WALKING DiSQUIETLY

One way or another, it seems that Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is always with us. I’ve owned a copy of The Book of Disquiet for a good long time, and I turn to it more often than many books on my shelves.  My “reading technique” is to open it at random and read a couple of fragments, a reasonable method it seems to me, and one recommended by the translator – Richard Zenith - though I arrived there under my own steam, since it’s a book of fragments, assembled posthumously from 30,000 items found in two huge wooden trunks belonging to Pessoa.

         I never love the writing as much as I feel ought to, and some would say it’s a consciously unlovable text, but I do enjoy his stuff about walking and (for want of a better term) urban exploration, such as this: “Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things.”

         The man who walks the street becomes like the street: I like that a lot.

Or this: “More than once, while roaming the streets in the late afternoon I’ve been suddenly and violently struck by the bizarre presence of organization in things.  It’s not so much natural things that arouse this powerful awareness in my soul; it’s the layout of the streets, the signs, the people dressed up and talking, their jobs, the newspapers, the logic of it all.  Or rather, it’s the fact that ordered streets, signs, jobs, people and society exist, all of them fitting together and going forward and opening up paths.”

Or indeed this: “Everyone has his alcohol.  To exist is alcohol enough for me.  Drunk from feeling I wander as I walk a straight ahead.”  Apparently Pessoa liked  actual  alcohol too.

         I knew that Pessoa lived in Lisbon for 30 years of his adult life, and rarely left the place (he’d lived in Durban as a child) but what I didn’t know till recently was that he wrote, though of course didn’t publish, a guidebook to the place, running to 88 pages, written in English and published as Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See.

Writing about that book and Pessoa in general for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Casey Walker, author of Last Days in Shanghai wrote, “Pessoa doesn’t ever seem to have had much interest, sexually, in women — or in men — but in all his time lingering in coffee houses and restaurants, in long and solitary walks around the city, he must have learned the places of surreptitious assignation, courtship, and romance … What I want to know is: Where in Pessoa’s Lisbon did people go when they needed to weep for how the world goes? Or where did they go to profess their lasting love? I want to go to these places, too. Perhaps Pessoa considered this knowledge too confidential to consign it even to his manuscript trunk.”

I’m not convinced that a man with no interest in sex would know “places of surreptitious assignation, courtship, and romance” but maybe he did.

Even less did I realize that Pessoa wrote his own version, a fragment naturally, of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”  - which by many accounts is the ur text for a certain kind of flaneurism and psychogeography.  Pessoa puts words in the mouth (or at least an internal monologue in the head) of the man of the crowd, and has him narrate,

“I became a man of the crowd. I never trusted myself alone. From night unto morn, and from morn unto night I elbowed speedily through crowds, clinging affrightedly to whom I could. Many thought me a thief. But I pressed my body against their bodies as a child clings to its mother during a thunderstorm. I tried to close up my mind's eye as a child seeks to escape the sight of the lightening; I strove to close my mental ears, as a child seeks by burying its head in its mother's lap to hear not the crash of the thunderbolt. And if there were a short gap in the walkers, I would hurry, run, my arms outstretched, eager for the touch of somebody's frame, my own body eager for a shrinking contact. And always, always, amid the shuffle and the tramp of all footfalls, I shivered to hear that firm, inexorable tread.”

         That doesn’t really match up with my idea of Poe’s man, and in fact it sounds far more like Pessoa than it does like Poe, which may be the whole point.

On the subject of writing itself Pessoa offers this, “While out walking I’ve formulated perfect phrases which I can’t remember when I get home.  I’m not sure if the ineffable poetry of these phrases belongs totally to what they were and which I forget, or partly to what they after all weren’t.”

No use suggesting he could have got himself a moleskine, I expect.

WRING OUT THE OLD

The customary New Year’s day walk, in the Sawtelle district  this time, revealing the 

customary abandoned Christmas trees:

A rather wonderful building on Sawtelle Boulevard – cladding in the front, Brutalist in the back:

I don’t know what goes on onside that brutal building - it's unmarked; and I have even 

less idea what goes on this one:

Some poor huddled cacti yearning to be free at one of the nurseries:

And some fearful, not quite symmetry:

TWO OTHER COUNTRIES

I was hunkered down for part of the holiday with the works of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, including  “Record No.36” - in Japanese “Kiroku” - the latest in his series of diaristic monographs that date back as far as 1972.  This is from that volume:

Moriyama has been around, in many senses.  Currently aged 79 he’s taken vast numbers of photographs, published a great many books (if not as many as his pal Araki), and also done a great amount of walking.  He may not, strictly speaking, be a street photographer (a term that seems ever more meaningless) but he’s definitely a flaneur.  His photographs are a record of his wanderings and also the reason for his wandering.

And of course sometimes he photographs other walkers.  And of course some of these walkers are women.

I started digging out some writings and interviews with the great man.  There’s this from the afterword to “Record No. 34,” “I am crisscrossing the central Tokyo area taking snapshots in the streets more or less on a daily basis. Within this routine, every once in a while it happens that I am suddenly overcome by a sense of bewilderment, just like a student in his first year at a photography school. What exactly am I trying to see through the finder of my camera? What is that photo that I just shot? It's questions as utterly naïve and elementary as these that occupy my mind in such situations.”

And there’s this from a documentary the Tate Gallery made about him a few years back, “I basically walk quite fast. I like taking snapshots in the movement of both myself and the outside world. When I walk around I probably look like a street dog because after walking around the main roads, I keep wandering around the back streets.”

This is probably his best known picture: of a street dog:

He continues, “My friends or critics are often surprised and ask me why I never got bored walking around for over 50 years. But I never get bored. I often hear it is said that people, even photographers, do their best work when they are in their 20’s and 30’s. I’m 73 now. But I could never see the city with an old man’s eyes, or as if I understood everything.

“Everyone has desires. The quality and the volume of those desires change with age. But that desire is always serious and real. Photography is an expression of those desires …

“I have always felt that the world is an erotic place. As I walk through it my senses are reaching out. And I am drawn to all sorts of things. For me cities are enormous bodies of people’s desires. And as I search for my own desires within them, I slice into time, seeing the moment.”

Well, the erotics of walking and the erotics of photography are not exactly the same, but there’s surely plenty of overlap.  Taking pictures of women in the street is currently regarded as a very dodgy activity.  I think it’s still OK to look at people you fancy, so long as you don’t touch or say anything appropriate.  And taking photographs creates its own set of problem.  It’s probably OK if you’re making art, not OK if you go home and lech over the images.  But who can read the intentions of the male gaze?

          I saw recently that the Christie’s website describes photographer Miroslav Tichy as a flaneur, thus: “From the 1950s to 1986, Tichý took thousands of surreptitious photographs in and around Kyjov, in the Czech Republic. With his wild hair and ragged clothes, locals viewed him as a harmless eccentric — but in many ways his art can be seen as a subversive act in response to a totalitarian regime. 

         “In the 1950s, he began to focus on photography, using an array of crude homemade cameras … He built his contraptions from scrap — cardboard tubes, tin cans and the like — sealed with tar, and operated by bobbins and dressmaker’s elastic. He cut lenses from plexiglass — even devising his own telephoto lens.  

“’These chance encounters, fleeting moments captured on film, have a distinctive Baudelairean flair,’ says Christie’s specialist Amanda Lo Iacono. ‘Indeed what we find so captivating about Tichý’s work today is how the artist acted as the quintessential flaneur, whose practice became inseparable from his way of life.’”

Well, you’ve said a mouthful there, Amanda.  Tichy’s “practice” involved wandering the streets, and sometimes hiding in the bushes, taking pictures of women, some of them walking, some of them in various states of undress.  

Geoff Dyer in the Guardian says, “Put as simply as possible, he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women. Ideally he'd catch them topless or in bikinis at the local swimming pool; failing that, he'd settle for a glimpse of knee or - the limitations of the camera meant the framing was often askew - ankle.”

Yes, I suppose flaneurism is what flaneurism does. Likewise perving. But that was in another country, and besides the guy is dead. 

HOLLYWOOD WALKS, CONSTRAINED AND OTHERWISE

I was at a party a couple of nights back and got talking to guy who’d grown up in Hollywood in the early nineties.  He went to Hollywood High, alma mater of Keith Carradine, Linda Evans, Fay Wray and Terry Richardson – to name a broad selection.

And the guy said that any time you walked in Hollywood in the early 90s you were always in danger of turning a corner and realizing you’d set foot in the “wrong” street, and then you’d be confronted by junior gang members who demanded to know what you were doing on “their” street.  The answer, “I’m just walking home from school,” wasn’t a good enough answer.

Of course, he said, you learned the rules pretty fast one way or another, learned where you could walk and where you couldn’t, but there was always this lurking anxiety that you might get it wrong.  

And some people think that Hollywood has become too safe and gentrified, eh?  Yeah, don’t you just hate it when there are no gang members confronting you on the street?

I’m not naïve enough to think that Hollywood is now an entirely safe haven of peace and tranquility, but as you walk around you don’t worry much about straying into enemy territory.  And of course it being Christmas and all, Hollywood looks pretty festive right now.  Even if the inhabitants behind this particular window haven’t quite got into the Christmas spirit yet: