The walk was structured with the following Forschungsregeln (Research Rules):
1. Talk to every person here. Push past the first uncomfortable silence.
2. Stop to listen. When you want to stop to listen, ask the group to ‘Halt’ ('stop'). We will ‘halten’ 'stop', and listen in ‘Stille’ until you direct us to ‘wiederbeginnen’ 'begin').
3. Look through the telescope*. We will provide you with a fifty –cent piece for your viewing pleasure.
4. Consider yourself a researcher. During the walk, write down four things that you observed about yourself, others, or the places around you. These will remain private and you will take these home with you as a memento.
We delivered the following texts, adapted from the November version of our Hillwalking lecture:
I.
Our way is mapped. But the map is just sheet music. We might learn to decipher and translate the gradients, the inclines and declines that imply a sense of harmony in visual dynamics, and a foreseen past, a foreseen present and a foreseen future. But the eye cannot see precisely how the body will feel in the unforeseeable future, the unforeseeable present and the unforeseeable past.
The mathematician will tell us that there are 1,760 yards to a mile, and that there are 5,280 feet to a mile, but that is incorrect, there are two feet, if I am walking on my own; four if there two of us. The maths is very simple: Multiply the number of feet by the number of beating hearts (this varies for bipeds, quadrupeds, and so on).
There is no such thing as a mile, and there is no such thing as a kilometer. We will not be measuring the walk at all, but if we did, we would measure it in the comfortable distances of our purposeful strides walked into many distances.
We will locate the walk in the space between the heel of one foot and the toe of the other. But this will also prove to be inadequate to an idea – or a love – of walking. The verb ‘to walk’ will, eventually, exercise itself beyond restraint and surpass the nouns and adjectives, which move slowlier and more deliberately.
II.
Acconci: Following Piece –
In 1969, the artist Vito Acconci decided to follow strangers (covertly) around the streets of New York: ‘until he or she disappeared into a private place where Acconci could not enter…following could last a few minutes…or four or five hours’ He did this throughout the month of October. His record from the 14th October’s reads:
5.00PM: 6th Ave & 4th St, SW corner: Man with black attaché case - he walks S on 6th Ave.
5:01PM: He goes down into IND subway station, 6th Ave & 3rd St, and stands on uptown side, upper platform.
5:08PM: He boards F train uptown.
5:50PM: He gets off at 169th St, Jamaica; he stands on line at bus stop, Hillside Ave & Homelawn St.
5:59PM: He boards 17A bus; line is too long and I’m too far behind him – I can’t get on.
Acconci began to consider the act of following as a kind of participation or complicity with others. He said: ‘I made my art by using other people’ / Acconci, who until then had been active as a poet, started as of 1969- to himself perform what he would otherwise have written : He said:
I used to know what my ground was—this piece of paper in front of me. Now I didn’t have that ground anymore; now I was in real space (…) I started by taking a system that already existed in the world and tried to tie myself into it: if there was a person walking on the street, I would follow that person. Decisions of time and space were out of my hands […]
Writers tend to consider Following Piece as a text, but we might prefer to consider it as a structured improvisation, a non-contact improvisation, with element of chance, that allowed Acconci bind his time to their time.
III.
Research:
The writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot offers us a definition of research that includes ‘fascination’, ‘waywardness’, ‘distraction’ - ‘to research’ is to renounce ‘the desire for certainty’ (Peters, 2003, ijea.asu.edu/v4n2), that:
Searching and error would be akin. To err is to turn and return, to give oneself up to the magic of the detour (Blanchot, 1993, p26 and 1982, p238), turning [is] the very movement of research (Blanchot, 1993, p3, 8, 25),
That research reverts or proceeds:
always [to] the point of beginning, at the point where the search must begin again in the face of, and from within, the unknown (Peters, 2003, ijea.asu.edu/v4n2).
IV.
Drifting:
In 2006, researchers Lawrence Bradby and Carl Lavery made a walk through Norwich, later responding to the walk through a series of letters published as Moving through place: itinerant performance and the search for a community of reverie .
In the foreword to the letters, they made a point of calling Norwich ‘a City they both knew well,’ but their letters suggest that our increasing familiarity with place necessarily involves a receptiveness to the strangeness of its changeability, that is, to the lives lived there.
As Lavery suggested: ‘the body is a tool which both registers what is there and rewrites it’ (Lavery, 2007, p45), that is: our transient movements through place provoke an intellectual and physical response, our response leaves its trace (even if it is only the prints left by our footsteps). Bradby and Lavery’s written correspondence affirms walking as a form of attentiveness to an environment.
For Lavery, Walking…‘permits us to experience place as something ephemeral and poetic, that is to say, as something lived’ (Lavery, 2007, p45). He wrote:
When I drift, I’m not interested in gazing at things; I pay attention to noises, to feelings, to smells, to intuitions. I want to pick things up. This sensitivity to atmospherics and materials is what allows the drifter to take the (…) temperature of a given place or site (Lavery, 2007, p45).
Lavery describes our attentiveness to place as something active. He offers an alternative to the distanced spectatorship that is often taken be synonymous with ‘critical engagement’.
What Lavery underscores, is that walking puts us into a direct and often-indeterminate relationship with our surroundings, where each movement we make and its corresponding sensation allows us not only to see, but to smell, touch, taste and hear place. After walking with Bradby, Lavery wrote:
This experiment in itinerant performance is not scientific
Walking is doing, a practice, a performance, a way of witnessing (Lavery, 2007, p46).
Our walk took two hours and was a lot of fun. In the shade from the trees at the foot of the hill we did an exercise that I devised with an old friend, Kate Rowles, in 2004, called 'Look Me in the Eye'. Participants look each other in the eye one-by-one.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote:
I have felt familiar with this text for a long time and always disagreed with Levinas on that issue - that we may turn towards the object as we notice details. The notion of 'face' as 'visage' is discounted by Levinas. In my PhD thesis I attempted to clarify Levinas' position on 'access to the face' by suggesting that the experience of the face of the other person can be twinned with the experience of heaing their voice.
I don’t know if one can speak of a phenomenology of the face, since phenomenology describes what appears. So, too I wonder if one can speak of a look turned toward the face, for the look is knowledge, perception. I think rather that access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn towards the other as an object when you see a nose, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them. The best way of encountering the other is not even to notice the colour of his eyes! When one observes the colour of the eyes one is not in a social relationship with the other. The relation to the face can surely be dominated by [visual / analytic / thematic] perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to that…The face is signification, and signification without context’ (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 1985, p85-6, my emphasis).
I could thematize the responses as smiles, frowns, tear in the corner of someone's eye, quiet laughter, trembling nerves and, very often, a feeling of peace. But many things still escape me, so that they cannot even be thought of as questions.
I hope that the memories that I have of your faces will comfort me as your faces comforted me as I looked and really saw them.
Some moments, then, heartwarming and vital. Today I felt that I have a lot to be thankful for.
Notes:
*There are two coin-operated telescopes at an old artillery battery from World War I.
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