I’m not telling you a new thing when I say that everything repeats itself. We ourselves are masters of repetition, striving for perfection, reaching our goals by never reaching our goal. Turning the past into the future and the future into the past. Stepping into other peoples’ steps as soon as we have learned to walk.
The idea is simple. I will walk 238.979 steps in a circle. I will walk the same circle again and again. The walking will wear out a circle in the earth. The diameter of the circle will be about 10 meter. This means I will walk about 6.300 circles and just over 190 km.
Possible locations:
Park-an-der-Ilm (my first choice if I get permission!)
Kirschbachtal
my own tiny garden
About the number of steps:
Between 1937 and 1945 about 238.979 people from more than 50 countries were deported to the concentrationcamp Buchenwald just outside Weimar and stayed for a longer or shorter period in the camp where a lot of them died.
About the circle:
“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays. Circles.)
A circle is a perfect shape, otherwise it isn’t a circle. Could I ever walk a perfect circle? Of course I couldn’t, not even if I would try 6.356 times. And although I will walk the same path again end again, always ending where I began until there is no beginning and no end, I will never step exactly on a step I made earlier. I will repeat and fail, and succeed in my failure. A useless act, leaving visual traces only for the time being, but remaining in peoples memories for the rest of their lives.
About my training:
In the period leading up to the “big circular walk” I make walks with the same number of steps as the days I am old on that particular day. For example: May 26 I was exactly 14.492 days old. I walked that number of steps, starting from the front door of my house in Weimar. I took a photo of the exact location I found myself in after 14.492 steps.
* A scientific article with the title "Walking straight into circles" was published in 2009, researchers Jan L. Souman, Ilja Frissen, Manish N. Sreenivasa and Marc O. Ernst describe how and research why people who get lost in unfamiliar terrain often end up walking in circles.
