An art project by Robert Wilson in Norfolk is called “Walking”. It’s about slowing down. Participants walk along a three-mile path on a beach and are asked to take three hours to do so. They pass installations, including a narrow tunnel where recordings of the stridulations of crickets are played. The sound is slowed down by the same ratio as a cricket’s life to a human’s, that’s to say around 21 days to 70 years. UK times journalist Bryan Appleyard, who did the walk with Wilson, says that what emerges is the “sound of angels”, adding, “There is a bass drone combined with soaring waves of superhuman strangeness and purity.” If there is one theme that runs through Wilson’s work, he says, it is to “Slow down, slow everything down, hear the real music.”
Some of the most memorable times are the slow ones. I’ve found that in among the chaos and distraction of being with small children there are also unpredictable slow times, so slow they are almost still. With kids the world inevitably narrows, but also focuses. We’ve spent the last three weeks with Mum and Dad in London. One day, two month-old CMH was lying on his mat in the garden and starting to get restless. Then he saw something in the sky and his gaze relaxed. I looked up and it was a bright, large cloud drifting. I lay down next to him and together we stayed still for a while, watching whispy cloud formations pass over us.
There was also the time at Brixton tube station. C and I had a morning with just CMH – while JNH stayed with his grandmother “gaggie”. We went to Brixton to wander and have lunch. CMH got hungry on the tube soon before we reached the stop, so when we got out we sat on one of the benches on the station platform while I fed him. Four or five trains came and went while we were there – coming from one direction and then going back in the same one, sometimes with a change of drivers, given it was the last stop on the line. We both read our books, savoring the enforced still time. C’s reading My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from Norwegian. And I’m reading Teju Cole’s Open City.
What a discovery. Julius, the Nigerian narrator, goes on walks around New York City which trigger thoughts, recollections and discoveries. From the start, the reader can’t help but care deeply about him. I think that’s because of his direct engagement with his surroundings. There’s a borderless ebb and flow between Julius’ mind and the stimulations of the streets he walks. As Rebecca Solnit said in her book Wanderlust “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.” That is certainly the case here. Julius' walks become a form of liberation.
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