Again A Gain

Like playing hangman.

REPETITION. — It is an excellent thing to express a thing consecutively in two ways, and thus provide it with a right and a left foot. Truth can stand indeed on one leg, but with two she will walk and complete her journey.

Nietzsche, Human All Too Human

Came across this via a recommendation by Dr. Herbert Wender to look at "The Wanderer and his Shadow" and was assured that a walk through this text was "virtually a real 'Wanderlust'".

And so for day 2078
21.08.2012

Setting The Pace: Pacing the Set

The opening chapter of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking brings the simple act of walking into the gambit of cogitation.

Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time, the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations. The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.

And as if she were ringing the changes on the notion of inventio — the finding:

A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along as though thinking were travelling rather than making.

If we retrace the paragraph we hear the consonance between "traversing" and "travelling". It is all mapped out and yet open to rediscovery.

And so for day 2077
20.08.2012

Movement versus Motion

Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking

[A] certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.

Parents, especially fathers, who drive their children to sleep might want to take note. A bit of an amble in fresh air might do wanders for sending the child off to dreamland and the human perambulator might derive a bonus pleasure from the footwork.

And so for day 1704
13.08.2011

Walking, Talking, Poking

Tracy K. Smith
Life on Mars

Let your fingers do the walking.

I think of your hands all those years ago
Learning to maneuver a pencil, or struggling
To fasten a coat. […]
At night, of the fingers wrangling something
from your nose, or buried in the cave of your ear.

"Song"

Dog walking.

Give a man a stick, and he'll hurl it at the sun
For his dog to race toward as it falls. He'll relish

"Eggs Norwegian"

Walking on.

Perhaps one day it will be enough to live a few seasons and return to ash.
No children to carry our names. No grief. Life will be a brief, hollow walk.

"The Speed of Belief"

The genius lies not only in the control of the enjambement but also in the gestural carrying on and a sense of a constant contemplation. A walk through the hollow. A short walk.

And so for day 1590
21.04.2011

Visual and Biological

One imagines festivals like Burning Man. One imagines the lost world of labyrinth walking. Tracing a path as a means not to forget.

These thoughts were inspired by Bruce Brown "Memory Maps and the Nazca" in Reframing Consciousness where he revisits the landscape of ancient Peru to draw us into a practice of cultural transmission formidable in its scope ...

The most dramatic example example of this process can be seen in the gigantic drawings made by earlier Nazca cultures on their desert pampas. These enormous images of birds, animals and fish were not intended to be looked at by some other being. They were intended to be transported from desert surface into the memory landscape of each person. A closer look will show that each drawing is made from one continuous line. Each a processional route to be walked, not to be looked at or seen. And the proportions of each line conformed to the digital mnemonic of all other structures in the culture. By walking over the surface of each symbol, the digital information it contained would be transported into the memory of each person with the images finally being held within the landscape of memory.

The explanation of the Nazca lines bolsters the take later in the article on the transition from oral to literate culture in the west (a take that eschews that brand of technodeterminism that one associates with McLuhan).

The invention of the printing press also saw the end of a tradition whereby objects and buildings were seen as texts. For example, it was no longer necessary for the side of a bowl or the wall of a church or cathedral to visualise a story from the Bible when it could be read in book form. So the role of objects and images as carriers of knowledge began to decline. And this gradual loss of our capacity to handle visual language resulted in a progressive erosion of our ability to design and navigate biological memory.

Pattern recognition, implanting information in the pattern, retrieval. What seems to mediate visual language and biological memory is tactile or kinesthetic manipulation. Famous slogan: "Let your fingers do the walking". Automatism. Even stronger associations can be built with tactile and sonic processing of visual material. Mantra. Mandala. Mala. (Keyboard, screen, speakers). A constant sensory translation to register what is not to be forgotten.

And so for day 355
04.12.2007