Wanderlust

From New Zealand S...

The act of walking has a rhythm of its own and creates a 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. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete - for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can... Perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilised in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion. It is the movement as well as the sights 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. Rebecca Solnit. Wanderlust: a history of Walking.

My immanent departure for New Zealand is made even more real by the fact that my replacement at Tech-Dry starts tomorrow, that I have packed up those belongings I wish to retain and discarded those that I wish to offload, and I have begun the process of farewelling many of my friends and family. Suddenly all this planning and dreaming has become something tangible and if I am a little honest, just that little bit overwhelming. Kundera writes about the unbearable lightness of being that people experience as monstrous, though of course he was talking more philosophically about disentangling oneself from having to attach meanings to things in order to weigh us to this world. I haven't quite been that radical but still, in less than a month I shall be itinerant without a house or hearth to call mine and almost nothing to fix me either here or there. It is quite an exhilarating feeling. I have been reading Solnit's Wanderlust, which as been reminding me of the freedom and rhythm of walking and how the very act of walking seems to enable thought in a meandering sense, when the mind has the time and the leisure to stroll through various forests and side paths and when without warning a beautiful scene or revelation becomes visible, as if simply walking around a bend or passing by an obstacle, a feature that has always been there becomes clear and gloriously displayed. I admit that it is primarily for this reason that I have chosen this particular journey, for the pleasure of time: to think, to allow a decision to simply present itself to me. For the past couple of years it has all seemed hopelessly clouded and unpleasant and I hope, I intend, for this journey to be as much an inner journey as an outer one.

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape, the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage - Lucy Lippard, Overlay

From New Zealand S...