WALKING WITH ADDITIONS

 

A note comes over the transom from Jane Freeman, one of my regular correspondents, also walker and top artist (she did some extraordinary pictures inspired by Jane Eyre) like this, 

 

“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.” 

I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried.

 

Jane reminds me about William Burroughs' ‘psychogeographic practice’ described as ‘Walking on Colours.’

Let Old Bill explain,“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”  This is James Arness:

 

(The Thing of course is a Volkswagen Type 181, and if you think that sucker is amphibious, well good luck)

         

A lot the time I think I’m ‘over’ Burroughs, but then I reread something like that I think I’m not so over him after all. That passage is from “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” and appears in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985.  This is a man with an actual Burroughs adding machine:

I’ve never done the walking on colours thing and I suppose I’m unlikely to, being red/green colour blind.  I’d be following what I thought was a red fire engine and then I’d suddenly realize, or somebody would tell me, I was actually following a green bus.  I exaggerate, but only a little.

 

Admittedly blue and yellow should be less of a problem.

BB GUNS

There's a very nice line in William Burroughs’, Last Words, The Final Journals of William S Burroughs  - he writes of "A long time ago but not too far to walk.”  

          This sent me digging around for other mentions of walking in the 

journals.  I found this one: “I carry a .38 snubbie on my premises, at my belt at all times.  I leave the door open.  Someone walks in with something in mind, he won’t walk away.”

The stuff of good noir fiction, right?  And how very different Bill’s life might have been if he’d kept his taste for gunplay inside the covers of a book.

And I did I find the above photograph of Burroughs walking with Kurt Cobain - I bet there was some sparkling conversation that day – perhaps some talk of guns.  For what it’s worth, I think the Burroughs/Cobain collaboration The “Priest” They Called Him - Burroughs reads, Cobain makes glorious guitar noise - is about as good as “spoken word with music” ever gets.

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.