Wanderlust, re-visited

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, A History of Walking, (London: Verso 2001)

I first read Wanderlust about a year ago. Solnit's survey of the history of walking is a charming, likable book which roves widely around its subject managing to touch on the significance of Rousseau, early hominid penile display, and the rituals of 'gym'culture in its pursuit of the cultural meaning of walking.
It was clear to me at the time, although the precise shape of my 'creative project' was still fairly sketchy, that the ideas in Wanderlust were surely going to influence it. So, as I read it I marked interesting passages by placing 'post-it' notes at each place, fully intending to return to the book as soon as I began more serious research and annotate them. Of course, when I return to the book, the post-it stickers remained, but the notes were never made. Instead, I have decided simply to record a few of the choice passages for future reference.

Walking into the realm of the symbolic

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of "real toads in imaginary gardens," and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space. [...] In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over, we are really travelling even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in entirely a different register than is thinking about travelling, or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to. For the real in this context is nothing more or less than the body we inhabit. [...] If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's fee is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not. And sometimes the map is the territory.

p. 70

Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is they cannot be perceived as a whole by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does.....
Just as writing allows us to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before [...} Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.

...The songlines of Australia's aboriginal peoples are the most famous examples of conflating landscape and narrative. The songlines are tools of navigation across the deep desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering stories: in other words the story is a map, the landscape a narrative.

So stories are travels, and travels are stories. It is because we imagine life as a journey that these symbolic walks and indeed all walks have such resonance.

p. 72

The Path out of the Garden

The formal, enclosed garden and the castle are corollaries to a dangerous world from which one needs to be protected literally and aesthetically. As the walls came down, the garden proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the 'natural' society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England's privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish. Too, private experience and informal art were blooming elsewhere, notably in the rise of the novel.

p. 91

The Solitary Stroller in the City

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude [...]. In the country one's solitude is geographical - one is altogether outside of society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the non-human. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger, surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is amongst the starkest of luxuries. [...] It is an observers state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are amongst life's most refined pleasures.

Not long ago I heard the singer and poet Patti Smith answer a radio interviewer's question about what she did to prepare to go onstage with, "I would roam the streets for a few hours." With that brief comment she summoned up her own outlaw romanticism and the way such walking might might sharpen the sensibility, wrap one in an isolation out of which might come songs fierce enough, words sharp enough to break that musing silence.

p. 186

Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanised Psyche.

If there was a golden age of walking, it arose from a desire to travel through the open spaces of the world unarmoured by vehicles, unafraid to mingle wither different kinds of people. It emerged at at a time when cities and countryside grew safer and desire to experience the world was high. Suburbia abandoned the space of the city without returning to the country, and in recent years a second wave of that impulse has beefed-up that segregation with neighbourhoods of high-priced bunkers. But even more importantly, the disappearance of pedestrian space has transformed perception of the relationship between bodies and spaces. Something very odd has happened to the very state of embodiment, of being corporeal, in recent decades.

p 256

And finally,,,,

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediate practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of the imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time, the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - of wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetites, true crime titillation's, and celebrity crises. [..]

Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, imagination and the wide open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them - drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes - that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions, the lines drawn between the stars are like paths worn between the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but wither it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are travelled still.

pp. 281 - 291

Rebecca Solnit - inspirational writer, great walker and conservationist of inner and outer spaces.

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