WALKING BEAT

"No one saves us but ourselves.  No one can and no one may.  We ourselves must walk the path."  I didn’t say that.  Buddha did.  But I tend to agree with him.  

Things Buddhist, and indeed Beat, were on my mind last week when I went for a walk in Berkeley, possibly the most Buddhist and Beat place in America.  The plan was not complicated. I intended to walk from the Cactus Jungle to the Allen Ginsburg Poetry Garden.  I knew very little about either place.  I’d discovered them online while looking for “things to do in Berkeley.”

Certainly it seemed odd that there’d be a cactus garden, let alone a jungle, in the temperate, dampish environs of the East Bay, though that only made me more eager to see this one.  Even though I was aware that this wasn’t actually a place to hang out, but rather a commercial enterprise, a nursery selling cacti and succulents, this didn’t make it any less intriguing, and I didn’t know what to expect.

I had a clearer mental picture of what I thought a poetry garden might be. I imagined something like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta (that's it above), a certain acreage of terrain dotted with lines of poetry, perhaps on plaques or paving stones, or cut into stone or rocks.  Was I asking too much? Possibly.

Before I got to the meat of this walk I had to get to the Cactus Jungle, which was a couple of miles from where I happened to be at the time, on Shattuck Avenue, although of course that formed part of the walk too – the journey is the destination, and so forth - and it didn’t seem daunting.  Most of Berkeley is leafy, flat, quirky and funky in places but essentially quite suburban.  And it had been raining earlier in the day, but that had cleared by the time I set off.

I had to walk past the public library where a large crowd of disheveled men were clustered.  I’m not sure, per Jack Kerouac, that these were genuine dharma bums, but bums they certainly were. It seemed to be a gathering of the tribe, and inexplicable until I noticed the time.  It was ten to one.  The library opened on Sunday at one o’ clock.  The guys were ready to invade, eager to get inside that warm, dry, and bookish environment.

Next was the Berkeley High School, where there was the above, a kind of mural of Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead.  I say “kind of” because it’s not painted on a wall, but on one of those metal boxes that I seem to see more and more of as I walk the streets.  I guess they can’t have much to do with the phone system,  since fewer and fewer people have landlines these days, so I guess it must be to do with cables.  They do provide a canvas for a certain kind of street art, and since they’re ugly to begin with, and don’t appear to belong to anybody, people don’t get too upset when people paint on them.

Opposite the school was the Berkeley Peace Wall, in Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park, over 5,000 hand-painted tiles, mostly with messages in favor of, y’know, peace, and not too far away there was this sign hanging on somebody’s garden fence:

I enjoy a good slogan as much as the next man, but I’m not sure how “imaginatively” the United States might have reacted when, say, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  And was the failure of imagination here on the part of the Americans or the Japanese?  These are big questions and possibly not ones to be answered by a sign hanging on a garden fence.

And of course even in leafy, essentially suburban Berkeley, a man with a taste for edgelands and ruin can find what he’s looking for, the occasional ruined house, and this absolutely wonderful “repurposed building.”  All my life I’ve wanted to live in a metal building, and this one above has the finest patina (call it rust) that I’ve ever seen.

As I often say, edgelands aren’t always necessarily on the edge of things, but the Cactus Jungle was located in the far west of Berkeley. It wasn’t actually on the other side of the tracks, it was on “this” side, but very close to them.

It was starting to rain by the time I got to the jungle, and the staff were huddled, sheltering under canopies and behind plastic sheeting.  This did not look like cactus country.  And although I’m not much of a man for nature notes, I did observe this:  the plants in the nursery were having spring-related growth spurts, well before anything was happening to their brothers down in LA.  I wondered if it was Berkeley’s extra rain that kicked them into action, but more likely it was the expert care and feeding by the folk of the Cactus Jungle.

And so on to the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Garden, another couple of miles, back in the general direction I’d come from.  Along the way there was this domestic cactus garden which seemed pretty darned successful, if not exactly a jungle.

There was this suburban dinosaur:

There was this car – cool enough in itself, though the message “smoke dope” that had been sprayed on the side towards the rear seemed to be overdoing things a little.

Eventually I arrived at the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Garden.  I gotta say I was disappointed and I think Mr. Ginsberg would be too.  Maybe I had indeed expected too much, but what I found was a bleak L-shaped patch of land attached to a school. There was a fancy gate, an Asian-style pool with some small trees and a rather stylish metal bench, but there was very little in the way of poetry, either real or metaphoric, not a line of poetry on a paving stone or a plaque, and certainly nothing carved into a rock.  If you wanted poetry you had to bring it yourself.

Strictly speaking I hadn’t actually brought any poetry with me, but I had brought some poetic prose.  I had a newly acquired (though vintage) copy of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans in my bag.  I’d just bought it in Half Price Books. I took it out and started to read.

And what is a “subterranean anyway” eh Jack?  “They are hip without being slick. They are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.''  I thought that sounded a lot like me, except for the Christlike part, obviously.

UNERASABLE WALKING

Here are two great quotations from the great Hamish Fulton – that’s him above, in Lanzarote.

 

The first: “I am an artist who walks, not a walker who makes art.”  Not trying to muscle in on the man, nor compare myself to him, but it's the case that I'm a writer who walks, rather than a walker who writes.

And even better from Fulton: “a walked line, unlike a drawn line, can never be erased.”  I wonder if that applies to writing too; “a walked line, unlike a written line, can never be erased.”  I'll be thinking about that for a while.

(I wasn’t there but I can believe it's true - LA psychogeographer Anthony Miller tells me he went to a lecture about Fulton at the Hammer Museum, and the lecturer throughout pronounced his first name as “Armeesh” – as in the religious sect.  A man with Scottish roots, and I assume Mr. Fulton has those, though he was actually born in London, would surely be amused.  Either that or he’d bottle the lecturer.)

Hamish Fulton's website is here:

http://www.hamish-fulton.com

And it's not just me, is it, there's more than a passing physical resemblance between Fulton and Iain Sinclair?  Walking obviously keeps them trim and attractive, though doesn't do much for the hairline.

SCENIC WALKING

If you go to the website caughtbytheriver.net (and why wouldn’t you?) you’ll find and extract/sampler/cut up from the opening of Walking in Ruins.  It starts like this:

Some Scenes From The Life Of A Ruin Walker

24 February 2014 // Books

By Geoff Nicholson

ONE:
  If, like me, you happen to have written a book titled The Lost Art of Walking, people tend to ask you, “What’s your favourite walk?” I always find this a really difficult question. I want to answer honestly, and I definitely don’t want to be evasive or pretentious, but the answer always escapes me.

More and more I find that if I’m in walking in an area of unspoiled natural beauty, or in a city of great vistas and magnificent architecture, I’ll be impressed, I’ll be appreciative, but the truth is, I’m often slightly bored in these places. Only a fool would bad-mouth the Champs-Élysées or the Lake District, but I just don’t get very excited about walking there. Whereas if I’m walking along a beach and discover some ruined bungalows, or if I’m at the edge of a city and find a wrecked and abandoned warehouse or barn, then I’m fascinated, I’m moved. And that’s why I’ve written a new book titled Walking in Ruins.

You can read the full piece (and much more besides) on the website here:

http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2014/02/some-scenes-from-the-life-of-a-ruin-walker/

WALKING WITH FLUTEBOYS

Pico Iyer says you should always take a book with you when you travel, but it should not be about the place you’re traveling to.  And so, I spent a week and a half walking (not hiking, I insist) around Death Valley and other parts of the Mojave desert, spending at least some of the evenings reading Iain Sinclair’s American Smoke.  It’s a book in which, in his oblique and free associative way, Sinclair investigates his own American literary influences and enthusiasms.  The fact that I share some of these – Burroughs, Kerouac, Ed Dorn - makes it a damn good read.

Consequently, by day I would be walking round, say, the Ubehebe Crater then at night I’d be reading about Sinclair walking around Gloucester, Massachusetts in the footsteps of Charles Olson.  Or I’d be walking on the Racetrack Playa then reading Sinclair’s account of walking the waterfront in Vancouver looking for the site of Malcolm Lowry’s shack, bulldozed in 1957.

One of the disappointing things, or at least one of the defining features, of Death Valley these days, is that you’re seldom entirely alone when walking there, certainly not when visiting one of the “main attractions.”

At the Ubehebe Crater, for example, a handful of people were visible walking down to the very bottom of the crater. The National Park Services website says “Walking to the bottom of the main crater is easy; however, the trip back up can be exhausting.”  That’s a bit of spectacular understatement.  It’s a steep 600 foot drop, and some of the people I watched making the return ascent were crawling on their hands and knees by the end. There are actually a couple of people in this photograph –  two minute dots on the diagonal light gray path rising on the left.  You can see them slightly better here.

 Being of sound mind I walked around the rim instead. The National Park Services website again: “Walking around the rim is moderately difficult due to the initial climb and loose footing.”  And the winds – don’t forget the lacerating winds.

And you might think that visiting the Racecourse Playa – 20 odd miles down a bone-shaking dirt road – would buy you a bit of solitude.  But the day I was there a camera club was in situ - much fancy equipment, many tripods, many people shooting the same landscapes from the same angle.  Those are their Jeeps on the right of the rock formation, but at least they're forming a Herzog-esque fata morgana.

 Of course you don’t have to engage with these other people, and only an idiot or  a snob would say that a little human presence ruins a walk, but if you actually want to be alone in Death Valley, the best plan is to visit some location that nobody else wants to go.   

I was much taken by these cyanide tanks at Journigan’s Mill – yes really, Death Valley was once a great source of cyanide – and although there was evidence that plenty of other people had been there before (beer bottles, the remains of fires, some wrecked cars) when I was there I had it to myself, and could walk in ruins in solitude.

I don’t know that Jack Kerouac ever went to Death Valley but when I got back I dug out some of my Kerouac books.  He was one of the first authors I ever discovered for myself.  I was pretty young at the time and there’s always a tendency to think you’ve “outgrown” early enthusiasms – but some you never quite do. 

It’s true I don’t have quite the passion for Kerouac’s writing that I once did, but any time I go back and read his work, I’m always reminded why it moved me so much.  Here’s a passage from The Dharma Bums, about walking, more or less. “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by. Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak… just like life.”