The Forest Flaneur: "Touch ... And Be Touched"

By Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto

Were you a child fortunate to be able to wander and play in Nature?
To touch the rocks, trees, dirt, stones, moss, flowers, plants?
Do you know that your sensitive fingertips
retain those experiences and aid your creativity today?

In this busy, concrete world, not many children
or adults are able to avail themselves

• Language: English
• Publisher: Re-Bound
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781943887965

Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto

Rosalinda enjoys writing stories and poetry inspired by her travels. She currently resides in Spain, on the plains of La Mancha. Rosalinda has lived in Asia throughout her early twenties and now vacations in Bali. China Blue 1984 is the first book in her collection of memoirs; charting her journey across the globe beginning in Tokyo 1982 and finishing in San Francisco at the age of 27.

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The Forest Flaneur

Touch … and be touched

How to Utilize the Tactile Memories

of Wilderness Experiences to

Enrich Your Creative Processes

Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto, PhD

park place publications

pacific grove, California

The Forest Flaneur

Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto PhD

First Edition January 2020

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in

critical articles and reviews. For information, address:

[e-mail]. Workshops: www.forestflaneur.com

© 2019 Text by Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto PhD

© 2019 Images by Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto PhD

ISBN 978-1-943887-94-1 Case bound

ISBN 978-1-943887-95-8 Perfect bound

ISBN 978-1-943887-96-5 E-book

Library of Congress Control Number:2019920417

Published by

Park Place Publications,

Pacific Grove, CA

parkplacepublications.com

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my family, friends, and fellow colleagues who accompanied me on my long and winding journey with layers of support that transformed an idea into a contribution to literature, art and humanity. At the University of Sunderland, I would like to extend my gratitude to Mike, Mark, Brian, Carol, Beryl, Kevin, Manny, Elisabeth, Lesley, Lynne, Alison, Diane, Robert, Angela, Rob, Jin and Zack. On a professional level, I am thankful to Robert, Kristina, Dennis, Camille, Sherrie, John and Petr. Personally, I am appreciative to Andrea, Abraham, Margo, Betsy, Harold, Doug, Lorenzo, Isa, Marta, Pepe, Marina, Naoki, Julie, Abby, John, Carlos, Petra, Francisco, Bob, Clemencia, Mimi, George, Cristina, Raquel, Isabel, Miguel Angel, German, Gustavo, Jose, Ramon, Luis and Felix. In memory of my parents, Jeanette (1936-2018) and Robert (1933-2017), forever in my heart. A very special thanks to K. Arsana for an unwavering guidance throughout the entire process of this transformation.

Abstract

This practice-led study explores the experiences of four poets in relation to specific landscapes and its inspiration on the creative practitioner. The research study focuses on tactile perception and its influence on the artistic process as both experiential and interpretative tool. It utilizes the idea of the ‘haptic intuitive’ (Di Giovine, 2015), specifically the finger pads, for a qualitative phenomenological study framed by fieldwork in nature and expressed in a 3D poetic canvas. The Flaneur methodology was applied to the approach made in the field and developed. This poetic style of walking which is historically associated with Baudelaire is chiefly applied to research in urban settings (Frisby, 1998) However, in this research study, the concept of a Forest Flaneur was developed as the scope of the fieldwork involved rural settings and encouraged movement (walking) in random directions primarily linked to tactile attraction in natural landscapes. The methodology developed focused on case studies of four walking poets’ inspirational landscapes (Wordsworth, Whitman, Machado and Snyder). The notion of the Forest Flaneur which has been developed in this study is a poetic walking style in nature, highlighting tactile memories, in rural settings. The contribution to knowledge focuses on a method of revisiting the experiences of poets in relation to their specific inspirational landscape and refining that method through exploring the tactile dimension of experience. This method of separating the tactile from the non-tactile has relevance for the creative practitioner, Furthermore, when undertaking this research I allowed a period of 15+ day’s gestation period between the haptic work in the field and the creative response to that experience on the poetic canvas in the studio. This relationship to time and what I have called ‘the looping of experience’ became a second key part of the research methodology. This methodology uses the memory of a visceral emotive ‘in situ moment’ as a stimulus—a memory formed in the somosensory cortex as a response to the 15+day gestation period. The cognitive process that is a consequence of the time lapse, or ‘time looping’ between the two events, synthesizes in the brain with the recall activity undertaken in the studio during the creative process. The research suggests that haptic experience (tactile perception) tends to enrich the creative process in both visual art and poetry.

Foreword

The Forest Flaneur is the harvesting, fully realized, of Rosalinda’s deep commitment to her own many arts and insights and community engagements. This work is passionate, compassionate, exploratory—a major artistic-intellectual advance beyond familiar categories. I find Rosalinda’s methodology not only to be well conceived and convincing, but also to be authentically artful, a quality not often associated with methodology.

Throughout this text, the intentionality of personal touch, in its most intimate concreteness, as each of us may experience that, is joined with a process of novelty, that is to say, creativity. This process is transparent from locality to locality, poet to poet, 3D canvas to 3D canvas, exhibition to exhibition, interaction to interaction. The wholeness of this whole, in our chaotic times, is best expressed in Rosalinda’s own veritable words:

… artists have the social responsibility to work towards avoiding such chaos and promote the harmony of all living organisms, humans included. The academic fields of arts and literature are confronted with non-tangible aesthetic choices that culminate into tangible heritage for future generations. Further research into this type of environmental aesthetic is the overarching goal of extending this study in hopes it will motivate our current choices that shape our future with a greater environmental empathy.

In an age that is thoroughly cinemaestheticized, I hear Rosalinda’s call to the significance of Tactile Perception and appreciation for the environment and how language is impacted by tactile-perception exploration in the environment.

This is important, vital work for all who may hear this call.

John Dotson

Carmel, California

August 2019

Author Introduction

I would like to give a personal introduction to this book as it was part of the larger thesis of my PhD. My masters was based on literature inspired by landscapes, contributing to the fields of tourism and literature. However, the personal artist was not expressed fully in that study. I had the unique opportunity to join the art department at the University of Sunderland with the W. A. L. K. Research Centre and extend these investigations into a studio art PhD. These types of doctorates, in the field of studio art, are rare in that we research a gap in the knowledge base using the phenomenological perspective by creating art in the studio.

It seems appropriate to explain, how I came to study these particular poets. Basically I chose poets that my directors of study and I considered walking poets in rural settings. My individual connection to each poet became part of the project almost on a subliminal level spanning my native West Coast, California to the East Coast, New York moving across the Atlantic to the British Isles in the Lake District and reaching out to a trail in the Spanish mountains of the Castile region. My previous study had been a study based on the comparison of literary routes including the Berkshires, USA and La Mancha, Spain. However, in this PhD project I utilized my own artistic tendencies in sculpture and poetry to investigate the 3D poetic canvas based on walking the footsteps of four select poets in their inspirational landscapes. The entire accumulation of research for this doctorate thesis spanned a decade prior to its completion in 2018.

Walking with Walt Whitman

Returning to the Land to Sing his Song

Journal Entry: May 2019

Walt Whitman turns 200 this month and I turn a new leaf. My mother has passed, and mother’s day reminds me of her birthplace, Long Island. Ironically it was Whitman’s homeland and his birthday month as well. New York, I was told by my mother, was a place of cold, poverty and struggle. Until I was walking with Whitman, I had not recognized the beauty of Long Island; merging the grasslands with Whitman’s small printing press in Brooklyn that gave us Leaves of Grass. Moving away to California, my mother never really left her childhood, as she shared her memories with each of her children. We had it clear that Brooklyn, especially the winters, never leaves your bones. Her stories of New York become part of my childhood memoirs. Returning to Long Island was twofold for me as a poet and a daughter of this landscape. It filled a gap in my heart.

Ironically it took following the footsteps of Whitman, in search of his inspiration for his masterpiece, to bring out the best of New York for me. On a visceral level, walking Whitman’s grasslands on Long Island ignited my finger pads with new memories that inspired my own poetic canvas. I was a witness to touching the native grasses of the bard, Whitman. How many baskets were woven from that land of grass to hold precious berries? I share with you my harvest from a walk with Whitman. It was those footsteps that inspired me to sketch out new lines in the Earth, re-playing on the ancient theme Song of Myself. Om Shanti Shanti Shanti OM.

Walking with Wordsworth

Beyond the daffodils to the summit of the Prelude

Journal Entry: April 2019

William Wordsworth passes away on supposedly the same day as Shakespeare and Cervantes, April 23rd. This month I am reflecting on Wordsworth’s epic poem, Prelude, two books completed in 1799, more than 200 years ago. Eventually, an accumulated 14 books were published posthumously to complete the full Prelude. It inspired others to follow in his footsteps, such as Walt Whitman creating his own epic poem. I walked behind Wordsworth on a journey to the Helvellyn summit above the Lakes District to write my own epic poem, Afterlude. I began the journey from his residence in Grasmere wandering around the hills above his cottage. I was stunned by the bright, yellow lichen pigment clinging to the stones. This colour was the original pigment for artists back in Wordsworth’s time. I was moved with emotion as I glanced down on the lake and felt the echoes of Ralph W. Emerson. The outline of the hills spoke to me. Gazing at the silver clouds, I was reflecting about the literary heritage that drifted from one continent to another. Emerson wrote Nature after his visit to England, and followed up with a magnificent review of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; noting it was original and worthy.

Paradoxically, I found myself appreciating the subtle hues of this remote landscape. I arrived behind a fortress of protective hills and was immediately overwhelmed with beauty upon first glance. I began to take note of the attraction that Wordsworth wanted to explore here as a sense of recluse for his inspiration. He invites us to walk the fells (hills) with vigour on paths that only sheep can handle in their meander to graze. He clung to rocky ledges similar to Striding Edge carved out by glacier slices and heard the wind in his ear (Prelude). This landscape of harsh winds, rain, and slate had to be approached with vigilance if one were to follow Wordsworth’s footsteps to the summits beyond the daffodil blooms.

Why had I chosen Helvellyn summit to inspire me? I only wanted to know Wordsworth deeper than his poem of daffodils. The native British walkers gave me a surprise by suggesting Helvellyn. It is no wonder Wordsworth, in his poem, compared Helvellyn with Paradise Lost, the starting point of Milton’s adventure. Luckily I was ignorant, having only marked the spot on a map (flat image) and had the bliss to follow his footsteps. Otherwise I may have remained amongst the daffodils given the risk at hand.

I must say, I have a profound understanding of his Prelude with the tactile journey to the summit. I can recall the first black sheep (others were pale ivory) that had greeted me at the fork of the path that separates the village from the crevice in the mountain. The gods must have heard my prayer that day, as I found myself blessed with superb weather of sunshine on a windless summit. Even a fellow hiker remarked that she had not seen it so calm in all the 40 years she had been hiking there. I had come up by Swirl Edge. No sheep dared to graze there on the rocks, where you made the path as you went. I slithered down Striding Edge staring down at Red Tarn, a steep glacier drop to a small lake. My heart was beating with each grasp of the harsh, rocky texture. Moss at the lower levels, where the sheep grazed, never felt so comforting. It was exhilarating and a good day to touch and be touched by Nature!

Walking with Machado

Campos de Castilla, Viva España! Viva Antonio!

Journal Entry: February 2019

My ancestor homeland of Spain is the origin of this journey to follow the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. This month is the anniversary of his death, 22 February. The poet-hero of Spain and Latin America was a walker and his poetry is full of inspiration from the landscape of Castile, although he is originally from Seville. He inspired others to walk the mountains to stay healthy. All around him was tuberculosis, striking his loved ones, including his father and wife. Eventually he died of exhaustion during the Spanish Civil War, while trying to walk to his freedom over the Pyrenees Mountains (just over the border to France).

My first encounter with Machado, in the 1980’s, was a few lines of his poem that is a legend. Caminante no hay camino (walker there is not road) was a poetic line woven into a famous Serrat song that played over and over in cafes in the 1980’s. It was part of the newfound freedom of expression for young Spaniards. I had arrived just before the mayor of Madrid, Tierno Galván, died. I watched the outpouring crowds throwing carnations in homage to him. He had transformed Madrid into a venue for freedom of expression for songwriters (like Serrat from Catalonia) to celebrate the 1975 Constitution that granted them democracy. They say Galvan changed the city forever.

I found myself following the footsteps of Machado in the Guadarrama Mountains near Madrid, his favourite pastime adventure in his youth. These mountains are clearly visible from the city, and accessible by train. It was a central mountain range that many writers had crossed to enter Spain from the North shore such as Alexander Dumas (Three Musketeers) Hans Christian Anderson and Virginia Woolf (Waves) amongst others. This traditional route to Spain from Europe was first by boat and then overland (North to South) via Madrid. It made Guadarrama, the central mountain range, a legendary passage. After Madrid, the vast open space of Don Quixote’s La Mancha invites writers to wonder before heading to Seville, Granada and Cadiz (door to the Americas, Africa and the Orient). No other country has hosted the wide variety of international writers to cross its mountains and plains to witness the Campos of Castilla in search of inspiration, myself included.

Walking with Gary Snyder

Re-Opening the Mountain chanting the Redwood Song

Journal Entry: January 2019

I found myself thrilled to receive a photo of Gary Snyder posing with my 3D poetic canvas inspired by Mt. Tam and him (sent to me by his publisher from Berkeley). It had been a long journey to discover an inspirational landscape for that ground-breaking poet. Although we did not meet in person, I feel akin to Snyder’s inspiration of Mt. Tam by following his footsteps on my native California soil. In college, the writing department had featured Mr. Snyder in our poetry program. The beat generation style was my preferred poetic meter, when it came to the creative impulse. Poetry at that time was a group effort with my generation; we read together, wrote together and even shared writers’ block together. Like Snyder, I had daydreamt on the beach, looking out at the open sea to the imaginary shores of the Orient. It was natural to wonder about Japan, the next frontier. I had innocently ventured there after university, much like Snyder, unaware of its influence. It was a turning point in my life both as a person and a poet. Buddhism was awakened in both of us from these experiences.

These small notions are part of growing up on the Pacific coast and I now realize I had been in tune with Gary Snyder before even embarking on this study. This unique connection between us was revealed to me once I became familiar with his letters and poetry. The rocks Snyder touched to build trails in Yosemite were the same rocks I had touched. His redwood forests were part of my life since childhood. Rediscovering my past with the California landscape at Mt. Tam reached inside me and uncovered more than I ever could imagine. Walking with Snyder on that mountain, wove pieces of my life together from the Zen gardens of Japan to the magical touch of a redwood trunk; nourished by the mysterious Pacific Ocean fog that moves between the two