A Philosophy of Walking (23 page)

Walking isn't tiresome in that way. It's simply monotonous. When you walk you are going somewhere, in motion, with a uniform tread. There is far too much regularity and rhythmic movement in walking to cause boredom, which is fed by vacuous agitation (mind rotating aimlessly in a stationary body). That is what led monks to suggest walking as a remedy for
acedia
, that insidious illness that gnaws at the soul. So it is generally right to contrast walking, which presupposes a purpose, with melancholic wandering.

Montaigne talked about his
‘proumenoir'
. To stimulate his thinking, to move reflection forward, to deepen inventiveness, the mind needs the help of an active body: ‘My thoughts sleep if I sit still; my fancy does not go so well by itself as when my legs move it.'

So there's no point in sitting over your desk when reflection is blocked. You need to get up and take a stroll. Walk, to get yourself moving, so that in sympathy with the body's surge the mind too will start moving again.

The mechanism here is one of pure release: walking as activation. Beyond that, through its regularity, walking provides an oscillation which this time can help poetry in verse: you get into the rhythm, establish yourself in the scansion. The English romantic Wordsworth is an example. When his
sister was asked where the poet worked, she waved vaguely at the garden and said ‘That's his office.' And in fact he did compose his long lyrical poems while walking. He walked up and down, murmuring, and used rhythmic body movements to help find the right lines.

Wordsworth is an unavoidable personage in any history of walking, many experts considering him the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape.

Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy'. Accordingly, he discovered France on foot, walked over the Alps and explored the English Lake District, using all his excursions as material for his poems. His immense
Prelude
, a revealing autobiographical poem worked on for most of his life and published after his death, even resembles a superimposition of three walks: from childhood to maturity, along the roads of France and Italy, and lastly that of balanced and sonorous lines:

The incomprehension and indeed hostility which Wordsworth encountered at the time underlines the real difference that exists between serious walking and the afternoon promenade. The promenade, in the big gardens of country houses, had been constructed as a social distinction. In those gardens with their complex walks, collusive shrubberies and providential intersections, people hid from and met one another. Hardly walking at all, really, but intermittent comings and goings, incessant dallying, shot through with witty conversation, flirtation and badinage, whispered confidences. The promenade was an occasion for deploying the art of seduction. It was in almost exact counterpoint to the day-labourer's trudge to the fields to sell his labour, or the homeless vagabond's endless quest for better luck along meandering paths. People didn't really walk along those garden paths: they danced.

But Wordsworth took to the road like a poor man, for pleasure and not through necessity. To general astonishment, he claimed to derive ‘riches' from the experience. Over and above these enormous cultural innovations (the long expedition, the beauty of landscape), his poetry is infused with a walking rhythm, steady, monotonous, unshowy. It soothes without wearying, like the murmur of waves on a beach.

One other poet, also a walker, was able much later to recapture that remarkable monotony. Charles Péguy, most notably in his
Présentation de la Beauce
, made the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Chartres in 1912 to pray for the recovery
from typhoid of his son Pierre, composing interminable verses on the road:

Any very long walk can bring this sort of lyrical, monochord psalmody to the lips. The Psalms themselves are essentially pilgrim and walker chants: they either sing of the sadness of exile, of the eternal stranger (‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem …'), or speak longingly of the Promised Land (‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.').

Psalms do not call for much intellectual effort on the level of meaning or content. They are meant to be uttered, articulated, chanted,
embodied
. They should be actualized in the body, and when chanted by several people, made real in the body of a community. In India, those who go to Pandharpur on foot still sing today the Psalms of Tukaram, the illiterate Maratha small shopkeeper, born in 1698 into the Shudra caste, the lowest one (‘I am of the vile caste called Tuka, I have read no books'), who met his god in the hills and soon began to compose and recite verses, copied for posterity by the literate disciples around him. Ever since, Hindu pilgrims have chanted on the road the psalms of that poet who couldn't read:

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn't break the silence, but structures it and
renders it audible
. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to
make the world's presence palpable and keep time with it
. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders
presence accessible and useful
.

So walking contains this huge power of repetition, repetition of the Same. It gives birth to psalms, which are the scanned realization of faith in the body's movement. That power of repetition can be found elsewhere, in a certain form of prayer. I am thinking especially here of what Orthodox spirituality calls in the
Philokalia
the ‘prayer of the heart'. It consists of the simple repetition of an absolutely basic
prayer, just a few words: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner.' Simply repeating this prayer, counting it out minute by minute and hour by hour, turns each day into a continuous orison. The exercise in repetition may be accentuated by controlled breathing, making the first part of the mentally recited sentence (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God') correspond to the intake of breath, and the second part (‘have mercy on me, a poor sinner') to its exhalation.
^*

The aim of this exercise in repetition is to achieve a state of concentration (by just doing one thing, repeating a single sentence), but not an intellectual concentration. Not a tightening of the mind, but a participation (with the whole body breathing and murmuring, all the senses attuned, all the soul's faculties reflecting the holy content of the prayer) of one's entire being in the recitation of the prayer. It's what the Orthodox Fathers called ‘bringing the mind into the heart'. The great dangers as they saw it were of dispersion, distraction, dissipation, tantamount in their eyes to forgetting God. This neglect could also manifest itself in hard labour, which deadened the body, play, which stimulated the imagination, and meditation, which could become gratuitous speculation. The short, humble prayer from the heart, repetitive, absolutely obsessive, short-circuited all those alienations to lead us back, the Fathers said, to our inner Kingdom. The heart was the point of unification because it was the opening and energy of presence, liable
to deflect the temptations of the flesh as well as the drifts of the mind. Through repetition of this single sentence, which only has one meaning, the soul is entirely cleared of the false riches of thought and is absorbed in mental repetition of a single content.

Concentration, oneness, clearing out. Just a small phrase to repeat tirelessly: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a poor sinner.' After a few minutes, a few hours, it is no longer a praying man but a man become prayer. He has become a continuous invocation of Christ, and little by little the terrible discomfort, the saturation of a mind suffocated by repeating the same thing, the mouth twisted by the mumbling of the lips, are succeeded in an instant, with sacral suddenness, by pure tranquillity (the famous
hêsukhia
, the Greek for ‘peace'). The repetition becomes spontaneous, fluid, effortless, comparable to the heartbeat. And the monk finds total security in an indefinite unending murmur, in the ceaseless breathing of his prayer. Just as when you walk, there comes a moment when, from the monotonous repetition of the tread, there suddenly arises an absolute calm. You are no longer thinking of anything, no care can affect you, nothing exists but the regularity of the movement within you, or rather: the whole of you is the calm repetition of your steps.

Among the Fathers who taught it, that prayer from the heart was widely uttered from a submissive seated posture, chin on chest (an example being the Pseudo-Symeon or St Gregory of Sinai), immersed for long hours in repetition of the same sentence. But it was popularized in the West by
the famous narrative of an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian pilgrim, who practised it while walking. It is the story of a simple soul who wanted fully to obey St Paul's exhortation to ‘pray unceasingly'. A monk helped him to discover the
Philokalia
and the ‘Jesus prayer': the determined fellow shut himself away in a garden for several weeks and repeated the prayer thousands of times, 6,000 a day, then 12,000. After many days of fatigue and effort, lassitude and boredom, the endless invocation of Christ's name came to inhabit his whole being, and became a source of inexhaustible joy and consolation. And when it had become almost as natural to him as breathing, he took to the road and walked tirelessly all day. He walked as he recited his prayer, to his own rhythm, without cease.

That same insistence on regular repetition as a key to walking without fatigue is to be found in Tibetan spirituality, with
the almost magical figure of the
lung-gom-pa. Lung-gom
consists of breathing and gymnastic exercises prolonged over several years, resulting in greatly increased agility and light-footedness. At the same time that he is training himself to control his breathing perfectly, the monk is learning how to tune the repetition of the mystical formulae to it with equal precision. Later, he will be able to harmonize them with the rhythm of his pace. At the end of his initiation, he becomes a
lung-gom-pa
. The monk is then capable, under certain circumstances, of walking very fast over enormous distances without fatigue. No doubt the necessary conditions include flat terrain, a desert landscape, nightfall or a starry night sky. In those ghostly spaces there is nothing to distract attention, concentration is at its maximum. The walker gathers himself, thinks of nothing, looks neither right nor left, focuses on a point ahead of him, starts walking, pronounces his cadenced formulae, and soon enters a hallucinatory trance state produced by the repetition of his tread, of the endlessly reproduced phrases, his steady breathing. And he covers great spans as if bounding over the ground.

Alexandra David-Neel recounts that during one of her long Himalayan walks, as she travelled across an immense isolated plateau, she saw a black dot in the distance which grew rapidly. She soon made out that it was a man coming towards her at very high speed. Her travelling companions told her the man was a
lung-gom-pa
, and that it was important not to speak to him or interrupt his progress, because he was in a state of ecstasy and might die if awakened. They
watched him pass, his face expressionless, with open eyes, not running but rising with every step, like a light flimsy fabric tossed along by the wind.