ABSTRACT WALKING

Willem de Kooning is not an open book to me but that’s him above, walking, and I just read this story, about him, from Bill Berkson’s memoir Since When.

  De Kooning was at dinner in East Hampton and somebody at the table said to him, ‘So, you take walks with your dogs.’

    And he answered, ‘No. I’m a man. MY dogs walk with me.’

  Sometimes I think those Abstract Expressionists weren’t all bad.

 

      I haven’t been able to find a picture of de Kooning and his dogs.  There’s this one of him on his bike with just one dog.  Doesn’t really count, does it?

"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.

 

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.’ 

WALKING WITH HOUNDS

When I was a boy, walking the streets of my old neighborhood in Sheffield, I was much troubled by dogs.  I was prepared to be friendly: the only dogs I knew were from cartoons and fiction - Huckleberry Hound, Pluto, 101 Dalmatians - and they were a benign lot, but that was no doubt because they were fictional. The dogs in my real world weren’t benign in the least.  As I walked the local streets I was snapped at and snarled at, and I learned to keep my distance, even as I learned to walk in fear.  Lads who lived in adjoining neighbourhoods said I had it too easy.  Where they lived, the dogs chased you till you dropped, and sank their rabid teeth into you given half a chance.

These days when I walk in LA I never encounter a dog on the street that’s without its owner, and I much prefer it that way, but I hear plenty of howling and barking from behind gates and fences.

Regular readers may remember a few months back I found the above sign in Jaywick, in Essex.  It seemed very desperate, very sad, very English.  But then at the weekend I was walking the streets of Barstow, in California when I found this strangely similar sign.

It’s actually on the fence of a motel – the Desert Inn, a place that looks a good deal more inviting from the front than it does from the back.  Of course, it seems a little unlikely that a wild dog would actually be let loose to roam the space behind a motel but you wouldn’t want to stroll in there and take your chances, would you?  You could even argue that if you really had a dog there’d be no need for a sign at all, although we know that isn’t always true.

Above is my favorite dog warning sign, it’s on a fence on Beachwood Drive and I walk past once in a while and wonder what it means.  The sign is old, the dog seems ghostly, the words “on duty” are barely readable.  Has the dog faded away too?  Has he done his duty and gone to a better place?  Or is he lurking on the other side of the fence, lying low, trying to lull the passing walker into a false sense of security?