"NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE"

 Who could disagree with Heraclitus when he said, “No man ever steps in the same river 

twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”  (Incidentally, “steps” is 

sometimes translated as ‘walks,’ but that sounds off to me.  I mean who walks in a river?  

Wade at best). 

 

Anyway it seems to me that Heraclitus’s notion applies to streets as well as rivers, though judging by this picture, old H. found walking a bit of a strain.  Scholars are reasonably sure that he suffered from dropsy.

 

Living as I do in small town Essex there’s a strictly limited number of nearby streets to walk down.  Even so, by definition, and not just Heraclitus’, every street is different every time I walk down it, as am I.  And I think you can say something similar about photography: you can’t photograph the same subject twice because the subject will have changed, as will the photographer.

 

There’s a certain street I walk down reasonably often and the first time I did it I was taken by this strange and interesting and rather attractive juxtaposition of plant life and dog statue. 

 

A year or so later it looked like this.  

 

I wasn’t sure what had happened to the plants but, as you see, snow was on the ground, and it did occur to me that the plant might have simply come to the end of it’s life or perhaps just receded for the winter.  I suppose a better plantsman would be able to tell you the names of the absent plants.  

 

And then, not so long ago, I walked down the street again and things had taken chaotic a turn – no snow, no plant, and a significant pile of rubbish.  The dog, however, endures, for now.

 

THE KOOL-AID TEST

 On Saturday

 we went for a walk on the banks of the Stour.  It was good.

 

And then the acid kicked in and it was … different ...

WALKING WITH WEIWEI

Ai Weiwei depicted in a mural in the L.A. Art District:

I've tried and failed to find who the artist is.  I guess that's how it is with street art.  

Somebody might tell me.

The Sunday Times just had an extract from Ai Weiwei’s memoir 1000 Years of Joys and 

Sorrows, about his 81-day incarceration in Beijing in 2011, having been deemed a ‘national 

security risk.’

 

It’s grim and disturbing stuff, and of course he was treated appallingly by the Chinese authorities, and yet I wonder why they didn’t treat him worse. They could certainly have given him a life sentence, for instance. The only obvious reason I can think of for this comparative leniency is international opinion and fear that they might turn him into a martyr.  Today he seems to be allowed to travel anywhere in the world.

 

Weiwei’s work S.A.C.R.E.D. features dioramas depicting his incarceration including this one:

 

The memoir describes what he calls a room rather than a cell, ' some 280 square feet and the floor was laid with brown ceramic tiles, each 2 ft by 2ft, six tiles across and 12 tiles down.  I could exercise only on the six square in the middle of the room: after walking seven steps I had to turn around and go back in the other direction.'

    Then later: ‘From 6.50 to 7.40 am was reserved for exercise, which consisted of walking back and forth on the six permitted tiles.  The guards accompanied me on either side, walking and turning just as I did, maintaining their position and adjusting their distance as necessary, to make sure I didn’t suffer some mishap – however unlikely that might be.  Together we made up the world’s smallest drill team, but in time we reached a high level of wordless co-ordination, sensitive to the slightest changes in rhythm.’

 

         I was left wondering whether it was always the same two guards. Presumably not.  Even in China prison guards must get a day off.  So were some guards better than others at walking with him? I don’t know.

 

Now Weiwei’s free to walk more or less where he likes, such as below, where he’s seen with Anish Kapoor, walking from the Royal Academy to Stratford. The blanket shows solidarity with refugees.  (photo by Mat Smith)  

WALKING VIRTUALLY

And here’s a thing.  I got an email from Don Pollins, “near Washington DC.”  He’d just read the part of my book The Lost Art of Walking where I spend a day walking back and forth from one end of London’s Oxford Street to the other. Given the wonders of Google Street View he was able to follow in my footsteps (“virtually” and of course now some years after the event), and he came up with this wonderfully telling image. 

I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of store Walk was, but it turns out, not all that surprisingly, to be (or rather to have been) a shoe store.  Obviously that branch above has gone out of business, and poking around on Yelp I see it got some pretty poor reviews, mostly based on the crappiness of the staff.  It’d be nice to think that was the reason it closed.  And it may be that the whole chain has gone out of business.  I’m not sure.  It’s really, really hard to Google a store that’s simply called Walk.  Maybe that’s why they went out of business.

But I know there was at least one other branch on Oxford Street because when I did the walk that I write about in the book, I took this picture, clearly a different store from the one on Street View:

The digital info attached to the image tells me it was taken at 6.41am on July 18^th, 2006, which sounds about right, though I’m never sure how accurate that info is.  And here’s another picture I took that day:

It was taken at 9.53 am, apparently, in Frith Street, just off Oxford Street.  I took it because I saw the number 666, but I don’t suppose the bar was actively involved in Satanism.  It was called 6 Degrees, and somebody in the bar clearly had a number of large “6 degrees” stickers and put three of them in a row on the glass doors.  Perhaps they were mocking Satan - always a high-risk activity.  6 Degrees, I discover, has now closed down too.