When I first went out this morning at 6:45am, there were rain droplets falling. I decided to just do the walk without making any audio recordings, and my plan was to take notes and write about it when I got back to the garage. Something interesting happened, though. When I got back, I felt unfulfilled. I know this is minor, and it is likely not as profound as it felt at the time, but it just felt a little lacking. I had thought that maybe the walks were becoming important and significant to me because I was just getting up and immediately going out into the sun and having a very intentional slow walk. The reality is, though, that the act of making the audio recording, the act of participating in my own artistic practice, was the significant component of these daily walks. About an hour later the sun came out, and it was clearly no longer going to rain. I have been struggling with back pain this week, and I was really unmotivated to go out again with the mic and recorder, but after a short bit I decided that I would do it anyway. The total walk if I don’t pause for long takes about 13 minutes, and that seemed foolish to not push through my mental block and do it anyway.
What happened next was really important. When I started to record, my focus shifted. I really was focused on listening in the first walk today, but with the audio recording equipment and headphones, my mind focused sharply on the task at hand of ‘making art’. My eyes started to scan the horizon for habitual cues, and my ears also did the same. But this hyper focus, where somewhat habitual at this point, brought about a connection to something deeper in me. My walk went from a meditation practice of soft focus without attachment to a space where my senses were heightened and looking for something very specific. I’m not saying that I was consciously labeling everything I heard, but I definitely was working from what Pierre Schaefer would call ‘close listening’. I was listening very closely, attuned by the microphone and the subsequent encapsulation by the headphones I was wearing. Having followed this ritual daily (often multiple times per day), my ears started to listen for patterns. I walked from the parking lot, sensitive to my footsteps through the mic, and the occasional hand noise and cable noise that seems somewhat unavoidable. I got to the bottom of the first grassy field, and my ears opened up and started to scan the area for sounds that might be of interest. I could hear the birds in the wooded area up the hill on the right, the song sparrows at the top left from where I stood, and I could see insects that my mic could not pick up given the traffic noises behind me. When it felt like it was time, I began to walk up the hill again, and paid attention to how the sounds moved and shifted through space, and of course, the constant sound of my footsteps. When I reached the top of the hill, I paused, and focused on the trees to my right. Until yesterday, I hadn’t really acknowledged them, focusing as I had been on the consciously designed fields on the grounds, but now that I had, I wanted to check in on them.
I suppose in many ways, that is what I am doing. Slowly taking my focus outward, and checking in on my friends here. The fields, the wooded area, the various areas of mugwort, the areas that are deeply populated with bees and other pollinators. Slowly, I am dialing into their spaces, listening in to their lives and hopefully not disrupting them too much as I do. As I start to become overfamiliar with what I am hearing and seeing, my focus turning outwards, asking “Who else is there? What am I missing?”
In his essay “The Infra-Ordinary”(1989) by George Perec, he asks us to ‘question the habitual’. This is important. For many, this site of questioning the habitual may be a call to cease the habitual, to break it up, to leave mundane existence and find something else. However, it can be deeply rewarding to question it in the exact way he asks us to question our spoons. This absurd idea of asking our spoons questions, or asking the why of the spoon, seems to be a space of liberating us from the spoon. But, what if, we use the site of questioning to find something else. When we look into the timed patterns of animals, when I listen to them and see that they have their own habits, and these habits seemingly correspond to times of day in their repetitions, I am finding myself asking questions such as “Why do the song sparrows perch on these two steel fence posts in field two in the morning, and in the evening, I see red winged black birds in the same spot?” Do they have a time-share? What brings these birds to these locations at these various times? Do redwing blackbirds sleep late, what do they get up to in the early morning when they aren’t here?
I pose these questions here because I think so often we look at the idea of questioning the habitual from the perspective of the Situationist International, and the site of the derive particularly when walking. We want to see how to divert ourselves from the space of habit, to shake things up, to cause disruption and change systems by breaking out of psychogeographic patterns. One of my favorite artists in this type of making is Alex Villar, whose videos of jamming himself into cramped areas, scaling walls, and engaging the world in a very absurdist and non-habitual way helps us to see how space and place can morph, change, and be something else by interrupting it. These moments of interruption tell us about ourselves, about infrastructure. But, when observing and capturing natural phenomenon, that site of disruption is something else, and the destruction it could bring is something very real. In cities, amongst human populations, standing in an obscure corner that architecturally makes little sense to the casual observer creates absurdist humor. A derive that takes you through uninhabited buildings, or into locations that you’ve never seen before, can be invigorating. In natural spaces though, it can bring other problems, and the responsibilities of humans when engaging with certain natural spaces can be quite damaging.
I grew up in Colorado, and am accustomed to hiking in areas where you really shouldn’t go off trail. Not just because of the risk to your body or ticks or anything like that, but because sometimes when you hike off trail you risk damaging the ecosystem. Hiking in Moab, Utah, you will see many signs that tell you to stay on trail because you will destroy plants and life if you decide to go off trail. In places that seem to have more robust ecosystems it seems like maybe that isn’t as important, and, for the occasional visitor it probably isn’t, but if lots of people go off trail at the same places, you will carve out a new trail and any of the plants and insects who lived there will be displaced and destroyed. We may want to question “why do I have to stay on this path? It’s so beautiful over there!”, but sometimes we really do need to stay on the path, to follow the route others have taken habitually, in an effort to do as little harm as possible.
Going back to the walks each morning, however, it is wonderful how many little friends I am making, seeing all these same birds and insects each day. I don’t know if they are the same exact ones each time, but I do suspect it is the same sparrows, the same rabbits, the same groundhogs. Of course, this brings me back to the Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. Connecting to this tiny microcosm of other beings, daily, at the same times of day, I am connecting to something bigger than myself, allowing these other lifeforms to inform my patterns of movement, my patterns of thinking, my patterns of knowledge making. I miss them if they are not where I expect them to be, and I am possibly fooling myself, but it also seems like they are becoming more comfortable with me in their space as well. The sparrows are slower to fly away. I doubt they would ever stop flying away when I got close, but they are no longer leaving immediately when they spot me.
And somehow, listening through my headset helps me to see this, to think through this, to be a part of this. When I left this morning for the first walk without. My gear, these are all the things I missed. Sure, the animals were there, but as I was no longer able to hyper focus without the aid of the microphone, I did not engage quite as deeply, quite as strongly. The extended ear of the microphone allowed me to hear more clearly, even though I could isolate their sounds without any troubles without the microphone before.
