Thinking in Motion Editorial

In a 2006 TED Talk, the late education advisor Sir Ken Robinson quipped:

I like university professors, but we should not hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They are just a form of life, another form of life. But they are rather curious—and I say this out of affection for them […] they live in their heads; they live up there, and slightly to one side. They are disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It is a way of getting their head to meetings.^[1]

Robinson’s humorous delivery continues to rank as the most viewed of all TED Talks. But his Cartesian description of a university professor has also haunted me in the years since first hearing it. While the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes’ maxim cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), represents a hierarchy of mind over body that has long fallen out of favour, Robinson’s caricature remains far from unfamiliar, even within the realm of arts education in the university.

PARSE Journal issue 18 explores the thinking that occurs when bodies are in motion. Six contributors from the fields of psychology, aesthetics, sports history, performance, craft and literature consider the ways our solitary bodies in motion think differently than our social and sedentary selves. The eclectic, rather than esoteric, reflections gathered here draw attention to the various ways movement can influence, and at times unlock, otherwise fixed patterns of thinking. While often invisible in the workplace, these activities provide crucial lessons for the long-term cultivation of creative thinking. Dance, the field Robinson so passionately advocated for, is perhaps the most acute form of thinking in motion. But instead of an emphasis on motion that informs motion (dancing to understand dance), contributors’ examples include the familiar experience of walking—but also running, cycling, rock climbing and motorcycle riding—that influence decision-making elsewhere in life.

Embodied knowledge is a central theme of “Thinking in Motion”. To borrow from Rebecca Solnit’s eloquence on the history of walking: “the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.”^[2] I follow Solnit’s observation because of the emphasis she places on motion that allows us to access other forms of understanding. Contributors to this issue step back from embodied cognition’s interest in how thinking in motion takes place—where the motions of the mind arguably are traced^[3]—to dwell instead on examples in which embodiment refers to knowledge accessed by a body deployed to do more than carry a head to meetings. Here embodiment entails what Ben Spatz, writing from the perspective of performance studies, has explained as follows: “I use ‘embodied’ to indicate a wider territory: everything that bodies can do. In addition to the physical, this space of possibility includes much that we might categorize as mental, emotional, spiritual, vocal, somatic, interpersonal, expressive, and more.”^[4]

A sub-theme of “Thinking in Motion” is solitary movement. While not the exclusive attention of every contributor, the discussions included here divert from the current academic emphasis on models of collaborative research to instead recognise the value of thinking time that is undertaken alone. Admittedly, popular culture rarely casts the solitary person in a positive light. Think of the long-distance runner in the Australian outback who appears in Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994): uncommunicative, myopic even, in her objective. The Covid-19 pandemic confronted us with solitude that was, for many, unplanned but tolerated. Solitude can, however, also be a state sought rather than imposed. While physical activities such as motorcycle riding, rock climbing and running are often coordinated through clubs or groups, these activities also command a ruthless responsibility for our own bodily safety. Held within the embodied experiences discussed by contributors are two seemingly antithetical actions, repetition and risk-taking, crucial, at least for some of us, for unlocking the routines of our thinking.

The issue opens with excerpts of American depth psychologist Lisa Garber’s decades-long internal dialogue that occurs when she rides her motorcycle. Reflecting on her then-husband Danny riding his motorcycle—an Indian—just collected from the repair shop along the alley behind her desk-bound job as a psychologist, Garber writes: “the polarization of my sedate job, rattled to its core by the beast of the Indian and its rider roaring past, remind[ed] me of a much more embodied life.” Garber’s evocative contribution dwells on the thinking she accesses during the hours of this “much more embodied life” riding her motorcycle on the congested roads and highways of southern California—confronting grief and loss while acknowledging an inner tension that exists between her prudent riding skills and the need, at times, to feel the exhilaration of risk-taking.

From the risks of the road, the issue turns to the sport, and art, of rock climbing. Hungarian academic Bálint Veres positions his discussion within the philosophical tradition of somaesthetics, drawing on his first-hand experience of rock climbing, which he posits is primarily a quest for an aesthetic experience. He considers the similarities between the evolution of climbing and similar shifts in emphasis found in the arts, offering a reading of rock climbing that suggests it is akin to experiencing art, particularly in its relentless requirement from the climber for adaptation, but also in the choreography visible in certain climbers’ agility and choice of routes and in the high/low culture wars between indoor climbing and rock climbing in the great outdoors. Veres concludes with a call for a somaesthetic approach to rock climbing that “has less to do with rules, regulations, compliance and rivalry—as most of classical sports activities do—than with an attitude and behaviour that is both adaptive and introspective.”

Inspired by the literature of psychogeography, British sports historian Martin Polley first revisited the route of the 1908 London Olympic Marathon as an embodied exercise in sports history in 2006. Nearly two decades later, here he reflects on his original experience. While Polley’s early archival research about British sport and diplomacy involved “engagement with the primary evidence [that] was all in my head”, by his own admission he later found himself to be an outlier from the humanities working in a Sports Science department. There he sought a research method that, he explains, “would be as far from a scientific paradigm as possible”. His now well-tested approach as a sports historian retraces the routes of sporting events: “I wanted my physical commitment to offer me a degree of empathy with the runners,” he writes, while seeking “time, space and calm to find out more about the course than the primary sources from 1908 could offer from their sanitised and regulated places in the archives.”

In 1971, when Joseph Beuys performed Bog Action in response to the now reclaimed wetlands along the edges of the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands, which at the time were under threat, his concerns were about environmental degradation. Speaking of her experience contributing to the film and performance Weathering (2023), the British-Irish writer, choreographer and academic Jools Gilson touches upon similar environmental concerns in the context of the flooding of The Gearagh in West Cork in the 1950s, the last surviving full oak forest in western Europe, to make way for hydroelectric dams. In contrast to Beuys’s male, hatted figure hovering above the landscape, Gilson describes the complexities of the choreography of her submerged performance and subsequent re-enactment. She then moves her evocative discussion to the speculative history enacted in Tempestries (2023–ongoing) and imagines the final steps that led to the seventh-century death of a woman found in 2005 in Ireland’s Cloonshannagh, County Roscommon. “A bog is not a place for running,” Gilson cautions, “but she’s running nonetheless.”

Gilson’s contribution takes the form of an audio essay—an important disruption to our reliance on reading that requires our attention as listeners. She also recognises that unlike most of the other contributors to this issue who explore embodied thinking as a departure from their typical research, for Gilson, “movement and writing practices [are] an integral part of my process of embodied thinking.” From Gilson’s poetic audio, the issue moves to my text “Makers Who Move”, which foregrounds the voices of individuals who engage in solitary exercise as a significant component of their craft practices. This writing is another example of an attempt to deviate from the straitjacket of academic conventions—in my case through interview material that I have chosen to preserve as excerpts rather than quantify or snip into discrete quotes.

While the voices I interviewed are now recorded as text, my hope is that they too convey the vividness and personalities of their speakers. Nine conversations capture forms of repetitive movement, such as running and cycling, where monotony is a recurring theme and decisions about making in the studio have time to emerge. These conversations also contain unplanned overlaps with other contributors. Drummond Masterton, for example, describes cycling famous competitive routes “to go through the similar suffering exercise and try to build more empathy with the landscape.” Martin Polley is less intent on suffering, but acknowledges that “covering, on foot, the same route and the same distance as the [Olympic marathon] runners 98 years earlier was an act of empathy, physicality and sensory engagement.”

The issue concludes with Zimbabwean author and academic Robert Muponde’s essay memoir—a reflection that draws on memories of his grandfather’s walking-walking and storytelling and his own recent experience writing The Scandalous Times of a Book Louse: A Memoir of a Childhood (2021). “[W]alking was like the ignition key he needed to restart and then let his mind run idle,” Muponde explains of his grandfather’s storytelling. Muponde’s writing shares with Polley’s contribution a double reflection—the production of new writing that returns to understand some of the intentions of a pre-existing text. It is also a dialogue with the no-longer-living, what he names in his memoir as “a form of séance, a feed-back conversation with my grandparent.” In this aspect, the final text in the issue echoes Gardner’s opening writing in which The Voice inside her motorcycle helmet supports dialogue about those no longer with us.

Tethered to my laptop as I write this introduction, my curiosity around the content of this journal issue has been brewing for years. Thinking in motion is a topic that with every tentative conversation found new introductions and new examples of embodied experiences I knew existed but that had remained largely disconnected from my academic life. Alive throughout the issue is the evocative potential of the literary and storytelling in place of “facts” and literal argumentation. Again, I turn to Solnit who observes that “[a]t times, thinking is an outdoor activity, and a physical one. […] The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.”^[5] It is my hope that readers find in this issue an absence of the replicable academic formulas that are often so stifling to our thinking.

A further reading list can be found at the end of the issue. Compiling it has been far from a solitary activity. Rather it is a collective work, with content based on suggestions from contributors and peer-reviewers. It attempts to capture less expected sources that do not appear in the articles and are very unlikely to reveal themselves through the algorithms of a typical search engine. I add to the suggested reading list one further example: “Cogito, ergo sum” (1988) by the German artist Rosemarie Trockel which depicts the phrase in wobbly handwriting knit in a textile—a material reminder of the ever-present body.

Finally, I offer my sincere thanks to each of the contributors to this issue, as well as the time, care and commitment of the peer-review readers: Glenn Adamson, Andre Alves, Botond Csuka, Jonathan Highfield, Ed Hollis, Sophia Lycouris, Tadiwa Madenga, Lisa Murray, Kevin Petrie, Matti Tainio and Otto von Busch.