A Philosophy of Walking (14 page)

There is another pass to be crossed before he reaches the Land of the Gods. Courage is given by the fabulous sight of a white dome coming into view, set like a reclining icy sun, motionless: the summit of Kailash, guiding and summoning the traveller. At last he crosses the Gula
Pass, more than 5,000 metres high, and there the impression is shattering, like a lasting bolt of lightning that works into the soul: sudden, definitive immensity. Below extends a lake, deep blue in colour (Manasarovar). And Mount Kailash is at last fully visible in its enormous, motionless completeness.

The air is so pure and clear that every shape glitters. There lies the sacred mountain, facing the walker: navel of the earth, axis of the universe, absolute centre. And the pilgrim, in the vertigo induced by this vision, is simultaneously victor and vanquished. Every truly magnificent landscape diminishes the person who has conquered it on foot, and at the same time fills him with victorious energy. Two impulses run through him at once: to give a shout of triumph and to collapse in tears. He dominates the mountain with his gaze, but is crushed by the vision at the same time. The incredible vibration that shakes the walker stems from this contradictory double impulse.

But also, for the Kailash pilgrim, the depersonalization pursued for months has given place to a void which is suddenly filled: there it is, right there, just here, in front of him! And the feeling is deepened by the presence of thousands of little cairns (three, four or five stones in a small pyramid) all around him, testimony to the thousands of pilgrims who, like him, have known exhaustion and ecstasy. The effect of presence given off by these innumerable stone offerings, like everlasting flowers on the ground, is enormous: each seems to beckon, producing a sort of shimmer, as if one were surrounded by ghosts.

There still remains the circuit of the sacred mountain, which takes several days: Oriental ritual tends to impose a prayerful circuit on foot of the holy place (circumambulation), and Mount Kailash is like a natural temple, a sacred monument sculpted in ice by the gods. And above all, the ultimate test awaits the pilgrim: the Dolma La Pass, altitude 5,800 metres, before he can descend once more into the valleys. And on reaching those hostile, frozen heights, the pilgrim stops, stretches out on the stones like a dying man, and thinks of all those he has failed to love, praying for them, reconciling himself to his past before leaving it for good. Then he descends to the Lake of Compassion (the emerald-coloured Gauri Kund) to wash away his identity, his history. There the cycle ends. The pilgrim however is reborn not to himself, but to detachment, indifference to physical contingencies, universal benevolence.

Pilgrimage can also carry a utopia of
cosmic
rebirth. A good example is the great peyote walk accomplished annually by the Huichol people of Mexico. This community, which lives in a remote region of the high Sierra Madre, every year (starting in October, after the maize harvest), in small groups, covers more than 400 kilometres of stony tracks and dusty roads to the Potosí desert; there the peyote grows, a small spineless cactus that combines medicinal virtues with hallucinogenic powers. They collect the peyote buttons in big wicker baskets and return home, singing.

The long walk is preceded by elaborate preparations in the home village, sacrifices and rituals including a deer hunt, the animal's blood anointing the offerings for the
great gods who will be encountered on the way. Each participant will bear a ritual name during the journey, will have a strictly determined place in the order of procession, will personify a god or a function, will be compelled to undergo major fasts, drinking only at fixed times, accepting rigid sexual abstinence, and on the fifth day of the journey will submit to a complete public confession. The object of the pilgrimage is to reach Wirikuta, the Land of the Ancestors where the peyote grows.

The stages are always the same, fixed by tradition back in the mists of time. During the journey, the shaman who guides them – he knows all the narratives and all the formulae of protection and salvation – reads the landscape being crossed like the pages of a great book. At a bend in the path, he stops, utters a humble request, then opens the empty space by sweeping it ceremonially with the feathers on his sacred staff: only then can he pass the ‘Door to the Clouds'. Each door gives access to a new sacred space. All along the road, the topography of the surface, the placement of trees, the disposition of rocks, have a history: here the stones scattered on the ground are a sheaf of arrows forgotten by an absent-minded Ancestor; there, a cluster of marshes represents the source of all the world's springs (this muddy pool is none other than a footprint left by a god, from which a spring gushes). The stops are lengthy, with ritual ablutions, placement of offerings, feathered darts planted in the banks. Then the journey resumes, eventually reaching the mountain of the sun, in a totally arid landscape.

Under the mountain lies the Land of the Ancestors. The pilgrims' faces go blank: the place is saturated with myths, with sacred presences. Suddenly the expedition leader says he sees a large stag. The recall is total. They follow the chief. In the place of the apparition, he sends the point of an arrow into the ground: the horns of the invisible stag are brought low; in their place appears a big cactus. In this way the story of the god is retold, for peyote was born when the Sun god launched an arrow of light at the Stag god whose horns, falling to the ground, were transformed into the precious cactus.

Around the peyote plant, with many invocations, a multitude of offerings are made, and it is called upon to give the pilgrims its power and magic. Only then does the shaman uproot the peyote; he gives a piece to each pilgrim who eats it, intoning as he does so: ‘You who have come seeking life: here is life!' The pilgrims will spend three days at Wirikuta, gathering the holy plant, filling their wicker baskets, consuming a little every evening and staying awake late (each man's dreams are carefully analysed and will help determine social life and organization in the coming year). Then they will retrace the 400 kilometres of road to their homes.

The Huichol accomplish this annual journey not only to harvest a cactus that serves the group as a universal remedy, a stimulant, but also to
keep the world going
. Peyote represents the god of Fire who forms, with Maize and the Stag, a sacred trinity. The mythology has it that the first expedition was organized by a primitive god (the one who triumphed over the shades and death) to impose the alternation of dry and
rainy seasons, a balance between the powers of Fire and Water. It is on this division that life depends: maize needs water and sunshine. And repeating that founding expedition is a way to ensure cosmic balance, guarantee the stability of the universe. You have to walk to
keep the world going
. A myth of rebirth, then, both personal and cosmic.

Pilgrimage also gives access to a utopia of presence. We have mentioned the importance of reliquaries as favoured pilgrimage destinations. On entering the sanctuary, the pilgrim is directly
present
: present to the saint's body which is really there, under its cloak of marble, radiating its force so that the stone is charged with it; present on the hill where the Saviour's shadow once fell, and where it persists as an eternal echo. No question of being a symbol, an image or interpretation: it is really
there
. But to get there you must walk: walking in itself, as it takes time, establishes presence. When you reach the foot of a mountain, having approached it from afar, it isn't just the eye that perceives an image: the body, in its muscles and sinews, has been feeding on it at length. The image itself is simply an introduction. If I get out of a car to face a monument, a church or temple, I see them, I scrutinize them, but they are just images. I apprehend them quickly, a specific photograph, the image of an image. Presence is something that takes time: you have to glimpse from a distance, from the last hill of Avallon, the sudden appearance of Vézelay Abbey, and then approach slowly, see how the slowly fading light transforms it, you have to lose sight of it and find it again, guess where it is … But as we walk on we know it hasn't moved, and is drawing
us. When the pilgrim at last sets down his bundle, and can
stop
because he has done it, he's
arrived
, he hardly needs to feast his eyes on the conquered vision: his body is filled with it from head to toe.

Then the entire day is transfigured. To arrive on foot at a place whose name one has dreamed of all day, whose picture has lain for so long in the mind, casts a backward light over the road. And what was accomplished in fatigue, sometimes boredom, in the face of that absolutely solid presence that justifies it all, is transformed into a series of necessary and joyous moments. Walking makes time reversible.

The Cynic's Approach
 

W
as the Greek sage a good walker? Legend would have it so, for he is usually depicted standing, strolling among his disciples, walking up and down a length of colonnade or a grove of trees, pausing from time to time, turning round, moving off in another direction, always followed by jostling pupils. Thus Raphael, in his famous painting
The School of Athens
, drew the prototype of philosophers in Antiquity: upright, the tread firm, the index finger authoritative.

Socrates, as we know, could not keep still. He was always taking a stroll in the agora, especially on market days when it was crowded. And he could be heard from a distance asking endless questions. But it wasn't walking that he
liked, it was finding people to talk to in public squares or outside stadiums. Xenophon in his
Memorabilia
wrote that ‘He was always visible. For in the early morning he used to go on walks and to the gymnasia, and when the agora was full he was visible there, and for the remainder of the day he was always where he might be with the most people' (I, 1, 10). But for all that, Socrates was not a great walker. In Plato's P
haedrus
he is seen as indifferent to walking, resistant to the countryside: Nature had not enough to say to him (230d).

In a somewhat elliptical reference, Diogenes Laertius suggests that Plato could have taught while walking about (III, 27). Aristotle himself probably owed his nickname ‘Walker' (
peripatêtikos
, V, 2) to the same practice. Unless he was so called after the place where he taught: for he established his school (the Lyceum) by taking over a former gymnasium on the banks of the Ilissos, which included a peristyle (
peripatos
)
. Peripatein
is a Greek verb meaning ‘to walk', but it also has the meaning ‘to converse', ‘to engage in dialogue while walking'. Diogenes Laertius says of Aristotle that he had skinny legs, and once he had a good number of disciples he preferred to sit.

The Stoics had already abandoned teaching on the hoof, but – as in the school of Epictetus – the master challenged an audience that should be imagined standing still. As for the Epicureans, who disliked fuss and movement, we should think of them hidden among gardens, conversing calmly in the shade of big trees.

The only Greek sages who were authentic walkers were
the Cynics,
^*
forever on the move, shuffling like vagabonds about the streets. Like dogs. Always rambling from city to city, from public square to public square.

It was from their demeanour and physical appearance that they were recognized. In one hand they carried a stout staff, on their shoulders a piece of thick fabric that served as blanket, overcoat and roof, and at their side a mendicant's bag containing ‘three times nothing'. They had done so much walking that they hardly needed shoes or even sandals, the soles of their feet being much like leather. The mediaeval pilgrim resembled them; even more so the preachers of mendicant orders. They did their walking not so much to teach as to provoke and upset. They practised the art of diatribe rather than of predication. They insulted and shocked people with their verbal attacks.

Apart from their appearance, their language was the thing that identified them. In fact they hardly spoke, but rather
barked
, a raucous, aggressive discourse. When they reached their destination in the public square, after walking for days, people flocked to hear them bawling, haranguing the rapt mass of the crowd, all hugely enjoying the furious rant, but vaguely disturbed by it too. For everyone felt accused and criticized for their habits, conduct and convictions. These sermons were not, however, erudite demonstrations
or moral dissertations. The Cynic barked, in short angry yaps, but insistently. Rather, a series of summonses, quips that cut in all directions, white-hot imprecations that spread like dye.

All the commonplace compromises and conventions were booed, mocked, dragged through the mud: marriage, respect for hierarchies, cupidity, egotism, the quest for recognition, cowardice, vice, rapacity. Nothing was spared, everything was denounced, accused, ridiculed, from the nomad perspective.