WALKING BLITZED

I’ve written elsewhere about my own father going to work the morning after the Sheffield Blitz of 1941, walking through ruins, stepping over dead bodies as he went.  The picture above is from the Sheffield Libraries archive but, need I say, that is not my father.

I’m never sure exactly what is we want from war photographs.  We want the “truth,” of course, but we know that truth is war’s first casualty. We also know that certain war photographs are in fact “set ups,” sometimes in a “good cause,” sometimes not.  And equally we do know that many war photographers have a good-enough and trained-enough eye that even in the midst of chaos their photographs can be surprisingly formal and well-composed.

When it comes to photographing the aftermath of war, photographers are inevitably confronted by ruins: piles of rubble and masonry which in themselves may be rather unphotogenic.  In those circumstances, what photographer can resist putting a walker or two in the picture?

The images above and below come from the conflict in Aleppo, and I have been following things there with a special interest.  A long time ago I did an MA in European drama at the University of Essex, along with (among others) a melancholy Syrian named Tarek.  He was specializing in Beckett and had hopes of teaching English literature at Aleppo University.  Occasionally we walked to the campus together, discussing modern European drama rather than the state of things in Syria, which even then seemed a very touchy subject. 

I have no idea of what happened to Tarek, whether he fulfilled his ambitions, and in any case I imagine he’d now be about retirement age.  Of course, I don't seriously expect to see him when I look at the news photographs from Aleppo, but if he is still there now, I feel pretty certain that he’s walking in ruins.

And speaking of modern European drama: those of you have been following the Nicholson “literary career” since its beginning (there may perhaps be three of you) will know that my first serious bit of writing was a play titled Oscar, a two-hander, less than an hour long, but performed in several different productions in Cambridge, Edinburgh and (improbably) Nottingham.  We needed an image for the programme, so our designer dug out something from an underground magazine, and used the image below.

At the time I thought it was wonderful, but I’d more or less forgotten about it, had certainly forgotten the name of the artist.  But recently, for one reason or another, I happened to be looking for images of the ruins of Hollywood, and there it was.  The artist is Ron Cobb, who I'm sure I should have known more about.  The image seems as terrific as ever.  I had imagined that an updated version would have our protagonist carrying a computer rather than a TV, but who’s to say he wouldn’t be carrying a fan, like this man in Aleppo?

THE WANDERING OF ART

The author Merlin Coverley recently sent me a copy of his new book The Art of Wandering.  It’s subtitled “The Writer as Walker,” which might suggest a book of infinite length, but in fact he brings it in at a trim and attractive 250 pages.  

In it, he speaks well of me and my writing, for which I’m very grateful.  But more than that, I think it’s a good book because it covers all the bases but still has room to include various texts and authors that are unfamiliar, and in some cases completely new, to me.  And this is exactly what you want from a book of this kind: an incentive to run out and buy some new books to further expand the “pedestrianism” section of your library.  Zymunt Bauman’s “Desert Spectacular” in The Flâneur edited by Keith Tester, for example, sounds like it was written with me in mind, though in fact the going rate on Amazon for a hard cover copy is currently $343.93.

Equally you want a book like this to send you back to rereading things you already know, and in this case I’ve found myself pulling out Poe’s “The Man of The Crowd” which is actually one of those shape-shifting stories that seems to be different every time I read it.

Coverley is hardly the first to have stressed the importance of this story in the history of modern, and indeed post-modern fiction, and in the literature of pedestrianism per se.   Baudelaire and Benjamin were big fans. Benjamin Benjamin wrote that the story, “is something like the X-ray picture of a detective story. In it, the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who arranges his walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd.”

Well, yes and no. In Poe’s story, the unnamed narrator sits in the window of a London coffee house  watching the world go by.   He’s recovering from an illness and finds the spectacle both fascinating and alarming, and is finally struck by a single devilish face belonging to an old man whom he feels compelled to follow.  The pursuit continues for the next 24 hours as the old man walks through London, apparently with purpose, though that purpose becomes increasingly indiscernible.  

It’s a walk on the wild side: “wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall  … horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters … large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro.”  None of this will seem at all unfamiliar to anyone who visits contemporary London.  The old man has a “wild energy,” and doesn’t slow down.  And neither does the sickly narrator, at least not until as the “shades of the second evening are coming on” he’s finally had enough and gives up the pursuit.  Our narrator concludes, “this old man is the type and the genius of deep crime.  He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd ... I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.”

For me, it’s one of those stories that keeps slipping in and out of focus.  Sometimes it seems sublimely prescient of most modern literature (think Thomas Pynchon passim), a mystery that refuses to give up its mystery, that refuses even to state what the mystery is, asserting that attempts to make sense of a character, or the world itself, is ultimately futile.  I know there are many supporters for this view of “The Man Of The Crowd.” 

Other times I wonder if Poe didn’t simply paint himself into a corner, realized he couldn’t resolve this story, couldn’t find a “solution” that would be equal to the quest, and so inverted and subverted the narrative: now the mystery is too profound to be understood, or perhaps there is no mystery at all.  And there’s at least some suggestion that the narrator never actually leaves the coffeehouse and that the narrative takes place entirely in is his fevered imagination.

Either way, to decide that the old man is “a man of the crowd who can never be alone,” doesn’t really seem to be saying very much, whereas to describe him as “the genius of crime” just seems like character assassination.  How could you possibly come to such a conclusion when you’ve followed the old geezer for 24 hours and he’s never, so to speak, put a foot wrong.

You could, of course, give Poe the absolute benefit of the doubt and say that this kind of ambiguity, this oscillation between the genuinely and the bogusly mysterious is precisely what he intended.  But was he really that kind of writer?

Finally, Poe holds a special place in the annals of aimless pedestrianism, because of the way he died.  On September 27, 1849, he set off from Richmond, Virginia heading, via Baltimore, for his home in New York: the trip was to raise funds for his magazine The Stylus.  He evidently made it to Baltimore, though whether directly we can’t be sure (he may have visited Philadelphia): but in any case what happened to him once he got there is certainly a mystery, and at this point in history an apparently unsolvable one.  

We do know however than on October 3 he was found in a very bad way, delirious, walking the streets of Baltimore, wearing cheap clothes that were not his own: eventually pitching up outside, then inside, Ryan's Tavern, sometimes known as Gunner's Hall.  Some reports have him sober, others have him in a state of drunken collapse.

He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, and died there on October 7, never having recovered sufficiently to give an account of himself.  Death certificates were not required at that time and place, and the local newspaper The Baltimore Clipper, reported that his death was caused by “congestion of the brain” which may, or may not, have been a euphemism for alcoholic poisoning.  A recent theory suggests Poe actually died of rabies.

Of course, these days everybody “knows” that Poe was a debauched wreck, an authorial image in keeping with his work (though he cleaned up nice for his stamp), but most of this comes from an obituary printed in the New York Tribune, attributed to one “Ludwig,” actually Rufus Wilmot Griswold, once Poe’s friend, then his rival in love and letters, and eventually his posthumous enemy, as well as his posthumous literary executor, N.B.  Among other charges he laid against Poe, was that Poe often walked the streets, either in "madness or melancholy", mumbling and cursing to himself: to which any self-respecting flâneur, or even man of the crowd, would surely respond, “Well who the hell hasn’t?”

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a pretty dreadful poem titled “Where Once Poe Walked.”  It starts:

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,


Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;


Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,


Arched high above a hidden world of yore.

Nuff said, surely.

However, I am rather taken with the above print “Poe Walking High Bridge” by B. J. Rosenmeyer, ca. 1930. Courtesy of the Print Collection, The New York Public Library, 
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

And incidentally I discover that there’s a bust of Poe above a winebar, the Fox Reformed in Stoke Newington Church Street, the former site of a school Poe attended.  I think I’ll have a walk over there when I’m in London, next month.  The art of wandering has not been lost.

WALKING WITH PATINA

I happened to be walking early one morning this week in the streets around the Beverly Center, here in Los Angeles.  I wasn’t looking for the seamy underbelly, since it’s a fairly swank neighbourhood, and I’d have looked in vain, but I was looking for things with a bit of quirkiness or patina.

Quite a few people were leaving their houses and apartments, getting in their cars and going to work.  A young couple fell in step walking behind me, so I didn’t get the very best look at them, but I got a general impression of young, attractive, cleanish cut, and I could hear their conversation quite clearly.

HE: I can’t believe Bobby’s got a job already.  He’s only been in LA like a week.

SHE: He got four casting calls in his first three days!  He’d have got the J.C. Penney job if     he’d been able to ride a motorcycle. He looks like the kind of guy who could ride a  motorcycle.

HE: That’s the thing about Bobby.  He’s so straight, but casting directors always think he’s so gay.

As you may have read elsewhere in this blog I have an ongoing interest in what I call “feral furniture” – couches, chests of drawers, televisions, that have simply been dumped on the street.  Some, of course, look in better shape than others, but I have never seen such a stylish abandoned couch as the one I saw that morning in the environs of the Beverly Center.  It looked like this:

And I was thinking to myself, man, this must be a really classy neighborhood.  The people here throw away furniture that looks cooler and more elegant than any furniture I’ve ever owned.  And then half a block later I came across something else feral, an abandoned toilet tossed into the ivy at the curb, which suggested that some of the area’s inhabitants may be slightly less classy than others.

GHOST WALKS

It was late Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting on a bench in the cactus garden, outside our house on the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills, and my wife was inside and the radio was tuned to National Public Radio and suddenly she stuck her head out the door and said “You’d better get in here, there’s going to be an English psychogeographer talking on the radio.”  I can’t swear how many other Hollywood homes that happened in, but I’ll bet not so very many.

Now, my wife is not easily impressed, and I long ago gave up trying to impress her, but when I replied, “Who? Iain Sinclair?” I did earn myself a gold star in her eyes, for intuition if nothing else.  Sinclair was talking about his book Ghost Milk, which has just been published in the United States, and in his beautifully soft, well-modulated voice he was spewing forth elegant bile about the evils of the London Olympic games.

Now interestingly, I see that the English edition of Ghost Milk was subtitled “Calling Time on the Grand Project,” but the US edition is subtitled “Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympic games,” a problematic subtitle I’d say, given that we’re already well past the eve, but I'm no publisher.

Anyway he duly talked about the Olympic site as a “future ruin,” and I was reminded of something I’d read just a few days earlier in a piece on Brian Dillon’s website. The site is named Ruins of the Twentieth Century and the particular post I was thinking of was “Adventures in Architectural Hell” a review of two books A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain By Owen Hatherley, and A Guidebook for the Urban Age By PD Smith.

In his review Dillon writes about getting off the train at Stratford station in the middle of the Olympic park.  He says, “It feels as if you’ve detrained into a high-tech, functional ruin, a genuinely thrilling (though likely inadvertent) hint at the classically inspired sporting rigours ahead.”

Future ruin, functional ruin these are wonderfully evocative terms, and ones I intend to use.  Of course neither Sinclair nor Dillon, is entirely averse to a good bit of ruin.  Nor am I.


It seems to me there are certain problems with the idea of a future ruin, since ultimately surely all buildings, all cities, all landscapes are destined to be ruins one way or another, and some of us will take great pleasure in walking through them.  Anish Kapoor’s magnificent giant sculpture at the Olympic park looks like a ruin already.  The idea of a functional ruining is much more paradoxical and intriguing.

I remember when I first walked the streets of Manhattan in the 1970s; the place did indeed seem ruined, and large swathes of it undoubtedly were, and since the city was more or less bankrupt you could certainly argue that it wasn’t truly functional.  On the other hand, when I started going there regularly, and eventually living there in the late 1990s the place was less conspicuously ruined, and was certainly functional, and yet a walk through the Port Authority bus station or around the piers or parts of the east village, showed that plenty of ruin remained.  And of course many New Yorkers much preferred it that way: they didn’t want to live Disneyland.  They didn’t even want to live in a clean, safe, well-ordered American city.

Incidentally, Brian Dillon is one of the authors of a book titled Walking in My Mind,  that accompanied an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.  Of course, the mind is a place where some of us do a lot of our walking anyway, and at least most of us who live, think, converse, get around, have minds that are more or less functional.  But most of us have no doubt that that one day in the future our minds will be absolute ruins, places we can do no walking whatsoever.

A LESS THAN PROUSTIAN WALK

Funny what you remember.  Above is a photograph featuring my regular, if increasingly occasional, walking companion Steve Kenny.  We’re in the middle of a walk in Dunwich, in Suffolk, sometime in the early 2000s I think.  Those are the ruins of Dunwich Abbey in the background.

Steve and I have walked a lot of many miles together over the years, in town and country, and invariably we talk as we walk. Needless to say I don’t remember any of our conversations verbatim, but I know the kind of things we’ve talked about, and like to think I remember some of them in detail.  And my recollection is that on that day in Dunwich Steve was telling me about an idea he’d had for a sitcom that involved superheroes and people who worked in local government.


He now tells me he has no memory whatsoever of this sitcom idea of his.  However, he does remember a horse and a small boy. The story, as he tells it, is that there was a horse in a field next to the Abbey ruins - we petted it and it seemed friendly enough.  This, in fact, I do now remember, though probably wouldn’t have without Steve’s prompting. And apparently I said that despite "making friends" with the horse, I felt I could still eat it.  Steve said that he couldn't (unless in great extremity, of course) as he felt there was now a bond between us - however slight and recently created.  I don’t actually remember this conversation, but it sounds very much like the kind of things each of us might have said.


And now the part I don’t remember at all.  According to Steve,  “A couple came along with a young boy – they let him give some grass to the horse.  He was too young (a toddler) and was doing it all wrong.  I had an urge to intervene but of course, I didn't – we'd already started to move on.  It was almost inevitable - the horse nipped the boy’s fingers - the couple were surprised but not as surprised and distraught as the boy, who was probably scarred for life (I was thinking mentally - but perhaps physically as well) - the horse had big teeth, he had little fingers. Did I blame myself or the stupid couple - perhaps both?  I couldn't escape the feeling that the horse had done it deliberately - perhaps you were right to want to eat him.”   To be fair to myself, I didn’t say I particularly wanted  to eat him, simply that I felt I could, if the circumstances presented themselves. 

As I go through life, and as I walk through the world I generally resist the urge to turn 

my experience into anecdote, but this is a pretty good anecdote.  The only problem is, it 

doesn’t feel like “my” anecdote.  I don’t doubt that it happened exactly as Steve described – I don’t for a moment think he’s inventing it - and that I was there and was at least a passive witness to events.  The problem is simply that this seems to be Steve’s walking anecdote rather than mine, which is why I give him full credit. I wonder if Marcel Proust would have had any such scruples. 

Proust did write, “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

Of course, I don’t have any recollection of how the horse smelled, any more than of how he tasted.