WALKING SCHTUM

          In December I did a bit of walking in the California desert; nothing too extreme, and some of it very tame indeed, but I did find it moving and uplifting and all the things the desert is supposed to be.  And once in a while I was struck by the profound silence of the desert.

Photo by Caroline Gannon

         In my experience this kind of desert silence is actually quite rare.  Often the sounds of wind, traffic and even low flying aircraft disturb the supposed tranquility.  

 

    At this point in history it’s hard to find untouched desert, or even to know what untouched desert looks like - you can be stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into Joshua Tree National Park - but in general I’m happy to be where the desert and the human intersect; the unusual structures, the desert art, the occasional gas station dinosaur.

Nevertheless, when I got back to England I found myself poking around for literary sources about silence and the desert.  There’s Edward Abbey, of course, but I also came across these words attributed toJean Baudrillard, ‘The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.’

 

         As usual I find myself in less than perfect agreement with old JB, and I’m not sure the body has an inner silence.  If it did, stethoscopes would be redundant wouldn’t they?  And of course I thought about John Cage’s, admittedly now contested, experience in the anechoic chamber, of hearing the sound of his ‘nervous system in operation’ and his ‘blood in circulation.’

 

I have, from time to time, wondered what (if any) music ‘goes with’ walking in the desert: maybe Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, perhaps Painted Desert by Robert Quine, Ikue Mori and Mark Ribot, for that matter Cage’s ‘In a Landscape.’  But in general I don’t need a soundtrack when I’m walking, although I’m well aware that others do.

And then, as it goes with these things, a copy of ‘Weird Walk’ Number 6 arrived. 

It's a zine that calls itself ‘a journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles.’  So no deserts in there, but it does contain an article, by Archer Sanderson, ‘a regular feature (in which) we explore an artist or genre well-suited to soundtracking lone perambulations.’  The current article is titled ‘Doom Strolling: The Solo Rambler’s Doom Metal Primer’ and the text says, ‘Doom can be paired with a host of environments, though epic, widescreen scenery seems to be a potent choice.’

Sounds great for the desert, no?

 

Now the fact is, I think I prefer the idea of Doom Metal to actually listening to Doom Metal, and although the article references one or two bands whose music I do kind of know - Sunn 0))), Earth, Napalm Death - it concentrates on Cathedral, Bell Witch, Pallbearer and a duo called Divide and Dissolve, all of whom were closed books to me.

 

I've done some research and some online listening, and I've discovered that Divide and Dissolve make quite an interesting noise, while also according to interviews referencing ‘decolonisation, the destruction of white supremacy and (the) prison industrial complex and the survival of indigenous sovereignty.’ 

Nevertheless I haven’t been able to find any explicit reference in any of these bands’ music to the desert or indeed to walking, though I may have missed it.  But you don’t have to be too literal about these things, do you?  You can always listen to Cage’s 4’ 33”.

 

 

 

 

 

THE LAST WALK OF LAST YEAR

Sorry if this is going to sound a bit middle of the road; I mean I don’t suppose Baudelaire spent his Xmas holidays doing this kind of thing, but the old year ended with a walk around the gardens of Hyde Hall in Essex – one of the Royal Horticultural Society properties.  

I’m not sure that walking in sculpture gardens is becoming my ‘thing,’ much less a ‘project’ but I do enjoy it, and I seem to have done a surprising amount of it lately.

 

To be fair there wasn’t a vast amount of sculpture at Hyde Hall but there was this great kinetic piece inspired by sycamore seeds; and no alas I haven’t been able to find out the artist’s name. 

 

I can see why gardeners or garden designers might think it’s a good idea to have sculptures that use botanical imagery, but often it seems to me that there’s enough botanical imagery and indeed botany in a garden, without having to add any manmade extras.  In general I’d rather have, say, an Eduardo Paolozzi like this one at Kew.

But Hyde Hall does have some spectacular ‘willow sculptures,’ things I’d never seen before.  These were not sculptures OF willow, but sculpture made FROM willow that continues to grow, the branches being bound together to form exotic (and I suppose organic) shapes.

 

I was also taken by the variety of signs dotted around the garden, many of them related to walking, or at least telling you where you should and shouldn’t walk, some more conventional than others.

The implication seemed to be that walkers just go hog wild when presented with a stretch of grass or a flowerbed.  

 

And I don’t even want to think about what they might do to working bees.

 

IT IS WRITTEN

 Even the joke in the Christmas cracker understands me.

LOAFING IS A KIND OF WALKING

 A little walking humour here, for fans of cricket and fans of Geoffrey Boycott.

          A story (perhaps apocryphal) in the Times last week said that Boycott was once talking to John Barclay, captain of Sussex, before the toss at a match in Scraborough.  Boycott asked Barclay if he was a religious man, and Barclay said that he was and that he always prayed before he went out to bat.  And Boycott said, ‘I’ve based my career on the first psalm.’ Barclay was evidently not religious enough to know the reference and had to look it up later.  The psalm begins, ‘Blessed is the man who does not walk.’  

 

To walk, in cricketing terms, in case you’re not a fan, is for a batter to give himself or herself out and walk off the field without waiting for the umpire to confirm the dismissal.  I suspect this is getting rarer all the time, and the reason often given for not walking is that umpires often give you out when you’re not, so staying in when you know you’re out is a small act of compensation.

 

Anyway, the line as it appears in the King John Bible runs as follows, ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’

 

This is not my area of expertise, but a little research reveals thatJewish tradition has it that the Book of Psalms was composed by Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman, Jeduthun, Asaph, and the three sons of Korah.  

One more and they’d have had a cricket team.

 

Below: the umpire raises his finger.

 

EVERYBODY WALKS IN L.A.

 For various reasons, some of them obscure even to me (perhaps especially to me), I’ve been in southern California, pretty much avoiding all my old friends and acquaintances there, trying to sort out my feelings about a place I loved for decades, lived in for over 15 years, and have ‘lost’ one way or another.  I mean, I haven’t really lost it.  It’s still there and I know how to find it, but even so ...

 

Naturally I did a fair bit of walking while I was there because that’s what I do wherever I am, and although I was seldom the only person on the street, sometimes I was:

 

The walking was great. I really do think that the LA authorities should promote the place with some slogan such as “Los Angeles – One Helluva Walking City.”

 

The place is built on a grid of course, which makes finding your way around comparatively easy, although admittedly the things you might want to see and places you might want to go are seldom walking distance from each other, and once in a while you do have to walk around or through a tent city, but what’s pedestrianism without a little local difficulty?

 

On my wanderings I briefly thought I’d found a Thomasson – in this case a set of stairs to nowhere - but in fact I think they’re part of the emergency exit from the building above, so unlike a true Thomasson the stairs do have a function.

 

There were ruins, just like ancient Rome:

 

There was even an obelisk:

 

There were cool vehicles of course. Here is the author with the vehicle of his dreams:

 

photo by Caroline Gannon.

And I saw a couple of VW Beetles still in action on the street, which is always reassuring. I even managed to get a picture of one of them.

 

There was walking in the gardens at the Huntington in San Marino, not least the desert garden.

It was fabulous.  And then the inamorata and I got in the rented car and drove inland to do some ‘proper’ desert walking …