PROFANE WALKS WITH GEOFF NICHOLSON

In an article by Greil Marcus titled “Heaven’s Gate” (it first appeared in the New York Times and is included in the collection Double Trouble) he tells the story of Bob Dylan meeting Pope John Paul II in Bologna in 1997.  The story may or may not be apocryphal but Marcus quotes the Pope as saying “You ask me how many roads must a man go down?  One road: the road of Jesus Christ!”

Of course, in this version, which is presumably a translation, the Pope misquotes the Dylan lyrics – it’s not how many roads must a man go down but walk down, and he omits the second half of the question “before you call him a man?”  So it looks like the Pope’s saying you can only be called a man if you walk down one road, with Jesus.  Well yes, I can see how that might be a papal view, but really John Paul, you know, it's a metaphor, right?

Meanwhile in the New York Times right before Christmas there was an article by Bruce Feiler titled “The New Allure of Sacred Pilgrimages” reporting that more and more folk “longen to goon on pilgrimages” (as Chaucer - and Pasolini below - would have it).  

Feiler is the author of Walking The Bible and host of a PBS series titled Sacred Journeys with Bruce Feiler. That's him below, he's the one rather conspicuously not walking.

He also reports that “of every three tourists worldwide, one is a pilgrim, a total of 330 million people a year,” which sounds both impressive and utterly impossible to prove or disprove.  2 million of these, according to Feiler are Muslims heading to Mecca for a walk around the Kaaba, though other sources say over 3 million.  Either way it still seems surprisingly low considering, again according to Feiler, that 20 million a year go to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Most pilgrims do end up walking one way or another.  If photographs of crutches at Lourdes, like the one above, are to be believed (4 million visitors a year says Feiler) many hobble in there but walk out with a spring in their step.

Feiler also reports the case of Brian Kwan, “a young photographer in Colorado Springs, (who) was born to Buddhist parents but converted to Christianity at 16. When his father died suddenly, he began to question his faith. He decided to hike the Jesus Trail, a four-day, 40-mile journey from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee. He carried no luggage.

“At one point Mr. Kwan ran out of food and water and became disoriented. He wandered in the heat for 10 hours. ‘That was the scariest part,’ he said, ‘but I knew that God was with me, and that my dad was with me, too.’”

Well personally I’d have thought that one of the three might have had the foresight to carry some water, but what do I know?

Feiler finally quotes Kwan as saying “You’re either walking in the direction of God or you’re walking away.”  But I disagree.  Some of us trying to keep god at a safe and constant distance, whichever road we’re walking down.

WALKING BLONDE

Here’s Wayne Koestenbaum writing about Debbie Harry and walking, in My 1980s & Other Essays (and yes as a matter of fact I do think he’s “exaggerating or over-interpreting” but that’s OK).

“Whenever, in the early years of this already compromised century, I’d see Deborah Harry walk along Twenty-Third Street, the block we shared, I’d marvel at her solemn, hieratic pace. She didn’t trudge, march, rush, lope, stroll, or skip. In billowy pants, she led, slowly, with her hips, as if gliding through water. (Once, I remember, she wore army fatigues: couture khakis?) She explored with pilgrim curiosity the spatial zones her body passed through. Each step gestured acceptance toward the sidewalk; you may think I’m exaggerating or over-interpreting, but these memories—the sight of Debbie Harry promenading on Twenty-Third Street—are my possession, and they are not visions that will disappear, or visions whose meanings I can ignore by pretending that it makes no difference how a star’s gait seemed momentous and allegorical to a primed beholder. Harry seemed at home with each step, at home with her feet and her legs as they maneuvered air and pavement.”

Interestingly, it’s extremely hard to find decent photographs that show Debbie Harry walking in the street.  I’ve done my best.  I suspect this is because most photographers were so entranced by her looks that they simply asked her to stand where she was and pose, even when in the street, as in the one below.  Yep, it’s England, yep it’s a Wimpy Bar.

WALKING VOICES

I remember once reading or hearing an interview with somebody, an actor or actress or model or maybe fashion designer, somebody like that, and he or she said that when they were growing up they liked to imagine that as they walked in the world they were constantly filmed by hidden cameras: yeah, yeah, these days we all are, I know, but these were imaginary and benevolent. 

The result was that when they walked down the street they straightened up, put a spring in their step, tried to move elegantly, to look attractive and vivacious.  Alas there’s no way in the world I’ll ever remember this interviewee’s name, but he or she obviously thought this was very quirky and unusual, whereas I’m not so sure.

There’s an article in the most recent London Review of Books by Tom McCarthy (that's him above), titled “Writing Machines” about notions of “the real” in fiction.  He quotes a (to me anyway) very familiar passage from William Burroughs: “Take a walk down a city street … You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments … Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up.”

        

“He’s right as well,” says McCarthy, and I also concur.  It’s a terrific piece and I agree with 90 per cent of it (so it must be good) but I did carp at something McCarthy then says: “We don’t walk down the street saying to ourselves: ‘As I walk down the street, comma, I contemplate the question of faith, or adultery, or x or y or z.’”

But I’m here to tell him that for for a longish period of my early life, say from the ages of 8 to 13, as I walked in the world I often “heard” a third person narrative voice in my head: though it wasn’t an hallucination, I knew I was constructing it, knew that the voice was my own.   It would be “saying” thing such as “The boy walked down the grey, wet northern street.  Nobody knew him, nobody understood him, he felt he didn’t belong here and he had to get out ...”  I fictionalize of course, which is largely McCarthy’s point about realism, and I exaggerate a little, but only a little.

I suspect my “narrator’s” prose style wasn’t the very best, probably Enid Blyton bleeding into Ian Fleming, since they were the two authors I’d read most of at that time.  I can’t swear that Fleming was much of a walker but Blyton certainly was, favoring the “nature walk.”

When I walk these days I don’t hear the third person narrative voice in my head, but I do sometimes rehearse what I’m going to write when I get home, the voice that I eventually use in this blog.

Above, incidentally, is the cover of Five on a Hike Together (which I don’t remember at all, though I thought I’d read all the Famous Five books).  It looks like something went seriously wrong on this particular nature walk.

CUTTING CACTI

Above is a photograph of our scribe walking in Arizona, in the Sonoran desert last month. Actually the area is designated the Sonoran Desert National Monument, though it doesn’t look very different from a lot of nearby territory that isn’t designated.  The best thing about the Sonoran desert, and about much of Arizona, is the presence of saguaros, the archetypical, anthropomorphic cacti.

As I walked I had some idea of finding the perfect saguaro specimen, the most human, the one with arms posed most convincingly at its sides.  This wasn’t so easy.  I’d see one in the middle distance and I’d walk towards it but I’d soon see it wasn’t quite the archetype I was looking for, the angles of the arms would be wrong, or what looked like a two-armed cactus from a distanace turned out to have an extra arm when I got closer.  But then I’d see another, apparently more perfect one, not so far away and I’d walk towards that one, and it too would let me down, and then I’d see another … and so on.

There were other imperfections too.  The chances of finding a saguaro in anything like perfect condition, without scars or wounds or dead patches, was very, very low.  But you know that made them kind of human as well: just like people they get beaten up and damaged by the years, by what we might as well call nature.

And another thing I like about the Arizona desert, actually about deserts in general: the long, long, multi-engined freight trains.   As you’ll find if you walk right up to the tracks, and certainly there’s nothing to stop you walking right up to the tracks, these are vast, thunderous, threatening things, but when you see one of them in the distance, snaking its way through the landscape it seems positively serene.

I was not on a very adventurous walk – I just strolled around for an hour or two, with no end in mind beyond looking at trains and cacti, but as I was heading back to the car I saw this thing:

Tires, chunks of wood, some kind of cord holding it all together: it would be easy to see it as random detritus, or even (at a pinch) desert folk art but in fact I happened to know what it was because I’d read an article a couple of weeks in California Sunday Magazine.

The device was almost certainly used in the process of “cutting for sign,” a tracking method and an old Native American trick.  You smooth out the dirt road with tires (the Native Americans didn’t have these, of course) and then if anybody walks there you’ll know about it. 

I assumed the Border Patrol had been involved, tracking illegal immigrants, although also desert flaneurs like me.  It also occurred to me that we were some fifty miles from the Mexican border, which seemed a bit late in the journey to start tracking anybody.  But of course the walking was the end of the journey, the walkers had made it this far by riding the freight trains.