Walking II

Walking around town this evening thinking about...walking around town, when suddenly I notice that the few other people on the street have stopped and are staring into the trees. Crows. Crows on branches and rooftops and the spires of our cold, humble, but sneakily-beautiful town. Which is both a miracle and not so strange since, as everyone who lives here knows, Portland belongs to two peacefully-co-existent tribes of highly intelligent birds. Down by the harbor, the gulls rule easily - but here in the heights it is Crow Central. Sometimes they get together to stare in our windows and delight our children. Apparently, Super Bowl Sunday is one of these times.

Point proven, to my mind - for without walking, how would I have ever seen this? How would I have ever known that there was a small army of creatures amassed outside my window? More importantly, how would I have seen the dude across the street standing there hooting at them, or the three little kids dive-bombing each other around his knees? In the NYT article, Mozgov pitches his flaneur's individual eye against Zuckerberg's "We want everything to be social"; but what spontaneous miracles such as this one demonstrate is that flaneurie - at least as I understand it - is interesting precisely insofar as it combines both the personal and the social. When we sit in a movie theater we watch movies simultaneously "with people" and "alone". The borderline creates a frisson, which is one of the reasons why some of my favorite moviegoing experiences have occurred after the movie itself is over, on the drive home, or over coffee, when the two moviegoers walk through the movie they just saw step by step and so realize how much, or how little their viewing experiences have in common. 

So, walking is in danger, says Mozgov. But I wonder if devoted walkers (of both the physical and electronic varieties) shouldn't ask themselves an important question here. That question is this: is walking a form, or an impulse? Is it a matter of using one's physical feet, or waiting for a page to download? Or is it an expression of an inherent human urge towards chance and generosity, which will outlast/overflow any of its particular manifestations? (inevitable question: is it, somehow, impossibly, both?)

May I quote some Russians on this? One of the great poetic walks was performed in early 20th century St. Petersburg, when Osip Mandelstam wrote his magesterial flaneurie, Conversations About Dante (queue my 1.5 regular readers' yawns of familiarity...here comes Mandelstam again). Born, allegedly, from an actual conversation between Man and Andrei Bely, the Conversation creates its own universe out of airplanes and beehives and sticks. Dipping into it for quotation is like drawing water from a well full of goldfish: you always get more than you wanted. For example when we hear that:

There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of words, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence.

Fair enough; but then set beside this the transcendental materialist monk Pavel Florensky, a mathematician and philosopher murdered too young by another, more deadly form of transcendental materialism. His book Iconostasis is, among other things, a long meditation on aesthetic phenomenology, meaning on the role that materials play in the creation of art. What we write with (pen, pencil, keyboard) influences what we write. Here he is on painting:

The way the artist's hand moves, its characteristic motion in applying paint, doing it over and over: this motion is connected to inner life; and if this characteristic movement for some reason does not correspond to inner life, thereby conflicting with it, then it must inevitably be changed - and changed not merely in the practice of one artist but in the artistic practice of a whole people, nation, history. Is it even conceivable that thousands of artists for dozens of centuries somehow, during all their nearly countless artistic lives, moved their hands in ways and rhythms that had no inner connection with their souls?

On this point, I am reminded of the scene in Peter Weir's Witness, when the bedraggled Amish grandfather explains a gun to Lukas Haas. "What you take into your hand, you take into your heart," he says. So, according to Florensky, our materials create us. Walking down a cobblestone street in 19th century Paris means something different from walking along the shoulder of I-95. The internet when you had to wait for it is different from the internet now that you don't. Technologies does not (contrary to what I said in my previous post) exist outside of us - or at least, not wholly outside. Things look back at us. 

Where do we stand (Emerson: "Where do we find ourselves?")? Mozgov's article is persuasive and, I think, true. It also panders at least a little to the nostalgia for forms that besets any walker. Walking, when it works, is a risk, a dance with waste and therefore death. As soon as its practice no longer involves this risk, it is time to change, as Florensky says. What needs to be cultivated - and with maximum atavistic frenzy - is not a particular form of the internet, but our Mandelstamian impulse. And who knows, maybe we can't. But people have been saying that since the first walker stepped out of his living room.

(Image: Florensky and Sergie Bulghakov, by Mikhail Nesterov. Screen shot from Norstein's Tale of Tales. Also, many thanks to a great local flaneur for the Mozgov tip!)

Why We Walk

Listening to the mellifluous Stephen Metcalf on this week's Culture Gabfest (1/18), I was struck by his final "endorsement" of poems/passages. All three had to do with walking and looking; specifically, with the imaginative/empathic act of seeing something/someone and "inhabiting" them via a sort of brief non-Vulcan mind-meld. Metcalf asked for a genre tag to describe this grouping - a question that seemed interesting to me, since only a few minutes earlier he'd mentioned an article by one of the great literary walkers/lookers, Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - SM's off the cuff paraphrase is, I should mention, concise and elegant, meaning it made sense of an article that I've read and baffled over multiple times).

Benjamin's stock seems to be particularly high right now. Nearly all the year's best of fiction lists were topped by either Teju Cole's Open City or Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station: two books that I haven't read, but which seem to be, among other things, walk novels. The second of these is frequently compared to Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurdis Brigge, the first to the German pan-fictionist W.G. Sebald, who himself rivals Bolano in his secret-saucitude among my friends who like writing and reading. In the same way, I don't know a person in grad school who doesn't worship the very dog-poop on Benjamin's shoes (actually, to be fair I don't know a person in grad school, period. Unless you count nurses. Which I do. Even though they don't usually read a lot of Benjamin). 

But to return to SM's genre-begging: I'd say that the mini-genre all these works belong to is, simply, the walk. Pioneers would include the American transcendentalists, English romantic poets, intra-war Germans (and Swiss - can't forget Walser here, not just for his name but for his long short story "The Walk"), Russians at all times (my favorite Russian saying: "When late for work, walk slower"), the French when they're feeling piqued (Baudelaire: a great theorist of flaneurie and the grain of sand hidden in most of Benjamin's best pearls) and of course Guy Davenport. After Dav, walking as an actual pursuit withers, at an inverse rate to the blossoming of its literature, until finally we get to the internet, which, if you're feeling generous, could be seen as an epic, breezy, and occasionally frustrating-walk that everyone with a computer is taking together. Hence, I believe, this discovery of walking. 

Do I like to walk, I mean me, personally, as a person with a body? Yes I do. At the same time, I am terrified of walking. Something is always at stake - time, for example. The wager is that sharp attention is enough and that the world is so suffused with meaning (or available to our meaning-makingness) that even the most out of the way detour will end up redeeming what we've spent on it (and if you don't like the mixture of spiritual and economic language here, please take it up with Emerson, also a great walker). Another way to say this is that the walker has faith, which is one of the reason why timid, conservative people like writers are so drawn to walking: not because we're naturally good at it, but because we recognize in it a set of skills that we are somehow deficient in.