I'm curious if you could comment further on this. I'm physically disabled, so statements like these jump out at me. I'm trying to see disability in OOO.
That's a good prompt. Walking meditation annihilates the teleological idea that walking is “for” something such as getting from A to B. It reveals something essential about walking, which is that it's a controlled kind of stumbling. Why? Because an object is always a little bit “in front of” itself.
There is a lot about this in Realist Magic, because theories of motion that regard time and space as atoms (now-points in a row, e.g., or ontically given A separate from ontically given B) are prone to Zeno's paradox takedowns.
However, if you think a thing as displaced from itself, in itself (as I do, and Hegel, and Graham Priest), there is no problem. If A is also not-A, if now is also not-now...
A thing such as a place (A) or a now-point is an appearance of an entity that is withdrawn. What is really the case is that past and future are strangely coinciding, not exactly touching, yet one is bathed in the other. Or they are like two trains moving against one another. So this place, A, contains all kinds of secrets, all kinds of not-A. And this time, now, is really a nowness, a quality that is for-me, or for-this-tree, or this iPhone; this nowness contains hollows of not-now. Walking opens all kinds of futures and traces all kinds of pasts.
There are objects, and space and time flow from them. So to move is not to float through a given time or given space, but rather to translate one's body, the street, the tree, the knee joint. To create new rifts. To paint a new picture on Earth.
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| Richard Long |
There is no such thing as a smooth unified movement “in” time from A to B. What this means is that walking has an intrinsically stumbly quality to it, which Laurie Anderson celebrates in her “Walking and Falling” and David Byrne sings about: “I'm catching up with myself.”
Walking that tries to eliminate this broken, stumbling quality (which I call an essential lameness) turns into marching: rigidity, imposing regularity on something intrinsically inconsistent. To exist at all, an object must “halt” somewhere, be “lame.” I believe ecological awareness forces this lameness on us willy nilly. All entities have a hamartia, a lamness or flaw, that enables them to exist. To exist is to be riven between essence and appearance.
Walking meditation slows down your movement to the point where you see it as falling, constantly giving in to a gigantic object—Earth, and its gravitational field. You let gravity pull your body forwards. The relation of Earth to one's body heightens the gap between what it is and how it appears, making it collapse and fold onto itself. We call this movement.
“Normal” walking is a disabled walking whose vulnerability and inconsistency has been erased and airbrushed.