heart, broken jaggedly in half, and the word “Love” below it.
I reached the end of the hike and the water’s crashing edge almost exactly at the end of all the songs I had downloaded. The last two songs were by someone I know, an artist so genuinely obscure that no one here would have heard the songs. But they spoke of the beauty of blueness, and of love lost and squandered and slipped away in the stream of life. Even the obscurity of the artist seemed to correspond with how small one feels before such great water, such powerful waves, and such paltry beauty to give back to the great beauty that is this earth, this life, this surging real-ness beyond any emotions, attachments or identities.
So I put away the cell phone and jumped into it. The real-ness of the moment, I mean, as well as the water itself. It was gloriously cold in a soft, turquoise way, and I felt reborn as you only can in a living body of water. I laughed. “I am free!” I found myself saying aloud inexplicably.
I had walked a little ways down the beach to avoid the only other hikers out at this hour, a group of three young men, who were about a sand dune behind me the whole way. When I swam out a little ways, I could see that they had now arrived at the beach, and one of them was ambling his way toward me. I wished to avoid encountering him, so I came back ashore, grabbed my clothes, and climbed up a short sand-cliff to go back by another road.
For awhile, I had to walk in my bare feet through some prickly dune foliage, but for some reason I didn’t feel a thing. Maybe the cold water had numbed my soles. Eventually, I met back up with the main path. I walked in silence this time.
I started to see that more hikers were on their way out to the water, and now I accepted the human contact. I passed each one smiling, looking them in the eyes and saying “Hi!” Several had rain jackets on over their shorts. Thunder was rumbling in the distance, and the lightest drops began speckling the sand. As I drew closer to the big initial dune, the sky opened up and poured on us all. I passed a middle-aged woman and a young boy with very professional-looking rain jackets on. She asked how far I had gone.
“To the end,” I said.
“Oh, really?”
“It’s not that bad,” I said, but what I meant to say was, it’s that good. Maybe they would have needed music, though, to make the whole journey.
Right after this, I came to a long, flat section before the final dive back to the parking lot. I thought of the Baudelaire piece about the mysterious, impractical people walking across a dusty plain, each with a chimera on their backs. They didn’t know where they were going, but “obviously they were driven by an irresistible need to walk.” This is clearly the motto for my entire endeavor as a No School University of School Student.
But more importantly, just a paragraph later in this same story, I found a motto for my life: “They made their way resigned expression of those who are condemned to hope forever.” Yes, I thought when I first read that. I am condemned to hope. Hope is such a wretched thing, so beautiful, so true, so inexorable. Hope is walking across this barren dune knowing that something waits for me, but at the same time this barrenness, this walk, is all there is.
As if to test this theory, when no one was in front of me, I closed my eyes and walked without knowing where I was going. This is a game my significant other taught me to play. It makes me feel free. I can’t hope for anything particular. I can’t look ahead. My feet moving steadily across the earth is all there. It’s funny how depriving oneself of a sense can actually make one feel freer. Until I veered off into the dune grass, and had to open my eyes to keep going.
I got back to the big hill sopping wet. At the crest, I began running down until my legs spun like wheels. Aware of my usual habit of looking down at the ground in such moments, I forced myself to keep my eyes looking straight ahead to the parking lot, trees and lake beyond me. I felt more balanced and limber than I ever have running down that dune.
One more thing before I end this. Aside from walking in the rain on the dunes, I did go jogging in the rain like I said I would, N.S.U.o.S. I’ve kept every promise like that, even the strange and useless ones. Not that I’m claiming this as a virtue—it’s just the persistent habit of a magical-thinking, nostalgia-prone introvert.
I thought of you, jogging in the rain on a summer day ten years ago, for reasons that were mysterious even to yourself. Maybe for love. Maybe not. But you were very much alive, even in your discomfort. I remembered you this way. Which is impossible, of course, because I never really knew you; I just felt like I did. I know that now. Just like I imagine you know it’s not worth jogging in the rain now.
But I still can’t shake this feeling that my heart is not in my chest, and it makes me want to go running out into the rain and look for it. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I am happy to lose it. Sometimes I am free. I guess that’s what I’ve been doing all this time.
Post a Comment