On Walking

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• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781909470309
• eBook ISBN: 9781909470316
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This is not the first walk in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn was an account of his walk round Suffolk 20 years ago. But Phil Smith's own walk soon becomes quite as extraordinary as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. On one level On Walking describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. On a second level it sets out a unique kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it. And on a third level, On Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.

A few highlights from other drifts and wanders (1)

Coming face to face with a tiger in the woods above Zurich.

On a very first drift, finding the water tower for the old asylum encased in thick brambles; a find that gave that wander both narrative and adventure.

In searing sunlight after a storm, Anoushka and Katie in the far doorway of a barn making a silhouette of two tea-drinking ladies; using their bodies and pieces of cardboard. “Do you think they’re real?” a passing group of enchanted women walkers asked me in a whisper.

Simon saying “rural walking is boring” the moment before we saw through a gate a field full of the remnants of demolished houses (with which we played for the next two hours).

Giddy with the heat, leading a fear-frozen horse by its bridle, me scared too, at the request of its unnerved rider, across a road, glancing up to see the massive eye of alarm just above me.

An angry man who thought we were surveyors come to put a building on his community’s last piece of green land (a grassed decoy pond); after we had reassured him he invited us all into his garden for cake and tea, and I saw in the stream at the bottom of his garden an eel battling upstream.

Talking about Horatio Nelson, when over my shoulder peered a one-eyed man.

With Karen, finding a peacock transfixed by its own image in a roadside mirror.

A tyre warehouse ablaze in the dark hours of the morning.

A huge pool of blood spilled across a suburban street in Fribourg.

Crossing an abandoned racecourse in the middle of a Belgian wood.

With Polly and Simon, finding a barn full of sheep listening to jazz.

 

29.9.11

“For the valley of the Waveney I see the vale of Tenoctitlan, for the slopes of Stowe the snowy shapes of the volcanoes Popo and Iztac, for the spire of Earsham and towers of Ditchingham, of Bungay, and of Beccles, the soaring pyramids of sacrifice gleaming with the sacred fires, and for the cattle in the meadows the horsemen of Cortes sweeping to war.” This is from Montezuma’s Daughter by H. Rider Haggard, who wrote at Ditchingham Hall, which is on my route. I have raided it from the shelves of my B&B bedroom, along with I Walked By Night, a poacher’s autobiography ghosted by Rider Haggard’s daughter, Lilas, and other volumes of ‘local interest’.

I learn that the anchorite Julian of Norwich in her cell participated in the liturgy through a squint in the wall: can I find squints in Norwich through which to participate in the liturgy of the city? “Fear not the language of the world”; George Borrow grew up here, taught to wander by the gypsies he ran away with. “Under the West Norwich streets there are old chalk workings. They open up occasionally and a bus disappears…” (D.J. Taylor, Real Life).

Perhaps Lorraine and I should walk the Hall as if its floors are made of ice or glass?

In nearby Wright’s Court eight bodies were piled, dead from diphtheria, the illness Mum survived, contracted simultaneously with TB; she passed on an immunity to me. When the gravediggers returned to the pile, the body of an elderly woman on the top had disappeared. Does it still walk? Hauntings at 19 Magdalen Street, close by, formerly a brothel, a girl strangled; a ghost disturbs bags of clothes in the charity shop, folding them neatly and stacking those suitable for a young woman.

My walk is framed by its postponement due to Mum’s dying and by the interment of Mum’s ashes a few days after the walk’s intended completion.

Obelisks in the breakfast room; rays of light frozen in stone. The coffee jug is an urn. The holder of brown and tomato sauces a grave. The butter knife an Egyptian death tool; the mouth-opener. At breakfast, an episodic tale, disrupted by bacon; a grain of truth in every ‘family legend’.

The bran flakes holder explodes in my hands and I surreptitiously clear up the mess between chapters of the owner’s tale of all he knows about his house. An island of Regency in a pub yard, The Gothic House is a narrow, almost freestanding, three-storey, multi-story building. What its owner has to say about it is not remarkable, but his way of saying it is; his prose is as complex and interwoven as anything by Sebald, if not quite so worked. The owner presents solid evidence and then reveals it to be mistaken, then family hearsay which he mocks and subsequently resurrects, local rumour which he undoes before reclaiming it. Through his tale he weaves three mayors who become one mayor in public service three times and a mistress hidden away with her maid who, together, become a respectable French governess and her daughter. Some of his deductive leaps leave him short of the far side, but his aim is never for a bridge of logic but rather a setting of many points in motion about each other simultaneously. He describes what he is doing as arranging a few pieces of the jigsaw. I say to him that the problem with the past is that there is never any flat surface on which to arrange the pieces. Half way through my fried egg I realise that I have found, already, one of those special characters who unexpectedly people these walks from time to time…

Encounters

Ascended

ON MY WALK in the footsteps of the acorn-planting Charles Hurst I met a woolly-hatted psychogeographer who drove a JCB. In half an hour of conversation, he took me on an imaginary journey through underwater ballrooms and plague villages and along roads to nowhere.

In Guernsey I met a man who levered himself along the cliff top on crutches. While photographing the sea, he described to me in detail how the island was run by a mafia. I turned down his offer of a lift because I wanted to see things on foot, but maybe that was a mistake.

In a Tibshelf graveyard I nodded to a woman who burst into tears. I looked into her empty eyes. I helped her to find a place to bury her dying husband: a miner whose role as a conduit for a divine source of inspired words she was preparing to assume.

Outside a pub in a Nottinghamshire village a woman pulled down her blouse to show me the purple bruising of heart massage, pointed to the pavement and, unknowingly repeating words from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, said: “and there I died”.

All the time we have the chance to meet extraordinary folk, but they do not necessarily immediately appear exceptional. So when a Dersu Uzala (as in Akira Kurosawa’s movie of that name) comes to your campfire like a bear out of the darkness, try not to turn him or her away. At any one time there are only seven Ascended Mistresses or Masters at work on the Earth, so it would be a shame to turn one away, particularly as you cannot find them by looking; without anonymity they would not be what they are.

“of course there are always a few psychopaths, but mostly there are fallen angels”

Suspended sentience

WALK AS IF THE CITY, the river, the sea, the field were sentient beings. Walk as if you were a city, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Who me?
• Superstitions
• What I do when I walk
• Sebald walk: Taken from my notebooks
• Walking bodies
• Tactics of sensitivity
• Knees
• Crab Man’s razor
• Don’t take your own food
• A skill
• A few highlights from other drifts and wanders (1)
• Encounters
• Democracy
• O my International Lettristes! O my Situationists!
• Getting started
• Scratching from start
• Mythogeography
• Jouissance
• Environmentalism
• Pilgrimage
• Dodgy
• Walk in the footsteps of others
• Being ready
• Leaderless
• Holey
• Tactics and things
• Deep topography
• Autotopography
• Cemetery Walk (2003)
• Walking in the Suburbs (2013)
• Doppel
• A few highlights from other drifts and wanders (2)
• Cryptic
• Coincidences
• Note
• The wobbly art of memory
• Holey space
• Follow animal tracks
• Bluster
• The right to more
• Rhythms
• Psychogeography
• Walk to the ends of the earth
• Atmospheres
• Alchemical crossing
• Walking in character
• Undercovers
• Walking as an ordeal
• The man in the mask
• Women and walking
• Re:enactment
• Urfaces
• A few highlights from other drifts and wanders (3)
• A few highlights from other drifts and wanders (4)
• The fire doors of perception
• The last tactic
• Appendix
• References
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author