WALKING SOMEWHERE ELSE

    Here's a thing that popped up on Instagram a little while ago

 - a quotation (and pic) from Buckminster Fuller “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”  

To which I suppose you might ask, “Well yes, but how often exactly?”

 

Anyway, it did make me think, in a way that I’d never quite thought before, that one of the great and comparatively rare pleasures of walking, is to be strolling along, going nowhere in particular, and suddenly to come across a geodesic dome.

In Los Angeles you can do it just by walking along Sunset Boulevard and seeing the Arclight cinema.

 

And if you walk further you might see them in some unexpected places – not a million miles away from the Hollywood sign:

 

And in Glendale you might once have walked by this dry cleaner, which I’m pretty sure was abandoned despite the Open sign on the door.

Or you might walk down a suburban street and think, who on earth lives in a house like this?

The experience can be even better if you’re walking in the desert. You crest a hill and look down, and boom there it is:

 

Or here:

Or here in Arizona:

Inevitably the experience happens rather more often in the United States that it does in old England but it’s not completely unknown.  There were these belonging to restaurant in Gloucestershire named (I think) The Ragged Cot:

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And there are these bad boys in Victoria Park, 

the kind of backdrop that a lad might use for an author portrait:

 

Photo by Travis Elborough

As for the question of whether Buckminster Fuller was much of a walker, well, his 1981 book The Critical Path certainly makes some mention of walking, as when he writes, “We walk right foot, left foot, not right foot, wrong foot.”  Though I’d say we surely all put a foot wrong once in a while.

 

And here he writes later in the book, “As I have mentioned before and now repeat in a more comprehensive manner, in 1800 the average human being was walking an annually cumulative distance of 1,100 miles and riding ten additional annual miles. By 1900 the average human being was yet walking a total of yearly distance of 1,100miles but the average U.S.A. citizen's annual vehicle-ridden miles had increased to 400.  All humanity is as yet in 1980 walking an annual average of 1,100 miles but in the U.S.A., Europe, and parts of the Near East, Asia, Africa, and Australia, all men, women, and youngsters free to travel, are averaging over 20,000 annual miles of vehicular travel.”

I’ve no idea how accurate his numbers are, though the general principle seems reasonable.  I know a good many people who walk more than 1,100 miles a year; as for the 20,000 vehicular miles, I suppose much depends on whether you’re frequent flyer.

         

     But here’s a thing. During World War One, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of an architect, and when the war was over he started a company with his father-in-law, making bricks out of wood shavings. Things didn’t go well, and on the verge of bankruptcy, they sold the business 1927. At much the same time, Anne gave birth to a baby daughter. As a jobless new dad Fuller was deeply depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, and by his own account, contemplating suicide.  But suddenly when he found himself floating a few feet above the ground, bathed in sparkling light; which I suppose is walking of a sort. He felt time standing still and he heard a voice say, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.”  Note the capitalization and absence of definite article.

 

 

 

WANDERING LOST

Pic from RCMP

It was old man Tolkien who said “Not all who wander are lost,” and how true that is. Some of them are psychogeographers, and some are following their GPS not realising it’s leading them astray.  But then again some of them really are lost, like this this guy, twenty year old, Sam Benastick who went missing on a ten day solo fishing and hiking trip in Redfern-Keily Park in the northern Rockies, British Columbia. 

 

When he failed to return at the expected time, and as temperatures dropped to -20C (-4F) there was an official search, but failing to find him, the authorities called it off fearing the worst.

 

And then 5 weeks later he turned up alive, even if not exactly well.  He was found by two trail workers heading for Redfern Lake. They knew exactly who he was.  He’d sliced up his sleeping bag and wrapped it around his legs to stay warm.He was suffering from frostbite and also, get this, smoke inhalation caused when the makeshift shelter he’d built for himself burned down.  An ambulance was called to take him to hospital, and Benastick was said to be in “rough shape.”

 

It’s not clear how much walking he did while he was missing - one account said he was chased by a wolf, although the BBC did manage to come up with what must be one of the most bathetic captions in their history, "Sam Benastick is an avid hiker."

Avid hiker indeed!  I wonder if he's less avid than he used to be.

 

 

Benastick apparently told police he stayed in his car for a couple of days and then walked to a creek where he camped for 10 to 15 days. He was carrying a tarp, a backpack and some camping supplies.  He also had a dirt bike, and according to his mother a lot of peanut butter. And eventually he  made his way to the area where he flagged down his rescuers. A very happy ending

Anyway here he is, in and out of hospital 

I do hope Taylor Swift sends him some love).

The BBC quotes Adam Hawkins, the search manager, as saying he’s ‘intensely curious’ to learn more about the area where Mr. Benastick was found and what he was doing while missing.  It’s a curiosity many of us share, in a good way.

 

SOURCES OF WALKING

 

I bought a copy of Journey to the Source of the Nile by Christopher Ondaatje.  It was in the local charity shop, and  I bought it mostly because the index contains 60 odd references to Sir Richard Francis Burton. This is Mr Ondaatje: 

 

         He tells us, among many other things, that “the Swahili word for ‘white man’ is mzungu which comes from mzungu katimeaning ‘wandering around in circles, going nowhere.’” I think that’s worth knowing.

 

Also, if Ondaatje is to be believed (and why would you doubt him?), walking home from dinner in Zanzibar can be a scary business.  He eats at a Goan restaurant called Chit Chat which he finds to be “a fabulous treat,” … “However walking back … through the dark shadowy streets of Stone Town was far from pleasant.  As the evening darkened, the lanes of Stone Town became really claustrophobic.  Figures lurked in every archway and we were studied very closely as we walked quickly back to the safety of our small hotel.  I would certainly not have liked to make the journey across town on my own.” People said much the same to me about walking at night in Dublin.

 

Meanwhile, in tandem, I’ve been rereading Nabokov’s Lectures on Literatureand here he is writing about Joyce’s Ulysses,  “If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light.  Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down. They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation without losing their dignity.  Well, this trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce’s new literary technique.”

         Well yes, I’m sure it can, and I know that Nabokov is one of the greats, even so I never imagined he was a man who’d look back between his knees with his face turned upside down, but apparently he did, and again that seems to be something worth knowing.

         And then one day in the Times last week, under the headline “Can’t Sleep?  Don’t panic – here’s how to cope” we were told “A BMJ study showed gentle 30-minute morning walks were enough to improve memory and executive function.”

Honey, I didn’t even know I had an executive function but apparently I do, and so do most other people. A little research tells me “Executive function is a set of mental    skills. It includes working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control.”  Well OK – and this gentle 30 minute morning walk – is that a version of wandering around in circles, going nowhere?  If so, that’s OK by me. 

 

WALKING WITH SEMI-DERELICTION

 I was walking in Stratford, the one in London, not the one upon Avon.  I had my reasons.  Stratford is usually just a place I just pass through on the train but this time I walked its streets and I was glad I did.

 

Stratford shows the world a face that is shiny, glossy, modern, sky-scraperish, zestily architectural, and the buildings have names like The Stratosphere Tower, the Unex Tower, the Legacy Tower, and many more besides, some still in the process of being built.

 

At this point I couldn’t tell you which building is which but collectively they make for some elegantly dramatic backgrounds for the urban pedestrian.  And nearby of course there are towers that are less shiny and glossy – for example the Carpenters Estate, old style council housing, though (as is the way of these things) it’s currently being restored and regenerated: a billion pound rebuild delivering 2022 homes.  You do the maths.

 

And I found myself walking past James Riley Point, part of the Carpenters Estate, which was in an elegant state of decay. It’s described by the architects currently working on it as a “23-storey semi-derelict residential tower” – and this one, they say, is not only being restored and regenerated, but actually reinvented.  Oh boy.

 

I was able to meander around the tower at ground level – I love a bit of ruin, or indeed semi-dereliction - and saw these curious and mysterious objects set into the ground.  Can anybody tell me what they are/were?

 

And I was able to look up at the pebble dashing on the building (I don’t think we’d call it cladding but I could be wrong) – some of which was obviously falling off and there were big lumps of it lying on the ground nearby.

 

Now being a scavenger, curator, collector and occasional recycler I was keen to pick up a lump of the stuff and take it back to the Nicholson Archive. But the lump I wanted was too big and heavy. and I was on foot and had somewhere else to be. If I’d had a car with me it might all have been very different. 

 

And as night drew in I wandered a little further, and I think you know that much as I love a good tower block, I enjoy a good obelisk even more.  And there on the Broadway was/is the Samuel Gurney Memorial, strangely out of place in its current surroundings but nothing wrong with that:

 

Now, need I say that I had never heard of Samuel Gurney but it turns out he was a banker, philanthropist, and MP, pro-penal reform, anti-slavery, anti-capital punishment, and apparently an all round good egg. He died in 1856 and the obelisk was erected in 1861, it’s also a drinking fountain.

        Now, I imagine the billion pound rebuild may contain the odd "hydration station," but I’ll bet it doesn’t contain any new obelisks.  I’d love to be proved wrong.

 

 

 

THE WELL WORN WALKER

A.E. Housman is not an open book to me, and much of what I know about him comes from an essay I read by Alan Bennett. And the most interesting thing in that essay runs as follows, “At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.”

The curious part of that sentence is the word “all.” Just how much, how many kinds, of underwear did he (or they) wear?  More than just vest and underpants?  Combinations? Drawers? Something more exotic?  This kind of thing?

 

        

 

If a work of statuary can be believed, Housman did look like a walker.

Swinburne on the other hand looks like a man who’s got his knickers in a twist.  

Though this is how Swinburne looks in a portrait by Robert M.B. Paxton, at the National Portrait Gallery, which is much more persuasive.

Alan Bennett does look convincingly like a walker.  

His underwear arrangements, to date, must remain a private matter, and personally I prefer it that way.

GONE FOR A BURTON

I’ve been walking in Dublin.  I was there for the 7^thSir Richard Francis Burton Conference, where my pal Anthony Miller and I were presenting a paper (possibly just having an on stage conversation) under the title “Burton as Psychogeographer and Walker.” We looked like this: 

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

I don’t think there was anything controversial about this paper.  Most travelers are psychogeographers to the extent that they “study (or at least experience) the effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”  And one way or another they often end up doing a fair amount of walking, when the car breaks down, when the bus drops you off in the wrong place, or in Burton’s case when the camel dies under you.  This is Burton walking in his own garden in Trieste - I guess he had to hold still for the camera.

 

I’d thought there must be some connection to be made between Burton and Joyce, and no doubt there is, but as part of my research I tracked down an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary dated 30^thJuly 1931. Nicolson was lunching with a group of literati including his publisher from Putnam, in order to meet James Joyce.  Joyce was “not a very convenient guest at luncheon” and they struggled for conversation.  

Knowing that Joyce had lived in Trieste where Burton had once been consul, one of the guests, Desmond McCarthy, asked Joyce, “Are you interested in Burton?”

“Not in the very least,” Joyce replied.

 

Still, the conference gave me, and everyone else, plenty of time for walking around the city, and it seems hard to go anywhere without getting the feeling that you’re walking in Joyce’s footsteps, which is no bad thing.

A walker doesn’t necessarily need a project but, I found myself noticing and photographing various “establishments,” whether in business or abandoned or somewhere in between, and in some cases I managed to photograph other walkers, walking past these places.  This kind of thing:

Of course we psychogeographers do love a good map and it was easy to find free maps in Dublin, offered by various tourist attractions but this one, not free, and very hard to slip into your pocket, is one of the best 3-D maps I’ve even seen, metal and stone, about two feet across, depicting (unless I'm mistaken) the outline of Dublin Castle.  I mean you probably wouldn’t use it to get anywhere but as a topographical object it’s hard to beat.

Oh and here’s a thing you might like.  As discussed earlier elsewhere, if you go to the Burton archive at Orleans House in Richmond you’ll see a plaster caster of one of Burton’s hands and one of his feet.

 

And if you were drifting around the Dublin streets up by the Glasnevin Cemetery, you might well see this cast of a foot in the window of a shop called Crafty Studio. 

 

Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message?  Nah, there’s no such thing.