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This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.
– Rebecca Solnit, wanderlust: A History of Walking
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I’ve walked myself with brilliant young people whose talk–entertaining, witty and incessant–yet left me weary and dispirited because the hill did not speak. This does not imply that the only good talk on a hill is about the hill. All sorts of themes may be lit up from within by contact with it as they are by contact with another mind. And so discussion may be salted yet to listen is better than to speak.
The talking tribe, I find, want sensation from the mountain, not in Keats’ sense. Beginners, not unnaturally, do the same. I did myself. They want the startling view, the horrid pinnacle, sips of beer and tea instead of milk.
Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.”
– Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
transcribed from audible by pavleheidler
pavements, 2022
a visual poem by pavleheidler
link
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Of course walking, as any reader of Thoreau's essay "Walking" knows, inevitably leads into other subjects. Walking is a subject that is always straying.
– Rebecca Solnit, wanderlust: A History of Walking
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Here then may be lived a life of the senses so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness is in itself a total experience. This is the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at the time to live all the way through.
– Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
transcribed from audible by pavleheidler
I am not yet confident writing about embriology, writing embriology, speaking about embriology, speaking embriology. I am not yet confident becuase my felt-sense understanding of embriological and anatomical processes is changing on a daily basis. And since my languaging stems from my ever-changing felt-sense understanding, my languaging keeps changing : rearranging words on paper or screen.
Changing (felt-sense feedback) occurs more rarely than rearranging. Cells, once named, tend to keep their names throughout their lifetime. Rearranging of words, however, in as much it [rearranging of words] relates to my experiencing relationship between experience of word and experience of feeling, happens on a daily basis. Or it would, were I to keep on working on the same text, paragraph, sentence.
Some sentences, then, do come back to be rearranged on a daily basis, though not in writing perhaps nor editing per se. {I skip and I jump now.} Think of Deborah Hay's What if... as an example of a sentence you might have had the opportunity to witness in its evolving, changing, rearranging. Think of the time, if you had experienced one the likes of which, when the familiar What if... –– that you've been looking forward to with gusto –– suddenly turns your body towards every cell in my body, instead of reminding you that where you are is what you need.
What happens -ed to your dancing then?
2022-06-24
Midsummer Eve
Embryologically speaking, movement conditions/necessitates/enables resistance that provides the feedback necessariy the transformation to be ignited, e.g. the transformation of a pluripotent stem cell into a singularly purposeful cell. Singular, in this case, I do not mean to read as single or individual, but remarkable as is the primary germ cell’s capacity to bring about the emergence of further form–bone, fluid, tranquil storm.
some art related to walking
Carl Andre, Lever, sculpture, 1966
Richard Long, Line Made by Walking, "drawing", 1967
Carl Andre, Joint, sculpture, 1968
Patricia Johanson, Stephen Long, sculpture, 1968
Trisha Brown, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, dance, 1970
Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once beceause it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.
– Rebecca Solnit, wanderlust: A History of Walking
RESIDENCY #2
host: pavleheidler
to walk to think to dance
In the desire to explore the notion of emergence practically, I think of walking. Historically speaking, walking has been associated with contemplation, with thinking and doing thinking. Walking has, too, been associated with art and philosophy and science making. And thinking. And doing. And doing. And thinking. And making.
Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker famously called her walking her dancing. I frequently mistook her suggestion to walk to dance with to walk to think to dance, thereby transforming my thinking into the equivalent of my moving and experiencing my moving as my thinking. Today I cannot tell one apart from the other, and let me tell you: I don’t think Descartes would appreciate that.
I hereby invite you to walk with me, whether or not you are thinking of attending the upcoming IDOCDE symposium. I invite you to walk with me, intentionally leaving any defining of what that could mean for you or me or us… not to chance, per se, but to real time. The practice I am hoping to develop during this residency is that of relationship building. And as is true of all relationships, they cannot be anticipated. This is what makes them fun.
The possibilities are endless, our interests paramount, and the only thing suggested: that we literally take this one step at a time.
I will be walking for 90 minutes every Saturday, starting with Saturday of June 11th. My first walk will take place in Oslo, Norway, where I will be at the time. I will broadcast my walk via Zoom, which will make it possible for you to join me virtually. At the end of every walk, I will announce where I will be walking next Saturday, if ever you’d want to and could join my walk in person. I will share the location of the next walk via idocde.net and idocde’s social media channels.
“What if art can only be found if you are not looking for it?”
On July 20, 21, and 22–the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday leading up to the symposium weekend–I will be walking in Vienna. All those in the city at the time are welcome to join me in person.
Please register your attendance via pavle.heidler@idocde.net. The specific time of the walk will be scheduled relative to which time zones the fellow walkers will be tuning in from.
till soon,
pavleheidler for Team IDOCDE
originally published on idocde.net [Accessed on 2022-06-17: http://www.idocde.net/pages/193]