I brought a book along because at the end of my walk, there's my favorite cafe. They have the best coffee in Weimar and serve a decent croissant.
It always takes me about an hour to get there, I guess I could be quicker but there's usually something catching my attention, or a photo has to be taken, or I get lost in a thought and my pace slows down. The fields always intrigue me, their color, the lines, the small things happening. While walking I thought about my plans for this semester. Last summer I embroidered my thoughts in a three-piece walking suit. This semester I want to develop this idea further.
In the Kaffeeladen I opened my book. John Berger, About Looking. I had actually brought it because it was lying around and I still hadn't read it. I quickly discovered it had been the right book for this day. In this book, Berger explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. One of the first essays is called "The Suit and the Photograph". Berger writes about August Sander's well-known photograph of three young peasants on the road going to a dance, as well as some other photos of men in suits. There is a reference to Goethe in the essay which was precisely what I read (in other words) in Henri Bortoft's book "The wholeness of nature. Goethe's way towards a science of conscious participation in nature." yesterday evening before I fell asleep: "There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory." But the biggest surprise of all was the last essay in the book. It is titled "Field" and if I could I would have quoted the whole essay here, but let's stick to some quotes.
"This field affords me considerable pleasure. Why then do I not sometimes walk there - it is quite near my flat - instead of relying on being stopped there by the closed level crossing? It is a question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take place in the field - two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing the sun and changing the color of the green - acquire a special signficance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin".
He explains how any field, if perceived in a certain way, may offer this experience and then describes the ideal field, the field most likely to generate the experience. Then he goes back to describing some of the events that might happen in the field. And how they relate to the field. "You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are sitll occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events."
He then explains why he first referred to the field as a space awaiting events and later on as an event in itself. The last line in the essay is the best one.
"The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life."
(John Berger, About looking. Bloomsberry 2009, "Field", p. 199-205)
