Critical Dialogues on Walking, Art, Landskip, and Knowledge

Critical Dialogues on Walking, Art, Landskip, and Knowledge

Contents

Ways of Walking and Not Walking Heather Yeung

Enduring Gravity: Footnotes on Walking, Distance, and Endurance Misha Myers

Mountaineering In Counterpane Alec Finlay

Beginning with the Big Toe: Peregrinations on Obligatory Bipedal Plantigrade Locomotion Matthew Beamont

Ways of Walking and Not Walking Heather Yeung The first walk I remember really taking, a walk for a walk’s sake, was with my family in Lion Rock country park in Hong Kong. We walked through the park approximately to the point that the trail we were following met the MacLehose trail, and then we stopped. I remember the humid smells of sub-tropical springtime, questioning my fellow walkers about various elements of our surroundings (rock-formations, flora, fauna, other walkers), why we were walking in the first place, what else we were going to do with the day, and why we had stopped when we did, as I felt able to continue for much longer at the pace we had set. Even in my seven-year-old mind, the process of walking led, in many ways to contemplation and interrogation, of the surrounding environment, of the human relationship to that environment, and of the walking process and related issues of mobility and ability in relation to that.

In An Examined Life, taking a walk with Sunaura Taylor around San Francisco’s Mission District, Judith Butler speaks of the process of walking thus: I’m just thinking that nobody takes a walk without there being a technique of walking; nobody goes for a walk without there being something that supports that walk; something outside of ourselves. And that maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self-sufficient.

Gary Snyder, too, in The Practice of the Wild, links the act of walking to a technical framework, and also to physical ability: We learn a place and how to visualise spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.

Returning momentarily to my Hong-Kong walk, its reason was in the main familial – my mother’s parents had come to stay with us, the idea of a Sunday afternoon walk brought together both the European and Asian sides of my family in a shared activity.

Tourism, in the main, determined the choice of Lion Rock and the MacLehose trail; who, after all, could visit Hong Kong without looking on that quite stupendous landmark. The reason for the walk’s length and duration was due to relative physical ability with relation to our surrounding environment – the 30′ heat was too much for a long trek for my Scottish grandparents, and my younger siblings. Both sides of the family shared interest in our surrounding flora and fauna; in broken English, more conversation was had during that walk than over the dinner-table the night before. In both my thought about the walk now, and my recollections of my seven-year-old train of thought, then, reasoning moved though the immediate process of walking through an imaginative visualisation of the space (Snyder), to form what Butler calls ‘a technique of walking’: the act of walking both at the time and in recollection of the event, leads us to elucidate some sort of reason for the walk, and thence also supply some sort of conceptual framework.

In Butler’s case, this introduction to the idea and technique of taking a walk leads us into a comparative study of what taking a walk means in the context of both disability and gender studies, questioning society’s conception of the the ‘able bodied person’ as somehow ‘radically self-sufficient’. Observing Butler’s walk, the act of taking a walk, and talking whilst walking – the ‘something outside ourselves’ which supports the walk – also becomes a shared ground of experience, a means towards understanding across abilities and disciplines. The walk is possibly the most basic way of developing an understanding of our surroundings, and of testing our limits. The way we walk (or do not walk) in relation to this surrounding environment and in comparison with and relation to others is a means to personal, interpersonal, and cosmic understanding. In the case of Butler and Taylor and Snyder and Harrison, the dialogic nature of this exchange is also paramount.

As well as a means to test ourselves, both physically and mentally, the walk also provides us with a site of memory – a concrete means by which we may interrogate a past. However, the walk is anything but concrete, and perhaps that is what leads us constantly, while walking either for a reason or for the sake of walking itself, to question the means of walking. In this way, the walk, the idea of walking and indeed of not walking, lends itself well to converging disciplinary studies. The way we walk, and how and why we walk, is a, perhaps the most, common ground. Indeed, what metaphor is more persistent in all fields of research, than that of the walk? Each person has a walk of life; understanding a person’s walk of life is a means toward understanding that person – the walk here is a way to provide context. Just as disciplines have their fields, each critic has his trajectory, or walk, in order to traverse these fields, to discover new frontiers of thought and artistic and scientific practise. The walk is partly a bidding farewell, partly a movement towards. The one informs the other; the two are inseparable. The walk, too, with motion its essential element, is inextricable from the pause in motion, whether this is a temporary break along the way or, indeed, a beginning or ending. The walk is at once one of the the most basic human activities and also a means towards interrogation, achievement, protest or intervention, and ultimately, also, the simplest possible way of making a shared space and time. Where my walk as a seven-year old bridged and brought together continents and cultures, Butler’s walk with Sunaura Taylor brought together different physical abilities and academic interests, making detours into the realms of gender-construction and political intervention.

The walk is necessarily an act of intervention in some way; it is almost inevitably multidisciplinary.

Walking conjures up a knowledge of limits – not just with respect to physical ability but also conceptual and geographical capabilities, interpersonal, cultural and social preconceptions. The walk for a walk’s sake will demonstrate to us physical limits. The Walk in order to contemplate will test conceptual capabilities. The walk through an unknown space will test the possibilities of geography; the walk with any person will test interpersonal understanding. Any combination of these elements will also test the limits of cultural and social preconceptions. Limits exist to be tested, pushed forward. In the interrogation of the limits, the act of walking, the act of talking about walking, and every metaphor related to the walk and its related space, is put under scrutiny.

The act of true criticism does not only involve this boundary-crossing scrutiny and interrogation, but is also, as Wayne Booth points out, inherently dialogic: To me, the most important of all critical tasks is to participate in – and thus to reinforce – a critical culture, a vigorous conversation.

Both Snyder’s and Butler’s approaches to and comments on walking, above, are at their roots dialogic – Snyder’s with Jim Harrison, Butler’s with Sunaura Taylor. What this perhaps emphasises is the common ground element again: the walk is not only an act of critical interrogation and boundary-pushing, but also the (shared) walk also demonstrates an act of personal development and of critical care. Each of these elements will lead to reflection, some of this on the move, some of this at stopping points along the way, and some of this after a final stopping point has been found or a goal achieved. Within the critical culture surrounding the walk, the act of walking, and all the related metaphors, there is a strange temporality. Although the act of walking lends itself to being cast in a distinctly narrative mould, this is not necessarily the case. The walk as peregrination, or walk for walk’s sake, may plot itself as some sort of vectorial path, but the interaction with the process of walking here goes a long way to muddling up this apparently straightforward temporality.

The pause in the walk is as important as the walk itself. In the first century AD, the Chinese poet Tu Mu writes

Climbing far into cold mountains, the stone path steepens.

White clouds are born up here, and there are houses too.

I stop to sit for awhile, savouring maple forests in late light: frost-glazed leaves glistening red as mid-spring blossoms.

Naturally, this poem is immediately subject to the Romantic interrogations that we see so often surround any poetry stemming from the Rivers and Mountains tradition. But perhaps what is more interesting here is the manner in which this much earlier way of relating to the landscape by walking reflects those impulses towards multidisciplinary engagement of our contemporary thinkers, above. We know that Tu Mu’s career, in contradistinction to many of his fellow poets, was one which was active politically. His poetry was influenced not only by his geographical surroundings (he made many journeys across China in the different stages of his political career) but also by the cultural and political; this act of walking in the mountains is opposed to the many politicallyorientated journey the poet also made. In the act of walking, the artistic, the cultural, and the political combine. Walking is both a pleasure and a means to a transportive end. This multivalent process leads eventually and always to some sort of ontological and ethical questioning. As David Hinton writes, ‘Tu cultivates the enigmas of history, landscape, and natural process in the very texture of his poems […] he opens the fundamental human enigmas of consciousness’.

As well as this, and perhaps most importantly for its context here, Tu Mu’s poem also demonstrates the tricky temporality of the walking process, and the importance of not walking, or limitation, to the walk. Not much of the poem, entitled ‘A Mountain Walk’, is about the process of walking. Rather, we see a concern with the mediated (through the walker’s vision) environment, the contemplation of which is facilitated though the pause in the walking process. The pause is our first moment of temporal concern. And pausing on this pause, we are led to notice that each element of the poem demonstrates a different temporality. First, ‘climbing far into cold mountains’, we are witness to the presentness of the possibilities of the walk itself – the path stretches ahead; we call to mind the ancient traditions of contemplation upon the prospect of the mountain, rather than the real process of walking up into the altitude and gazing down from the mountain. The speaker of the poem moves through and recognises his immediate surrounds. Here, too, attention is drawn to potential limits of the walk – ‘the stone path steepens’, there is a hint at the possibility of struggle against the environment here.

Second, at this point, walking in the mountains as the path steepens, the surroundings gain more clarity. Our present now is not in the walking process but in the abstract particular of that which is noticed in the walk: in comparison to what, unmentioned, has come before, here we have white clouds and houses. In this act of contemplation, the climbing of the first line is placed in the past. Thirdly, we have the pause, which leads to further contemplation in and of the surroundings of the walk. The pause / process of contemplation extends into the final line of the poem. And yet this part is only a pause in the walk – ‘I sit awhile’, but then, unspoken, the walk will continue – the walker cannot rest in the mountains, away from clouds and houses, among autumnal mapleforests, forever. Just as the walk extends across a landscape it also gives us pause, and this pause, or contemplation, is an endlessly accretive process.

The final twist in temporality of Tu Mu’s poetic walk is the manner in which its composition interacts with the walking process. Just as, in the poem, the pause is as important to the walk as the walk itself, here, the past subject of the walk is rendered present again as the poem is composed. In many ways Tu’s poem is, rather than a simple walk, a re-walk. Indeed, many reflections on walking (and reflections on the reflections that walking gives rise to) occur in some pause after the event. In this way, we can constantly revisit and reinterpret the terms and conditions of the ‘technique of walking’ integral to the act of walking itself. And what better way to expand and extend this interrogation of the technique of walking to the acts of talking, and of writing about walking.

Critical Dialogues was an afternoon symposium on walking held at the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh in July 2011, organised by the W.A.L.K. (Walking Art Landscape Knowledge) research project at the University of Sunderland.

Originally conceived as a symposium around the subject matter of art-walking, the remit of the day expanded, naturally, even at the conceptual stages, due to the necessarily multidisciplinary nature of any thinking or talking about walking: Critical Dialogues on Walking Art Landscape and Knowledge seeks to examine and interrogate the practice and process of walking in all its cultural, ethnographic, poetic, and geographical ramifications, and bring together innovative and speculative ideas on walking, landscape, and social, cultural, artistic, vocalic, and geographical constructions of space.

Just as we move through space by walking, for whatever reason, we also come to form and frame the space through which we have walked. The consequent interrogation takes into account each elements of the titular acronym of the University of Sunderland’s research project. Each of these elements, too, takes its place in Butler’s and Snyder’s discourse on walking, above. And observed in a different way, each may give way to any one of the ramifications of or ideas on walking delineated in the symposium blurb, above, testing the limits of each discipline. Each or any combination of these elements contribute in some way to and produce some sort of reflection on Butler’s ‘technique of walking’, and Snyder’s ‘spatial relationships’, Booth’s ‘critical culture’.

Again, walking, or the walk, provides a common ground.

Participants at the Critical Dialogues symposium came from a wide range disciplines demonstrating diverse academic and practical approaches to walking, and the three papers, too, developed diverse theories around the act of walking. To read these talks, now, also brings to light the age-old analogy that has been made between the text and the landscape, the writing as path, the writer as walker. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination… To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide.

And yet the act of writing marks a pause in the process of walking itself, a movement from the physical act of walking into the realms of walk-as-metaphor, which, as we have seen above, can lead to an important critical pause, an interrogation of the act.

Critical Dialogue represented such a critical pause. The papers which comprised the main body of the symposium, given by Misha Myers, Alec Finlay, and Matthew Beaumont, mark a stabilised point of this dialogue, and it is my pleasure to (re)introduce them here. The three papers, one from a performance artist, one from a poet, and one from a literary critic, all circling around the same theme (that of the walk) promised to be excitingly diverse in scope and approach. And indeed they were. But, equally, many variant lines of flight were created between the papers, and progression from one to the next, and, indeed, the discussion that punctuated this progression, created coherence rather than disparateness. Taking time to look at rather than listen to the papers, formal as well as thematic lines of flight may be drawn between each, the conclusion from which we may draw is that the walk, and the act of thinking about walking, not only takes time but also takes a radical approach to both time and thought. These three talks express this in different ways both thematically and formally.

Misha Myers’s ‘Enduring Gravity: Footnotes on Walking, Duration, and Distance’ takes as its starting point the idea of a ‘lentology’, extending Paul Virilio’s ideas of slowing down and acceleration into the domain of performance art, and the art of walking. Myers posits the importance of adopting (whether accidentally or on purpose) a means by which the spatio-temporal experience of the walk may be altered as a technique of interrogating the practise of the walk itself. The walk becomes a way of rethinking our present relationship with space, but also provides a means to interrogate past conceptions of space and the walk. Questions of mobility, in terms of endurance and duration (concerns we will find common to all three papers) are raised, as each of Myers’ ‘footnotes’ looks at practices that ‘[push] the boundaries of human capacity’ in some way.

And, as we have seen, the walk itself is defined by what it is not – the idea of the pause, and of boundedness.

Of course, if we trace Myers’ track back to Virilio, the thought surrounding slowness, or the slow walk, in comparison to acceleration, becomes necessarily multidisciplinary.

Virilio, in ‘Continental Drift’, links super-speed of transport and communications technologies to surface-space and the blurring boundaries of globalised geographies, thence mapping this onto subject-centred discourse and identity-politics: [P]retty soon… a nation’s geographical depth will disappear. But so will all topographical asperities, those hills and steep valleys that were the pride, the splendour of the regions traversed… The current waning of institutional borders, echoing the decline of natural boundaries, will then be accompanied by the waning of the interval that once divided the peoples of Europe into nation states

Indeed, elsewhere in his work (again testing the idea of boundaries, Myers’ Virilio ‘footnotes’ focus particularly on Negative Horizon) Virilio decries the amount of time that super-speed contemporary man spends sitting down as he no longer needs the apparatus of the landscape, a map, a pair of walking boots, in order move at lighting speed across borders and through spaces. So, as we increase our affective map of the world, it is likely that the related exponential decrease will be in our ability to take time, to, like Tu Mu’s walker, ‘stop and sit awhile’ during the walk. And the walk, too, is important in this process of contemplation. And so, too, is the sticky temporality of the manner in which we engage with the time of walking, or, as Myers writes, the importance of the manner in which ‘the walker switches-back, turns, retraces and falls between steps and gaps in thought’. In many ways, therefore, Myers’ slow walking praxis becomes an intervention, not only into the linear space-time of the walk, but also into physicality of the walk itself, calling as if a manifesto for the continued questioning of the idea of endurance and the walk; putting forward and looking back upon the ‘technique of walking’ we would need in order to accomplish a more than natural feat of walking.

As with Misha Myers’ talk, Alec Finlay is concerned with the interruption or intervention into the congenitally perceived easy and linear process of walking, and the use of this new perception, or ‘footnote’ as a means to interrogate the walk itself. From the starting point, the paper’s title, ‘Mountaineering in Counterpane: A Report to the Armchair Mountaineering Club’, Finlay posits the innumerable imaginative possibilities of the walk. From a poet’s-eye-view, Finlay straight away moves away from the endurance-feats of Myers’ footnotes into something shorter, more personal. For this talk is also a confessional. Coming from a long line of walkers of sorts, Finlay uses this talk as a base to explore his own ability (or inability) to walk: he is, as he states, ‘confined by a muscular contrition / to the short walk, sometimes the very short walk’, and when walking with others will often find a stopping point at which he will wait for the more intrepid. But of course this stopping point is also the point at which the imagination will walk on (see, again, Du Mu’s poet, above). The landscapes of Finlay’s father and their family walks becomes a movement out from these short walks, but is bounded too, by the long period of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s agoraphobia. Contrast to that the mountain-bound strides of Finlay’s great-grandfather, Seton Gordon. But the process of walking, and of knowing one’s limits, is not just biographically bound for Finlay, it is also tied up with the process of making.

As Myers has presented us with a talk structured as a preamble followed by seventeen ‘footnotes’, Finlay also takes on a non-linear, discontinuous, and discursive structure, giving us ten ‘walks’. The talk, we can see here, is also lineated, calling up his art as poet, and allowing Finlay structural freedom to breathe between lines. Each ‘walk’ Finlay gives interrogates in some way (through the telling of a past walk, a personal walk, of an art-project, a ritual) the ‘walk beyond the walk‘; the complicated mesh of metaphor and reality that ideas of walking and of viewing call up. Where Myers notes the limits of the imagination in the face of physical pain, using the example of Tim Brennan’s Codex Crusade, Finlay points towards the opposite of this, that The imagination can dominate any physical experience […]

A walk defines the distance to or from society physically an also in terms of the psyche.

The meaning of a walk is defined by the interpenetration of the body and memory.

It exists on a spectrum running from the purely physical to the purely imaginative.

On the subject of John Cage, Finlay riffs poetically on one of Cage’s stories of a shared walk, the imaginative boundaries between humans thinking, and the manner in which the shared common ground of the walk can lead very disparate thought processes towards dialogism and imaginative, as well as geographical, progression. Finlay, thus, plumbs a line of walking inheritance; In ‘Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)’, Cage riffs on lines from Henry Thoreau’s book, Walking.

Here, Thoreau is concerned with the purity of the experience of the walk (in this case, the walk in the woods), stating the importance of entering the landscape both physically and in spirit: a turning away from the rest of the world both physically and mentally, and a turning towards the woods physically, mentally, with the senses similarly and completely turned. Thoreau asks ‘What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something outside the woods?’

Of course, Cage muddies this essentialist attitude to the experience of walking, first quoting this phrase from Thoreau, subsequently asking ‘What business have I in the woods if the woods are not in me?’, simultaneously calling for complete and reciprocal immersion in the landscape, yet complicating this attitude of complete immersion through the very structure of the work in which the manifesto is articulated: this Diary is a tissue of quotations, stories, and forms; in order to move to a process of landscapeexperience deeper somehow than Thoreau’s, Cage must first reference and build upon Thoreau. In doing this, Cage establishes a sort of metapoetic dialogism, a paradoxical call for a temporal presentness of walking predicated on a specific past idea of a presentness of walking, which Finlay subsequently builds upon in his ideas of the essential nature of imaginative as well as physical, literal, walking. Finlay looks back to Threau’s first pronciple fo walking experience through a Cageian lens and asks how far the imagination, too, may travel. Like Cage’s, Finlays’ text here is built upon various stories, quotations, and forms, all pointing to the different temporalities that different attitudes to walking, and their subsequent articulations, engage. And so Finlay, like Myers, engages with the tricky temporality of the walk as well as with the physical and psychical possibilities that humankind is endowed through their ability to walk and not walk.

Matthew Beaumont’s talk ‘Beginning with the Big Toe: Perigrination on Bipedal Plantigrade Locomotion’ is a meditation on the big toe, a manifestoe, and as such, an intervention on the subject of walking much in the same way as Myers’ and Finlay’s talks have been. But here, Beaumont begins not with the walk itself but that which gives man the ability to walk: his hallux. Again we are concerned with the physical nature (or as Beaumont writes) the ‘physics’ of walking, with ideas of slowness and speed, technique and limitation. Where Myers draws from Virilio, Beaumont begins with Bataille; like Myers’ and Finlays talks before it, Beaumont’s is both diverse and diverting. Indeed, the beginning is in humour, and the talk goes on to riff on the reality and metaphor of the big toe across disciplines and cultures, times and places. Again, the talk has a multiple of exploratory structure, taking a triplicate approach to the idea of walking – the anatomical, the anthropological, and the philosophical. And again there is a movement towards multidisciplinary through these multiple views of walking; Beaumont’s manifestoe seeks to ‘defamiliarise … the act of walking’. Where Myers’ and Finlay’s talks deal with the limits or extremes of the walk in terms of structural and physical boundaries, Beaumont’s talk looks at one extreme of the body, and moves on from there.

Mobility is the key question here, or, rather, humankind’s peculiar and defining aspect of mobility: their obligatory bipedal plantigrade locomotion, i.e. the human art of walking upright, on two feet. For Myers, the artistic practise and philosophical reflection on the possibilities of a lentology disrupts basic walking. For Finlay, basic walking is disrupted through limits imposed on the body and the imaginative processes of walking.

In both cases, the walk is in some ways a fugitive – a movement necessarily delimited by its stopping points. The big toe, or hallux, itself provides us with the mechanics of this fugitive movement – hallux, as Beaumont points out, deriving from the Greek halmos, meaning to spring or leap. Beaumont, however, returns us to the most basic physics of walking: the big toe ‘provides the impetus needed to walk’. And yet reflection upon the big toe also leads us towards all sorts of digressions and disruptions; Beaumont writes ‘…if one thinks about walking as one walks, if one looks down at one’s feet and really thinks about it while performing this most unthinking of everyday activities, one simply stops, topples over, or collapses’. And so we cover up the big toe, both psychologically, and physically. Beaumont’s paper looks at many elements of the physiologico-aesthetic paradox of this ‘ingloriously glorious digit’, providing an intervention and re-view, in terms anatomical, psychological, and intellectual, for and of the big toe. As, at the beginning of this introduction, I have made reference to Judith Butler’s comments on the ‘technique of walking’, Beaumont’s physics of the big toe presents us with a technics of walking. Like Butler, Beaumont destabilizes the cultural perception of the able-bodied walker’s ‘radical self-sufficiency’, instead positing a more humorous, fugitive, open efficiency which is by definition unrooted. Reflection on these multiple manifestations of techniques of walking ought, just like the walk itself, bear to, both physically and imaginatively, give us pause, a pause which gives way to contemplation and interrogation, of the surrounding environment, of the human relationship to that environment, and of the walking process and related issues of mobility and ability in relation to that, a demonstration of which occurs in the three papers which now ensue.

Enduring Gravity: Footnotes on Walking, Distance, and Endurance Misha Myers

Preamble The footnote is an elusive fugitive. It slips under foot of the word, tripping up the trajectory of the thesis. It is the banana peel on the path that interrupts the gravity and linear progression of an argument to create diversions, detours and breaks of consciousness that open up new horizons and dimensions of thought.

This essay follows such a path in pursuit of an elusive subject-- the long distance and slow motion walker’s endurance of gravity and experience of time and space. This form may give some more accurate representation of how consciousness works as the walker switches-back, turns, retraces and falls between steps and gaps in thoughts or as the blister, break or sprain collapses and shatters space and thought to be endured. How space and time are manipulated, collapsed or expanded in the consciousness and body of the walker as they contend with gravity, the requisite condition of walking and falling into the world, will be considered, as will the scales of attention a slow mobility affords.

As is the nature of the footnote, these diversions are diverse and ramble. The way is sometimes uneven, and sometimes dead ends; there are some long legs, some short.

But all paths taken here aggregate around a gravitational pull of walking feats of endurance and duration, including some personal steps and junctures along a trajectory of my own walking practice and some falling into step on the heels of others. The survey of practices that follows is not exhaustive, but ongoing and a kind of preparation for my own long walk.

Footnote 1 Ten Teka Ten is the exercise from the Japanese director Suzuki Tadashi’s method of actor training that focuses on showing off the foot, the exercise that best articulates the director’s approach and challenges and tests its practitioner’s manipulation of time, balance and gravity through a slow motion walk. Indeed, this particular approach is grounded by the feet. Suzuki was first inspired to develop the approach when he made the observation that the feet of actors on the western stage were not physically grounded as they moved about the stage. While training in Suzuki’s approach with his company in Toga, Japan, and with the Saratoga International Theatre Institute (SITI) in New York, I was often reminded that Ten Teka Ten is the most difficult of the exercises of the approach. It shows off the practioner’s mastery, or not, of the training and the feet to be precise.

It involves a slow motion walk where the movement of the feet must maintain the same speed for the duration of the passage. The body must move continuously with the upper body remaining completely still resting over the hips and at the same level while traversing the space. The effect that is sought is a quality of floating in slow motion. If the viewer could see only the walker’s upper body it may appear as if they were moving on a conveyor belt. As with all of Suzuki’s approach, the performer is training to create a kind of magic using only what Suzuki refers to as the animal energy of the body alone --to master the manipulation of time and space through the mastery of gravity, to stop time, to speed it up, to collapse and expand space through the gesture of the body.

Such mastery to create the illusion of effortless and weightless movement requires an entirely effortful and focused attention. Any lapse of attention may result in a loss of balance or slight increase in speed to shatter the illusion. Indeed this is a walk of other worldly beings, ghosts and gods.

How then does one walk as ghosts and gods? Before the walk begins, the body is poised in a state of restrained motion. The body’s centre of gravity is both propelled and accelerated forward while also pulled back, a deceleration of movement in tension with the acceleration of will and energy. Then there is a release and a momentum that carries the centre of gravity forward into space over the heel as it is placed first, then followed by the rest of the foot as it rolls into contact with the floor to the toe as the heel of the back foot lifts to the toe to rise off the ground to move forward to advance. All of these movements are coordinated and executed at a continuous pace. In this moment between the back toe lifting off and the front heel coming down there is a structural ambivalence, a chasm that threatens to swallow the actor into mortal corporeality bounded by gravity. In this moment there must be the right balance of momentum and restraint, of acceleration and deceleration, of flying and falling.

The saggital and lateral alternation and circulation of weight is displaced from one base of support to the next as the centre is thrust forward smoothly and continuously along the horizontal axis. While gravity pulls the body downward, the spine is intended up out of the top of the head, energy is extended from the centre of the body and out through the focus of the eyes looking ahead, casting an anchor at a some precise point some distance away on the horizon, a distance maintained as the body advances. At the moment of displacement of weight between the two supports there is a moment of instability and the body is suspended, but anchored above and ahead on the horizon by the exertion of will. In the passage of the body’s centre of gravity to go beyond its peripheral edge, a vertiginous zone, a constant revolution, an inward turn or involution is marked, not a fixed point of stability. If this moment is lost or the actor loses themselves, their concentration, there is a fall into disequilibrium, a loss of control, into a state of vertigo. This structural impossibility, this chasm between supports is manoeuvred with the force of imagination and will to stand, to fly, to fall again and again into the world. This space between is a dangerous moment of suspension across a distance without ground, which requires a manoeuvre of skilful control, a kind of levitation.

Footnote 2 In Paul Virilio’s ‘dromosphere’ acceleration and deceleration are the only dimensions of space, a speed-space where space is defined by movements and by the relative or changing speed of those movements (James 2007: 31). In Open Sky Virilio suggests that speed permits a more intensive sensual perception of the world. He argues ‘Speed not only allows us to get around more easily; it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely’ (Virilio 1997a: 12).

However, Virlio suggests that for the car traveller, the oncoming object of perception is as quickly forgotten as it is perceived, as it is hurled against the windscreen and soon after disappears in the rear window (Virlio 2005: 105). How is the world perceived then in the space defined by slowness? Does this mobility enhance memory as muscle memory and perceptions of the world intertwine? Is the body able to absorb perception better at a human pace? Not necessarily. For instance, in Ten Teka Ten, slowing down to a pace against the body’s momentum requires a degree of concentration that challenges the ability to perceive external phenomenon. Indeed, maintaining a soft focus that engages peripheral vision is one of the skills tested by the exercise.

‘What is human time?’ my colleague Carl Lavery asks. ‘Is it the time it takes to live?

Or to die?’ (Lavery 2011: unpaginated). What sets that human pace is the bodily limit.

Where movement is propelled by human effort, is it the heart and the lungs and their capacities and endurance that establishes this pace and its limits? In a world that increasingly relies upon technologies of speed, this leads me to ask if those capacities are exceeded or does the human pace always fall short to keep up and catch up? How are those human capacities exceeded through means that rely solely upon human mobility, movement generated and propelled by bodily effort?

Footnote 3 There is an image of He Yunchang leaping in the air with the rock that he carried for 3500 kilometers and 112 days in his walk ‘Rock Tours Round Great Britain’ (20062007) (Yunchang . Beginning his walk in Rock, near Northumberland, he picked up the stone near the town of Boulmer and walked counterclockwise around the perimeter of Britain until he returned it to the exact point where he found it. Through this walk the artist said he intended to represent ‘the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods’. (Yunchang 2007: unpaginated). The levitation captured in the image defies not just the gravity of the rock, which is not of much significance in weight in reality, but there is density in the gravity of time and distance of his journey. These are the invisible dimensions of the durational artwork that exceed, expand and evade the frame of the action altogether. That expanded frame provokes me to wonder about the intimate and private dimensions of space and time of the act, how the weight of the rock and the repetitive action of stepping one foot in front of another around the perimeter of Great Britain left its impression upon the artist’s body and that of other bodies that he came into contact with. Did the density of stone and distance increase the density of his muscles? Where were the aches and pains felt?

Do calluses remain where the blisters hardened?

The work marks space and time outside the conventional conceptions of time or measurement of space. Where the work may be understood as ‘durational’ in that its meaning is constituted by a temporal constraint, drawing upon Adrian Heathfield’s definition of the term, it is also constituted by spatial constraint as much as a temporal one (Heathfield 2009: 22). This leads to the question what spatial aesthetics and discourses such a durational work engages with? I would suggest it engages with a distal aesthetics or aesthetics of mobility. The space that the work takes place in is extensive and extended, such that it is witnessed by the few companions that joined the walk at various intervals or incidental passers by. In fact, I belong to neither of those categories of witnesses and contemplate the walk through the second hand paces and traces that exist of the walk: stories, photographs, videos. The distal interpretation of the work through this writing is a kind of readying for me as a practitioner, a way of thinking through my own long distance walk and it’s potential trajectories through the footsteps of others.

Footnote 4 A lentology is considered her, a study of slowness, and an aesthetics of slow mobility.

Consider the latin word for slowly ‘lente’, which also means to move calmly, cooly and deliberately. The related word ‘lentus’ means supple, tough, resistant, tenacious, but also lethargic and inactive. I continue to search for the concept that will hold both the slow and deliberate movement with the active. A movement that is not so much an inverse trajectory of Virilio’s dromosphere, but a parallel dimension of movement that is not simply understandable as deceleration, but as an intensity of action that takes the time it takes and allows the interpenetration of feelings and states and of past, present future, of inner and outer experience. It is a kind of laziness that is actively generative.

Footnote 5 After a repetitive ankle sprain continuously let down my emerging career as a young dancer, in 1989 I sought out different physical practices that might allow me to break my habitual patterns of movement assimilated through ballet training since I was three years old. I spent a summer at a retreat centre in upstate New York working in exchange for workshops in various practices including butoh, tai chi and yoga. One practice was particularly influential in changing the direction of my work- a workshop with Jean Couch in her particular approach to yoga, which was informed by Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Dance. With Couch I explored the smallest imperceptible micro-movements of the body, studying the place between willed intention to move and the movement that happens automatically, that is not in the everyday range of perceptions, where the muscles differentiate and articulate. For a young dancer bursting with energy and desire to move, I initially found the stillness required to be a tortuous experience. I felt caged. Towards the end of the workshop I began to find immense freedom in the smallest movement as I surrendered to a feeling that felt like falling, a continuous weightless motion uninhibited by my preconditioned ideas about dance or what I thought my body could or should do. At first this feeling was fleeting, but eventually more sustained. After the workshop concluded I took this inner experience of movement outside the studio and into a practice of walking in the landscape. It wasn’t walking strictly speaking, but a kind of fluid slow motion upright dance that would follow a trajectory influenced by forms in the landscape, textures of terrain, such as walking along a line of pines into a lake until submerged. This particular walk was only around 20 metres or so, but endured over most of a day. I was trying to meet that micro experience of an innerscape with the micro experience of the external landscape, to allow them to intertwine, interpenetrate and influence one another, to feel both with greater intimacy and detail. Sometimes an audience would stop to watch, but there was so little to see and performing was not really my intention or main preoccupation in this activity. In some ways I was attempting to disappear into the landscape, to feel myself merged with it completely. However, these audiences reminded me that there was another time running parallel to the one I was inhabiting in this walk-dance and something that always resists that merger.

Footnote 6 Henri Bergson referred to the inner experience of time as ‘Pure Duration’, a state of intensities composed of sensations, emotions and prehensions. It is he writes, ‘the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states’ (Bergson in Heathfield 2009: 21).

Suzanne Guerlac writes that to think of this temporality of duration as defined by Bergson ‘we must be willing to give up our conceptual separation of past and present in order to conceive of temporal synthesis’ (Guerlac 2006: 66). Furthermore Guerlac suggests, ‘the idea of an order of succession implies spatial orientation’ (ibid). Distance travelled can be measured in space as successive positions along a trajectory, however, she argues that mobility is ‘felt as intensity... it is an action’ (ibid: 68). An aesthetics of mobility considers the intensities of movement along a trajectory of distance and duration.

Footnote 7 For a module I teach on walking as performance, entitled Foot-Mobile: Performance at a human pace, a group of my students walked six miles throughout the town of Falmouth as spacemen on holiday, walking as if in zero gravity. They had planned to walk a longer route, but exhaustion overcame them. Despite their pre-flight tests and training they underestimated the effort involved in transforming the atmosphere of earth within their body. But the slow deterioration of the attempt to walk as if weightless and it’s wearing on their bodies became part of the work’s choreography.

Footnote 8 For Robert Wilson’s Walking, created for the Oerol Festival with Dutch theatre designer Theun Mosk and actress Bourkke Schweigman, the audience walked in slow motion the 4.8 killometers width of the island of Tershchelling from the waddensea to the northsea. At the beginning of the walk the audience entered a container where they were asked to leave behind their time—all instruments that marked time-- watches, cameras, phones (Groenveld 2008: unpaginated). A host would help them set the slow tempo of the walk with approximately 50 metres between them and the next person.

The walk is made alone moving through a series of installed spaces along the journey between the seas. A volunteer described the varied emotions of the audience—some very emotional, relaxed, happy and some angry (ibid).

Footnote 9 In 1993 I devised a slow motion walk across San Francisco’s United Nations plaza, a space outside the City Hall designed to resist loitering. The walk involved around 20 performers advancing at an exceptionally slow pace side by side as one line across the width of the plaza. We walked with one hand extended in front of us palm up and holding an apple, advancing towards a line of police in riot gear standing across the top stairs of city hall. The performance was intended as a non-violent action in the context of a protest against the police crackdown on members of the group Food Not Bombs who were being arrested for distributing free food to homeless people without required permits. The line of performers could be seen by the policemen to be approaching from a distance—an unknown force that moved imperceptibly and too slow to be a threat. As we approached closer, the policemen moved down the stairs. We continued advancing until our extended hands were nearly touching their mouths. Their superiors repeated the command ‘hold the line’ as we then stood in stillness and silence before them with the apple held suspended between our mouths. We looked the policemen in the eyes and opened our mouths as if to eat the apple, straining against ourselves to bring it to our own mouths, but keeping it out of reach. ‘Hold the line’ was heard with more frequency and pronouncement. The officers became more and more restless. Our slow and still advance was an ambiguous force of a different dimension and intensity of space and time that for a brief moment seemed to unsettle or suspend the laws that constituted normal behavior.

Footnote 10 Lone Twin unintentionally came ‘nose to nose’ with policemen when they conducted an exercise involving a slow meditative walk with a group on a beach in Scarborough in 2003. David Williams describes the proposition of the exercise: ‘count the number of steps from the Victorian Spa to the beach’s edge and then over a period of thirty minutes walk towards the sea using the same number of steps; at the water’s edge make an action imagined en route, then turn and retrace one’s journey back to the beginning of the beach, again reiterating the same number of steps over a thirty minute period (Williams 2011: 114).

Williams writes of the encounter the event precipitated: ‘a private action in public, its internal dynamics, meanings, and functions resistant to a normalizing survey from the outside, constituted a threatening anomaly to the civic everyday. The most everyday of actions ... had produced an unreadable and dissident friction among the complex layered polyrhythms of the seaside’ (ibid).

There is an agitation that comes into relief around the stillness of the lentosphere. Why is it so threatening? Virilio suggests ‘the reduction of distances by the acceleration of movement is the effect of the instinct for self preservation ... The constant acquisition of greater and greater speed is only therefore the curb to increasing anxiety’ (Virilio 2006: 46). To slow down reveals and undoes the disciplinary action of acceleration. To slow down is to come nearer to extinction.

Footnote 11 Every year at the beginning of May the town of Helston in Cornwall brings in spring with a four- mile dance known as the Furry dance of Flora day. The first dance begins at dawn and is repeated by different groups of dancers four times throughout the day.

The origins of the dance are uncertain, but one version suggests it was the town’s inhabitants’ expression of relief, levity and celebration of their survival from the fall of a meteor on their town-a hell stone left by a dragon that fell from the sky.

The dance moves in and out of thresholds of houses, gardens, businesses throughout the town and crosses the everyday thresholds that separate public from private to enfold, entwine and invert the private into the public sphere, the spaces of commerce become sites of effortful but unproductive labour.

As I watched a brass band and some 200 dancers enter the front door of a cottage, my first impression of the dance was that it was an attempt to alter the dimensions of space, to fit an entire town into a front room. The dance also altered the perception of the scale of time.

Not only did the dancers’ keep time with the brass band that led the procession through the town’s streets, the dancers kept a cosmic time, marking the seasonal rhythms. Their steps remind, reflect, and juxtapose and intertwine a mythical time of origin with the present.

Footnote 12 For the walker landscape is intimately close up, as Wylie suggests ‘that which is both touching and touched, an affective handling through which self and world emerge and entwine (Wylie 2007: 167). Perhaps in the lentosphere the landscape impresses itself upon the body and mind, The body and self are entwined and emerge with and within the landscape, as Wylie suggests, ‘landscape as entwined materialities and sensibilities with which we act and sense’ (ibid: 215). The landscape is both marked/made by and makes marks upon the slowed down moving body and consciousness of the walker.

Drunk on milk and tangerines and battered from the extreme weather of midwinter, Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris in 1974 to attempt to stop the death of film maker Lotte Eisner. In his account of the journey his visions of landscapes are written in a form of stream of consciousness landscape writing where the boundaries blur between reality, dream and hallucination in filmic imagery with close up detail and wide angle visions and layering of narrative associations. Indeed he writes, ‘I walked there on feet so tired that I had no more consciousness left’ (Herzog 2009: 66). Herzog writes everyday at the resting points along his journey; he recounts all that he has seen in a day and in these narratives his feet seem to still be moving. His feet are doing the writing in the same way that they pull him along when he has gone to that point where ‘falling forward becomes a Walk’ (Ibid: 50).

The landscape is also imprinting itself upon his body. Thirteen days into his journey and seven from it’s end, he notes the increasing swelling of his right Achilles tendon and ankle, which he suggests was probably due to walking all day long on the left side of the asphalt road with the left foot treading level ground and the right twisting with every step along a slope in the road that let the rainwater flow down. He decides to compensate this by changing the choreography of his walk, switching road sides, ‘As long as I walked crisscross i didn’t notice a thing. The soles burn from the red-hot core in the earth’s interior’ (ibid: 48).

Footnote 13 Tim Brennan’s blisters become a preoccupation for me at this point along the way, those he too obsessed about as he retraced the 298 miles of the Jarrow Crusade from Jarrow to the Houses of Parliament and attempted to walk the same distances as the original marchers over the same number of days. How can the walker not become preoccupied with the blisters that bring focus to every excruciating step, expand distances such that destinations stretch further and further away into oblivion and collapse the space of awareness to a small centimeter of flesh.

Day 1: Brennan treats the blister by piercing it and draining it, rubbing the surrounding areas of skin (Brennan 2004: 52). Day 2: the heat of the tarmac feels like it is flaying the skin from his feet and he notes the words of Thich Nhat Hahn, another slow walker, ‘You need to suffer in order to learn’ (ibid: 54). Day 3: he moves from needles to razor blades for opening blisters, he says, ‘in one slice’ (ibid: 56). Day 4: the blisters won’t harden, feet are swelling, toes cramped, and all he can think of he says ‘is to get to the next point. If I stand still the pain is greater. I’ve lost my rhythm. I march with my eyes and let my stride become regular so that there is no focus on my feet. Walking with my eyes’ (ibid: 58).

There it is again. The levitation. Brennan keeps his momentum with an eye stride. He suggests a mode of vision synaesthetically conjoined with the rhythmic movement of his pace. His movement in the world becomes indistinguishable from his visual perception of it. As suggested by Tim Ingold, with an ambulatory vision the world is revealed along ‘paths of view’ rather than ‘projected from a sequence of points of view’ (Ingold 2000: 226). There is an openess to the gaze rather than a grasping, a falling into the world through the eyes. The eyes touch the world as much as his feet and pull him into the world.

Day 5: He writes ‘It’s just a matter of going forwards. I have slowed to 2 miles an hour (ibid: 60). Day 6 a day off. Day 7 No pain. He is gaining momentum. Eleven miles in 3 hours.

Although Brennan measures his progress against ‘clock time’ and the speedometer, the mode of temporality and memory activated through his walking suggests a different logic or mastery of it to that of the capitalist homogenization, division and regulation of time. The marking of this time resists what Heathfield refers to as the kinetic logics of capitalized temporality, the marking of productive or non-productive time. The walking artists’ pace resists and reveals that of technologies that have become assimilated as human rhythms through their labour and use.

As Heathfield proposes, ‘acceleration can be seen as a disciplinary operation whose very object is to be forgotten as an exterior order of time, to hide its active conditioning of the subject’ (Heathfield 2009: 21)

Footnote 14 What of the walker whose daily labour is an uphill climb? As part of Foot-Mobile, my students Natalia Eernstman and Helena Korpela created a guided audio walk based around the daily walk of a postman on his eleven mile journey up and down hills of the town of Penryn in Cornwall. They walked with Paul his last day of a route he had walked for 21 years. For the sake of efficiency Royal Mail would exchange this walked route with a van and GPS. The audio walk they created with Paul, Do the Hills First, traced the spaces of overlap and transition between the old and new routes with recordings of customers that Paul would deliver to along his route telling stories of letters that had changed their lives. Paul’s voice narrated and guided the walk, starting with the hills first as he would do everyday and at one of the houses enroute where he would store mail to pick up on a switch back further along. The walk stopped at houses where Paul would often stop to chat, have a cup of tea and catch his breath. Along the new route he is able to cover more ground in a shorter amount of time, as the route is flat and he knows the short cuts to take on foot unbeknownst to the GPS enhanced computer that now regulates his route. This leaves Paul with more time to himself. Instead of talking to customers he sits in his van drinking tea and the mail is stored in the back instead of in customer’s garages. His is now a more solitary than social occupation.

Footnote 15 A switchback. Day 8: Brennan is thinking ‘what it must be like to fight a battle after a 23 mile hike or run’ (ibid: 66). Day 11: Four miles an hour. ‘Every step is a step into the future’ he writes (ibid: 72). Day 14: he tells Tony Benn that he has been thinking about how one might design a memorial to the Jarrow Crusade. ‘The route is the monument.

And to walk the route would activate it. Walking it might then at times be an act of remembrance’ (ibid: 78).

Day 19: A reporter asks Brennan if he is mad. ‘I think you have to be rationally minded to walk the 298 mile route’, Brennan replied (ibid: 88). What drove the 200 workers of Jarrow to walk? A rational determination for survival.

Contrary to Virilio’s car traveller’s amnesia, Brennan activates a remembering of this determined effort through the blisters that swell up and harden into calluses that toughen the skin. He feels the tarmac through his soles, and through that suffering he comes to understand and learn about the determination of those walkers he is following after. Through that suffering he is not stepping back in time, not reenacting it, but stepping into the future alongside the reverberations of those steps of the past.

The effects of the actions and events of a time gone by interpenetrate the present and anticipate a time to come.

As the endurance of pain is an inevitable aspect of the long distance walkwork, the narrative theme of martyrdom of ‘Endurance Art’ is necessarily invoked, as much as it is in other journeys of protest and penance. As Heathfield suggests the ‘logical outcome is self-affirmation and the (eventual) productivity of hard labor’ (Heathfield 2009: 22).

However, as an aesthetic act the walkwork undoes this productivity as aesthetic duration. As Heathfield argues, it is a ‘wasteful form of labor; it saves nothing, and as such it is often deployed as a means to disturb or suspend narrative resolutions or consolidated identities’ (ibid). But what of the pleasures of such walking? Can they be separated from the pain? The pleasure of uninhibited movement through space, of accomplishment at the end of the journey.

Indeed, Brennan also aims to suspend the separation of the past from the present in his work. Instead of a static memorial to a timeless past or attempt to reconstruct some authentic representation of history, the memorial he proposes ‘give[s] time back to timeless landscapes’ as suggested by Desilvey (Desilvey unpublished: 9). as he advances into the future with his steps he anticipates the past. Contradictory interests, memories, claims and visions of the past and/or futures held by various communities and social and political constituencies of contested landscapes and their histories coexist alongside one another.

Footnote 16 Yesterday I went for a walk from here, the Edinburgh Gallery of Modern Art, following the Waterway of Leith four miles through the city towards the sea, following Anthony Gormley’s figures wading mid stream along the way. These static and silent companions always facing downstream and towards the bridged banks remain rooted solidly and fixedly resisting the movement of the water, the momentum of time. All the washed up debris of the waterway entangles at their feet creating a kind of nest or trap for this stagnant dwelling.

I imagine there are times when they are up to their neck in it, as would be those inhabitants along the waterway’s banks, this fact given away by the busy activity of a flood prevention project. My own journey moved against stagnancy, the river perhaps the more convivial partner along the way as we both were drawn by a common force, the downward pull, for me earthward and for the river seaward. I expected to see Gormley one last time there where the Firth of Forth asserted it’s own push and pull, but we, the Waters of Leith and me, had left him behind.

Footnote 17 A last leg ... for now ... of an ongoing and rambling journey of the fugitive ‘Tomorrow’, Virilio suggests ‘speed will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body’s sphere of influence and that of its behavioural egonomics’ (Virilio 1997: 12). With teletechnologies and remote telepresence Virilio suggests a third interval signals a ‘qualitative leap’ (ibid: 13) in the relations between human beings and their environment. Time (as duration) and space (as extension) are inconceivable without the third interval, ‘of the light kind’, light (as limit-speed) or the speed of light. As the increasing acceleration of speed exceeds the limits of human capacity to reach the limit of the progress of acceleration, society reaches what Virilio’s refers to as a ‘wall of acceleration’ (Armitage 2001: 97-98).

Perhaps it is possible to conceive of a third interval in the kinetics of the lentosphere as the light of consciousness. Each of the practices traced in these footnotes pushes the boundaries of human capacity, but by going a distance, enduring through the human body-mind and the landscape’s sphere of influence and momentum. In doing so these efforts give a glimpse at what might be a human time that is unmarked by or surpasses the everyday limits of time and space and advances towards a duration more than a destination.

References Brennan, Tim (2004) Codex Crusade, Sunderland: Reg Vardy Gallery.

Desilvey, Caitlin (2011) Eernstman, Natalia and Helena Korpela (2011) Do the Hills First (Online) Available at: http://thecloudcastle.wordpress.com. (Accessed 10 July 2011).

Groenveld, Laura (2008) ‘Oerol festival Tershelling-Project: Walking’, (Online) Available at: http://www.travelblog.org/Europe/Netherlands/Frisia/blog-300216. html#comment_form (Accessed 10 July 2011).

Guerlac, Suzanne (2006) Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, New York: Cornell University Press.

Heathfield, Adrian (2009) Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Herzog, Werner (2009) Of Walking in Ice, Canada: Free Association. Ingold, Tim (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. James, Ian (2007) Paul Virilio, London: Taylor & Francis.

Lavery, Carl (2011) Conversation following the presentation of this paper at W.A.L.K. Symposium, Edinburgh Gallery of Modern Art, 29 July 2011.

Virilio, Paul (1997) Open Sky, New York: Verso. -----(2006) Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Virlio, Paul and John Armitage (2001) Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, California: Sage.

Williams, David and Carl Lavery (2011) Good Luck Everybody: Lone Twin-Journeys, Performances, Conversations, Aberystwyth: Performance Research Books.

Wylie, John (2007) Landscape, London: Routledge.

Yunchang, He (2007) The Rock Touring Around Great Britain’, artnet (Online) Available at: http://www.artnet.com/artwork/426074265/the-rock-tours-round-greatbritain-detail.html (Accessed 13 July 2011).

Yunchang, He (2007) ‘He Yunchang, The Rock Touring Around Great Britain’, ARTCAT, (Online) Available at: http://www.artcat.com/exhibits/5837 (Accessed 13 July 2011).

Mountaineering In Counterpane (Report on my resignation from the AMC (Armchair Mountaineering Club)) Alec Finlay

Are paths the first human-made structures or views?

I am keen on walking but confined by a muscular condition to the short walk, sometimes the very short walk.

As someone who edited an anthology of mountain writing, but has never been to the top of a mountain, today I will attempt to rebalance walking and viewing.

I felt the need to reflect on the work I have made on these related themes and activities over the past few years In particular, I wanted to resolve my response to a hostile comment an artist recently made, to the effect that it was not proper for me to make work on the theme of mountains, in the manner that I have been, because I am unable to climb them; and further, that I can never ‘belong in them’.

To my mind, the harshness of these remarks put in question, the healing function of the imagination: something that can reach beyond physical boundaries elude hostile political or moral claims; a power that can, in effect, walk beyond the walk.

The structure of my talk is 10 walks.

The first was the walk I made to reach this lectern.

Walk 2 The second walk is a traditional view of the walk as a climb – thinking of the walker as a mountain-top, thinking of them as a peak – as defined by Tim Robinson in his study of Connemara in a passage narrating a walk up Errisbeg: ‘Any hill suggests a progression from close-up observation of what is immediately under the climber’s hands and feet, through rests for breath-catching and retrospection and glances ahead at intermediate delusive skylines that hide the ultimate goal, to the triumphal horizon-sweeping outlook from the summit.’

(Tim Robinson, Connemara) Walking cannot unconditionally claim an ethical stance when its goals are described as a progression from retrospection to ultimate triumph.

As this poem, from the road north, admits: bend after bend skyline after skyline we came this far no further Alec Finlay, the road north (2010-11)

Walk 3 The third walk is any one of the walks made by my great-grandfather, Seton Gordon, who studied the permanent snow patches of The Cairngorms, and stated his preference for walking around – but not always up – the slopes and contours of mountains.

The image which accompanies it shows the view towards BRUACH NA FRITHE in the Skye Cuillin from Dun Merkadale, Loch Harport.

It is from a collaborative project that I began in 2011, ‘WORD-MNTN’.

Walk 4 The fourth walk is a very slow and short walk following my recovery from a serious illness made at the Hutters Republic of Carbeth with Gerry Loose & Morven Gregor in April 2011 offering a view of Dumgoyach.

The walk is described in a poem written for Alice Ladenburg whose art practice centres on the handstand and who taught me how to read backwards.

would we could live our lives as a novel read backwards secure in our ending as a rope tied or taut stay each strand untwisting a moment tense with shock giddy for joy

love become our delirious ending we slowly unwind to the knot of that familiar difficult beginning glimmering the perfect form of an idea as it emerges complete in its own right from out some vague object the craggy dome of Dumgoyach’s summit a step away still we’ve to walk by the old paths at what pace we’re able – only every now & then we may be brave enough to dare a cartwheel empty ing out our pockets seeing inside a world turned upside-down.

Walk 5 This next walk, the fifth out of ten, is a Zen walk-parable, as retold by John Cage.

Two monks are on a long journey.

They come to a deep river where they meet a beautiful young woman who is unable to cross so the older monk carries her over on his shoulder.

The monks walk on in silence.

The younger monk brooding growing steadily more furious until after a few miles walking he blurts out to his elder “how could you do that when you know the precepts of our order forbid us contact with women” The older monk replies “I set her down back at the river – it’s you who have been carrying her with you for all this time” Which is a reminder that walking and thinking are different things The imagination can dominate any physical experience.

Walk 6 The sixth walk is a daily family walk repeated many times always following the same circular path from Stonypath, around the moor and back home It represents those aspects of limit and extent that define any walk, no matter how long or short.

I will now describe the walk briefly, from memory (the walk) I have come to realise a number of things concerning this walk Firstly, that it was an act of walking the bounds – not in terms of a specific limit defined by geography or property but a border of the imagination and psyche Beyond the bounds of the walk the moor was, to my father, like an expanse of sea – alien, waste, un-navigable.

These bounds defined the relationship between our home and his garden, with the wider wilder moorland This boundary was eventually demarcated by a one-word poem:

(‘FRAGILE’, Ian Hamilton Finlay, with Sue Finlay, Stonypath, Little Sparta; photograph by Robin Gillanders)

Every boundary has two sides defined by belonging or feeling alien, as every walk reaches a crossing point even if is only the moment one turns for home.

This boundary walk inscribes the effects of my father’s agoraphobia which first impelled him to create the garden – physically, a landscape to walk around imaginatively, a world to walk within.

The distance to and from the garden remained the same, physically, but History and Art lengthened it, imaginatively.

The fragile garden became increasingly focused on boundaries metamorphosing into an armed Republic of the imagination, re-named ‘Little Sparta’.

The moor, however, always remained a moor.

It represented the zone beyond home – a place to walk through but never tarry in.

It also represented a refuge free from the imposition of the poet’s own imagination.

On this walk one passes near the natural spring up on the moor upon which the water of our home his garden depended upon.

This wild spring was reimagined in the garden, as a source bubbling out of a stone bearing a carved quotation from Virgil.

The source is Little Spartan; the spring is Stonypathian.

This walk around the moor between the source and the spring is the most important walk in terms of understanding my father’s art.

It appears in none of the literature.

When my father became too old to walk around the moor then a memory of it was placed within the garden in the form of a sheep fank, stell or fold.

(‘Fold’, Ian Hamilton Finlay, with Pia Maria Simig, Stonypath, Little Sparta; photograph by Robert Gillanders)

This circular walk also recalls the platonic perfection of the isle of Rousay, Orkney my father’s perfect ‘black sheep’ where he became a poet in the late 1950s.

My friend Alistair Peebles took me to Rousay this June There he passed on a charming story that relates to the single road which circles the island and which my father labored on.

When the tarmac came then so did cars.

Alistair asked an islander if Sunday drives circumnavigating the island became repetitive?

To which the islander replied in the Orcadian manner: “Well, no, of course not, you’d only to turn the car around and drive the other way” Which is a reminder that even on a short walk we can see the world from opposite directions.

Also that people in gardens and islands feel they live in a world (moreso than the metropolitan mind sometimes allows).

We can walk imaginatively.

We may have to – through illness, age, confinement dispossession, limits imposed on the right to roam even imprisonment.

Walk 7 Next, another longish short walk, the seventh.

In fact, this is a series of walks made in August 2001 & 2002 from the wooden huts of the campsite at Vaasbakken to the site of Wittgenstein’s house at Skolden, Lusterfjord, Norway – walking in blue wellingtons with Guy Moreton, Nina Sverdvik and David Connearn.

This walk passes through fields and a woodland hillside of rowan, pine and birch, past the remains of the small stone anchorage where Wittgenstein anchored his rowboat and the remains of the pulley mechanism which he devised to bring water from the lake.

It finally arrives at the plateau where the foundations of the philosopher’s house remain.

(The Wittgenstein Hut, Skjolden. Alec Finlay & Guy Moreton; photograph by Guy Moreton)

The position of the house was unusual being neither an alpine hut, nor an integral part of the village – being close to and at the same time held at a remove from society.

Wittgenstein chose to be a short walk and a row away because he needed to be.

The view Wittgenstein found is a conspectus It represents one of the ways in which he attempted to do philosophy without language mapping paths, overlooking a forest.

(The Wittgenstein Hut, Skjolden. Alec Finlay & Guy Moreton; photograph by Guy Moreton)

The walk is described in a poem From which these are extracts.

The Wittgenstein House (Skjolden) I went back to Skjolden and the dark circle of mountains to look for my own place in the glen of a shadowed world where what I find is shown in how I think and live.

In the north day gives way to night slowly: evening stretches for miles through a landscape suffused with light.

The clouded Fjell peaks are gone again into white lift.

There is seeing, there is rain, a smirr gives way to sun.

At Vasbakken the waterfall gleams whitely in the dark.

What I forget each time is how the rush of falls fills the valley, as just under my window the burn clinks away softly.

Luster fjord is black, lake blue, river eddies copper-green.

The damp makes me rheumy, glandy, eyes gone bleary with my nose sunk in tea tree and some sun my only remedy.

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Make your way past the wooden sign WITTGENSTEIN Along the lane wild rasps & nettles line the verges, puddles fill the track.

All the small fields meet up in corners, each with its own suitable barn stone huts, wood shacks or corrugated iron lean-to’s; stacks of felled thinnings like pencils in a box Step into the wood through willowherb, elder, rowan & birches.

The path walks up through Guy’s arch of bending branches, down beside the lake – take care over slippy rocks, ferns & brambles.

You’ll see the walled harbour where his row boat anchored.

Follow the spray-marked ‘W’s’ on the two scarred findlings that seem to be resting on each other’s shoulders.

To your right are still tides of scree winter washed down the slope splashed with grey and orange lichen.

Then, when the trees get too thick, turn and zig-zag up the steep path.

Here, on the plateau, perched above the lake, the foundations are a man-made rock.

Stand where the verandah was and look out over the grey curtain of mountains

and their rippled reflections.

See the view that W chose: a landscape utterly simple.

I would like to set out my life clearly, to have it plainly in front of me, to survey all of the connections.

I can’t imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here at Skjolden.

It’s the quiet and, perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness.

There it seems to me that I gave birth to new paths of thought within me.

There I had some thoughts of my own.

I have built my house away from anyone.

I long to see a human face in the morning.

If I am unable to grasp the mechanism of thought then from this view I can still learn how to see.

The foundations are a razed platform.

Two white birch grow from the open cellar.

Somehow, I must find my way out of this forest.

(Alec Finlay, 2005)

Limits define any walk.

What may seem a short walk to one person is a walk to the farthest edges of possibility for another.

A walk defines a distance to or from society physically and also in terms of the psyche.

The meaning of a walk is defined by the interpenetration of the body and memory.

It exists on a spectrum running from the purely physical to the purely imaginative.

Proust journeyed far using only Railway Timetables stacked on his bedside table.

The sailors of Croisset took their bearings by the light of Flaubert’s lamp as he wrote deep into the night.

Stevenson had his Land of Counterpane patrolled by leaden soldiers and fleets and dominated by the ‘pillow-hill’.

Walk 8 The eighth walk consist of some sentences written as a commentary to accompany a project creating poems, or ‘word-maps’, for walks and views in The Peak District.

The lines of each poem were composed as typographical skylines and also made available, in situ, as audio QR-code.

white peak / dark peak poem: line in time horizon: line in space skyline: earth drawn line peak: line in dialect each poet is a view without outline there is no shape walking the skyline always changes burns to walk to, rivers to walk along the tors cast stone as celebrity next time you walk this sunbathing, mountaineering, hiking: pursuits have to be invented each car has an A–Z torn on the page-spread for home

Walk 9 The final two walks follow on from white peak | dark peak.

The first belongs to a year-long project, the road north journeying round Scotland, using Basho’s Oku-no-hosomichi as a guide.

To many people this project suggested a series of long walks or one continuous journey.

Some people were disappointed that myself and my collaborator Ken Cockburn didn’t stay on the road full-time, or travel by horse and sleep in tents and bothies.

The project adopted and updated Basho’s practice of haiku, or hokku, and renga, two forms of poetry which he renewed and revolutionised – It also took on the practice of gingko which translates, roughly, as: walking-to-be-composing-poetry And the traditional Japanese poem tanzaku an inked poem on paper gifted or left in a place which we adopted as the hokku-label.

Using these forms and practices the project also became an attempt to rebalance walking and viewing by placing a greater weight on the view.

We also gradually included other actions such as libating with whisky and collecting 14’s (for Ken’s daughter Isobel) Before I describe this project in more detail I need to briefly mention the most difficult walk of all.

I don’t wish to go into my muscular illness in detail here, but to sketch a context for the road north I will describe a walk in The Meadows a park in Edinburgh, which I lived beside.

This occurred some 15 years ago – again this is from memory (the walk) The Meadows was also where I came across the idea for the road north, over a decade ago.

The poems prologue sets the scene.

When was it I first had that dream of roving the glens up and down guided by Basho’s oku? leaving behind the pink lanes of gean blossoming in The Meadows heading off to look for Shirakawa ten years on the gean’s pink again in Pilrig Park and there’s a flitting in the offing swopping one hill view for another familiar streets Pilrig, Rosslyn, Bonnington exchanged for hills Tinto, The Buchaille, Roshven

packing old pink & new orange maps a picnic blanket for the dog yellow bottles of Rescue Remedy miso packets, rice noodles, oatcakes, flasks and chocolate compass, gazetteers, pens pencils for rubbings wee muji notebooks hokku-labels to tie a handful of CD s Neil Young’s Jukebox Annie Briggs Lucy & Johnnie naming our band shafts of sun naming our album bands of rain setting out to see the best view of all where the land meets the sky letting our looking with extensive view survey Scotland from Monreith to Polewe turning down another glen east west into low sun keeping going that’s the thing singing the kettle’s on summersgone

running my fingernails along the contour lines gauging the incline and fatigue that will result are we going then? yes, let’s go up Balvraid cow-track weighing the lag in our legs against the last task fording Dragonfly Burn to the broch at Dun Grugaig finding other kinds of happiness making honey of our failures at its best the world’s a nest at its worst sharp with thorn

Walk 10 One of the things we learnt from our close reading and walking of Basho was the places he choose not to visit or where a poem wasn’t written.

And we found time and again that the neolithic duns we visited offered the best views were conspectus, like Wittgenstein’s plateau.

We began to absorb a kind of ritual looking – connecting up landmarks peaks, tors, points, islands.

A reminder that in many ancient cultures mountains were viewed, but not climbed And a kind of imagined seeing viewing places through the descriptions of poets Burns at Aberfeldy, Sorley Maclean at Hallaig.

In one of Maclean’s interviews he describes Raasay as a conspectus, without stating the term directly.

I have adapted it here into poetic lineation to clarify the different elements.

Raasay conspectus Raasay is a centre-point with such a wonderful situation in relation to Skye and the mainland of Wester Ross from Raasay we could see the Cuillin from Sgurr nan Gillean to Bruach na Frithe and further to the south-east the great landscape of Blabheinn and Garbhbheinn from Raasay we could see the coast of Skye from Beinn na Caillich in Broadford to Rudha nam Braithrean in Staffin and there must be very few stretches of sea in the Highlands more spectacular than the Clarach seen from Raasay

(the Clarach: southern sound of Raasay)

Adapted from ‘Sorely Maclean: Some aspects of Family and Local Background, an interview with Donald Archie MacDonald’ (Sorley Maclean: Critical Essays: ed. Joy Hendry and Raymond J. Ross, Scottish Academic Press, 1986).

And so the tenth and final walk is one that is just beginning where my non-mountain climbing becomes the heart of a project.

Where others do the climbing or join me in viewing hills and mountains from such low lying conspectus.

(‘WORD-MNTN (BEN RHINNES)’, Alec Finlay)

(‘WORD-MNTN (BEINN BHEARNACH)’, Alec Finlay & Heather Yeung)

(‘WORD-MNTN (BLABHEINN GARBH-BHEINN)’, Alec Finlay & Emma Nicolson)

‘word-mntn’ is an ongoing index of the hills and mountains of Scotland.

Their names composed as poems, ‘word-mntn’ which are then returned to their locations as poem-labels – the same tanzaku that the artist took such exception to – where they are recorded photographically.

The project is collaborative.

note: Armchair Mountaineering Club; formed by Alexander Maris and colleagues in London. Alec Finlay was formerly an associate member; he resigned his ‘cushion’ in August 2011.

Beginning with the Big Toe: Peregrinations on Obligatory Bipedal Plantigrade Locomotion Matthew Beaumont

Why begin with the big toe, in a talk about walking, in talking about walking? The philosopher Georges Bataille, to whom I will briefly turn at the end of the talk, referred to ‘the hilarity commonly produced by simply imagining toes’ (90). So why risk provoking such a reaction, by focusing on this most risible, contemptible feature of the body?

My polemical response is, because it is at the same time most significant part of the human anatomy and the one most neglected, denigrated even, in the cultural imagination. The phrase ‘toe-rag’, still occasionally used as an insult today, can communicate a preliminary sense of this dynamic. It originated in the nineteenth century, when it was used as an expression of contempt for tramps and vagrants who wrapped a rag around their feet or toes in order to prevent or alleviate blisters and corns. It therefore meant, and means, ‘a despicable or worthless person’ (OED); but it also testifies to the heroic powers of endurance of the most ordinary, and the most oppressed, section of society, the lumpenproletariat, and of the most ordinary and oppressed part of the body, the big toe.

This talk is about beginning with – or from – the big toe in a triple sense. These three senses, which I will explicate in turn, might be summarised at the outset in terms of the anatomical, the anthropological (or palaeo-anatomical), and the philosophical respectively – though this makes the talk sound more systematic than it is, since it will contain a number of rambling asides, or peregrinations, on the politics and poetics of the big toe. As I indicate through my rather elaborate subtitle – which signals the fact that humans are obliged to use two feet to walk, as opposed to four, and that, roughly speaking, they plant them flat on the ground – what I propose to do in this talk is simply to defamiliarize (that is, simply to complicate) the act of walking.

A child learning to walk is engaged in attempting to make conscious material unconscious,’ noted the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion; ‘only when this is done can it walk.’

My aim is in one sense the opposite of the child’s according to Bion, since I want to render this and other ‘material’ conscious, and in so doing to make the spontaneous act of walking so self-conscious as to seem almost impossible. More precisely, my talk will use the big toe to do two things: on the one hand, as I have intimated, to render the unconscious activity of walking conscious, that is, rationalising it, intellectualising it, aestheticising it, as Edwaerd Muybridge did in the late nineteenth century when he developed the technology of motion photography in order to capture the movements of humans and other animals; and, on the other hand, to relocate it to the unconscious, in the Freudian sense, restoring it not simply to the region of the preconscious, or the no-longer conscious, but to the lawless region of human desire.

The conscious and the unconscious are not so much opposed in this instance, though, as dialectically related, as in a Moebius Strip. When Walter Benjamin celebrated ‘the unconscious optics’ to which the camera, as a technological medium, introduces us, he used the example of walking. ‘Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk,’ he notes, manifestly thinking about Muybridge, ‘one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride.’ Focusing on the big toe – fetishising it perhaps, as in Bunuel’s famous Surrealist film L’Age d’Or, where the heroine sucks away at the big toe of a stone statue – might momentarily make walking seem like both a more and a less conscious activity than it ordinarily is. And it provides glimpses, moreover, of a kind of ambulatory unconscious.

So, once again, in what sense do I intend the phrase ‘beginning with the big toe’? First, the anatomical response. The action of walking itself – to the extent that it can be said to have a beginning at all, and I am no doubt simplifying, even mythologizing, a little here – begins with the big toe. It is what provides the impetus needed to walk. Certainly, it is crucial to the physics of walking. Before we raise one foot completely off the ground, as we commence walking from a standing position, we roll our body weight onto the toes of the other foot. More accurately, perhaps, we transfer our body weight onto the toes of one foot at the same instant that we raise the heel of the other foot. The toes are in contact with the ground for about three quarters of the walking cycle. And of all these toes, the big toe – or hallux, to give it its technical, Latin name, which is taken from the Greek halmos, meaning to ‘spring or leap’ – is the most important. The big toe is what provides the crucial propulsive force needed to take a step, and approximately 40% of our body weight is sustained by it when we walk.

That’s not to say, incidentally, that people who don’t have a big toe – perhaps because they’ve lost it from frostbite, or as a result of some mechanical accident, or because they’ve cut it off or shot it off, as draft dodgers hoping to escape conscription have often done – can’t walk effectively. And it is not even necessary, strictly speaking, to use a prosthesis, like this one discovered on an Egytian mummy, in order to walk without a big toe. The cricketer Fred Titmus, for example, who lost four of his toes when his foot got caught in the propeller of a boat while swimming in the Caribbean during England’s tour of the West Indies in 1967-68 was spin bowling for his county team – though never again for his national team – within a couple of months of the accident.

So the big toe is not absolutely indispensable in enabling us to walk, but it is probably more important than any other component part of the foot’s anatomy in this respect.

‘Toe off’, as it is sometimes called, provides the leverage needed to start walking, and to keep walking. A monograph on the human foot published in 1935, by Dudley J. Morton, explains the propulsive role of the big toe with some eloquence: [The] dorsal movement of the toes […] has the effect of increasing the tension of their muscles, and to such a degree that when the leverage effort of the foot against body weight has been completed, the subsequent toe flexion is strong enough to add a final elastic impetus to body movement which gives it smoothness and grace. At this point the stresses have been swung toward the first metatarsal bone so completely that the most important digital effort is performed by the great toe. The phase of bipedal locomotion undoubtedly accounts for the conspicuous size of that digit in man.

This is eloquent, I think, partly because of its implicit or incipient sense of the aesthetics of walking. The big toe, Morton seems to be saying, is secretly responsible for the elegance of human ambulation. In some literal sense, it is on the big toe that the rhythm and rhyme of walking depends.

Indeed, it seems a pity that when ancient Greek prosodists devised the term ‘foot’ to measure and calibrate the rhythms of poetic discourse – the name is commonly thought to allude to the movement of the foot as it beats time – they didn’t find a place in their technical vocabulary for the word ‘toe’ too. The inner mechanics of the metrical foot are surely to be located in the metrical toe. The ‘sprung rhythm’ sponsored by Gerard Manley Hopkins – which is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed, however many unstressed syllables follow – is unimaginable without the propulsive impetus of the metrical toe. This first, stressed syllable is perhaps the metrical toe – the term hallux, you will recall, is from the Greek meaning ‘I spring or leap’. Here is the poetic equivalent of toe-off. It is regrettable, this omission of the toe in the annals of human culture, and the glossaries of literary criticism, this refusal of its rhythmic significance; but it isn’t unexpected. For, historically, the achievements of the big toe have been systematically marginalized and denigrated.

This most glorious part of the human body is habitually, routinely regarded as base, in spite of its heroic labours. ‘Le gros orteil,’ as it is called in France, is in a dual sense gross – it is generally thought to be at once excessively large and peculiarly disgusting. As Barthes pointed out, gros is repulsive in a way that grand is not’. So a kind of ideological contradiction is central to my celebration of the big toe: the big toe is an ugly, clumsy-seeming, embarrassing part of the human anatomy – perhaps the least celebrated part of all, one which is more often hidden as shameful than honoured, as it should be – and yet it stops us from stumbling and makes the elastic grace of human perambulation possible. In the body politic, truly it represents the most oppressed section of the proletariat, unashamedly lumpy, lumpen. Its ‘digital effort’, in Morton’s formulation, its humble but titanic labour, is what guarantees the ‘smoothness and grace’ that is characteristic of walking in humans, yet it is despised.

The big toe is thus not merely base, in the moral or spiritual sense. In Marxist terms, it might precisely be ascribed to that realm of production called the base. The despised, occluded physical labours of the big toe, in the body’s political economy, provide the infrastructural support which makes all that smoothness and grace in the realm of the superstructure, at the level of culture as opposed to mere physical subsistence, mere mechanical self-reproduction, possible. The elegance of the flâneur’s elegantly shod foot as he saunters along the pavement is dependent on the hidden mechanics, the digital effort, of the big toe.

This is in fact one of the thrusts of my manifestoe, as I am tempted to call it, my attempt in this talk to restore the oppressed but, I hope, insurgent big toe to its rightful role as the ruling part of the human anatomy. I am thinking here of Menenius Agrippa’s famous allegorical speech in Act I Scene I of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, set in the Roman street, which identifies the big toe as the leading figure in an insurrection of mutinous body parts against the belly, which stands in for the Senate, the locus of power. ‘What do you think,’ Menenius asks his interlocutor, the rebellious First Citizen, ‘You, the great toe of this assembly?’ I the great toe!’ the Citizen responds indignantly, ‘why the great toe?’: For that, being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest, Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost: Thou rascal, that art worst in blood to run, Lead’st first to win some vantage.

The big toe, according to Menenius’s metaphor, is the last part of the body to receive the nutrition circulated through the bloodstream by the belly, which stores, processes and distributes energy; and hence it is the most disgruntled, cantankerous part of the body, the first to agitate for revolution. In the revolution I dream of, which takes its inspiration from the martyred figure of the First Citizen, the legendary forerunner of this movement, its Wat Tyler, or Wat Toeler , the last shall be first. The lowest, poorest, basest part of the body – the big toe – will act as the vanguard of the insurrectionary body parts. The gros will become grand. I call, in other words, for the dictatorship of the toeleprariat. ‘Toeleprarians of all countries unite!’ is the slogan of this movement.

According to Morton, to return to his rather less excitable description of the mechanics of walking, the big toe imparts ‘a final elastic impetus’ to the body as it moves. I must admit that every time I read this ostensibly objective, scientific description of the mechanics of the foot in walking, which (it should be said) is scrawled in my notebook, I misread ‘elastic’, which itself has a pleasingly aesthetic quality, as ‘ecstatic’: ‘a final ecstatic impetus to body movement which gives it smoothness and grace.’ This misprision transmits the giddy gloriousness of walking as well as its gracefulness. It communicates a sense of vertiginous achievement to this most mundane of activities – this quintessentially pedestrian activity – and not least because the word ‘ecstatic’ is derived from the Greek word meaning ‘unstable’. All walking, from this accidental, mistaken perspective, is moonwalking – a gravity-defying combination of elasticity and ecstasy. It might also be conceived as a kind of tightrope walking. For if one thinks about walking as one walks, if one looks down at one’s feet and really thinks about it while performing this most unthinking of everyday activities, one simply stops, topples over, or collapses – like Bion’s infant, who cannot walk if he is conscious of learning to do so.

Indeed, it seems a pity that when ancient Greek prosodists devised the term ‘foot’ to measure and calibrate the rhythms of poetic discourse – the name is commonly thought to allude to the movement of the foot as it beats time – they didn’t find a place in their technical vocabulary for the word ‘toe’ too. The inner mechanics of the metrical foot are surely to be located in the metrical toe. The ‘sprung rhythm’ sponsored by Gerard Manley Hopkins – which is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed, however many unstressed syllables follow – is unimaginable without the propulsive impetus of the metrical toe. This first, stressed syllable is perhaps the metrical toe – the term hallux, you will recall, is from the Greek meaning ‘I spring or leap’. Here is the poetic equivalent of toe-off. It is regrettable, this omission of the toe in the annals of human culture, and the glossaries of literary criticism, this refusal of its rhythmic significance; but it isn’t unexpected. For, historically, the achievements of the big toe have been systematically marginalized and denigrated.

This most glorious part of the human body is habitually, routinely regarded as base, in spite of its heroic labours. ‘Le gros orteil,’ as it is called in France, is in a dual sense gross – it is generally thought to be at once excessively large and peculiarly disgusting. As Barthes pointed out, gros is repulsive in a way that grand is not’. So a kind of ideological contradiction is central to my celebration of the big toe: the big toe is an ugly, clumsy-seeming, embarrassing part of the human anatomy – perhaps the least celebrated part of all, one which is more often hidden as shameful than honoured, as it should be – and yet it stops us from stumbling and makes the elastic grace of human perambulation possible. In the body politic, truly it represents the most oppressed section of the proletariat, unashamedly lumpy, lumpen. Its ‘digital effort’, in Morton’s formulation, its humble but titanic labour, is what guarantees the ‘smoothness and grace’ that is characteristic of walking in humans, yet it is despised.

The big toe is thus not merely base, in the moral or spiritual sense. In Marxist terms, it might precisely be ascribed to that realm of production called the base. The despised, occluded physical labours of the big toe, in the body’s political economy, provide the infrastructural support which makes all that smoothness and grace in the realm of the superstructure, at the level of culture as opposed to mere physical subsistence, mere mechanical self-reproduction, possible. The elegance of the flâneur’s elegantly shod foot as

So in this first, ‘synchronic’ sense, as it might be described, in the sense that walking is initially reliant on ‘toe off’, we begin with the big toe. There is also a diachronic sense in which, anatomically speaking, we begin with our big toe, and this is the second of the meanings I want to infer from the title of this talk, the anthropological or palaeoanatomical one. For in evolutionary terms, humanity itself can be said to begin with the big toe. That is, our identity as a species hinges, or pivots, on the development of the big toe, because it is either cause or consequence, or both cause and consequence, of the fact that, to put it slightly crudely, instead of climbing trees we walk across plains.

In short, it is what makes us human. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin quoted his old antagonist Richard Owen, an opponent of the theory of evolution by natural selection, to this effect: ‘The great toe, as Prof. Owen remarks, “which forms the fulcrum when standing or walking, is perhaps the most characteristic peculiarity of the human structure”.’

The basic structure of our body is shared both with our evolutionary ancestors and with our immediate relations, that is, chimpanzees and other apes. Obviously there are quantitative differences between a human and a chimpanzee brain, but structurally they are directly comparable. To put it in terms of aesthetics, formally they are the same, even if they have different contents. And this is true of the eyes, the nose, the breasts, the penis and every other body part you care to list. Except the big toe. For the big toe, in contrast to the innermost toe of our ancestors and our genetic cousins, is not in humans opposable, as the thumb is. We do not have a prehensile big toe. On the contrary, we have one that has evolved to enable us to walk rather than climb, or that has at the least facilitated walking.

The toe of the human foot is adducted – it is drawn inwards; the toe of the chimpanzee is abducted – it is drawn outwards. The chimpanzee’s big toe is opposable, like our thumb. In contrast, the toes of the human foot are convergent – the other toes have aligned with the big toe, or vice-versa. (In the case of the Doma people of Zimbabwe, incidentally, a completely different process of alignment has taken place, at least among those susceptible to a chromosomal mutation which causes a condition called ectodactyly, in which the middle three toes of each foot are missing, and the disproportionately large big and small toes are turned inwards.) In addition, the middle footbone is far more compact than that of the chimpanzee, and is consequently less mobile, more stable; and these relatively dense, rigid, solid bones can be used to lever the body in walking. So even though it now seems that the earliest anatomical changes relating to bipedalism didn’t in fact occur in savannahs, as a result of deforestation for instance, there is no doubt that these features of the emergent human foot would have helped humans to survive in the plains, perhaps giving them an evolutionary advantage over other primates.

The big toe, then, is the most distinctively human part of our anatomy. It is the feature that guarantees our unique status in evolutionary terms. As the authors of a clinical textbook on the human foot summarise this point, anatomically modern humans, which emerged about 150,000 years ago, ‘are the only living primate, indeed they are the only living mammal, that is an obligatory striding biped.’ Obligatory bipeds, as I briefly hinted at the beginning of this talk, are animals that rely solely on their hindlimbs for support and propulsion when walking on the ground. All other primates are characterised by optional bipedalism. They have a ‘locomotor repetoire’, as it is called, that is mixed – in other words, they use a range of means of moving about that includes, for example, balancing, hanging, jumping and quadrapedalism as well as occasional bipedalism. For this reason they have a divergent hallux. Humans are by contrast committed to a single locomotor mode – ‘obligate bipedalism’.

The causes of the evolutionary shift to a flat, non-prehensile, in short, modern human foot are inevitably still debated, and the answers that scientists tend to volunteer only raise further questions. It might be that humans’ forelimbs were used for purposes other than locomotion for prolonged periods, for some reason, and that bipedalism came to be the most efficient means of locomotion as a result (for example, it is possible that humans first learned to walk in trees, on an arboreal rather than terrestrial surface, using their arms to suspend and support themselves from higher branches).

It might be that the forelimbs were used, for tool-making for example, such that the efficiency of hands for quadrapedal locomotion or climbing was gradually reduced. It is also possible that it was the development of an upright posture – perhaps in order to facilitate displays of aggression – that created the evolutionary conditions for bipedal locomotion.

The consequences of bipedal locomotion are equally debatable. Freud for example speculated in Civilization and its Discontents that what he called, in a slightly comic formulation, ‘man’s decision to adopt an upright gait’ led directly to ‘the decline of the olfactory stimuli’; and hence the association of bodily dirt and smells with shame. ‘The beginning of the fateful process of civilization, then,’ he concludes, would have been marked by man’s adopting an erect posture’ – that is, by become an obligate biped.

The emergence of the big toe, to put it in slightly exaggerated terms, is thus responsible for the beginning of civilization, and so for that history of repression that, for Freud, defines it. This is another sense in which we begin with the big toe.

Recently, and in a rather different register of course, some scientists have argued for the coevolution of human hands and feet, claiming that ‘evolutionary changes in the toes associated with bipedalism caused matching evolutionary changes in hand anatomy that may actually have facilitated the emergence and development of stone tool technology.’ According to these evolutionary biologists, the marked increase in the length and robusticity of our ancestors, the australopiths’ thumbs, which paralleled morphological changes in their feet, improved their ability for precision grasping. Furthermore, they propose that when Australopithecus, a partly arboreal, so-called facultative biped, evolved into Homo, an obligate terrestrial biped which probably did a good deal of long-distance trekking, about two million years ago, the directional selection on the lateral toes for locomotion ‘may have caused parallel changes in the fingers that provided further performance benefits for manipulation’. In other words, the development of the toes, toes designed for walking, made it possible for humans to become the sophisticated tool-makers that gave them such an evolutionary advantage.

This peculiar type of primate locomotion known as obligate bipedalism, then, probably first started to evolve between about five million and eight million years ago – though precise dating is extremely difficult, largely because fossils of the foot are extremely rare, since predators and scavengers have a predilection for the red marrow in the tarsal bones and consequently eat the feet of their prey. We can however be fairly confident that our ancestors, Australopithecus, had predominately grasping feet, and relatively prehensile big toes, until about two million years ago, as I have indicated.

Obligate bipedalism, and the convergent big toe on which it partly depends, developed rather belatedly, in evolutionary terms; and the human foot, with its everted rather than inverted posture, and its characteristic distribution of the metatarsals in a transverse arch configuration, is thus a comparatively recent anatomical structure.

This might help to explain why our feet (as Klenerman and Wood state) ‘are one of the parts of our body, like our backs and the veins of our lower limbs, that are prone to signs of maladaptation and malfunction’. One thinks in particular of gout and corns.

The maladapted quality of human feet have of course always been of especially pressing concern, if I can put it like that, to soldiers. One of my favourite Elizabethan portraits is the one of Captain Thomas Lee, by Marcus Geerhaerts II, from 1594, which is in Tate Britain. In spite of his gentlemanly status, signalled by the lace and embroidery on his shirt, Lee, an officer in the English army that ruthlessly colonised Ulster, is dressed as an Irish kerne, one of the common foot-soldiers who travelled bare-legged through the bogs – he hoped either in order to advertise his humility or to make a complaint to the queen that officers in Ireland were treated to terrible conditions. Bare legs, naked feet, the big toe – or in the case of Captain Lee perhaps the bog toe – are signs of a sort of zero-degree humanity. The big toe as sign of our bare, forked humanity, the fact that we are always ultimately enmired, enbogged in a brutal struggle for subsistence. Magritte’s La Modele Rouge (1935), which surely alludes to Van Gogh’s ‘A Pair of Shoes’ (1885), is a playful reflection on the idea that civilization is nothing more than a thin veneer, and that culture cannot finally elude or repress nature.

In this context, one might also think of Mantegna’s painting, from about 1480, of the dead Christ, his feet inertly thrust down towards the spectator, their wrinkled, slightly leathery soles marked with the stigmata, which are like tiny, blackened mouths crying out in pain, for lost soles perhaps. Marcel Duchamp was surely thinking in part of Mantegna’s feet when he constructed his ‘Torture-Morte’ (1959), a sculpture of a dead foot pocked with flies – in art-historical terms, it is a deliberate faux pas or false step (perhaps it’s also both a testament and a rebuke to Breton’s claim, in Nadja, that il n’y a pas de pas perdus, there are no lost steps). In Mantegna’s and Duchamp’s torturemortes alike the foot is the most tragic-comic part of the human anatomy – at once heroic and pathetic.

The maladaptation or malfunction of the foot – in evolutionary terms, its belatedness – is no doubt one of the reasons for the ignominious status of the big toe in the history of representations of the human body. The big toe has been developed rather too hurriedly – it is a botched job, a strangely Frankensteinian touch, in spite of its effectiveness at providing propulsive force and bearing weight. But if it is belated it is also highly advanced, a piece of technology that makes it possible to walk, and to go on walking. We are back to the contradiction that is central to my interest in the big toe. The grossest, the ugliest, arguably the most alien-looking, and hence least human-seeming, part of the anatomy, is actually what makes us human. It is the part of our body that, in spite of its crucial role in enabling us to stand upright, to transcend our brute past, most seems to be a trace of that brute past, of some primitive, primeval, muddy origin. As in some Gnostic myth, one which no doubt draws on the legend of Achilles, it is as if the god that created humanity, dipping her in fire in order to give her life perhaps, held onto her by her toe, clumsily squashing it, and so rendering it at once the most godly and most brutal of all parts of the anatomy.

This brings us, finally, to the third sense of the title of this talk, ‘Beginning with the Big Toe’, which relates to the philosophical dimension of this ingloriously glorious digit – and it is with some highly abbreviated comments on this that I will conclude. The only philosophical meditation on the big toe of which I am conscious is ‘Le gros orteil’, written by the great Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille, whom I cited at the beginning of this talk, and published in the journal he edited, Documents, in 1930.

This essay, which was brilliantly illustrated with three photographs by the Surrealist photographer Jacques-Andre Boiffard (photographs that, unfortunately, I don’t have the time or space to discuss here), this essay effectively begins from the paradox that I have been elaborating in this talk, namely that, though it is generally ignored and demeaned, associated with mud and darkness, ‘the big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is so differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape’. The upright gait of which humanity is so proud, according to Bataille, is founded on the foot, ‘but whatever the role the foot plays in his erection, man, who has a light head, a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, regards it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud.’

Building on Bataille, what I want to end by proposing, in the context of this symposium on walking, is a complete reorientation of the human body. In order to understand the human being as a species that walks, that is defined by walking, by obligate bipedalism, it is necessary, paradoxically, to invert its anatomy, to turn it on its head, or, like Mantegna, to lay out its body in such a way that its feet protrude towards us, so that we can confront the big toe, and its anthropological and cultural significance, in all its refulgent glory. Everything begins with the big toe. It is by taking the big toe as its starting point that we can best reorganise the semiotics of the body in relation to the mechanics of walking. Boiffard’s big toe stares at us. We must stare back at it unflinchingly, sublating our sense of hilarity and celebrating its humanity and inhumanity alike – ‘eyes wide open,’ as Bataille says: ‘open at the prospect of a big toe.’

PLEASE NOTE: The copyright of each of these essays rests with their author. No quotation should be published without the prior written consent, and information derived should be acknowledged.

Author contact details: Heather Yeung – h.h.yeung@durham.ac.uk Misha Myers – misha.myers@falmouth.ac.uk Alec Finlay – alecfinlay@yahoo.com Matthew Beaumont – m.beaumont@ucl.ac.uk