Art Walk

While I was at this weekend’s conference, I missed the first of the summer’s First Friday celebrations here in Keene. I’ve actually never been to one of these celebrations: Chris and I moved to Keene last July, so we were so tapped from the process of selling our house, liquidating a huge portion of our belongings, and settling into our new apartment that we somehow missed the various summer activities in our new hometown.

Although I’m an entirely outgoing person when I need to be (and, unfortunately, at times when I shouldn’t be), I’m not much of a joiner. It’s ironic but telling, I think, that my taciturn and reticent former office-mate has been to countless more academic conferences than I have: scholars I’ve merely heard of know him on a first name basis. When I envision any sort of club or organization, academic or otherwise, I immediately imagine the reasons why I would never fit into such a group: surely the folks in this club are too cool for the likes of me, and surely I’m not well-read enough for that organization. Perhaps this is a hold-over from a childhood growing up in a neighborhood with few other children my own age, or maybe it’s the natural tendency for thoughtful, sensitive kids to remain aloof and withdrawn. It’s curious, though, since “aloof” and “withdrawn” (like my office-mate’s self-descriptive “taciturn” and “reticent”) are not adjectives one would normally apply upon meeting me. I can make friends and fit into groups, but for some reason I tend not to.

So it somehow seems fitting that I’ve been enjoying the leftover remnants of this past weekend’s First Friday Art Walk while doing my usual lonely circuit around the Square with the dog. There are no crowds of other strollers jostling for elbow room; I don’t have to stretch and strain to see over or around the heads of other art admirers. Instead, I have the shop-windows of Keene virtually to myself, each being filled with an assortment of art (paintings, quilts, pottery, sculpture) by local artists and school-children: art by and for the masses. I like the idea of a pedestrian festival devoted to art and artistry: I think the term “Art Walk” is a delightfully redundant term, walking itself being an art with few truly practiced practitioners.

In his journal, no less an authority than Henry David Thoreau noted that “It is a great art to saunter”; in his essay “Walking,” Thoreau laments that he has “met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” I don’t know if Thoreau would have included me in his privileged company of “not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers”; Thoreau very well might have lumped me together with his fellow villagers, those “vile” folks who saw roads as being the practical way or via toward the marketplace and its monetary pursuits. These days, I walk for the dog’s sake as well as my own: perhaps it’s not possible to saunter with a leashed dog in tow. I do know, though, that it cheers my heart to see other walkers, alone or in pairs, strolling the Square, men in ties and shirt-sleeves and women with sneakers and skirts enjoying a spot of fresh air on hurried lunch breaks.

There has been a long debate in both elite and popular circles about the true nature of art: is art a practice for the masses or is it something to be practiced (and truly appreciated) by only the privileged few? Debates about high- and low-brow art–disputes, in fact, about whether there is a difference between art and Art–have raged for centuries and have, I fear, frightened off many average folks who might otherwise be interested in aesthetic pursuits. I was heartened to see, then, a local shop window that displayed gorgeously wrought quilts as an example of “art”: here at least this form of “women’s work” is applauded for its mastery, creativity, and design, a craft that is both intentional and artistic. Similarly inspiring was another shop window filled with intricately welded metal animals: why should a paintbrush be deemed superior to an acetylene torch if the creative impulse of each craftsman is the same?

None other than Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance” argued that that the toil of common workingmen could be considered a higher action: “The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.” If stodgy old Emerson could see a laborer’s work as a kind of prayer, it seems no more generous for Thoreau to see an office-worker’s lunchtime stroll, a young mother’s jaunt with a baby carriage, and even a restless academic’s walk with an equally antsy dog as falling within the Saunterer’s art. Is the noble order of Walkers closed to those who have to work for a living or who walk with others? Is Sauntering an art only to be practiced by long-dead writers who themselves weren’t much in the way of joining?

If I could travel through time, I’d love to go walking with Thoreau: I’d love to show him around Keene, the town where his own mother was born. I’d show him around the forested hills and rocky country-side; I’d show him Beaver Brook Falls and take him up Beech Hill. And I’d walk him, dog-like, through town, pointing out shop windows hawking cell-phones, mutual funds, and high-tech running shoes, products the likes of which Thoreau probably could have never imagined. And if he and his legs were up to it, I’d saunter with Thoreau down to Colony Mill Marketplace, where we’d sashay into the Toadstool Bookshop to show him his own writings hawked and marketed alongside the likes of common folk he’d never envisioned.

Ultimately, we’re all joiners whether we like it or not. Walt Whitman recognized the “the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls”; Whitman realized that we’re all traveling to some invisible destination, our elbows perpetually brushing with those of our fellows. Walking like life is an accidental art: we practice it well or poorly without even trying or realizing. Both Walking and Art are pursuits to which we should devote our First Fridays, our Last Fridays, and all our Fridays and other days in between. It is a great art to saunter, you see, and the world needs everyone to take artful, joyous heed of their every step.