In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
/ But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
—Wallace Stevens, “Of the Surface of Things”
Historically, philosophers
have been skeptical, even suspicious, of the surface, a plane of the visible
and the apparent that suggests shallowness, superficiality, illusion, and a
lack of gravitas. In German, for
example, the realm of aesthetics typically belongs to the arena of “Schein”
(appearance) as opposed to that of “Sein” (Being). And yet, beauty—and with it
aesthetic enjoyment—is entangled intimately with this sphere of the epidermal.
From the roiling white caps of ocean waves to the flickering sheen of silver
coins loitering in the bottom of a fountain, we are drawn deeply to and through
the patina and palpation of the
shimmering “skin” of things.
It is valuable to reflect upon our encounters with
the sensuous surface of the earth in the everyday enterprise of human
motility and ambulation—that is, walking. How and why are we drawn along on
foot and seduced by the charms of the tellurian domain? Are there sensuous
imperatives that hold, command, or channel our unfolding actions and
attractions as we walk? Might a sense of style or even an aesthetic sensibility
emerge through regular and reflective walking practices that could inform
practical work in urban design, ecological theory, or the politics of the
pedestrian world? Through the medium of our
bodily senses and a vocabulary cobbled together from experiences of physical
texture and tactility, furtive glancing and more protracted beholding, temporal
rhythms and emergent patterns of repetition, or simply attention to the earth’s
lines, colors, fissures, shapes, and curves, we might learn a great deal about
our surroundings.
Walking, in short,
encourages a fundamental, if overlooked, form of sensuous engagement with the
biological and built worlds in ways that other forms of bodily posture and
comportment do not. In relying largely on horizontal movement across surfaces,
it stimulates the corporeal senses—via a kind of actual and imaginative
“friction”—and offers, in turn, a needed counterpoise to both the physical
tendency to “look down” upon the subtending earth and the metaphysical penchant
to “fall up” towards the universal, the transcendental, and disembodied
abstractions. In so doing, it can help to provide a viable everyday
environmental aesthetic—one whereby we literally and figuratively move from
sensation (sense perception) to the sensuous and eventually to a more robust
ecological or communitarian sensibility. In addition to wilderness walkers, the
urban “stalker,” flaneur, and
aesthete might develop and, in turn, come to rely upon such a “sensibility”
(understood as a flexible aesthetic temperament or disposition rather than a ideologically rigid position) as he or she becomes a cultivated appreciator, artist or
“voluptuary” of beautiful and sensuous surfaces.
How might we come to understand
sensuous surfaces? Very briefly, the sensuous involves engagement with,
arousal of, or gratification in one or more of the human senses. It frequently
carries further into the anticipation or experience of physical pleasure itself
and even carnal arousal or erotic expression. Mikel Dufrenne draws a helpful distinction between the “brute sensuous” and the “aesthetic sensuous,” where the former is encountered in ordinary perception and the latter resides solely in aesthetic objects. And Alphonso Lingis rightly locates a further link between the sphere of the sensual and the realm of the elemental, observing: “Sensuality is a movement of involution in a medium. One finds the light by immersion, one is in atmosphere, in sonority, in redolence or in stench, in warmth or in cold. One feels the supporting element of the ground rising up within one’s posture.”
In the simplest sense, a surface is the outermost boundary of an
object. “Sur” means ‘above’ or ‘over’ while “face,” suggests the ‘look’,
‘appearance’ or ‘countenance’ of entity. When surfaces are sensuous, they attract or
delight us at a peculiarly visceral and imaginative level. A sensuous surface also suggests more than what initially meets
the sensing ear, hands, feet or eyes since it can withhold from fully exposing
or expressing itself. On first blush, we
are not necessarily privy in a conscious way to the unseen insides, the unfelt undersides,
or the undetected infrastructure that gives a surface its aesthetic qualities
or properties such as shape, illumination, slope, color or texture. There is
routinely, however, a glint, trace or residue of greater dimensionality, of
something more to come or be brought forth. In other words, surfaces do
not preclude the intimation of intensity or the possibility of profundity, a
point Wittgenstein gestures toward in his remark, “the depths are on the
surface.”
We might reasonably
consider sumptuous walking surfaces as being like layered fabrics or lush woven
carpets. There exists granularity and
volume to them. We sense slight thermal changes, pressure differences, and
vibrations and adjust our actions or reactions accordingly in response. Just as clothing becomes a kind of “second
skin,” a sensual extension of the body, worldly surfaces might be understood as
akin to an encapsulating “third skin,” outer membrane or tenuous shell of a
sort. Indeed, walking surfaces can
become beautiful or intriguing when they are adorned or illuminated with artful
graffiti, chalk drawings, colorful lights, and poetic words. Or
they can become annoying, harrowing or even dangerous when they are populated
with advertisements, holes or pollutants that undermine either their
functionality or charm.
Walking
possesses the ability to animate our senses in ways in which sitting, standing,
and lying—the three other major bodily postures and physical modes of being in
the world—do not. More specifically, mindful walking triggers both our “distal”
senses (sight and hearing)—which pick up information at a distance—and our
“proximate” senses (smell, touch and taste)—which are tethered more closely to
the visceral body—as well as our “auto-centric” faculties (self-centered and
subjective) and “allocentric” (other-centered and more objective)
capacities. By attending actively to the
full human sensorium when we perambulate, we might thereby nurture a form of
“peripheral vision” (hearing, touching, feeling)—a sensual awareness of what
lies near or lingers upon the edges, limits, perimeters, and margins of our
perceptual fields.
As
we journey through the world on foot, we are moved not only by cognitive
intentions and conscious interior directives, drives, or choices through we
which exercise an actual or imagined control, but we are lured along externally
by sensuous phenomena and affects that emerge independently and unexpectedly:
unusual textures, interesting patterns, erotic shapes, atmospheric moods of the
weather, color tones, distinct smells, shape-shifting shadows, and the
like. We are also both led and limited
by physical affordances: possibilities for action in an environment that
presented by objects. These range from
thresholds and steps to rocks and posts that are supported by, co-extensive
with, or expressive of the underlying earth.
More specifically, the materiality and horizontality
of the ground—the substrate of brick, sand, stone, soil or concrete beneath and
before us—serves to guide and govern our habitual but often unconscious
corporeal movements and to orient our upright and vertical bodies. As we
traverse the ever-changing and undulating ground in front of us, walking stimulates our multiple senses through a form of productive “friction” with generative and affective
feedback loops to the other parts of our body.
We find ourselves enticed by the membrane or seemingly palpitating
“skin” of the earth. We are distracted or seduced by the charms and challenges
of surfaces—layers of wet leaves, fresh tracks in the snow, or chalk marks left
for a child’s game of hopscotch—which can offer sensuous imperatives that lure,
channel, and even command our evolving interests and actions. From such
encounters, a somatic style or an aesthetic and ecological sensibility can, in fact, potentially arise with
practical implications for work
related to environmental planning and ecological design.
Sense-centered and hence
sensuously aware walking involves an attention to the nuance of color, shape,
curves, lines, patterns, and other forms of repetition. Sidewalk cracks, for
example, reveal character in a place and serve as registers of time in a
surface, just as wrinkles or scars do in an aging human face. Lines offer us
grooves to visually anchor motion, provide channels for forward flight, or
outline avenues of escape. Curves are alluring and enticing; they suggest the
unknown or hint at concealed realms, counteracting the rule of straight lines,
grids, and utilitarian structures. Sidewalks that are sensually engaging—that
visually weave and wend, or offer attractive and varied textures that call
forth touch, or provide pleasing rhythms and acoustics—embody and bequeath us a
kind of “beautility,” (being at once both beautiful and useful) to the urban
floor and pedestrian experience.
Sight. Given its ties to peripheral spaces and
places, walking might help to facilitate and legitimate a model of sensual
perception that represents an alternative to the relative hegemony of the
visual gaze, which is a more
objectifying and invasive form of looking. Walking is especially suited to the shorter
span of the glance. The glance
alights on surfaces; it careens and reverberates them. Unlike its counterpart,
it is nimble, pointillistic, and given or geared to particularity. Whereas the
gaze tends to be sober and serious, the glance is potentially playful,
irreverent or subversive. It is tuned for surprise, delight, and even
enchantment because the snares for our visual attention are constantly changing
in a walk.
Below is a very
rough contrast of some of the hallmark features that characterize these two
different ocular frameworks, distinctions that summarize briefly and build upon points
made in a more fully developed form by the philosopher, Edward Casey. By comparing the columns, we can see
important dissimilarities in terms of the passage of time, the degree of focus,
the kind of attention, and the quality of appreciation offered respectively by
visual gazing and glancing.
The Gaze The Glance
Glares Glimpses
Sober,
serious Subversive,
irreverent
Depth Surfaces
Lingers,
loiters Alights,
insouciant
Scrutiny
Celerity
Internalizes Enjoys
Contemplates
Captivates
Studies Surprises
Stares Seduces
Duration Instant
Permanence Fleeting
Intelligible Sensuous
Centers Peripheries
Sitting
or standing Walking
While ambling
along a sidewalk, we can glance quickly or furtively into or across the street
or through a store window. We can be temporarily intrigued, astonished, or
captivated. We might momentarily enjoy curious sights or erotic encounters
without scrutinizing them closely in a threatening manner. Peripheral
vision—glimpsing or glancing off to the side—encourages bivalent exchanges and
eccentric (off center) interests rather than more one-sided or (self)-centered
frontal assaults on our surroundings.
Touch. By its very
nature, walking invites and involves elemental surface contact. It initiates
conversation between the feet and the ground; it introduces our bodies to and
into the world, the environing elemental medium. Ideas and images begin to form and flow; they
produce their own “kinesthesias” of a certain kind. The eyes and ears even seem to reach toward
outlets and objects as well with a sense of form of projected
intentionality. As the poet Rilke puts it
in “Spaziergang” (A Walk), “My eyes already touch the sunny hill,/going far
ahead of the road I have begun./So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
The Greek word haptein
means more than simply to grasp or clutch with the hands in that it encompasses the broader
touching of an entire human body. Our
sense of touch is the manner in which we sensuously com-prehend—literally hold together in a joint way—the surrounding
world. We be-hold place and grow to inhabit it. When we walk within a
particular place, we become an ambling extension of it. We belong to it
bodily.
Even
with shoes on, we can differentiate, first, the qualities of rough and smooth,
soft and hard, and wet and dry along with, secondly, multiple kinds of surfaces
and substrates, whether they be wood, concrete, grass or brick in built
environments or mud, sand, gravel, stone, silt or dirt in more natural areas.
With the growing use of materials such as asphalt and concrete for walking and
driving surfaces, however, our tactile stimulation is increasingly simplified
and our senses are disengaged further from our surroundings. There is, in other
words, a concern with quite literally “losing touch” with the immediate
environment when our haptic senses are neglected. This development suggests the need for more varied, less uniform
walkways constructed of cobblestone, mosaic tiles, brick, wood, metal and other
physically and sensually-engaging surfaces which keep us more intimately
attuned with our own bodies, neighborhoods, and biotic communities.
When walking, we need
attend to the tradeoffs between, on the one hand, being protected by garments, hats, gloves, shoes, sunglasses or bug spray
which can occlude our senses or insulate our bodies) and, on the other hand,
being receptive (open, responsive,
and inviting). We should be aware as well about the subtle tension and interplay
between comfortability and vulnerability—being too exposed to the elements or
another’s gaze but being aware of glancing communication that is generated
through our gestures and the corporeal semaphores we are forever sending. We might want the rain on our face at times
but not the direct sunlight in our eyes. Our nerve endings are capable of
distinguishing temperature changes to a tenth of a degree and even while wearing
clothing we should still be able to distinguish up to a dozen different
airspeeds. It is helpful in this regard to remember that the body is not simply
a closed container but a porous meeting point of our flesh and organs with the
ambient environment.
Sound. As with sight
and physical contact, there is a complex and changing acoustic world to be
appreciated when we are on foot. As we walk, we play the place, in effect.
We attune and entrain ourselves bodily to the beats and “music” in the
margins and become part of a reverberating and sonorous “echo-system” that is
mixed and remixed constantly. Walking thus possesses a deeply musical aspect to
its motions, a dimension that is both temporal and spatial. As we walk, we are
often drawn along, as in a song, by the figures and surface elements in a
landscape. Like sheet music, there are
visual “notes” and “scores” to be sensuously encountered and creatively
“played” by the moving body. Fence
patterns, telephone posts, doors, hedges, flower boxes, trees, and many
architectural features provide opportunities for attuning oneself to a
neighborhood. The surface of the city
sidewalk or wilderness trail is rife, too, for possibilities of finding
syncopation, repetition, and rhythm. No wonder, then, that many walkers hum,
sing, or listen to music as they walk.
When
thoughtfully planned, sidewalks possess a rhythm that enhances, facilitates and
encourages energetic and engaged movement that is related aesthetically to the
landscape and surrounding objects and buildings. There are, then, multiple
possible responses to the challenges of “environmental boredom” and the
emergence of “blandscapes” (bland landscapes)—that is, when walkways, paths and
streets are overly uniform, uninteresting to our senses, or monotonous in
appearance. Such phenomena point to the need for changes of level and height,
the significance of altering surface qualities, the importance of providing
alternatives to the classical, if efficient, grid patterns, and the value of
placing curves in the “walkscape” in order to supplement open vistas and views,
a subject to which we now turn.
