Bradley Andrews

🪱 Re: my last post.

The quality that adorns all great literature is an eternal and irrevocable sense of freshness.* Any individual, of any age, in any time of history, will approach the text and receive something of value, assuming that they approach the text in humility and goodwill. George Herbert’s Dune is a premier example. The sheer imaginative energy of the books are enough to permanently alter the inner life of most children; and any adult with eyes to see will find gems that more than repay the price of reading.

Among Herbert’s many distinct and sterling inventions is the idea of “a sandwalk”— the signature gait of the nomadic tribe that lives in the arid, inhospitable deserts of the planet Arrakis. It is a walk devoid of rhythm and predictability, since rhythm and predictability invite the fatal attention of Arakkis’ apex predator, the sandworm. The original text which describes the walk is in my first post, which is linked above. You can see a short example of the walk from the 2021 film here.

When David Lynch (rest in peace) made his version of Dune, he summed it up quite tersely—

“Walk without rhythm and we won’t attract the worm.”

This line was later included in the song “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim, which was released along with one of the most engaging, hilarious, and iconic music videos of all time, eventually earning Slim and Spike Jonze a Grammy. If you’re still reading, please stop and watch the video — I promise that Christopher Walkens’ dance moves will not only surprise you (yes it’s him doing most of the dancing), but will also make you smile.

What the music video understands about the sandwalk is precisely the attribute that I believe is most difficult to convey in the film adaptations— that sand walking resembles more of a dance than it does a mode of travel. Although sandwalking shuns the reliable and comforting beats of a controlled meander, it is still movement defined by grace, elegance, and wisdom. The key to sandwalking is assimilation to the desert’s natural impulses. It is knowing the environment, conforming to it, and letting your choices remain congruent with what is already there, soft as sand, rather than dominate with harshness. Throughout the books, the sandworm is a symbol for total chaos, and it eventually swallows up anything that leans too hard into order — anything that can’t learn to entertain a little arrhythmia, a little weirdness, or a little folly.

As I trekked through the snow late last night and playfully did my sand walk, or snow walk, through the white powdered playground, I realized exactly how difficult this is. Not the actual movement, of course, but the surrender of familiar rhythms. It is hard for us to imagine that something which lacks symmetry and predictability can still be beautiful. Walking, running, and even skipping (which I highly recommend adults do every once in a while) have a baseline of repetition that is hard to abandon, even when doing so consciously. But that is, perhaps, one of the many lessons that Herbert was attempting to teach: Unless we avoid the hypnotic trance of history and learn to break the pattern of “how things have always been done”, we will one day be overtaken by the unexpected and insurmountable. That idiosyncrasies are essential to life, not optional.
So when we endure alternative forms of living, allowing ourselves to be creatures who exult in the unexpected and a participant of the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be, we learn to thrive in otherwise uninhabitable circumstances. We become people capable of eschewing the patterns that confine us, and remain innocent to the assumptions that no longer serve the greater human project. Fatboy Slim understood this, I think, which is why he put it this way:

If you walk without rhythm, huh, you never learn.

Indeed, there are some things I hope I never learn. That’s not ignorance— it’s innocence. And the only remedy is to continue, on occasion, walking without rhythm. Next time you find yourself on a snowy sheet or sandy bank, give it a try. It’ll make more sense then, I promise.

*this is a paraphrase of one of Ezra Pound’s idea

“We must walk without rhythm,” Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory. “Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.” He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace. Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag . . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . ." — Dune

Try and spot my path through the snow in Brooklyn tonight. 🙂