When I am talking about ‘wander’, although I mean to refer to ‘a feeling of drifting’, it is easier to start from physical action. Actually, most writers and philosophers equate wandering with walking. They talk about the teminology of location and mobility, emphasizing the value of really walking into the nature and learning how to deal with you own. Walking might be monotonous, but you always have trees, birds and fresh air as your company.
For me, I consider it is more into culture than nature. Walking into nature alone, creates a circumstance to make you figure out what is the ‘elemental’. ‘The necessary is on a level below the useful… The bottom level is that of the elemental… The elemental… is everything to the man who has nothing.’ (Gros, 2014) Henry David Thoreau almost is mentioned in every book. He is a real practitioner of walking. ‘You need a roof, Thoreau admits, walls, a bed, chairs. But: what roof, what things exactly?’ (Gros, 2014) The intention behind my project, is to create a visual and conceptual perspective to viewer’s eye, provoking a review on our personal needs in depth.
There is another important aspect in this field: flaneur. Comparing to above opinions (nature/rural), it seems more about street/urban. I am trying not to involve too many concepts since my project should be focusing on illustration practice and mental state. However, it is a bit weird to skip this part. In Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s <Les Fleurs du mal>, he wrote extensively about flaneuring through his poetry.
Nomad is also a kind of historical context I can look at. Again, it is about the teminology. How to define this kind of ‘rootlessness’? I feel like it is unfair to just talk from the perspective of who has been educated about the specific values more or less since born. For me, I has been told that I should find a stable job and marry the man with houses and cars the whole life. It seems that my parents, grandparents and other elder relatives already told me the shortcut to happiness, why I keep questioning myself and always choose detour?
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Some notes from books:
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Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. (p4)
Sinclair, I. (1998). Lights out for the Territory. London: Granta Books.
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The flaneur is usually identified as the ‘man of the crowd’ of Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and as one of the heroes of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. (p0)
Tester, K. (1994). The Flaneur. London, New York: Routledge.
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If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. (p77)
Auge, M., Howe, J. (1995). Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London, New York: Verso.
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Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. (p5)
Much of the teminology of location and mobility – words like nomad, decentered, marginalized, deterritorialized, border, migrant, and exile – are not attached to specific places and people; they represent instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seem as much the result of the undergrounded theory as its putative subject (p28)
Wherever you go, there you are. A guide to get lost. (p52)
William Wordsworth:
Should the guide I choose
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way,
(p106)
By the late nineteenth century the word tramp as both noun and verb was popular among the walking writers, as was vagabond and gypsy and, far down the road in a different world, nomad, but to play at tramp or gypsy is one way of demonstrating that you are not really one. (p123)
The first essay specifically on walking is William Hazlitt’s 1821 “On Going a Journey,” and it establishes the parameters for walking “in nature” and for the literature of walking that would follow. “One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself,” it opens. Hazlitt declares that solitude is better on a walk because “you cannot read the book of nature, without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others” and because “I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy.” Much of his essay is about the relationship between walking and thinking. (p119)
The history of both urban and rural walking is a history of freedom and of the definition of pleasure. (p173)
Charles Dickens: “If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should explode and perish.” (p184)
The crowd itself seemed to be something new in human experience – a mass of strangers who would remain strange – and the flaneur represented a new type, one who was, so to speak, at home in this alienation: “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish,” wrote Baudelaire in a famous passage often used to define flaneurs. (p199)
Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust. London: Granta Publications. --------------------------------
That is how the big separation between outside and inside is turned upside down by walking. We shouldn’t say that we cross mountains and plains, and that we stop at lodgings. It is almost the opposite: for several days I live in a landscape, I slowly take possession of it, I make it my site. (p33)
So it’s best to walk alone, except that one is never entirely alone. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.’ To be buried in Nature is perpetually distracting. Everything talks to you, greets you, demands your attention: trees, flowers, the colour of the roads. The sigh of the wind, the buzzing of insects, the babble of streams, the impact of your feet on the ground: a whole rustling murmur that responds to your presence. Rain, too. (p54)
…you are not alone because when you walk you soon become two. Especially after walking for a long time… there is always this dialogue between the body and the soul. (p56)
He (Rousseau) wasn’t walking to find his own identity, or to rediscover a disguised singularity, or to get a rest from shuffling masks; but walking long distances to find in himself the man from another age, the first man. (p73)
The first eternity we encounter is that of rocks, of the swooping contour of the plains, of the skyline: all that is resistant, unchanging… Walking is to experience there quietly and humbly insistent realities – the tree growing between rocks, the watchful bird, the streamlet finding its course – without expecting anything. (p82)
What profit is obtained from a long forest walk? None: nothing saleable is produced, no social service is rendered which needs to be rewarded. In that respect, walking is thoroughly useless and sterile. (p89)
You need a roof, Thoreau admits, walls, a bed, chairs. But: what roof, what things exactly? (p91)
… ‘Gyrovagues’… walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world. (p108)
The road is exhausting and includes all the trials and risks of mountain country: steep paths, vertical cliffs. Little by little you lose your identity and memories along the way, until you are nothing but an endlessly walking body. (p122)
The walker is king, and the earth is his domain. The necessary, once conquered, is never lacking, for it is everywhere and belongs to all, the property of none. (p137)
In walking, you find these moments of pure pleasure, around encounters… a handful of encounters along the way. (p141)
Once outside, the body moves at its own rhythm and the mind feels free, in other words, available. (p164)
The necessary is on a level below the useful… The bottom level is that of the elemental… The elemental… is everything to the man who has nothing. (p191)
Walking is dull, repetitive and monotonous. That is all too true. But for that reason it is never tiresome… distinguish between monotony and boredom. Boredom is an absence of plans, of prospects. (p207)
Gros, F., Howe, J. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. London, New York: Verso.