Integration
'Deambulation is the achievement of a state of hypnosis by walking, a disorienting loss of control. It is a medium through which to enter into contact with the unconscious part of the territory.'
-Francesco Careri, Walkscapes 2002
When out there in the landscape, I feel as though walking underlines the connection between the mind and the world we move through. There is the external journey with its changing scenery and, in counterpoint to this, are strands of the ‘internal’ narrative: memories, associations, stories, dreams. Self and world can potentially be sutured together, and indeed for some past and future may be exposed/revealed in the present.
Phenomenology
The gateway for the experiential interchange between mind and world is my sensing body. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty presented the human body and the senses as the conduit between inner and outer worlds; by touching one hand with another, he demonstrated that the body can be simultaneously subject and object. Consequently,for Merleau-Ponty, the Cartesian notion of a discrete mind which is emphatically separated from the landscape from the mind is shown to be false. The membrane between subject and object is punctured by the senses.
'the mental and the material, or the terrains of the imagination and the physical environment, run into one another to the extent of being barely distinguishable. They are like countries whose borders are thrown wide open to two-way traffic which, in passing from one country to the other, one has to cross no ontological barrier.
-Tim Ingold, Reading, Writing Painting,2010
'My body is a thing amongst things, it is caught in the fabric of the world.’
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Landscape by John Wylie 2010
Deep Topography
‘Topography is the study of the land and its details, and I applied the adjective ‘Deep’ to the word in order to describe the magnitude of experience I was having when I went walking…’
-Nick Papdimitriou, in Newsnight 2011
Papadimitriou's intensive study of the region in which he lives is obviously a more extensive investigation than my three month exploration of Dartington; a lifetime's memories are embedded into Papdimitriou's Middlesex. Nevertheless, his process of familiarisation through walking again and again, of peeling back layers of sedimented time and of close scrutiny do align with my own walking process. I also began sensitised walking in places that were familiar to me, but I have subsequently found that they may be applied anywhere, given the time to meander aimlessly and become absorbed.
‘The repeated walking of the same stretch of terrain, observing and re-observing, reading and re-searching, deep in information and feeling, the terrain and the body seeping in to one another, the map into the mind, the mind into the map.’
-Phil Smith, discussing Deep Topography, in On Walking 2014
'the deeper implication is that
the world that confronts us through our immediate surroundings is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways not amenable to instrumental reason or economic reductionism'
-Nick Papadimitriou in the introduction of Scarp, 2012
'the deeper implication is that
the world that confronts us through our immediate surroundings is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways not amenable to instrumental reason or economic reductionism'
-Nick Papadimitriou in the introduction of Scarp, 2012
Synasthesia
When I was tiny, I had colours, images and sensory impressions that went with the days of the week:-
Monday: Black,grey. Tarmac (smell of), ‘men at work sign’ (or man opening umbrella, as I perceived the image, at that time ).
Tuesday: Pale blue. My blue ‘tippy cup’
Wednesday: Purple. Lavender
Thursday: Navy blue.
Friday: Orange. Tinned tomatoes. Wooden ice lolly sticks.
Saturday: Red. Strawberry opal fruits (now starburst). Red. Red letterbox
Sunday- Yellow.
This jumble of sensory impressions I now understand are the signs of synasthesia. I suspect that these associative memories and impressions are from a time when I was learning language; before I learnt the order of things, and before I had the synaesthesia trained out of me. At that time, nouns leaked out of their boundaries and into each other, and the senses were blurred.
Later on, at primary school, I understood the year as a circle, and saw the centuries lined up in individual rows, like soldiers on parade.
Later still, as a teenager I was surprised that other people did not generally ‘see’ the music on their Walkmans if they shut their eyes.
Very recently, I noticed that when I garden with no gloves, I can taste the plants I have been touching. At first I thought I was maybe absent-mindedly putting my fingers in my mouth and the taste was coming form this; so I experimented. I found that if I broke the leaves of the plants when I touched them with my fingertips, within a few minutes I would taste the plant in my mouth. I guess chemicals from my mouth had entered my blood stream, and this was causing the reaction. It made me think about the overlap between me and the plant; was this taste sensation a point of fusion between us? In a reverse process, when I eat chilli I can later feel it, fizzing like pins and needles in my finger tips.
I suspect that the sensitised drifting that I practice is actually a way to help me to revert to this way of perceiving and experiencing the world.
Abject spaces help me to comprehend Tim Ingold’s notion of leaking and developing ‘things’ rather than ‘objects’; because in those spaces we can witness cars turning to rust, and buildings to dust. The symbolic order is broken down. In a similar way, walking aimlessly and purposelessly creates a space and time in which we can slide between the gaps of the separate five senses, and experience a different interpretation of the world. In this zone I can see the shapes and colours of sounds, and taste through touch. Without a destination, free from chores tasks, lists and intentions, the body and mind do not need to filter our sensory experience,and maybe it is this ‘sensory union’ that makes this kind of walking feel so profound.
Drawing, too, maybe used to access these sensory overlaps. Using a blindfold, I can 'see' with my fingers, touching an object with one hand, and drawing with the other. I can draw with two hands to 'see' with my tongue and draw the cavernous space of my mouth. Sometimes, I draw the sounds around me, or the trajectories of falling leaves, and a bird in flight.
Drawing, too, maybe used to access these sensory overlaps. Using a blindfold, I can 'see' with my fingers, touching an object with one hand, and drawing with the other. I can draw with two hands to 'see' with my tongue and draw the cavernous space of my mouth. Sometimes, I draw the sounds around me, or the trajectories of falling leaves, and a bird in flight.
