SOCIETY WALKING

     Here’s a book you might like, though perhaps you know it already: it was published in 2016.

 It’s The Wander Society by Keri Smith, who describes herself on her website as ‘Artist, polymath, illustrator, explorer, conceptual thinker, subverter, mystic, obsessive researcher, reader, querent, introverted, experimenter, honest, curious, maker, defender of trees, defender of human rights, phenomenologist, philosopher, autodidact, LGBTQIA+ ally, inventor.’

         Sounds like a full life. 

 

The book’s McGuffin is that Smith bought a secondhand copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and found it contained annotations such as ‘WW will show you the way,’ ‘Solvitur Ambulando,’ along with the name of the Wander Society and its lightning bolt symbol.

 

         In due course she sleuthed out more information, became a member, and she thinks that you, the reader, might want to do the same.

         The conceit is sustained online by a modest Wander Society website, and the book comes with a quasi-academic introduction by the, I assume, fictional Professor J. Tindleman.

 

         The book is a handsome object containing texts, manifestos, graphic art, photographs, diagrams, meditations, suggested ways of walking (some familiar, some not), quotations from walkers and wanderers, booklists of recommended reading.  And yes, you will find Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking in the same list as Perec, Sebald, Dickens, Gary Snyder and Nick Papadimitriou, among others.  Cool.

 

     Some of the ideas may be familiar to experienced walkers, not to say psychogeographers, but of course walking and wandering are not quite the same thing, and Smith assures us it’s OK to wander via the imagination or literature.

         

I was very taken by a section titled ‘Slow Walking’ in which Smith says, ‘Slow down your pace to at least half speed, slower if you can … There is no need to speed up.  Everything you need is right here.’

At a time when I constantly read about the many health benefits of walking ‘briskly’ I find this wonderfully refreshing.

Then, as luck or fate would have it, quite unconnected with Keri Smith as far as I’m aware, I came come across this photograph on the Instagram feed of artist Robert Bean.  (Hi Robert!).

 

Both he and Keri Smith are Canadian though I don’t know if that’s at all significant.

I assume those carved shoes are ‘simply’ art or decoration, but after reading Keri Smith I can’t help wondering if it’s the symbol of some clandestine organisation of walkers, or possibly of shoe fetishists.  I’m no conspiracy theorist but I do like the idea of a universe of secret societies, none of which (I assume) would want me as a member.