Walkscape Now!

Sitting out on the Oval with the Walkscape Scroll--across from me is Preacher Tom ("I never thought I could be going to hell"); to my left, Students for a Sustainable Campus in veggie costumes, accompanied by a fiddle-and-banjo duo; to my right, a Greek group quarter-pitching for cancer research ("win a beer mug"); somebody selling paintball tickets; an Obama insignia. Meanwhile, all around, it's carnival--bare flesh, frisbee, flirting and high spirits of various kinds.

It's an ironic coincidence that our day here began, just after 10 am, with a collision between two bicycles that left one young man with a concussion. Walking is safer, for sure.

OSU.Edo

Mirror Lake at noon--
Mallard asleep in the sun,
a duck in the shade.

Wikipedia:

Edo (江戸 ^?), literally: bay-door, "estuary", pronounced [edo]), also romanized as Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868. During this period it grew to become one of the largest cities in the world and the site of a vibrant urban culture centered on notions of the "floating world".^[1]

In the West

Windrise over West Campus.
Storm clouds massed and moving
across the fields
where the cows still graze, solemn
in the damp gusts
Like a gathering of Stoic philosophers.

The fountain in Fred Beekman Park
keeps gushing, idly.
A lone goose paddles in the spray. On Kenney Road
the cars shudder and start to rush,
raising their voices as the rain hits
and a loamy smell
lifts from the earth.

Great 'Scapes Upcoming

Gerlach Hall, Fisher College of Business

With the Walkscape spring finale coming up next week, we're scheduling a couple of group walks, to generate interest and conversation:

Tuesday May 19th, 3:00pm: TBD Walk with Rick Livingston;
Start: On the Pedestrian Bridge Over the Olentangy at the Drake Union

Wednesday May 20th, 8:30am:
Thoreau Walk with Ann Bremner and Prudence Gill;
Start: Center of the Oval, please bring a stick.

Walking patterned ground

In an earlier post, I referred to the book Patterned Ground, edited by Harrison, Thrift and Pile. Subtitled "Entanglements of Nature and Culture," the book is divided into three sections (Flow, Site, Matter), comprised of brief (3-4 pp) essays by a variety of writers/scholars/artists, on topics ranging from Continents and Virtual Space to Pipes and Wildlife. The term "patterned ground" comes from geology, but the editors extend it into a metaphor for activated relationship to the world--a patterning perceived or imagined that gathers humans into the landscape.

Anyone flying over the continental US will notice the rectilinear inscriptions that make up the Jeffersonian grid-system (lots, townships, etc), and the network of interstates that traverse the countryside and bind the cities together. The local inscriptions--smaller-scaled, more intimate lines of desire--are harder to see from the air, but make up tactical adaptations of/to the prescribed and hardscaped pathways. Still more lightly sketched are idiosyncratic patterns, escape routes, "lines of flight"--these may be invisible from the air, ambiguous from the ground, occasional and improvisatory, momentary openings in the fabric of conventional movement.

Walkscape is an open invitation to stray, to loosen the constraints of habitual motion (goal-oriented, purposive, efficient) and perhaps discover other motives for movement, different ways of aligning body and mind. Patterned Ground suggests that patterning is active and constructive: other orderings emerging into attention, on multiple scales and timescapes. Recovering the full range of motion--physical and mental--could be a project worth pursuing.

17th Ave, Back of MUCIA (After Richard Long)

South of South Campus

My daily route to work takes me through the area just south of South Campus--a mixed area, mostly off-campus student housing. (A notable sign, hanging from a second-floor balcony: The Brick House, painted on the hood-flap of a car). The rhythms of the quarter are marked by the amount of trash in the streets. It is, apparently, a local custom to toss empty beer cans from the porch onto the sidewalk, in the belief that the homeless can collect them for cash.

I've never taken much notice of the architecture before: there are houses converted to housing, of course, and a lot of generic mid-70's apartment buildings, complete with mansard roofs. I hadn't noticed a recurrent stylistic whim: the number of two-story buildings, brick below and shingled above, a kind of brownstone/Cape Cod hybrid. There are also a number of somewhat older buildings, with quite nice yellow-brick facades over red-brick, many with decorative neo-gothic touches. Then up onto South Campus, with its massed phalanx of apartment blocks, Corbusian concrete tricked out with red-brick corners, apologetically.