Echo Chamber

The crust of ice makes a satisfying crackle as I push off and up towards the summit. Slowly the sound of foot and breath fade to a dull harmony as I ascend a twisting path. Further upwards I go, and deeper inwards my focus becomes. Rhythmic striding always tends to lull me into a space of contemplation, bringing both acute awareness of, and complete distancing from the outside world. I wonder about the opened Microsoft Word™ document sitting as an empty essay, glowing from the laptop screen on my desk back home. The empty page and flashing cursor stick like a thorn of irritation, begging to be fulfilled. My foot slips slightly on a melted patch of slippery snow jolting my mind back to the path I tread. Perhaps my academic neglect is because of the many meetings I scheduled this week, or the time spent aimlessly on Internet platforms. There was that date I was supposed to —

: Excuse me.

Julian: Who said that?

: Hello again. I’ve missed you.

Julian: I’m quite busy at the moment with the labor of conjuring up a brilliant paper topic to succeed expectation and solidify myself as a student of prowess and poise. If you don’t mind I need to get back to work.

: Oh?

Julian: Well, not labor in the sense of toil, but an intellectual endeavor that I do not have time to stray from. I need this walk I’m on to conjure up a nuanced claim about the larger canon of “walking as philosophy.” If you must know, I set out on this ascent of Gile Mountain to hopefully uncover a deeper truth behind the ambulatory literature in which I’ve been studying.

: “Though often if such dilatory walk / Tired, and uneasy at the halts I made. / A hundred times when in these wanderings / I have been busy with the toil of verse — / Great pains and little progress — ”[1]

Julian: Did you just quote Wordsworth at me?

: So you have been paying attention. You are the one who brought up a larger literary walking canon. Perhaps you should take heed of what it means to bring the toil of the civilized world along with you into a landscape that has so much to offer. It seems to me that like Wordsworth, you’ll only achieve “Great pains and little progress” with that approach.

Julian: The fresh air is quite invigorating today I must say. The way the thin, cool, wintry light plays across the tree branches is truly captivating…but how is meandering thought of obligation a limiting factor? Is it not in the same poem that Wordsworth says, “Besides in truth / That Summer, swarming as it did with thoughts /Transient and loose”?[2]

: Loose transience aside, how can you expect to find a deeper understanding of the elemental aspects of natural thought by packing in your fears and insecurities from the indoor world in which you operate?

Julian: Please elaborate.

: Well, if a snowy mountaintop is where you came looking for answers, then you must place a sense of importance on the natural landscape as a realm where natural thought must roam.

Julian: By natural thought do you mean the mental processes that occur outside of a civilized sphere?

: That definition will do for now. What you must ask yourself is why you came out here in the first place. What did you hope to find? Unless of course your intention is not to search.

Julian: I suppose I came to escape in some sense…not in a Rousseauian way of uncovering a primitive self outside of the Polis, but more so to escape distraction and focus on my thoughts.

: How can you think only of yourself when surrounded by such beauty?

Julian: Well am I to pay attention to the landscape sprawling before me, or the vast horizon-less expanse in my mind?

: The mind as a landscape you say? How so?

Julian: To touch back on Rousseau for a moment, there is a certain exhilarating freedom that comes from leaving behind a world of desire and expectation. Striding beyond city limits allows one to open themselves to an understanding of self that is just as limitless as the natural landscape they can now see before them. Frédéric Gros riffs on Rousseau’s conception of this freed individual nicely, “To be alone, far from the hubbub. No longer to have to check his social share price daily, calculate his friends, ration his enemies, flatter his protectors, ceaselessly measure his importance in the eyes of fops and imbeciles…no longer assailed by worldly emotions, a heart no longer affected by society’s desires, but surrendered at last to its primary natural beat.”[3] The primitive self is once again rendered moldable when it escapes from civilizations’ clutching obligations and constricting enclosures. I do not see this as a place to dwell in the way that Rousseau found peace in the primitive, but instead an opportunity to remap the moldable individual on the sprawling landscape before him.

: So you accept then, Rousseau’s idea of the “Noble Savage”?

Julian: Problematic as that romantic notion may be, I think it serves as a way to conceive of the soul as a constructable entity. Rousseau stops and glorifies the savage self that supposedly resides locked behind layers of societal exposure. Continuing the idea and leaving romanticization out of it, the “primitive self” to me, is an opportunity to reconstruct the constructed soul. The important distinction being, this self is not of noble or biblical origin, but a soul merely stripped of its systemic modes of production.

: Ah, but you think this is achievable? You really think it is possible to rise to a place of vantage and look upon the modes of production in which you were created?

Julian: I too have read Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses and understand the impossibility of such a vantage point in the Althusserian point of view, but for the sake of discourse, let us say that modes of production may not be totally extricated from the soul, but instead, submerged below the surface of the constructed self long enough for one to reconstruct an identity in the wild.

: I’ll allow it.

Julian: Right, then the landscape in which one walks is not merely the inspiration of the wild, or a space absent of civilization. No, the landscape is a mystifying and boundless space where the deconstructed self can chart an identity.

: I think you’re confusing the terms of self, soul, and identity as we agreed to define them. What you call a “deconstructed self” or a de-romanticized “Noble Savage,” is just a formless essence that has been freed from identity yes?

Julian: Correct, though the places in which you can take this moldable essence are unlimi —

: Yes, yes we’ll get to that. For now though, let us refer to this formless essence as something else.

Julian: What do you have in mind?

: A lot actually. From what I understand so far, those who are extricated from “civilization’s clutches” as you put it, are reduced to a point of plastic personage, where they may not be totally free from the modes in which they were produced, but free enough to autonomously create their own modes of production in the wild.

Julian: That is certainly a mouthful but I’m with you.

: To discuss this autonomous state of being as a pursuit of identity, seems inappropriate due to the great lengths one would have to go to shed their civilized identity to get into this state. Let us rename the moldable identity, or plastic personage, to the understanding of it as a creaturely state of being. Now pay close attention to my syntax Julian. I said “creaturely” for a purpose…Ask yourself why one typically goes for a stroll.

Julian: To exercise or clear the mind I suppose. It is why local parks surely exist.

: Exactly. The civilized notion of walking is that of recreation. Recall the creaturely state of being while in plastic personage. Now put pressure on the term “recreation.” Is it to casually stroll with a bemused expression of self-satisfaction on a constructed bark-chip path while a sickening neon display of Playcore Inc.™ playground structures whizz by you? Or is it to RE-create the world around you? To be reduced once again to the state of being a creature! To fundamentally reengage this creaturely state of —

Julian: Okay, yes I understand your point.

: Excuse my fervor, but you must understand the stakes in which our discussion operates. We can now move on to this idea of the boundless landscape you seem to be so preoccupied by.

Julian: The stakes are clear. The walker who has achieved a wild autonomy has done more than escape a civilized self. He has subverted the relations of power, which sought to contain and control him. We have treated the personage subjected to power in largely theoretical terms so far, but we haven’t touched upon the important distinction of why one can escape power in the first place. The soul, constructed by civilization, is an intangible essence we have used so far to aid us in understanding how power works within us.

: You must realize that you’re spelling out what Michel Foucault discusses in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. He famously claims after all, “the soul is the prison of the body.”[4]

Julian: My, my, you are well read. What do you mean by that exactly?

: Foucault’s interpretation of the soul is not a glimmering essence of pure humanity that Rousseau would conceive his “Noble Savage” to embody. No. For Foucault, the soul is a technology constructed by a political anatomy (or for simplicity’s sake let’s call it power) implanted into one’s interior. And it is through this technology that power takes hold of us, and subjects us to power’s own interests.

Julian: Is this similar to Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatus” where he argues that subjects of civilization are merely constructions of a distinct and intentional mode of production?

: Similar in language yes, but different in terms of power’s implementation of control.

Julian: So then, what does it mean to break from this control? And furthermore, is the natural landscape really enough to distance one from power?

: Well that’s the question is it not? How and why is the plastic personage able to attain autonomy in the wild? Maybe recall your intentions of climbing this mountain in the first place.

Julian: I came here to walk. To physically separate the body from the “prison of the soul.”

: Now we’re getting somewhere.

Julian: Could it be that through ambulation one can literally walk away from power, or at least resist the technology of the soul?

: For some amount of time perhaps.

Julian: If this is the case then, one recovers their body and defies the prison of the soul by walking out…into the wild.

: Don’t get too romantic on me. Recall your thoughts on the natural landscape as a boundless space. You struggled with where to place your attention, the landscape sprawling before you, or the “vast horizon-less expanse” in your mind. Are you beginning to see a connection?

Julian: Indeed. Are you insinuating a parallel between the expansive capability of the mind and the boundless space in which we have interpreted the natural landscape thus far?

: You tell me.

Julian: I want to take it a step further. The beauty of the land is what attracts one’s gaze, and inspires the uplifting feeling of consumption as you take in the dazzling splendor of the world around you.

: By consumption you mean a mapping of sorts? Charting the land with your gaze?

Julian: Precisely. One’s gaze is truly powerful. Just recall the potency of the Wordsworth poem you quoted to me much earlier. Wordsworth’s observations of the Lake District[5] are all manifestations of the simultaneous mapping of the landscape by his gaze, and the remapping of his own understanding of self. “Unthwarted — I experienced in myself / Conformity as just as that of old / To the end and written spirit of God’s works, / Whether held forth in Nature or in man.”[6] By gazing at and describing in verse, the vast natural beauty of his surrounding landscape, Wordsworth feels a solidification of and re-creation of the self. In the state of plastic personage, Wordsworth does not go the route of autonomy that we have been discussing, but understands this newfound natural sense of man as that of the divine.

: Well divinity aside, are you saying that when walking in the wild, taking in and traveling through a landscape is simultaneously a remapping of the mind?

Julian: The power of gaze and ambulatory motion is truly incredible.

: For the sake of not getting too carried away, I think you need to understand the proportion of one single person’s gaze standing in opposition to nature itself. To quote Frédéric Gros once more, “Every truly magnificent landscape diminishes the person who has conquered it on foot, and at the same time fills him with victorious energy. Two impulses run through him at once: to give a shout of triumph and to collapse in tears. He dominates the mountain with his gaze, but is crushed by the vision at the same time.”[7] Perhaps you have placed too much importance on one’s processing power.

Julian: Walking then, can subvert power, and civilized constructs, but when it comes to nature’s presence, we are once again rendered submissive?

: You’re missing the duality. Is this not what you want? To be caught in such a glorious vertigo of understanding that the resulting reflection of the self, off the iridescent display of nature before you, leaves you crumpled and shaken?

Julian: I suppose the creaturely state of plastic personage is not as tranquil as I originally thought.

: Did you not come here in the first place looking or searching for a meaning?

Julian: I’m no longer sure why I came here. Definitely not to get a good grade on the paper I need to write. Maybe I came here not to search but to find.

: In what sense? Rousseau’s “Noble Savage”, Wordsworth’s connection to the divine, or the plastic personage we teased out of Althusser and Foucault?

Julian: I do not know!

: Take strength Julian, now is not the time to crumple back into that constructed shell of a self you have allowed to control you back in civilization. Be here. Be aware. Be present.

Julian: …maybe that’s it. Maybe I came here to be aware. To not think. What are these thoughts and desires I’ve been having anyways? They have no substance, no physical control over me. To quote the Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking you love so much, “It is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself”[8]…so then…this leads me to the question of who you are.

: I am your thought of course.

Julian: But then doesn’t that mean you have no substance?

:

Julian: Hello? Oh, and suddenly you have nothing to say…Hello?

Are you there?

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My, this is a beautiful view.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press: New York.

Foucault, Michel. “Torture: The body of the condemned.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Gros, Frédéric. A Philosophy of Walking. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso. 2015

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Norton & Company: London. Editions 1799, 1805, 1850 compiled.

[1] Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Norton & Company: London. Editions 1799, 1805, 1850 compiled. Lines 108–112.

[2] Wordsworth, 345–347.

[3] Gros, Frédéric. “The Walker’s Waking Dreams — Rousseau,” The Philosophy of Walking. 72–73.

[4] Foucault, Michel. “Torture: The body of the condemned.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Page 30.

[5] Wordsworth’s home territory, a mountainous region in North-West England where he wrote many and most of his poems.

[6] Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Norton & Company: London. Editions 1799, 1805, 1850 compiled. Lines 349–352.

[7] Gros, Frédéric. “Regeneration and Presence” A Philosophy of Walking. Page 123.

[8] A paraphrase from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas in, Gros, Frédéric. “Freedoms.” A Philosophy of Walking. Page 9.