When I looked up at those silver slivers peeking through the branches on my moon walks, I thought maybe, just maybe my brother was seeing them too. Even if we were halfway across the world from each other. One in a city in the midwest, one in a desert in the middle east.

This was years ago. I’d follow the sightline of the moon, however it snaked me through the streets or alleyways. From my DePaul dorm to the lake, to Boystown, up until I exhausted myself and callused my feet too harshly for the night. When I’d gone too far north, I’d find the closest red line stop and head back.

I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I felt that all I could do was think too much, or not think at all and be the empty well on the abandoned farm near my old house in Indiana. The one that I’d wait and wait to hear my penny hit the bottom of, but never would.

But I could walk.

I was studying 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes at the time of these moon walks. He dismissed walking quickly as proof of a person’s existence, or proof of humanity. “But if it is so that I have no body,” wrote Descartes, “it is also true that I can neither walk nor take nourishment.” If, as Descartes contended, one is to prove that they truly “exist” in an ontological realm (i.e. having a soul), a scientific method of elimination must be applied to the body and its observations of the world. Descartes, in psychoanalyzing his senses, eliminated all perceptions he could not prove were real beyond a doubt. He could neither prove he was walking, nor even seeing a world that was not just a figment of some deceiving Creator’s imagination. If physicality is removed, Descartes argued, then there is only one answer, one thing that proved existence. And it is doubt itself –– “I think, therefore I am.”

 The meat of Descartes’ philosophical musings surround the idealization of the mind as the ultimate prover of existence. Yet, it is difficult to digest that existing is simply thinking. The body, and what that body creates in tandem with the mind, has existential merit. The decaying of our bodies, with disease and ailments, with paralysis and cancer, prove otherwise. Our bodies work symbiotically, or against, or rather completely in control of our minds. Descartes lived a long time ago, and at his time the chemistry of the brain and body were unknown; so today, I think belief in existence is tied to not only musings in our minds, but movements, or lack of movements, in our body.

 In particular, physical movements or lack there of, like artistic gestures that I and others make prompt startling existential reflections. Artists and individuals allow, or perhaps succumb, to bodily movements such as walking as dictating their states of existence. My moon walks led to a terrible video art piece I did in an intro class. An artwork, nonetheless. But there are other examples.

 In her 2008 artwork “Cardinal Signs,” Libia Posada used the ambulatory history of her subjects as a modicum for humanistic expression. Practicing at the time in Columbia, Posada worked with displaced people in refugee camps. Asking them to first draw their routes onto paper, she then transferred these subjectively drawn maps onto the legs of the displaced persons. In a striking documentation of the work, Posada photographed just the bottom half of their legs –– showing the path those legs literally carried the displaced individuals. This transfer, as Rebecca Scott Bray in an essay wrote, “returned crime to the scene of the body.”

Posada latched onto the physicality of her subjects, and, by using their legs, showcased the humanness of their existence. Here the act of walking (often a simple gesture of movement from one place to another) becomes the metaphorical translation of grievous, and commonly violent, displacement. Posada not only re-contextualized these participants’ histories, but made them into artwork. This work attacks the consciousness of the viewer, bringing the autonomy of each displaced person’s experience to the forefront.

Although Posada is acting just as the translator from paper to skin in Cardinal Signs, she illuminates walking as a penultimate expression of humanity. This physical awareness in Posada’s work counters Descartes’ mind-body duality, affirming that bodily movement is not only a proof of existence, but proof of a specifically shared human existence.

Artist Eve Mosher had a similar trek through New York City. In 2007, she stumbled upon a daunting vision of the future –– her home, and her city, would soon be afflicted by rising water tides. Areas along the coast of Manhattan, New York would be consumed by water in a “100 year flood” due to the warming of the planet. The foreboding and quasi-apocalyptic premonition prompted Mosher to contemplate who (and what) would be affected by these rising waters. Leila Christine Nadir wrote in an essay that “for Mosher, art provid[ed] the crucial link” for confronting this radical change in habitat. She quotes Mosher as saying that “artists can create visceral and emotional connections that can make change possible in ways that data and reports cannot.” Thus, utilizing only a chalk dispenser, Mosher set out to delineate the flood zones of Manhattan. This work, titled “HighWaterLine,” mixed the physical movement and performance of Mosher’s body with a social practice element. The chalk line she drew on pavement showed exactly what would be underwater in the future. The people Mosher passed by would question her project, and were surprised to find that their homes would be underwater in the future.

Mosher here opens up the viewer-participant’s senses. “HighWaterLine” made them realize their innate human-ness. They, in fact, are at the mercy of the earth and nature. The gesture of walking in “HighWaterLine” acts as that proof of existence – a proof that the earth will have an impact on humanity, and that humanity is not immune to the world. While Mosher’s realization for the viewer is less focused on the self, it relates the self of one to the self of the whole world –– a rather isolating and chilling expression.

Back during the first moonwalks I worked in the biological anthropology lab. We had a model of a skull of Australopithecus afarensis, an ancestor of homo sapiens that is theorized to be the first in our species line to walk upright. Our ancestral species took on one of its first human traits by walking.

I finished a Netflix docu-series called “Diagnosis” a few weeks ago. One case was of a man who slowly lost feeling and control of his legs. It started with tingling in his toes, then up his calves, then numbness. Eventually he couldn’t walk. He lost all control over the lower-half of his body. All he wanted was to be able to walk again.

Throughout a new moonwalk last night, I was thinking about the privilege of walking. These moonwalks have the addendum of taking the train to unknown stops and getting off, where I walk and walk. A privileged experience truly, to be able to climb these steep steps at train line stops with no elevators. Walking seems to be an easy answer to a question of proving existence against Cartesian thinking. I’ve found existence or purpose in walking at least, and so have some other artists and individuals in my life.

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