The body described again and again in postmodern theory does not suffer under the elements, encounter other species, experience primal fear or much in the way of exhilaration, or strain its muscles to the utmost. In sum, it doesn’t engage in physical endeavor or spend time out of doors. The very term “the body” so often used by postmodernists seems to speak of a passive object, and that body appears most often laid out upon the examining table or in bed. A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is a site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production. Having been liberated from manual labor and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound (and relevant to walking’s history, as we shall see), only to propose that they are so emphasized because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people. The body presented to us in these hundreds of volumes and essays, this passive body for which sexuality and biological function are the only signs of life, is in fact not the universal human body but the white-collar urban body, or rather a theoretical body that can’t even be theirs, since even minor physical exertions never appear: this body described in theory never even aches from hauling the complete works of Kierkegaard across campus. “If the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all,” writes Susan Bordo, one feminist theorist at odds with this version of embodiment.
Travel, the other great theme of recent postmodern theory, is about being utterly mobile; the one has failed to modify the other, and we seem to be reading about the postmodern body shuttled around by airplanes and hurtling cars, or even moving around by no apparent means, muscular, mechanical, economic, or ecological. The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square; it does not move but is moved. In a sense, these are problems arising from the level of abstraction of contemporary theory. Much of the terminology of location and mobility—words like nomad, decentered, marginalized, deterritorialized, border, migrant, and exile—are not attached to specific places and people; they represent instead ideas of rootlessness and flux that seem as much the result of the ungrounded theory as its putative subject. Even in these endeavors to come to terms with the tangible world of bodies and motion, abstraction dematerializes them again. The words themselves seem to move freely and creatively, unburdened by the responsibilities of specific description.
Only in maverick writings does the body become active. In Elaine Scarry’s magisterial book The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World, she considers first how torture destroys the conscious world of its subjects, then theorizes how creative efforts—making both stories and objects—construct that world. She describes tools and manufactured objects as extensions of the body into the world and thus ways of knowing it. Scarry documents how the tools become more and more detached from the body itself, until the digging stick that extends the arm becomes a backhoe that replaces the body. Though she never discusses walking directly, her work suggests philosophical approaches to the subject. Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable, but walking itself extends into the world as do those tools that augment the body. The path is an extension of walking, the places set aside for walking are monuments to that pursuit, and walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it. Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire; walking sticks, shoes, maps, canteens, and backpacks are further material results of that desire. Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
Chapter 3
RISING AND FALLING:
The Theorists of Bipedalism
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for. Out train and car windows, in my imagination, and on my walks through more complicated terrain, flat expanses would call to me, promising walking as I imagined it. And now I had arrived at the pure plane of a dry lake bed where I could walk uninterrupted and utterly free. The desert holds many of these dry lake beds or playas, washed long ago or annually to a surface as flat and inviting as a dance floor when dry. These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor, like in the blues. This one, near Joshua Tree National Park, in southeastern California’s Mojave Desert, was occasionally a lake bed but mostly a pure plain of cracked dust in which nothing grew. To me these big spaces mean freedom, freedom for the unconscious activity of the body and the conscious activity of the mind, places where walking hits a steady beat that seems to be the pulse of time itself. Pat, my companion on this walk across the lake bed, prefers rock climbing, in which every move is an isolated act that absorbs the whole of his attention and seldom rises to a rhythm. It’s a difference of style that cuts deep in our lives: he is something of a Buddhist and conceives of spirituality as being conscious in the moment; while I am a sucker for symbolisms, interpretations, histories, and a Western kind of spirituality that is located less in the here than in the there. But both of us share the same notion of being out in the land as an ideal way to exist.
Walking, I realized long ago in another desert, is how the body measures itself against the earth. On this lake bed, each step brought us minutely closer to one of the ranges of mountains, blue in the late afternoon light, that circled our horizon like the bleachers rising above a field. Picture the lake bed as a pure geometric plane that our steps measured like the legs of a protractor swinging back and forth. The measurements recorded that the earth was large and we were not, the same good and terrifying news most walks in the desert provide. On this afternoon even the cracks in the ground cast long sharp shadows, and a shadow like a skyscraper stretched from Pat’s van. Our shadows moved alongside us on our right, growing longer and longer, longer than I had ever seen them. I asked him how long he thought they were, and he told me to stand still and he’d pace it off. I faced east into my shadow, toward the closest mountains that all the shadows stretched toward, and he began to walk.
I stood alone, my shadow like a long road Pat traveled. He seemed, in that pellucid air, not to grow distant but only to grow smaller. When I could frame him between my thumb and forefinger held close together and his own shadow stretched almost to the mountains, he had reached the shadow of my head—but as he arrived, the sun suddenly slipped below the horizon. With that, the world changed: the plain lost its gilding, the mountains became a deeper blue, and our sharp shadows grew blurry. I called for him to stop at the now-vague shadow of my head, and when I had myself covered the distance between us, he told me he’d gone a hundred paces—250 or 300 feet—but what constituted my shadow had become harder and harder to distinguish as he went. We walked back to the van as night approached, the experiment concluded. But where did it begin?
Rousseau thought that humanity’s true nature could be found in its origins, and that to understand those origins was to understand who we were and who we should be. The subject of human origins has itself evolved immensely since he cobbled together a few sketchy descriptions of non-European customs with some groundless speculation on the “noble savage.” But the argument that who we were originally—whether originally means 1940 or three million years ago—is who we are or ought to be has only become stronger with time. Popular books and scientific articles debate again and again whether we are a bloodthirsty, violent species or a communitarian one and what kind of differences between the genders are encoded in our genes. Both are often just-so stories about who we are, could be, or should be, told by everyone from conservatives arguing the adequ
acy of tradition to health seekers arguing that we ought to eat some just-discovered primordial diet. This, of course, makes who we were an intensely political subject. The scientists researching human origins have been contentious about these questions of human nature, and in recent years walking has become a central part of their conversation.
While philosophers have had little to say about what walking means, scientists have of late had a great deal to say. Paleontologists, anthropologists, and anatomists have launched a passionate and often partisan argument over when and why the ancestral ape got up on its hind legs and walked so long that its body became our upright, two-legged, striding body. They were the philosophers of walking I had been looking for, speculating endlessly about what each bodily shape says about function and about how those forms and functions eventually added up to our humanity—though what that humanity consists of is equally debatable. The only given is that upright walking is the first hallmark of what became humanity. Whatever its causes, it caused much more: it opened up vast new horizons of possibility, and among other things, it created the spare pair of limbs dangling from the upright body, seeking something to hold or make or destroy, the arms freed to evolve into ever more sophisticated manipulators of the material world. Some scholars see two-legged walking as the mechanism that set our brains expanding, others as the structure that established our sexuality. So, although the debate about the origins of bipedalism is full of detailed descriptions of hip joints and foot bones and geologic dating methods, it is ultimately about sex, landscape, and thinking.
Usually the uniqueness of human beings is portrayed as a matter of consciousness. Yet the human body is also unlike anything else on earth, and in some ways has shaped that consciousness. The animal kingdom has nothing else like this column of flesh and bone always in danger of toppling, this proud unsteady tower. The few other truly two-legged species—birds, kangaroos—have tails and other features for balance, and most of these bipeds hop rather than walk. The alternating long stride that propels us is unique, perhaps because it is such a precarious arrangement. Four-legged animals are are as stable as a table when all four feet are on the ground, but humans are already precariously balanced on two before they begin to move. Even standing still is a feat of balance, as anyone who has watched or been a drunk knows.
Reading the accounts of human walking, it is easy to begin to think of the Fall in terms of the falls, the innumerable spills, possible for a suddenly upright creature that must balance all its shifting weight on a single foot as it moves. John Napier, in an essay on the ancient origins of walking, wrote, “Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe. . . . Man’s bipedal mode of walking seems potentially catastrophic because only the rhythmic forward movement of first one leg and then the other keeps him from falling flat on his face.” This is easiest to see in small children for whom the many aspects that will later unite seamlessly into walking are still distinct and awkward. They learn to walk by flirting with falling—they lean forward with their body and then rush to keep their legs under that body. Their plump bowed legs always seem to be lagging behind or catching up, and they often tumble into frustration before they master the art. Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the Fall.
Genesis may seem out of place in a discussion of science, but it is often the scientists who have dragged it in with them, unwittingly or otherwise. The scientific stories are as much an attempt to account for who we are as any creation myth, and some of them seem to hark back to the central creation myth of Western culture, that business of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Many of the hypotheses have been wildly speculative, seemingly based less on the evidence than on modern desires or old social mores, particularly as they relate to the roles of the sexes. During the 1960s, the Man the Hunter story was widely accepted and made popular by such books as Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis, with its famous opening line “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was man born.” It suggested that violence and aggression are ineradicable parts of human disposition, but redeemed them by proposing that they were the means by which we evolved (or males evolved; most of the mainstream theories have tended to leave females doing little but passing along the genes of their evolving mates). Early challengers of the Man the Hunter scenario, writes the feminist anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, “point out parallels between the interpretation of hunting as propelling humankind into humanity, on the one hand, and the biblical myth of expulsion from Eden, after Eve’s eating of the tree of knowledge, on the other. The authors argue that both fates—that of hunting and of the expulsion—were precipitated by an act of eating—meat in the first instance and forbidden fruit in the other.” And they argue that the division of labor—men as hunters, women as gatherers—reflects the distinct division of roles given Adam and Eve in Genesis. Similarly, during the 1960s and 1970s, the theory went that human walking evolved during a time of radical climate change, when the species was transformed from an arboreal forest dweller to a creature of the savannah, another expulsion from Eden. Nowadays both the dominance of hunting and the residence on the savannah have fallen from favor as evolutionary explanations. But the language remains: scientists now pursuing human origins not in fossils but in genes describe our hypothetical common ancestor as “African Eve” or “Mitochondrial Eve.”
These scientists have sometimes looked for what they wanted to find, or found what they were looking for. The Piltdown man hoax was believed from 1908 to its denouement in 1950 because British scientists were eager to believe the evidence of a large-brained creature with an animal jaw. The bones suggested that our intelligence was of great age and gratified them by showing up in England. Much was made of clever Piltdown man as an Englishman, until new technologies proved him a liar cobbled together from a modern ape’s jaw and a human skull. When Raymond Dart found a child’s skull in South Africa in 1924 that, unlike Piltdown man, turned out to be genuine, it was widely discredited as a human ancestor by the British masters so pleased by Piltdown. It was discredited because the scientists of the era preferred not to come from Africa and because the skull of the Taung child, as it was called, had a small cranium but evidently walked upright, suggesting that our intelligence had come late rather than early in our evolution. At the base of the skull is an opening called the foramen magnum through which the spinal cord connects to the brain. The foramen magnum of the Taung child was in the center of the skull, as it is in us, rather than at the back, as it is in apes, and so it was evident that this creature had walked upright, its head poised atop the spine rather than hanging down from it. Like most of the skulls of the australopithecine hominids who would evolve into humans, this one looks to the modern eye like a house with odd proportions: the porch of the brow and jutting jaw is enormous, the attic where the modern brain rises is nonexistent. Most early evolutionists proposed that our human characteristics—walking, thinking, making—originated together, perhaps because they found it hard or unpleasant to imagine a creature who shared only a part of our humanity. Dart’s counter-hypothesis was advanced by Louis and Mary Leakey’s spectacular Kenyan finds in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and all but confirmed by Donald Johanson’s celebrated discovery of the “Lucy” skeleton and related fossils in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Walking came first.
Nowadays walking upright is considered to be the Rubicon the evolving species crossed to become hominid, distinct from all other primates and ancestral to human beings. The list of what we eventually got from bipedalism is long and alluring, full of all the gothic arches and elongations of the body. Start with the straight row of toes and high arch of the foot. Go up the long straight walker’s legs to the buttocks, round and protruberant thanks to the massively developed gluteus maximus of walkers, a minor muscle in apes but the largest muscle
in the human body. Then go on to the flat stomach, the flexible waist, the straight spine, the low shoulders, the erect head set atop a long neck. The upright body’s various sections are balanced on top of each other like the sections of a pillar, while the weight of quadrupeds’ heads and torsos hangs from their spines like the roadway from a suspension bridge, with a pair of pierlike legs toward either end. The great apes are knuckle-walkers: creatures adapted to life in tropical forests who for the most part move only short distances on the ground between trees, on long forelimbs that give them a kind of diagonal posture. Apes have—when compared to humans—arched backs, no waists, short necks, chests shaped like inverted funnels, protruberant abdomens, scrawny hips and bottoms, bandy legs, and flat feet with opposable big toes.
When I think about this evolutionary history of walking, I see a small figure, like my companion on the lake bed, only this time it is dawn and the figure is moving toward me, an indecipherable dot in the distance that seems somehow unfamiliar as it becomes distinguishable as an upright figure and finally, when it draws close, is just another walker. But what was that casting a long shadow in the middle distance? Lucy—as they named the small 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974, presuming from various details that it was female—was apelike in many respects; she had little in the way of a waist or neck, short legs, longish arms, and the funnel-like rib cage of an ape. Her pelvis, however, was wide and shallow, and so she had a stable gait with hip joints far apart tapering to close-together knees like humans and unlike chimps (whose narrow hips and far-apart knees make them lurch from side to side when they walk upright). Some say she would have been a terrible runner and not much of a walker. But she walked. This much is certain, and then come the arguments.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 5