RAMBLING WITH ROBERT

(The post below was written at a moment when I changed the name of this blog - I changed it back pretty quickly for reasons that now escape me - I still think An Anatomy of Walking is a great title for something.)

Eagle-eyed readers, or in fact anybody who’s paying attention, will see that I’ve tweaked the title of this blog, from The Hollywood Walker to An Anatomy of Walking.  I still live and walk in Hollywood, but I started to think that “Hollywood Walker” sounded a bit too glam, a bit too Hollywood, that people might think it was all about movie starts and red carpets, which (with very few exceptions) it isn’t.

 An Anatomy of Walking suggests a much broader remit, and it’s a title that pays homage to my main man, Robert Burton (1577- 1640), the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.  As a regular pedestrian and an occasional sufferer from the Black Dog, I’ve always found plenty of overlap between walking and melancholy, not least that the former is a pretty good way of getting rid of the latter.  Not infallible, admittedly.

As times goes by, I find that I admire Burton more and more: his obsessiveness, his crazed but thorough scholarship, his all-embracing inclusiveness.  Got a fact?  Got a quotation?  Then put it in the book.  Here was a man who wrote his great work,  published in 1621 under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, and then he spent the rest of his life rewriting and expanding it.  That’s an admirable policy for a writer, I’d say, and I’m sure he would have been an excellent and madly energetic blogger.

I’ve been reading a part of The Anatomy of Melancholy where Burton considers “Terrestrial devils,” who turn out to be great walkers, especially the kind that “frequent forlorn houses” and are for the “most part innoxious.” He says, “These kind of devils many times appear to men, and affright them out of their wits, sometimes walking at noonday, sometimes at nights, counterfeiting dead men's ghosts, as that of Caligula, which (saith Suetonius) was seen to walk in Lavinia's garden, where his body was buried, spirits haunted, and the house where he died … every night this happened, there was no quietness, till the house was burned.”  This seems to involve a slightly specialized definition of “innoxious,” but let’s not quibble.  It’s hard to find a picture of Caligula walking, but there’s this:

  Burton also discusses “ambulones, that walk about midnight on great heaths and desert places, which (saith Lavater) ‘draw men out of the way, and lead them all night a byway, or quite bar them of their way;’ these have several names in several places; we commonly call them Pucks. In the deserts of Lop, in Asia, such illusions of walking spirits are often perceived, as you may read in M. Paulus the Venetian his travels; if one lose his company by chance, these devils will call him by his name, and counterfeit voices of his companions to seduce him.” No, it’s not easy to get a short, pithy quotation out of Mr. Burton. 

The M. Paulus in question is better known as Marco Polo, and the Desert of Lop (seen above) is in China.  Certain scholars have always doubted whether Marco Polo actually went to China at all.   Still, here’s a picture of the extraordinary Lei Diansheng, following in Marco Polo’s footsteps (or not), walking in the Lop Desert, part of his 10-year, 81,000-kilometer journey around China on foot.  I can’t say whether he was beset by “walking spirits,” but he does look a bit haunted.

DIGRESSING WITH DIOGENES

It’s happened before (more or less) so I wasn’t completely surprised when it happened again over the weekend.  I was walking along the San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail, about 60 miles south of Los Angeles.  I would have preferred to walk on the beach, but the tide was in, and there wasn’t much beach to walk along, and in certain places there was none at all. 

San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail is quite narrow, pressed in against the railroad track, and I encountered a certain number of other pedestrians along the way.  And one of them stopped and looked at me searchingly and said, “You’re a famous Hollywood actor, right?”

         “No,” I said, “but I get that a lot,” which I understand is what actual famous Hollywood actors say when they want to deflect attention.  However, I was, and still am, left wondering which particular famous Hollywood actor this man thought I looked like.

There was an occasion some years back when I was walking down the main street of Beacon, in upstate New York, (I don't remember it being quite ruined as it looks in the picture above but it was certainly the same era) and a man stopped me and said, “Has anybody ever told you, you look just like Dave Stewart of Eurythmics?” Of course, in this case he evidently didn’t think I actually was Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, but I said no, nobody ever had told me that, and the simple truth is that I don’t think I look anything like Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, nor would I wish to.  I mean, I have a beard, but that’s about it.  Still, the man in Beacon didn’t intend it as an insult.

I was in San Clemente because I’d just come down from visiting the Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded by the Spanish in 1776 (a year when things were getting a bit lively over on the other coast), and the mission is the place the swallows return to every year.  I had gone there to walk among the ruins and the cacti, two of my current obsessions.

 These days the mission, though certainly ruined in places, is also thoroughly preserved, perhaps too much so.  There were long periods when it looked more like this:

 I think I’d have been more impressed back then, though of course the cactus gardens wouldn’t have been in place.

The railroad line cuts right through San Juan Capistrano and I suppose there’s a right and a wrong side of the tracks, though San Juan Capistrano is such a wealthy little enclave, that even on the wrong side there’s a tea house and a petting zoo. But if you’re looking for cacti, there’s this utterly amazing specimen which I’ve now visited a couple of times.   (Actually, now that I agonize about it, I wonder if it’s actually a euphorbia).

It’s  inside the boundaries of the Ito Nursery, which doesn’t seem to do a lot of business in cacti, which I think is a shame.  I’d happily pay good money for a cutting from this monster.  Was the cactus a ruin?  No, far from it, despite being in a neglected and unwatered section of the nursery: I guess that’s why I like cacti, and indeed euphorbia.

In the motel that night I found myself reading The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux, a quirky and excellent book, partly an anthology of extracts by other authors, partly a collection of “amazing facts” and mini-essays by Theroux himself.  Inevitably there’s a section about traveling pedestrians, titled “It is Solved By Walking.”  The usual subjects are present – Rousseau and Wordsworth, Muir and Thoreau, Chatwin and Herzog.  But there was one name that I wasn’t familiar with: Xuanzang (my ignorance knows few bounds).

 Xuanzang (I now know) was the 7^th century Chinese monk and scholar, who thought that the Buddhist texts available to him in China were badly translated, so he traveled to India and beyond to get closer to the source, and to bring back  some texts in the original language for more accurate translation.  He traveled 10,000 miles in seventeen years, much, though not all, of it on foot.

He visited the ruins of Gandhara (now in Pakistan), “there were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted and in delicate condition.”  And he visited Taxila, which currently looks like this:

He also visited, and was awed by, the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan, now in Afghanistan, one of which once looked like this:

They were dynamited and destroyed in March 2001 after the Taliban declared that they were idols.  As Theroux puts it “to the cries of ‘Allah is great.’”  The current Afghanistan government has pledged to restore the statues, but I can’t help thinking they may find themselves with other, more pressing priorities.

Inevitably I didn’t see any Taliban equivalents in Southern California, however, while walked along the San Clemente Pedestrian Beach Trail I did see some signs of ruin, or at least a house that may be just a couple of winters away from becoming one.  Some of the houses in San Clemente are built on the cliff top, and the cliff is eroding, with this result:

I like those big, serious industrial supporting columns and they’re obviously doing their job, but you see the area to the left, where a giant slab of rock has fallen away like a collapsing sandcastle.  Look on my works, ye mighty, and move inland.

WALKING SEATTLE-WARDS

My wife and I have been together long enough that I reckon I’ve heard all her stories, most of them many times.  But over the weekend she told me a walking story I’d never heard before.  Back in the day when she lived in Seattle, she was the owner of a very cool but rapidly expiring 1948 Plymouth that had cost her a hundred dollars.  It looked much like the image up above.

 One time, she and her then boyfriend were driving on the Seattle freeway, having up a young hitchhiker, as was the style at the time.  As the three of them were driving along, the car finally died suddenly and completely, having just enough momentum to make it to the freeway exit and roll down the off ramp, coming to a halt at the bottom of the slope.

My wife really didn’t know what to do.  The car wasn’t worth repairing, and even having it towed away would be a complete waste of time and money.  But then the young hitchhiker said, “OK, I’ll buy the car from you.”

She assumed he was trying to be funny but it became clear he was serious.  He was apparently a well-to-do kid who still lived with his parents, and his plan was to get the car home and park it in the back garden so he could sit in it and contemplate the mysteries of the universe.  He would telephone his dad, who was evidently the doting sort, and dad would come along in his truck and tow the car back to the house.  The kid offered $50 cash for the Plymouth.  My wife took the money, and left before the kid’s dad arrived, just in case he might have had certain objections to the deal, and she set off for home on foot.

It hadn’t been such a bad day.  She had $50 in her pocket and she’d got rid of a car that was probably worth nothing at all.  She was a fair distance from where she lived but there was nevertheless a certain spring in her step as she walked all the way home. 

THE DANGERS OF PEDESTRIANISM

Of course there’s nothing funny about walkers being killed by drunk drivers.  And there’s not actually anything very funny about mooning, and yet who can resist an ignoble snigger, followed by a swift twinge of shame, upon reading this headline on the Fox news website in Phoenix:

Pedestrian 'mooning' cars fatally hit by drunk driver

The news items reads:

 “Police say a pedestrian who was walking in the road and flashing his buttocks to drivers was hit and killed by a suspected drunk driver early Saturday morning. 

25-year-old Lee Cole Koontha was allegedly ‘mooning’ drivers and laying down in the roadway near 20th Avenue and Indian School Road. According to police, he was likely drunk or had taken drugs. 

Although his friends tried to get Koontha out of the road, officers say he was eventually struck by 48-year-old Stanley Stafford. 

Police say they believe Stafford was also impaired by alcohol or drugs. 

Koontha was taken to a hospital where he later died. 

Stanley was arrested and booked for aggravated DUI.”

I’m glad that Lee had friends who at least tried to get him out of the road.  He looks like he may not have been a very easy man to befriend.