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| "Walking Willow Man" a sculpture by Hester Pilz |
Measure the double sense of all our talk,
And, every man his dramatist, anxiously
Corrects his role, his gesture, and his walk.
in John Ciardi's poem, Port of Aerial Embarkation
Waiting at the arrivals hall, I could see her before I could recognize her face. She came through the gate with one of those gaits that others before her didn't exhibit. The flow of her movement stood out amidst the crowd of walking passengers weary of the time spent sitting. Amusingly, sitting is the new smoking in terms of health, and I tell you this while sitting down and just before going outside for another smoke.
My dog died a year ago, and since then I'm not forced to walk around one hour daily to maintain its happiness levels. That lack of maintenance endowed me with a bigger belly, so new reasons to force me to walk are in the forge of my very belly. After all, our guts turned out to be our second brain. And, no, our brain is the boss of our sexual organs, and not the other way around: it's just that our brains are, wisely, very reproduction-oriented, and we've to thank nature for it to be so pleasurably so. With such two brains, the connection in between two separate pleasures, food and sex, has quite some new reason to be made. Perhaps I should forget about that cigarette and go out for some chocolate instead.
Tergiversation aside, I've been observing how we walk. This time of the year is appropriate for that as the city is brimming with tourists so the walk of more than one culture can be scrutinised, and as we are wearing less clothes much more of the mechanics of walking can be thus seen. And if you're thinking I'm just finding an excuse to my pervert ways, if you're measuring the double sense of my talk, let me inform you that I've been observing men too, and no children at all.
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| "Walking Man" a sculpture by Mathew Harding |
And it turns out to be that days pass without an elegant walker being spotted. Or rather, without a walker drawing my attention. The elegant walker is the agent after all, while I'm just a passive walker-by.
In films, where most of the time we're watching actors from the belly up, I started to pay attention to the frames when their full person is shown walking. And attractive looking people don't seem to pass the test very often. As one example, George Clooney's elephantine displacement cuts his grace in half.
Could it be that as we inherited a face we inherited a motion as well? Or is it derived from culture? Or from our very emotional traumas? (physical traumas are too obvious a walking changer.) How much of how we walk is a result of our own body's mechanics? Has the time we spend sitting down increased our awkwardness as upright walking primates? Should we walk more and drive or be driven less? I can't answer these questions as I'm not a scientist or will ever study the subject at hand. Err, at foot.
I don't even know if my own stride is graceful, and I apologise for drawing your attention to this subject when we have so many others, more or less important, to deal with constantly. But I invite you to join me for a walk whenever you feel like it. I'll, of course, be watching you from up close.
