Episode 59: Green Mountains Are Always Walking

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around a lake." This line from Wallace Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" captures something of the mysteries of walking. It points to the undeniable yet baffling relationship between walking and thinking, between putting one foot in front of the other and uncovering the secret of the soul and world. In this episode, JF and Phil exchange ideas about the weirdness of this thing most humans did on most days for most of world history. The conversation ranges over a vast territory, with zen monks, novelists, Jesuits and more joining your hosts on what turns out to be a journey to wondrous places.

Header image by Beatrice, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Dogen, The Mountains and Waters Sutra
Weird Studies listener Stephanie Quick on the Conspirinormal podcast
Weird Studies episode 51, Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'
Lionel Snell, SSOTBME
Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"
Arthur Machen, "The White People"
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Vladimir Horowitz, Russian panist
Gregory Bateson, cybernetic theorist
The myth of the Giant Antaeus
Wallce Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
John Cowper Powys, English novelist
Will Self, English writer
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait”
Paul Thomas Anderson (director), Punch Drunk Love
Viktor Shklovsky, Russian formalist
Patreon blog post on Phil’s dream
David Lynch (director), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me