Take baby steps.
“The modern version of hell is purposelessness,” wrote the English novelist John Fowles in a brilliant essay accompanying photographs of individual trees in an oddly titled book about forests, The Tree.
While ostensibly writing about trees, Fowles writes about the need to get lost, to literally wander through the green chaos of forests and the mental greenwood of our psyches without a planned route – purposeless.
He writes about art and the art of life as analogous to wandering through a dense woodland and stumbling in wonder upon a hidden treasure, something akin to Tolstoy’s green stick hidden in the forest that contains the secret to happiness, no matter how brief. Fowles argues that it is because so much of the natural surround is useless that there is so much hostility toward it.
Everything and everyone have become commodified, and only valued for their use value. Science, as opposed to art, seeks to categorize and control us and nature; to impose on our minds the idea that nature is outside us, separate, alien territory to enter only with a map and shield.
The wild green man or woman, open to the flow of experience, to wandering, to the serendipitous, the unexpected is a dangerous outlaw. That the woods have long represented places of freedom to our ancestors in fact and in fiction is not just because life was more rural then but because the wild world hidden among trees corresponds to needs of the soul. Fowles compares trees, the woods, walking planless through them, as the best analogue of prose fiction, which is equivalent to living life.
Sitting still too much is the real sin against the Holy Ghost, said Nietzsche, who was a great walker “on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.” And he was not alone. Thoreau, Rimbaud, D. H. Lawrence, Rousseau, Gandhi, et al. knew that only by getting off our asses and putting them behind us might we discover something new, an unexpected treasure only available to outsiders with no expectations, no plans, having relinquished control.
When recently feeling lost, not in the woods but in my thinking mind, I remembered all this good advice about walking and purposely getting lost. So I stood up and took a few baby steps, putting one foot in front of the other, which I think is called walking. I then realized that I was doing everything ass-backwards, which seemed counterproductive. So I sat down on my ass again and started to think it through.
What, I asked myself, was I trying to accomplish by walking? What was my purpose? But if I had a purpose, wouldn’t it contradict Fowles’ point about wandering without one?
So I stood up again and took a few more baby steps. I turned my head to see if my ass was still behind me. It was. It occurred to me that I never saw anyone with their ass forwards, so what fool came up with the saying “he did it ass backwards,” meaning stupidly? I really wanted to put my best foot forward and do this walking right. I knew my left foot was my good foot and my right foot was even better, but I couldn’t fathom where my best foot was. Like they say about third eyes and stuff, did I have a third foot? I had no idea and couldn’t find it. I was still lost.
I had heard from Dr. Marvin, the eminent psychiatrist, that baby steps would help me walk free. He said to follow my dreams.
So I sat down again and tried to think it through. I felt like I had put my foot in my mouth by thinking too much, so I took it out. I felt more lost than ever and gave up trying. Then I went into the bedroom and made my bed and lay in it. Soon I was asleep. I dreamed that I was going to take my son’s dog Steve out for a walk. Steve suggested that he take me. I put his collar around my neck, attached the leash, and he walked me up the hill where we entered the woods. There he let me off the leash and there, for no reason, I walked on the wild side at last. I felt found. I owe it all to Dr. Marvin and how he taught Bill Murray to just take baby steps
When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press) website: edwarcurtin.com curtine.substack.com
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