(re)thinking walking -- a response

If you don't know the rethinking walking series by bfp and Jess -- a collection of stunning, awesome posts over at bfp's flipflopping joy -- run, don't walk over there to read them -- link to the whole series is here. The posts started as a partial response by bfp to the "way she was 'doing' media," to her deconstruction of white feminist arguments, and to the way she was thinking about "movement making." In their collaboration, bfp and Jess have taken on these and a variety of other critical life-forming questions (women, nature, the outdoors, colonialism, bodies ... to name just a few). The series has grown into a collection of some of the most wide-ranging, interconnected and thought-provoking writings I have read in a while.

So compelling is the collection that others have been inspired to join the conversation by writing on their own blogs. Bfp invites this kind of community participation; I suppose you'd say that this is my contribution.

As I read the walking posts, I am over and over captivated by how frequently and how powerfully the idea of walking (including its cultural functions), the experience of walking, and the body (and, in particular, its failings and pains) are connected. And I'm not just talking about the so-called curative effect of walking/being out in nature in the fresh air, walking 30 minutes a day kind of stuff. I am talking about the actual biomechanics and physical experience of the body.

Bfp remarks on the pain of Sacagawea: "A vast part of Sacagawea’s travels were also made while in severe pain–bad enough pain that Clark notes it often in his journals." Julie notes that her post about pain and her body is influenced by bfp's and Jess's walking series; specifically, she's had trouble walking over the years and her post "crystallize[s]" her thoughts about these experiences. Kai talks about her hip tendon injury, ankle surgery, and her experiences of walking.

My first reaction is to want to understand (yeah, I picked that word deliberately) what is happening beyond the kinesthetic experience of not being able to achieve the biomechanics of walking without pain. What is going on here? What can we glean from these vignettes of difficult walking; what can we learn from pain and disability as elements of a walking story? Because it seems to me that the personal experience of these women walkers might also open a door to a different understanding of walking. So, that's where I am going.

In an earlier post, I wrote about figurative speech, cognition, meditation, sitting, and walking. It was January 2008, my body was changing, and I wanted to put down some ideas about walking and walking language; my post was also a silent goodbye to an old blog that I had taken down a long time ago, but only recently deleted. I was never going to be using walkinggirl.blogspot.com again. My post finally landed on the point that our culture is all about standing and standing movement as precursors to knowing (and as a kind of brightline between bipedal walking and quadripedal). Sitting still was just as important to knowledge, I decided. And, moreover, it was essential to a kind of knowledge that could not be accessed from either standing or standing movement. (Though as Kay reminded me, wheelchair users are in something of a unique position here -- we get to sit-move in ways that no others really can.)

Now, I am curious about the next conceptual push, the next figurative step both with regard to my thinking and, literally, in my reality as I attempt to regain some of my own walking skills. The hip surgery has stabilized my hip nicely, and my lower body (including my legs) is stronger than it has been in forever. I have a rolling walker, and I am learning to use it -- more on the connection between walking and rolling in a sec.

Bfp asks, " When did walking transition from meaning “to roll, toss, journey about” to putting two feet on the ground, lifting one, then lifting another…? Why did it transition in such a way?"

What if that transition never completely happened or at least did not happen the way our culture likes to think it did?

When I walk, I stump and hip hike. I don't really use my lower legs or feet except as poles and plates on which I stand. "You're doing it wrong," the PT explained. "Use the water and remember that you are aiming to roll through your foot." Roll. Roll through the gait cycle. (Longer explanation here). I can't do it. Strike with the heel. yeah, I know. But I STILL can't do it. My biomechanics apart, walking, as a non-disabled body knows it, is a roll.

We can learn a lot from our bodies -- but the rolling effect is also there in the very meaning of the word, too. Rolling, curliness is at the very semantic heart of the letters that we acknowledge as the word "walk." From the OED (subscription only: sigh):

Old English gewealc rolling or tossing (of waves), struggle, contest. Y- prefix + the Germanic base of WALK v.; compare Middle Low German walch fight, Middle High German walc struggle, fight (early modern German walc), Old Icelandic válk tossing (especially of waves), trouble, worry (Icelandic volk tossing (of waves), toil).

With sense 1 compare Middle Dutch walc tangle, knot of hair or wool, German regional (Low German) Walk knot of hair, Old Danish walck small clump, hair-pad (Danish valk plait, curl, hair-pad), Swedish valk hair-pad (16th cent.). With sense 2 compare use of Old English gewealc:

Walking, as we think about it culturally and socially, has been straightened out. It's kinkiness (think hair, not sex) flattened. It's been verticalized -- we don't talk so much about the "cycle," we talk about "steps." All the round, rolling, roiling has been ironed out. It's been systematized, serialized, yes, even logicalized. By way of contrast, I'm struck by the chaos of the early Germanic words. Walking is a passionate, forceful/forcefilled activity. None of this meditative serenity in nature stuff. More OED examples:

Middle Dutch walken (weak verb) to knead, work with the hand, to press together, to full (cloth) (Dutch walken to knead, work with the hand, to full (cloth), (regional, reflexive) to roll), Middle Low German walken to knead, to full (cloth) (German regional (Low German) walken to knead, work with the hand, to full (cloth), to beat, thrash), Old High German walcan (strong verb) to press or mat together, to felt (attested only in past participle giwalcan, and in the prefixed form firwalcan, in the same sense; Middle High German walken (strong verb, later weak) to roll up, (reflexive) to roll, (transitive and intransitive) to move back and forth, to go (rare), to full (cloth), to beat, thrash, to fight, to stamp out, German walken (weak verb) to full (cloth), to beat, thrash, (regional) to move back and forth), Old Icelandic válka (weak verb) to toss about, to toy with, to ponder over, (reflexive) to wallow (Icelandic volka to rumple, mess up), Norwegian valke (weak verb) to full (cloth), Norwegian (Nynorsk) valka (weak verb) to press, squeeze, Old Swedish valka (weak verb) to roll (something) about (Swedish valka to full (cloth)), early modern Danish valcke (weak verb) to knead, work with the hand,...

Ironically, our contemporary flat, physical view of walking constricts our bodies. And this intellectual, rational view of walking means that walking is a site at which disability is easily located. It's not about the body so much as about how we value the achievable movement of a body.You can walk? Not disabled. You can walk 40 feet? OK. No ultralight manual for you. You walk inside only? No powerchair for you -- but perhaps you could qualify for a scooter. And on and on.

With the cultural understanding of walking as this flat thing, it is easy to see how walking becomes attached to stories of body pain. It's not that walking always causes the pain; it is more that the anatomical understanding of walking limits us to one kind of appropriate body motion. As Kai put it, what if, instead of doing walking meditation, we did moving meditation? Her "move" here is to take the emphasis of the anatomical, bipedal thing to a kind of travelling, an impulse to move. Doesn't matter how -- wheels, canes, crutches? -- all good.

Transitioning from walking to moving is an important maneuver for me in a number of ways. Yes, it takes the emphasis off "pure" physiologic walking. And for that I am grateful. I can imagine a world in which I return to gimping happily around the house, but pop into my chair when I leave or when it gets painful. I'd appreciate there being no stigma about the way I move. But equally as important, it opens the door for a different understanding of disability and walking.

As it features in these posts, disability is identified and identifiable in what I have come to call the "boundedness" of the pain and difficulty walking. It is intricately but immovably connected to the experience of difficulty and the "can't" that comes with body fragility. I'd like to make an argument by analogy. If you've followed me thus far in shifting the critical and interpretive weight from bodily walking to a body moving, from foot planting/stumping to rolling as experiences and philosophies of walking, can you follow me also in gathering together the many disability studies/disability rights cultural, social, political and still embodied understandings of disability as being more than the failure of the body? How can we apply these ideas to this act, this walking, that so many of our fellow people and our social and political institutions use as a dividing line between disableds and nons?

When dancers, choreographers, and critics talk among ourselves, we tend to focus on a dancer's body: He's got beautiful feet; her hips can make that line. Some of the immediate consequences of our gossip are a discourse of “can and can't.” There’s also an understanding of good dance as a function of physicality, and an unassailable set of aesthetics which makes no sense for a disabled dancer. I am very skilled, but my hips won't ever make that line; my wheels will never point. Does that devalue my movement?

By definition, movement is not a static thing, but I wonder if we have got hung up on how to move and what movement is? Yes, movement is fundamentally concerned with change, with motion and with dynamic. Movement is the act or process of moving. Movement is a noun. It is what is. I'm concerned with the verb, i.e., with what movement does. Movement has the sense of setting in motion. I don't care how big your movement is or how small, how many people, how controlled, how pointy, rolly, clumpy, stumpy.... I want to know what you are setting in motion.

The rolling motion of walking is its own impetus. That's the whole point. Once the movement has started, it is almost more difficult to stop it than to keep going. Once the rolling gets going, it is infinite. There's no clear beginning nor obvious end; there is only what the act of rolling sets in motion: the movement itself.

Vive la revolution!