WALKING WITH SKULLS

 Mortality marches on.  Each step reveals our new infirmities and takes us that much closer 

to the grave.

    But, on the bright side, my local antiques emporium has just reopened and I was able to 

buy this spiffy walking stick with a skull handle:

 

I don’t need it at the moment but no doubt I’ll grow into it

 

When I bought my stick I was well aware that Darwin had one (very slightly) similar, though his was made out of whalebone and ivory.  David Attenborough weeps.

 

But it took me longer than it should have before I recalled this 1998 self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe. 

 

When I next see you, remind me to tell you the story about Robert Mapplethorpe having lunch at Sardi’s in New York, and the cocaine and the screens.

And there's this, of course:

SOME AFRICAN WALKING

The caricature below, by ‘Ape’ from Vanity Fair, shows Verney Lovett Cameron (1844 

1894) and is captioned (if you can make it out) ‘He walked across Africa.’

 

And you know, he more of less did, in 1874-5.  In fact he arrived in Africa intending to assist Dr. Livingstone, but by the time he got there Livingstone was dead, so Cameron pressed on, intending to explore the main stream of the Congo river but he couldn’t obtain canoes on acceptable terms so he continued on foot.  

He was certainly the first European to cross Equatorial Africa from sea to shining sea – Zanzibar in the east to Benguella in the west (sometimes spelled Benguela).  However, it wasn’t absolutely straightforward.  His diary from April 1873, extracted in his book Across Africa,  reads as follows, ‘I was suffering such pain, that I could neither walk nor ride but was carried in a hammock.’  In other words he didn’t absolutely walk all the way across Africa.

 

Thinking about Cameron, leads a person also to think about Ewart Scott Grogan, born 1874, who, newly graduated from Cambridge, fell in love and wanted to marry Gertrude Watt, the sister of a Cambridge friend.  But Gertrude’s stepfather wasn’t sure that Grogan had the right stuff.  So Grogan said, ‘What if I walked from Cape Town to Cairo?’ a thing nobody had ever done, and the stepfather said, ‘All all right then.' So off he went, in 1898, looking like this:

         He made it, but again he needed some help.  In his book From The Cape to Cairo he 

writes,

‘I was suffering from slight fever, and …the fever brought on a very bad foot; I had rubbed all the skin off the heel with elephant-hunting, and had been walking on it ever since; and owing to the poisonous influence of the fever, it swelled to a great size, and was in such an unhealthy condition that when I pushed my finger into the swelling it left a cavity which did not swell out again for some minutes. As it was impossible to stop in the country, I had to make arrangements to be carried, and all the time that I was in camp, sat with my foot in a basin filled with a strong solution of permanganate of potash, applying a poultice of Elliman's Embrocation at night.’

 

 

I first read about Grogan in photographer Peter Beard’s book, The End of the Gamepublished in 1965 -  and it contains this image of Grogan - strange how a man can change his look over 60 odd years:

 

Grogan lived until 1967.  It’s even stranger to think that a man who fought in the Matabele Wars, lived long enough that he could have listened to Sgt Pepper, though I can’t swear that he did.

 

       Somewhere I have a photograph or two of me walking, not across Africa, but definitely in Africa, in Egypt and Morocco.  Having failed to find them, here’s a photo I took, in which you can, just about, see a man walking somewhere in Africa, not far from the pyramids.  No hammock or carriers – but one or two cars.  

And here, for people who like that kind of thing, are some walking maps:

SIMPLY WALKING SIMPLY

 

Some people say that all great ideas are simple.  Obviously this isn’t literally true.  Some 

great ideas are incredibly complicated.  And of course not all simple ideas are great.

 

But one great, simple idea is exemplified by a piece of art title Walking by the Chinese artist Deng Tai.

 

It was shown at the Hammer Museum in LA in 2015, at a time when I was living in LA and could have gone to see it but I’m only reading about it now

 

The description from the Hammer runs as follows.

“Walking is a series of photos made over a three to four year period of time, in different cities, always at night, using only the street and shop lights for illumination. It is simply the recording of a journey, walking an endless road, without a map, to some distant and undefined destination “  

 

The description goes on for a while getting a bit artspeak-ish, but concludes more or less sanely with the words 

“Walking is a simple travellers (sic) passage down streets, over bridges, up stairs, around corners, past buildings, glass, trees, and lights. Each photo, or each frame, is a painting of a day in the life, but all together it is a bigger story, a journey without beginning and without end.’

 

In other words it’s a video of a couple of thousand blurry photographs of some bloke’s feet.

And not only is this a simple idea, but it leads me to the thought – I COULD HAVE DONE THAT!!

 

But of course I didn’t.

 

However the most telling line on the website is “Music for Walking video by William Basinski.”  Now, getting William Basinski to do the music for your art is a great idea, but I’m sure making it a reality is not at all simple.  

SLINKING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

I’ve long thought that Jay Rayner is a top writer and very decent man (he showed great 

kindness to a friend of mine who was stricken with cancer).  

 

Having said, that, I’ve never thought that Rayner’s life and mine resembled each other much, but now I discover that he and I both suffer from the curse of osteoarthritis.  Just like John Cage, as I said in a blog post a couple of weeks back.

Whereas my own version is in the knee, Rayner’s is in the hip, which may or may not be worse, but at least his gives him the opportunity to make a good wise crack, when, in the Observer a couple of weekends back, he described his own walking as ‘limping about the place, like a broken slinky.’  

 

But even in our pain, our lives diverge again.  My own osteoarthritis revelation didn’t cause much of a reaction (though one person did recommend turmeric), whereas young Rayner has been deluged with unsolicited wisom wanted advice from ‘concerned readers,’ a lot of it about plant-based diets. One of them also told him to lose weight.  This is in fact fairly standard advice for arthritis sufferers but as Rayner asks ‘Who reads about somebody else’s injury and thinks, “You know, what I really need to do now is send this stranger an email telling them they’re fat”?’  Well, who indeed? 

He did however receive an offer of a 20 per cent discount for surgery at a private hospital. He wasn’t tempted by this, but you know, I think I might have been.

SUNDAY MUDDY SUNDAY

I was going to say, ‘Before we finish with John Cage ..’ but I think I’m never really going to be finished with John Cage, so there’s this.  We were walking in the mud yesterday, following the footpath along the south side of the River Stour, right across the water from the Cattawade Nature Reserve, which has no public access, which I think is very cool.  It wasn’t meant to be an expedition, just a Sunday afternoon walk, and that’s what it was until we hit the mud.

 

         I mean, I knew it had been raining, I knew that the footpaths in these parts had muddy patches here and there, but I wasn’t expecting the full Glastonbury–Woodstock-Somme experience.  And as a matter of fact it was actually far worse than it looks in these pictures.

 

         It was hard work, walking through this stuff, but after a while, as Billy Shakespeare almost said, ‘I was in mud, stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.’

Thinking of Shakespeare helped a bit, and also thinking that John Cage had written a book on the subject, with Lois Long, one of his collaborators on The Mushroom Book. This one was The Mud Book.  I’ve never seen a copy 'in the flesh,' but apparently it looks like this: 

 To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood for making 'pies and cakes.'