SLINKING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

I’ve long thought that Jay Rayner is a top writer and very decent man (he showed great 

kindness to a friend of mine who was stricken with cancer).  

 

Having said, that, I’ve never thought that Rayner’s life and mine resembled each other much, but now I discover that he and I both suffer from the curse of osteoarthritis.  Just like John Cage, as I said in a blog post a couple of weeks back.

Whereas my own version is in the knee, Rayner’s is in the hip, which may or may not be worse, but at least his gives him the opportunity to make a good wise crack, when, in the Observer a couple of weekends back, he described his own walking as ‘limping about the place, like a broken slinky.’  

 

But even in our pain, our lives diverge again.  My own osteoarthritis revelation didn’t cause much of a reaction (though one person did recommend turmeric), whereas young Rayner has been deluged with unsolicited wisom wanted advice from ‘concerned readers,’ a lot of it about plant-based diets. One of them also told him to lose weight.  This is in fact fairly standard advice for arthritis sufferers but as Rayner asks ‘Who reads about somebody else’s injury and thinks, “You know, what I really need to do now is send this stranger an email telling them they’re fat”?’  Well, who indeed? 

He did however receive an offer of a 20 per cent discount for surgery at a private hospital. He wasn’t tempted by this, but you know, I think I might have been.

SUNDAY MUDDY SUNDAY

I was going to say, ‘Before we finish with John Cage ..’ but I think I’m never really going to be finished with John Cage, so there’s this.  We were walking in the mud yesterday, following the footpath along the south side of the River Stour, right across the water from the Cattawade Nature Reserve, which has no public access, which I think is very cool.  It wasn’t meant to be an expedition, just a Sunday afternoon walk, and that’s what it was until we hit the mud.

 

         I mean, I knew it had been raining, I knew that the footpaths in these parts had muddy patches here and there, but I wasn’t expecting the full Glastonbury–Woodstock-Somme experience.  And as a matter of fact it was actually far worse than it looks in these pictures.

 

         It was hard work, walking through this stuff, but after a while, as Billy Shakespeare almost said, ‘I was in mud, stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.’

Thinking of Shakespeare helped a bit, and also thinking that John Cage had written a book on the subject, with Lois Long, one of his collaborators on The Mushroom Book. This one was The Mud Book.  I’ve never seen a copy 'in the flesh,' but apparently it looks like this: 

 To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood for making 'pies and cakes.'

THE MUSHROOM WALK

Having recently had a birthday, I decided to spoil myself, and so I bought a copy of John Cage: A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms.

 

It’s a two volume boxed set, one of them a kind of scrapbook about Cage and his mushroom interests, with photographs of him, often walking in the woods collecting fungi, also pictures of some of the mushroom-related things he collected.  Also the text of Mushrooms et Varitiones, which is frankly very hard work.

 

The other ‘volume’ is a reproduction of The Mushroom Book, a legendary limited edition that he did in the early 70s with Lois Long, illustrator, and Alexander H. Smith, botanist.  It’s not so much a book as a set of unbound lithographs, with some more abstruse Cage texts.

 

Together they make a fine thing, and I do fear spilling coffee or red wine or even mushroom ketchup over them.  Cage had his own mushroom ketchup recipe: you probably knew that.

 

Of course, I was not surprised to find that Cage was a walker, especially in the woods, especially looking for mushrooms, but one thing I didn’t know was that he suffered from arthiritis.  I feel his pain, as well as my own.  That was why he adopted a Macrobiotic diet to help cure it.   It probably worked as well as anything else does. (Don't get me started).

 

There’s also a partial transcript of a 1983 interview Cage did on Canadian radio, in which the interviewer is trying to get him to talk about 'sacred' mushrooms.  He didn’t have much time for that.  He said, ‘I don’t think in those terms.  Nothing is more sacred than any other thing.  We should wash our dishes and brush our teeth and forget about one thing being sacred and another thing not.

         ‘I don’t have a favorite mushroom – I just like the one I have.”

         This guy was GOOD!!

 

 As for me, I continue to walk, often with a more or less painful arthritic knee, and lately as I walk, I look at mushrooms, photograph them, and then when I get home, using a couple of books and an online source or two, with much hesitation and head scratching, I try to identify them.

 

The one above, I believe, is Exidia glandulosa (though it could be Exidia plana), black jelly fungus, sometimes declared to be edible, but you wouldn’t, would you?

 

Of course I wouldn’t need to do all this research if John Cage was walking with me.  And you know sometimes, in a sense, he is.

WALKING WITH WARNINGS

Look, I've got nothing against dogs, just so long as they’ve got nothing against me. 

But currently I’m doing most of my walking in more or less rural Essex, and I regularly encounter some unfettered hound that bounces up and sniffs me, pursued by its owner who says to me, ‘Oh, he may look like something that should be poking around in Grimpen Mire but he’s really just a bit softy.’

 

Meanwhile I continue to collect ‘beware of the dog' signs and here are a few 

(comparatively) recent ones.  

 

Are there really dogs behind these signs or are they just to scare aware intruders?  In most cases I have have no idea. As our pal Roland Barthes would say, ‘language is never innocent.’ 

BABYLONIAN CARNIVAL WALKING

Look, I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, and maybe even less by its title, but 

when you see a book titled It Walks By Night and it has an obelisk on the cover, then 

given my range of interests, it seems like a book that should be read.  So I read it.  It's by 

John Dickson Carr.

 

Spoiler alert: the plot is so preposterous, involving a ‘locked room,’ plastic surgery, decapitation, opium, and one of the characters attempting to live out the plot of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ that I pretty much gave up trying to understand it.  Suffice to say there is no obelisk in the book, and precious few mentions of walking, unless you include passages like this one, describing Inspector Bencolin, the hot shot Parisian detective:

     ‘In his hands a thousand facets came glittering out of the revolving jewel of Paris – lights and shadows, perfume and danger – the salon, the greenroom, the pits – abbey, brothel, and guillotine, a Babylonian carnival through which he walked in the name of the prefecture.’

 

No one ever accused this book of being underwritten.

And here on the last page is the heroine/murderess’s final utterance in the book: note, she has been indulging in marijuana cigarettes.

     ‘When I smoke one of those – I don’t know why – I am capable of anything. I took a taxi.  I came up to the villa by the back gate, and when I came in by the back gate, he was standing there … I struck him.  I hacked him – I was bathed in his blood.  I liked that!’  

      Pity she didn’t just go for a walk, with friends, and a map:

DANCES WITH DAFFS

 It being the beginning of March I found myself walking in Suffolk, at the very southern 

edge, along the river Orwell, in Pin Mill and Shotley Gate.

 

The first bit of the walk – in fact on a patch of land belonging to the National Trust - was suitably woody and bucolic.  Along the way I came across these – and have even managed to identify them – Daldinia concentrica:

 

They’re not edible, and not in the least psychotropic.  In fact and the reference works say they make ‘great kindling’ which seems rather a waste of a mushroom even if it’s not edible.

 

The second part of the walk was more or less industrial looking out from Shotley at Felixstowe which I gather is often very much busier than this:

 

And I was thinking about Pauline Oliveros and her notion of deep listening.  In the woods there were a lot of bird sounds – most of which I couldn’t identify though I’m pretty sure I heard a woodpecker.  There was also some distant droning, either from something on the river or traffic the A12 which wasn’t a million miles away.

This is Pauline Oliveros, apparently in some woods:

 

Shotley probably had some sounds of lapping water but mostly there was noise from the tankers being loaded and unloaded across the way: deep thuds and the occasional metallic clunk. 

 

In both places there were daffodils – these near Pin Mill

 

these at Shotley – I am very fond of plants in tyres:

 

Of course I thought of the Wordsworths.  Interestingly, or not, it was evidently much later than the beginning of March when William floated on high (or in fact walked) and saw the daffs that inspired his poem. Sister Dorothy was with him of course, and she wrote about it in her journal of April 15^th(1802).  There may have been a delay before she wrote about it, but surely not a month and a half. On the other hand, by his own account, it took William a couple of years to get round to writing the poem.

 

Dorothy wrote, ‘When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.’

 

You know, I’m quite naïve in matters of daffodil reproduction.  I always imagined the bulbs proliferated underground.  The idea that seeds floated ashore was quite a new idea to me.

 

This is a picture of Dorothy and William from Look and Learn magazine.  Dorothy seems amazingly happy with that rake.

 

 

AURAL WALKING

 There’s a line by Pauline Oliveros, the avant-garde musician, composer and theorist, that gets quoted surprising often.  It runs “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

 

In fact it’s one of Oliveros listening exercises, titled 'Native' from her small volume Sonic Meditations. 

To be fair Oliveros was more concerned with listening than walking.  In fact she was more concerned with listening than just about anything else, an advocate of ‘Deep Listening’.  And yes OK, I get that the piece is no doubt metaphoric, but I’ve been thinking how weirdit would be if the bottoms of my feet became ears.  

 

I mean they’d be inside my socks and inside my shoes: they wouldn’t hear much of anything.  And if you say, as some people do, that it’s always best to walk barefoot, well that’d be even worse, wouldn’t it?  These new ears would be constantly pressed hard against the ground. They might hear things in a new way but you wouldn’t have to walk very far before they got really, really sore.