A Philosophy of Walking (21 page)

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.

Elemental
 

W
hen setting out to walk for more than a few days, say more than a week, one question keeps arising as you pack your rucksack: is this thing really necessary? A matter of weight, of course. Because while we have been able to list the forms of well-being it brings, walking can be a nightmare if you are overloaded. So the same question, over and over: do I
really
need this? Because you have to reduce as much as possible. Medicines and first aid, toiletries, clothing, food, sleeping equipment, always the same obsession with eliminating the superfluous, throwing out the useless. Just take what you need to walk and stay alive. All you need to walk is protection against cold and hunger. None of
the clobber normally taken to
kill time
while travelling is needed here.

‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,' Thoreau wrote. You don't walk to kill time but to welcome it, to pick off its leaves and petals one by one, second by second. Anything that would help kill time, counteract boredom, divert the body and the mind, is much too heavy. In sorting out what to take and what to leave, no preoccupation with effect, no consideration of appearances, even of comfort or style, no social calculation should play any part. All that counts is a certain strict relation between weight and efficiency. All you need when walking is the necessary. Walking means living a life scoured bare (social varnish burned off), unburdened, divested of social skills, purged of futility and masks.

The necessary is on a level below the useful. The useful is something that intensifies a power to act, augments a production of effects or increases a competence. The useless or superfluous is whatever remains subject to the appreciation of others or to one's own vanity.

Just below the useful, there is the necessary.
^*
Whatever is irreplaceable, indispensable, un-substitutable, anything whose absence will promptly be rewarded with some blockage, an involuntary halt, physical discomfort. Strong
shoes, weatherproof or spare garments, provisions, first aid kit, maps … For the merely useful there are nearly always natural equivalents: branches (for stakes, staffs, walking sticks), grasses (towels, bedding).

The bottom level is that of the elemental. It is almost a reversal. I recall one time in the Cévennes, at the foot of a mountain: still six or seven hours of walking to reach the summit. The weather was fine and settled, and the nights still warm. I made my decision there and then, and stuck my rucksack in the crotch of a tree. Nothing left on my shoulders or in my pockets. Two days like that followed, without anything. The sensation was one of immense lightness, relieved of even the necessary, without the very minimum: nothing. So there would be nothing between me and the sky, me and the ground (cool stream water from cupped hands; wild strawberries and bilberries; the soft ground for a couch).

The elemental is revealed as fullness of presence. And the necessary is distinct from the useful. The elemental no longer opposes: it is everything to the man who has nothing. The elemental is the primary, primitive layer, whose consistency can hardly be felt, for it yields itself in pure form only to one who has, at some time, got rid of the necessary. Walking, sometimes, for moments, lets you feel it. Otherwise, to reach it demands a brutal, dangerous, extreme conversion.

Here we should again draw the distinction between confidence as assurance and confidence as trust. Assurance comes from knowing you've got
the necessary
, the wherewithal
to cope – with bad weather, paths in all directions, absence of water sources, cold nights. You feel you can count on your equipment, your experience, your capacity to anticipate. This the assurance of technologized man, who can master situations. Wily, responsible.

To walk without even the necessary is to
abandon yourself
to the elements. When you do that, nothing counts any more, plans, self-assurance, nothing. Nothing but a full and wholesale trust in the world's generosity. Stones, sky, earth, trees, all become subsidiary to us, a gift, inexhaustibly supportive. By abandoning ourselves to it we gain a previously unknown confidence which satisfies the heart, because it makes us totally dependent on an Other, relieving us even of the duty of self-preservation. The elemental is that to which we entrust ourselves, and which is given to us in its entirety. But to experience its texture we have to take a risk, the risk of going beyond the necessary.

Mystic and Politician – Gandhi
 

I
n 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 massacre in 1919: he called 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 double one: to denounce the 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, attending his law lectures and finding vegetarian restaurants. 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. Gandhi had always set great store by vows made to himself or others, those formal commitments to give up
this or that practice, this or that behaviour. He could only see them as final. And he had always cultivated personal discipline and self-control. Walking facilitates that decided relation with the self which is not of the order of undefined introspection (something better suited to a reclining posture on a sofa), but of meticulous self-examination.

While walking, you hold yourself to account: you correct yourself, challenge yourself, assess yourself. Later, working as a lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi continued to walk, regularly covering the thirty-four kilometres between the Tolstoy farm and Johannesburg. In the struggle he led in Natal, he again tried out a political dimension of walking. While defending the rights of South African Indians subjected to vexatious measures or unjust taxes, in 1913 he organized, instead of simple demonstrations to occupy public space, a number of marches several days long. The idea was to protest without violence, while trying to get arrested. Gandhi decided to organize marches leading from one province to another (Natal to the Transvaal) without obtaining the compulsory travel pass, thus mounting civil disobedience on a massive and visible scale, but collective and peaceful. 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 petals to comfort the walkers' feet. Each time Gandhi would stop, calmly start to speak and urge people to cease all cooperation with the Empire: to boycott imported goods, to resign from any appointment as an official representative of the Empire. Above all, not to respond to provocation: to accept in advance the blows that would rain down, and allow themselves to be arrested without resisting. It was an immense success. Foreign correspondents followed the
march by the day and sent it echoing round the world. The viceroy of India was at a loss for an answer. Gandhi's daily routine was immutable: prayer in the morning, walking through the day, hand-spinning cotton in the evening, writing articles for his journal at night. On 5 April, after walking for more than a month and a half, he came at last to Dandi, on the sea, and spent the night praying with his disciples. In the morning, at half past eight, he walked to the ocean, bathed in it, returned to the beach and performed in front of the assembled thousands the forbidden gesture by stooping and picking up a piece of salt, while the woman poet Sarojini Naidu cried: ‘Hail, Deliverer!'