Wrights & Sites, “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City’”

A library search for the term “walking culture” turned up this manifesto, produced in 2006 by the walking performance collective Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith, and Cathy Turner, although the manifesto includes contributions from Richard Layzell, Bess Lovejoy, and Fiona Templeton and contemporaries of the Dadaist movement [115]) for Walkzi’s “Everyday Walking Culture” conference in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2005 (121). What primarily interests me about this manifesto is its title: a call for a “new” walking culture presupposes the existence of an “old” walking culture, one which runs contrary, perhaps, to the manifesto itself, one the manifesto wishes to change, to make new. The use of the term “walking culture” in the name of the conference is also a suggestion that such a thing exists and is clearly recognized. Perhaps I don’t need to worry so much about defining a walking culture—unless there’s a literature that uses that term, one I can’t seem to find for some reason.

The manifesto is organized apparently at random (although looks can always be deceiving): each of the 52 sections is identified by a playing card. I think the nod to chance is both in recognition of the conference venue, a casino (121), and the chance procedures used by some psychogeographers to organize their urban dérives. Apparently each section was a PowerPoint slide, so I’m going to refer to the sections as slides, without trying to summarize the entire manifesto.

The first slide calls for walking to move beyond functionality: to become, in addition, “a wandering, an odyssey of sight and sound, a quest for knowledge and stimulation, a grand roaming expedition, and a living breathing work of art in its own right” (115). The third slide calls for walkers “[t]o combat the functionalism of walking” by, among other things, “having no particular place to go” and “[t]o write the city with your relationships” (115). The fifth slide quotes Guy Debord describing the dérive as a “great game” (qtd. 115). That slide also uses the term “mis-guide” (115), which was one of the themes of the work of Wrights & Sites. It suggests “making things strange,” as if the light had changed, thus making “the city ‘other’” (115).

The seventh slide suggests that functional walking—from home to the train or automobile to work—is “the antithesis of walking culture” (qtd. 116). The eighth suggests shopping without buying anything, considering “shopping malls as hyper-real museums to consumerism” (116). The ninth advocates “discovering sensations in the textures and secrets” of the city, “a city disrupted to meet the needs and desires of an evolving, mutating walking” (116). The fourteenth slide calls on walkers to “[s]tep on the cracks and find the gaps and make new tracks” and to “[e]xtend your walking territory becoming more aware of the restrictions being imposed upon you by signs and surfaces and the aggressive armoured invasion of the car. . . . Walk a new walking culture to write the city with your bodies” (116).

The seventeenth slide calls on walkers to “[a]bolish habitual walking patterns, such as the home-to-work-and-back-routine: those head-down journeys when the mind is focused elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’” (117). It cites the example of Lone Twin’s disruption of Colchester by carrying a telephone pole in a straight line across the city, through shops and houses, in Totem (1998) (117). The following slide demands that pedestrians insist upon their rights over the car (117). The twenty-first slide states, “We demand the right to linger. We are loiterers without intent. We are children taking the long way home from school” (117). The twenty-third slide suggests that walkers “re-value public space” as if they were children (117).

The twenty-fourth slide quotes André Breton’s call for walkers to leave everything—including wife, mistress, and children—to “[s]et off on the roads” (117). In their article on women walking, Cathy Turner and Deidre Heddon object to the masculine adventuring implied by this statement, and instead call for domestic, convivial, participatory walking (Heddon and Turner). Later, the fortieth slide quotes a similar call for pedestrians to be free from domestic responsibilities (119), another example of a masculinist rejection of the domestic that Heddon and Turner refuse to countenance. Clearly Wrights & Sites was not in agreement about this slide, or else Turner’s thinking changed.

The thirtieth slide states, “Amble, ramble, and de-ramble the city in search of wildlife, ancient tracks, sacred signs and paths of desire and fill abandoned roadside cars with earth and turn them into immobile gardens” (118). The reference to rambling in this slide suggests one element of the walking culture to which this manifesto responds: rural rambling. That form of walking culture is relatively unusual in my city: while there are two footpaths within a 30-minute drive of the city, only one, the Fairy Hill trail, sees much use, although with the appearance of wood ticks this spring and the widespread fear of lyme disease, it’s possible that it will see less use until autumn arrives.

The thirty-first slide calls on walkers to create their own maps: to abolish published maps, and use GPS technology to map their own journeys. The thirty-second suggests inviting town planners “on practical courses exploring trespass and paths of desire” (118). The thirty-fifth slide calls on pedestrians to “[b]elieve absolutely that every walker is a potential mis-guide,” that “every walk leads to anywhere” (118). There is a strain of utopianism in that statement, along with the reference to the “mis-guide” theme.

The thirty-seventh slide suggests abolishing ETAs, “predetermined destinations and thoughts of artistic outcomes” (119). It calls upon pedestrians to, instead, “[d]rift for three or four months at a time,” following the Situationist psychogeographer’s Ivan Chtcheglov’s example or, like Richard Long, “let the walk become the work” (119). I’m surprised to see a positive reference to Long’s artistic practice here, given the way attitudes towards his work seem to have changed in the past 15 years since the manifesto was published.

The thirty-eighth slide suggests a variety of walking strategies or techniques, including “[p]layfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing,” “mis-guided tours,” using “wireless on-line technology” to spread “networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows in the glints in pedestrians’ eyes,” as “the instruments of the architect-walker” (119). The reference to “mis-guided tours” suggests another aspect of the old walking culture this manifesto reacts against: walking tours of historical sites, something that only happens in this city during the annual Jane’s Walk event. Again, the walking culture against which Wrights & Sites is reacting simply doesn’t exist here. Would it be possible to create a walking culture without that foundation? I’m not sure. If nobody walks, would anyone show up for a convivial, participatory drift?

The forty-fifth slide calls on walkers to “[a]cquaint yourself with methods of urban exploration rejected by the good manners of the heritage and tourism industries” by misapplying a map of one city to the geography of another, an old psychogeographical strategem (119). Again, the heritage and tourism industries are not connected to walking in this city: tourists—when we get any—are expected to drive.

The forty-seventh slide demands that walkers follow the composer Erik Satie’s example and work while walking, instead of at their desks (120). The forty-ninth slide calls on pedestrians to “reclaim the nights in the city. Walking through the streets at the dead of night is not a criminal offence” (120). Such walking, if practiced alone, might be dangerous or at least frightening for some walkers—and I wonder if this is another example of gendered approaches to walking that are rejected by Heddon and Turner.

The fiftieth slide states, “Anyone, anywhere can be an architect-walker—begin by mapping atmospheres and feelings—they are our foundations as we build from ideas and emotions outwards. . .” (120). Again, I hear echoes of psychogeography here, particularly as practiced by the Situationists.

The fifty-first slide tells walkers to “walk with a sense of not knowing anything about the city,” to consider walking “a constant experiment to discover the intricacies and individuality of your walk that is as distinctive as your handwriting” (120). I don’t see any sign of the kind of compromise required for group, convivial, participatory walking, where “the intricacies and individuality of your walk” would have to be subordinated to the group as a whole.

Finally, the last slide states, “Know that every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are potential material for an artwork” (120). It suggests recording “the stories of people that you encounter,” encouraging “personal associations,” generating mythogeographies, and looking for “the extra-ordinary in the seemingly ordinary” (120). That sounds like a call for the new walking culture to be a mythogeographical one, as I understand the term mythogeography.

The manifesto is followed by a brief explanation of its contexts. The work of Wrights & Sites is the most important part of the manifesto’s context, I think: for nine years, Wrights & Sites had been working on urban site-specific performance and art projects (121). The term “mythogeography” apparently was first used in their 2003 book An Exeter Mis-Guide, which generated interest outside that city (121). The purpose of the mis-guide was to encourage “new ways of exploring the city, of making it strange and seeking out its ‘mythogeography’ (the personal, mythical, fictional, and fanciful mappings that intertwine or subvert the official, municipal identities and histories of a place)” (121). That led to the publication of A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (2006), which I think I have a copy of, and other publications as well. “Drawing on our urban exploratory work,” the authors conclude, “this is a manifesto for the active and creative pedestrian—envisioning a walking that is neither a functional necessity (to shops, to work) nor a passive appreciation of (or complaint about) the urban environment” (121). If that is the old walking culture, it doesn’t really exist in my city: nobody really walks to work, or to shops, and nobody walks to appreciate the urban environment (unless the path around the small end of the lake, and to a much lesser degree the path along the creek, might be considered urban rather than park environments). I never see any other pedestrians when I’m walking away from the lake or the creek. So my question remains: can a new culture of walking begin when there’s no old culture of walking to react against dialectically? How can walking engage with and change the city, using art not as a passive expression of the city, but as an active way to change it (121), when nobody walks at all—when the city itself is not walkable, when almost everyone relies on their cars rather than their feet, and so when no culture of walking of any kind seems to exist?

Works Cited

Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.

Wrights & Sites. “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘Dealing With the City.’” Performance Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115-22. DOI: 10.1080/13528160600812083.

124. Fiona Wilkie, “‘Three Miles an Hour’: Pedestrian Travel”

wilkie

I read Fiona Wilkie’s book, Performance, Transport, and Mobility: Making Passage, during my MFA, but I don’t remember it. That’s what happens when you read a bunch of books quickly, without taking good notes—at least, that’s what happens to me. I remember reading the book. It came by interlibrary loan; I remember the yellow paper band around the cover and having to rush to finish it by the due date. And I remember finding it useful. I wish I could remember the argument, though. A couple of months ago, I found a cheap(ish) copy online, and it arrived, finally, just before Christmas. On this snowy day, I decided to give it a (second) look.

“‘Three Miles an Hour’: Pedestrian Travel” is the first chapter in the book—the others discuss mobile performance by train, automobile, boat, and airplane, none of which interest me—and I thought I would return to it today. I’ll read her introduction as well. The introduction begins by positing a homology between performance and movement: performance “moves its audience to a range of feelings” and “tours from one place to another” (1). “Performance has always been a slippery business,” Wilkie writes: “on the move, ephemeral and difficult to contain” (1). Wilkie has “two opening premises”:

The first is simple: that transport systems are important to our experience and understanding of mobility. The second is that, perhaps less obviously, a rich dialogue exists between transport and performance, and that this is worth investigating in order to consider how concepts of mobility are explored and debated. An underlying assumption of this book is that how we travel is intimately connected with the ways in which we both understand that travelling and conceive of ourselves—and others—as travellers. And part of this understanding comes through performance. A wealth of performances and related cultural practices have been, and continue to be, actively engaged in imagining, exploring, revealing and challenging experiences of being in transit. (1)

For Wilkie, “transport systems are a means of enabling collective imagining,” as theatre and performance is, and so thinking about these two different practices together “raises questions of the kinds of imagining that have been, and might be, done through them, and of those who are included in, and excluded from, such imaginings” (2). Her case studies, she hopes, will show that “performance not only responds to but can also produce new mobilities, reshaping existing models and engendering new, alternative possibilities for movement” (2).

Wilkie acknowledges that she has been influenced by work on “the ‘mobility turn’” in the social sciences—work by geographers and sociologists on travel—and her intention is to bring “scholarship in geography and sociology . . . into dialogue with that in theatre and performance studies” (2). “My hope . . . is that this book begins to signal some of the ways in which, when we consider performance, ‘mobilities make it different,’” she writes, citing John Urry. “By bringing ideas from within the mobility turn to bear on theatre and performance analysis, I suggest, we open up a rich field of inquiry,” she continues. “Conversely, I believe that performance has much to bring to the conversation and so, by discussing a wide range of performances and artworks that offer nuanced explorations of what it is to be mobile, I argue that the perspectives of performance extend existing discourses of mobility” (2).

Next, Wilkie summarizes the idea of the “mobility turn” (3). One of the clearest arguments about the significance of this shift is made by John Urry, who “conceives of a ‘mobilities paradigm’ . . . which provides a theoretical framework for analysing social groupings and practices in terms of movement instead of spatial rootedness” (3). She cites Urry’s 2007 book Mobilities, which I should probably read. Mobility theorists presuppose “that social life consists of movements and stillnesses at different levels that sustain one another” (3). “Broadly, the concept of mobility enables an enquiry into how the movement and transmission of ideas, arts practices, theory, capital and information relate to the physical movement (voluntary or otherwise) of people,” Wilkie writes (3-4). However, mobility isn’t just about physical movement. Wilkie quotes geographer Tim Cresswell: mobility “is about the contested worlds of meaning and power. It is about mobilities rubbing up against each other and causing friction. It is about a new hierarchy based on the ways we move and the meanings these movements have been given” (qtd. 4).

Wilkie discusses Cresswell’s distinction between a “sedentarist metaphysics,” in which “place is unmoving and mobility is perceived as a threat to fundamental human values,” and a “nomadic metaphysics,” in which “mobility is coded as freedom, figuring centrally in postmodern culture and positively linked to subaltern power,” as in the work of Michel de Certeau on walking (5). For Cresswell, neither the sedentarist nor the nomadic metaphysics is aware of the ideological meanings they ascribe to mobility (5). Janet Wolff’s feminist analysis is suspicious o the postmodern sense of travel as freedom, suggesting that this assumes “a patriarchal model of movement as the norm and thus excluding the experiences of women and other less dominant groups” (5). “Much of the current scholarship on mobilities takes care to avoid universalizing assumptions,” Wilkie writes. “For example, Cresswell’s proposed way out of the nomadic/sedentarist/dichotomy is an approach that is alert to the ‘historical conditions that produce specific forms of movement, which are radically different’” (qtd. 5-6). Doreen Massey’s work also argues for a consideration of place “as fundamentally mobile” (6). “One consequence of these debates,” Wilkie continues, “is a focus on mobilities as fundamentally relational” (6). In other words, “the various scales on which mobility operates, and the vastly different levels of privilege and empowerment in experiences of being mobile, exist not in spite but in direct relation to one another” (6). Writing on mobility tends therefore “to be invested in a notion of connection. It frequently reveals the ways in which movements on a small or local scale have generated important ideas about mobility, in turn informing a much wider set of movements across different scales” (6). We might, Wilkie suggests,

consider the range of mobilities involved in theatre and performance as not merely arbitrarily linked by meaningfully connected in terms of ideas about mobility. In this way, the audience’s applause, stage entrances and exists, the dramaturgical structures of movement, thematic explorations of travel within theatre works, the actors’ journeys home, and the global tour of a mega-musical might all be understood to contribute to a sense of the theatre’s mobility. But the seductive power of such connections should not mask an awareness that these various movements at different scales are not connected equally. An emphasis on the relationship of mobilities requires also an acknowledgement that difference rather than similarity is often the result of relations between mobile experiences. (7-8)

Many of Wilkie’s case studies “work to tease out the disparity and power imbalance of vastly different mobilities” (8).

Wilkie is interested in the ways that “performance always already attends to, and is expert in, a number of different levels of movement” (8). Movement is part of the content of theatre and performance works. Historically performers moved from place to place, seeking audiences. “These various movements—of the performers and the characters—then circulate in a variety of ways: as theatre tours, as documents (for example, playscript, photograph, video, and web presence), in the memories of spectators, and in critical responses,” she writes. “Underpinning all of this is the travelling that enables performance events to happen at all: the temporary relocation of actors required in rehearsal periods, national and international touring schedules, and the travel of audiences. The circulation and production of contemporary arts practices have an intrinsic mobility that is worth conceiving as such” (9). She cites Miwon Kwon’s comments on the way that travel has become a marker of artworld success (9). It’s part of academic success as well. And many artists address travel in their work.

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that “a range of performances and artworks that might otherwise not be considered together” do actually “have something to say as part of a larger conversation about movement and travel” (11). The book focuses on modes of travel other than walking as a way to extend discourses about walking and performance, “to signal a rich set of performance dialogues taking place in and through other means of travel” (11). Moreover, “transport has not often been a focus for scholars of theatre and performance,” even though “transport frames ideas of social experience in ways that are worth investigating” (12). One of the ways she tried to understand performance’s relationship to mobility at the beginning of this book project was “through a concept of ‘registering passage’” she takes from the work of David Pascoe on the architecture of airports: we move through airports “‘without registering passage’” (qtd. 16). This idea echoes Marc Augé’s discussion of such spaces as “non-places” (16-17). “Performance as a set of mostly live practices has a vested interest in meaningful encounters, and it is therefore not surprising that there are many examples of performance that seek to mark the significance of transit spaces,” Wilkie writes. “Such performances work against the logic of uninterrupted flow as sites of transport, encouraging spectators to register their passage as a complex activity, simultaneously public and private, and culturally, socially and even morally loaded” (17). Now, however, she wants to claim “something more for the practices discussed in this book” (17). She cites sociologist Peter Frank Peters, who discusses the relationship of time and passages, and the Australian artist Mick Douglas, who describes his participatory art projects “as a kind of ‘making passage’ and therefore a creative ‘method of mobility’” (17). “Following Peters and Douglas, then, I suggest that the cumulative effect of the case studies gathered in this book is one of making passage, developing not merely a commentary on travel but a valuable means of shaping experiences of transit and thereby creating new momentum,” she concludes (17).

Wilkie’s introduction outlines her general approach; the first chapter, on walking, presents specific instances of the ideas she discusses in that introduction. (So do her other chapters, which I’m not going to reread this time.) Walking, “the form of mobility that occupies the most central place in twentieth and twenty-first century performance practices,” provides her with a context in which other forms of mobility can be discussed (18). Wilkie’s argument is that “the well-established tradition of thinking, writing and performing the pedestrian yields a rich critical legacy that informs both theoretical and artistic explorations of other kinds of mobility” (18). Walking, she continues, “establishes a set of values and ideals against which the choice of mechanized transport is measured (and frequently found wanting)” (18).

While walking is often seen in opposition to other forms of movement, it also complements other kinds of travel. “The fact that an overwhelming majority of the walking attended to in the critical discourse is undertaken as a choice also has implications that we should note,” Wilkie continues:

For the most part, Romantic poets, landscape artists, Situationists, ramblers, cultural geographers and flâneurs walk because they want to, not because they have to. The stories of those who walk because they are too poor to do otherwise are far less visible in the vast literature on walking. . . . There is therefore a context of privilege in which most documented walking occurs, and a corresponding context of walking in poverty that needs to be acknowledged. In some places this is more apparent than others. (19)

At the same time, many artists “position their work as a political response to the situation found in LA and elsewhere,” the notion that walking is pathological, and “walking is thus perceived as a radical choice in the face of cultural pressure to relinquish any prolonged contact between pavement and footwear” (19).

In the work of Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, and Walter Benjamin, the radical potential of walking is a key theme, and these writers “have created a pervasive critical apparatus, setting out the figures of the dérivist, the pedestrian and the flâneur as standard positions from which to theorize one’s walking” (19). This critical apparatus “has become academically favoured—the accepted means of accounting for the role of the walker—and at least one of these three writers is likely to be employed in any discussion of walking in the arts, humanities and social sciences” (19-20). One consequence of this dominance is “the shift of focus to urban settings” (20). After all, all three of those “standard positions” are urban walkers. “The critical discourse of walking also tends to be organized, albeit often implicitly, around two pairs of opposing terms: urban/rural and solitary/collective,” Wilkie continues. “That is to say, the claims made for pedestrian mobility frequently rest on its status as either urban or rural; similarly, different claims are made for walking depending on whether it is undertaken alone or as part of a group. The urban/rural pairing emerges from quite distinct genealogies” (20-21). Rural walking begins with Romanticism, and “[s]till today, discourses of rural walking emphasize introspection, beauty, imagination and inner discovery,” while discourses of urban walking, which begins with avant-garde walkers, focus on “modernity, subversion and political comment” (21). (My walking practice, I think, tries to apply subversion and political comment to rural spaces, which is part of what makes it strange.) So-called “natural” country walking is both historically unusual and demographically limited: that’s the point made by “[t]he black British artist Ingrid Pollard’s Wordsworth Heritage” billboards (1992): “Pollard’s photographic project draws attention to the dearth of black pedestrians in narratives of rural walking, and cautions us to consider the ownership of various types and sites of mobility” (21-22). Walking practices also tend to be organized around “[t]he solitary/collective pairing”: Romantic rural walkers are supposed to walk alone, as are Benjamin’s flâneur and de Certeau’s pedestrian (22). Rousseau makes it clear that he walks alone “not through choice but through circumstance,” but nonetheless “the prevailing image of the Romantic walker is a solitary figure,” and that figure can be seen in the art of Richard Long, who walks alone: “the point of encounter with others is in the documentation rather than the journey” (22). Alternative versions of walking prize the collective: the dérive is a collective form, as is Misha Myers’s “conversive wayfinding” and Deirdre Heddon’s “Turning 40” project (22-23). Collective walking is said to be sociable, as well as “an enduring form of protest, found in both rural and urban situations” (23).

The term “walker” is very broad, and it “encompasses a wide variety of approaches to, and reasons for, travelling on foot”:

The walker, as we have seen, is frequently theorized as flâneur, dérivist, or pedestrian. Elsewhere, the walker is figured as pilgrim, hiker, wanderer, activist, stroller, climber, migrant, nomad and tourist, among others. Further, walking art constructs a number of different modes of encounter: the artist walks and reports back; the spectator walks, guided by the artist in the form of recorded voice, written instructions or “smart” technology; spectators walk with performers, experiencing sections of performance en route. (23)

“Across all of these discourses, figures and structures,” Wilkie writes, “the themes of belief, retracing, resistance and pace recur, emerging as guiding ideas that inflect every other experience of travel” (23). These are the themes Wilkie goes on to discuss in this chapter.

Wilkie begins the section on belief by quoting Phil Smith: “When the writer and performance-maker Phil Smith writes ‘I am a great believer in walking as far more than physical exercise,’ he is expressing something akin to a spiritual belief, and it is a belief that has many historical precedents” (23). Many grand claims are made about walking; it is “conceived by some as a life choice rather than, or as well as, a means of getting from A to B. And it is as a life choice that walking becomes associated with values of truth and authenticity” (23-24). Walking is both physical and spiritual, “prized for its directness,” because “it seems to offer an unmediated encounter between environment and traveller,” and because “[i]t enables a contact with the elements—with open/fresh air and changes in weather—that many other modes of transport prevent with barriers of glass and metal” (24). Rebecca Solnit suggests that walking “engenders a feeling of embodiment,” in contrast to the disembodiment produced by automobile travel. An important aspect of this belief, Wilkie suggests, is “the connection made between physical contact and self-knowledge” (24). Walking pilgrimage is the clearest expression of this “strand of belief in discourses of walking,” which “emerges as a fertile model for walking artists,” such as Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who “both adopt tropes of pilgrimage in their work,” as does the poet Tom Chivers (24). “The structure of pilgrimage—or at least walking as a ritual act of belief—is also there in Carl Lavery’s Mourning Walk (2006), a performance documenting a walk made to mark the death of Lavery’s father,” Wilkie suggests (25). “Another engagement with the pilgrimage model—this time collective and somewhat extended, as befits a pilgrimage—is offered in the Louise Ann Wilson Company’s Fissure (2011),” she continues. “Wilson’s project takes the form of a large-scale secular ritual: a three-day journey through the Yorkshire Dales, in the company of scientists, dancers and musicians, for around 100 participants/audience members” (25). The “fissure” referred to in the work’s title “connects the workings of the brain to the shape of the Yorkshire landscape: the performance was created in direct response to the death of Wilson’s sister from a brain tumour, and was staged in the environment of the sisters’ childhood” (25). What Wilkie finds interesting in both Lavery’s and Wilson’s projects “is that it is specifically a walk, rather than any other mode of engagement, that is chosen as having the required weight and depth to address the subject of grief” (27). For Lavery, that engagement is solitary, while for Wilson it is collective, “[b]ut both artists, through these works, profess a belief in the power of walking: to remember, to mark and, perhaps, to heal” (27).

“Perhaps the belief that I am tracing through these examples is, for some at least, a consequence of a sense of awe,” a feeling that might not be true for urban walkers, “who may feel spurred on to a feeling of mastery by a Certeaudian confidence that their walking ‘transgresses . . . the trajectories it “speaks”’” (de Certeau, qtd. 27). That sense of awe, as Wilkie points out, is primarily associated with the Romantic tradition. “The theme of belief that runs through discourses of walking is, then, tied up with the dialectic of the rural and the urban,” she continues. “It is based on a combination of seemingly paradoxical feelings of autonomy on the one hand and connectedness within a larger ecology on the other, a combination that is arguably unique to walking among modes of transport” (27). In this context, it might be appropriate to note the Romantic connotations of what, for Wilkie, is intended to be a neutral term, “transport”: the O.E.D. suggests that one of that word’s meanings is “The state of being ‘carried out of oneself’, i.e. out of one’s normal mental condition; vehement emotion (now usually of a pleasurable kind); mental exaltation, rapture, ecstasy,” all feelings associated with the Romantic experience of the sublime, as I recall from the course I took on the Sublime so many years ago, taught by Dr. Ian Balfour.

Retracing is next. Wilkie suggests that “[o]ne aspect of the enduring spiritual belief in walking is a sense that walking might enable a kind of communion with those who have gone before” (27-28). She sees this idea in Robert Macfarlane’s book The Old Ways, and suggests that “[t]here is a significant strand of performance practice that responds to such ‘voices heard along the way’ by figuring the walk as reenactment. Retracing another’s steps offers a rich structural and thematic framework for performance walks. It is a framework that immediately imagines a historical relationship, establishing a dialogue between a past and a present” (28). That relationship reveals both similarities and differences between past and present, although Wilkie suggests also that “[t]he historical walk—the one that has gone before—also becomes a means of validating the present one, justifying the choice of pedestrian movement over other modes of travel” (28).

Wilkie gives Smith’s 2008 performance In Search of Pontiflunk as an example of “this doubling effect” (28). In Search of Pontiflunk is a theatre project based on two walks: Charles Hurst’s acorn-planting walk in the early twentieth century in the English midlands, and Smith’s 16-day reprise of that walk in 2007, “with a variety of accidental and invited companions at various stages along the way” (28). Smith’s account of the journey became a solo play and was toured by Nottingham’s New Perspectives Theatre Company in 2008 (28). During the walk, Smith looked for 100-year-old oak trees that might have grown from Hurst’s acorns. “The performed account reveals both the pleasures and the frustrations of walking,” Wilkie states: “alongside memorable meetings . . . and the enjoyment of ‘private journeying,’ Smith records encounters with others unwilling to talk, blisters and a burning pain in his left knee. He confesses to taking a taxi for part of the route. Certainly, Smith’s enduring belief in the power of walking is tested here, but it remains strong” (28-29). Smith’s belief in the power of walking is political, though, rather than spiritual, an important distinction to be made in relation to his work. Smith’s play (as opposed to his walk, or as well as his walk?) “emerges as a study in time,” contemplating temporality through the acorn. As well as looking back in time at Hurst’s journey, Smith looks ahead, to our responsibility for the planet’s future. He also conceives of his walk in opposition to other forms of transportation: the point is to meditate on walking and the way motorized transportation “displaces us” (qtd. 29). In her chapters on other modes of transportation, Wilkie says, she discusses “many examples of artistic practice that parallel this concern with ‘what our mobility makes us’ at the same time as they challenge Smith’s argument by articulating ways in which transport still has the power to move us and to reassert our sense of place” (29). As a walker, I would be interested in reading those chapters—not now, but eventually—partly because I believe it would be difficult to make that kind of argument successfully.

Another example of walking as reenactment is Esther Pilkington’s A Long Walk (2009), in which Pilkington retraces half of one of Richard Long’s walks: a 626-mile walk carrying a stone from the beach at Aldeburgh to the one at Aberystwyth, and then retracing the journey with another stone. “Divided into 20 short sections, the performance text describes weather conditions, clothing, walking companions, stopping points and photographs taken along the way,” Wilkie writes. “Alongside such details, the artist considers issues of generosity, identity and documentation. Her focus is on the relationship ‘between the walk and its documentation,’ the activity and its description, and it is a relationship that we can only guess in Long’s work,” which is documented with a sparse text work, as is his practice (30). With its emphasis on anxiety, Pilkington’s text “makes an appealing contrast to the prevailing image of the confident walking artist in command of the task to be undertaken and fully equal to the distances involved” (30). Her decision to treat Long’s text work as instructions rather than a record of a past event “complicates the apparent simplicity” of Long’s Crossing Stones (30). Pilkington’s text “could be read as a postscript to Long’s attending to the sometimes messy realities involved in long-distance walking and art-making. She recasts the closed, completed work as an open invitation, and in doing so implicitly reminds us that any experience of walking is circumscribed by gender, age and expertise” (30). In fact, for Wilkie Pilkington’s performance leaves her inspired to think that she could walk across Britain one day. That is “part of the appeal of conceiving the walk as reenactment: the fact that another has gone before not only validates and lends historical weight to a current walk but also acts as reassurance that it can be done” (30-31). It also generates a sense of being in dialogue with previous walkers even as we are issuing an invitation to future walkers who might follow in our own footsteps (31).

“As A Long Walk makes clear, though, none of these manifestations of one route can every really be understood as the same walk” Wilkie continues. “When a walk enacts a retracing, it also marks out—footstep by footstep—historical changes, personal differences and cultural shifts” (31). Deidre Heddon’s reenactment of Mike Pearson’s autobiographical talking tour Bubbling Tom is one example: when she reperformed Pearson’s work in 2000, “she found that the ‘original’ guided tour was ‘remembered, written over, added to, forgotten, extended, transformed, recontextualized, reinvented, as space and place were shared, contested, and for the ‘outsider,’ borrowed” (Heddon, qtd. 31). “Indeed, Bubbling Tom itself might be understood as an act of retracing, attempting a communion with the cumulative power of many childhood explorations of the same territory more than 40 years earlier,” Wilkie writes. “By similarly unsettling any sense of a stable ‘original’ walk that exists unproblematically to be traced and retraced, we might view each of the reenactments discussed here as creative exploratory acts, positing histories of walking as open-ended conversations stretched across time” (31).

Audio walks, such as those created by Janet Cardiff, are another kind of retracing: “The artist walks and records that walk along with instructions for repeating it,” Wilkie writes. “In doing so, she makes claims for the significance of the route: it is, implicitly, worth walking again. The effect of the binaural recording technique used by Cardiff is that the walker follows in the artist’s footsteps, retracing the walk that she has done before” (31-32). This retracing is a layering, and the power of these audio walks lies in the slippages between the two layers. “My suggestion here is that a significant proportion of walking art is premised not just on walking but on walking again: reenacting; retracing; reconsidering,” Wilkie continues. “Legacy thus emerges as one of the value-based claims made for walking over other forms of transport: walking practices are supported, or perhaps haunted, by historical precedence” (32).

Resistance is another theme in walking art: “it is one means by which we can conceive of separate instances of apparently private walking as, cumulatively, a public art. Walking more explicitly engages with the public realm—and with pressing questions of what it is to be public—in those instances when it is figured as an act of resistance” (32). Wilkie suggests that there is an etymological link between “mobility” and “mob” and that protestors are usually on foot. “But resistance, of course, does not necessarily mean protest,” she continues. “Rather quieter forms of resistance involve walking as a deliberate choice in the face of its perceived ‘others,’ including commerce, globalization, transport culture and urban planning” (33). Debord and de Certeau provide key theoretical texts about walking as resistance, and many art projects use walking as a form of resistance: Platform’s 2006 And While London Burns; FrenchMottershead’s 2012 Walkways; Bruno de Wachter’s ongoing series Circling Around (Without Taking Off), in which de Wachter and participants walk around the perimeters of international airports (33-35).

“In all of these examples, the choice to walk is deemed important to the capacity of resistance,” Wilkie writes, partly because walking is literally out-of-step with modern (or postmodern) forms of space, time, and embodiment (35). “The claim for slowness is used to set walking apart as a more virtuous choice than other means of travel, and therefore has clear implications for the practices discussed in the chapters that follow,” she continues (35). Whereas French theorist Paul Virilio has been called “the ‘high priest of speed,’” he is interested in deceleration as well as acceleration. “One of the means by which the world might now be said to be slowing down is the advocacy of slow travel, which, by association with slow food, signals ‘a concern for locality, ecology and quality of life’” (Dickinson and Lumsdon, qtd. 36). The 2010 performance installation Slow Travel Agency (presented by Sustrans in Bristol) is an example of a performance that emphasizes slowness (36). The work of Wrights & Sites is another example of work that uses slowness to resist hierarchies that value speed. “Many of those employing pedestrian travel in practice and theory rely, implicitly or explicitly, on celebrating the pace of the walk over the speed of mechanized transport,” Wilkie writes. “The comparison with other forms of transport is fundamental to this celebration of walking” (36-37). She notes that slowness is not the only important aspect of walking, and suggests that “pedestrian performance is not so much a return to ‘slowness’ . . . as a quest to find a more fluid and mobile mode of interaction with our surroundings, one which is based on a self-generated rhythm” (Lavery, qtd. 37). Nevertheless, Wilkie emphasizes slowness “because it continues to be cited by those performing and documenting pedestrian travel. Lavery’s caveat would be that walking is a reaction against both the speed and the passivity of contemporary life” (37).

Writer Andie Miller highlights these elements in her book on walking. The artist Ohad Fishof’s Slow Walk series announces its emphasis on slowness: rather than travelling at three miles per hour, Fishof walks at one metre per minute (37-38). The Slow Walk project is intended to have an audience; Robert Wilson’s Walking, another “slowed-down walking event, operates rather differently” (39). First created for the Oerol Festival in the Netherlands in 2008, “Wilson’s immersive installation does not really work in conceptual terms” but rather operates “as something to be experienced” (39-40). “The work sends its participant-spectators on a three-mile, three-hour walk,” Wilkie writes. “Participants set off at intervals of about a minute: the piece works . . . by creating a continuous line of walkers” (40). Participants leave “stress-inducing” items (phones, watches, cameras) behind (40). “The central event of the walk insists on silence, and explicitly strips away what might be seen as the trappings of a fast-paced walk,” Wilkie continues (40). The experience is both solitary but also a communal ritual. “Even as I find myself resistant to any straightforward equation of thought, landscape, pedestrian travel and well-being, I cannot deny the physical invigoration I feel at the end of Wilson’s walk,” she recalls (41). That’s because the work operates through a slow pace and “what it means for the artist or participant to switch to a different tempo” (42). While Fishof connects slowness to political resistance, Wilson “constructs an enjoyably escapist experience that sidesteps any sense of its relationality” (42). Running performances, though, address a very different pace: “Part of its potential, perhaps, will be to problematize the historically enduring sense that contact between the foot and the ground is characterized by slowness and leads to [a] profound relationship with both the self and the environment” (43).

In her conclusion, Wilkie notes her attraction to and skepticism about statements that equate walking with thinking. Despite caveats about the connection between those two activities, “walking seems to maintain an air of righteousness, whether it lies in the ‘one-ness with nature of rural walking or the potential for subversion often claimed for urban walking” (43-44). “Walking is valued because it inspires belief,” she continues, “because it has a strong legacy that can be trace and celebrated, because of its power to resist dominant structures, and because it is slow. It is connected rhetorically or symbolically with ideals of autonomy, freedom, insight, truth, political subversion and critical reflection” (44). But we need to be cautious about claims that the values of walking are “universally available and when the differential experiences of walking are overlooked” (44-45).

Wilkie’s discussion of walking is both a brief introduction and an interesting analysis, through her four themes, of the practice. It would be worth assigning as reading in a course on walking. But my sense, from the chapter’s conclusion, is that Wilkie is more interested in the other forms of transportation she explores in the rest of the book. That might explain some of her missteps: I don’t think Phil Smith’s walking practice is about belief, for instance; it would be better to consider his walking as a form of resistance. That’s how he would frame it, anyway.

Work Cited

Wilkie, Fiona. Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

87. Henry David Thoreau, Walking

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There are many passages from Henry David Thoreau’s lecture Walking, published after his death in 1862, that show up in any survey of writing about walking. But there is a lot more going in in Thoreau’s text than those frequently quoted statements. Rather than being focused on walking, most of the text addresses another topic entirely: wildness. For Thoreau, the two go together: walking is a vehicle for experiencing wildness, by which he means, the natural world, or life beyond human society. In fact, the lecture begins with a short paragraph in which Thoreau states, “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (35). The “extreme statement” (35) he intends to make begins with the idea that humans are natural rather than social or cultural. It doesn’t matter that such an idea is impossible; what’s important is Thoreau’s intention and, I think, the way it reflects his own love of the natural world and of solitude.

From that point Thoreau moves to one of those often-quoted passages, an attempt at an etymology of the word “sauntering.” He makes two suggestions. One is that “saunter” comes from medieval pilgrimages (pretended, according to Thoreau) to the Holy Land, from the idea that children would exclaim “There goes a Sainte-Terrer” when such people walked past. Strangely, Thoreau shifts to the present tense when he evaluates these pilgrimages: “They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean” (35-36). I find the syntax of that sentence very strange, and I have a suspicion that Thoreau might prefer the “idlers and vagabonds” to those who would actually be walking to the Holy Land—or that he’s less interested in the notion of a religious pilgrimage than in one that leads into the woods, which is the site Thoreau really finds to be sacred. That’s the derivation he prefers, because “every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels” (36). By “this Holy Land” Thoreau means Massachusetts, or Concord: the place he called home. And by “Infidels,” I am assuming he means those who do not or cannot appreciate the natural world of that place; that, in any case, is an opposition he develops through the lecture.

However, Thoreau also acknowledges that some people derive “saunter” from “sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere” (36). This, he claims, “is the secret of successful sauntering”: “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea” (36). This derivation, although Thoreau prefers the first, has the benefits of lending itself to a metaphor taken from nature, and of distinguishing those who walk, or saunter, from those who stay at home, and who, despite their stationary quality, “may be the biggest vagrant of all.”

The first derivation, though, allows Thoreau to make this apparent self-criticism, although I think it’s actually an ironic critique of his audience, and his culture:

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. (36)

Thoreau wants to raise the stakes, as dramaturges say; he wants walkers to take risks and walks to mean something. But at the same time, the exaggeration here (“embalmed hearts”?) might suggest he’s not entirely serious. Such hyperbole continues through the first pages of the lecture, including this passage, which Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner describe as an example of “nineteenth-century chauvinism” (226): “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk” (36). The joke is on the reader, of course; Thoreau never married, lived alone, and had few if any domestic entanglements. He is asking his audience to do something he wouldn’t have to do and likely wouldn’t be able to imagine. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his biographical sketch of Thoreau, he was “the bachelor of thought and Nature” (9).

The self-conscious drama of the notion that one must treat any walk as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, an experience likely to lead to one’s death, is (to me) sheer hyperbole, and the language in the following paragraphs supports that claim. Thoreau describes the pleasure he and his walking companion take

in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order,—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but the Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People. (37)

Is Thoreau serious here? I don’t think so, although I could be wrong. Elsewhere in the essay he criticizes any interest in what are, for him, outmoded or inappropriate European ideas and idioms, and so his use of them here might suggest exaggeration. I keep thinking that he’s giving a lecture, that he has to engage his audience and interest them not only in what he wants to say, but in himself as a speaker. What better way to accomplish those goals than to begin by making oneself something of a figure of fun who is in on the joke?

At the same time, there is a serious side to the distinction he has been making, subtly, between those who walk and those who stay home:

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, mo[s]t of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of Walkers. (37)

Again there is deliberate exaggeration here, but I think Thoreau is making a point. After all, his lack of domestic obligations; his self-imposed poverty; his friends and family, who supported his life and work (by paying his tax bills, for example); all of the factors of his life allowed him to spend hours every day going for long walks. Others, who had to work long hours as farmers or clerks, did not have that freedom.

Still, in this paragraph the butt of the Thoreau’s humour shifts from Thoreau himself to those who lack the leisure or disposition to walk:

Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws. (37)

The short period of the remembered walk (just half an hour), and the decision to “confine themselves to the highway” afterwards, and the allusion to Robin Hood, all suggest (to me) that Thoreau is having a bit of a laugh at his audience’s expense. After all, they are likely to be the kind of people who have to work and lack the leisure to wander around. They bought tickets to the lecture, after all.

Thoreau, in fact, acknowledges that he is both unusual and lucky in his need to walk and in his ability to do it:

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least,—and it is commonly more than that,—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. (38)

Thoreau’s freedom to walk is also a necessity, and although it has led to poverty (for him there’s no difference between a penny and a thousand pounds, because he has neither), it has also helped him to preserve his “health and spirits.” In fact, he cannot understand how others, with jobs and obligations, manage to survive. He wonders why “there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street” every afternoon between four and five o’clock, a blast that would scatter “a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing,” and thus cure the evil of being confined “to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together” (39). Thoreau’s wonder is not confined to men working outside of the home: “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know,” he writes, but he suspects “that most of them do not stand it at all” (39). He remembers walking past houses on summer afternoons, houses whose occupants appear to be sleeping (39). He seems to be suggesting that they aren’t sleeping at all; perhaps they have gone out for a walk. It’s hard to say, though, what Thoreau means here, because he ends that paragraph with a paean to the architecture that doesn’t go to sleep itself, but which stands guard over the slumberers (40). The notion seems strange. What is more likely: sleeping or walking? Shouldn’t those women be walking? If they are sleeping, what does that say about Thoreau’s views on women?

Thoreau suggests that the walking he is describing has nothing to do with “taking exercise,” but “is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life” (40). Moreover, when one walks, one must think—ruminate—as Wordsworth, who famously wrote while walking, did (40). Being outside so much “will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character,” he admits, but the “natural remedy” for that roughness “is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience”:

There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience. (41)

In other words, that “certain roughness of character,” far from being a vice, is a virtue. Given the choice between that roughness and “mere sentimentality,” Thoreau will choose roughness. I wonder if the figure who lies in bed during the day is a return to the female inhabitants of those silent houses whose occupants seem to be asleep; perhaps those women are actually sleeping, rather than walking, a suggestion which would support accusations of chauvinism.

As Heddon and Turner point out, Thoreau critiques domestic walking: “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?” (41). I don’t think it’s the domestic that Thoreau is rejecting as much as it is the notion of wild nature that he is advocating (although they necessarily go together). It’s not enough to walk in the woods, either; one must want to walk there, and one must be focused on the experience rather than thinking of other things:

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works,—for this may sometimes happen. (42)

For Thoreau, walking is an experience of attention and flow—of being, in two ways, returned to his senses: to the sensory experience of the world, and to his right mind. The reason he rejects society and its obligations, here and elsewhere in the lecture, is that he seems to require that specific kind of walking experience, and even when he is thinking about “good works,” he is not present in his surroundings.

“My vicinity affords many good walks,” Thoreau continues, “and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not exhausted them” (42). One might expect that Thoreau is interested in walking as an experience of place, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s sense of place as a location that one knows through experience, and he does, but he’s also interested in walking as an experience of space, of novelty and freshness:

An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this on any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of a human life. It will never become quite familiar to you. (42)

That experience of space, as Thoreau’s Dahomey simile suggests, is related to processes of colonialism and empire, and yet, there is also something strangely local and perhaps almost domestic in the suggestion that seeing a previously unnoticed farmhouse is “as good as” African exploration. There is a sense here that Thoreau’s neighbourhood is so rich that he will never finish discovering new things in it—although, as Emerson suggests in his biographical sketch, those new things are more likely to be plants or birds than farmhouses (22-25).

Indeed, Thoreau suggests his movements during a walk are like those of “the fox and the mink”: he moves “first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side,” through a territory without human inhabitants. The animal imagery in this paragraph is applied to other aspects of “civilization and the abodes of man” as a way of minimizing their impact on the land:

The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. (43)

That what must have been a densely populated part of the United States could afford so much space without signs of human activity is a wonder, and perhaps Thoreau is exaggerating his experience.

Or perhaps Thoreau sees few signs of human activity because he avoids travelling on roads:

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. (44)

He is clearly one of those who “walk across lots,” and of no use to the “landscape-painter” who “uses the figures of men to mark a road”; that artist would not be able to use Thoreau’s figure because he is elsewhere (44). Walking “across lots” is a way to “walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in” (44). That territory is not America, nor was it discovered by Columbus: “There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen” (45). The only roads Thoreau likes are those that “are nearly discontinued,” and he includes a poem about one of those, “The Old Marlborough Road,” in his text.

Thoreau notes that most of the land in his vicinity is not private property, and so “the walker enjoys comparative freedom” (47). However, he imagines a very different future:

possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. (47-48)

Those days, as Ken Ilgunas and Matthew Anderson have pointed out, have arrived all over North America.

At this point, Thoreau begins shifting away from thinking about walking to thinking about nature, which for him primarily exists in the west—an expression of an American frontier thesis, I think, although he also makes arguments rooted in mythology (the importance of the setting sun) to defend his preference for that direction. The west is the direction of “the wilderness,” and he suggests that when he leaves the city, he is “withdrawing into the wilderness” (50). That is the American tendency, he suggests: “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress[es] from east to west” (50). Here he rejects history and “the old World and its institutions” (51) in preference to the west, the territory of the sun, “the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow” (52). Others who “felt the westward tendency” include Columbus and the “man of the Old World” who travelled from Asia into Europe, with “[e]ach of his steps . . . marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development,” until he crosses the Atlantic Ocean and resumes his westward movement (52-53). He suggests that the climate in the United States may enable “man [to] grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically” under its influences—that, in fact, the North American landscape will create a new kind of human:

I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. (55-56)

I was surprised to read such an evocation to American exceptionalism in Thoreau, given that he refused to pay taxes in part because they supported a state that allowed human slavery, but he was of his time, as we all are, and he had a lecture audience to please.

There’s another reason for this apotheosis of the west in Thoreau’s discourse: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (57). “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” he writes (58). He notes that according to “[t]he African hunter Cummings” the skin of the eland “emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass,” and he would like “every man” to be “so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts” (58-59). That odour would be preferable to “that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments,” which is a smell “of dusty merchant’s exchanges and libraries” (59). “Life consists with wildness,” he contends. “The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. . . . Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps”—the wildest place, it seems, that Thoreau can imagine (60). “Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness!” he exclaims (61)—places, like the swamp, that are dreary (because they are frightening to civilized humans, or because they don’t conform to codes of visual beauty). And yet, the American economy depends on agriculture, which requires draining swamps (63-64). “The weapons with which he have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance,” he argues, “but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field” (64).

“In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us,” Thoreau continues, suggesting that “it is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and the “Iliad,’ in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us,” in the way that a wild duck “is more swift and beautiful than the tame” (64). He wonders where “the literature which gives expression to Nature” is (65):

He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. (65-66)

Strangely, though, this evocation of “the literature which gives expression to Nature” is premised on figures of human domination of nature, particularly through agriculture. Would that literature necessarily be a hybrid between the human and the natural? In any case, it doesn’t exist:

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. (66)

The literature that comes closest seems to be Greek mythology, “the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated” (66).

“In short,” Thoreau continues, “all good things are wild and free”:

There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. (67-68)

The influence of Rousseau on Thoreau is obvious here. “Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization,” he writes, and just because some can be tamed, “this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level” (69). Nature, he writes, is “this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,” and she possesses “such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man” (71). It would be better, he continues, that “every man nor every part of a man” should be “cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated”: the greater part of the earth should remain “meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports” (72).

Thoreau then critiques the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, suggesting that a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance or “what we will call Beautiful Ignorance” would be more useful “in a higher sense,” because what is called knowledge is “often our positive ignorance, ignorance in our negative knowledge” (73). “A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly,” he argues. “Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?” (74). That question suggests that Thoreau was a pioneer in the study of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant,” Thoreau continues—a strange thing for someone interested in walking to say, it seems to me. “The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence,” he writes:

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. (74)

The insistence on “sudden revelation” and on something beyond knowledge suggests something about Thoreau’s Romantic predisposition, I think.

Thoreau suggests that “almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society,” but “few are attracted strongly to Nature” (76). For that reason, he considers most men “lower than the animals,” because they are incapable of appreciating “the beauty of the landscape” (76). “For my part,” he continues,

I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. (76)

At this point, he suddenly returns, in the middle of the paragraph, to walking:

The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as if it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. (77)

What is that other land? Where did the reality described in the property deeds he refers to go? He gives an example:

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious, to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,—as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding that I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed. (78)

Why does Thoreau imagine that the forest is the home of this family? Is that family a metaphor for the ecosystem of Spaulding’s farm? Or is he recording some mystical vision experienced while walking there? I don’t know. He states that he finds it hard to remember that family: “They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself” (78). Regardless, he concludes that “[i]f it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord” (78). Perhaps that family is a way of giving shape to the thoughts he has while walking. He suggests that “few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to breed on” (79).

“We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more” (79). Those words lead into a literal description of climbing a tall white pine, which leads Thoreau to “discover new mountains on the horizon” which he had never seen before (79). At the top of the tree, he saw “the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward,” which he picked and took to show the villagers (80). “[N]ot one had ever seen the like before,” he writes, “but they wondered as at a star dropped down” (80). The moral of this fable seems to be the importance of attending to the natural world, but even more, the importance of allowing ourselves, or our imaginations, to soar.

“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present,” Thoreau writes. The past is without interest. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated,” he continues, suggesting again the importance of attending to what is around us. That rooster’s philosophy, Thoreau states, “comes down to a more recent time than ours,” because he rises early and is “in the foremost rank of time” (80-81). The rooster’s crow “is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are past. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?” (81). So many things are combined in this description—Peter’s betrayal of Christ, the controversy over fugitive slave laws (with which Thoreau was concerned), “a new fountain of the Muses,” and I find it hard to understand how paying attention to the present moment brings all of them together. But “[t]he merit of this bird’s strain”—and, remember, he is still talking about attending to the present—“is in its freedom from plaintiveness,” its “pure morning joy” (81). When Thoreau hears a rooster crow, he states, “I think to myself, ‘There is one of us well, at any rate,’—and with a sudden gush return to my senses” (81).

The next paragraph provides an example of attending to the senses while walking, and that example becomes what can only be described as an epiphany:

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. (81-82)

This is an experience of paradoxes: warm air on a cold day, a sunrise at sunset, a slumbering meadow (it’s November, after all, and winter is quickly approaching) becoming “a paradise.” More importantly, Thoreau continues, “[w]hen we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever on an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still” (82). How can that be? How can such a singular event be infinite? It seems impossible, but Thoreau is certain that it’s the case, even though it is, for him, clearly a special and unique experience:

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. (82)

This is the approach to the Holy Land, he suggests, returning to the place where he began:

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn. (82)

Enlightenment is possible, it seems, if we walk long enough, and far enough, and it will take the form of the “great awakening light” of the sun.

Thoreau’s optimism at the end of the lecture is something of a surprise, given the discouragement he sometimes expresses, but it’s clear that for him walking is more than a way to experience nature—it is a path towards some kind of enlightenment. I was also surprised by the lecture’s circularity, but the way it circles back to the etymologies with which it began. In a way, I think the key to Walking is Thoreau’s brief introduction, where he suggests that he’s not interested in humans as social creatures, but as “part and parcel of Nature” (35). If that’s his starting point, then it’s not surprising that our enlightenment will be natural, experienced by walking in the sunshine. And if that’s his starting point, criticizing him for (jokingly, I suspect) suggesting that walkers need to abandon their friends and families misses the point. For Thoreau, those social and familial ties are unimportant; what is important is one’s experience of nature. He might well be wrong about that—and I think he is—but that suggestion is consistent with the rest of his argument. In the end, Thoreau was what he was–a nineteenth-century Romantic–and we can only take what we can from this odd text.

Works Cited

Anderson, Matthew Robert. “Why Canadians Need the ‘Right to Roam.’” The Conversation, 29 July 2018, https://theconversation.com/why-canadians-need-the-right-to-roam-100497.

Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.

Ilgunas, Ken. This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Get It Back, Plume, 2018.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walking, 1863, Watchmaker 2010.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

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