Alec Spangler: Walking and narrative

The mid-80s to early 90s was a big time for extra dimensions. Superstring theorists proposed an 11-
dimensional universe; digital virtual realities had become possible, and popular culture abounded with
stories of strange, secret worlds overlaid onto our own. It was also the period in my childhood when I
became interested in walking. The kind of walks I liked were mundane and arduous; drawn-out
errands in back-country suburbia. I don't doubt this habit began as a way of playing out my Terry
Gilliam-fueled inter-dimensional fantasies. I enjoyed going to the often seen but rarely inhabited
places I knew from car windows; medians and edges of industrial parks, places where Stephen King
might have said that the boundaries between worlds had grown thin. Had I known the word 'uncanny'
I'd have been able to describe where I wanted those walks to take me. I only knew them as my version
of a magic wardrobe.

Years later I found out about more analytic methods for such spell-casting. Erwin Straus thought that
when walkers become train travellers the phenomenon of space is contracted and systematised. So for
those of us used to mechanised forms of living, walking ought to de-systematise. I think this means
'make-into-narrative'. When I read about Straus's idea of mechanised 'geographic space' vs. bodily
'landscape space' I fully understood what walking means to me.1  Walking is narrative; and narrative is
all about embedded worlds.

I've spent some time thinking about what the expression of walking is in art and design, even in
strategies for living. For me, the answer is that the walking-self creates by telling stories: There is
duration and spatial extent. The body has a place in it. Possible outcomes are multiple and
simultaneous; there are added dimensions. There is meaning. There is no logical necessity. There is no
rightness, because stories don't have to be right. They just have to be good.


1  Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley:The University of California Press, 1986. pp 52-53

Alec Spangler. Greens #2, 2015. Coloured ink on paper, 30” x 41”Alec Spangler lives in Brooklyn and designs landscapes for Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. He has an MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; an MFA from Purchase College, SUNY; and a bachelor’s from Vassar College.