To walk: the pace of meaning

Because walking is a universal and everyday activity, it is easy to forget that it is also the defining human activity. Man evolved crucially when he could stand upright and walk on two feet. The archaeological record shows how early on certain kinds of walks were developed for special purposes. Some of the oldest surviving monuments impose a ritual significance on the walking that must be done to approach and to pass through or around them. Nowadays, we walk less and less in some respects, more and more in others. In the West, walking is hardly ever a serious form of transport, but as a means of exercise it is increasingly popular, often carried out selfconsciously in counterpoint to the usual modes of employment and communication. The range of kinds of walk, going from the plainly utilitarian to the overtly symbolic, is now immense, comprising various sorts of religious and social ceremonies, such as pilgrimages, sponsored hikes, funeral processions, passeggiate, military marches, protest marches, nature trails, and so on.

In Britain, the connection between walking and art goes back to at least the eighteenth century, to the era of landscape gardens, in which a portion of nature would be corralled, re-modelled and transformed into a series of aesthetic experiences that would often be themed and charged with allusions to classical principles of order and reason. The garden had a story to tell that was actually about cultural values, not about natural phenomena, and that story could only be appreciated by taking a walk through an area that was organized around a series of views, a sequence of opportunities to contemplate specific objects and arrangements of objects. The experience of taking such a walk would have been closer to the experience of moving through an installation at an art gallery than of setting out to explore the landscape beyond the perimeter of the estate. The intimate relationship between walking and art in the eighteenth century was an inflexion of aristocratic leisure, and was wholly dependent on the wealth that could afford to own tracts of land large enough to support the illusion of a nature tamed and regulated, while ensuring that everything likely to break that illusion would remain out of sight and out of mind, beyond the protective walls of the park.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, actually in its last decade, the relationship between walking and art was completely revolutionized, in every conceivable way. The key figures in this change were the English Romantic poets, above all Wordsworth. The change is signalled by the famous walk that Wordsworth took with Robert Jones to Switzerland in 1790. Their itinerary represented a subversion of the tradition of the Grand Tour, since they went on foot, rather than by horse-drawn carriage, and their destination was not Italy, with its paintings, classical ruins and expatriate salons, but a country associated with republican government and the crucial figure of Rousseau. This journey through France shortly after the Revolution, culminating in a visit to the Isle St Pierre, was an inaugural moment in the formation of an art movement whose priorities had shifted towards nature and democracy. The second of these two terms was as important as the first; in his subsequent life and work, Wordsworth was to head for the public roads as much as for the mountains and lakes, and it was during his many journeys on foot that he encountered, either on the highways or close to them, the vagrants and members of the labouring classes who inspired the subject matter of some of his most influential and memorable poems. He also walked routinely as a rhythmic aid to composition, and was often seen at his home, Rydal Mount, near Grasmere, pacing out his lines by walking from one end of the garden terrace to the other. According to the critic Robin James, Wordsworth’s closest associate Coleridge also identified walking with writing, and even ceased to write blank verse after giving up the habit of walking regularly.

But Wordsworth’s legacy had become side-tracked by the late nineteenth century into an apolitical cul-de-sac. His Lake District became the prime destination for the fledgling Victorian tourist industry; and even then, the landscape was effectively edited into a selection of easily accessible beauty-spots. Nature had become an object of mechanical piety, offering an occasion for contemplation, rather than an environment that was experienced through physical effort and offering the chance of unpremeditated encounters with those who lived on and by the land. It was partly in reaction to this sanitising process that another wave of writers re-engaged with the land in the early twentieth century, immersing themselves in the rustic with an exaggerated enthusiasm for the way of life of those who were least assimilated into literate, middle class culture. Edward Thomas, W.H.Davies, and Douglas Goldring all celebrated vagabondage, romanticized the figure of the gypsy, and wrote for a journal called The Tramp. But their own energetic wanderings in the countryside proved them to be less concerned with the conditions of real tramps than with playing at the role themselves. Piers Gray, in his study of Edward Thomas, has shown convincingly the extent to which this form of pastoralism is motivated by a fear of, and desire to escape from, the familial structures of late Victorian England. Thomas’s desire for solitude is quite different from Wordsworth’s gregariousness in the countryside, and it is different again from the other main tradition of walking for political purposes that gathered momentum in the nineteenth century.

If there is a single thing that distinguishes the Britishness of walking in the British countryside, it is the use and upkeep of the very extensive network of ancient footpaths that reaches from one end of the country to the other. A glance at the ordnance survey map of any part of England will show the density of footpaths and bridle paths that seem to reach into every corner of the landscape. The British tradition of public access can be disconcerting to outsiders. When the pop star Madonna first moved to the United Kingdom, she was dismayed on waking up in her new home to find large numbers of people walking past her property on what she had assumed was her own land—they were simply exercising their right to walk on a public footpath. After Wordsworth, footpaths took on a new importance; the fact of their centuries-old existence, previously taken for granted, now became a matter of contention, and throughout the nineteenth century there were successive waves of legislation and forms of organized response to that legislation. When in 1815, Parliament passed an act allowing magistrates to close any path they considered unnecessary, it was seen as an assault on traditional English freedoms. An Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was formed near York in 1824, followed in 1826 by the establishment of another organization with the same name in Manchester. The Scots fought their corner by setting up a Scottish Rights of Way Society in 1845, and 1865 saw the birth of the nationwide Commons, Open Spaces and Footpath Preservation Society, still in existence today as the Open Space Society.

What this means is that walking in Britain has been transformed into a political act. Walking to maintain the rights of the common people to walk over land in private ownership has a different character from organized walking in other parts of the world. In the United States, for example, recreational walking takes place in national parks and state parks, protected enclaves surrounded by much larger areas with no footpath access. In Britain, walking has been seen almost as the antithesis of owning. In the 1930s, in particular, mass trespassing was sometimes organized to resist legislation restricting access to land that had previously been open to all. It was during that decade that the Ramblers’ Association was formed, still dedicated today to keeping footpaths open, trampling crops and dismantling fences and other obstacles whenever these have been interposed on existing footpaths. The most important milestone in this 150-year campaign of challenging the encroachment of private interests on the countryside was the passing by Parliament of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, which even established the ‘Right to Roam’ freely in certain areas of private land not under cultivation or other dedicated use. Such is the paradox of rural walking in Britain: an activity that began in aristocratic gardens has ended up as a form of assault on private property.

But urban walking has also been very significant in British culture of the same period, especially with regard to its portrayal in literature. If rural walking has stressed the importance of preservation and continuity, urban walking has had to respond to relentless change. If one looks at the structures of cities that have remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years—Italian cities provide the best example—it helps one to recognize the part that walking can play in the fashioning of citizenship. When the urban environment is organized around piazzas and arcades designed for pedestrians, the rhythms of daily life are controlled by the pedestrian encounter, not simply in the conduct of business or the transmission of information, but in the socialization of inhabitants of all ages. Even today, the most important daily ritual in Italy is the passeggiata, the evening stroll taken by the whole family that helps to interweave familial and communal identities. This performance of citizenship goes against the grain of developments in Northern Europe, where a significant number of major cities have been constantly remodelled in recent centuries. In London, for example, opportunities for walking are largely focussed on opportunities for shopping, and the British city in the twentieth and twenty first centuries has been largely shaped by the needs of the automobile.

In the vast new urban centres of the industrial revolution in nineteenth century Europe, walking was often paradoxically a more solitary experience than its equivalent in the countryside. From midcentury onwards, the alienation of modernity was often represented as the feeling of being alone in a street full of strangers. Poe’s story of 1847, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ epitomized a new understanding of the urban crowd as the human embodiment of an unknowable, baffling and demoralising environment. It is set in London, a cityscape represented by Dickens as undergoing such extensive and dramatic transformation that it is impossible to become attached to it, to feel at home in it, or even find one’s way in it. Some of Dickens’s most powerful and affecting writing concerns his own wanderings in the capital by night, when insomnia drove him out into the company of the homeless, imagining for himself what it would be like to belong nowhere, and finding evidence of ‘houselessness’ (see ‘Night Walks’) so extreme that its conditions beggared even his imagination. The sheer size and scale of transformation of the nineteenth century city made it psychologically unsettling to residents and beyond effective control by the authorities. Only the projections of the imagination could edit it into something manageable and navigable, and this resource was central to European writing about the city in the following century, in the work of Baudelaire, of the Surrealists, and of the Situationists, and in the parallel American tradition of ‘the poet in the city’, reaching from Whitman to Frank O’Hara.

These alternative lines of development, of the changing meanings attached to walking in the countryside, on the one hand, and to walking in the city, on the other, lie behind the recent upsurge of interest in walking in contemporary British art and literature, in its potential to articulate some of the most pressing concerns we have with the wholesale reorganization of our temporal and spatial relations, the ones we inhabit from day to day. In the field of the visual arts, Britain, or more accurately, London is now recognized as the international centre of the contemporary art world, with many British artists producing work that has a correspondingly international appeal. Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst are examples of artists whose work has translated easily into an international context. It is therefore revealing that those artists whose work seems most untranslatable, most specifically British, are artists who have shown a particular fascination with the cultural scope of walking.

Hamish Fulton, Richard Wentworth, Janet Cardiff and Andy Goldsworthy have all created artworks subtended to walking, but surely the most sustained and comprehensive investigation of the relationship between art and walking is found in the practice of Richard Long. The actual, physical experience of walking is the essential pretext for a high proportion of Long’s artworks, but the walk itself ends up being represented by a photograph with accompanying textual matter; or by a map; or by a text alone. The following provides a good example of the latter option:

DARTMOOR TIME

A CONTINUOUS WALK OF 24 HOURS ON DARTMOOR

1.5 HOURS OF EARLY MORNING MIST

THE SPLIT-SECOND CHIRRUP OF A SKYLARK SKIRTING THE BRONZE AGE GRIMSPOUND FORDING THE WEST DART RIVER IN TWO MINUTES PASSING A PILE OF STONES PLACED SIXTEEN YEARS AGO A CROW PERCHED ON GREAT GNATS’ HEAD CAIRN FOR

FIVE MINUTES

HOLDING A BUTTERFLY WITH A LIFESPAN OF ONE MONTH CLIMBING OVER GRANITE 350 MILLION YEARS OLD ON GREAT MIS TOR

THINKING OF A FUTURE WALK EIGHT HOURS OF MOONLIGHT

55 MILES

ENGLAND AUTUMN 1995

What this text does not do, clearly, is provide an adequate representation of the sensuous experience of walking; it is instead concerned with presenting a concept of walking, with formulating the idea of a walk. Formal and quantifiable aspects are emphasised; the text is organized around measurement, number, duration, and the mise-en-page has a geometrical look to it. Certain problems do arise from this concentration on visual order and composure, since it cuts out any sense of walking as a predominantly physical and dynamic activity, involving a mixture of attention and inattention towards one’s surroundings, and a feeling of achievement measured partly by stamina and muscular effort, sometimes culminating in exhaustion. It bears a relationship towards the messy and uneven experience of a walk similar to that of the epitaph on a tombstone in relation to the miscellaneous experience of an entire life (and that is what it looks like, as well). Having said that, however, the text also requires the reader (and viewer) to reflect on the relationship between the different timescales that contextualize human presence in the landscape, forcing a realization that our own rhythms of being are accompanied by many others, providing some measure of the relative importance, perhaps even the very slight importance, attached to our habitual selfabsorption. A text-work can be particularly successful in rendering this complexity of time-space relations, which a photograph or painting would struggle to suggest; and even film would tend to obscure the careful selection process of the text, indebted as it is to the technology of the camera that simply picks up everything that comes into shot.

‘Dartmoor Time’ is a text-work by a visual artist that demonstrates the advantages of a collaborative relationship between art and literature. The two literary projects I now wish to explore also rely on the interaction between text and image, although in the first case, that of W.G.Sebald, the relationship is oblique, and particularly intriguing for that very reason. Although Sebald was a German writer (he died in 2001), he lived for most of his working life as a university teacher in England, and the impact of his work on British art and literature of the last two decades should not be underestimated. His most well-known work, The Rings of Saturn, is a novel of sorts that takes the form of a first person account of a ruminative walk along the coast of Suffolk. The state of near-paralysis suffered by the authorprotagonist and described in the first few pages of the book allows for a situation in which this report of a walking tour can be narrated from a position of complete immobility. And what this means is that the idea of travel, and the purposes of travel, can be entertained first and foremost as a journey of the mind.

Sebald’s itinerary along the Suffolk coast was literally and metaphorically eccentric, missing out several major foci of obvious historical interest, including Aldeburgh and Sutton Hoo. These and other omissions allow one to gauge something of his motivation in choosing the particular tracts of the country he explores in such detail, even though the detail is rendered much more in terms of historical associations than with regard to the physical reality of the landscape. From time to time, Sebald pauses in his journey in order to recall the stories of individuals linked to specific places, and he is drawn especially to those episodes in their lives concerned with moments of choice, often of critical importance not just for one or two people, but decisive in the way they reveal the condition of an entire class, or the way of life of a sea-faring nation, or the collective psychology of an imperial power. This is a book of forking paths, a record of turning points in history, of the roads not taken. Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, Edward Fitzgerald and Swinburne are among those figures who provide scenarios of diverging trails, and of misgivings that they have taken the wrong turning, that the route they have pursued has caused them to lose the lives they should have led. Sebald’s own passage through the Suffolk countryside is constantly bedevilled by labyrinthine indirectness and actual mazes; he is thwarted by cut de sacs and obliterated footpaths, turning this elegy for lost directions into a chronicle of anxiety.

As the narration progresses, it thickens with the details of ways of inhabiting the landscape that have nearly all disappeared, and as it follows a course never very far from the Suffolk coast, it traces the outline of a constantly shifting threshold between land and sea. The

East coast is where more of the English landscape has crumbled away than anywhere else. And the most spectacular marker of this vanishing territory is the town of Dunwich, once one of the busiest ports in the country, now reduced to the partial remains of a small complex of ecclesiastical buildings formerly on the very edge of town. But the lament for a lost landscape is felt even more profoundly in the remarkable section of the text concerned with the ecological trauma of 16 October 1987, when millions of mature trees, comprising the heart of Britain’s ancient woodland, were devastated by hurricane force winds. Every adult in Britain now has a double focus on particular parts of the landscape, a before and after effect in their awareness of something missing that has to be supplied by the imagination. And this experience of loss is parallel to the emigre’s feeling of dislocation from the landscape he grew up in, the environment in which the very template for his sense of landscape was formed. Perhaps this is why the human centre of the book seems to be provided by the narrator’s visit to the home of another German-speaking emigrant, the writer Michael Hamburger, exiled from his native Berlin when only nine years old.

While the text is genuinely moved by the loss of physical features in the ensemble of town and country settings, of customs, ideas and personalities that it so scrupulously explores, it is arguing ultimately that landscape is something you carry around in your own head, perhaps even more than it is something you encounter necessarily in your movement through a sensuous world. Perhaps this is why there is a high incidence of dreams in the text, since in dream it is common for the landscapes of one’s past to be re-worked and combined. The writing fuses the log-book of a pedestrian journey with the flight of the imagination—its plotted itinerary keeps turning into an exploratory wandering. Just as the mind keeps pace with the body, and then moves away from it, so the text functions partly through retrieval and commemoration, partly through invention.

And in that respect, Sebald’s text operates in a way that closely resembles the dynamic governing the writing and reading of Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and Liquid City (1999), both collaborations between the writer Iain Sinclair and the artist Marc Atkins. The texts themselves are companion pieces; the first contains more text than photographs, the second more photographs than text, but both cover the same terrain and even many of the same events. They are also generic transformations of much of the same subject matter exposed initially in another pair of texts, both novels: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Downriver (1991). In all four books, the protagonists can be seen transferring from a rural to an urban context the tradition of asserting their right of way, and where appropriate, trespassing in order to claim the right of access. In Lights Out for the Territory and Liquid City, Atkins and Sinclair patrol the boundaries of the City of London and traverse its interior, dowsing for the lost routes of the historic city and the vanished contours of its original landscape. The books are effectively organized around a series of walks that avoid the circuitry of modern transport systems and the pace of contemporary city life: ‘time on these excursions should be allowed to unravel at its own speed, that’s the whole point of the exercise. To shift away from the culture of consumption into a meandering stream.’ But these wanderings are not like the solitary adventures of the nineteenth century flaneur, nor are their reveries highly subjective but collaborative, symbiotic attempts to discover and tap into the collective memories and shared experiences that energize particular buildings and patches of ground. ‘Energy’ and ‘heat’ are important words in the vocabulary used by Sinclair to describe the vitality now hidden or displaced that once animated a particular set of coordinates. Misalignment is what particularly galvanizes the attention; the focal characters are fascinated by the removal of monuments from one place to another; by the excavation and repositioning of the Temple of Mithras, by the peregrinations of London Stone, by the deracinating of sculptures from the original Ludgate, which stood on the western flank of the old City wall. These markers, and others like them, are correlated, mutually defining and embedded in the symbolic history of London, in ways that a modern map of the same area will not register.

The books have a double focus: on the ghosts of old buildings, lost imprints in the landscape, vanished rivers, missing earthworks; and on the record of what is continuing to disappear every day, anticipating what will be remembered after its extinction, and what will be irremediably forgotten. Sinclair notes of Atkins that he is ‘quick to notice vulnerable structures. He doesn’t want to photograph anything that will still be there tomorrow’ (Liquid City, p.66). This suggests the vocation of archivist, the primacy of conservation; but from another perspective, it is as if the real meaning of these buildings is only arrived at in Atkins’s dark room: ‘The care that Atkins lavished on his inanimate subjects (however swiftly he operated) ensured that every image was an elegy. There was no point in hanging on any longer, better to collapse in a rubble heap, exist in memory’ (Lights Out, p.277); (everything in life existing to end up in a book).

What Sinclair’s and Atkins’s making of connections reveals is the extent to which London is a text that is endlessly re-composed, and over which the individual builder or architect, writer or artist, has no control. The most the individual interpreter can hope for is to piece together perhaps a single structure or sentence or image that will capture the process of re-composition in a ‘credible form’: momentarily, precariously, provisionally—too fleetingly to exert power over the process and authorize it. For himself, Sinclair wants to devise ‘a single sentence to contain everything I knew’, dreams of arriving ‘at that nanosecond when the pattern was revealed, before it vanished forever’ (Liquid City, p.8). But any such encapsulation is merely a trigger for the next stage of the process; keeping the writer /investigator/walker on the move in a city forever recomposing the boundaries of what London is, and what it isn’t.

What this discussion has proposed is that when we walk through the landscape, whether urban or rural, we walk through it culturally— what we see and how we react to what we see depends largely on the culture we have been brought up in. And walking as represented in British culture may be one of the most revealing tropes to unpack when the aim is to uncover precisely what is most specifically British about that culture.