I’m in the middle of doing one semester’s part-time teaching at Cal
Arts (MFA workshop on the novel). Maybe
you’ve heard of it. They say of
themselves, “As an internationally recognized school
for the performing and visual arts—film, theater, art, dance, music and
writing—the CalArts artistic philosophy places an emphasis on an exploration of
new paths beyond conventional boundaries.”
That sounds like me, for sure.
Anyway, Calarts is thirty miles north of Los
Angeles, set in the middle of a green, rolling campus and the first time I saw
it I thought I, “Wow this place is huge, there’ll be so many opportunities for
walking around and drifting and exploring it.”
I’m “mentoring” a couple of students and I
have even been known to employ the peripatetic method when discussing things
with them. I think they find it winningly eccentric, or at least
eccentric.
But the odd thing and the interesting
thing is that once you’ve walked round the campus even once you realize it
isn’t nearly as big as you thought it was, and also although it certainly does
have elements that are green and rolling, an incredibly high percentage of its
acreage is given over to parking lots.
This seems fair enough in one way.
You’re not likely to get there without a car and you have to have
somewhere to park the damn thing once you get it there.
The campus walk will also show you that
there really aren’t very many people walking around, and the few that are most
likely are walking from the car to their main building or vice versa.
On my first cursory stroll I did see what
looked like an intriguing path, running through a hillside on the edge of the
campus, and I saw that some graffiti had been painted on it – a face and a
penis – not precisely “beyond conventional boundaries” but hey, street art gets
everywhere.
So last week, before I started teaching, I
decided I’d try to walk along this path.
The first, and in some ways the last, problem was finding where it
started. I didn’t much want to scramble
down the hillside, if only because I thought it’d be a terrible sweat to
scramble up again.
I poked, I walked, I ambled around in the
scrub and finally found the start of what proved not to be a “path” after
all. It looked like this:
And it wasn’t exactly an optical illusion,
more a trick of perspective, the thing I was looking at wasn’t a path at all,
it was part of a concrete drainage system. And it wasn’t flat, the way it had
looked from the top of the hill, but it ran at an angle, which is no doubt what
you need for water runoff along a concrete drainage system.
Well I was glad to have “solved” that
problem though as a walking expedition it was a bit of a bust, and of course it
meant there were even fewer opportunities for walking the campus than I’d
thought. I went off to teach my class
and finally found some walkers; my own students.
Later
in the week, after some discussion about Thomas Bernhard, one of them
sent
me this passage from Bernhard's Wittgenstein’s Nephew:
“I do
not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have
always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and
this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing theatricality
about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover
or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to
convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know
nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the
country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country
if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except
nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and
implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul,
and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time
contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever
I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature.
It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I
find hostile.”
Here’s a picture of Thomas Bernhard
walking, or doing something anyway.
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