Moving Through Time

In 2022, ArtEZ studium generale is focusing on the theme of Body and Power(lessness). In this article, researcher Ed McKeon delves deeper into the body’s daily negotiations with gravity in the act of walking. McKeon investigates the interplay between surrender and control, active and passive moments, and their intricate relation with the coming-into-being of time itself. 

This article is part of the programme ‘Extreme Slow Walk. Listening to the In-Between’ which brings together a team of researchers and practitioners of Deep Listening®️, the lifework of the legendary composer, sound artist and improviser Pauline Oliveros. One of the results of that programme is the podcast ‘Listening to the In-Between’, in which ArtEZ researcher and journalist Joep Christenhusz interviews Ed McKeon and other deep listeners.  

We hope you enjoy this article and the power of Deep Listening!

Abstract: This article investigates Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening exercise Extreme Slow Walk as a mode of philosophical action or the realisation of embodied knowledge. It develops a non-dualistic understanding of subjectivity by reconsidering relations between thinking and movement, and between thinker (or subject) and time as expressed in conventional notions such as ‘method,’ ‘experience,’ and ‘homeostasis.’ In contrast with conceptions of time that operate independently of perception as a regular and measurable ground for subjective experience, temporality is elaborated here as a form of movement that is neither separate from, nor purely internal to, individual perception.

In this paradigm, temporal movement is, like walking, simultaneously horizontal—forward and backward—and vertical, with a sense of depth and height involving actions of memory and anticipation. Oliveros’ exercise is introduced through her collaboration with Elaine Summers—dancer, choreographer, and pioneer of Kinetic Awareness—and the connections her work makes with Elsa Gindler’s pioneering work in psychophysical concentration; and brings this into dialogue with the implications of John Cage’s experimental music and concern for time. Deep Listening is then proposed as a musical discipline for the production of temporal awareness constitutive of subjectivity.

Keywords: Deep Listening, walking meditation, temporality, subjectivity, Pauline Oliveros

Moving as slowly as possible…¹

I’ve been reflecting on the Extreme Slow Walk that Pauline Oliveros incorporated into her practice of Deep Listening ever since I experienced it in a workshop in Athens in 2017 that was led by the writer, poet, director and performer IONE, Pauline’s spouse. I find it remarkable that what appears as the most unexceptional of actions offers such riches for practical contemplation. Walking (or breathing or listening) is something we usually take for granted, an ingrained habit that only demands attention when it goes wrong, when we injure a muscle, fall awkwardly, or step on something sharp. By stripping back the action of movement to the minimum pace we can achieve, Oliveros defamiliarizes everyday walking—just as she does listening—and invites us to ‘learn to reconnect with very subtle energies in the body as the weight shifts…. You may discover the point-to-point connections of movement and/or the merging into the experience of flow.’

Pauline Oliveros Photographer: Becky Cohen

If this description sounds like ways of experiencing time—moment by moment, or in the flow—that is no accident. Time is often understood in terms of space and movement. We go forward into the future or backwards into the past (hence the notion of ‘time travel’). A long time can pass quickly. My daughter is about to turn 18 and that time has ‘flown by.’ A short time can also drag, as anyone knows who has had to listen to ‘hold’ music on the telephone while waiting for customer services. Your inability to have the call answered more promptly—time impacts the corporation’s profit margin, as the number of call centre staff is calculated so that they never pause—also makes evident that the experience of time is also conditioned by power, which echoes ArtEZ studium generale’s theme of Body and Power(lessness). Time is money. We can be time rich or time poor. This also indicates how imprisonment is not only a state of spatial confinement but above all one of temporal punishment. Time without power can weigh heavily. It can crush spirits.

I want to approach the Walk slowly, then, without rushing. It is a thoughtful exercise in the experience of time, not just a metaphor or analogy but something that might stretch our sense of self. I begin by considering the interwoven relations of movement, time, contemplation, and knowledge. I then return to the Walk and give an account of its emergence in Oliveros’ practice, and close by paying attention to the ways Deep Listening and the Walk both shape and are shaped by forms of attention that constitute temporal experience. Let us take this idea for a walk together.

…balance may be challenged

The notion of ‘thinking on our feet’ goes back to antiquity. While not the first to exercise his mind in this way, Aristotle was called a peripatetic—‘one who paces’—because of his characteristic habit of walking while teaching, a feature that came to name the mode of philosophy he and his followers practised. More recently, Frédéric Gros elaborated a history of ambulant thought in A Philosophy of Walking.²

A good way to grasp this correspondence of movement and thinking is through the language we use to articulate it. Arguments are developed methodically step by step. ‘Method’ itself indicates a directed path, an ordered trajectory. For ancient Greeks, the hodos was ‘a road marked out upon the ground [providing] an enduring line that leads from starting point to destination,’ a royal highway from A to B, ‘a securable artery’ that shaped the terrain and ‘maintained civil identity.’³ A clear method (met-hodos) allows thinkers to travel assuredly from proposition to safe conclusions. John T. Hamilton notes how this contrasts with the poros, the way of water, the ocean’s way, the troubling route taken by Odysseus. Beset by chance, by accidents of fate, this route relies more on improvisation, on spontaneity and cunning to avoid logical aporia at the limit (peras) or boundary (peirar) of legitimate knowledge. It is also in this sense that the prefix ‘per’—‘through’—indicates something permeable, porous, such that we learn through experience and through the process of performance.

The way that we consider knowledge, then, implicates not only a passage to enlightenment or Gradus ad Parnassum (‘Steps to Parnassus’), as Johann Joseph Fux’s seminal treatise on musical counterpoint suggested. It also involves consideration of whether the path is laid down in advance of our journey, something well-trodden that everyone can follow without going astray, and so also repeatable; whether a thinker creates the path by the traces they leave on a landscape; or whether there is no path to follow, only a form of movement or path-making itself. Extreme slow walking, I will suggest, invites us precisely to forego journeying with predetermined starting point, itinerary, and destination, and instead to attend to the embodied experience of movement, its gait and rhythm.

Thinking and movement, then, provide two dimensions of this meditation. Its inseparable pair comprises the thinker (or ‘subject’) and time. We know abstractly that a life begins with birth and ends with death, but lived experience is ignorant of when these will occur. For individuals who treasure their self-mastery—for whom agency, self-control, and personal responsibility are paramount—time and the ageing and change it brings signals danger and the possibility of ruin. The future with all its contingencies and risks becomes something to be ordered and managed.

In addition to neutralising chance, then, a system of knowledge and self-narrative is needed to transubstantiate unexpected events into expected encounters. This is what Freud articulated as homeostasis, the capacity of the individual to endure injuries of time—illness, divorce, displacement, and so on—while retaining a secure sense of self-identity. I appear to be the same person now that I was from my earliest memories, held together by the unique ‘I am’ bearing the name Ed McKeon. A unified subject is one who remains essentially the same from birth to death whilst undergoing ageing through constant exposure to changing circumstances.

This also provides the model for a certain kind of historical narrative—a history of…Western music, the Netherlands, the university, and so on. Time is first externalised as the medium through which the unchanging entity moves and only then, secondarily, internalised as a narrative property, a meaningful series of events. The potential chaos of worldly synchronous activity is incorporated into a singular, bounded, endogenous, diachronous history. Time can therefore appear separate from and different to our experience of it. It can be measured abstractly as long or short, its rate of movement as fast or slow.

To appreciate this relation of subject and time and its entanglement with thought and movement, we can once again turn to its appearance in language—the privileged medium of an essay like this. It can equally be appreciated simply by carefully practising the Extreme Slow Walk.

How can an unchanging self-identical subject appear within a world in flux? How is the transubstantiation of time made possible? How might these ideal and material entities touch? The first precondition is a feeling of solid ground. To be grounded is to be stable, capable of withstanding the winds of change or erosion by time. To be one and the same—homos, and so homeo-, to be the same as or similar to—requires a sense of stasis, of standing firm and still. In contrast with walking, ‘sta-’ attests to a cessation of time or a perspective unmoved by change and contingency. We find it in arrest, epistemology (the discourse on understanding or literally on ‘over-standing’), establish, estate, institute, obstacle, restore, stable, state, stage (‘a place for standing’), status, statute, stet, store, substance, stutter, and system. We ground knowledge when we verstaan [in Dutch] or understand.

Furthermore, we like it best when this solid ground relating us to our temporal world is level and even so that our apparently unchanging selves might not trip or fall. Exploring the philological valences of ‘complacency,’ Hamilton teases out links between a satisfied sense of self-certainty and a ground rendered flat, smoothed, without obstruction. The Greek adjective platus (flat, even, smooth) qualified the secure way forward as the hodos plateia, ‘a thoroughfare with a hard-packed surface designed for smooth and convenient movement.’ ⁴ These arterial routes defined a city’s habitual paths, literally paving the way to make it knowable to citizens, giving it identity. This notion appeared in Latin as platea—place—which ‘came to denote a levelled courtyard, and then a public square’ (or plaza). The ‘pla-’ sequence appeared ‘with verbs of pleasing (placere) and soothing (placare) suggesting a core metaphor—namely, that the feeling of being pleased relates to the experience of walking upon an open area with no threat of stumbling…where communication and transportation can proceed unimpeded.’⁵

Cartography: ‘Reduc(ing) volume and depth to comprehensible surfaces’

As a planar logic, space—as time—becomes two-dimensional such that the future is rendered fully visible, foreseeable, controllable, calculable, ordered by power. It is in this sense that the blank flat page (from the Latin planum) provides the medium for laying down plans, pre-inscribing the future by laying out the path to be followed, a process of removing or circumventing obstructions and of ‘smoothing out recalcitrant difference.’ It is precisely the timeless perspective of the self-same, unmoving and unaffected by change, that abstracts time in this way.

The rise of European humanism is coincident with advances in perspective and cartography, two revolutionary technologies that reduce volume and depth to comprehensible surfaces. Planimetric grids order the globe to mark proprietary rights and inspire further conquests. The plenitude of the entire world, across epochs and cultures, its history and its aspirations, comes to be displayed visually and textually on the flatness of the page…. Today’s screen technologies and networks continue a trend that has long been in place, breeding general gratification with ever thinner, more efficient devices that deceive most of us into believing that nothing is taking place within or behind them.⁶

In this ordered environment, time is smoothed and made measurable as a surface on which subjects can move unimpeded as if touching it only virtually. For example, it is in this sense that preventing the risk of stumbling, asphelein—for Plato, an argument that cannot fall is asphalēs—shares with asphalt a material condition for levelling a track allowing for greater velocity. This accounts for the modernist sense of disorientation at the almost frictionless speed of historical change, an Icarean dream of flight unconstrained by gravity made recognisable, for example, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and more recent Accelerationist theories.⁷What this ruinously neglects is another dimension, that of depth and (non-abstract) time, a register of experience requiring experimental techniques of improvisation (from the Latin improviso—unforeseen, and unplanned). Let us now consider this immanent production of thinker, thought, movement, and time by exploring Deep Listening through the Extreme Slow Walk.

Maintain good posture…. Use your breathing

My account of the Extreme Slow Walk has a two-legged history, one in movement and the other in music.

Oliveros developed her Walk through her experience of collaborating from around 1969 with the dancer and choreographer Elaine Summers, a pioneer of Kinetic Awareness. Diagnosed with potentially career-ending osteoarthritis at the age of 30, Summers had consulted two practitioners of somatic psychotherapy, Carola Speads and Charlotte Selvers. They were both former students of the pioneer of this practice, Elsa Gindler (1885-1961), who was a leading figure in the Gymnastics movement in Berlin from the 1920s. Gindler had pivoted from a method based on imitating beauty stylised on Greek statuary—the tried and tested path of classical authority—to an experimental process in which she encouraged each student to explore the forms of movement ‘natural’ to them by opening themselves to gravity.

Movement became a mode of thought concerned with the distribution of weight across the body, the expression of gravity unique to each person, while sharing common principles. By not resisting, by making oneself powerless to gravity’s force, its energy was not external but incorporated. ‘In every fibre of us, consciously and unconsciously, we feel keenly that the earth pulls us toward it and holds us. Full trust should be placed in the force of gravity.’⁸It involved a recalibration of psychophysical awareness by slowing down bodily motion to allow attunement to internal processes, feeling the rhythms of the body’s movement in space, and especially attending to breathing.

Elsa Gindler

In contrast with the patented methods of other movement practices from this time—such as those of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, Rudolf Laban, and Konstantin Stanislavski—Gindler’s approach was deliberately not systematised. It was not a predetermined route but rather was permissive and particular for each to discover through exercise, practice and discipline in her own way. ⁹ As such, it was continually open to revision, a constant work in process through a feedback loop between individual gesture and recognition within the group, passed from body to body as ‘a viral, network knowledge.’¹⁰

These ways of working were also expressive of a feminist form of knowledge production. Gindler and other women investigating the thinking body—such as Genevieve Stebbins, Nina Gorte, Elizabeth and Isadora Duncan, Charlotte Pfeffer, Gerda Alexander, Hedwig von Rohden, Louise Langaard, and Mabel Todd—tended to approach learning through and as practice and experimentation. Excluded from university training and traditional networks of scholars and professionals, and often self-employed and self-reliant, they produced their own networks. Anticipating Summers’ and Oliveros’ transitional practice by decades, Gindler formed all-female ‘working groups’ for her courses as safe spaces open to not knowing, acknowledging and allowing a position of vulnerability from which a more intuitive understanding could emerge.

In developing her own practice that was also informed by studies of anatomy, physiology, and nutrition, Summers initiated a key change. Where Gindler emphasised relaxation—expressed as Gelassenheit, a letting fall, an opening to gravity’s pull in contrast to controlling or resisting—Summers gave equal status to ‘tension,’ the intuitive capacity to channel the body’s movement at different rates of both extreme slowness and speed.¹¹

Time and memory—the other leg of this story—were key concerns of experimental music practices in which Oliveros began her career. She experimented with time by improvising with techniques of echo and tape delay (using the ‘gap’ between the machine’s record and playback functions) in early pieces such as Mnemonics I-V and Once Again. Evolving continuously over 50 years, her Expanded Instrument System for improvising live with technology was, she said, a ‘time machine’ creating a kind of temporal resonance in which her own playing, transformed, returned unpredictably as a layer in the next moment.¹² Listening deeply involved an awareness of and attentiveness to the potential future recurrence—and alteration—of sound made spontaneously in the present.

The Maverick Concert Hall and stage in 2008, where 4’33” had its premiere in 1952. With kind permission of Kyle Gann, from his book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”.

John Cage’s 4’33” (1952) was an important precursor.¹³Defined by its temporal frame in which the performer makes no intentional sounds, Cage demonstrated that there is no experience of silence. This not only opened musical possibility to all sounds—‘anything goes,’ as he put it ¹⁴—it also shifted the weight of musical practice onto modes of listening. In other words, music was no longer obliged to be pre-composed as a passage of time, smoothed through repetition and convention into familiarity for undisturbed listening, intimate—touching—while at a distance. The time of the performance was the same as the time of the listening that constituted it.

Alongside inviting us to attend to the ‘ambient’ sounds of our environment in this piece, Cage often recounted a story of his experience when visiting the anechoic chamber (a room designed specifically to cancel external noise and spatial resonance) at Harvard in 1951. Instead of silence he heard two sounds, one high and one lower pitched, which the engineer told him were respectively the sounds of his nervous system and blood circulation.¹⁵ It is significant, then, that Oliveros presented these two forms of listening as the opening instructions for Energy Changes (1969), her first collaborative work with Summers, which then featured as an independent piece in the Sonic Meditations:

Listen to the environment as a drone. Establish contact mentally with all of the continuous external sounds and include all of your own continuous internal sounds, such as blood pressure, heart beat and nervous system.¹⁶

In 0’00” (otherwise known as 4’33” No.2, 1962), which used contact microphones to make audible a performer’s smallest movements, Cage had further demonstrated that as well as no experience of silence there was no such thing—while living—as inactivity. Oliveros had already long been fascinated by the possibility of considering listening as a kind of ongoing recording process, the unlidded ears forever open, inspired by her experimentation with a tape machine given to her by her mother. Leaving the microphone dangling from her San Francisco apartment window in 1952, she was astonished on playing back the recording to hear the range of sounds it gathered that she too had heard but not consciously processed. By the end of the decade, she was using tape recording to train her listening memory to facilitate intuitive music-making in the moment—what became known as free improvisation—alongside Terry Riley, Loren Rush, and Stuart Dempster.

We learned an all-important lesson in these early sessions: If we talked first and tried to impose guidelines or structure for the improvisation, the attempt would likely fall flat. If we played first without talking about it, then listened to the recording critically, our improvising would improve naturally. We liberated ourselves from unnecessary controls and developed trust in process through spontaneity. As far as we know, we were the first in avant-garde art music to engage in ‘free improvisation’.¹⁷

This open mode of listening, accepting all sounds, was not simply an ‘unconscious’ process, the opposite of ‘conscious’ listening. Rather, what she called ‘global’ and ‘focal’ listening were differential rates of attention that operated in tandem and could be practised. Like the experience of gravity unique to each person that Gindler explored, listening in this way becomes particular to each practitioner.

With the Extreme Slow Walk and Energy Changes, Oliveros brought the experience of movement through simultaneous forces of tension and relaxation together with the combined modes of open listening to the environment and concentrated listening to the body’s internal processes. She invites us to ‘discover the point-to-point connections of movement and/or the merging into the experience of flow’. Here, time is not external to the unchanging self who listens, to be incorporated later as self-narrative, but instead could be experienced as an affect of our own modes and rates of attention, both slow and fast, relaxed and controlled, global and focal. Deep Listening was the experimental discipline Oliveros developed to tune ourselves to this capacity to be shaped by and to shape time, to feel time’s movement.

…no matter how slow you are walking, you can always go much slower

I encourage you to practise the Extreme Slow Walk for yourself. You may find yourself losing balance at first as the relatively controlled movement against gravity of one leg then falls under its force, transferring body weight forward and propelling the heel of your other foot to lift and pivot in its own upward stretch. A step, it seems, is not singular but the balancing action of two movements. Each leg passes through different rates of movement alternating cycles of tension and relaxation. But we don’t use just one leg at a time; each is in motion such that whilst one leg is more ‘controlled’ the other is more ‘relaxed’ (moved by gravity, or ‘resting’), then vice versa.

Recalling that our sense of balance is co-ordinated by our inner ear’s vestibular system, I want to close by expressing this sensation of movement in terms of time and self-experience as I encounter it through Deep Listening practices. First, consider one leg as an ‘external’ and the other leg as an ‘internal’ movement. Second, each leg shifts between a global, open, relaxed, slower (or patient) mode and a focused, specific, controlled, faster process of attention. External listening is synchronous with our surroundings, shifting between an ambient awareness of the environment that invites sounds and other sensed phenomena to settle into memory and a concentrated attentiveness to a particular sounding event.

Internal listening is diachronous, alternating across a directed search into memory’s ‘depths’ and an opening to memory through which intuition and long-forgotten events ‘rise’ to the surface of consciousness, like Proust’s revelation on eating a madeleine. Furthermore, this opening to time’s depths—beneath its conventional smoothed, flattened and hardened surface—is not limited to personal memory but can also be shared as indigenous listening knows very well: a common ground of ancestors and living beings.¹⁸ Sites have memories that can be felt. What rises from these depths can have an oracular sense of portent or the prophetic, a propitious significance.

In her introduction to the Sonic Meditations, Oliveros describes each exercise as

a special procedure for the following: 

1. 1. Actually making sounds
   2. Actively imagining sounds
   3. Listening to present sounds
   4. Remembering sounds.

The first and third can be approached, I think, as aspects of one dimension, and the second and fourth as the range of the other dimension of temporal experience. Movement in time requires both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ dispositions simultaneously across these two registers of present sense and the temporal ‘depth’ of memory and anticipation. While actively focusing on an acoustic event or making a sound we can also be open to a memory rising unbidden to consciousness or to an unwitting sense of something about to occur. Actively engaging memory for a significant event or sound we nevertheless continue to hear what is happening around us.

The experience of temporal continuity, then, is not a singularity, a series of ‘nows’ forming a straight line but can be approached as an epiphenomenon, the product of a contrapuntal wave function, two oscillating systems fluctuating between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ modes of attention with different rates of movement. In this model, the self is akin to a difference tone, a phantom note heard as the frequency differential between two actually sounding tones—a technique that fascinated Oliveros, especially when the sounding tones were above the threshold of audibility and the resulting difference tone within it, and which she used on her accordion and in her electronic music.¹⁹

Understood through the experience of Deep Listening, time is not something that we are powerless against nor something that we have power to control. We are neither simply victims of fate nor makers of our own destiny. We ‘receive’ and ‘produce’ time together, rhythmically—often ‘in sync’ with others. Our experience is not sequential, as if moving on one leg, but phasing in and out so that—for example, at a concert—you might be focusing on a violin solo whilst suddenly finding yourself remembering an event you haven’t thought of in years, then recalling intensely your memory of another performance or recording of the same piece or sensing a variant recurrence of an earlier sequence of the music while broadly aware of the ambient sounds of the auditorium and the people in it.

Deep Listening exercises encourage us to tune ourselves in time. The practice shifts the understanding of self from a movement ‘in relation to time’ to the embodied movement of time itself. We are time in motion, phasing between synchronous and diachronous forms of attention. Deep Listening can perhaps help to overcome common misconceptions of our own and broader subject histories and potential futures. It can help us achieve a ‘balance’ between present time and its ‘vertical’ dimensions of memory and expectation, not as a static position but as a form of living temporal movement.

Our ways of being in time, then, involve both a sense of agency—of the power of intentional action—as well as of a humbling powerlessness affected by simply experiencing time without interposing the ego on it. If experience of this movement is unique to each individual as Gindler’s method of allowing gravity to express itself on the body suggests, could we consider forms of selfhood as so many postures and actions of walking, with similar effects of embodiment? For example, hobbling and limping, stooping and slipping, gliding or skating, being prone to stumbling and tripping, requiring a helping hand to stabilise or lift us up, or finding a comfortable balance with erect posture? Our listening—as a feeling for time—has a gait, one that can be distorted by traumatic memories, by a fixation on the present or a preoccupation with a past event, one that can be absorbed in tasks without concern for those around us, that ‘drifts’ at the slightest distraction, or that can be oblivious to the present in over-eager anticipation of a future event.

As Oliveros claimed in introducing the Sonic Meditations, these processes can help us to heal.

Healing can occur…when 1) individuals feel the common bond with others through a shared experience. 2) when one’s inner experience is made manifest and accepted by others. 3) when one is aware of and in tune with one’s surroundings. 4) when one’s memories, or values, are integrated with the present and understood by others.

Just as movement training such as Kinetic Awareness can improve posture, flexibility, and the integration of body and mind, so Deep Listening can aid our feeling for time and help us to avoid becoming prey to its pathological forms. It is a musical practice through which we might listen for a future and recall a past without making it the possession of a subject—of any one of us.