Çocukluğumdan beri yürümeyi severdim. Sonra Ölü Ozanlar
Derneği filminde bir sahne dikkatimi çekti. Aslında konuyla çok ilgili bir sahne
değildi ve kimsenin hatırlayacağını sanmıyorum. Her taraf karla kaplıydı.
Üniversitenin bahçesinde bir öğretmen ile birkaç öğrencisi kitapları ellerinde
yürüyerek bir şeyler çalışıyordu. Hepi topu birkaç saniyelik bir yürüyüş. Ama nedense çok etkiledi beni. Kafamda kendini tekrar etmeye başladı. İster istemez bu çağrıya kulak verdim. Önceleri bazen elimde kitapla bazen de kafamda belirsiz düşüncelerle sakin yerlerde yürüyüşe çıkıyordum. Sonra odamda çalışırken bile yürümeye başladım. Gördüm ki bu şekilde okuduğumu daha kolay anlıyor ve daha zor sıkılıyordum. Basit bir alışkanlık ya
da özentiden öte bir düşünme ve çalışma metodu haline geldi yıllar içinde. Hala hikaye ya da
romanları oturarak okusam da özellikle anlamaya çalıştığım bir metin varsa
mutlaka yürümeye başlarım. Ya da kafamda halledemediğim bir mesele varsa "yürümeye bırakırım". Hatta bir şeyler yazarken de sık sık yürüme molaları
veririm. Sanki yeni fikirlere açık oluyor insan hareket halindeyken. Otururken açık olmayan bir kanaldan beslenmeye başlıyorsunuz. Kardiyovasküler sistemin daha fazla kan pompalamasından belki de. Ama olumlu bir etkisi olduğu kesin.
Bu girişin üstüne bir dizi yürüyüş temalı kitaptan bahsedeceğimi ve notlarını burada paylaşacağımı söylemem sürpriz olmaz artık. İlki Yürümenin Felsefesi isimli kitap. 25 bölümden oluşuyor. Türkçe’ye de çevrilmiş. Yazar Frederic Gros bir yandan kendi görüşlerini aktarırken bir yandan da Rimbaud’dan Rousseau’ya, Nietzsche’den Gandi’ye örnekler veriyor. Özellikle dönüşümlü olarak tarihte yeri olan insanların yürüyüş tutkularına yer verilmesi, metnin akıcılığına ciddi bir katkı sağlayarak içeriği daha ilgi çekici hale getirmiş. Esas olarak yürüyüşün fiziksel bir egzersizin ötesinde insana kattıkları hakkında hem yazarın hem de şairlerden filozoflara pek çok insanın görüşlerini dinleme fırsatı buluyorsunuz. Bazı kitaplar insanın belli konulardaki yalnızlığını üzerinden alır. İşte bu kitabın bende böyle bir etkisi de oldu. Bu arada İngilizce'sinden okuduğum için notlar da o dilde çıktı. Meraklısına kitabı kaçırmamasını tavsiye ederim.
NOTLAR
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books,
when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors – walking, leaping,
climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even
the trails become thoughtful. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other
method that has ever been found.
Once on his feet, though, man does not stay where he is.
Because the city-dweller tends spontaneously to interpret such activity in terms of deprivation, whereas the walker considers it a liberation to be disentangled from the web of exchanges, no longer reduced to a junction in the network redistributing information, images and goods; to see that these things have only the reality and importance you give them.
NIETZSCHE
Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels. – Sitting still (I said it once already) – is the real sin against the Holy Ghost. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Nietzsche was a remarkable walker, tireless. He mentioned it
all the time. Walking out of doors was as it were the natural element of his
oeuvre, the invariable accompaniment to his writing.
Misfortune in love plagued him too: refusal after refusal
answered his – somewhat abrupt – proposals of marriage. And lastly, social
failure, for he did not manage to take root either in the worldly clamour of
Bayreuth or in academic and intellectual circles.
Every term was harder, more impossible. Increasingly he was
seized by terrible headaches that kept him in bed, lying in the dark, gasping
with agony. His eyes hurt, he could hardly read or write. Each quarter-hour of
reading or writing cost him hours of migraine. He asked to be read to, for his
eyes wavered on contact with the page.
‘I am walking a lot, through the forest, and having
tremendous conversations with myself’).
he became the peerless walker of legend. Nietzsche walked,
he walked as others work. And he worked while he was walking.
He walked, alone, for up to eight hours a day, and wrote The
Wanderer and His Shadow. All of it except a few lines was thought out en route,
and scribbled down in pencil in six small notebooks.
Nietzsche walked all day long, scribbling down here and
there what the walking body – confronting sky, sea, glaciers – breathed into
his thought. I am, says Zarathustra, ‘a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he
to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.
Finally it is worth mentioning what Eternal Recurrence owes
to the experience of walking (bearing in mind, too, that Nietzsche’s long
excursions were made on known paths, signposted routes that he liked to
repeat).
Walking causes the inversion of town-dweller’s logics, and
even of our most widespread condition.
When you go ‘outside’ it is always to pass from one ‘inside’
to another: from house to office, from your place to the nearest shops. You go
out to do something, somewhere else. Outside is a transition: the thing that separation
between outside and inside is turned upside down by walking.
The authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I
mean is a sort of slowness that isn’t exactly the opposite of speed.
The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time.
RIMBAUD
I can’t give you an address to reply to this, for I don’t
know personally where I may find myself dragged next, or by what routes, on the
way to where, or why, or how! Arthur Rimbaud, Letter from Aden, 5 May 1884
‘I’m a pedestrian, nothing more.’ Rimbaud walked throughout
his life.
It was always the same movement, the same slow oscillation:
winter getting bored at home, champing at the bit, learning languages from
dictionaries; the rest of the time trying his luck.
In the hollow of the belly the pain of being here, the
impossibility of remaining where you are, of being buried alive, of simply
staying.
Here, it’s impossible. Impossible here, for a single day
more. Here, it’s ‘atrocious’. Time to go; ‘Forward, route!’ Every route is good
to follow, every road towards the sun, towards more light. Doubtless it’s no
better elsewhere, but at least it’s away from here. The route is needed, to get
there. ‘Fists in my ripped pockets.’ In reality it is only en route, on paths,
on roads, that there isn’t a here. ‘Adieu to here, no matter where.’
Thoreau observed repeatedly that silence usually taught him
more than the company of others. Just as there are several solitudes, so there
are several silences.
But above all, silence is the dissipation of our language.
What is called ‘silence’ in walking is, in the first place,
the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs
everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness
I never do anything but when walking, the countryside is my
study. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mon Portrait
ROUSSEAU
Rousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of
composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking. The mere sight
of a desk and chair was enough to make him feel sick and drain him of all
courage. It was during long walks that the ideas would come, on the road that
sentences would spring to his lips, as a light punctuation of the movement; it
was paths that stimulated his imagination.
In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and politeness,
and so many sublime maxims, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a deceitful
and frivolous exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and
pleasure without happiness.
With the thinkers of the time, all around him, chorusing the
songs of liberation through reason, perfectibility through education and
progress through science, he aspired to show that society corrupts mankind.
Homo viator – Yolcu insan kavramı
I like to walk at my ease, and to stop when I like. A
wandering life is what I want. To walk through a beautiful country in fine
weather, without being obliged to hurry, and with a pleasant prospect at the
end, is of all kinds of life the one most suited to my taste.
We must really manage one day to do without ‘news’. Reading
the newspapers in fact only tells us what we didn’t yet know. And that is
exactly what we are looking for: something new. But what we didn’t yet know is
exactly what we forget immediately. Because as soon as we know it, we have to
leave room for what we don’t yet know, which will come tomorrow. Newspapers
have no memory: one piece of news drives out another, each event displaces
another which sinks without a trace.
With its great shocks, Nature thus awakens us from the human
nightmare.
THOREAU
Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four,
leaving an immense, fascinating oeuvre including the magical Walden, the distilled
account of his two years living in the forest. He is the author of the first
philosophic treatise on walking: Walking.
Confronted with the development of this lust for unlimited
wealth, faced with the blind capitalization of material goods, Thoreau proposed
a new economics. The principle is a simple one. Instead of asking what return a
given activity will produce, the question is what it costs in terms of pure
life:
Frugality vs Austerity
It is still easier to acquire wealth than to get rid of it.
Thoreau, that heroic walker – three to five hours every day
– was anything but a great traveller.
‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood
up to live.’
Thoreau loved mornings. ‘The sun is but a morning star.’
The life Thoreau led – a life of resistance (Emerson
recounts that his first response to any request was to say no, that he always
found it easier to refuse than to assent),
Seeking truth means going beyond appearances. It means
denouncing manners and mores, traditions, the everyday, as so many conventions,
hypocrisies and lies.
‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’
A true life is always another life, a different life. Truth
brings rupture,
PILGRIMAGE
Walking isn’t always an aimless stroll, a solitary wander.
Historically it has sometimes taken codified forms which governed its conduct,
termination and purpose. Pilgrimage is one of these major cultural forms.
The primary meaning of peregrinus is foreigner or exile. The
pilgrim, originally, is not one who is heading somewhere (Rome, Jerusalem,
etc.), but essentially one who is not at home where he is walking. For the
pilgrim is never at home where he walks: he’s a stranger, a foreigner.
Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were
especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal
strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without
fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are
still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on
narrow mountain paths,
xenateia (the condition of foreignness to the world)
Peregrinatio perpetua emphasizes the wish to leave, tear
oneself away, renounce. Christ invited his disciples to take to the road: to
leave their wives and children, their lands, their businesses and status, to go
forth to spread the word (‘Sell all that you own, give it to the poor and
follow me’). And much earlier still, the act of Abraham: leave everything (‘Go
into a place that I will show you …’). You walk to have done with it all
and purge yourself:
Church condemned the itinerant mode of life. St Benedict in
particular imposed ‘monastic stability’,
Obviously the main sites of pilgrimage were the tombs of
apostles or saints: St James in Compostela, St Paul and St Peter in Rome,
Christ’s empty sepulchre in Jerusalem; more modestly, St Martin’s tomb at
Tours, or the archangel Michael’s relics at Mont-Saint-Michel.
The first main routes for Christians led to Rome or
Jerusalem. From the third century, Jerusalem became the ultimate pilgrimage for
Christians, But widespread social and political unrest made the journey
increasingly difficult, and soon Rome became a safer, more reliable
destination. The resting place of the leading apostles, Peter and Paul, Rome
was the hub and centre of the established Catholic Church. Thus to perform the
peregrinatio romana was a perfect act of submission, expressing profound
loyalty to the Church in fulfilment of its historic mission.
Compostela was the last of these major destinations. It is
said of St James – one of Christ’s three favourites, and the first martyred
apostle, decapitated by order of King Herod – that his own disciples loaded his
remains onto a ship which was then wrecked on the shores of Galicia. The heavy
marble casket was carried ashore, and there forgotten – until the famous moment
when a hermit called Pelagius dreamed that angels had shown him the exact
location of the tomb, whose direction was being indicated every night by a row
of stars. A sanctuary was built over the rediscovered sepulchre, then a church,
and finally a cathedral. Santiago de Compostela became one of the most famous
sites of pilgrimage, soon taking its place beside Rome and Jerusalem.
Christians must complete the Stations of the
Cross. After gathering in the sanctuary of the Holy Sepulchre, they follow the
Via Dolorosa; they climb, in the east of the city, the Mount of Olives where
the Agony occurred; they walk in the Garden of Gethsemane, the scene of
Christ’s last night, and reach the chamber where the Last Supper took place,
behind the ramparts on the Hill of Zion, at whose foot a church marks the spot where
Peter denied Christ three times. And beyond that, one can push on to Bethlehem,
two hours’ walk, and further still, well to the north, reach the banks of Lake
Tiberias, where Christ played as a child; and seek in Nazareth the Grotto of
the Annunciation. Thus in Jerusalem as in Rome, the authentic pilgrimage only
starts when you arrive.
As an example of this utopia of rebirth through walking, I
would cite the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, a splendidly solitary
mountain, a dome of ice sitting on an immense plateau, and regarded by many
Oriental religions as a holy place: the centre of the universe. Pilgrims depart
from the great plains of India. There follows a journey of several hundred
kilometres across the Himalayan ranges, freezing passes alternating with deep,
stifling valleys. The road is exhausting and includes all the trials and risks
of mountain country: steep paths, vertical cliffs. Little by little you lose
your identity and memories along the way, until you are nothing but an
endlessly walking body.
Pilgrimage can also carry a utopia of cosmic rebirth. A good example is the great peyote walk accomplished annually by the Huichol people of Mexico. This community, which lives in a remote region of the high Sierra Madre, every year (starting in October, after the maize harvest), in small groups, covers more than 400 kilometres of stony tracks and dusty roads to the Potosí desert; there the peyote grows, a small spineless cactus that combines medicinal virtues with hallucinogenic powers. They collect the peyote buttons in big wicker baskets and return home, singing.
You have to walk to keep the world going.
If I get out of a car to face a monument, a church or temple, I see them, I scrutinize them, but they are just images. I apprehend them quickly, a specific photograph, the image of an image. Presence is something that takes time:
CYNICS
Thus Raphael, in his famous painting The School of Athens, drew the prot
otype of philosophers in Antiquity
The only Greek sages who were authentic walkers were the
Cynics,* forever on the move, shuffling like vagabonds about the streets. Like
dogs. Always rambling from city to city, from public square to public square.
The second experience raised by the nomad condition is that
of the raw. Writers of the time often mentioned the scandalous behaviour of the
Cynics in devouring raw meat. Is not Diogenes said to have died from trying to
eat a live octopus? It wasn’t only their diet that was raw, but their language
and manners too. That rawness, that rusticity in their behaviour and condition,
is again a battering ram against another great classical opposition. The
sedentary philosopher liked to distinguish between the natural and the
artificial.
The ‘outside’ espoused by the Cynics destabilized the
traditional contrast between public and private. The distinction was of
interest only to the sedentary: a choice between two closed circles, both
shielded from the great outdoors. Private meant the intimacy of family
passions, the secrets of desire, the protection of walls, property. Public
meant ambition and reputation, the scramble for recognition, the regard of
others, social identities. But the Cynic was outside. And it was from that
elsewhere, that exteriority to the world of men, that he could equate low
private acts and public vices.
After all – as the Epicureans had shown – he is rich who
lacks for nothing.
* The term ‘cynic’ is derived from the Greek noun kunos,
meaning dog. It designated a character whose mode of behaviour was very rough,
who spent his time haranguing the crowd and denouncing the world’s hypocrisies.
This is remote from the modern sense of ‘cynicism’, which signifies an attempt
to extract the maximum profit from a system without regard for the most
elementary human values.
KANT
We know that Immanuel Kant’s life was far from adventurous.
It is hard to imagine a drearier existence. He was born in Königsberg and died
there. He never travelled, never left his native town. His father made saddles
and harnesses. His mother was very pious and loving. He never heard an insult
uttered at home, but lost both parents at an early age. He studied, worked
hard, became a tutor, then a lecturer, then a university professor. At the
beginning of his first book is the statement: ‘I have traced a path which I
will follow. When my advance begins, nothing will be able to stop it.’ Of
medium height, with a large head and bright blue eyes, the right shoulder
higher than the left, he had a delicate constitution. He had gone blind in one
eye. His behaviour was such a model of regularity that some called him ‘the
Königsberg clock’. On teaching days, when he emerged from his house, people
knew it was exactly eight o’clock. At ten to, he had put on his hat; at five
to, he had picked up his stick; and at dead on eight he stepped out of his
door. He said of his watch that it was the last possession he would part with.
Like Nietzsche – although with different emphases – he was concerned with only
two things apart from reading and writing: the importance of his walk, and what
he should eat. But their styles differed absolutely. Nietzsche was a great,
indefatigable walker, whose hikes were long and sometimes steep; and he usually
ate sparingly, like a hermit, always trying out diets, seeking what would least
upset his delicate stomach. Kant by contrast had a good appetite, drank
heartily, although not to excess, and spent long hours at the table. But he
looked after himself during his daily walk which was always very brief, a bit perfunctory.
He couldn’t bear to perspire. So in summer he would walk very slowly, and stop
in the shade when he began to overheat.
Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate
repetition of the possible.
The adult sees everything from the height of his years. The
outlook born of experience flattens everything, piles it together, renders it
dull.
FLANEUR
In his reflections on Paris, Walter Benjamin spotlighted the
character of the flâneur, far removed from the ogling Tuileries gallant. He
analysed, described and captured him from a rereading of Baudelaire – Le Spleen
de Paris, the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ in Les Fleurs du mal, the sketches in Vie
moderne. This form of strolling presupposes three elements, or the presence of
three conditions: city, crowd, and capitalism. The urban flâneur does
experience walking, but in a way far removed from Nietzsche or Thoreau. Walking
in town is torture to the lover of long rambles in nature, because it imposes,
as we shall see, an interrupted, uneven rhythm. But the fact remains that the
flâneur walks, unlike the mere loafer, always stopping to see the attraction or
stare entranced into shop windows. The flâneur walks, he makes his way even
through the crowd.
The flâneur appeared at a time when the city had acquired
enough scale to become a landscape. It could be crossed as if it were a
mountain, with its passes, its reversals of viewpoint, its dangers and
surprises too. It had become a forest, a jungle.
This crowd was hostile, hostile to all its members. Everyone
was in a hurry and everyone else was in their way. The crowd transformed the
other instantly into a competitor.
The stroller does not consume and is not consumed. He
practises urban foraging, or even theft. He does not, in the manner of the
walker of the plains or mountains, receive the landscape as a gift for his
effort. But he captures, snatches in flight implausible encounters, furtive
moments, fleeting coincidences. He doesn’t consume, but nevertheless continues
to capture vignettes, to bring down on himself a drizzle of images stolen in
the improbable instant of the encounter.
In the crowd everyone is pressed, in two ways:
in a hurry, and constantly obstructed. But the stroller doesn’t have to go
anywhere in particular. So he can stop for any incident or display, scrutinize
interesting faces, slow down for intersections.
Walking is an invitation to die standing up.
Just below the useful, there is the necessary.* Whatever is
irreplaceable, indispensable, un-substitutable,
GANDİ
In December 1920, Gandhi predicted Indian independence for
‘next year’, if everyone followed the path he had mapped out for liberation
from British rule: non-cooperation extending gradually into all sectors of activity,
civil disobedience in progressive stages, pursuit of ever-increasing economic autarchy,
and above all a refusal to respond violently to the repressive acts that would
inevitably accompany that seditious campaign. After making this prediction,
Gandhi travelled the length and breadth of India, preached traditional
cotton-weaving methods, and organized bonfires to burn imported fabrics. But
the British stood firm, and the main effect of that incautious announcement
from the Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) was to unleash a huge wave of arrests.
Nevertheless civil disobedience had made a good start, and here and there the
instructions were followed: strike pickets to be placed outside alcohol
outlets, imported textiles to be boycotted, court summonses to be ignored. But
eventually violence broke out and, after a confrontation with the forces of order
causing deaths among the demonstrators, an angry mob set fire to a barracks,
burning some twenty policemen alive. Gandhi reacted as he had to the Amritsar a
halt to the civil disobedience movement and decided on a personal fast – a
gesture he made a number of times in his life – assuming personal
responsibility for the deaths, and exculpating the violent rioters. A decade
later (after a spell in jail, and a resumption of his long peregrinations in
India campaigning against the exclusion of Untouchables, promoting women’s
rights and teaching basic hygiene),
Gandhi in January 1930 again decided to
defy the Empire, and launched a new non-cooperation campaign. But he was less
confident in his approach this time, unsure of how to start, how to give the
most publicity to a calm and massive refusal to obey. He confessed to the great
poet Rabindranath Tagore, who visited him on 18 January: ‘I see no light among
the shadows that surround me.’ What he called his ‘small voice’ soon spoke up,
though, telling him to march to the sea and gather salt. Gandhi had decided on
a new satyagraha:* the march for salt. The strategy was a salt tax, as the
prelude to a more radical dissidence, and to stage the condemnation in the form
of an immense mass march. The British held a monopoly on harvesting salt. No
one was permitted to trade in it or even extract some for personal use. There
was even recourse to destruction of deposits when natural salt was found close
to populations who might take it for their own use. Salt: a free gift from the
sea, a humble but indispensable foodstuff. The injustice of the tax was
immediately obvious to all, and simply stating it was enough to underline its
scandalous unfairness. The second stroke of genius was the organization of a
slow mass march to the coast: a walk from the ashram† at Sabarmati to the Dandi
salt marshes, on the seashore near Jalapur. Gandhi had long valued the
spiritual and political benefits of walking. In London, as a very young man, he
had walked regularly, five to fifteen kilometres most days,
Those walks helped him to live up to the three vows he had
made to his mother when leaving India (no women, no alcohol, no meat), to test
their solidity and measure his own constancy. On 13 October 1913, Gandhi
accordingly took the lead of an immense marching crowd: more than 2,000 strong,
walking barefoot, feeding themselves with a little bread and sugar. The march
lasted a week. Gandhi was soon arrested, and 50,000 Indians immediately came
out on strike. General Smuts was forced to negotiate, and signed with Gandhi a
series of agreements in the interests of Indian communities. In February 1930,
now sixty years old, Gandhi formed the plan for the salt march. It was a
dramatic construction, a collective epic. He assembled around him a nucleus of
reliable militants, satyagrahis he had trained personally, on whose
self-discipline and self-sacrifice he could depend. Seventy-eight militants
were gathered for the expedition, the youngest aged sixteen. On 11 March, after
evening prayer, Gandhi addressed a crowd of thousands requiring all his
followers, in the event that he was arrested himself, to pursue the civil
disobedience movement without him, calmly and peacefully. He set off at half
past six the following morning, his long walking staff (a thick iron-bound
bamboo) in his hand, surrounded by followers dressed like him in hand-woven
cotton cloths, not quite eighty of them. When they reached the sea forty-four
days later, they numbered several thousand. As the days passed a routine became
established: rise at six in the morning for prayers, meditation and chanting.
Then, after ablutions and a meal, the procession would set off. Villages along
the route took on a festive air; the roads were watered and scattered with
leaves and flower
Walking also fitted with the theme of simplification he
pursued all his life, taking the paths of non-possession (aparigraha). All the
way from well turned-out young gent to the ‘half-naked fakir’ mocked by
Churchill, Gandhi pursued his quest for stripping back in every area of life:
clothing, housing, food and transport. From his early days in London wearing a
greatcoat, double-breasted waistcoat and striped trousers, carrying a
silver-knobbed walking stick, he gradually simplified his attire until in his
last years he was dressed only in a loincloth of hand-woven white cotton. In
South Africa, he left his comfortable rooms in Johannesburg to live on
community farms, doing his full share of domestic chores. He made it a point of
honour to travel only in third class, and by the end of his life ate nothing
but fresh fruit and nuts. This simplification of life enabled him to go faster,
straighter, more dependably to the essential.
To live above your needs, Gandhi warned, is to be already
exploiting your neighbour.
Humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions
fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity.
Gandhi at a political meeting in South Africa had invented a
new word to describe his style of action: satyagraha. Satyagraha is the idea of
force and truth rolled into one, the idea that one should be anchored firmly to
truth as to a solid rock. Walking calls for determination, tenacity and willpower.
That perfect self-mastery is the precondition for a perfect
love of all beings and for non-violence: ahimsa. This lies at the heart of the
doctrine. Gandhi’s non-violence wasn’t a passive withdrawal, neutral
resignation or submission. It gathered in a single sheaf, displayed in a single
posture, all the dimensions identified above: dignity, discipline, firmness,
humility, energy. Non-violence wasn’t a simple rejection of force. It was more
a matter of opposing physical force with the force of the soul alone. Gandhi did not stop walking all through his life. He attributed his
excellent health to the habit. He walked to the very end. The final years of
his life saw his dream both fulfilled and destroyed: freedom with
disintegration. When Britain was seriously preparing to abandon its Indian
possessions, in the late 1940s, the rivalries between religious communities, hitherto
exploited by the British to divide and rule, became intensified and soon
exploded in violence, leading to unprecedented massacres between Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs. hitherto exploited by the British to divide and rule, became
intensified and soon exploded in violence, leading to unprecedented massacres
between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
In the winter of 1946 Gandhi took up his pilgrim’s staff
once more, to travel on foot through two regions ravaged by hatred (Bengal and
Bihar), to walk from village to village in the hope that here and there, by
talking to everyone and praying for all, he could revive the principles of love
and fraternal unity. Between 7 November 1946 and 2 March 1947 he passed through
several dozen villages, always on foot. He walked because he wanted to make it
clear that destitution was peaceful. He rose every morning at four to read and
write, spun his daily measure of cotton, led prayers open to all, reciting
Hindu and Muslim texts to show their peaceful convergence, and walked onward.
Gandhi performed ‘the miracle of Calcutta’: his simple
presence, and announcement of a fast, were enough to extinguish the explosion
of hatred that was ravaging the city.
The bored body reclines, gets up restlessly, jerks its arms
about, steps out in one direction, then another, stops suddenly, starts again,
fidgets. It is trying desperately to fill each second. Boredom is an empty
rebellion against immobility
Boredom is dissatisfaction repeated every second, disgust
with beginnings: everything is wearisome from the start, because it’s you who
starts it.
Montaigne talked about his ‘proumenoir’. To stimulate his
thinking, to move reflection forward, to deepen inventiveness, the mind needs
the help of an active body: ‘My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my fancy does
not go so well by itself as when my legs move it.’
WORDSWORTH
Wordsworth is an example. When his sister was asked where
the poet worked, she waved vaguely at the garden and said ‘That’s his office.’
And in fact he did compose his long lyrical poems while walking. He walked up
and down, murmuring, and used rhythmic body movements to help find the right
lines. Wordsworth is an unavoidable personage in any history of walking, many
experts considering him the authentic originator of the long expedition.
The incomprehension and indeed hostility which Wordsworth
encountered at the time underlines the real difference that exists between
serious walking and the afternoon promenade. The promenade, in the big gardens
of country houses, had been constructed as a social distinction.
The promenade was an occasion for deploying the art of
seduction. It was in almost exact counterpoint to the day-labourer’s trudge to
the fields to sell his labour, or the homeless vagabond’s endless quest for
better luck along meandering paths. People didn’t really walk along those
garden paths: they danced.
I am thinking especially here of what Orthodox spirituality
calls in the Philokalia the ‘prayer of the heart’. It consists of the simple
repetition of an absolutely basic prayer, just a few words: ‘Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner.’ Simply repeating this prayer,
counting it out minute by minute and hour by hour, turns each day into a
continuous orison. exercise in repetition is to achieve a state of
concentration Concentration, oneness, clearing out. Just a small phrase to
repeat tirelessly
That same insistence on regular repetition as a key to
walking without fatigue is to be found in Tibetan spirituality, with the almost
magical figure of the lung-gom-pa. Lung-gom consists of breathing and gymnastic
exercises prolonged over several years, resulting in greatly increased agility
and light-footedness. At the same time that he is training himself to control
his breathing perfectly, the monk is learning how to tune the repetition of the
mystical formulae to it with equal precision. Later, he will be able to
harmonize them with the rhythm of his pace. At the end of his initiation, he becomes
a lung-gom-pa. The monk is then capable, under certain circumstances, of
walking very fast over enormous distances without fatigue. recounts that during
one of her long Himalayan walks, as she travelled across an immense isolated
plateau, she saw a black dot in the distance which grew rapidly. She soon made
out that it was a man coming towards her at very high speed. Her travelling
companions told her the man was a lung-gom-pa, and that it was important not to
speak to him or interrupt his progress, becausehe was in a state of ecstasy and
might die if awakened. They watched him pass, his face expressionless, with
open eyes, not running but rising with every step, like a light flimsy fabric
tossed along by the wind.
