MORE ALCHEMICAL WALKING

You almost certainly don’t recall a post on this blog from 2017, with this image:

 

and the quotation ‘He that endeavors to enter into the Philosopher’s Garden without a key, is like him who would walk without feet.'  They’re from a 1617 alchemical ‘emblem book’ by Michael Maier (aka Michael Majerus) titled ‘Atalanta Fugiens, The Flying Atalanta or Philosophical Emblems of the Secrets of Nature.’  Now read on.

 

I’ve been doing some further reading about walking and alchemy, mostly in a book titled Alchemy, the Philosopher’s Stone, by Allison Coudert who quotes from atext titled The Nei P’ien by Ko Hung (c.280–340 CE), a Chinese alchemist and philosopher whose name sometimes gets transliterated as Ge Hong.   This is him:

 

 In The Nei P’ien he writes ‘Chao T’o-tzu took cinnamon for twenty years whereupon the soles of his feet became hairy and he could walk five hundred miles a day.’ That’s just under 21 miles per hour, which I don’t really think counts as walking.

 

Ko Hung also writes ‘Tu Tzu-wei took asparagus, with the result that he had eighty concubines, sired one hundred and thirty sons and walked three hundred miles a day.’

         

This is the Formby Asparagus Walk, a National Trust property on Merseyside:

So Tu Tzu-wei walked 200 fewer miles a day than Chao T’o-tzu but no doubt that was because he was distracted by his concubines.

 

I have taken cinnamon and asparagus but admittedly not every day, so perhaps that’s why my own soles remain hairless and why I have yet to sire 130 sons.  Also why I can’t walk even 300 miles a day.

HYPER-OBSERVERS

 

 I was dipping in to Genpei Akasegawa’s Hyperart: Thomasson, as I do from time to time, and I came across this picture:

 

For those who’ve missed it previously, a Thomasson is an architectural feature that remains in place even though it’s no longer functional: bridges and staircases to nowhere, third floor doors that open into space, and so on. The name is Akasegawa’s invention.

 

That picture was actually taken by Yomota Inuhiko, back in the day, in the Rue De Cardinal Lenoine, in Paris.  Yomota Inuhiko writes, ‘At first glance, it looked as though huge band-aids or strips of scotch tape that had been affixed to the building had, over the years, become rotten and faded leaving behind only a scar.’

 

In fact I’m not sure that the photograph really shows a Thomasson.  I think it’s just a badly repaired bit of masonry, but it made me realize that in my own wanderings I’ve developed quite a taste for looking at and photographing badly, or eccentrically, repaired walls and brickwork, if not strictly speaking masonry.

 

Further research (although ‘research’ sounds a rather grand term for it) revealed an article by Terunobu Fujimori titled by ‘Under the Banner of Street Observation.’  Tom Daniell seems to be the man who made it, and much more information on this subject, available to we gaijin.

 

The article is partly about the Street Observation Society, formed in 1986 by the author of the article - Terunobu Fujimori, an architectural historian - and Genpei Akasegawa (op cit) who is probably best thought of as a multimedia artist.

 

Alone, together and with others, the pair wandered the streets of Japan, looking, photographing, making drawings, giving names to things.  But above all looking, and if that meant looking at things in a new or different way then so much the better.  The Japanese name for the activity was, and I suppose still is, Rojo Kansatsu -- Street Observation.

 

I find this just wonderful both as a practice and as an idea.  And yes of course it involves many of the same activities as psychogeography, but I find this Japanese version so much more appealing because it involves going out walking and looking at whatever’s there, not making any claims for "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,”  a la Guy Debord. 

 

Among many wonders in the article, some of them quite inscrutable, there is this photograph captioned ‘Genpei Akasegawa photographing a tsuboniwa (spot garden) in a manhole cover, in 1986. From Kyoto Omoshiro Watching (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1988).

 

That would be fine in itself but it also brings in Joji Hayashi (about whom I can find very little), described in the Terunobu Fujimori article as ‘a bizarre individual who finds everything worthy of close attention and orderly documentation; he glues train ticket chads into albums, places pebbles that lodge in his shoes into small bottles, all carefully dated, and has famously taken thousands of photographs of manhole covers.’  There’s a book:

There’s something Zen about this I think, though my understanding of Zen is patchy.  And I realized that I too have photographed a certain number of manholes and even coalholes in the course of my ‘street observation’ though the ones I’ve photographed aren’t nearly as cool as the Japanese ones.

                                             

If the Internet has proved anything it’s that there you’re never alone in your obsessions.  However arcane your interests may seem, there’s probably already a website, a chatroom, a Facebook page, for people who share your interest, and in this particular case there’s now an activity called Drainspotting.

 

But the notion of street observation raises the issue of whether you go walking and look for specific things – manhole covers, Thomassons, brick work repairs or whatever, or whether you try to walk and be open to whatever turns up, whatever happens to be there.

 

I haven’t solved this problem.  I don’t see how you can be equally open to all stimuli.  That would be like some intense but amorphous acid trip.  Human consciousness is nothing if not selective. And a lot of the time I don’t even think it’s a problem.

 

And then, out of the swamp of the Internet this appeared.  I'm not so sure about that, Stanley:

FIELD NOTES

 Back in quasi-rural Essex, we also have ground though it’s not like London ground. A walk 

around Dedham (Constable country) revealed plenty of fields.

 

But after a few arty days in the metropolis a field can look a lot like some minimalist piece of land art:

 

And the things to be found on the ground here are local too. Such as potatoes that had been rejected by the mechanical potato harvesters: 

 

And in fact some of these spuds (not the ones above) looked perfectly edible so I picked up a couple to take home.  I keep wondering if this was foraging or scavenging.

Also on the ground was a warning sign that had fallen off an electric fence:

 

The best thing about that notice is that each of those names sounds like a band or musical act, plenty of electronica of course, but with regional variations from country to country – and frankly I’d be prepared to give any of them a listen but I’d have highest hopes for Schrikdraad.

 

‘When you want to get down, down on the ground, Shrikdraad.’

And then in the Dedham Arts and Craft Centre I bought the selected works of Lenin for 3 quid.  Want to see a picture of Lenin walking? Well, why not:

Want to see a picture of the book and two potatoes I 'foraged'?  Both book and potatoes are bigger than they appear.

 

MIRACLE ON OXFORD STREET

 

OK well, I’m still banging on about ‘Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground’ – a project of 

potentially infinite scope and duration.

 

I was in London for a few days last week; and you know, the stuff you find on the ground in London does seem more interesting and curious than the stuff you find on the ground elsewhere.

 

Some of the stuff is not necessarily surprising - it may just be litter – but most litter isn’t quite as eye-catching as this package of ‘Sliming’ Herbs, found on the pavement in Leytonstone. (That's one for the archive).

 

But other things are more mysterious.  Yes, I can imagine circumstances in which I might abandon my socks while out for a walk but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t just leave them lying on the pavement, like these near Leicester Square:

And what exactly is the story behind this mysterious pair of crutches left in Oxford Street.  To be fair they’d been left next to a waste bin which could be construed as an attempt to be tidy.

 

But it so happened that immediately after I’d taken that picture above, the man who empties the bins came along and asked me suspiciously, ‘Are these yours?’

 

I thought of one or two smart replies involving miracle cures but thought it best to play it straight, and said no they weren’t mine and I think he believed me.  And we both said they looked brand new.  Who throws a way a brand new pair of crutches, we asked each other?  We didn’t have an answer.

 

But I was reminded of a book I used to look at in my catholic grandma’s house when I was a kid.  The book was about Lourdes the scene of any number of miracle cures, and a place where a great many crutches were abandoned, like this:

And on the ground in Walthamstow – a pro-bee graffito (I think that’s the word even though it’s on the ground). 

 

HOLMES AND AWAY (OK, SO YOU COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER)

 This is Burton Holmes (1870-1958):

 

He’s posing ‘As a gentleman of Japan dressed for rainy day promenade.’  It looks to me like he’s wearing wearing two kimonos, neither of which appears all that rain-proof.

 

And this is me posing on Hollywood Boulevard with various walkers behind me.  The dinosaur you can see behind them is atop the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum.

There’s a little more connection between these two images than you might immediately think, chiefly that Burton Holmes has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which at this time of writing I do not, but there’s more to it than that.

Burton Holmes, who some people know, and many more don’t, was a great traveller in the days when being a great traveller was a ‘thing.’

 

I know him best as a photographer but he was considerably more than that.  He delivered hugely successful public lectures about his travels, illustrated first with hand coloured slides and eventually with film that he’d shot. This put him way ahead of the game, before the slide show and the home movie became domesticated and ruined many a family evening. It’s also said, and I have no reason to doubt it, that Burton Holmes invented the term ‘travelogue.’

 

I’m not sure how much walking Holmes did.  It was possibly limited by how much photographic gear he was carrying, 

 

but certainly plenty of his photographs show people walking:

 

And this is me, posing not ‘as a gentleman of Japan’ but as an Englishman in a kimono, and not ‘dressed for rainy day promenade’ but for mooching about in a hotel room.

And here’s where it all comes together.  Holmes owned, among other properties, a duplex apartment in New York which he named "Nirvana," an understated little bolthole as you can see:

He eventually sold the apartment to Robert Ripley (1890-1949) – he of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoon strip and eventually a series of museums, which I understand are franchised, including the one on Hollywood Boulevard: see above.  This is Ripley with the whole world in his hands:

And here he is posing, and very possibly walking, walking in China:

 

Much more about Burton Holmes here:

https://www.burtonholmes.org