walk and move

In general I try to not stockpile things anymore, magazines, postcards, boxes and boxes full of them, but sometimes by chance I discover something useful again. Like last half of the year the idea of walking as an essential movement has been all around, notably with All This Can Happen, I now discovered (while visiting home/land) in an old issue of Another magazine a whole special about Robert Walsers The Walk. Travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin writes in there: "The best thing is to walk. For life is a journey through wilderness." A walk is constantly moving forward, in an ongoing balance between motion and still, where each step becomes an image.

Robert Skyner describes how this most essential movement works and essentially, perhaps, how life works, too: "To walk, we have to lean forward, lose our balance, and begin to fall. We let go constantly of the previous stability, falling all the time, trusting that we will find a succession of new stabilities with each step."

via 3ammagazine

Later on in his text, Chatwin cites Robert Burt from his Anatomy of Melancholy:

"The sun rises and sets, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow...to teach us that we should ever be in motion." 

Ever be in motion...so it is no wonder that Robert Walser has been found dead, after a walk, in the snow, lying there, nearly peacefully as if just pausing from his journey after his last dance.

Robert Walser found dead in 1956