Posts tagged writing and walking

Crossing the Alps

We’ve been “making stuff” in the Creativity Catalyst all this week, which has inspired me to lean with extra energy and attention into making the paper collage that heads up today’s newsletter.

I approach the process differently every week. Sometimes I already have a topic in mind, so I let the title or theme dictate the design. Right now, for example, I’m mulling over the collage options for my upcoming WriteSPACE Special Event on Writing and Risktaking with criminologist David R. Goyes. Should I create a recognizable scene — a mountain climber scaling a cliff, for example, or a ringmaster placing their head in a lion’s mouth — or use abstract images to invoke an emotional response? Will I incorporate words amongst the images? What does risky writing look like, anyway?

More rarely, I start with the collage and let the writing follow. Perhaps I’ll begin with a word or image and build the collage from there. Or maybe I’ll pull out paper and scissors and glue and just start playing around: cutting pictures from magazines and books, juxtaposing colors and textures, waiting for the moment when the collage show me where it’s taking me. I love this part of the process, which never fails me. Bit by bit, under my moving hands, a colorful conglomeration of images takes shape — and as it does, I’m thinking about how and what I’ll write to go with my new collage.

Below you’ll find my visual-verbal narration of how this week’s image came into being. I’ll end with a few writing/collage prompts that you can try for yourself.

Enjoy!

The Simplon Pass

Many years ago, when I was a PhD student in comparative literature, I read Wordsworth’s masterpiece The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind in a graduate seminar on Romantic poetry. Our professor pointed out the famous scene — sometimes published as a free-standing poem called “The Simplon Pass” — in which the young poet experiences a kind of sublime epiphany, a perception of divine Eternity in the ever-changing features of nature:

The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

But shortly before this revelation, Wordsworth narrates a scene of bitter disappointment, almost as though the former required the latter for its release. Having become separated from the rest of their group while crossing the Alps between Switzerland and Italy, the poet and his companion attempt to scale a lofty mountain, get hopelessly lost, and have to backtrack. Eventually they meet a local peasant who points out the route to their destination, which leads inexorably downward:

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant's lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps.

The mountains of the mind

Using italic font in several different sizes, I printed excerpts from the “crossing the Alps” stanza on collage paper of various shades and textures, pondering as I did so the central question of Wordsworth’s poem: What does it mean to cross the Alps unknowingly, missing out on that key moment of summiting? If you undergo a major life transition without noticing it, can you really count it as a milestone?

Opening myself to the wisdom of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls handmind, I started cutting and layering the paper, trusting my hands to tell me what to do. Before long, I noticed mountains forming:

My collage, I decided, would depict a mountain range criss-crossed by tracks of text. My placement of each “mountain” was dictated — no, that’s too strong a word, it was suggested — by some ineffable combination of color, pattern, texture, and text. Some of the words ended up upside down, or they slanted sideways like layers of sandstone shifted by ancient earthquakes:

I decided not to use the pink sheet on which I had printed out the poem’s key message in bolded, extra-italicized text, as it seemed a bit too in-your-face:

But I did make sure that the phrase “we had crossed the Alps” appears in a prominent position on the white mountain in the foreground of the collage:

And when my composition was all but complete, I capped that white mountain with another iteration of the same phrase, carefully centering feelings at the peak of the mountain and crossed the Alps just below:

All that remained for me then was to photograph the finished collage in better light and play around with the color mix in Photoshop, so that the finished artwork glows on your screen as though backlit by bright mountain light:

Have you ever fixed your eyes on a real or metaphorical mountain and, in doing so, lost sight of the path you’re actually walking on? Have you ever looked back on a transformational moment in your life and realized that you failed to notice it at the time because you were focusing on the wrong things? Like Wordsworth’s poem, my poem chronicles the challenges of looking, travelling, noticing, aspiring — the central themes of any writer’s life.

Coming down the mountain

If you’d like to try this writing-and-collage exercise for yourself, here are a few prompts to get you going:

Choose a short passage of text to work with: for example a poem or song lyric, a paragraph by a favorite author, or a piece of your own writing.
Copy or print the text out on sheets of colored or patterned paper, using different fonts and font sizes if you wish. As you do so, think about why you’ve chosen this particular text and what you can learn from attending to it closely.
Cut or tear the paper into scraps or shapes and start arranging them on a piece of cardboard — anything strong enough to remain stiff even when you covered with wet glue.(I use square 15x15 cm pieces of canvas or card stock, but any size or shape will do). Think about what you’re doing and why as you make your decisions about composition, imagery, and form, but don’t overthink.
When you feel ready, start gluing the paper onto the cardboard using white glue or a glue stick. Don’t worry if you make mistakes or affix things in the “wrong place” (whatever that means!) Mistakes can lead to serendipitous flashes of insight.
To finish off, you can frame and display your collage, or glue it into a notebook, or photograph it and post it on Instagram — or not! In collage-making, the process matters as much as the product.
Don’t forget to write! Before, during, after the collage-making process — in your head if not on paper. Your handmind will tell you what to do.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

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October 2023Helen SwordOctober 27, 2023Stylish writing, wellbeing, writing and walking

Take Your Words for a Walk

The theme of the fourth Creativity Catalyst module is “Move Around,” an exhortation that I’ve taken rather literally by traveling to Australia for ten days! Sydney is a great city for walking — not to mention bussing, biking, training, and ferrying — and my notebook has been happily accompanying me to all manner of cafes, museums, beaches, and other lovely writing spots.

If you’re like me, you may find that some your best thinking-about-writing happens when you’re out walking. Paradoxically, however, the act of walking is not conducive to actually writing. Sure, you can record your thoughts on your phone as you walk and write them down later, or you can stop for a while to scribble down your brilliant ideas (if you’ve remembered to bring along a notebook); but at that point you’re no longer really walking, are you?

Conversely, you may find that some of your best writing happens just after you’ve been engaged in physical activities that don’t involve thinking-about-writing. Sometimes your brain needs a break so that you can return to your writing with a clean mental slate.

In this post, I draw a distinction between mindful walking — when you deliberately focus on your body, your senses, and the world around you as you walk — and writingful walking, when your body is moving forward but your thoughts are consciously turned inward. Go for mindful walks when you want to clear your head and for writingful walks when you want to push your ideas in new creative directions. Both kinds of walking are good for you, after all!

To finish off, I’ve included links to some walkingful reading materials that explore in greater depth the many historical, conceptual, and metaphysical connections between walking and writing.

Enjoy!

Mindful walking

The phrase mindful walking is something of a misnomer, as the meditative practice of mindfulness — often described as “living in the moment” — involves attending to your physical senses rather than to the messy machinations of your intellect. Mindful walking recalibrates your body, refocuses your brain, and reminds you of the power of sensory experience to engage our emotions (a useful principle for any writer to keep in mind).

Mindfulness feeds your writing by deflecting you from thinking about your writing. Here are some prompts you can try next time you stand up from your desk to go for a walk:

Bodyful walking
As you walk, pay attention to how you hold your body as you move through space. Spend some time taking your mind through a slow body scan, deliberately sending your awareness first to your feet as they flex and fall, then to the pivoting of your ankles, the stretching of your calf muscles, the hingeing of your knees, and so on, all the way through to the top of your head. Think about the pendular swing of your arms, the line of your spine, the way you hold your head, the slope of your shoulders: are they hunched up near your ears as you walk, or are they relaxed and mobile? Bodyful movement develops your postural awareness and prepares you for the hard physical work of sitting and writing.
Senseful walking
Hone in on each of your senses in turn: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. For example, you could bring your attention to a single color, or to visual patterns in the landscape — I like focusing on the interplay of straight lines and curved lines — or to the many different sounds that you hear when you tune in to notice them: your footfalls, your breath, the wind in your ears. How many different scents can you pick out as you walk past a garden or a market stall? What textures can you touch as you travel?
Spaceful walking
Trace a horizontal line through space as you walk, attending to the vertical volumes that rise above or fall away below you along your route. Notice the layers of the landscape you’re moving through: what’s happening at ground level, at tree level, at cloud level? Walk in a straight line, in circles, up and down stairs, in zigzags. You can add an aleatory dimension to your travels through space by flipping a coin at every street corner — heads means turn right, tails means turns left — and following wherecwe chance leads you.
Artful walking
Look around you with an artist’s eye as you walk. Stop to photograph intriguing objects and scenes, or at least to frame them with your eye. Listen to the music of the landscape: chattering birds high above you; a radio blaring from a passing car. Notice the art and artistry all around you — architectural details, street signs, posters — and create your own works of art through the transformational magic of your gaze.

Freddieful walking
Not to be confused with fretful walking! My wee dog Freddie reminds me daily to savor the pleasures of the material world. While I may not share his delight in certain odors — rotten food and dog pee come to mind — it can be a lot of fun to try to picture and sense the world through his merry little eyes.

The only rule involved in mindful walking (if you want rules at all) is that you must not think about your writing as you walk. As soon as your mind begins to stray, simply bring your thoughts back to the designated object of your walk: birds, buildings, body, or whatever else you’ve decided to focus on. If you get bored, shift your focus to something else: flowerful walking, peopleful walking, birdful walking, architectureful walking, dogful walking (paying attention to other people’s dogs, not just your own) — the possibilities are endless!

Writingful walking

“Simply bring your thoughts back to the designated object of your walk” — hah! That’s easier said than done. Thoughts have a pesky habit of following their own path, especially when our bodies are moving too. So you may wish to put a time limit on your first attempt at a mindfulness walk — say, 5 or 10 minutes — then let your thoughts off leash for a while.

When you’re ready to shift to “writingful walking,” take a moment to recalibrate, then set yourself a writing-related topic to focus on or an issue to work through. I enjoy brainstorming about new projects while I walk; the rhythm of my legs and arms sets my ideas flowing, and it’s easy for me to retain a few key bullet points on my phone or in my head (as I did, for example, with the list of “mindful walking” ideas above). When I try to compose fully-formed sentences and paragraphs, by contrast, I’ve found that the words tend to unravel as soon as I start recording them or writing them down; so I’ve stopped trying.

Writingful walking can be solitary or social, freewheeling or focused. It requires just two key ingredients: time and space. In Writing with Pleasure, I observed that “the contemplative rhythms of walking demand ample investments of unstructured time, historically a commodity more readily available to men than to women”:

William Wordsworth striding over daffodil-covered hillsides; Charles Baudelaire flâneuring through the arcades of Paris; Charles Darwin wearing a groove in the section of his garden path where he paced up and down for several hours a day; Wallace Stevens jotting down snippets of poetry while he walked to his job as an insurance executive, where he gave them to his secretary to type up. (Writing with Pleasure, p. 52)

Time remains a rare and precious commodity for nearly every writer I know; but space for generative movement is generally easier to come by. Note that the romantic landscapes of Wordsworth and Baudelaire — the mountains of the Lake District, the grand shopping arcades1 of Paris — find their mundane equivalents in Darwin’s well-worn garden path and Stevens’ daily walk to work through the decidedly unromantic streets of Hartford, Connecticut.

Writingful walking allows you to double-dip on both time and space: you’re writing and walking, moving your words and your body, rather than having to choose between intellectual labor and physical exercise. How efficient! But remember, you can’t be hyperproductive all the time. Writingful walking activates the writing brain; mindful walking clears it; but sometimes it’s best just to go for a walk and let your mind wander where it will.

Walkingful reading

The relationship between writing and walking has been the subject of numerous books, articles, and scientific studies,

from Merlin Coverley’s cultural history of the writer as walker (The Art of Wandering) to Frédéric Gros’s lyrical meditation on living and thinking in motion (A Philosophy of Walking) to Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman’s dense account of how carefully staged “research-creation events” can help participants navigate their way through tricky topics such as “settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing (Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World: WalkingLab). (Writing with Pleasure, p. 52)

You can find a whole section on Writing and the Body in the Bookshop on my website; don’t miss Cheryl Pallant’s Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice (not just on walking!) and Tim Ingold’s brilliant Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description.

My favorite short article on writing is On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks Across the Page by writing scholars Evija Trofimova and Sophie Nicholls (the latter’s Substack newsletter Dear Writing is a weekly delight). Sophie likens unstructured freewriting to a ramble in the woods near her home in Yorkshire:

The woods are full of darkness and danger, grandmother’s cottage, wild beasts, witches, poisonous fruits. The woods are where traps are laid, where children wander and get lost, where enchantments befall us. By stepping into the woods, we surrender to not knowing, to walking off the path and into the depths of our imagination.

Evija, by contrast, summons up the flat, wide-open landscape of her native Latvia:

When I’m stuck, I crave openness and space. . . . Here, where the landscape is simple and spacious, my thoughts can breathe. Ideas quietly graze as I move through them. The country road is under my feet and I know exactly where I’m heading. . . . I need to be able to look far into that hazy distance to get my sense of seeing things “in depth.”

I used a walking-and-writing line drawing by Evija as the starting point for my paper collage this week, which depicts a word-strewn path that draws us enticingly forward into unknown landscapes. Was there ever a better description of writingful walking — or, indeed, of walkingful reading?