IT'S NOT THE REST ...

 

Because I’m such a cool and well-connected guy, people sometimes send me things, books mostly, and last week my own publisher sent me this, Calligraphies of the Desert by Hassan Massoudy.

 

Massoudy has a reputation as one of the world’s great calligraphers, this is him:

and although this isn’t my area of expertise, I can see it’s a terrific publication, works of calligraphy inspired by thoughts and quotations about the desert.

 

And because of the nature of the subject, one or two of the quotations also relate to walking. There is, for example, a Bantu proverb, ‘It’s not the rest that reduces the distance, it’s the walking,’ which seems unarguable.  And the Bantus knew of what they spoke.  

This is just one more area in which I lack expertise but I’m aware of the Bantu Migration.  By some accounts (meaning that it’s a contested anthropological hypothesis),  4,000 to 5,000 years ago (estimates differ), about 300 million members of the Bantu-speaking population roamed many, many thousands of miles, most by walking I assume, from the Niger Delta all across southern Africa eventually to what is now Angola and Zambia, looking for new places to settle.  

 

Elsewhere in Massoudy’s book there’s a quotation from St Augustine ‘Go forth on your path, as it only exists through your walking.’  I like that, although I assume there most be some paths that exist because of other people’s walking.

 

      The quotation comes from St Augustine of Hippo, not to be confused with St Augustine of Canterbury who landed in Kent baptised King Ethelbert in 597, and in due course set England on the course of conversion to Christianity.  

In his memory there is now a walking trail, the Augustine Camino from Rochester Cathedral to the Shrine of St Augustine in Ramsgate: 

To be fair, Saint Augustine of Hippo’s walks look a bit more lively.

 

STUMBLING IN THE SHRUBBERY (FOR INSTANCE)

I’ve been thinking there might be a book to be written, and one that I could possibly write, about walking in gardens. Of course I wouldn’t call it Walking in Gardens – that sounds like something Alan Titchmarsh would write – I’d be going for something like Shambling in Eden (yes, yes I know it needs work).

And of course it wouldn’t be all about the joys of walking around, say, the Chelsea Physic or Kew, though here, for reference, are some people walking in Kew:

I’d be more concerned with, say, the Poison Garden in Alnwick, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Charles Jencks’ The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and so on. 

Photo by Richard Tulloch (I think)

And of course I’d also be concerned with imaginary or fictional gardens, the suicide garden in You Only Live Twice

and perhaps most obviously the one in Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (Le Jardin Des Supplices), a book that’s obviously driven jacket designers mad over the years.

 There’s also a somewhat faithful film, Le Jardin Des Supplices 1976 directed by Christian Gion:

and there’s the 1967 film Torture Garden starring Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith that has almost nothing to do with the novel, but hey, it stars Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith.

 

And so, as research, I’ve been rereading the novel. The edition I own is the one above with Catherine Deneuve on the cover, and it also has a quotation on the back from my cineaste pal Anne Billson ‘This decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le denier cri in kinky exoticism.’  Fair enough. She knows of what she speaks.

Self-portrait by Anne Billson from her blog Multiglom.

There’s a key scene in the book where the narrator goes walking in the Torture Garden, which is at the centre of a prison, with Clara, the deracinated English ‘heroine’ who only feels at home and free in China, where the garden is located. 

(Spoiler alert - everything grows so well in the garden because it’s fertilized with the corpses of tortured prisoners; actually not much of a spoiler, you would almost certainly have guessed)

 

Clara started walking again, very quickly … She walked on – a hard shadow on her eyes and her eyes aflame… Clara continued walking.  I walked beside her and everywhere was a fresh surprise … Suddenly Clara stopped as though an invisible arm brutally descended on her. 

‘Do you smell it?’

‘I smell the aroma of peonies.’ 

       ‘No that’s not it ... it smells as it does when I make love with you … Here it is here it is oh my darling.’

In fact a powerful phasphatic odour, an odour of semen wafted up from that plant (a ‘thalictus’ in the text, the RHS prefers the term thalictrum)  

‘Why do so many flowers resemble sexual organs if not because nature ceaselessly cries out to living beings in all its forms and through its perfumes, ‘Make Love.’

 

I don't doubt that Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville West felt much the same way. 

 

 

 

 

THE WALKING GAZE, THE GAZING WALK

This is a depiction of a flaneur:

 

It’s by Honoré Daumier, and is an illustration for M. Louis Huart’s Physiologie Du Flaneur, 1841.

 

The binoculars are a worry aren’t they? I mean they’re not likely to be very useful for looking at anything in the street are they? Things are surely close enough that you don’t need a powerful lens to zoom in on anything.  Compare and contrast with the popularity of the basic 28mm lens as used by a great many street photographers, not least Garry Winogrand.

 

Though other camera options were available, as Diane Arbus demonstrates here.

This is the title page of Physiologie Du Flaneur, 

 

which does suggest that the flaneur is a bit of a lech, watching all the girls go by, maybe even following them.  This is of course all about the male gaze.  According to Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson in her Paris as Revolutionthe flaneur’s gaze ‘begins in the activity of following women.’  This seems impossible to prove or disprove. 

Certainly this fellow, Le Flaneur Parisien by Theophile Steinlen looks dead dodgy, whether he’s about to follow the woman or not.

At least you couldn’t accuse any of the flaneurs illustrated here of being sneaky.  You can see exactly what they’re up to, and I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s words: ‘Dialectic of flaneurie: on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man.’ These guys look completely discovered.

 

But you know, it was a different age.

 

CARELESS WALKING

It being the Chas and Camilla weekend, we motored over to The Place for Plants in East Bergholt, which is partly a plant-centre but also a 20 acre garden, where you can have a longish and surprisingly uncrowded walk.  The handout you get when you enter says the place is inspired by the landscape of Cornwall, though this would have passed me by if it hadn’t been pointed out.

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

There were ducks and bamboo and euphorbia if you like that kind of thing – and it so happens I do.

Last week it rained quite hard so it wasn’t surprising that parts of the garden  were wet and muddy, though in fact some parts weren’t.

 

Now, I may not be the most cautious of walkers but I’m not the most reckless either.  And although I understand that in the interests of heath and safety, when a garden is open to the public you may well need to put up a few warning signs, ‘Do not walk on the water’ and that kind of thing.  But I thought they overdid it at this place.

 

It seemed fair enough that there were signs telling people to take care:

But then there were signs telling people to take extra care.

And I’m really not sure that I know the difference between taking care, and taking extra care.  What would be the measure?  What  strategies should the extra careful walker employ, as opposed to the one who’s simply taking care?

There is possibly a philosophical walking conundrum here.  We went to the tea room.

DEAD MAN IN DEDHAM

My mate Richard and I went walking in ‘Constable Country’ – Manningtree, Flatford, Dedham, that kind of thing – about 7 miles round trip with stops for coffee and a beer.

 

I didn’t imagine the landscape would look exactly like a Constable painting

 

and that was just as well

 

 

On the walk we discussed

 

the political situation in Brazil

the Atacama desert

Richard’s experience with a dodgy scout master

smoothies for breakfast

Keith Waterhouse and Billy Liar

Sheffield Wednesday

the consolations of fandom

our shared indifference to the coronation and the local elections

who would be our head of state if chosen by the electorate – my guess was Judy Dench

muscular Christianity

notions of agency in children’s fiction

JK Rowling

‘magic’ in the bible

LS Lowry

the only time I’ve ever been thrown out of a pub when I was 18 for snogging –

Constable said, 'Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her I look for fame.' It seems an odd thing to me, to look to your mistress for fame.