THE EMPOWERMENT OF IMAGERY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL WALK
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THE EMPOWERMENT OF IMAGERY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL WALK |
EMPOWERED IMAGES
Specific interpretations of the images in each of the three landscapes have been undertaken in Chapters 2–4 in relation to bodily kinaesthetics and sensory dimensions of the landscape. Rather than repeating these observations, the intention of this concluding chapter is to focus on more general interpretive and methodological issues informing the individual discussions, together with some comparative notes.
The very different rock art images in the areas considered in Chapters 2–4 all require different forms of performative bodily posture and movement in order to experience them. The central argument being made here is that the rock art images were not just expressive of cognitive thought but constituted a major element in the formation of those cognitive thoughts—by virtue of their kinaesthetic experience. The imagery provided a specific cultural form through which bodies were manipulated and structured in space-time. From Foucault’s (1977) essential insight that power is directed through the body, we can understand the images as technologies for reproducing power through the kinaesthetics of the body. Power here is meant as both positive empowerment and as a medium through which meanings and knowledge become channelled, directed, and controlled through encounters with the images themselves. Experiencing the images entailed various embodied actions and performative forms of bodily movement. Movement through these landscapes of images simultaneously constituted an orientation to the landscape itself and established different forms of social identification with it. The carvings in each of the different areas made possible certain kinds of bodily performances rather than others and articulated different kinds of corporeal relationships. In other words, the images acted as technologies for the cultural production of bodies moving in relation to them, both providing performative affordances and acting as ‘disciplinary’ arenas, restricting thought and action in the context of their very different landscapes and ‘sensescapes’mediated through the body.
Thus, at Vingen, it has been argued, movement is directed from the west to the east, and then east to west around the fjord. It entails very different kinaesthetic acts at different moments in this sequence: weaving between the decorated rocks on Vingeneset, climbing sheer rock faces at Elva (requiring ropes), then climbing again to reach the flattish pavement with carvings at Nedste Laegda, and then entering into and becoming a participant within the image fields. The experience of the carvings at Urane requires negotiating a way through a huge and hazardous boulder field, moving up and down, around, and through the stones. The carvings at Brattebakken, Hardbakken, and Vehammaren require observers to move from east to west along steeply sloping rock faces, looking up and across at the images. Here bodily movement is highly structured and constrained in character, contrasting with the greater freedom to choose one’s movement implied by the locations of the images on the rocks of Bak Vehammaren. The surfaces across which the body is required to move are fundamentally different in character—from those that are smoothly sloping to broken surfaces with numerous obstacles, chasms, and fissures through which one might fall. In this manner, the kinaesthetics of the body are produced in and through the landscape of rock carvings, and the relationship between person and place has a quality of an embodied and embedded identity, both divisible in terms of different qualities of the rocks and linked together in the sequences in which they are encountered.
The kinaesthetic experience of the imagery in relation to the characteristics of the rocks themselves in the Norrköping area is far less extreme and variable, and the images themselves differ significantly to the north and south of the Motala River. The presence of grooves in the rock and the distribution of the mica-schist outcrops here were critical factors for the presence of the imagery, the manner in which it was structured in relation to the rocks, and even for the size of the images. Overall movement in this landscape may have been from the southwest to the northeast south of the Motala River, and from the northwest to the southeast, following the orientation of the grooves themselves, to the north of the river, with movement culminating in the ceremonial arena of the great rock pavements of Himmelstadlund, on which the most complex and differentiated bodily movements and postures were required as one entered into and became a participant within the great image fields themselves, moving back and forth and across the grooves.
At both Vingen and in the Norrköping area, some of the image fields have to be seen from off the rocks; others require moving along the rocks in a linear fashion, yet others demand more complex sequences of movement in and among the image fields. All the nine relationships listed in Chapter 4 (pp. 246–57 and Table 4.2) between an observer and individual image forms in the Norrköping area also occur in relation to the Vingen rock carvings but differ between individual rocks and carving surfaces. However, at Vingen there are only a few huge deer images, compared with many large boat and sword images in the Norrköping area. The visual complexity of the internal body differentiation found in many of the Vingen deer is only matched by that found in the relatively few net/frame motifs in the Norrköping area and in the internal decorations found on the larger boat images. The animals on the Norrköping rocks are depicted in a much simpler fashion. None have internal body differentiation, and most appear static rather than in vigorous movement. It is the cultural artefacts and symbols here that have primary significance, as opposed to the deer at Vingen. As one might expect, whereas at Vingen it is animal–human relationships that are being stressed in some ‘narrative scenes’ (as on Brattebakken with the deer riders and at Leitet), in the Norrköping area it is relationships between people and boats and weapons that are being emphasized. The carvings at Vingen seem to stress the social and metaphoric interconnections between human and animal domains. In the Norrköping area where hunting and herding scenes do occur, the emphasis seems to be on the separation of animals from people and the exploitation of the former by the latter. At Vingen there is an emphasis on states of bodily transformation from life to death, from skeletal to fully fleshed forms. In the Norrköping area there is little emphasis on the human body itself. Instead, the humans are all depicted doing things: engaging in heroic acts such as boat lifting, taking part in processions and ceremonies, or in boar hunting, wielding huge spears, and so on. If the narrative on the Vingen rocks appears to be primarily about the relationship between people and animals and states of human bodily transformation, in the Norrköping area it has to do with social relationships among people and between people and artefacts. People are never depicted holding the hook and scythe motifs at Vingen precisely because, as argued in Chapter 2, these may not depict tools or ceremonial regalia at all, but instead might be primary landscape signifiers representing scythe- and hook-formed fjords, movement, and journeying.
The Vingen and Norrköping imagery contrasts greatly with the graphic imagery encountered inside and outside the Irish passage graves. Here, because of the virtual absence of iconic designs, the orientation of individual images in relation to an observer is not really an issue: none appear upside down and there is no indication of directionality in relation to the images themselves. They are not obviously moving or going anywhere and appear static. Most are rather small, and only those on some of the kerbstones outside Knowth might be described as visually dominant, contrasting with the huge deer depicted on a few of the rocks at Vingen and many boats and swords found among the Norrköping carvings. In Ireland there is an absence of narrative scenes or stones with clear image transformations. Here complex, intricate images occur on some of the stones, such as the three-spiral motif in the Newgrange chamber, and there is an emphasis on symmetrical relationships and the packing of images on some stones.
The structuring of bodily movement in relation to the images inside and outside the Irish temples is far more predictable and less variable than at either Vingen or in the Norrköping area. It has been argued that the Irish temples required circular movement to the right outside the temples, in accordance with the passage of the sun across the heavens. This contrasts significantly with the constricted and linear movements imposed by moving up and down the narrow passages to the internal chambers, when bodily movement and posture became far more variable and differentiated according to the particular architectural characteristics of these spaces.
At various points in each of the landscapes being considered, experience of the images either had to be individual or permitted collective experience. In an obvious sense, experience of the images in the Irish temple passages had to be individualised. Only one person could physically experience them at any one time, given the physical constrictions of the space; and even in the chambers, collective experience would only have been possible for a few. At Himmelstadlund and Ekenberg in the Norrköping rock carving landscape, the huge rock pavements leant themselves to collective forms of experience taking place on the same rocks. Elsewhere images on the smaller rocks were such that they could only be simultaneously experienced by individuals or a few persons at most. In the Urane boulder field and in many other areas at Vingen, it was only possible for individuals to experience a large number of the images, such was their size and locational context. Thus, in all three landscapes we can refer to different images and different image fields as being related to either individual or collective experience—carving panels that bring people together or serve to separate them. Only the young and physically fit could have ever reached some of the carvings at Elva on Vingen, perched as they are on an almost sheer rock face.
Distance and Intimacy
A very different kind of relationship exists between observers and the images where one must walk over and across the carved rocks and actually enter into the image fields, as in many locales at Vingen and in the Norrköping rock carving area. In these cases, the images are below the body or under the feet. Inside the Irish temples the situation is completely different. One passes through a space in which the images may simultaneously be to the left, right, or above the body. One may reach out to touch such images but may never walk over, in between, or on them. The experience itself occurs in the process of moving through and within a kind of stone body. The images remain, relatively speaking, both intimate and distant, surrounding the body yet still apart. Some high up in the chamber roofs could never even be touched without clambering up to them on some form of scaffolding or support. The imagery of the Irish temples always occurs on a vertical plane in relation to the body, whereas in Norway and Sweden imagery placement is far more varied, occurring on a horizontal plane, a vertical plane, and all gradations in between.
Hiding Images
At Vingen, only a small number of the images, which appear to have been of minor importance, were deliberately hidden under natural rockshelters or under boulders. However, many others were in fugitive locations by virtue of their placement in the vast scree and boulder fields. None of the imagery at Norrköping appears to have been deliberately hidden in either a direct or indirect manner, although much of it in more peripheral areas of the landscape or on the carved panels may effectively have become hidden or lost over time. In Ireland, some of the stones in the kerb at Newgrange, and in the temple interior, are like playing cards, their outward surfaces hiding more than they reveal. At the Irish temples we witness imagery related primarily to a cult of the dead. Much of the imagery inside Newgrange and the other temples discussed in Chapter 3 were probably never intended for general public display and consumption. Much of it at Newgrange and Dowth, even on the external kerbstones, was hidden or not visually striking. The whole point about the architecture of the Irish temples, essentially solid cairns but with tiny internal passages and chamber spaces, seems to be about symbolically containing the spirits of the dead and preventing them from getting out. Sensory experience inside the temples may have been primarily tactile and auditory rather than visual. It simply did not matter whether or not the graphic imagery could be seen, for this imagery belonged primarily to the dead, who could ‘see’ and experience it from inside the temple. Unlike the living, the ancestral dead could still benefit from the experience of that which was hidden away, seeing the unseen, knowing the unknown. The important thing was that their remains be buried in the context of the magical power of decorated stones. Newgrange and other Irish temples may be understood as architectural snares for the spiritual forces associated with the ancestral dead. The emphasis is on containing ancestral forces within the monument and preventing them from escaping outside into the world of the living. By contrast, at Vingen and in the Norrköping landscape, the visual experience of the images was of essential significance, because these images were connected with cults for the living rather than for the ancestral dead. The iconic power of these images, in looking like what they represented, was an essential part of their meaning. Some of the animal and human images at Vingen clearly possess an animated corporeality, as do the bear footprints at Himmelstadlund and the ‘narrative scenes’ in the Norrköping area discussed in Chapter 4. Animals might be controlled through their mimetic imitation. In Sweden the great displays of bronzes north of the Motala River represented prestige for the local group in the absence of actual bronze. If Vingen was a display of images that had significance for insiders (local foraging groups), some of those in the Norrköping area seem to have been specifically created to impress outsiders in the context of a radically different social and economic system in which exchanges of raw materials and alliances were far more important.
Marking the Landscape with Images
The carvings areas themselves in all the three locales considered convey an almost palpable sense of the carver’s presence; and specific motifs, such as the footprints on the Norrköping rocks and the human imagery there and at Vingen, further communicate this presence. The performative act of creating the carvings not only embodied in stone the actions of those who carved the images, but was a symbolic act drawing together localised and more distant landscapes quite literally through the action of stone on stone. The images carved on and in the Irish temples were produced by pecking, with either flint or, more probably, quartz from the Wicklow Mountains to the south (Figure 5.1). Those at Vingen were made using diabase quarried from a striking dyke at Stakaneset running up to the top of a mountain towards the end of a peninsula 50 km to the south (Figure. 5.2). Those in the Norrkoping area may have been produced using flint tools whose closest source was Skåne in southern Sweden or Denmark to the south. Interestingly, in all three cases these were magical stones derived from distant and powerful places to the south.
Figure 5.1. View along a glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains, source of the quartz found at the temples in the bend of the Boyne.
Figure 5.2. The bottom of the Stakaneset diabase dyke running vertically up the mountain from the fjord. Above the modern wall it is entirely quarried away, creating a dramatic fissure through the rocks.
All three rock carving areas considered in Chapters 2–4 might be described as transitional places in the landscape. In every case they occur where freshwater mingles with seawater: along the Boyne and Motala Rivers, and at Vingen where the waterfalls plunge down the mountains into the fjord. The presence of the rapids on the Motala River and the freshwater pond along the Vingen terrace in particular appear to have been especially significant in relation to the meanings of the images. The rock carvings in the Vingen and Norrköping landscapes are like sequins sewn onto a cloth. Together they form a larger network in an embedded matrix consisting of the landscape itself. The contrast with the Irish imagery could not be greater. There the images, rather than being located with reference to preexisting significant places (rocks) in the landscape, are found on stones that were gathered together from local and more distant places to construct the temples and create new places of cultural significance in that landscape, defined by the presence of the temple architecture. In Ireland, stones walked or were made to walk.
At Vingen, the mountains around the fjord frame the carving area in a very obvious way. In Ireland, the bend of the river Boyne frames the locations of the major temples with images there. By contrast, the Norrköping carvings lack any such obvious frame. It is primarily the presence of the grooved mica-schist rocks and their contrast with the surrounding granite rock outcrops that attract and collect the carvings there.
The Pursuit and Husbandry of Images
In all these very different rock carving landscapes, experiencing the images pushed bodies to do unusual things, go to peripheral spaces, place themselves in unusual situations, sometimes exert themselves in exceptional ways, stimulating a concatenation of sensory experiences beyond the normal. These diverse performativities folded these landscapes and the places within them in and through the body, which thus became of the place. They produced different kinds of people and social relations and were at the same time the product of these people and their relationships. Knowing how to go on, how to experience the rock carvings in the Norrköping landscape, would provide no guide with regard to Vingen or Ireland or vice versa. That which is predictable in any one of these landscapes cannot be generalised to another. The sensations of movement registered in the joints, muscles, and tendons, the performative bodily acts, their sequencing and timing, and the character of interactions with others, were completely different. The experience of the images in the Irish temples was of a highly structured character. Intimately associated with the monuments themselves, their locations in the landscape were known and associated with calendrical rites, the agrarian cycle, and husbandry. In Ireland the stones were gathered together and the images experienced at the focal points of the temples, marking, changing, and presenting the surrounding landscape. At Vingen and in the Norrköping area, the stones were not moved to specific places but were encountered by moving through and around the landscape itself. Appropriately, at Vingen, experiencing some of the images required one to actively stalk them, just as the Vingen hunter-fisher-gatherers of necessity stalked their prey. If one was not highly attentive to reading the signs, both the prey and the images would remain forever lost in a landscape that was only seasonally occupied and exploited. In the Norrköping landscape, some image fields were in well-known and significant locations in the landscape, natural monuments, huge stone pavements, closely associated with permanent dwellings and the collective husbandry and appropriation of domesticated resources. Others required a much more active process of stalking and seeking in order to encounter them at all in the context of an economy in which hunting, fishing, and gathering remained of considerable significance. What is being suggested here and in Chapters 2–4 is that the structuring, form, and experience of these images in these three landscapes was, in general terms but not in any deterministic sense, intimately related to the use of their wider landscapes as ‘taskscapes’ (Ingold 1993), to hunting, fishing, and gathering in Norway, to farming in Ireland, and to both in Sweden. This occurs in the manner in which the images are structured in relation to the rocks themselves as well as in their form and content, as discussed above.
Sensory Shifts
Part of the embodied kinaesthetic meanings of these images is conveyed through sensory shifts in their encounter in the landscape, in their changing relationships to water and the land, to rivers and the sea, to sound and silence, darkness and light, sun and shade, the odours of these places, to fire and food, touch and taste. The images in the three case studies differ not only in their form and content, but also in relation to the wider sensory worlds of which they are a part. In relation to the Irish temples, it has been argued that the sensory experiences of touch and sound became intensified within them in a manner that contrasted with their experience from the outside. The rock carvings at Vingen were located in a place that was a huge amplifier of the sound of running water, of wind, and of thunder. The presence of the constant roar of the rapids on the Motala River constituted an important part of the auditory experience of the carving locales in their vicinity. By comparison, other carved rocks were situated in a quiet landscape. It rapidly becomes apparent, however, that every rock in each of the three landscapes has its own particular sensory mix in terms both of its material presence and the sensory skills and values required to create the images and subsequently experience and encounter them. The images are sensed, and the senses are part and parcel of the significance and meaning of the images.
The differing colours of the stones and their other manifold sensory qualities are co-presences in the social construction of the significance of the place. The literal and symbolic weight of these stones in the landscape makes each place heavy with meaning. The stark whiteness of the quartz façade at Newgrange and its distant origin constitute part of the power and force of this monument in this landscape. This captivating power, on the southern side, was directed towards the river and the bend of the Boyne, entirely apt for a water temple. The muticoloured and textured façade of Knowth was altogether different, and here the contrasts between the kerbstones and their images were fundamental. The colour as much as the architecture itself structured place and created its own topographical relationships. The transformation of the exterior of Newgrange from dull to brilliant underlines the power of this temple as a sensory technology of power and containment in relation to ancestral rituals. Similarly in the Norrköping area, the presence of the bronzed areas of the grooved mica-schist was of essential significance in relation to the depictions of bronzes on the rocks themselves, while the orientation of the grooves across the rocks became duplicated in the orientations of the long houses in contemporary settlements.
The images considered in this book make a new kind of landscape come into being, one in which the invisible, the cosmogenic world, instituted in space-time, always itself hidden from perception (one cannot perceive space-time except through its material objectification or mode of being), becomes visible through the mediation of the images. They draw out the hidden powers of the rocks on which they are inscribed and draw attention to them through the body. They create a new tactile domain on the rock surface itself across which the body moves, commingling with the specific auditory and olfactory experiences of being in and of the place.
Temporality
Knowing where the images were to be found and on which kinds of rocks they belonged was no doubt part and parcel of the constitution of both an individual body image and an image of the social body. Different kinds of bodily motion and posture were required on different rocks at different places and at different times and seasons. Thus, the rock art imagery and bodily dispositions were linked to cyclical patterns of seasonal temporality, the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and conceptualisations of the cosmos. These images were obviously not created all at once but were added to over time. The addition of new images altered the experience of those who had visited previously and possibly required different bodily motions to see them. One might have had to walk farther through the landscape, visit different rocks, move in different ways between, over, and on them. Thus, the structuring of the imagery and its bodily effects would be subject to constant change over time. Some images might have been collectively experienced by everyone, in the social context of rituals and ceremonies, others by only a few persons with restrictions related to status, age, and gender. Those images entirely hidden away became part of individual and social memory, their locations and forms known only to a few or a matter of ancestral rather than living memory. The manner in which the images were experienced in the landscape would alter their power and efficacy. Some of their effects on bodily kinaesthetics had intended consequences; others, particularly when new rocks were carved or new images added to existing ones, might have had unintended effects on bodily movements and routines. After many years and seasons, the experience of the images might have been engrained as part of bodily habitus and tradition. A regular or frequent observer would know how to move and encounter various images without consciously seeking them out and would know the right way to move from rock to rock and across the rocks themselves. By contrast, for the novice or stranger (like the anthropologist today), unless being led by someone ‘in the know’, the process would be very different, requiring constant attention, seeking, learning, trying to work out how and why one must walk or move. It is, of course, this very process that I have tried to reconstruct, by attempting to learn something about the traces of the past through embodied experience in the present. This is not a matter of personal empathy, but a process in which the human body itself (that of the researcher, of you or I) becomes a primary methodological tool in the landscape, allowing oneself to be open to its agency and its effects. Of course, this is a contemporary experience—but then so are all experiences of the past. We inhabit the present, of which the past is a part. The individual images discussed in this book are by and large impossible to date with any certainty. We simply do not know which rock or rocks were carved first or which was the first image. What we experience today is the end of a long series of events in which temporal sequences become collapsed into space. The internal temporality of the images related to their patterns of inscription is lost to us, and we see the final result, the end of this process. But in moving through the landscape and engaging with the images, they temporally inscribe themselves in another way, through their sequences and bodily encounter. So the time of these images is no longer a matter of abstract chronological time, a matter of dates, but plays itself out in relation to our bodies and the weather and the seasons. In other words, the time of the images becomes human and humanised time, part of our contemporary experience linking together past, present, and future. Abstract linear and measurable time is the time of modernity, the time of the clock, of capital and wage labour, the time of wealth and poverty, the time-space compression of global flows of money and information, goods and services. Human, cyclical, and seasonal time is the time of the past and the time of embodied experiences, past or present. This is the time of the rock art imagery, and it is the same time in which we encounter these images today through their bodily encounter. So to experience these images phenomenologically is to relinquish the time of the present, forever the same, and reconnect ourselves to a human and humanised time of the past. It is to appreciate that the landscapes of rock art possess their own spaces and times and that these times constitute a fourth dimension of the images, experienced through the sequence of their bodily encounter. The time of the image is the time of the body at rest or in motion in relation to seasonal time. The seasonal time of the rock art imagery encountered in the Norrköping area of eastern Sweden was during the summer and autumn months, after the final April melt of the snow that had filled up and concealed the images during the dark winter period. The growth and regeneration of the land and the crops and the spring births of the animals within it would be linked with the reappearance of the carvings. Vingen is also likely to have been seasonally visited by hunter-fisher-gatherers during the summer, when the carvings would first be illuminated by the sunlight absent for much of the year. It is clear that the significance of the Irish imagery was intimately linked to calendrical rites marked by the cycles of the rising and falling of the sun and the moon in the sky, to the shortest and longest days of the year and the equinoxes. Light was integral to the kind of light, or intellectual illumination of the cosmos, provided by the images themselves. Thus, the changing seasonal colours and illumination of the landscape were intimately linked with the agency of the images.
WALKING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
This book is a study grounded in movement, movement shaped in space-time in relation to landscapes of images. Walking the three landscapes discussed in Chapters 2–4 has been developed as an art of knowing, that is to say, thinking in and through the walk. Walking is an experience of the lived body, and the various studies have attempted to develop a technique of walking in relation to a phenomenology of the lived body. The attempt has been to gain experience of these landscapes of images from the ‘inside’, and theories with regard to the structure and meaning of the images are based upon such a viewpoint. Walking the landscape is an attempt to understand the landscape at a human scale. The limits of this knowledge are thus essentially the limits of the body and the manner in which this body both limits and facilitates perception. The objective is to gain an insider’s knowledge of place and landscape, as opposed to a knowledge acquired by mediated representations which can only provide an outsider’s perspective.
The vast majority of landscape research is thoroughly mediated by various representations and abstracted technologies. By the former I mean the representations provided by texts, photographs, paintings, sketches, maps, or, in other words, the entire discursive panoply by which we normally inform ourselves about places and landscapes. This is, in effect, all about perceiving the landscape through the minds and eyes of other people. Such representations are inevitably selective, framed (often quite literally in the borders of the painting, photograph, or map), and ideological. We encounter the landscape through its always partial representation, and such an encounter encourages us to build new texts and representations on the basis of old ones in an endless series of repetitions of the same. This is never a lived landscape but is forever fixed in the words or the images, something that becomes dead, silent, and inert, devoid of love and life. By abstracted technologies, I refer to statistical analyses of landscape involving measurement and quantification, computer simulations and the creation of virtual landscapes one might walk around in with cursor and computer screen, and the use of various forms of geographical information system technologies for landscape analysis which, like all new technologies, are popular largely for their newness rather than for the kind of information they are actually capable of providing.
The two problems I have with all such mediated approaches to the landscape are that, first, they obviously constrain and limit my possibilities for perception in that I need not leave my desk in order to learn, and, second, textual and visual representations tend to encourage the highly suspect view that landscape and landscape research are just about representation. This view recognizes that landscapes are being represented in a particular manner within a particular cultural or historical context but that these are only representations and so might always be different. Such representations are therefore essentially arbitrary and ideological, and we set about investigating this. Ultimately, in a Foucauldian sense we end up talking about the discursive construction of power, landscapes of power. The landscape itself becomes inert, a blank slate upon which culture is writ large. Such a relativist and ‘postmodern’ view makes perfect sense when we study the landscape through mediated forms in which stone and wood, grass and trees, the sun, the moon, and the stars, the heat of the day, or the coolness of the evening become words and images. The literary turn in anthropology in which ethnographies become just forms of writing has undoubtedly encouraged an involuted style of thinking which, rather than encouraging a meaningful encounter with landscapes, has operated as a means of escape from them. This has frequently been combined with an ocularocentric view of landscape as image.
The approach that I have undertaken demands, by contrast, that I take my own body into the landscape and allow it, rather than texts or images or diagrams, to mediate my encounter so that I can re-present it in a fresh way. When I feel the sun or the rain on my face, landscape becomes anything but representation; it becomes part and parcel of my lived sensual experience, of my carnal being. And it is this experience that this book has attempted to express (although the irony here is that inevitably the text produced cannot itself avoid being a representation). The sensuous character of this human experience is absolutely primary, and the form this takes in the research conducted here is the walk. There are three bases for this: (1) the material character of the walking; (2) walking as an act of gathering; and (3) the temporality of walking. I shall consider each of these in turn.
Walking and Materiality
Walking involves embodied experience, and by this term I also subsume other modes of movement such as crawling, climbing, jumping, stumbling, and so on. The character of the walk is such that it is mediated through the effects of the weather and the qualities of the light on perception. The landscape varies according to the time of the day, the day of the week, or the months and seasons of the year, whether the rain falls, the sun shines, or the wind howls, whether it is misty or clear. All these affect how I sense and relate to the qualities of the landscape. To walk is to adopt different bodily postures, sometimes upright, sometimes bent, sometimes looking up, sometimes looking down. This is, in turn, related to the surfaces on which I walk and their characteristics: hard or soft, dry or slippery, even or stony, flat or rising or falling, firm or boggy. In a stony landscape I must look down most of the time or I will fall over and bump into things; in a bog I must test every step; on a flat pavement I can move less tentatively and look straight ahead. My calf and leg muscles sense and register various degrees of energy and strain. These direct sensory relations engage my body as part of the landscape. I may feel that it has been very easy to reach this place and very difficult to reach that one. This directly affects the manner in which I think about places, landscapes, relationships. Sometimes on the walk I may find myself high up on a hilltop with a panoramic view of the world with a circular horizon. I can see a great deal of the sky. I am exposed to the wind and the elements. At other times I might be in a sheltered valley. My lateral vision is restricted by the valley sides, as is my view of the sky; my senses of sight and sound and smell reach out before and behind me to a farther horizon line. The power of the wind and rain may be broken. I feel that I am in a different world.
Perceptive experience as mediated by the body in this manner is understood as always changing and processual in character. It inevitably has profound effects not only on what I can perceive but on what I am able to think and emotionally feel. My body becomes the measure of all things in relation to me and the possibilities, or affordances, and constraints that the landscape provides. I am a part of that which I seek to describe and understand. I rapidly learn that in order to inhabit a landscape, I need to know how to walk in it, and that certain practices of walking are appropriate in particular places at particular times and seasons. After a while they become routinised and embodied; the landscape becomes part of me in a way that is never possible if I encounter it from a car or a train or an aeroplane, where my experience is more or less limited to the visual appreciation of something shut away and distanced from my physical being.
Walking is always a gathering together of places encountered along the way and the sequences in which they are encountered and the effects these have on my body. A walk is thus a material journey and a temporal narrative. A walk gathers together the landscape in relation to my body. A walk gathers together visionscapes and smell-scapes and touchscapes and soundscapes and tastescapes in relation to my body, always in various degrees of association and intimacy: it has synaesthetic effects.
A walk not only gathers together and mediates places and their material properties, including the weather, along its path but also events, things that take place, social encounters with people and plants and animals. It was Bergson’s fundamental insight, discussed in Chapter 1, that there is no perception that is not replete with memories. Such memories are almost always place-bound; everything is always somewhere, in some place with its thresholds, boundaries, and transitions to other places. The changing human and non-human horizons of the walk continually alter my understanding, so much so that one walk will provide a whole series of expectations about what may be encountered on another. My expectations may be fulfilled or continually dashed or perhaps exceeded. Thus, to walk is to fuse past with present with future. Walking thus gathers known past histories, practices, and traditions; following a path (for the most part), I am walking where others have walked, in the footsteps of previous generations and the ancestors. The paths I take may, in this sense, be weak or strong, well-trodden and known, or new and fragile. Walking a landscape is thus to gather together through my body its weathers, its topographies, its people, histories, traditions, and identities. The walk gathers itself through my own body to create my own identity. In this sense, the sum of my embodied being is the sum of the walks I have taken and what and whom I have encountered along the way.
The Past in the Present
Until very recently in modern industrialised societies, everybody walked and for most of the time. Walking was life. To live was to walk, to be a socialised being was to walk and work, usually involving particular practices of walking, whether hunting or gathering or fishing and farming, in the landscape. Being in that landscape, being part of that landscape, inevitably resulted in the kind of intimate knowledge of it that is largely lost today. Walking the past in the present is an attempt to regain at least some of that intimacy and lost experience. It is simply to walk the landscape as earlier peoples would have done and to familiarise oneself through the process of walking in it. The contemporary skin of the land has itself more often than not been irrevocably altered, but its bones—the hills and the valleys, springs, river courses and coasts, high and low-lying areas, rocky and steep or flat places—are often the same.
The walk unites the walker and the landscape in a lived dialectic of being and becoming, acting and being acted upon. In the process of walking we communicate with the landscape that surrounds us, not with words but through our bodies. To experience the walk is to experience our own carnal bodies. My walk involves embod ied immersion in a landscape. By contrast, I am not embodied in the same sense in any image or artefact I might produce. It is always externalized, out there, apart from my body. I walk my sentient embodied existence in a lived metaphysic. Walking is in and of the body; it cannot take place outside of the body. It is a wholly lived and participatory corporeal practice. The body cannot be reduced to the status of an object because it is always a minded and mindful body, and the relation is internal. The mind is not external to the body controlling it, as it were, from the outside, but part of it. Thus, thought is of, through, and in the body. The body is lived through its actions, and movement is both the medium and outcome of embodied knowledge. Walking the past in the present thus involves a material experience and a mode of gathering together of this experience in a temporal mode of narrative understanding.
A new walk may jog one’s memory of a previous walk, encounter, or understanding. It is a process of linking different kinds of experiences. While the walk is obviously in one sense a personal experience, it is directed to a broader, more generalised understanding in relation to characteristics and qualities of the walk that stand out not only for oneself but for others. Only when approaching a landscape from a certain specific direction, for example, does one see that distant hill for the first time, or notice that the rocks look far more jagged from this vantage point than from that, or hear that this place in the landscape echoes, whereas another does not, and so on. Thus, the art of walking the landscape is one in which experience of the particular leads to considerations of the general and the gradual building up of a holistic interpretive account through comparing and contrasting and reflecting on these experiences.
The Phenomenological Walk
The kind of walk described throughout this book is what I will term the ‘phenomenological walk’. This is the walk of the walk, a walk that may be undertaken either in relation to a study of the present or of the past. It is an attempt to walk from the inside, a participatory understanding produced by taking one’s own body into places and landscapes and an opening up of one’s perceptual sensibilities and experience. Such a walk always needs to start from a bracketing off of mediated representations of landscapes and places. It is an attempt to learn by describing perceptual experiences as precisely as possible as they unfold during the course of the walk. As such, it unfolds in the form of a story or a narrative that needs to be written as one walks. Walking and writing become synonymous acts, as language and knowing are synonymous. This is simply because the act of writing slows experience down and focuses attention. To write is always to write about something. To be able to write, one must look, listen, smell, and feel that which is in reach. Filming the walk while walking it (except afterwards on another walk) as an alternative, or equivalent, is entirely problematic because one cannot film before one knows how to look and how to hear, and it can only frame and encase visual and auditory perception. So one walks in order to be able to write; one writes in order to be able to walk. Different landscapes provide affordances and constraints for different forms of motion and perception. Walking the landscape allows that landscape to exert its own agency in relation to my body. There are the shifting and changing horizons beyond which I cannot see, the hills and valleys that come into sight and disappear, the specific places where monuments and settlements were built, places for the living and places of burial and death, the streams and rivers I must cross or navigate. My perception and understanding are intimately related to these material presences and absences and gradually develop as a structure of feeling and an awareness of the material character of place and landscape. Walking the landscape takes time, and in principle, the more time and care one takes in this art of walking, the more that is likely to be understood. As I walk the landscape, this very landscape becomes embodied in my being, unfolds itself, and I can begin to build up a comparative understanding of places in that landscape and their relationships: similarities and differences. How similar is that river valley to this? How does the location of the imagery on this rock or temple compare with that one? What influence might that hill or that river have on places deemed suitable for inscribing images in the landscape?
It is only after walking in a landscape that I can learn how to see, and more broadly, sense that landscape through my body, for the act of walking is sensing that landscape at a human pace. The encounter is radically different from those kinds of speeded-up and essentially visual experiences available from a vehicle. I can stop, turn, pause, change direction. I do not need to keep to the road. The process of walking is one in which the landscape teaches me, and it opens up my experience to this landscape. I am always surprised at first and cannot predict what I will find. After I have walked the landscape, places and their relationships become much more predictable. I know how to find my way, the kinds of relationships to expect, and those that will not occur.
The phenomenological walk involves a gathering together of synaesthetic and material and social sensory experiences as they unfold in the sequence and duration of the walk. It shows what is there from the perspective of the flesh, from embodied experiences. Such a walk is utterly different from a real walk in space-time, since it involves temporal expansion. Attempting to write such a walk involves pause, looking around, sensing place from different perspectives along the route, going back as well as moving forward. There is always sensory overload, and decisions have to be made with regard to what appears to be significant. Such a walk takes time and is far from spontaneous. It is an analytical walk that selects from experiences often gathered at different times to create the narrative. The process of walking is one in which one perceives in order to be able to know. To know is to know how to perceive, and bodily perception is a form of cultural knowledge. As well as describing some perceptual experiences, it must inevitably filter out or ignore others. The words never capture experience. They can only evoke, and in the final result, the phenomenological text is inevitably another mediated representation, for all representations are, of course, mediated.
The present is where we meet the past in and through the medium of our carnal bodies. We meet then, here, in a place and in a landscape, in stasis and in move ment, through the medium of the walk. The phenomenological walk is a performative kinaesthetic walk connecting past to present, here to then and now. It involves a distillation of perceptive experience, of embodied memories that sit in the body rather than in the mind. Through movement in it, the landscape effectively writes itself in me by virtue of my participatory experience in it. The images discussed here have been described in terms of the perception of the landscape as experienced through the body, but the account is not personal in intent. The writing is propelled by a generalising imperative to try to describe what is fundamental to the imagery, being considered from a bodily point of view. This involves not only an attempt to describe what is there, but also conceptual reflection in relation to that experience. The descriptions undertaken are inevitably based upon personal experience, but the experiences being described are those that can be held in common with others—in other words, shared and generalised beyond the autobiographical self, in the form of what I have termed the phenomenological walk.
Landscape is a set of placial relationships in which the experience of one place, landmark, carved rock, or monument depends on its relationship with another and its mode or directionality of encounter. The phenomenological walk attempts to annotate and record these experiences such as the main direction taken, intermediate directions, going up or going down, moving to the left or right, the manner in which horizon lines increase or recede with reference to other places in the landscape, the different forms of bodily motion required, the sounds and smells and tactile experiences encountered along the way. For such a walk to be successful, the landscape needs to be as familiar as it would be to a hunter. Just as hunters need an intimate knowledge of their game and their movements, a phenomenologist needs to hunt out the forms and characteristics of the landscape and the places and paths within it that constitute it. This is a move from naïve to informed experience. One ideally tries to understand a place from the point of view of moving towards it or away from it, from another place at different times, days, seasons, directions, orientations, sensory points of view. Such a practice of walking encourages an account stressing a progressional or syntagmatic ordering of reality in which sequence and succession become primary in the account rather than an abstracted categorical ordering of landscape in terms of geology, topographic features, settlement patterns, and the like.
Walking is thus fundamentally linked with orientation. Having a sense of orientation, knowing where to go, is dependent on familiar and place-bound memories. To be orientated in a landscape is to know it through these embodied experiences. Being a walk of the walk, a walk informed by previous walks, the phenomenological walk is always a composite walk, a synthesis of temporarily sequenced perceptions that must be imaginatively understood. Thus, it has an inherently ambiguous character in relation to a single real walk, insofar as it records much more than could ever be perceived or remembered and far less as regards various embodied sensory experiences. It thus has a simultaneous character of excess and indeterminance. It attempts to embrace an aura of the real by being surreal, through writing the kinaesthetic experiences of the body in motion, in being, and becoming.
