MR Festival 2008: SLOW WALK by T. Nikki Cesare

by T. Nikki Cesare
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There

4 June 2008

Embarking upon the guided meditation of Wednesday evening’s Slow Walk, I rather expected to adopt the position of a sort of postmodern flâneur. Not quite as detached and cynical as Baudelaire’s, perhaps, but still remaining somewhat distanced in my peregrinations around Judson Memorial Church. However, this hourlong journey—and journey it was, though it only encompassed one city block—became more than a silent wandering around a particular space but a query into how time, both the immediate minutes we barely notice passing and the longer durations by which we measure history, might shift and blur, might even slow down itself when we allow ourselves the privilege of slowing down.

We began, on Washington Square South, with the festival’s cocurator Chris Peck reading a few excerpts from Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Tich Nhat Hanh and composer-performer Pauline Oliveros about meditative walking; the former exploring the possibility of walking for our ancestors and the latter offering a somewhat more practical method—small steps might be better for balance. This was, indeed, still a dance, and, as its participants, we created a choreography as we walked that was hesitant, exploratory, and gentle. Before starting off Chris donned a jaunty stopwatch (strangely incongruous to the more organic philosophy we’d just heard), telling us he would accept responsibility for our pace. At the moment I was a bit perplexed by this, but as the walk progressed I found I was indebted to him for releasing me from measuring my own time.

The light drizzle that began, quite literally, with our first steps emphasized the collective nature of our small group. Sharing but not huddled under umbrellas, we established a hesitant rhythm together. I found myself staring at another walker’s shoes, marking my own time by his; and as my feet found his tempo, I felt an unexpected (if slightly fugitive) intimacy. When he reached out to touch a tree, to release rainwater collected in a plastic bag over a bike seat, I could almost feel the tactility of the objects myself.

Meditation has never been a well-developed skill for me, and knowing I would be writing about the experience later, I have to admit I was thinking more about how to describe what I was doing than exactly what I was doing. I was hyperaware of textualizing my own muscular movement, writing out the process in my head as I tried neither to step too fast nor too slow (funny, I could seem to control the placement of each foot on the sidewalk, but the act of moving one in front of the other was the part I had most trouble slowing), and far less aware of the buildings, traffic, and people—excepting those on the walk—around me. At some point I remember thinking that the idea of “flow,” burdened with one-with-the-earth rhetoric, could be as much about the physical as the meta—that the act of walking, from hips to toes, created a waterlike flow of its own.

We were noticed by passersby, some friendly, some self-conscious, some just a little antagonistic, but that didn’t really alter the accord among us as we walked. Ironically, it wasn’t during the walk that I was self-conscious at all but only now that I am actually writing about it. I’m finding myself measuring each word like a step, slowing down what is generally a faster process to think through each phrase. Stops and stutters, like the way my legs would imperceptibly quiver between steps, confound the flow of descriptive prose… but not necessarily in a bad way. Just a new one.

By the third turn I noticed, from some internal distance, that my perception, both visual and aural, had shifted: Time became an affect. Tiny details like the points on a rod iron gate, the way branches of ivy clung to brick, how the plaque on the small garden outside the NYU Law School (granting the public access between specified hours) was slightly hostile—likewise, the sound of a woman’s heels clicking behind me made me a bit anxious—were brought into a closer and unusual focus.

Chris had asked us to imagine, as Tich Nhat Hanh wrote, walking this for an ancestor. Chris was walking for Louis Horst—the dance critic who in 1957 penned a blank review of Paul Taylor’s Epic. I tried to imagine an ancestor, falling into the more recent branches of this family tree (perhaps my grandfather, confined to a wheelchair the last years of his life?; my ninety-four-year-old grandmother whose fierce steps are becoming compromised as she ages?; my mother, who never takes time for herself?), but that felt strangely self-serving, as did imagining I might be walking for those who can’t take time. And I certainly wasn’t walking for myself, which felt just gratuitous. I revised Chris’s request from who to what: What was I walking for? Just for Time, I think. Time, which incorporates not only the passing of history, particularly the unique history of Judson Church, but also ancestors, gesture, movement; which might be choreographed in this space through the collective but still intensely personal act of walking.

We were the performers and audience to ourselves, even as onlookers became our audience as well; and this was a work that needed multiple participants. The flâneur’s singularity wouldn’t have quite sufficed. Walking away from Judson afterward, at a slightly slower pace than I usually assume in NYC, I realized that Slow Walk was as close as I’ll ever come to experiencing John Cage’s 4’33” for the first time—experiencing it without knowing what to expect.

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