Why get out of the house?
Why ever get out of the city?
Walking into Reverie
Walking into thinking
This paper is a brisk walk taking in many features of interest, think of the large number of references as varieties of tree or flower, each with a unique ecology of its own, which you are free to investigate further or let be.
At the end we will return hopefully with some sense that a Poetics of Space requires:
an ecological account of place/space;
a truly embodied account of dwelling, and
an enlarged aesthetic - one which appreciates attention as well as distraction, investigation as well as daydream and reverie, and responsibility as well as play.
1. Why get out of the house?
Bachelard’s nostalgia for the house is my departure point. The modern house was invented (at the same time as stockmarkets and still life) by the mercantile Dutch, as one’s own:
Castle, even if like the Kerrigan’s of Cooloroo, your leaky fibro is built on a toxic landfill, beneath high-voltage power lines and a flight path; or one’s
Private seat of dreams, as in Bachelard’s outdated and deeply nostalgic notion of mortgage rates), primarily because houses are catalysts for what Clive Hamilton calls 'growth fetishism',[i] and mask our gross ecological footprints.[ii]
The House is often a tool not of liberation but confinement, e.g. domestic violence. The House corrupts our sense of home, which should be place sensitive, Edward Casey suggests, ‘A place is my familiaris (literally, a ‘familiar spirit’). As I know my way around my own house, so I know my way around all the familiar places of my ‘habitat’ . . .’[iii]
Home should open up:
a) affectively – learning to feel at home outside the house – outside nostalgia’s epiphanies[iv], belonging, through skilled practice and a natural aesthetic - not relying on imagination (contra Bachelard);[v] and
b) culturally/politically/bio-regionally. To clarify – environmental historian William Cronon urges: ‘We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness can somehow be encompassed in the word home. Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility.’[vi]
2. Why ever get out of the city?
I live in this city, enjoy walking in cities (don’t have a car). Michel de Certeau calls walkers the ‘ordinary practitioners of the city’; this embodied act is ritual and daily practice, which he thought offered freedoms,[vii] and which Jane Jacobs calls the ‘art form of the city’.[viii]
Some north American flâneurs appear less confident in the artform, perhaps due to a capitalist environment anxious for productivity. Charles Reznikoff walked twenty miles a day, but after twenty years wondered if, ‘I am just a fool / to be loitering here alone.’[ix] Like Edmund White, Frank O’Hara cruised rather than loitered, his flâneurship was sociable, seeking art and sex, the unexpected and the ordinary.[x]
‘Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful!’[xi]
Poems don’t have to walk. Emily Dickinson rarely strayed beyond her garden walls, but her circumference extended past O’Hara’s:
‘My Business is Circumference – . . . Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.’[xii]
Marianne Moore was another stationary flâneur:
: ‘it stops its gleaning
on little white castors, and makes fern-seed
foot-prints with kangaroo speed.’ [xiii]
Balzac noted Parisians' insatiable love of novelty: ‘The Parisian is interested in everything and, in the end, interested in nothing.’[xiv] We must take the novelty of a kangaroo further. Georg Simmel (pre-empted by Wordsworth[xv]) warned of blasé attitudes caused by increasing stimuli of urban life.
Flâneurs are still exploring the possibilities. The writer Iain Sinclair makes, 'Walks undertaken as research . . . Walks for their own sake, furiously enacted but lacking agenda. . . Walks as portraits. Walks as prophecy. Walk as rage, Walk as seduction.’[xvi] The Institute of Applied Technology generates formalist constrained walks, for example, ‘iSee’ applications plot routes through Manhattan avoiding surveillance cameras.[xvii] A reminder many cities are unsafe; as Mike Davis notes, ‘‘the freedom of the city’ is an obsolete idea.’[xviii]
3. Walking into Reverie
In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke of walking as reverie,[xix] and his last unfinished work, begun as a ‘shapeless diary’ is called, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker.[xx] Rousseau’s reverie is seen as - an escape (by Bachelard[xxi]); ‘conscious dream’ (by Guy Girard[xxii]); and ‘intoxication’ (Walter Benjamin[xxiii]) - and has links to Andre Breton’s ‘psychic automatism’.[xxiv] Creative thought or hermetic indulgence?[xxv] Renato Poggioli comments, ‘What Rousseau terms ‘reverie’ is a state of passive introspection’.[xxvi]
Rousseau confessed ‘never have I thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself, if I dare so, than on these [journeys] I made alone and on foot.’[xxvii] He pursued in Michel Serres’ words: ‘the aleatory and happy destination: ‘la randonnée’, as Jean-Jacques saw it, passes throughout the whole island and calmly allows all the plants and flowers to bear fruit.’[xxviii] Rousseau is seen as proto-Romantic.[xxix] Serres claims he wrote in opposition to Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637),[xxx] a foundational document of modernism.[xxxi] Rousseau preferred botany to geometry as his science but never claimed to found a new sensibility.
Rousseau’s reveries were not solely of a dreamer, but alternated with a botanist’s exacting observations, measurements and recordings of this destiny. [xxxii] He defended Enlightenment reason.
According to Robert Wokler, Rousseau, ‘found respite only in solitude, the study of botany, and a romantically lyrical communion with nature.'[xxxiii] Wokler and Serres should have added the practice of walking. Rousseau’s walking it’s been said was ‘idle and lazy’ strolling in ‘circuits and exclusions;’ but was neither the dark ‘dromena’ of the sacred rites of Eleusis, which Plutarch, an initiate, described as, ‘chance directions, difficult detours’, nor was Rousseau tiptoeing through the light of the ‘opopte’ where ‘one walks in pure meadows’.[xxxiv] Walking is a grounding practice.
house.[xxxv]
Houses are reified in Australia, which is problematic (the last Federal election was arguably decided on
4. Walking into thinking
The Romans had an expression Solvitur ambulando – walking a solution. Darwin had a purposive oval path at Down House to think with. Hazlitt recounts: ‘Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.’[xxxvi] Rebecca Solnit suggests the mind works best at walking pace: ‘It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.’ We think through our bodies, and recent evidence suggests that walking (as aerobic exercise) ‘increases connections in the brain’, and ‘our ability to think’.[xxxvii]
Reverie, as internally directed, can be contrasted with externally directed associative thinking - a style both collagist, improvisatory and flowing.[xxxviii] Rousseau’s excitement about nature influenced the Sturm und Drang movement. Goethe’s young Werther had been on a high, walking in the mountains, but a few months later succumbed to melancholy (as Goethe did): ‘the most innocent of walks costs thousands of wretched grubs their lives, one step wrecks what the ant laboriously built and treads a little world into an ignominious grave underfoot.’[xxxix]
The ant trail leads to EO Wilson, seer of biodiversity and known for sociobiology.[1] Co-evolution and Gaia are key terms, but our deep microbial level of being alive is summed up by Mary White the Australian palaeobotanist and environmental writer: ‘Here I am, my cellular endosymbionts performing their housekeeping duties within every individual bacterial cell of the 100 billion, of more than 200 different types, that contain my DNA; knowing what to do and when to do it; enabling the metabolism that keeps me alive; providing the neurones that enable me to think and begin to understand a little of the meaning of life.’[xl]
After Werther’s suicide, Goethe moved to Weimer and then walked to Italy wanting peace, complaining: ‘a tremendous mass of new things crowd in on one, facing one at every step, each demanding the tribute of one's attention’ – he took no books, no poetry on his journey.[xli] Goethe travelled in a flush of naive Romanticism to find Rousseau's natural man - ‘The idyllic dream of the first men living out of doors . . .’[xlii] On his return he took to botany just as Rousseau had.
Petrarch may have been the first, Rousseau the most influential, but Coleridge and Wordsworth are probably the most famous ambulatory writers (DeQuincy deserves a mention too). Leslie Stephen actually claims that 'the literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was . . . due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.'[xliii] Robin Jarvis uses the term 'the materialities of pedestrianism'.[xliv]
In this period walking was a fad;[xlv] in 1790, with his good mate Robert Jones, Wordsworth undertook a Grand Tour, like Goethe using feet not carriages and ignoring renaissance cities. That summer, they walked thirty miles a day for over 2,000 miles, and visited the island of Saint-Pierre, where Rousseau wrote his Reveries. Kenneth Johnston claims it was the making of Wordsworth as an original poet.[xlvi]
Even in literate cultures, poets have an oral impetus tied to the body. A servant confided, ‘Mr Wordsworth went bumming and booing about, and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she picked up the bits as he let ‘em fal, and tak’ ‘em down, and put ‘em on paper for him.’[xlvii] Helene Cicoux claims Mandelstam wore out hundreds of pairs of shoes. You cannot write such intense poetry without the kind of dance that dances you round the world.’[xlviii]
In Australia, the walkers who wear out their shoes are white explorers, the ones who inscribed a feral topography on they names, maps and eventually landscapes of this continent.[xlix]
[1] Sociobiology re-emerged under the new name of Evolutionary Psychology in the early 1990s, when gene-based explanations were again proffered for human behaviour but it is not necessarily genetic determinism or genocentric.
[i] Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, 2003
[ii] We don’t build our own houses, which are now all about consumption not production. Around half the energy consumed in Europe is used to run buildings. A further 25 per cent is accounted for by traffic. Preamble to the European Charter for solar Energy in Architecture and Planning, drawn up by Thomas Herzog between 1994-95, and supported by the European Commission. The Charter is reproduced in its entirely in Solar Energy in Architecture and Urban Planning, a series of case studies edited by Thomas Herzog, Prestel, Munich, 1996. Quoted by Catherine Slessor, ‘Green light - role of architects in developing concepts for sustainability’, The Architectural Review, Sept, 1996. Cities are another matter. Cities are relatively efficient - Imagine if the population of Sydney became farmers like the late Australian poet Philip Hodgkins, or lived on a farm like Les Murray.
[iii] Casey, Edward S., The Fate of Place, (1997) Uni of California Press, 1998, p232-3. He quotes from Merleau-Ponty’s, Phenomenology of Perception, 1963 p252.
[iv] See Helen Garner, ‘What’s home supposed to be?’ Heat 15, 2001.
[v] Bachelard argues that space and any 'poetic image' (art) is experienced through ‘pure’ consciousness and instinct. Peter Read, in Belonging, fails to appreciate that it is not a just matter of a farmers say, loving a place, it is how their cultural tools service the place, landscape, or country (as well as a matter of civil rights, which have for the main part been lost to our sad history). Aboriginal love of place is qualitatively different (which means one doesn’t have to discuss unanswerable quantitative questions). Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge; Oakleigh, Vic: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
[vi] He continues, ‘[A]nd calling a place home inevitably means that we will use the nature we find in it, for there can be no escape from manipulating and working and even killing some parts of nature to make our home.’ William Cronon, ‘Getting Back to the Wrong Nature: Why we need to end our love affair with the wilderness’.
[vii] Michel de Certeau, 'Walking in the City', The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans S. Rendall, U of California P, 1988, p91. He opposes Michel Foucault’s account of panoptic power for individual acts and agency. He uses the term La perrugue, (‘Engaging the wig’) a venerable French expression meaning ‘duping the master’, to refer to ways workers trick employers through slacking off, petty theft and taking sickies. It is a way of slipping from under the authoritative gaze, reversing the normal hierarchical processes. de Certeau argued that everyday practice lacks the ‘organised discourse’ of modernity, rather is a varied ‘‘reserve’ of procedures’ that may help democratise society. Michel de Certeau, p48. As Merleau Ponty wrote, ‘Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think', it is a grouping of live-through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium.’ Merleau Ponty, ibid 1962, p153. Herbert Fingarette reminds us of the complex subconscious routines we use in daily walking, ‘I see you on the street; I smile, walk towards you, put out my hand to shake yours. And behold – without any command, stratagem, force, special tricks or tools, without any effort on my part to make you do so, you spontaneously turn towards me, return my smile, raise your hand toward mine. We shake hands – not by my pulling your hand up and down or you pulling mine but by spontaneous and perfect cooperative action.’ Fingarette points to the phenomenological, ‘Nor normally do we notice that the ‘ritual’ has ‘life’ in it, that we are ‘present’ to each other, at least to some minimal extent.’ H. Fingarette, Confucius, Harper & Row, 1972, p9
[viii] Jacobs wrote, ‘The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet.’ And, ‘Under the seeming disorder of the old city is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city, and liken it to dance.’ Quoted by Marshal Berman, All that is solid . . , ibid, p315, 317. Her celebration of the richness and diversity of everyday life in the city runs parallel with nature writers. This understanding is now used by urban planners, ‘A promenade is marked by people physically tuning to common movement and rhythm. A promenade is an activity common in all urban ecologies, a basic homeostatic or self-regulating mechanism by which the community as a whole maintains awareness of the well-being of the individuals who comprise it, and by which the sense of community is reaffirmed collectively.’ Quoted by Arlene Raven, ‘Two Lines of Sight and An Unexpected Connection: The Art of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’, High Performance Magazine, Winter 1987. We cannot forget its formation, space is constituted. Through out the late medieval period, the spaces of cities were specific places and revolutionary agents of change. See Arnade, Howell, and Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol 32:4, 2002, p515-548.
[ix] ‘Walking along the highway, / I smell the yellow flowers of a shrub / watch starlings on a lawn, perhaps –
but why are all these / speeding away in automobiles, / where are they off to / in such a hurry? / They must be going to hear wise men / and to look at beautiful women, / and I am just a fool / to be loitering here alone.’ ‘Autobiography, New York’, from Going To and Fro and walking Up and Down 1941, Vol 2, ibid, p27.
[x] ‘A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.’ - Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, Bloomsbury, 2001. See The Flaneur. http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/flaneur.htm.
[xi] Frank O'Hara, ‘Today’, in Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems, Ed., Donald Allen, Vintage, 1974, p6-7.
[xii] Emily Dickinson wrote to T. W. Higginson, July 1862, ‘Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself... And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you - Obedience - the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that - My Business is Circumference - An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn - or the Sunset see me - Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away.’ Dickinson Focus Texts, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume3/werner/texts.html. Thomas Wentworth Higginson an eminent Bostonian known both as a literary critic and as an active abolitionist offered advice to enthusiastic young writers in The Atlantic Monthly. They communicated for 20 years; she baffled him and he did not help her to publish.
[xiii] Cid Corman, ‘Apron in the Jungle’, in At Their Word: Essays on the Arts of Language Vol II, Black Sparrow, 1978, p41.
[xiv] ... Intoxicated as he is with something new from one day to the next, the Parisian, regardless of age, lives like a child. He complains of everything, tolerates everything, mocks everything, forgets everything, desires everything, tastes everything, feels everything passionately, drops everything casually - his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idol, whether made of bronze or glass ... - Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, Bloomsbury, 2001. See The Flaneur. http://www.edmundwhite.com/html/flaneur.htm. From Honore de Balzac’s dedication to Eugene Delacroix, Painter. The Girl with the Golden Eyes.
[xv] William Wordsworth, in the 1850 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, accused the speeding industrial culture of ‘craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’. Selected prose, Penguin. Ed., John O. Hayden. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, p284.
[xvi] He continues, ‘Walks for the purpose of working out the plot . . . Walks that release delirious chemicals in the brain as they link random sites (discrete images in an improvised poem). Savagely mute walks that provoke language.’ Iain Sinclair & Marc Atkins, Liquid City, Reaktion, 1999, p15. ‘I thrived on movement, drift, being out in the weather. I wanted a single sentence to contain everything I knew. I suffered (exposure to Jack Kerouac at an impressionable age) from that impulse to sketch, note, improvise, revise, double back, bifurcate, split like an amoeba.' Iain Sinclair, Liquid City, ibid, p8. However, Jack Kerouac (who wrote on foot, on trains and in cars) influenced a new generation of flâneurs, like Sinclair, and myself, who as a teenager to begin travelling not on foot, but by hitchhiking, throughout England and then Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. I mostly followed, without knowing it, Lin Yutang’s advice, ‘The true mode of travel should be travel to become lost and unknown. More poetically, we may describe it as travel to forget . . . A good traveller is one who does not know where he or she is going to, and the perfect traveller does not know where he or she came from.’ Lin, Yutang, The Importance of Living, New York: Reynal & Hitchkok, 1937, p331. I was escaping a stifling public school education in England.
[xvii] See http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee/.
[xviii] Mike Davis, ‘Fortress Los Angeles’ in Michael Sorkin Ed., Variations of a Theme Park, Hill & Wang, 1992, p174.
[xix] He confessed that he could 'meditate only when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' His imagination worked best when he was alone walking, ‘never have I thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself, if I dare so, than on these [journeys] I made alone and on foot. ’Rouseau, Confessions 4; Quoted Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions U of Notre Dame P, 1983, p106.
[xx] The book was begun in 1776 as a ‘shapeless diary’. Walking changed his life. On a late walk 14 March 1728 he found himself locked out of Geneva. He escaped. A priest found him and sent him to Madame de Warens, famous for converting Protestant runaways to Catholic. She was a beautiful spy and eventually they had a relationship. He spent some years in rural retreat with her, reading and learning.
[xxi] Bachelard believed reverie liberates us from worries, tasks to hand through what calls the ‘material imagination’, which helps us ‘to escape from the rigidity of mental habits formed by contact with familiar experiences.’ Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, p4. An exploration of the psychic meanings of the four cosmic elements. In The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938), he used the term, 'the epistemological obstacle', for the fixed ideas and categories which language imposes on our thought, limiting experience.
[xxii] Guy Girard describes ‘reverie’ as ‘a kind of conscious dream when the imagined is stronger than my reason’, it is achieved by ‘derive’, a Situationist term meaning drifting, ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences.’ K. Knabb, Ed., Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p50. Debord’s formal PsychoGeography used the practice of 'Derive' (drift), actually organised walks through Paris based upon semi-randomly assigned coordinates marked on a map. His aim was to find new places and note the phenomenology of town planning and architecture.
[xxiii] ‘Convolute M’ is dedicated to the flâneur: ‘An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name. Then comes hunger. Our man wants nothing to do with the myriad possibilities offered to sate his appetite. Like an ascetic animal, he flits through unknown districts–until, utterly exhausted, he stumbles into his room, which receives him coldly and wears a strange air.’ Quoted by Noah Isenberg, ‘On Walter Benjamin's Passages’, Partisan Review, 2 May 2001. He uses the term again, ‘Only the mass of inhabitants permits prostitution to spread over large parts of the city. And only the mass makes it possible for the sexual object to become intoxicated with the hundred stimuli which it produces.’ (1938), Fragments of the Passagenwerk: A meander through the Arcades project of Walter Benjamin, http://art.derby.ac.uk/~g.peaker/arcades/passagenwerk.html . [DL.9.3.2001]
[xxiv] ‘After you have settled yourself in a place as favourable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive a state of mind as you can . . . Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to re-read what you have written.’ [xxiv] (Robert Desnos did it better). Breton, ibid, p15.
[xxv] The condition Breton was seeking is allied to Robert Graves beginning a poem in ‘a trance-like suspension of his normal habit of thought.’ Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel, 1949, p1. William Blake said he wrote Milton ‘from immediate Dictation . . . without Premeditation and even against my Will.’ Letter to Thomas Butts, 1803.
[xxvi] Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry & the Pastoral Idea, Cambridge 1975, p22. Diderot thought that in reverie one forgets oneself and is content with oneself and one’s existence. Rousseau was also keen on forgetting self. Bachelard too: the ‘world dreamer does not know the division of his being.’ The Poetics of Reverie . . .trans D. Russel, Beacon Press, 1971, p175.
[xxvii] Confessions, quoted in Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions, U of Notre Dame P, 1983, p106
[xxviii] Michel Serres, Eloge de la philosophie en langue française. Paris: Fayard, 1995, p144,160. Quoted by Pierre Saint-Amand, ‘Contingency and the Enlightenment‘, SubStance 83, http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/83. Michel Serres uses Rousseau's wanderings to develop his concept of la randonnée, (random circuit) a contingent path that returns haphazardly to its starting point. The term is used in different works. In The Eloge, Serres explains, la randonnée is, ‘an old hunting term in which the quarry at bay tries to lose its pursuers unleashed at random, that is to say following impetuously behind it; capriciously it bifurcates its course, thereby completing, through apparent irregularities, a circuit of stable design, in order to return to the starting point, la randonnée: long, strenuous, determined by the circumstances, la randonnée does not overlook any particular feature, any law of return. It recognises the rule through chaos and chaos through the rule. . . hence it is exodus and method at the same time. Eloge, ibid, p163. Serres’ analysis is part of his attack on Enlightenment epistemology, which Romanticism had opposed. ‘The Age of Enlightenment strongly contributed to the relegation of all reason not formulated by science into the irrational.’ Eclaircissements. Paris: F. Bourin, 1992, p79. Quoted Saint Amand, ibid. For his botanical passion see Letters on the Element of Botany, tr. Thomas Martyn, London: White, 1785; and Books V & VII of Rêveries du promeneur solitaire.
[xxix] Though his wanderings are through a multicursal maze rather than a unicursal labyrinth, and local, not the macro adventures of Gilgamesh, Odysseus or some Romantic hero.
[xxx] Descartes wrote ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind in 1629. It became ‘the Discourse of Method’ and was published as the Introduction to Essays (pub 1637) – and is the source of his fame. He argues that true knowledge is discoverable by procedural rules e.g. reduction, splitting large into small problems and accept what is clear to the mind only, (he saw this in terms of mathematical proofs not an actual empirical scientific method).
[xxxi] Albert Borgmann suggests the other two are Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Uni of Chicago Press, 1992, p22.
[xxxii] Rousseau’s walking seems to alternate between a botanist’s alertness and a hypnogic state, ‘that state between waking and sleeping. From there you can wander towards either of the two. You can go away in a dream or you can open your eyes, be aware of your body, the room, the crows cawing in the snow outside the window.’ John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, Writers & Readers, 1984, p14.
[xxxiii] Robert Wokler, Rousseau, OUP 'Past Masters' series, 1995, p15. In 1749, on way to visit Diderot in prison, Rousseau had a vision that man was essentially good but corrupted by civilisation, he kept to this all his life, though towards the end, was embittered and paranoid. The process of walking was important for his thoughts but so too was the act of writing. Rousseau did not discuss his ideas with others, he wrote them out, a vast amount, almost as therapy. Rousseau is considered a proto-Romantic for his contact with nature, defence of primitivism, of love, imagination, and self-reflexivity. A key work is J-J. Rousseau, (1755) A Discourse on Inequality, Trans. & Intro M. Cranston (1984), London: Penguin. Here he argues civilisation corrupts man's natural goodness happiness and freedom by creating artificial inequalities of wealth, power and privilege. Wokler considers The Confessions as the most important autobiography since that of St Augustine, ibid, p1. He echoed Pre-Socratic and Eastern philosophies, 'Everything is in constant flux on this earth’, and a proto-Romantic search for ‘sufficient, complete and perfect happiness’ in the presence of nature. ‘But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island Of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones. J-J. Rousseau, (1782) Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. & intro. P. France, London: Penguin, 1979, p88-89.
[xxxiv] Plutarch, like Aeschylos, Sophokles, Herodotus, Aristophanes, and Pausanias, was a initiate. See Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, in Plutarch's Moralia, trans. F.C. Babbit, Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1936. Vol. 5: 6-191. The ancient Greek cult of Demeter, goddess of grain, may have come from Egypt; her Temple was at the heart of the rituals for the annual renewal of life
[xxxv] Or more ‘sensibly’, ‘Centre of peace and satisfaction.’ Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: a biography, Hogarth, 1991, p97.
[xxxvi] Hazlitt, ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets’ quoted Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge 1991, p49.
[xxxvii] Professor Arthur Kramer of the Beckman Institute in Illinois, scanned the brains of volunteers using a magnetic resonance scanner. He then split them up and put some on a cardiovascular fitness programme of walking, while the others were sent on non-aerobic stretching sessions. He found differences: ‘The brain circuits that underlie our ability to think - in this case to attend selectively to information in the environment - can change in a way that is conducive to better performance on tasks as a result of fitness.’ In mice, research has suggested that exercise produces increased levels of a molecule called brain-derived neurotrophin factor - which not only protects the brain, but can increase "connections" between brain cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 17.2.04. Husserl wrote that walking, ‘illuminates the history of how one builds up a coherent core world out of fragmentary appearances that takes in isolated groupings and the far sphere of the unfamiliar and unknown things.’ E. Husserl, Ideas: a general introduction to Pure Phenomenology, (1913) trans. WR Gibson, Humanities Press, 1931, p224.
[xxxviii] An alternative to reveries is a state achieved from flow in action, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi maintains, leads to happiness. Who doesn’t want that? Embodied skilled practice gives meaning and satisfaction - or what he calls, being ‘in the flow’, engaging in ‘the activity itself, the pattern, the action, the world it provides.’ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, San Francisco: Jossey and Bass.1982, p14. see also Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper and Row, New York, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York; 1993. Such flow (which I would link back down to Heidegger’s notion of zuhanden): requires learning skills; and having concrete goals; provides feedback;
allows a sense of control; facilitates concentration and involvement; and is distinct from the everyday (‘paramount reality’). From Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper and Row, New York, 1990. Solnit notes: ‘Unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking not as an analytical but [as] an improvisational act’. However, she suggests that a negative reason for walking and hence by association, associative thinking, in our ‘production-oriented culture’ doing nothing [is]achieved best by appearing to do something, and walking fits this bill.’ ibid, p43-4.
[xxxix] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), (Letter of 18 August 1771), trans. Michael Hulse, NY: Penguin 1989, p65.
[xl] Mary White, Earth Alive! From Microbes to a Living Planet, Rosenberg Publishing 2003, p173.
[xli] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey: Et in Arcadia Ego. Trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, p123, Goethe wrote, ‘All I have written so far must be thrown away’ p175, and what others have written, instead, "thrown... in the fire, and watched... slowly turn brown and black, till the pages curled and went up in smoke" p146 Quoted Roberto M. Dainotto, ‘Goethe's Backpack’, SubStance, 33:3, 2004, p8. Rousseau describes his exile on St. Peter's Island in Lake Brenne, Switzerland, and notes he had no books so lived for the moment. See Walk 5, Reveries of the Solitary Walker.
[xlii] Goethe, Italian Journey: p123. He wrote, ‘All I have written so far must be thrown away’ p175. Quoted Roberto M. Dainotto, ‘Goethe's Backpack’, SubStance, 33:3, 2004, p8.
[xliii] Leslie Stephen, In Praise of Walking [no citation], quoted in Jarvis, ibid, pix. Jonathan Bate claims ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge were walking poets every bit as much as they were poets of the imagination.’ Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge 1991, p49.
[xliv] Robin Jarvis insists, ‘that in the displacement from physical experience to the order of imagined reality and literary representation the rhythms and modalities of walking remain a visibly determining influence.' Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, Macmillan, 1997, p33. He discusses Wordsworth and Coleridge in chapters 4 & 5. He uses the phrase 'the materialities of pedestrianism' to emphasise the causal influences of walking on thought.
[xlv] In the summer of 1806 'Captain' Robert Barclay Allardic won a heap of money by walking a 1000 miles in 1000 hours.
[xlvi] Kenneth Johnston claims, ‘With this act of disobedience his career as a Romantic poet may be said to have begun,’ The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, Norton, 1998, p88. Walking was associate with the lower classes and thus allied to Rousseau’s virtues of simplicity and humbleness.
[xlvii] Wordsworth’s actual practice was revealed by his wife, Mary - he would be, ‘murmuring his verses’; and locals reported him mumbling to himself as he walked. Wordsworth wrote to Isabella Fenwick that he began Tintern after crossing the Wye and didn’t finish it till he reached Bristol and added, ‘Not a line of it was altered, nor any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.’ Wordsworth's note to the 1st ed. http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/ww/tintern.txt.html. [DL Jan 2000]
[xlviii] The Helene Cicoux Reader, Ed., Susan Sellars, Routledge, 1994, p202.
[xlix] See the spatial history of Paul Carter in The Road to Botany Bay, Faber, 1987.