Doing Nothing With The World Before Your Feet
“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.” (Thoreau, Walden)
If you find some useful ideas in reading this, it won’t be because I worked to put them there. As Townes Van Zandt sings, “I can’t use nothing,” and to tell the truth I hope you find nothing useful here. Above all I hope you won’t feel that your reading has been productive. When Thoreau writes of his hours spent doing nothing, “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night,” he’s identifying with the corn, not with the farmer. Thinking of the corn’s growth in terms of productivity is taking the farmer’s point of view, because the farmer wants to harvest the corn, and sell it in the market, or perhaps feed it to his pigs, and sell them. I, of course, haven’t the atom of an intention to harvest anything from the time you spend here. You’re not paying to read this. I don’t even know that you’re reading it. The more likely problem is that you’re looking to reap a harvest from your own time.
Who does have an intention to harvest your time as a crop for the market? The easier question to answer may be, who doesn’t? Any time we are at what we call “work,” for pay, our time and labor is somebody’s product, countable in dollars and cents. And when, exactly, are we not at work? Just take a moment and consider the number of products, the occasions of admonition, all directing us towards greater productivity and efficiency. “Make your time more productive and efficient with/by ____” is practically an ur-ethic, an omni-advertisement, pervading our daily lives. We count the number of steps we take, we count our heart rates, the minutes we spend with our heart rates in “the zone,” the calories we consume, the calories we burn, the money we earn, the money we spend, say, on products that count our heart rate and the number of steps we’ve taken, we count our “friends” on social media, our “likes” on social media, the number of “work” emails or texts we’ve gotten, our rate of return on investment, both literal and metaphorical. And when, exactly, are we not seeking a rate of return on investment? We spend our lives shooting at productivity targets, saturated in an ethic directing us to improve those numbers, bathed in an unceasing flow of advice on how to do it. We count the minutes we spend meditating. We have taken contemplation itself, and the forsaking of works, and reproduced it, made it into work, a matter of efficient production. We are our own corn crop, and we are constantly at once cultivating and harvesting ourselves, selling ourselves, turning our lives to advantage, looking for an angle, for the main chance, for the win, looking to hit the target, to improve our rate of return, to make a killing.
One must make one’s way from birth to death, and this St. Vitus’s dance of productivity and efficiency, I suppose, is one way among others. It’s certainly widespread, and all but compulsory, I dare say, and so — I can’t help it — it’s my way, too. I am not the one to pass judgment.
But I do wonder what the corn’s growth in the night might feel like from the point of view of the corn.
The subject of Jeremy Workman’s documentary film The World Before Your Feet (2018), Matt Green, spends much of his days, and most of the movie, walking. But he’s not counting steps. His project is to walk every step of every public pathway — every street, alley, bridge, public park, beach, cemetery, you name it — within New York City. “All five boroughs,” as he says over and over to people he encounters in his walks, who are right away curious about why he’s doing it. His response? Many versions of, no reason really. It’s just a thing I’m doing. “Are you going to write a book?” asks the driver of a big, new, shiny, expensive-looking white pickup truck, who has stopped driving and fallen into conversation with him on a muddy lane in a bit of wasteland on Staten Island. No plans, says Green. The driver asks, why are you walking on this particular lane? Green replies, there’s a big puddle up ahead (visible on camera as we watch); it looks like it has some nice reflections, and I thought I’d take a picture. “That puddle’s always there,” says the driver, who then tools off through the puddle, disturbing the reflection. Green waits for it to settle, takes a picture, and posts it on his blog, which is called “I’m just walkin’”.
“We wish Matt had a way to make money off his project,” says Matt’s father, but he recognizes that Matt spends no time thinking of such a way, nay, has literally and figuratively dedicated his life to walking away from such a notion. His father accepts that, showing himself to be a loving father, with no idea of seeing his son’s life as a crop for his harvesting.
Where does Matt sleep, you may ask, and what does he eat? Well, he couch surfs, and cat-sits and dog sits. Presumably he gets some money from those, along with a place to stay. He doesn’t tell us. He used to have a job — he was an engineer, and before he decided that he would prefer to spend his time walking, he saved up his money. But for the most part, he resembles the lilies of the field, neither toiling nor spinning. Just walking.
He does indeed count the miles, but what’s notable is that the number is fluid, tending upward, and especially that it really doesn’t matter. He begins by estimating the total mileage for his project at 5000 miles, and the time needed perhaps two years. Four years later, having factored in all those cemeteries and beaches, his estimate is up to 8000 miles. At the end of the film, he stands on a street corner somewhere in New York, estimating that somewhere on the block he just completed he passed 8000 miles. But he’s not finished. Now he estimates that he has 500–1000 miles left, but it’s clear that he has little to no stake in the accuracy of the estimate. He’s not looking forward to finishing. He’s not really thinking about it. To focus on finishing, he says, would be to miss the point. Which is? Well, a good question. He’s just walkin’. It’s not something he’s trying to get over with, much less to do more quickly, or efficiently. Walking is not a bug. It’s the feature. You get the sense that Matt would be pleased, delighted even, to discover the existence of a heretofore unknown sixth borough of New York, whose streets he could look forward to walking.
Much of the film consists of the camera following Matt as he walks, from about 15–20 feet behind him. We quickly become familiar with the signature of Matt’s stride. He is a loper, down crowded sidewalks in Brooklyn, along the uncrowded waterfront of Battery Park City, through the waste spaces of Staten Island, along the beach at Coney Island, through various cemeteries, across the Brooklyn Bridge, through a heavy snowstorm in a non-descript part of the city whose name I forget, for so long that I found myself thinking “Matt, get inside, for god’s sake, the tip of your nose is gonna freeze off.”
Certain things happen to Matt, or perhaps I should say, he does certain things, over and over. He greets strangers as he approaches them, and stops to chat, which quickly leads to the question, what are you doing? Matt’s answer — I’m walking every foot of every public byway in all five boroughs — invariably sparks interest, amazement, curiosity. Why are you walking every public byway, etc? Just because. No reason, really. Free-flowing conversations follow. Clearly Matt Green has an appetite, and a gift, for such encounters. Is he walking in order to meet and engage with people thus? Perhaps. But, if so, he’s meeting and engaging with people, so that…? Nothing follows, there is no so that, there is no purpose to it, beyond the thing itself. Matt wants nothing from the people he meets, and takes nothing, but the having met. Now, to be sure, the filmmaker is taking a film away from all this. But he’s not Matt. And let me assure you, this is not the kind of film that’s going to make anyone money.
This ultimate purposelessness is even clearer in the other thing Matt does over and over, which is to notice things. He lopes, and he notices, for example, how many barbershops/hair styling storefronts replace the letter “s” with the letter “z,” as in “Custom Cutz,” or “Fadez and Braidz.” He notices a subcategory of swapped letters on barbershop signs: “k” for “c,” as in “Kustom Kutz.” He notices 9/11 memorials, some official but many more (close to 300, he estimates) done by individuals or small groups. There’s the mural of the Statue of Liberty crying, on the brick wall of an otherwise unremarkable little building. And inside the call box fixed to the wall outside a fire station, he peers through the little glass window and sees a tiny miniature of the Two Towers, with a little memorial flame behind them.
He takes pictures of the barbershop signs and 9/11 memorials, and posts them to “I’m Just Walkin’”. In one passage of the film, he notices wildflowers, growing mostly streetside. In his years of walking he has learned to identify lots of wildflowers. At one especially charming moment, he notices a particular and unusual wildflower and turns to the camera, recalling with a smile that he saw another such flower, a year ago, halfway across the city. This is the sort of stuff that fills Matt’s mind, and that he posts on his blog. You see clearly enough that all this noticing leaves no room, none, for thoughts of monetization, that horrible, horrible term of our recent, er, coinage.
But there I go judging. Forgive me.
Matt does some philosophizing, or speechifying. Not a lot, but some. He begins the film by affirming his inability to address the why of what he is doing, but by the end of the film, he has expressed some thoughts. Let me foreground those thoughts that have to do with what is not his purpose. He’s not setting out to see particular things, “sights,” as we call them when we are tourists. He positively does not organize his daily walks around particular spots of interest or landmarks. Instead, he walks, more or less randomly, and discovers as he walks what is interesting on the path he has chosen for the day. Another barbershop with a “z” in place of an “s.” A mud puddle, nicely reflecting trees and sky. The group of teenagers hanging out in some dingy urban colonnade, one of whom turns and faces the camera and launches into a rap, as the others, behind the rapper with Matt, shake hands with him, expressing pleasure and admiration of Matt’s project. Watching the rapper, I wondered, what moved him to launch into his rap at that moment? And I guessed that the was doing it for reasons similar to Matt’s: that is, because he could. Because no one was stopping him. As we are in the habit of saying, for no good reason.
In my mind’s eye, as I remember one monologue Matt delivers late in the film, I see him beginning, seemingly, to glow, animated, inflamed by his topic: the greatness, the multifariousness, the beauty, the sheer heterogeneous richness and massive scale, of New York City. He compares it to a geological wonder, marvels at the centuries it’s taken for people to produce the city, and then marvels again at how those centuries are just the geological blink of an eye. Here may be the heart of his project: wonder, delight, awe, at how much there is to see! It’s all already been produced! He needn’t lift a finger, or burn a calorie, to produce it. It’s all already produced. A stupendous, colossal, sublime gift. All he need do is walk out into it.
It took God six days to make the world, so the story says, and on the seventh he looked, and saw that it was good. How long would it take us to finish admiring God’s work, to come to the end of our delight in the world? But have we even begun to take delight? Have we even looked? Are we rushing instead to promise, over and over and over, that we will “remake the world,” that the things we are producing for sale on the market will “change the world,” not perceiving that we’ve barely begun to see, to appreciate, much less to take the measure of the goodness to be found, as a given, as a gift, in the world we’re rushing to change? Do we thus fail to see how our noble-sounding commitments are woven from threads of blasphemy and rank ingratitude and egoism and contempt for the world and for ourselves? Are we failing to understand how our obsession with producing everything, more, faster, cheaper, now, elevates the appetite for destruction into a civilizational ethic?
Now I’m not judging. I’m just askin’. And if you’re thinking that the appetite for destruction has been a driving force in the growth of New York City, well, I would say you’re absolutely right. Now you’re starting to pay attention, eh? Maybe that flame behind the tiny twin towers really means that the city’s always been on fire. If, for example, we imagine a woman, or a black person, doing what Matt’s doing, the atmosphere and the stakes change altogether. It’s worth pointing out that almost all of the groups of people Matt encounters on the streets of NYC, in the film at least, are people of color. If it was a black man walking up to groups of white people, it would be different, right?
But Matt’s gift is for the delightful, especially the unobtrusively, modestly delightful. It would be, perhaps, churlish and ungrateful, foolish even, to spurn that gift because it’s not a gift for the sorrowful or the horrible. Alas, how many of us never worry about experiencing a dearth of those. How many of us really need a Matt Green of sorrow and horror?
Near the film’s end Matt is walking alongside a busy, noisy motorway in Queens, when he turns off and into the small stretch of woods adjacent. This one time he does have a particular sight in mind: the Queens Giant, the oldest living tree within the borders of New York City, a Tulip Tree that sprouted sometime around 1750. Matt speaks of the tree as a watcher over the history of New York City, watching as it is built, as it grows, as Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island, grow, are built, as the streets are laid, as the bridges are built, as people walk up and down, stopping to converse, as barbershops put up signs swapping the “s” for a “z,” as jet planes fly overhead, as wildflowers grow, as the Twin Towers rise and fall, as Matt Green lopes up the streets, stopping to converse, sharing his project (“all five boroughs”) with others, who react with amazement, and delight. Matt himself is plainly amazed and delighted with his vision, or rather, his vision of the tree’s vision. Of course the tree didn’t actually see all of this, or any of it. We may say the tree was present for all of it, rooted in the earth, feeling the heat and cold and wind and rain and snow, breathing in its tree fashion the air. Matt is identifying in imagination with the tree, as Thoreau identifies in imagination with the corn. Why? Because he can. Because no one’s stopping him.
Imagine what it’s like for the tree, or the corn, to grow. Not for harvest, not as a product. Not as any “work of the hands,” but as a gift, free for the taking, over and above our usual allowance. No work required, no money. Your price? Nothing.
Eventually of course, whether or not the farmer comes to harvest it, the corn dies. Although, to be sure, we are well on our way as a civilization to the production of immortality for sale in the market. The monetization of immortality!
The Queens Giant will die too. But it will have been alive for a very, very long time. Now, I may be going back on my promise not to offer useful advice, but — try taking only the tiniest fraction of that time span, relatively speaking, the merest bit of time, and try imagining growth, for nothing. Or just try doing nothing. Yes, it’s harder than it seems, but the truth is, you’ve got plenty of time, even if it feels like you don’t. Relax. Nothing is at stake.
I don’t say it will be time well spent.
