"Travel, the other great theme of recent postmodern theory, is about being utterly mobile; the one has failed to moditfy 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 to another square; it does not move, it is moved."
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"To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes suring the journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp."
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"In going on pilgrimage, one has left behind the complications of one's place in the world - family, attachments, rank, duties - and become a walker among walkers, for there is no aristocracy among pilgrims save that of achievement and dedication. The Turners talk about pilgrimage as a liminal state - a state of being between one's ast and future identities and thus outside the established order, in a state of possibility. Liminality comes from the Latin limin, a threshold, and a pilgrim has both symbolically and physically stepped over such a line: "Liminars are stripped of status and authority, removed from social structure maintained and sanctioned power and force and leveled to a homogenous social state through discipline and ordeal."
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Charles F. Lummis "Tramp across the continent":
"I was neither after time nor money, but life - not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete, but life in the truer, broader, sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and wakend mind..."
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"Long-distance walking in North America never had the gentility of the walking tour. In England, you can walk from pub to pub or inn to inn (or, nowadays, from hostel to hostel), in America long-distance walk is usually a plunge into the wilderness or at least un-English scale anbd uninviting spaces such as highways and hostile towns.
There seem to be three motives for these long-distance trips: to comprehend a place's natural and social makeup; to comprehend oneself; and to set a record, and most are a combination of the three. An extremely long walk is often taken up as a sort of pilgrimage, a proof of some kind of faith or will, as well as means of spiritual and practical discovery."
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"...a walker does not skip over much, sees things close up, and makes himself vulnerable and accessible to local people and places. On the other hand, a walker may be so consumed by atheltic endeavor as to be unable to participate in his surroundings, particularly when driven by a schedule or competition."
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"But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect.
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"The Guiness Book of Records defines a walk artound the world as beginning and finishing in the same place, crossing four continents, and covering a total of at least 16000 miles,"
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Henriette d'Angeville:
"I am among those who prefer the grandeur of natural landscapes to the sweetest or most charming views imaginable ... It was not the puny fame of being the first woman to venture on such a journey that filled me with the exhilaration such projects always called forth; rather it was the awareness of the spiritual well-being that would follow"
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"Joseph Beuys: "Everyone an artist" ... that everyone could become a producer rather than a consumer of meaning (the same idea lies behind punk culture's DIY - do it yourself - credo). This is the highest ideal of democracy - that everyone can participate in making their own life and the life of the community..."
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"In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by creation of a world that is no longer human scale."
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"It is the unaugmented body that is rare now, and that body has begun to atrophy as both a muscular and a sensory organism. In the century and a half since the railroad seemed to go too fast to be interesting, perceptions and expectations have sped up, so that many now identify with the speed of the machine and look with frustration or aliennation at the speed and ability of their own body. The world is no longer on the scale of our bodies, but on that of our machines, and many need - or think they need - the machines to navigate that space quickly enough. Of course, like most "time-saving" technologies, mechanized transit more often produces changed expectations than free time; and modern Americanshave significantly less time than they did three decades ago. To put it another way, just as the increased speed of factory production did not decrease working hours, so the increased speed of transportation binds people to more diffuse locales rather than liberating them from travel time (many Californians, for example, now spend three to four hours driving to and from work each day)."
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"It is its monotonous steadiness and not its severity, which constitues its terror, and frequently breaks down the obstinate spirit," Hardie wrote on the treadmill's effect in the American prison he oversaw."
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"The Gym is the interior space that compensates for the disappearance of outside and a stopgap in the erosion of bodies. The gym is a factory for the production of muscles or of fitness, and most of them look like factories: the stark industrial space, the gleam of metal machines, the isolated figures each absorbed in his own repetetive task..."
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"What exactly is the nature of the transformation in which machines now pump our water but we go to other machines to engage in the act of pumping, not for the sake of water but for the sake of our bodies, bodies theoretically liberated by machine technology? Has something been lost when the relationship between our muscles and our world vanishes, when the water is managed by one machine and the muscles by another in two unconnected processes? The body used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead the body is exercised as one might walk a dog."
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About hometrainers:
"The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is nowhere to go. Or no desire to go : the treadmill also accommodates the automobilized and suburbanized mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors; more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors."
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"When I went to Tibet and the Aborigines I was also introduced to some Sufi rituals. I saw that all these cultures pushed the body to the physical extreme in order to make a mental jump, to eliminate the fear of death, fear of pain, and of all the bodily limitations we live with," Abramovic later said."
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