“On Stepping From The Sea To The Wind” is an eight channel sound piece by Martin Eccles. Martin showed this work on the evening of Thursday 30th April, in the Mining Institute in Newcastle (The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Neville Hall, Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne).
I went along to see how this project was coming along, Martin is recording the sound of a walk he is making once a month for a whole year, so there is potential for this work to change and grow as the year progresses. At the Mining Institute Martin had set up eight speakers on head height stands in a circle facing outwards, we were invited to experience the work in what ever way we wanted, but most people spent some, if not all the time walking round the circle of speakers.
Later Martin told me that he had received a piece of text written in response to the installation. I thought this was such a beautiful and generous way to respond to the work that I would share it (with Martin and Rachael’s permission).
The following text is by Rachael Hales, PhD Researcher, ICMuS, Newcastle University; it is addressed to Martin.
“On Stepping from the Sea to the Wind”
In Zen Buddhism, the practice of walking meditation is considered just as important as seated meditation. In the group I have attended, after a time of seated meditation a bell is rung, and a walk begins, activated by sound. Everybody gets up and walks slowly, silently; following one another round the room with steady, slow, meditative steps. Eventually, the bell rings again, signaling the end of the walking meditation, and a return to seated meditation. As we walk, we listen – we listen for the bell, listen for the sound. The website ‘Wildmind – Buddhist Meditation’ describes walking meditation as ‘an opportunity to experience the body in action; in sitting meditation the body is still, while in walking meditation we can pay attention to the body as it moves, producing stronger and more easily observed sensations.’ The website goes on to say ‘When we do walking meditation, we are using the physical, mental, and emotional experiences of walking as the basis of developing greater awareness.’ When talking to you before the performance began, you were keen to emphasise the importance of walking in your practice, and in this piece. You told me that what I was about to hear was the same walk, repeated at monthly intervals over an 8 month period. We discussed the idea that through walking, you experience place in a physical, embodied way. There are clear parallels here to the descriptions of walking meditation above. When the performance started, I had no conscious idea of how I wanted to experience it; at first, I listened to individual speakers, but as the piece started gradually, not all of the speakers were making sound. I found myself walking around, slowly, listening to hear which speakers were on, allowing the piece to gradually build as I walked around it. And I continued walking. I walked with you, the rhythm of your steps dictating my own internal rhythms. My feet followed yours, my breathing and heartbeat synchronized with your steps. Round and round. Treading the same path, over and over – just like you. I don’t know how many times I walked that path. Enough to get to know the walk intimately, physically, an embodied knowing that only comes from walking. The same kind of intimate, embodied knowing that you have come to experience, through making the piece. Like you, I get to know the sound spatially: here it is dry; here wet; here it is still; here the wind howls, buffeting the microphone, a low, bassy drone; but here also is where the birds sing most clearly, celebrating life, celebrating wind, a juxtaposition between the low thrum of the wind and the high chirping of the birds. My walk is much slower than yours, but at the same time it is much faster: seasons change at a dizzying pace, months pass in seconds, the weather changing moment by moment. As I pass each speaker, I glimpse your experience, like peering through a window into a room which extends far beyond my sight, far beyond what I can know. A glimpse as I walk past, as you glimpsed places as you walked past them – glimpses of trees, of birds, of sky and land, of people. Sometimes as I pass, distant sounds echo like fleeting memories from elsewhere in the room. My attention is diverted for a second from the window I was listening into, as I hear a distant bird; a muffled greeting from a man, out with his dog; a distant siren – or is that outside the window? It doesn’t matter; I revert back to walking, slowly, steadily. The rhythm of your feet is inside me now, so that I barely hear it; I have internalized it, your rhythm and mine are one and the same: it is inside my eardrums, inside my head, but also in my body, in my heartbeat, in my slow, gentle breath, in my feet, walking with yours. My walk and your walk are both different and the same. Your walk, your experience, activates mine, and gradually, in my own way, I come to know it. I know it through walking. I know it in my body as much as in my mind. I am aware of the subtle changes, in season, in weather, in sound, as I walk; these changes are quick, changing each time I pass a speaker; but others are much slower; the material of the path you are walking on, changing gradually; first one speaker, then another, and the room gradually moves from gravel to tarmac, the change so slow as to be imperceptible at times. There are many rhythms that I am experiencing now; the rhythm of your feet, and of mine; the rhythm of the seasons, changing as I walk; the rhythm of the bird calls; the subtle rhythms of the wind. All felt in my body. And then, gradually, the curtains are closed, one by one. Gently, you shut the door onto your experience, and silence falls once more. I am left calm, relaxed; and I feel deeply privileged, to have been able to know this experience, to have had access to these glimpses of your practice. I feel I know something of this place, which is both of this room, and of the place you walked; but it is a totally different type of knowing to that which I would have had if I had actually visited the place. There is something very special about experiencing place in this way. It is both spatial and temporal – but in a unique way. I have never experienced time and space in quite this way before. My experience of time was multiple and complex – I experienced the duration of your walk, through walking with you for 50 minutes, but within this I experienced time at a much quicker pace – a month every few seconds; but returning to that time, over and over; but always slightly different as your walk progressed, as I retraced the same path. Similarly, my experience of space was multiple and complex; I experienced the space in the room, the circle of speakers echoing the circular dome in the roof, combined with the faint echo of your circular walk; whilst at the same time I caught snatches of the space you experienced during your walk, space marked out in sound by the strength of the wind, by the distant calls of birds, by the progression of your footsteps along the path. To finish, I’d like to return to an earlier quotation: ‘When we do walking meditation, we are using the physical, mental, and emotional experiences of walking as the basis of developing greater awareness.’ For me, your recordings were the record of a type of walking meditation, a practice that you undertook in order to ‘use the physical, mental and emotional experiences of walking as the basis of developing greater awareness’. And this record, presented in the way that you did, allowed me to undertake my own walking meditation, in which my awareness of both your walk and my walk was enhanced through the experience of walking.
