A Philosophy of Walking (20 page)

This crowd wasn't that of the people on the march, the crowd of big demonstrations, of united demands; the epic mob, that formidable mass of collective energy. On the
contrary, everyone in it showed contradictory interests, on the concrete level of their movement from place to place. No one met anyone. Unknown faces, generally forbidding, statistically unlikely to be known. The common experience of preceding centuries had been surprise at the sight of a
stranger
in town, an unknown face. Where's he from, what's he up to? Now, anonymity was the norm. The shock would be to recognize someone. In the crowd, the basic codes of the encounter vanish completely. Out of the question to say ‘Good day', or stop and exchange a word or two on the weather.

Thirdly, capitalism; or more exactly, what Benjamin saw as the reign of merchandise. For him, capitalism designated the moment when the concept of merchandise extended beyond industrial products, to include art works and people. The mercantilization of the world: everything becomes a consumer product, everything is bought and sold, available on the great market of endless demand. The reign of generalized prostitution, of selling, and selling yourself.

The urban stroller is
subversive
. He subverts the crowd, the merchandise and the town, along with their values. The walker of wide-open spaces, the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of a clean break, the cutting edge of a rejection (Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, etc.). The stroller's walking activity is more ambiguous,
his resistance to modernity ambivalent. Subversion is not a matter of opposing but of evading, deflecting, altering with exaggeration, accepting blandly and moving rapidly on. The flâneur subverts solitude, speed, dubious business politics and consumerism.

Solitude first: the isolating effect of crowds has often been described. An unending succession of strangers' faces, a thick blanket of indifference which deepens moral solitude. No one feels he knows anyone else, and the mass presence of this feeling produces a dense hostility, making the individual prey to everyone. The stroller seeks this anonymity because he
hides
in it. He melts into the mechanical mass, but voluntarily, to conceal himself there. After that, anonymity is not a constraint that crushes him, but an opportunity for enjoyment, enabling him to feel more vividly himself from his private internal vantage point. Since he is hiding, he won't experience anonymity as oppression, but as opportunity. Amid the dense, gloomy solitude of the crowd, he carves out that of an observer and poet:
no one can see what he is looking at
! He is like a wrinkle in the crowd. The stroller is
out of synch
, a decisive maladjustment that without excluding or distancing him, abstracts him from the anonymous mass and makes him singular
in himself
.

Next, speed. 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. But resisting the speed of business politics, his slowness becomes the condition for a higher
agility: that of the mind. For he grasps images on the wing. The hastening passer-by combines velocity of the body with degradation of the intellect. He wants only to go fast and his mind is empty, preoccupied with slipping through the interstices. The flâneur's body moves slowly, but his eyes dart about and his mind is gripped by a thousand things at once.

With regard to the convoluted relations between business and politics, government increasingly by and for big capital, Benjamin's stroller was absolutely impervious to the ambient productivism and the utilitarianism behind it. He was himself useless, and his idleness condemned him to marginal status. Nevertheless he never remained wholly passive. He might do nothing, but he followed everything, observing, his mind always alert. And by catching collisions and encounters in flight, he created a flow of poetic images. If the stroller didn't exist, everyone would follow their own course, produce their own series of phenomena, and there would be no one to report what was going on at street corners. The stroller noted sparks, frictions, encounters.

Lastly, consumption, consumerism. The crowd is the experience of a commoditized future in formation. Tossed about and dragged along by it, the individual is reduced to being a mere product offered up to anonymous tides. Offered up, going with the flow. In a crowd, there's always this impression of being effectively consumed: by the movements that constrain the body, the paroxysms that shake it. One is consumed by the streets, the boulevards. The signs and shop windows are only there to boost the circulation
and exchange of goods. 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.

Yet this poetic creativity retains an ambiguous quality: it is, Benjamin said, a ‘fantasmagoria'. It bypasses the awfulness of the city to recapture its passing marvels, it explores the poetry of collisions, but without stopping to denounce the alienation of labour and the masses. The flâneur has better things to do: remythologize the city, invent new divinities, explore the poetic surface of the urban spectacle.

Baudelairean sauntering spawned a number of descendants. There was the surrealist meandering that gave the stroller's art two new dimensions: chance and night (Louis Aragon at the Buttes-Chaumont in
Paris Peasant
, André Breton crazily seeking love in
Nadja
). Then there was the Situationist ‘drift' theorized by Guy Debord: sensitive exploration of differences (being transformed by ambiances). The question that now arises is whether the spread of uniform brands (‘chains' as we call them without irony, identical links, tightening around us) and the aggressive expansion of traffic haven't made urban strolling more difficult, less delightful and surprising. Spaces where strolling is compulsory are being made, but no one has to go there.

The great romantic walker, the eternal wanderer, communed with the Essence. Walking was a ceremony of mystic union, the walker being co-present with the Presence, curled up in the pure bosom of a maternal Nature. In both Rousseau and Wordsworth we find walking celebrated as testimony to presence and mystical fusion. What is retained in Wordsworth's well-turned verse and Rousseau's musical prose is precisely that deep unhurried breathing, that gentleness of rhythm.

The urban stroller doesn't put in an appearance at the fullness of Essence, he just lays himself open to scattered visual impacts. The walker is fulfilled in an abyss of fusion, the stroller in a firework-like explosion of successive flashes.

Gravity
 

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.