I keep forgetting those short blessed moments, sometimes due to great tiredness, those brief ecstatic instants when the body, while walking, advances without being aware of itself, almost like a tumbling dead leaf. Especially after a long walk when the fatigue is immense, and you suddenly lose all sensation. Then, as long as the path is well enough laid out and not too steep, you stop looking down, stop thinking altogether, and let your feet find the right places and avoid the pitfalls.
On the walker’s side, there’s nothing left but an immense renunciation. The walk ends in a sort of dream, and the tread then gains in firmness and speed. As soon as you consent to stop thinking. After that, you can’t call it lightness because you no longer feel a thing: your legs are absorbed by the road and your mind floats overhead. Now, when you run for long enough, the time comes when you feel a huge impression of lightness, as if carried off in a race of your own. After a period, sometimes a long one, of ‘finding your pace’, at last the body finds its breathing rhythm and your feet answer the rhythmic call to rebound from the road, like a regular, repeated take-off. The experience of lightness when running is still wholly distinct from the feeling of induced lightness that walking can, on rare occasions, produce. It isn’t the intoxication you feel on a run, from the perfect tension of the muscles, but more a mental detachment produced by tiredness, a creeping anaesthesia. The lightness felt in running is really an unfatiguing victory over gravity, an easy and sovereign assertion of the body. The floating feeling derived from walking comes when the feet have ultimately become one with the road, and the mind through lassitude forgets to echo their fatigue.
The fact remains that, very broadly speaking, the experience of walking is always a perception of gravity. I don’t exactly mean that of a heavy, weighty body. Even if sometimes, truth to tell, when there are still several hours to go before the end of the stage, and the path steepens, your knees might just as well be carrying an anvil. What I am trying to get at is what runs all through those immense days in the open: at every step, contact, the foot endlessly falling back down; that support every time, the perpetual sinking down to lift up again. You have to take root each time so that you can depart anew. That is how the foot takes root, through that repeated enlacement with the earth. Each step forming another knot. There is no way of being more earthbound than by walking: the immeasurable monotony of the soil.
I think of those abstracted sedentary individuals who spend their lives in an office rattling their fingers on a keyboard: ‘connected’, as they say, but to what? To information mutating between one second and the next, floods of images and numbers, pictures and graphs. And after work it’s the subway, the train, always speed, the gaze now glued to the telephone screen, more touches and strokes and messages scrolling past, images … and night falls, when they still haven’t seen anything of the day. Television, another screen. What dimension do they live in, without dust raised by movement, without contact, in what featureless space, in what time, where neither rain nor shine count? Those lives, disconnected from roads and routes, make them forget our condition, as if erosion by changing weather over time didn’t exist.
A Taoist sage said: ‘Feet on the ground occupy very little space; it’s through all the space they don’t occupy that we can walk.’ Which means in the first place that people don’t keep still. Watch a man waiting on his feet, poorly set: he prances, tramples, quickly feels chafed. He doesn’t know what to do with his arms, swinging them weakly or clamping them against his body: he’s in unstable equilibrium. When he starts to walk it all comes back immediately: nature unfolds, expresses itself, the wellspring of being relaxes, the rhythm resumes. The foot finds the right balance.
Zhuang Zhu also meant that the feet as such are small pieces of space, but their vocation (‘walking’) is to articulate the world’s space. The size of the foot, the gap between the legs, have no role, are never lined up anywhere. But they measure all the rest. Our feet form a compass that has no useful function, apart from evaluating distance. The legs survey. Their stride constitutes a serviceable measurement.
In the end, to say that it’s through what remains to me of the journey that I can walk makes obvious reference to the Taoist void: that void that isn’t empty nothingness but pure virtuality, a void creating inspiration and play, like the play of letters and sounds that makes the life of words. Walking in that way articulates the depths of the space and brings the landscape to life.
To end, I would note that in many sporting activities, joy comes from the transgression of gravity, from victory over it through speed, height, vigour, the invitation to go ever higher. Walking on the other hand is to experience gravity at every step, the inexorable attraction of the earth’s mass. The passage from running to rest is a violence. You hold your sides, you pour with sweat, your face is scarlet. You stop because the body’s giving way, you’re out of breath. When you walk, on the other hand, stopping is like a natural completion: you stop to welcome a new perspective, to breathe in the landscape. And then when you start off again, there isn’t a break. It’s more like a continuity between walking and rest, not a matter of transgressing gravity, but completing it.
Thus, walking reminds us constantly of our finiteness: bodies heavy with unmannerly needs, nailed to the definitive ground. Walking doesn’t mean raising yourself, it doesn’t mean getting the better of gravity, or letting speed and height delude you on your mortal condition; it means reconciling yourself to it through that exposure to the mass of the ground, the fragility of the body, the slow, remorseless sinking movement. Walking means precisely resigning yourself to being an ambulant, forward-leaning body. But the really astonishing thing is how that slow resignation, that immense lassitude give us the joy of being. Of being no more than that, of course, but in utter bliss. Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step, as if to take root there again. Walking is an invitation to die standing up.
~~A Philosophy Of Walking -by- Frédéric Gros
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