WALKING IN EDENS

I’ve been re-reading parts of the book Robert Irwin Getty Garden, and discovered this passage in which Irwin, an “artist who isn’t a gardener” describes walking in the garden with Jim Duggan, a “gardener who isn’t an artist” (that's a quotation from the San Diego Union Tribune).

Irwin says, “Well, one thing that Jim’s been doing as we go through the year (the book was published 2002) is, he lists every single plant.  We’ve been walking through the garden together on an average once every two weeks, and he takes notes, giving each plant a rating, like one star, two stars, up to five stars.  In January, a plant might get one star, then it’s a two star and then it’s a three star and then it’s a four star and then it’s a five star – it stays five stars for whatever, and then it becomes a four and a three and a two and we plan its replacement, and then we take it out.”

Well, what a very singular way of walking through a garden, and what a formidable display of ruthlessness.  It must make you feel like a god, or perhaps like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, as he appears in the novel You Only Live Twice.  

I first read it a long time ago, when I was barely a teenager, and I’m really not sure I ever saw the movie, but I gather that book and film resemble each other only in passing.  What has stayed with me from the book for all these years is the Garden of Death, a place in the grounds of a castle on a Japanese island, a place full of deadly plants where people go to commit suicide.  There’s a pool of piranhas in there too.  The whole thing moved my thirteen year old’s heart in ways I don’t understand even now.

So I just reread You Only Live Twice, and frankly it’s a bit ropey, Fleming’s eleventh and penultimate novel, written at a time when he was ailing.  Bond is in Japan for one reason or another. Blofeld has disguised himself as Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, a man internationally praised for his knowledge of plants but the Japanese authorities find his Garden of Death a bit of an embarrassment (which sounds extremely unlike the Japanese, to me) and so Bond’s mission is to disguise himself as a Japanese deaf mute (!?), get inside the castle and kill Shatterhand.  Spoiler alert - he succeeds.

     

Walking in the garden is considered a bit of a liability, but Bond’s Japanese connection, Tiger Tanaka, tells him the garden is full of hiding places.

    “Thanks very much,” says Bond.  “In one of those poison bushes or up one of those trees.  I don’t want to blind myself or go mad.”

    “The ninja clothing will give you complete protection.  You will have a black suit for night and a camouflage one for the day.  You will wear the swimming goggles to protect your eyes.”

    Actually it’s not all that easy to see how deadly this garden is.  Sure, Fleming gives us a list of the deadly plants growing there, including castor bean, ipecacuahana, and Mexican wild potato, all of which are certainly dangerous, but it’s not as if a wild potato is going to leap from the ground and force you to eat it, is it now?  

It makes you wonder who the gardeners were, and whether they went around giving plants star ratings.  I’m guessing not.

        

 In recent years the Aokigahara Forest, also known as Yukai forest “the Sea of Trees,” has been getting a lot of publicity and there are some truly gruesome pictures online. Like Blofeld’s garden, it’s a place where people go to commit suicide; somewhere between 70 and a 100 per year is the accepted number.  People walk in and never walk out, and of course they take their fate in their own hands without having to rely on deadly plants or any Bond villain.  Hanging is the most frequently used suicide method, followed by poisoning and overdose.

 I can’t make up my mind whether this is a good or a bad thing.  In general, I think people have every right to kill themselves, not that “rights” come into it much. I don’t claim to have any expertise in the matter, but of the friends I’ve known who’ve killed themselves, at least two of them did it while out walking.

     There are no gardeners in the Aokigahara Forest as far as I know, though there are volunteer counselors who position themselves in the forest and try to talk potential suicides into changing their mind.   The photographs above and below are by Pieter ten Hoopen who has documented the place in a less grisly fashion that many.  The picture below shows Azusa Hayano, a geologist who has apparently talked hundreds of people out of ending it all.  Of course he’s also found a certain number of bodies.

Well there was none of that a few days ago when I went to the James Irvine Japanese Garden at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in downtown LA, one of those places that’s always on lists of “LA’s best kept secrets” thereby ensuring it’s no longer secret.  James Irvine, or at least his foundation, was the major sponsor, and it was designed by Takeo Uesugi, who for several decades was the go-to guy if you wanted a Japanese garden in southern California: he died in January 2016

You can see into the garden from the street, just about, but it’s sunk down into the earth and there are locked and forbidding gates.  It’s open to the public, but they don’t exactly beckon you in.  You have to go into the community center, and confront a stern Japanese woman who will quite literally look you up and down to make sure you’re worthy, and if you are (it seemed touch and go in my own case, but I just made it), then you sign in, and are allowed go down in a elevator, thread your way along corridors between office doors, and there you are in a Japanese garden surrounded on all sides by the skyscrapers of LA..

It’s not large but it has most of what you want and need in a Japanese garden – there’s a stream, footbridges, some ferns, some redwoods, and a very great number of plants I couldn’t tell you the name of.  I don’t believe any of them were overtly deadly. There wasn’t a lot going, which is want you want in a Japanese garden.  A few people came and went while I was there – but for much of the time I was the only one.

Interestingly there are no benches in the garden, which may have been another attempt to make sure the riffraff don’t linger too long, and it meant that if you wanted to sit you had to find a rock to accommodate your buttocks, or, as in my own choice, you could keep on walking around the paths.

LINGER ON THE SIDEWALK ...

When I first arrived in Los Angeles it seemed to me that neon was everywhere. Somehow you feel safe walking at night when there’s neon around, glowing above your head. I’m not sure that you are, but it feels that way.

One Sunday afternoon, in those early LA days, I even visited the Museum of Neon Art which at that point was in a bleak stretch of downtown, on a block where I was the only walker.  The museum closed down not long thereafter.

I tend to think of neon signs being especially used by bars, restaurants and motels, and maybe the auto trade, but the image below shows there was a time when it could be used for just about anything.

Anyway, I settled down in L.A., and then I stopped noticing the neon.  Did it go into decline, or did I just become immured to it?  Both, I think.  But lately I seem to see an increasing amount of neon.

And now the Museum of Neon Art has reopend in shiny new premises in Glendale (so not really LA, if we’re being pedantic).  I’d been meaning to go for a while but finally got there at the weekend.

It wasn’t so very long since I last went to Glendale but boy, it’s changed.  Even a few years back much of Brand Boulevard was a reasonable approximation of a classic main street:

But now it’s rapidly turning into one giant corporate mall.  Arguably this could be said to have made the place more “pedestrian-friendly,” though personally I found it about as friendly as a pit full of komodo dragons. The fact that the temperature in Glendale is generally five to ten degrees F hotter than Los Angeles is no great encouragement to walkers either.

Well the Museum of Neon Art is great, which is to say that the neon exhibits there are great: classic, nostalgic, witty, well-crafted, smart, optimistic. Here are a few of them:

Of course I wanted more, and there is room for the exhibition space to expand, but I wanted much, much more, I wanted to be able to walk among thousands of exhibits arranged over hundreds of acres.   Of course I wanted too much, but it was the museum that put the idea into my head.

I also came out of there with an urge for a drink and some economy meat, although that may not have been entirely because of the neon.

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 In fact there’s a newish, hipsterish bar that’s opened in my neighbourhood, The Know Where, well within walking distance.  I’d probably have gone there in any case, but it was definitely that neon sign that first drew me in.

 

MYSTERIANS?

Can’t help thinking that the guys involved in replacing the pipes in my street may have lost their way.  Yes, we know it’s all a mystery down there but spraying question marks on the ground looks a bit like admitting defeat.

WALKING WITH SNOW

A lot of writers drink, a lot of writers walk.  Are there many people who walk and write and drink?  Some obviously: Guy Debord, Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Crews, Malcolm Lowry and Jack Kerouac maybe: but I’m not sure how many, and it’s an awfully boyish crowd to be sure.  And what about the druggy walker/writers?  Once you’ve said De Quincey and Will Self, who else is there?  And is sensory derangement good for walking?  I dunno, but I’m working on it.

In the meantime, a small story about walking and drinking, and of course writing, from the great Sebastian Snow, author of The Rucksack Man, a book which describes his walk from the bottom to the top of South America: Tierra Del Fuego to Panama.  It didn’t kill him, but it’s hard to say (per Nietzsche) that it made him much stronger.  He experiences a fair amount of derangement in the book, but most of it isn’t of the alcoholic kind.

“Well, I had made it, I’d traversed the continent of South America on foot and crossed the Darien Gap.  The end was hazardous, ghastly, a grueling nightmare where Death stalked.  Only willpower kept me going.  Under weight by about five stone, two sprained ankles, both swollen and discoloured, my feet and ankles covered with gore, blood and bites, a mass of suppurating sores, stung by a hornet on the neck, bitten by a scorpion, nipped by a vampire bat, ticks under the skin.  I looked in the mirror and saw what days in the jungle could do.”

Somewhere outside of Pasto, in the south of Columbia, he writes, “I encountered three young Colombian men who told me that they had not a peso between them and had been walking for five days without food.  I was very sympathetic.”  He gives them money for food, and buys them new shoes.   “Although I felt quite quixotic towards their evident plight I could not believe they had been tramping for five long days without a bit to eat.  It was just not feasible, I thought, especially as all three looked in very good shape.”

      They start walking together but they young men aren’t very good walkers, certainly not by Sebastian Snow’s standard.  The youngest of them starts complaining about his feet almost immediately, although of course if you believed his story he’d already been walking for 5 days.  Snow puts him on a bus and pays for his ticket to Cali.  A day later the second Columbian starts “hobbling badly, in spite of or despite the new shoes I had so stupidly bought him.” I wonder if it’s “because of,” but in any case, he too gets put on a bus.

“The last, Sancho Panza, however, bravely soldiered on but it was not very long before he took to taking buses and meeting me in the evenings at the places I had appointed.  In the end I reluctantly had to sack him for taking to the bottle in a big way; all, of course, at my expense.” 

     Some of us might think the whole episode was something other than quixotic.

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And once we start talking about “quixotic” travellers we’re right there with William Wordsworth in The Prelude Book 5, and the dream (had by Wordsworth or by a friend, depending on which the draft of the poem you read) in which the dreamer encounters a man crossing the desert on a dromedary.   Was Sebastian Snow familiar with this?  I think there’s a reasonable chance.

Some of the relevant lines run as follows:

Full often, taking from the world of sleep

This Arab phantom, which I thus beheld,

This semi-Quixote, I to him have given

A substance, fancied him a living man,

A gentle dweller in the desert, crazed

By love and feeling, and internal thought

Protracted among endless solitudes;

But now hold on there.  You and I might think this fellow is just some imaginary Romantic Bedouin, but according to recent scholarship – Kelly Grovier is the scholar in question - this poetic image was a “coded tribute” to a real person, a man named John “Walking” Stewart, an Englishman who in 1765 started walking home back from Madras, where he was working with the East India Company.  Supposedly he walked all across Persia, Arabia, Africa and through every European country.  It took him the best part of 30 years.  He met Wordsworth in Paris, and was befriended by Thomas De Quincey in London, where he eventually settled. 

         Now, “Walking” Stewart was clearly one helluva guy, and Kelly Grovier is more of a scholar than I am, but all I can say is that if I were writing a poem containing a coded tribute to a great walker I’d have him walking, not riding a camel.

         Anyway, Stewart became quite the man about London, and was often seen walking the street.  He lived to the age of 75, and right now I have no information about his attitudes toward sensory derangement, but on 20 February 1822, the morning after his 75^th birthday, he was found dead in his room with an empty laudanum bottle beside him.

     De Quincey wrote an actual, as opposed to a coded, tribute to him in the London Magazine, which I think is very fine.  It starts like this:

“There are several kinds of pedestrians, all celebrated and

and interesting in their way. …

The Walkers, indeed, like the lichens, are

a vast genus, with an endless variety of

species; but alas! the best and most singular

of the tribe is gone! … “

Walkers as varied as lichens: there are some 17,000 recognized lichen species: I like that a lot.

 

WALKING STARS

Three Olympic cheers for Wang Zhen, Liu Hong, and Matej Toth, gold medal winners in Rio for, respectively, the 20 km men’s, 20 km women’s, and 50 km men’s race walking events.

 And if you’ve not heard much about them from your Olympic news source I can’t say I’m very surprised.  Here in the States it’s been extraordinarily difficult to find coverage of any events that the US isn’t likely to do well in, and there was just one American race walker, John Nunn, who seems to have an interesting enough backstory – he runs a “gourmet cookie” business with his daughter - but he came 43^rd in the final so he isn’t being celebrated as much of a hero.

In fact the one person who has been getting some coverage is poor (but heroic) Yohann Diniz of France who had some terrible bowel malfunction during the 50 km race.  Early reports said he “soiled himself,” which would have been bad enough.  However, later reports said it wasn’t poop running down his legs, but blood.  The current story is that it was both.  Still, he sponged himself down and carried on, then he collapsed but he got up and carried on again, finishing the race in 8^th place.  Hell that’s what I call walking!!

In fact it seems to have been a punishing race around - 48 competitors finished, 19 dropped out along the way, and were 13 disqualified.

Of course one of the main reasons walking doesn’t get much coverage is because people think it looks kind of absurd, which is unfair, but not entirely unjustified.  The nature of the sport guarantees a certain inelegance.  The heel and toe business, the feet not allowed to get airborne, is part of it, and then there’s the odd rotation of the hips. Most of us rotate our hips about four degrees when we walk, race walkers rotate theirs about 20 degrees, so that the extra rotation gives them longer strides.

Back in the day, when I was growing up in Sheffield there was an annual twelve mile Star Walk.  The Star was, and is, the local newspaper.  It was one of those events that we used to go out and watch, even if the rest of the year we never gave a thought to race walking.  Some competitors used to take it very seriously:

Somewhat less so over the years: