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. 

 

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.

 

ULYSSES ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

 It’s a good few decades since I first read the opening lines of the “Proteus” chapter in Ulysses, the chapter in which Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount Strand.   I read the words "Ineluctable modality of the visible," reached for the dictionary and looked up the meaning both of ineluctable and modality, and I think I was at least very slightly wiser afterwards.

Now I know, or at least I’m given to understand, that this is a reference to Aristotelian notions of form and substance, that what the eye sees is not inherent in the thing seen.  At one point Stephen closes his eyes and wonders if the world still exists, to which the all too obvious answer is “Duh.”

At the very least I suppose those words mean that we can’t escape the visual, though I’m not sure why we’d want to. 

And of course there’s a double bluff going on here, in that Joyce’s novel is transforming a visual experience (though obviously not only a visual experience) into a verbal one, into a text.  And I often think, as I walk in the world, that the separation between the verbal and the visual is largely a false one.

I’m a writer and I love words, but a lot of the time I write about what I see. And occasionally I take a photograph to capture details that I might otherwise forget, even as I accept that taking the photograph changes the nature of forgetting and remembering.

  But the fact is, the world I see when I’m walking is full of language, visible language, words in a landscape. Cities seem to be full of fragmented poetry and prose, right there on the wall or the floor, and very occasionally up in the sky.    

This isn’t why I walk, but it definitely makes the experience of walking all the more worthwhile.  Sometimes I wonder if language is ineluctable.