This is what a walker may experience, a perceptual revolution.
— Ernesto Pujol, Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths1
Ernesto Pujol and I meet in Philadelphia to walk and talk about walking. We meet to produce something in words, to be read on a page or a screen or, perhaps, to be heard in an ear. It feels a little odd. Talking walking.
We are both writers and walkers. We write language even when we speak. We write on air. Words and details are important to us. And so, to produce this, we spend the day walking and driving through Philadelphia with the voice memo recorder on. I carry his book Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths (2018) to read it out loud or ask him to read.
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Thyrza Goodeve: Let me begin by thinking out loud. Walking is a verb. It is movement in space /time. It implies a body, with legs, knees, ankles, feet, toes. But spiders walk, as do cows and giraffes. Fish don’t but octopuses have been known to. So, animals walk but when humans started walking upright on two feet straight up in the air like a tree, as Georges Bataille put it, the big toe became the great signifier of being human. When his original essay was published in 1929, it included a photograph by Jacques-André Boiffard of a big, cracked toe.2 When I look at it now, I see a big white male toe and think of French colonialism and your comment, “The history of walking is contaminated by the pale, masculine virus of colonialism: by the fever of “discovery,” of being “the first man” to arrive and step into an “unknown” territory.”3
Ernesto Pujol: Walking used to be a masculine-gendered verb, heteronormative. Americans walked west of the Mississippi. They walked the seemingly endless frontier until they reached the Pacific. And then they wanted to walk some more. Because walking was an act of empire. Walking was conquering and assimilating. The restless big toe of the big white father. But some of us wish to go back to walking like trees. Yes, trees walk. They walk north, south, east, and west through roots and seeds. It is a quiet gentle walk, integrated into natural patterns.
TG: I love this phrase from the section of your book, “Walking and Love,” “My cerebrum is mind and my toe is mind.” What do you mean?4
EP: I mean several things. First, that the foot perceives as much as the eye and the ear and the tongue. Secondly, that we tend to equate brain with mind. Thirdly, that even as the toe feeds the mind, the mind is in the toe. I am parts, I am whole, and I am whole in each part.
TG: From you I have learned that any walking I do, in any place, and at any time, is always a conversation with the nonhuman. In other words, walking is not a walking of the self but a state—really a verb—of being selfless.
EP: I am interested in walking from a non-human animal perspective because I want to see a place through the non-human. The non-human does not colonize. It harvests only what it needs. I would like to walk like an animal.
TG: This makes me think about your dog-walking project in Puerto Rico.
EP: Yes, while working in Puerto Rico during the pandemic, I created a volunteer group with 60 volunteers under my supervision, and we walked shelter dogs. There were 170 dogs caged in terrible conditions in a very poor shelter. It was like a prison for dogs. Feral dogs taught me to listen carefully with all of my body, mindful of its responses. To be fully open to what a path presents you with, to what you find, and what finds you. I seek to be found by what is visible and invisible to the human eye.
TG: But walking can happen in the mind, as a metaphor, as a practice, as a method of transportation, as a form of exercise. And walking can happen with the fingers as you do in the passage “Walking Trees” and, of course, differently abled bodies walk in different ways.
EP: There is no wasted step, no step in the wrong direction. I do not know how others walk. I can only speak about how I try to walk, vulnerably, trying to explore what feels like the simultaneity of past, present, and future invisible territories through psychic acuity. It may strike some as ridiculous, as stretching beyond believable grassroots scholarship. But this is an embarrassing practice, the lineage of the village’s witchy idiot, the town’s prophetic fool, and the city’s mad visionary.5
I am not a scientist, a daring theoretical physicist like cosmologist Stephen Hawking. But he imagines that if we could travel to what is popularly known as the beginning of the universe, as we approached the infinitely dense singularity before the Big Bang, approximately 15 billion years ago, time would give way to space to the degree that there would only be space and no time. So I will argue that for artists who walk, the more they integrate into place through no-thought, the more they integrate into space through no-mind, the more they will approach a miniscule time-framed experience with a titanic psychic effect for their life practice: a sense of timelessness, followed by a sense that there is no time, an insight open to interpretation, from poetic metaphor to sidewalk activism. In the end, what we call the spiritual may be our primitive name for glimpsing a science we do not yet know.6
TG: So, this is walking for you?
EP: Walking is the poor man’s grounded methodology for studying reality as we have constructed, destroyed, and reconstructed it. Walking is the ultimate reality check to whatever we have read about reality. As a walker, I seek to enter this complex web so that I can walk in all directions and dimensions, even if I only seem to be walking along the pattern that we humans see. I have no words with which to accurately describe this walk, really. All verbal efforts are incomplete and embarrassing. If magical language is the medium of fools, then foolishness is a requirement for walking.7
TG: You call walking “psychic editing,” and say, “The path is editing you, clawing at you.”8 What do you mean?
EP: Walking tests our American Platonism about the world and usually dismantles it. It takes us out of the cave. Even a little chained walk outside around the cave can transform everything. Meeting a mushroom, a bird, a snail, an earthworm along a path can change our perception of our place on the Earth.
TG: You have written many articles and essays for collections, and two books. Did you consciously set off to write a book about walking?
EP: I make through walking and wanted to share my making, step by step. No one owns walking. I encourage everyone to write their own history of walking. I want everyone to make walking. Walking is a humbling form of deep reading, of getting to know the visible and invisible world. I structured my book as a collection of brief reflections, from the readings performed by my steps. I tried to share many ways of walking and meditating the walking. The book was written for a generation with a short attention span. But it was also written so that the walker reads a little and then thinks a lot. So that the walker sees. The book is not meant to absorb you nonstop. It is meant to be read as a series of gentle provocations and, sometimes, instructions. It is an experiential text.
TG: And every experience of walking is like a first walk? Or it should be?
EP: Life is never repeatable. This may be an obvious thing to say, even a cliché, but life is meant to be a journey towards greater and greater awareness. I remember moments in my life when I said to myself, why in the world was I not aware? I was there. But I was caught in some kind of narrative of my own that did not allow for my awareness to extend that far, to encompass the world around me. The state that helps awareness the most is selflessness. So that rather than just being self-aware—aware of one’s narrative and only one’s narrative—if one can become selfless, stepping outside one’s narrative, awareness thus extends into other human and non-human narratives. Deep walking also requires silence. But this is increasingly hard because we now walk with civilization, with handheld technologies. So, we walk through filters. We are there but not there. We are multitasking, thinking we can be there and everywhere else at once. Productively. But truly being somewhere requires the fullness of our being.
TG: Which makes me think of the section, “Walking with Trees”—one of the most moving and difficult sections in your book.
EP: Yes, I talk with trees. I am quite unapologetic about it. Readers are slowly finding out that trees have a lot to say, to teach us.
TG: Would you read this passage?9
EP: Yes, “…there was a period when I walked slowly around New York like a forest ranger. I walked the city in silence, mindful of my breathing, cultivating no thought. During those urban walks, I would touch the trees. They were on planters along the sidewalk. Many were littered with garbage, enduring daily doses of car fluids, dog urine and excrement, not to mention the seasonal salting of city streets. Most were bruised and scarred: their trunks bore terrible lacerations from vehicles backing into them. Their lower branches were mangled by adults trying to access their cars or torn by kids playing. Their upper branches fared no better, violently ‘pruned’ by tall trucks. Sometimes an entire tree would be a monument to mutilation.”
TG: It can feel that way. It is hard not to wince. When I talked about that pain with artist Zoe Leonard, she said of her photographs of urban trees that they are heroic, bad asses saying fuck you to the urban. When did you start walking?
EP: I have been walking since I was an adolescent. Because my mother walked, and I accompanied her.
TG: Would she literally say, “We’re going for a walk” or would she just walk?
EP: My mother walked the city of San Juan, shopping up and down its avenues before the age of malls, when the city was the only urban shopping mall. If she could walk the distance, instead of taking her car, she would walk. I walked with her also because I felt safer as a gay man, less likely to be homophobically harassed because we were perceived as a mother and son unit. It was socially understood that I was escorting my mother. Otherwise, it was not safe for me as a solitary queer man.
I didn’t really walk by myself until I arrived to New York. I first started walking the city because I didn’t have the money to use private or public transport. I was living in a shelter for the homeless on the Lower East Side. I’d walk Southwest to Soho, to see art. North, to youthful Astor Place. I’d walk up to performative Union Square, on 14th street. Or I would walk west, because all the gay dance clubs were in and around the Village. I fell in love with walking on the sidewalks of New York, observing its architecture and watching the diversity of humanity on its streets. And cruising, made romantic by the atmospheric vapor coming out of the sidewalks’ metal grates, late at night. It was magical. I loved the broken antiques that people placed on the curb, with which one could furnish an apartment. That is how I furnished my first home in NY. Once I walked New York, which is to say, once it taught me how to walk a city, I wanted to walk other cities across the world. So when I traveled, I wanted to walk endlessly and get lost. New York gave me a first template for urban walking.
I walk to know fully, even though it is very hard to get to know a place completely. In nature, non-human animals live in territories of their own making, through boundary markings and density calls; or along pathways, like whales do. Human animals are not that different. Most live in territories according to where they live and work, socialize and worship, exercise and rest. Humans live in subjective territories.
TG: Did you walk, and read about walking, in the monastery?
EP: The monk often reads inspired writing, biblical commentary, theology, hagiography, and mystical treatises during the cloistered walk. Deep reading while walking a cloister alters pace, slowing steps,sometimes marking moments of insight with the cessation of step, before resuming reading, walking on. In robes. To walk wearing long, flowing fabric vanishes the legs but emphasizes each step the way a ship’s entire body sways right and left in heavy seas. Fabric swings to and fro, like a pendulum. In this rhythm, a right is a clear right, and a left is an indisputable left. To suddenly stop in the middle of this creates a material disruption only fixed by the downward pull of gravity. The cloister walk is a highly choreographed private walk in the shade surrounded by protective walls, with a pool of bright light in the middle, where there is a birdbath, a sundial, a cross, a statue, or a plant specimen blooming or fruiting seasonally as a reminder of creation’s cycles. I invite performative walkers to consider a silent retreat in a monastery to experience this form; considered step, sustained slowness, and punctuating stillness as an ancient training which is not provided in contemporary art schooling.10
TG: Where was your cloister?
EP: It was located outside of Charleston, South Carolina. It was a small abbey with about 30 Trappist monks. Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Originally, an old French religious order that came about as a reform of what is known as the primitive Rule of Saint Benedict for Monasteries in early Christendom. I entered at twenty-three and lived there for four years.
TG: How did you get to New York? What took you there?
EP: I moved to New York City straight from an abbey. Literally, I woke up in the middle of the night, put on ill-fitting civilian clothing for the first time in four years, stepped into a car, and was driven from the cloister to the airport. I arrived in Manhattan directly from a monastery. With only a change of clothing and a few hundred dollars. All I had in the world. I had renounced everything I had inherited, earned and collected until the age of 23 as a pre-condition to entering, to leaving the world behind through a vow of poverty and silence. I did not speak for four years.
I arrived to the Catholic Worker in NYC, a Christian socialist movement founded by journalist Dorothy Day and philosopher Peter Maurin during the Great Depression. The group ran a soup kitchen and shelter for the homeless on First Street and First Avenue called St. Joseph’s House. I slept in a dormitory with sixteen homeless men. It was an experimental community where you became homeless with the homeless in order to understand homelessness from within, and serve ethically.
We worked for food and lodging. We were hungry most of the time. And then, those of us who were queer would walk to the clubs to dance on weekend nights, to put some distance from the devastation of trickle-down Reaganomics. From there, I was recruited to the first AIDS Case Worker Unit in Brooklyn. That’s how I moved to Downtown Brooklyn, as an advocate for people with a full-blown AIDS diagnosis. Later, I would become the first Director of Social Services for the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force, and finally a public health education consultant for international groups like The Panos Institute in London, fighting disinformation about AIDS worldwide. I spent the late 1980s walking through the AIDS pandemic.
TG: When and how do you use walking in your art practice and as a teaching tool?
EP: Socially engaged art practice is delivered through the walker’s body: arriving, entering, greeting, hand shaking, hugging, standing, speaking, bending, sitting, being still while listening, answering while gesturing, greeting some more, exiting, and walking on. The visiting walker’s body meets and is temporarily absorbed into a sited collective body. Together as one, this new body becomes the performer of socially engaged art practice on the body of Nature. This practice is the creation of a performative body that is larger than the artist’s body.11
I believe in the conscious artist’s voice. I want to hear conscious artists speak about their making, the why and how they make. I am currently teaching a class at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Experimental Ethnography that we called Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability. I believe in student-centered teaching based on a series of curated experiences that make participants apply and thus test information and gain transformative knowledge. My art students do a lot of walking.
TG: How would you structure an ideal walking class?
EP: I would curate a series of site-specific walking experiences, in order of complexity and intensity. I would look at different kinds of cartographies, and then curate a series of walks through diverse human and biodiverse non-human layers. We would walk, taking time in-between our walks and their processing, so that our discussions are not reactive but filtered by memory, seeking the psychic imprint of the local. I do not want to consume the experience every step of the way. I want to have a contemplative space around the experience. Participants would learn about walking as a research tool. I would also ask them to propose their own walks. As a curator of those walks, I would have a series of questions to make sure the walks are ethical. What is their effect on the walker? What is the effect on what is walked? How is this communicated to others after the fact?
TG: What is landscape to us now? The question came to me as I read this section from your book: “Walking faces us with many landscapes: there is the landscape outside of us, and the landscape inside of us. We enter a landscape, seen and unseen, but we also bring our landscape into it. We, too, are a landscape: the secret landscape of love, gained and lost, only known to us in remembered and repressed memory.”12
EP: Landscape is everywhere. Landscape is everything: a mountain, a forest, a desert, a valley, a coastline. But also, a bedroom. Any space and place where a human or non-human process unfolds. You can walk circles inside a room, for miles. Inside a prison cell. You have walked nowhere and you have walked somewhere. To a visible or nonvisible destination. Most of my performances have consisted in the repeated walking of an area, for hours and even days. We reached very far. Inside.
TG: I associate your walking with silence. You value silence greatly. This passage, “Silence is not the absence of sound. Silence is the absence of distractions. Following this thought, I believe that stillness is not the absence of movement, but the absence of disturbances. We can walk with a deep inner stillness that is not shaken by movement. We can walk with a deep inner stillness that informs movement. Movement informed by deep, core stillness is not necessarily abstract and unproductive. Movement informed by stillness has the quality of considered gesture, regardless of pace. The gesture may be very slow, and thus, prolonged. Perhaps it is being explored, so that the gesturer is watching his own gesture unfold. Nevertheless, a considered gesture may also be manifested quickly because it has the wind behind its back, it is walking downhill, pulled by gravity—or it is like a bird, in flight. We can embody stillness in motion. We can manifest the movement of stillness.”13
EP: I dwell in silence. I do not have a radio or a sound system in my home. I watch films but, when they conclude, I return to deep silence. I do not listen to podcasts while I walk or drive. Silence is a precondition to listening. And I want to listen to everyone and everything around me, all the time.
TG: You recently relocated [here?] to Philadelphia where you are currently teaching. You lived here in 2018, before you went to Puerto Rico because of Covid. What is it like returning in 2024? I ask because it feels like more than just a return but the path and destination of a new pilgrimage.
EP: Yes, if people are truly present at a site of pilgrimage, it may provide them with a psychic blueprint that produces existential scaffolding in reverse, like skin that finds a skeleton. The destination stands as their material reminder of who they are supposed to be, to keep becoming, and to forever remain. They experience a reengineering marker that can rebuild them as a human cathedral, chapel, church, mosque, shrine, stupa, synagogue, temple, or zendo. In fact, they may never need to pilgrimage again because the destination is now forever within.14 Philadelphia is a city of archetypes that holds the mythology of American democracy. As we experience a crisis of democracy in America, I think it is important to walk it. Again.
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Endnotes
- Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, Ernesto Pujol (Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press, 2018), hereinafter Walking. Footnotes in this interview are to the Kindle edition. This quote appears on 965.
- Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe” (1929). Translated by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Excerpted from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: UMP, 1985.
- Walking, 183.
- Walking, 330.
- Walking, 745.
- Walking, 750.
- Walking, 873.
- Walking, 264.
- From “Walking with Trees,” in Walking, 550.
- Walking, 829.
- Walking, 447.
- Walking, 330.
- Walking, 504.
- Walking, 864.
Ernesto Pujol
