Walking the Talk
.
I’m just going to put this on.
(Load Walkman with Tom Davies' remix of North by North West.)
I often walk with my Walkman on. Not when I'm drifting. Not when I'm dériving. I'll explain what that is in a minute. I listen to my Walkman when I have a destination to walk to - when I just want to be there. The effect of the music .......... and this may have something to do with the kind of music I listen to - the effect of the music is to coat everything around me with a thin film of cinema... I block out the sounds of places I pass through, I can float, I often used to read as I walked, crossing roads without realising … but sometimes, even with the Walkman on, perhaps because of the music, I begin to drift… like the other day, I’d just walked for about an hour through the town of Basingstoke, to see the movie The Mothman Prophesies in a public toilet of a studio in a Warner Brothers cinema complex on the edge of Basingstoke, - on the way there I really had been depressed by the apparent anonymity of the town, its humourlessness, its lack of anomaly – the only thing that caught my eye all the way there was this…
(Take out the burnt stars and stripes.)
I found this distressed flag hanging on a traffic sign.
I pocketed it.
Because of the red and white.
But it didn’t raise my spirits. On the way home I put on the Walkman again. I was just as miserable on the way home, except weary of the prospect of another hour of walking. And, then, just as it is so often on dérives, it is just when you are wearying, just as you have to make an effort to walk at all – you begin to drift:
I suddenly just turned off, into a cemetery… on a whim - and, I’ll talk about that later….
(Take off the Walkman)
This is what I was listening to.
(Play North By North West on CD player. Track 5.)
That was Tom Davies’s remix of Bernard Hermann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s North By North West. But that’s not what I was listening to in Basingstoke, that’s what I was listening to just now. I’ll come to Basingstoke later.
Henry David Thoreau – the American utopian – once wrote on walking: “Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.”
He was writing that when walking was the norm, the base line, the default mode of transport through the outdoors.
But now our default mode of transport is a passing through interiors. The car is an extension of the home, the ferry and the Chunnel an extension of the car, the plane an extension of the airport lounge.
Walking – particularly in the city – is in danger of becoming a mark of eccentricity. In some places a foolhardily risky eccentricity. But it can also be a refusal of dominances and a re-conquest of public space. I don’t mind being marginalized in a number of ways, I’m happy to work in the margins in lots of ways – but I draw the line at being called an eccentric. Listen to this set of reaction to an invitation to participate at a distance in a recent ‘drift’:
(Read from Re:Bus)
- and those reactions are from people, many of them arts professionals, responding positively. I think they soon change their tune if they come on a ‘drift’, but it’s worth acknowledging that a common first reaction to this walking is a not-quite-respectful scepticism. After all, walking is banal, functional, how can it be an art? Or, worse, walking is healthy, it’s improving…
I sympathise.
When I read (“reed”) what Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Wanderlust, A History Of Walking of a rooted “return” to the body’s “original limits”, of the return of a “supple” and “sensitive” body/against postmodernism’s passive, medical/erotic body, decentralised and fragmented…
I feel uneasy.
When she writes “on foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between (…) interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors: one lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”
– I feel uneasy.
I’m not so sure that the overriding quality of walking, particularly in the city, is that everything stays connected. In fact, I feel that it is in the very possibility of disruption, of tripping up, tripping over, of refusal, of risking the crossing, disrupting the flow, not going to the destination… in these disconnections that the enigmatic meanings of the city and the landscape can be floated free from their immobile sites and engaged in movement.
Walking can still bring the walker upon unexpected and strange dominions… Dahomey is still a place to be found in a suburb… but not to be accessed either by eccentricity or healthiness. But rather by disruption, disconnection, refusal, extreme and unnatural sensitivity to ambience bordering on paranoia, by drift and dérive.
But I’m coming to that. Because it takes an act of will, a tradition of practice and a theory to keep finding those dominions.
(Video: play opening credits of North By North West)
The simple, natural, supple, sensitive act of walking, in itself, can take you right past the borders of strange dominions. Even carefully thought out strategies – even bloody-minded formalism - can lead you right up the garden path to the same old interiors. In his book Two Degrees West, Nicholas Crane describes how he walks from the top to the bottom of Britain, always keeping within 1,000 meters of Longitude 2 Degrees West – and yet so does he plan his journey - his meetings and his sleeping places largely arranged ahead of him - his journey reads as if it were one made through an interior, his encounters like cosy chats suggestive of a Radio Four studio.
Walking is no guarantor of discovery.
Having said all that, I’m not sure I like this characterisation of a virtuous exterior and a vicious interior. I’m not someone who immediately opts for the open air.
But I do like the exterior’s potential for pleasurable unpredictability. Maybe I’m attracted to that for reasons of personal history. I have an autobiography of walking that might offer some clues. Here are a few quotations:
(Show my certificate.)
When I won it was because I was able to turn my walk into a narrative, into a melodrama… I would keep on the shoulder of the leader and then with a lap to go suddenly give a burst of speed. I remember the exhilaration of that burst, the adrenalin rush, the absence of any weariness.
Walking to school through a spinney. I first lived on a big road in Coventry, the Foleshill Road, next to a huge factory – Courtaulds – and a working canal. But we moved to a smarter, edge of town development on the cusp of rural and urban. In the spinney I would meet up with girls, slide on frozen ponds, gaze into the big warm windows of a detached house and wonder if the Antichrist lived there, discover a huge cache of porn mags wrapped in newspaper under a pile of leaves, it was there I would be hurling a stick to bring down conkers when the car pulled up and they told me Grandad Smith was dead.
Walking in the interval at the Kirov Opera in St Petersburg – it’s the The Queen Of Spades –
Pushkin coming alive, I recognise the sets as places I have been walking in that day – up and down the Nevsky Prospect – dreaming I am in Andrei Bely’s Symbolist novel of the city:
(Read from Petersburg by Bely:)
(Video: of Anti-Poll demonstrations)
Many were dull, ritualistic affairs, dominated by the reformist priorities of trade union bureaucrats and career polticians. But in Dresden, in 1989, a week after the Berlin Wall fell, it’s frightening – the Stalinist Government of Honneker still hold power – we don’t know it at the time but as we march the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party is voting narrowly not to fire on the marches. It was the most humorous march I have ever been on, as well as the scariest. One protestor was the editor of a potholing magazine banned by the authorities – no doubt for being an underground publication.
Two years later – another march – this time a spontaneous one – a couple of thousand people demonstrating against the setting of Poll Tax outside Bristol Council House, getting nowhere in attempts to break through police lines – the decision instead to march through the city - the police in panic, people coming out of the pubs and off the buses to join in. I’m at the front and with the rest of those at the head of the march I’m having, at every junction, to decide where to go next … we’re making it up as we go along… a Police Commissioner approaches me and wants to know where we are headed. I don’t know, there’s no official leadership of this march – that really throws him. By a series of spontaneous choices we head back towards the Council House where the Poll Tax setting is still going on, it’s 7 hours since this demonstration began, the intention is to round off the day with some final speeches on College Green in front of the Council House, but the police think we’re going to try to storm the building one more time, with the impetus of the march… they line up a swathe of horses across the road in front of us... those at the front slow the march to a gentle edge forward, while we struggle to think of our next move… keeping everyone together… but what do we do? What do we do? Suddenly there’s a murmur behind us… and people start to pour down a side road, at first those at the front try to stop the breakaway… but, wait, there’s another way into the Green from there… the police see the move, a group of their horses split away to cut off the breakaway marchers… and before the police can close the gap we march through it and onto the Green, the horses milling in our wake… the collective wisdom of a barely led mob on the march…
But the walking I do now – at least the particular kind of walking that I want to talk about today – is different from all of those memories. And at the same time influenced by all of them too.
And by the desire to change everything – to find other worlds in this one… to make art as serious as work…
And the means to realise these desires is the practice and theory of the dérive or drift. But I’m coming to that.
First: about that thin film of cinema that seems to fall over sites that I walk through. It’s not always an unconscious process. I take pleasure in it. I’m drawn to certain sites because I mis-recognise them from films I’ve seen. Very particular films, very particular, wasted sites. Sites that stand in the British neo-Romantic tradition of artists like Paul Nash and John Piper, a comtemporary installationist like Rachel Lichtenstein, writers like Arthur Machen – whose infected and invaded rural sites he transplants to the shadows of haunted urban tracks and alleys - Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair - films like Charles Crichton’s Hue and Cry – I saw this film when I was about ten years old and mis-read it – it’s a post 2nd World War comedy thriller played out in the bomb damage left over from the Blitz, but I mis-watched it as a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare. Growing up in Coventry, I associated the film’s setting with the bomb damage still around in the city in the 60s and I believed the film to be the precursor of a far greater destruction.
(Video: Hue and Cry. Watch the excerpt.)
There are others: Romero’s Day of the Dead, Daleks Invasion Earth, The Horn Blows At Midnight with Jack Benny... these films are always playing in my head as I drift through shopping centres, trashed parts of London, as I meet people I can’t quite place, can’t quite identify…
(Video: Quatermass 2. No sound. Talk as film plays.)
Another film I watch again and again for its locations, and for its sense of invaded space is Val Guest’s Quatermass 2: a scientist discovers that the Moon Project on which he is working – a project supposedly only at the planning stage and supposedly designed to sustain human life on the Moon – is a reality, built in the shadow of a New Town, in a countryside where strange concrete roads stop abruptly in the middle of nowhere – the Project’s domes are housings for a plant-like alien life. The new housing near to the Project is just like the housing we moved into when I was three or four years old – the countryside is just like the one I would explore as a kid – scored with inexplicable roads… sudden high fences… and broken remnants of old industries, quarries full of newts – and new places just as haunted, invaded, ambient as old…
And I was never against the aliens, anyway. Why try to punch through the white whale, when you can be between its jaws?
In Olaf Stapledon’s novel The First and Last Men the Martians are more like a collective intelligence than men in rubber suits. I wanted to be invaded by that.
For a long time I tried to find a way of theorizing that desire.
I tried to find a way of theorizing my feeling that, though my associations were resonant – the least of their qualities was their being individual to me.
For a long time that theorizing was a political one, or a political-aesthetical one that excluded my own predilections for low art, for space and site.
I have been fortunate in that my introduction to the possibilities of site-specific theatre and performance have been coincidental with my first reading of the theory of Memetics and my re-reading of the theory and practice of the situationists.
Memetics
M – E – M – E – T – I – C – S
is a theory of the natural selection of ideas.
According to this theory – first articulated – almost as an afterthought - by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and popularised by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine – ideas circulate in the form of memes, complexes of single units of meaning. Given the abundance of meanings it is possible to imagine and the limited number of brains to accept them, ideas are in competition with each other, their acceptance or rejection based on the attractiveness of the means and agencies of their communication (rather than their own merits).
Most appealing to me about this theory – aside from its intellectual merits - is that it proposes a theory of self at odds with those assumptions about a watching mono-presence seated somewhere behind the eyes – and in place of that watcher/operator puts a set of incredibly successful meme complexes. In other words the idea of the self is a successful meme, rather than a material reality. Yes, we are individual, the composition of our thoughts, ideas, memories are individual to us – but that individuality lies in the unique make-up of our memes, not in the monolithic authority of a self.
This helps me to understand why something as subtle and intangible as the “ambience” of a place can be shared by numbers of people. Because we share meme-complexes – some of which, by definition, will be more successful in multiplying themselves than others. It’s almost as if memes can ‘hover’ about a place – ready for us to detect. That neo-Romantic tradition I accessed earlier: is a successful, complex of counter-memes – memes that dissent from more genteel, picturesque concepts of landscape for an aesthetics of the bleak, the distressed, of Pan-ic in the woods and invasion – a tennis ball hovering over a trembling field – of suspense.
This memetic process is an idealist one – there is a material basis to it. It is not simply a case of the laying of ideas on the material site. Instead, it is the very attractiveness of sites and landscapes - the sublime quality of a site’s seeming limitlessness in some cases, the beauty of its limits, restrictions and frames, in others – exactly those qualities of attraction that promote the success of the ambient memes of site.
‘Ambience’ is a crucial part of the situationist theory of the dérive.
I first came across the situationists in a book by Richard Gombin called The Origins Of Modern Leftism and in a re-print of their writings – they’d been given to my Dad by a book reviewer to be sold at some charity event. I nabbed them. In the Gombin book I read something that has stayed with me for almost thirty years – a description of the situationists’ critique of modern life:
The situationists wanted to destroy that society, overthrow it… tip it up… shatter it… trip it…
They were revolutionaries. Most of them French, but not all.
They emerged from the political gloom of the 1950s – dominated by the Cold War, and on the political left dominated by the dead hand of the Communist Parties – passive instruments of Russian foreign policy, espousing radicalism only in order to dampen it down.
The most prominent member of the situationists was Guy Debord – a contradictory figure. His refusal to work for the profit of others was exemplary, his utilisation of a private income for the purpose, perhaps less so. He was habitually drunk, yet wrote, drunk, with great clarity. His drinking was a reaching for the sensuality that capitalism denied him – but it took its intellectual and organisational toll eventually.
Yet – all this contradiction was necessary, rather than either incidental or unforgiveable. Given the crushing pincer movement on revolutionary politics – from one direction the state capitalism of the US arms-based economy and from the other the bureaucratic state capitalism of the Russian command economy – it could only be a slippery, un-categorizable theorist/activist – part charlatan, part on-the-line integrity – who could survive the crushing political gravity of the 1950s.
(I suppose I sympathise with Debord for reasons of autobiography – we both read and mis-read at an early age the same book – Norman Cohn’s coruscating attack on the revolutionary, utopian and millenarian cults of the reformation period – The Pursuit Of The Millennium. Both Debord and myself seem to have wilfully un-read Cohn’s analysis of the necessary descent of these cults into authoritarianism, sexual predation and often mass murder. We read Cohn’s many examples as noble failures only waiting more propitious times. The ruins of these cults, like the ruins of wasted, distressed sites, awaiting fulfilment.)
Debord theorized the weapons with which the spectacle was to be disrupted and overthrown. The most important of these was détournement – the ‘turning’ of decrepit art forms from their ‘consumed’ and ‘consumable’ functions into spanners in the works, grit in the eyes – this could involve the montaging of comic books and porn mags with texts taken from the writings of Marx.
For the situationists, art was dead – an irredeemable product and machine of the spectacle – its only revolutionary usefulness its capacity to be détourned, to be redeployed as a disruption of itself and the rest of the spectacle and the social relationships it rested upon.
Détournement could be practised on the streets as well as in the publishing house and the printers. It could be triggered by going on dérives – walks that cut across all economic imperatives. There was no geographical or economic destination for these walks – they were not walks to a place of work, not to the shops, nor to sites of pre-digested leisure, nor to places of religious worship. Instead, they were un-planned “drifts”, in which the criteria for choosing a route was that which promised the most abundant ‘ambience’ – being those sites or routes with the greatest resonance, the greatest capacity to be détourned, re-deployed for the purposes of disrupting everyone else’s economic trajectories. Most treasured were those places that seemed to manifest a meeting place of different ambiences – these were called psychogeographic hubs.
(Once again, autobiography is as much a source as the library – I remember nights of experimental sexual adventure in other peoples’ garden sheds and coal holes, expeditionary “drifts” across whole streets of back gardens, I remember bike-catapulted dérives through Coventry council estates and trespasses into locked and closed for the winter pleasure parks – but I can’t think I’m even exemplary let alone unique in these adolescent drifts, most adolescents without liberal parents are surely forced to either suffer or dérive: without homes that we have control over, without full control of what we do in the bedrooms of our teens, we “drift” the streets.)
The walks, or “drifts” or “dérives” were not ends in themselves. They were acts of research. Expeditions in search of material – material for the creation of ‘situations’ – combinations of site, performance and demonstration that would eventually evolve new ways of urban living. Living that transform the cities.
This is a walking that is not an end in itself – that does not test its own qualities in terms of the physical posture or health of its protagonists. Instead, it tests them in their engagement with the social relationships expressed in the images and ideas that circulate about sites and spaces – what I would call memes. It is a walking of disruption, a walking of refusal, and a walking of research and redeployment of old arts and old art.
As I turned off the tedious artery and into that Basingstoke cemetery, I wasn’t really sure why – there was an odd heraldic badge on the iron gates, and in the distance there was a black car that seemed to be moving, but not getting any closer. There seemed some promise of ambience. I went in. I started to read the gravestones… And this is what I was listening to on my Walkman.
(On CD player: play War Of The Worlds, cd 1, track 13)
That was the Todd Terry remix of part of Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds.
If you want to go on your own dérive or drift, there is no proscription on integrating your walk with other forms of transport – in fact, these can be used as a catapult, to give your walking a burst of momentum, to propel you, at speed, into a new site, sensitising you to its possible ambient qualities.
One such catapulted “drift” that I took part in was the Re:Bus drift of 13th December last year with other members of Wrights & Sites. On this drift we used spontaneously chosen buses as a means to catapult ourselves across Exeter, Exminster and Topsham, from one walk to another. We found “hubs” on Topsham quayside, along a strangely rural route so close to business parks and housing estates, at a steel bridge over the Exeter canal, at a ruined site - still sporting a palm tree - at the Moto services. And at a church, on which the cross had been changed into a giant snowflake. I went in… and the experience has made me think about how I dérive, in what persona, in what uniform, in what guise, in what disguise…
(Read from Re:Bus – p.17-18)
As well as that British neo-Romanticism to access, there is a European tradition of character/non-character to draw upon – from Gustav Meyrink and the hero of his The Golem, a man whose name and history are accidentally taken from someone else, Paul Leppin whose Severin in Severin’s Journey Into The Dark is as much the place he is in as he is a permanent psychology, Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, to the geometrical and coded characters of Bely’s Petersburg. And there is also a Hindu practice of looking to learn: darshan – “a way of touching, of making actual contact through the gaze.” To cultivate an ability to disrupt just by looking. To be like Khlestakov, the agent of change, not through one’s own qualities, but through the disruptions invented by others on one’s behalf.
The “drift” was not an end in itself – it was partly a research.
Its near invisibility a ghost that may become a force. The walk a momentum of walkers and changers.
During Re:Bus I was telephoning and emailing from pub phones and public call boxes to nine people – some in Exeter, one in New Zealand, one in Canada.
(Cassette player: play Phone Messages to Sandra)
This is how my e-mails were received by the Goth journalist Bess Loveday in Vancouver:
(Read from Re:Bus, p.18)
Ten days ago – we went on a more directed “drift” – cathedral–Moto–cathedral based around the rural-in-the-urban route that we’d discovered on Re:Bus – and this time taking with each us one guest.
The images on the True Image Projector are all from that “drift” – the colour images from the outward journey to Moto services, the black and white ones from the return to the cathedral.
The “drift” begins in darkness – the disruption of an unfamiliarly early start – 5.30am already disrupting the drifter’s routine walking of the city. At 5.30am I’m walking down the centre of the usually bumper to bumper Queen Street, no cars now, only one other person – a homeless man stands in the shadows of a shop doorway – I’m in Day Of The Dead.
On this “drift” I began to find more and more significant objects that replicated the red and white bars I have been working on for some time…
(Show: tape and trowel handle – place with flag)
… first coming to them in a parody of the measuring rods used in cartography and archaeology, the sections painted on to bent sticks. By a fortuitous accident these became confused in performance with Dionysian tokens, snapped as part of an academic paper at a Birmingham conference and rebound…
(Show: red and white painted stick – place with flag)
now I take sticks from along the Hoopern Valley Walk – a path that runs along the top of our road in Exeter – I paint them in red and white sections and return them to the path.
I’ve been working on a cd for people to use when walking the path. But it’s a disrupted walk. Because the path takes about ten minutes to walk at normal speed in one direction, but the sounds for each direction last twenty minutes. At worst the cd will delay the act of going to work, going to the theatre… at best disrupt it. The cd has been mixed by Tom Davies. It is called the Hoopern Valley Slow Walk and will soon be complemented by a website so people can walk it at a distance.
I’ll finish by playing you a short excerpt from the start of the Walk.
(CD Player: play first part of the Hoopern Valley Slow Walk cd)
As I turned off that dreary Basingstoke road I started to read the gravestones. I was immediately struck by the brutal, crude, vulgar power of the feelings expressed ungrammatically – I was weeping absurd tears – the effect of unsophisticated, unpunctuated ornamental masonry.
First this is what was playing as I walked deeper into the graveyard. Then I’ll finish by reading out what I wrote down:
(Cd Player: play track 14 of War Of The Worlds.)
Read from sheet of paper:
Gilly Cole: “You stirred up many feelings
In people in your life, Dad,
But in us only everlasting love”
“Dear Lord why?
Did you take him from me
When you knew I needed him so.”
Bernard Stokes
Called to rest on
19th Sept 1973
Brigadier Elsie K. Blunden
(retired)
Of the Salvation Army
Blood & (ampersand) Fire
“The following are not permitted:
Glass or plastic vases (or similar), Iron or wooden
Crosses, Enclosed floral tributes, Fencing around graves.”
Think of throwing earth on my Gran’s coffin, my nephews crying as my Nan’s, their Great Nan’s coffin slides towards the fire, being stoned after Danny’s funeral – having stones thrown at me … by kids… because I was walking through our estate wearing a suit for the funeral.
The big horse chestnut tree – beneath which I was told Grandad was dead.
It’s really dark now, only been here five minutes
I was really excited before
The man comes to lock the gates
Denims and trainers.
I’m going to die,
Nothing noble about it
Attwood Close
A house called Victoriana
Deep lane
No one smiles here
I’m seeing everything now
I’m seeing great Martian troops striding over the homes
Sunny Take Away
An advertising hoarding covered in lichen – can just make out Captain America
House called Beth Shalom
Facing it a brick hut – a placard says: Albirr Masjid – on the placard there is the illustration of a mosque that looks nothing like the brick hut
A coffee shop, it’s 6pm, chairs on the tables
This sure ain’t Munich anymore, Toto
Welcome to Basingstoke College of technology
Access to excellence
5 miles per hour
a teenage girl walks by – other side of the road – on her head a scarf made of the stars and stripes
“cylinder follows cylinder – the Earth belonged to the martians”
Penrith Road
I found evangelical tracts in the house of the artistic director this morning
Samaritans
And an arrow
That’s it.
(a talk on walking at Dartington College of Arts, Phil Smith, 2002)
I’m just going to put this on.
(Load Walkman with Tom Davies' remix of North by North West.)
I often walk with my Walkman on. Not when I'm drifting. Not when I'm dériving. I'll explain what that is in a minute. I listen to my Walkman when I have a destination to walk to - when I just want to be there. The effect of the music .......... and this may have something to do with the kind of music I listen to - the effect of the music is to coat everything around me with a thin film of cinema... I block out the sounds of places I pass through, I can float, I often used to read as I walked, crossing roads without realising … but sometimes, even with the Walkman on, perhaps because of the music, I begin to drift… like the other day, I’d just walked for about an hour through the town of Basingstoke, to see the movie The Mothman Prophesies in a public toilet of a studio in a Warner Brothers cinema complex on the edge of Basingstoke, - on the way there I really had been depressed by the apparent anonymity of the town, its humourlessness, its lack of anomaly – the only thing that caught my eye all the way there was this…
(Take out the burnt stars and stripes.)
I found this distressed flag hanging on a traffic sign.
I pocketed it.
Because of the red and white.
But it didn’t raise my spirits. On the way home I put on the Walkman again. I was just as miserable on the way home, except weary of the prospect of another hour of walking. And, then, just as it is so often on dérives, it is just when you are wearying, just as you have to make an effort to walk at all – you begin to drift:
I suddenly just turned off, into a cemetery… on a whim - and, I’ll talk about that later….
(Take off the Walkman)
This is what I was listening to.
(Play North By North West on CD player. Track 5.)
That was Tom Davies’s remix of Bernard Hermann’s music for Alfred Hitchcock’s North By North West. But that’s not what I was listening to in Basingstoke, that’s what I was listening to just now. I’ll come to Basingstoke later.
Henry David Thoreau – the American utopian – once wrote on walking: “Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.”
He was writing that when walking was the norm, the base line, the default mode of transport through the outdoors.
But now our default mode of transport is a passing through interiors. The car is an extension of the home, the ferry and the Chunnel an extension of the car, the plane an extension of the airport lounge.
Walking – particularly in the city – is in danger of becoming a mark of eccentricity. In some places a foolhardily risky eccentricity. But it can also be a refusal of dominances and a re-conquest of public space. I don’t mind being marginalized in a number of ways, I’m happy to work in the margins in lots of ways – but I draw the line at being called an eccentric. Listen to this set of reaction to an invitation to participate at a distance in a recent ‘drift’:
(Read from Re:Bus)
- and those reactions are from people, many of them arts professionals, responding positively. I think they soon change their tune if they come on a ‘drift’, but it’s worth acknowledging that a common first reaction to this walking is a not-quite-respectful scepticism. After all, walking is banal, functional, how can it be an art? Or, worse, walking is healthy, it’s improving…
I sympathise.
When I read (“reed”) what Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Wanderlust, A History Of Walking of a rooted “return” to the body’s “original limits”, of the return of a “supple” and “sensitive” body/against postmodernism’s passive, medical/erotic body, decentralised and fragmented…
I feel uneasy.
When she writes “on foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between (…) interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors: one lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”
– I feel uneasy.
I’m not so sure that the overriding quality of walking, particularly in the city, is that everything stays connected. In fact, I feel that it is in the very possibility of disruption, of tripping up, tripping over, of refusal, of risking the crossing, disrupting the flow, not going to the destination… in these disconnections that the enigmatic meanings of the city and the landscape can be floated free from their immobile sites and engaged in movement.
Walking can still bring the walker upon unexpected and strange dominions… Dahomey is still a place to be found in a suburb… but not to be accessed either by eccentricity or healthiness. But rather by disruption, disconnection, refusal, extreme and unnatural sensitivity to ambience bordering on paranoia, by drift and dérive.
But I’m coming to that. Because it takes an act of will, a tradition of practice and a theory to keep finding those dominions.
(Video: play opening credits of North By North West)
The simple, natural, supple, sensitive act of walking, in itself, can take you right past the borders of strange dominions. Even carefully thought out strategies – even bloody-minded formalism - can lead you right up the garden path to the same old interiors. In his book Two Degrees West, Nicholas Crane describes how he walks from the top to the bottom of Britain, always keeping within 1,000 meters of Longitude 2 Degrees West – and yet so does he plan his journey - his meetings and his sleeping places largely arranged ahead of him - his journey reads as if it were one made through an interior, his encounters like cosy chats suggestive of a Radio Four studio.
Walking is no guarantor of discovery.
Having said all that, I’m not sure I like this characterisation of a virtuous exterior and a vicious interior. I’m not someone who immediately opts for the open air.
But I do like the exterior’s potential for pleasurable unpredictability. Maybe I’m attracted to that for reasons of personal history. I have an autobiography of walking that might offer some clues. Here are a few quotations:
Getting lost in Channock Chase with a pseudo-cousin and trying to trace our way back to the distorted cries of our parents.
At the age of 15, running errands – which actually meant walking errands – in the Coventry Economic Building Society, where my Mum was employed all her working life… I earned four pounds 19 shillings a week.
I don’t necessarily associate walking with leisure.
The boots I am wearing – the boots I usually wear for any walk that might get off the beaten track – are not rambling boots. I’m not a rambler. These are working boots – I was given them and wore them for 9 months or so, ten or eleven years back, when I worked for Continental Landscapes, a division of a Dutch-owned multi-national firm with a contract to maintain the grass verges on Bristol’s council estates. For those 9 months I would either be walking behind a Hayter – a big grass cutting machine, a heavy thing, dangerous enough to snap the finger of one of my colleagues and back her against a fence before someone could turn it off – or wielding an industrial strimmer that flicked slow worms in two, dog shit in flecks onto your mask, grass into liquid – all the time me, walking, walking…
… just as likely to make me think of work, walking is.
Walking across an airfield on the top of the Long Mynd in Shropshire, during a wide game organised by my school – happen to glance over my shoulder and see a glider silently bearing down on me.Race walking – I was Coventry schools champion at 15.
(Show my certificate.)
When I won it was because I was able to turn my walk into a narrative, into a melodrama… I would keep on the shoulder of the leader and then with a lap to go suddenly give a burst of speed. I remember the exhilaration of that burst, the adrenalin rush, the absence of any weariness.
Walking to school through a spinney. I first lived on a big road in Coventry, the Foleshill Road, next to a huge factory – Courtaulds – and a working canal. But we moved to a smarter, edge of town development on the cusp of rural and urban. In the spinney I would meet up with girls, slide on frozen ponds, gaze into the big warm windows of a detached house and wonder if the Antichrist lived there, discover a huge cache of porn mags wrapped in newspaper under a pile of leaves, it was there I would be hurling a stick to bring down conkers when the car pulled up and they told me Grandad Smith was dead.
Walking in the interval at the Kirov Opera in St Petersburg – it’s the The Queen Of Spades –
Pushkin coming alive, I recognise the sets as places I have been walking in that day – up and down the Nevsky Prospect – dreaming I am in Andrei Bely’s Symbolist novel of the city:
(Read from Petersburg by Bely:)
At the Kirov the walking is different from on the Nevsky Propsect – here, in wooden floored room, we promenade with our drinks in a clockwise direction around a bust of Kirov – murdered by Stalin for being just too St Petersburg and not Moscow-enough.I’ve been on many political marches.
(Video: of Anti-Poll demonstrations)
Many were dull, ritualistic affairs, dominated by the reformist priorities of trade union bureaucrats and career polticians. But in Dresden, in 1989, a week after the Berlin Wall fell, it’s frightening – the Stalinist Government of Honneker still hold power – we don’t know it at the time but as we march the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party is voting narrowly not to fire on the marches. It was the most humorous march I have ever been on, as well as the scariest. One protestor was the editor of a potholing magazine banned by the authorities – no doubt for being an underground publication.
Two years later – another march – this time a spontaneous one – a couple of thousand people demonstrating against the setting of Poll Tax outside Bristol Council House, getting nowhere in attempts to break through police lines – the decision instead to march through the city - the police in panic, people coming out of the pubs and off the buses to join in. I’m at the front and with the rest of those at the head of the march I’m having, at every junction, to decide where to go next … we’re making it up as we go along… a Police Commissioner approaches me and wants to know where we are headed. I don’t know, there’s no official leadership of this march – that really throws him. By a series of spontaneous choices we head back towards the Council House where the Poll Tax setting is still going on, it’s 7 hours since this demonstration began, the intention is to round off the day with some final speeches on College Green in front of the Council House, but the police think we’re going to try to storm the building one more time, with the impetus of the march… they line up a swathe of horses across the road in front of us... those at the front slow the march to a gentle edge forward, while we struggle to think of our next move… keeping everyone together… but what do we do? What do we do? Suddenly there’s a murmur behind us… and people start to pour down a side road, at first those at the front try to stop the breakaway… but, wait, there’s another way into the Green from there… the police see the move, a group of their horses split away to cut off the breakaway marchers… and before the police can close the gap we march through it and onto the Green, the horses milling in our wake… the collective wisdom of a barely led mob on the march…
But the walking I do now – at least the particular kind of walking that I want to talk about today – is different from all of those memories. And at the same time influenced by all of them too.
And by the desire to change everything – to find other worlds in this one… to make art as serious as work…
And the means to realise these desires is the practice and theory of the dérive or drift. But I’m coming to that.
First: about that thin film of cinema that seems to fall over sites that I walk through. It’s not always an unconscious process. I take pleasure in it. I’m drawn to certain sites because I mis-recognise them from films I’ve seen. Very particular films, very particular, wasted sites. Sites that stand in the British neo-Romantic tradition of artists like Paul Nash and John Piper, a comtemporary installationist like Rachel Lichtenstein, writers like Arthur Machen – whose infected and invaded rural sites he transplants to the shadows of haunted urban tracks and alleys - Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair - films like Charles Crichton’s Hue and Cry – I saw this film when I was about ten years old and mis-read it – it’s a post 2nd World War comedy thriller played out in the bomb damage left over from the Blitz, but I mis-watched it as a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare. Growing up in Coventry, I associated the film’s setting with the bomb damage still around in the city in the 60s and I believed the film to be the precursor of a far greater destruction.
(Video: Hue and Cry. Watch the excerpt.)
There are others: Romero’s Day of the Dead, Daleks Invasion Earth, The Horn Blows At Midnight with Jack Benny... these films are always playing in my head as I drift through shopping centres, trashed parts of London, as I meet people I can’t quite place, can’t quite identify…
(Video: Quatermass 2. No sound. Talk as film plays.)
Another film I watch again and again for its locations, and for its sense of invaded space is Val Guest’s Quatermass 2: a scientist discovers that the Moon Project on which he is working – a project supposedly only at the planning stage and supposedly designed to sustain human life on the Moon – is a reality, built in the shadow of a New Town, in a countryside where strange concrete roads stop abruptly in the middle of nowhere – the Project’s domes are housings for a plant-like alien life. The new housing near to the Project is just like the housing we moved into when I was three or four years old – the countryside is just like the one I would explore as a kid – scored with inexplicable roads… sudden high fences… and broken remnants of old industries, quarries full of newts – and new places just as haunted, invaded, ambient as old…
And I was never against the aliens, anyway. Why try to punch through the white whale, when you can be between its jaws?
In Olaf Stapledon’s novel The First and Last Men the Martians are more like a collective intelligence than men in rubber suits. I wanted to be invaded by that.
For a long time I tried to find a way of theorizing that desire.
I tried to find a way of theorizing my feeling that, though my associations were resonant – the least of their qualities was their being individual to me.
For a long time that theorizing was a political one, or a political-aesthetical one that excluded my own predilections for low art, for space and site.
I have been fortunate in that my introduction to the possibilities of site-specific theatre and performance have been coincidental with my first reading of the theory of Memetics and my re-reading of the theory and practice of the situationists.
Memetics
M – E – M – E – T – I – C – S
is a theory of the natural selection of ideas.
According to this theory – first articulated – almost as an afterthought - by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and popularised by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine – ideas circulate in the form of memes, complexes of single units of meaning. Given the abundance of meanings it is possible to imagine and the limited number of brains to accept them, ideas are in competition with each other, their acceptance or rejection based on the attractiveness of the means and agencies of their communication (rather than their own merits).
Most appealing to me about this theory – aside from its intellectual merits - is that it proposes a theory of self at odds with those assumptions about a watching mono-presence seated somewhere behind the eyes – and in place of that watcher/operator puts a set of incredibly successful meme complexes. In other words the idea of the self is a successful meme, rather than a material reality. Yes, we are individual, the composition of our thoughts, ideas, memories are individual to us – but that individuality lies in the unique make-up of our memes, not in the monolithic authority of a self.
This helps me to understand why something as subtle and intangible as the “ambience” of a place can be shared by numbers of people. Because we share meme-complexes – some of which, by definition, will be more successful in multiplying themselves than others. It’s almost as if memes can ‘hover’ about a place – ready for us to detect. That neo-Romantic tradition I accessed earlier: is a successful, complex of counter-memes – memes that dissent from more genteel, picturesque concepts of landscape for an aesthetics of the bleak, the distressed, of Pan-ic in the woods and invasion – a tennis ball hovering over a trembling field – of suspense.
This memetic process is an idealist one – there is a material basis to it. It is not simply a case of the laying of ideas on the material site. Instead, it is the very attractiveness of sites and landscapes - the sublime quality of a site’s seeming limitlessness in some cases, the beauty of its limits, restrictions and frames, in others – exactly those qualities of attraction that promote the success of the ambient memes of site.
‘Ambience’ is a crucial part of the situationist theory of the dérive.
I first came across the situationists in a book by Richard Gombin called The Origins Of Modern Leftism and in a re-print of their writings – they’d been given to my Dad by a book reviewer to be sold at some charity event. I nabbed them. In the Gombin book I read something that has stayed with me for almost thirty years – a description of the situationists’ critique of modern life:
“life in modern society could be reduced to survival (life brought down to the level of economic imperatives). Such societies are societies of the quantitive, the consumable… …that is the only existence permitted… frenetic production of goods. Enrichment only results in an expansion of survival, leaving the quality of life untouched…. This applies across the board, including tourism, which imitates the circulation of goods with its ‘package tours’, its excursions lacking any element of surprise, its factitious recreations…. Life is thus experienced at one remove, it has become a show in which everything is becoming incorporated. This is the phenomenon to which the situationists refer as a spectacle… a merchant-showman economy, (in which) alienated production is supplemented by alienated consumption…”Ours is the society of the spectacle: a society in which the circulation and distribution of images and ideas defines social relationships – relationships which have been subjugated to economic imperatives.
The situationists wanted to destroy that society, overthrow it… tip it up… shatter it… trip it…
They were revolutionaries. Most of them French, but not all.
They emerged from the political gloom of the 1950s – dominated by the Cold War, and on the political left dominated by the dead hand of the Communist Parties – passive instruments of Russian foreign policy, espousing radicalism only in order to dampen it down.
The most prominent member of the situationists was Guy Debord – a contradictory figure. His refusal to work for the profit of others was exemplary, his utilisation of a private income for the purpose, perhaps less so. He was habitually drunk, yet wrote, drunk, with great clarity. His drinking was a reaching for the sensuality that capitalism denied him – but it took its intellectual and organisational toll eventually.Yet – all this contradiction was necessary, rather than either incidental or unforgiveable. Given the crushing pincer movement on revolutionary politics – from one direction the state capitalism of the US arms-based economy and from the other the bureaucratic state capitalism of the Russian command economy – it could only be a slippery, un-categorizable theorist/activist – part charlatan, part on-the-line integrity – who could survive the crushing political gravity of the 1950s.
(I suppose I sympathise with Debord for reasons of autobiography – we both read and mis-read at an early age the same book – Norman Cohn’s coruscating attack on the revolutionary, utopian and millenarian cults of the reformation period – The Pursuit Of The Millennium. Both Debord and myself seem to have wilfully un-read Cohn’s analysis of the necessary descent of these cults into authoritarianism, sexual predation and often mass murder. We read Cohn’s many examples as noble failures only waiting more propitious times. The ruins of these cults, like the ruins of wasted, distressed sites, awaiting fulfilment.)
Debord theorized the weapons with which the spectacle was to be disrupted and overthrown. The most important of these was détournement – the ‘turning’ of decrepit art forms from their ‘consumed’ and ‘consumable’ functions into spanners in the works, grit in the eyes – this could involve the montaging of comic books and porn mags with texts taken from the writings of Marx.
For the situationists, art was dead – an irredeemable product and machine of the spectacle – its only revolutionary usefulness its capacity to be détourned, to be redeployed as a disruption of itself and the rest of the spectacle and the social relationships it rested upon.
Détournement could be practised on the streets as well as in the publishing house and the printers. It could be triggered by going on dérives – walks that cut across all economic imperatives. There was no geographical or economic destination for these walks – they were not walks to a place of work, not to the shops, nor to sites of pre-digested leisure, nor to places of religious worship. Instead, they were un-planned “drifts”, in which the criteria for choosing a route was that which promised the most abundant ‘ambience’ – being those sites or routes with the greatest resonance, the greatest capacity to be détourned, re-deployed for the purposes of disrupting everyone else’s economic trajectories. Most treasured were those places that seemed to manifest a meeting place of different ambiences – these were called psychogeographic hubs.
(Once again, autobiography is as much a source as the library – I remember nights of experimental sexual adventure in other peoples’ garden sheds and coal holes, expeditionary “drifts” across whole streets of back gardens, I remember bike-catapulted dérives through Coventry council estates and trespasses into locked and closed for the winter pleasure parks – but I can’t think I’m even exemplary let alone unique in these adolescent drifts, most adolescents without liberal parents are surely forced to either suffer or dérive: without homes that we have control over, without full control of what we do in the bedrooms of our teens, we “drift” the streets.)
The walks, or “drifts” or “dérives” were not ends in themselves. They were acts of research. Expeditions in search of material – material for the creation of ‘situations’ – combinations of site, performance and demonstration that would eventually evolve new ways of urban living. Living that transform the cities.
This is a walking that is not an end in itself – that does not test its own qualities in terms of the physical posture or health of its protagonists. Instead, it tests them in their engagement with the social relationships expressed in the images and ideas that circulate about sites and spaces – what I would call memes. It is a walking of disruption, a walking of refusal, and a walking of research and redeployment of old arts and old art.
As I turned off the tedious artery and into that Basingstoke cemetery, I wasn’t really sure why – there was an odd heraldic badge on the iron gates, and in the distance there was a black car that seemed to be moving, but not getting any closer. There seemed some promise of ambience. I went in. I started to read the gravestones… And this is what I was listening to on my Walkman.
(On CD player: play War Of The Worlds, cd 1, track 13)
That was the Todd Terry remix of part of Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds.
If you want to go on your own dérive or drift, there is no proscription on integrating your walk with other forms of transport – in fact, these can be used as a catapult, to give your walking a burst of momentum, to propel you, at speed, into a new site, sensitising you to its possible ambient qualities.
One such catapulted “drift” that I took part in was the Re:Bus drift of 13th December last year with other members of Wrights & Sites. On this drift we used spontaneously chosen buses as a means to catapult ourselves across Exeter, Exminster and Topsham, from one walk to another. We found “hubs” on Topsham quayside, along a strangely rural route so close to business parks and housing estates, at a steel bridge over the Exeter canal, at a ruined site - still sporting a palm tree - at the Moto services. And at a church, on which the cross had been changed into a giant snowflake. I went in… and the experience has made me think about how I dérive, in what persona, in what uniform, in what guise, in what disguise…
(Read from Re:Bus – p.17-18)
As well as that British neo-Romanticism to access, there is a European tradition of character/non-character to draw upon – from Gustav Meyrink and the hero of his The Golem, a man whose name and history are accidentally taken from someone else, Paul Leppin whose Severin in Severin’s Journey Into The Dark is as much the place he is in as he is a permanent psychology, Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, to the geometrical and coded characters of Bely’s Petersburg. And there is also a Hindu practice of looking to learn: darshan – “a way of touching, of making actual contact through the gaze.” To cultivate an ability to disrupt just by looking. To be like Khlestakov, the agent of change, not through one’s own qualities, but through the disruptions invented by others on one’s behalf.
The “drift” was not an end in itself – it was partly a research.
Its near invisibility a ghost that may become a force. The walk a momentum of walkers and changers.
During Re:Bus I was telephoning and emailing from pub phones and public call boxes to nine people – some in Exeter, one in New Zealand, one in Canada.
(Cassette player: play Phone Messages to Sandra)
This is how my e-mails were received by the Goth journalist Bess Loveday in Vancouver:
(Read from Re:Bus, p.18)
Ten days ago – we went on a more directed “drift” – cathedral–Moto–cathedral based around the rural-in-the-urban route that we’d discovered on Re:Bus – and this time taking with each us one guest.
The images on the True Image Projector are all from that “drift” – the colour images from the outward journey to Moto services, the black and white ones from the return to the cathedral.
The “drift” begins in darkness – the disruption of an unfamiliarly early start – 5.30am already disrupting the drifter’s routine walking of the city. At 5.30am I’m walking down the centre of the usually bumper to bumper Queen Street, no cars now, only one other person – a homeless man stands in the shadows of a shop doorway – I’m in Day Of The Dead.
On this “drift” I began to find more and more significant objects that replicated the red and white bars I have been working on for some time…
(Show: tape and trowel handle – place with flag)
… first coming to them in a parody of the measuring rods used in cartography and archaeology, the sections painted on to bent sticks. By a fortuitous accident these became confused in performance with Dionysian tokens, snapped as part of an academic paper at a Birmingham conference and rebound…
(Show: red and white painted stick – place with flag)
now I take sticks from along the Hoopern Valley Walk – a path that runs along the top of our road in Exeter – I paint them in red and white sections and return them to the path.
I’ve been working on a cd for people to use when walking the path. But it’s a disrupted walk. Because the path takes about ten minutes to walk at normal speed in one direction, but the sounds for each direction last twenty minutes. At worst the cd will delay the act of going to work, going to the theatre… at best disrupt it. The cd has been mixed by Tom Davies. It is called the Hoopern Valley Slow Walk and will soon be complemented by a website so people can walk it at a distance.
I’ll finish by playing you a short excerpt from the start of the Walk.
(CD Player: play first part of the Hoopern Valley Slow Walk cd)
As I turned off that dreary Basingstoke road I started to read the gravestones. I was immediately struck by the brutal, crude, vulgar power of the feelings expressed ungrammatically – I was weeping absurd tears – the effect of unsophisticated, unpunctuated ornamental masonry.
First this is what was playing as I walked deeper into the graveyard. Then I’ll finish by reading out what I wrote down:
(Cd Player: play track 14 of War Of The Worlds.)
Read from sheet of paper:
For All(Take plastic flower and lay it on the other objects.)
Our Babies
Always Loved
Never Forgotten
The locked chapel
The black doors
Fallen headstone
An urn
Snapped off at the stem
A cross with an unnatural arm of ivy
Pricked by holly … feeling alive
The black car ahead – moving – not getting any closer
The red lights
On the roof
It’s already darker in here
Now I’m re-walking
Full up with piss
On the fence
The car with red lights has gone
Suddenly
The dearly loved child
Suddenly called to rest
Can’t help thinking of my own children
No entry
Two way traffic
Not fucking here
Now I’m noticing how many graves have flowers!
New flowers!
Signs that the living haunt here.
I’m writing this down, I’m dériving for you
I’m haunting this place
You’re here with me
I’m presuming upon your ghosts
Gilly Cole: “You stirred up many feelings
In people in your life, Dad,
But in us only everlasting love”
“Dear Lord why?
Did you take him from me
When you knew I needed him so.”
Bernard Stokes
Called to rest on
19th Sept 1973
Brigadier Elsie K. Blunden
(retired)
Of the Salvation Army
Blood & (ampersand) Fire
“The following are not permitted:
Glass or plastic vases (or similar), Iron or wooden
Crosses, Enclosed floral tributes, Fencing around graves.”
Think of throwing earth on my Gran’s coffin, my nephews crying as my Nan’s, their Great Nan’s coffin slides towards the fire, being stoned after Danny’s funeral – having stones thrown at me … by kids… because I was walking through our estate wearing a suit for the funeral.
The big horse chestnut tree – beneath which I was told Grandad was dead.
It’s really dark now, only been here five minutes
I was really excited before
The man comes to lock the gates
Denims and trainers.
I’m going to die,
Nothing noble about it
Attwood Close
A house called Victoriana
Deep lane
No one smiles here
I’m seeing everything now
I’m seeing great Martian troops striding over the homes
Sunny Take Away
An advertising hoarding covered in lichen – can just make out Captain America
House called Beth Shalom
Facing it a brick hut – a placard says: Albirr Masjid – on the placard there is the illustration of a mosque that looks nothing like the brick hut
A coffee shop, it’s 6pm, chairs on the tables
This sure ain’t Munich anymore, Toto
Welcome to Basingstoke College of technology
Access to excellence
5 miles per hour
a teenage girl walks by – other side of the road – on her head a scarf made of the stars and stripes
“cylinder follows cylinder – the Earth belonged to the martians”
Penrith Road
I found evangelical tracts in the house of the artistic director this morning
Samaritans
And an arrow
That’s it.