Tag: London Orbital

60. Alastair Bonnett, “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography” 

dilemmas of radical nostalgia

I often feel nostalgic, sometimes for a past I’ve never experienced. I am nostalgic for a world where the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is less than 405 parts per million, for instance. I’m nostalgic for a world when southern Saskatchewan was still grassland, a time before settlers arrived (which would mean that, as a descendant of settlers, I would be somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere, but I honestly don’t care about that). I don’t imagine that in the future the concentration of carbon will be less than 405 parts per million, or that this province will have any more than 13.7 percent of its original grassland ecosystem intact, so I imagine the kind of past I’d like to see. I’m not the only one who feels that way. I remember a passage in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (I think it was The Road to Wigan Pier) measuring a happy working-class home in the 1930s against a similar home in the modern future, and Orwell deciding that the present, when there was work and food and decent housing–all things that, as his book demonstrates, manifestly did not exist in the UK of the 1930s–would be better than what was coming. But at the same time, I know that nostalgia is a vehicle for right-wing fantasies of white supremacy and empire. That’s what those MAGA hats are about, right? A malignant and racist nostalgia—and I’m not attacking Americans here, either; there are enough white supremacists right here, some of them working for one of our major political parties. My point is that nostalgia is slippery and dangerous–and yet, I am very familiar with its call.

So Alastair Bonnett’s essay, “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography,” speaks directly to me, and his bibliography suggests lots of further reading on the topic of nostalgia’s place within radical political and aesthetic practices. Bonnett begins with Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, one of his central examples, a book which, he writes, depicts “a journey in and against the contemporary landscape” and “an act of retrieval of radical histories now by-passed,” but also “a kind of romantic tribute to the brute energy of a technocratic, dehumanized environment” (46). That book is, for Bonnett, also an example of the “psychogeographical turn” in British literary culture and avant-garde activity (46). It is a work that “seeks to re-enchant and re-mythologize prosaic geographies. The resultant effect is disorientating—funny yet melancholic; utterly of our time but ill at ease with modern Britain” (46). In a review of London Orbital, Robert Macfarlane described it as “nostalgic radicalism” (qtd. in Bonnett 46), highlighting what Bonnett sees as its ambivalence, “the unresolved nature of his project” (46). Bonnett’s purpose is to develop this interpretation and to argue “that contemporary British psychoeography should be understood as a site of struggle over the politics of loss within the radical imagination,” and more specifically “that British psychogeography is an arena of conflict between two important strands within British radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrian modernity and the suppression of nostalgia” (46). “[T]hese tendencies, though they remain discordant presences, are, in fact, partially resolved into novel forms of creative praxis,” he writes (46).

Bonnett’s essay has three sections: first, the historical context of “the emergence of nostalgia as a dilemma within political radicalism,” and the second and third examples of British psychogeography—one devoted to Iain Sinclair’s work, and the other to the various psychogeographical groups which sprung up in the 1990s in the UK (47). Both share “a quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past,” exhibiting “an uneasy combination of deracinating modernism and folksy localism,” but both are distinctive in “their fraught relationship with nostalgia” (47). “Within Sinclair’s travel books, the modern landscape becomes a site of creative purgatory,” Bonnett writes. “Britain’s auto-centric, disorienting non-places seem to have for him the fascinating, troubling allure of a kind of necessary violence, a violence that simultaneously anchors the writer in modernism while establishing marginal spaces and histories discovered on foot as sanctuaries that tell of profound cultural and social loss” (47). In what he calls “revolutionary psychogeography,” on the other hand, the simultaneous refusal and deployment of nostalgia 

is enacted in a different way and to different ends. The use of a self-consciously exaggerated and, hence, self-subverting rhetoric of class war enabled these activists to evoke and ironize orthodox revolutionary politics. The development within this resolutely ‘underground’ community of so-called ‘magico-Marxism’ encapsulates the novelty but also the folk-historical inclinations of their project. (48)

For Bonnett, “a newly confident politics of nostalgia can be glimpsed within this milieu: at the counter-cultural margins of society radicalism is (once again) becoming tied to a popular politics of loss” (48). 

This discussion is part of a larger debate about the relationship between radicalism and “the politics of loss,” Bonnett writes (48):

Politics demands the critique of the present and, hence, the necessity of political visions of the past and/or future. Yet within an era that distinguishes itself by its modernity, these are not equivalent options. to be “backward looking” is unacceptable, inadequate, eccentric. . . . However, while we should acknowledge that a yearning for and an attachment to the past is inherently discordant in the modern world, it appears that the relationship between nostalgia and radicalism is uniquely troublesome. “Making a new world” is a defining or, at least, central claim of the radical imagination. (48-49)

“The landscape has been the central stage for the proof and spectacle of radical transformation,” Bonnett continues. “The eradication of old buildings, old place names and old monuments, and the construction of new places, new names and new monuments, provided the most visible symbols of revolutionary intent. This eagerness to build anew was never simply a mere concretization of radical ideology. It was also an assertion of authority over the past” (49). So, by the middle of the 20th century, “the idea that radicals are necessarily suspicious of the past had become so dominant that, across the range of radical opinion—from authoritarian to libertarian—feelings of loss and regret were cast as intrinsically wrong,” and looking back has been seen as wrong-headed (49). Regret about the past leads to resignation about the present and, therefore, political quietism, according to Richard Sennett, a claim Bonnett suggests “bears little scrutiny” and “has the brazen, generalizing quality of a stereotype” (49). Nostalgia therefore came to be seen as “an alien presence” within radicalism (49). 

“However, it is only by addressing the use and subsequent repression of nostalgia in the broader radical movement that we can begin to understand how and why the unresolved problem of the past is played out within contemporary psychogeography,” Bonnett argues (49). Attachments to the past were once central to popular radicalism, but after the late 19th century “such attachments became marginalized and, hence, available to an emergent avant-garde as a resource for cultural transgression” (49). Nevertheless, the relationship between the avant-garde and nostalgia always uneasy: “The way in which the avant-garde imagined and recuperated aspects of the past as pre-bourgeois and pre-civilized is indicative of how it has managed the paradoxes of modernist nostalgia” (50). In fact, he suggests, “[t]he attachment to the land and to myths of traditional community that are so central to late 18th-century and early and mid-19th-century English revolutionary thought have been consistently underplayed” (50). The sense of loss experienced by those early radicals was not just related to “ancient landscapes” but also to “traditional and communal relationships to the landscape” (50). “Whether expressed through romantic or practical historical comparison, resistance to the transformation of ‘our places’ into things owned and traded by an alien class was central to the emotional and political message of early radicalism,” Bonnett writes (50). However, as scientific socialism became pervasive, “such backward-looking perspectives took on an increasingly self-conscious and risky quality” (50). Nostalgia came to acquire “defensive and disruptive connotations” (51), and “resistance to industrial civilization” came to be seen as “arcane and conservative” (51). 

“As hostility to nostalgia developed into a radical orthodoxy, the past became more attractive to the unorthodox,” Bonnett writes. “Hence, one of the consequences of the opprobrium that came to surround the topic was that the past came to take on forbidden connotations and acquired transgressive qualities (especially when cast in the form of the ‘primitive’ and pre-civilized) that attracted the avant-garde” (51). While “[t]he avant-garde have continued to work through the dilemmas and opportunities of radical nostalgia,” though, “an attraction to the past triggers automatic suspicion” (52). For instance, the attempts by the Surrealists and Situationists to “cast the street as a terrain of intimacy and creativity, a space hidden and threatened by the ‘suppression of the street’ augured by modern traffic and modern planning,” might “have had ‘elitist’ components,” with elitism being one of the suspicions modernity has about nostalgia, but “it must also be understood as an attempt to defend ‘popular’ or ordinary space within and from the new technocentric and exclusionary landscapes of modernity” (52). “Nostalgia cannot be adequately summarized as either elitist or popularist,” Bonnett continues. “Indeed, it often acts to confound and confuse such designations and, by extension, the ability of ‘melancholic intellectuals’ ever to be entirely ‘at home’ within either modernity or anti-modernity” (51). For example, “radicalism and nostalgia were most clearly drawn together within the often uneasy combination of anti-technocratic pastoralism and avant-garde experimentalism found within the hippie and bohemian arts scenes of the 1960s and 1970s” (52). In addition, “nostalgia has had a somewhat mercurial presence within theorizations of postmodernism” which is often overlooked: one example is Wendy Wheeler’s 1994 essay “Nostalgia Isn’t Nasty,” which argued that nostalgia is a central feature of postmodernism (53). Nevertheless, nostalgia never became a central theme in postmodern discourse: 

it has been stereotyped by both postmodernists and Marxists as a sign of failure and conservatism. By approaching nostalgia through political history it becomes easier to see that any attempt to classify it as a symptom of postmodernism (or, indeed, of late modern Marxism) is unlikely to be satisfying. The politics of loss are chained to the politics of modernity. This also implies that the possibility of nostalgia’s reassertion in radical politics is best explained by reference to political change (such as the demise of communism) and chronic political dilemmas. (54)

According to Bonnett, “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space where feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated,” although the dilemmas “negotiated within this body of work are far from unique,” and there have been other “critical deployments of nostalgia by avant-garde groups” (54).

Bonnett turns to Iain Sinclair’s writing as one example of “a creative space where feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”: his “double mapping of modernity and loss is narrated as an engagement with alienating, often brutally instrumental, landscapes. These places (or non-places) offer disorientation and disharmony while establishing the necessity of resistance and human solidarity” (55). Bonnett argues that London Orbital is Sinclair’s “most revealing and edgy confrontation with the dilemmas of radical nostalgia” so far (55). His exploration of the M25 expressway (the “Orbital” of the book’s title)

both repudiates and welcomes its disturbance, its capacity to dehumanize and deracinate. The ceaseless motorway provides the kind of hostile terrain and antagonism to sentiment required by Sinclair, both explore the creativity born of disorientation and his own profound sense of loss. The road and its surrounding ‘retail landfill’ are used to experience the violence of modernity. It is a violence that lures those who find themselves in and against their era. (55)

Sometimes the tensions in Sinclair’s work are resolved through apocalyptic fantasies (57): “Visions of the doom of Western civilization combine the violence of modernity with a violence towards modernity. They are a familiar avant-garde trope. However, Sinclair’s work offers other, less cataclysmic resolutions. Indeed, his wanderings may be represented as a search for restorative and redemptive community” (57)—in Edge of the Orison, for example, which traces a journey made by poet John Clare (57). However, unlike Clare, “Sinclair never belongs. Indeed, he implies that belonging is now impossible. But this only intensifies his hunger for company, for a community of the dispossessed” (57). This Bonnett suggests, is the reason Sinclair walks with others (58). “It is in Edge of the Orison that Sinclair comes closest to the kind of heartfelt sense of remembrance that one always suspects lies just below the rather glassy façade of London Orbital,” Bonnett continues (58). 

“Reading Sinclair, one may wonder how his melancholic concerns could ever be compatible with the rhetoric of class struggle. Such an incongruous mix is precisely what can be witnessed within the agitational psychogeographical groups,” Bonnett writes (58). While editing a psychogeographical journal, he saw “the odd amalgam of preservationism and radicalism, modernism and anti-modernism . . . propelling psychogeographical activity” (59-60). The occultism of that era of psychogeography imagines the occult, and “other hidden forms and sources of power,” as “a class strategy, a technique of control in the management of the spectacle,” ideas that came to be called “magico-Marxism” (60):

As with many avant-garde interventions, magico-Marxism is determinedly disorienting: is is evasive, infuriating, constantly asking that we see the city in new, unexpected ways. However, I would also argue that the disorienting game played by these psychogeographical groups acted to conceal and cohere the tension between anti-nostalgia and nostalgia, modernist and anti-modernist politics, that animated their project. (60)

Magico-Marxism “combined communist militancy with a romanticization of landscape and memory” (60). Some psychogeographic groups romanticized decaying or abandoned landscapes while being hostile to the destruction of old buildings (62). Bonnett suggests that the impulse towards preserving old buildings, and a hostility toward the construction of new ones, indicates that “the relationship between radicalism and nostalgia is changing”: “The hostility to the past that shaped the socialist tradition from the late 19th century is no longer the force it was” (63).

In his conclusion, Bonnett writes,

Modernity turns the past into an arena of provocation and danger. Attachments to the past and feelings of loss become sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and critique. These processes can be seen at work across many political projects. However, they appear to have a uniquely troubled relationship with that set of ideas and ideals associated with the pursuit of equality and the critique of commercialization that we can, perhaps, still call radicalism. (63)

The different psychogeographies he has discussed “illustrate different ways the dilemmas of radical nostalgia have been negotiated” (64). In Sinclair’s writing, “the non-place urban realm becomes a site of creative purgatory, a necessary violence that simultaneously positions the writer as dependent upon and antagonistic to deracination and alienation,” while in what he has called “revolutionary psychogeography,” the “tension is organized around themes of communism, occultism and preservationism” (64) The result, however, “has a desperate quality: it wants to be communist but it no longer believes; it wants to articulate the sense of loss that sustains it, but it does not know how” (64). The impulse towards preservation of the built environment appears to many as culturally conservative, reflecting “a political paradigm that, although dominant, no longer inspires the automatic loyalty of creative radicals” (64). “With the collapse of communism and the widespread questioning of the sustainability of industrial modernity, the radical imagination has been profoundly challenged. Old assumptions and prejudices can be overturned. And not the least of these concern the role of the past in the politics of the present,” Bonnett concludes (64). “[T]oday the shame of nostalgia is fading. It is perhaps fitting that it is radicals at the most iconoclastic edges of political and cultural life who are beginning to grapple with the fact that the poetry of the future is no longer enough” (65)

Bonnett’s essay doesn’t resolve the tension between nostalgia and radicalism, but it doesn’t have to: it identifies that tension and shows examples of it within psychogeography, and that’s all Bonnett set out to do. His discussion of magico-Marxism is valuable, although my revulsion at the occultism of much of 1990s psychogeography is such that I’m unlikely to pursue that direction of research. In any case, I’m not sure that the tension between nostalgia and radicalism can be resolved—not at the present time. What is clear to me, though, is that I will need to understand more about nostalgia in order to explore my nostalgia for landscapes and histories I have never experienced. One place to begin, of course, is with Bonnett’s bibliography. Another place is by reading more Iain Sinclair, especially Edge of the Orison. Wouldn’t it be great to take a course on Sinclair? Or, even better, to teach one? Maybe someday. It’s possible, even if it feels unlikely.

Work Cited

Bonnett, Alastair. “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography.” Theory, Culture & Society vol. 26, no. 1, 2009, pp. 45-70.

52. Arthur Machen, The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering

the london adventure

Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering is one of the central texts in occult and literary psychogeography. It’s also a very strange book. Its digressive narrative is characterized by endless deferral; the narrator (I’m not sure whether this book is a novel, an autobiography, or a pseudo-autobiography) tells one story after another, all in preparation for writing a book called The London Adventure, a text that ends without beginning (142). I’m certainly no expert on Machen, but I have to say that this book is less gothic than romantic, even neoplatonist, and that the “wandering” of its subtitle is as much discursive as ambulatory or geographical. And yet, after reading The London Adventure, the role it plays in particular types of psychogeography becomes clear, as does (to a degree) the term “psychogeography” itself.

The book begins in a tavern in the suburbs of London. The narrator is thinking about the difference between those who work because they have a gift, like the painter J.M.W. Turner, and everyone else—the narrator included—whose employment is “but the curse of Adam, the slavery that we have to endure; about as blessed as oakum-picking and limestone quarrying and treadmill climbing and the other employments of the poor fellows that we call convicts, as if we were not as much convicts as they,” sentenced to earn an honest living (6-7). A man arrives in the tavern, someone the narrator knows. He looks at the narrator in a threatening manner and says, meaningfully, “The leaves are beginning to come out” (10). The narrator knows exactly what that statement means:

I knew what the man meant. I had told him some months before that I was to write a book about London, that it was to be a really great book, this time. But, I explained, I was not going to begin writing it till the leaves were out on the trees, since the green leafage of the boughs made such a marvellous contrast with the grim greyness of the streets; of the streets of which I meant to write: unknown, unvisited squares in Islington, dreary byways in Holloway, places traversed by railway arches and viaducts in the regions of Camden Town. (10-11)

In other words, the book is supposed to be about unfashionable and suburban places, the kinds of locales most writers would avoid because they prefer more chic environs, displaying an obvious importance or heritage. 

The narrator then recalls going to the “waste portions of the world down beyond the Surrey Docks” and visiting a neighbourhood he had never seen before: “Everything was shapeless, unmeaning, dreary, dismal beyond words; it was as if one were journeying past the back wall of the everlasting backyard” (11). Then, on a grey street, he sees something wonderful: 

from the area of one of the sad houses there arose a great glossy billow of the most vivid green surging up from the area pavement half-way up the height of the ground floor windows; a veritable verdant mountain, as blessed as any wells and palm trees in the midst of an African desert. It was a fig tree that had somehow contrived to flourish in this arid waste; but to me a miracle and a delight as well as a fig tree. (12)

“[T]his was to be the kind of adventure out of which I had agreed to make a book; and thus it was that I had talked of waiting till the time of the opening of the leaves before I began it” (12). The problem is—remember, the narrator doesn’t like to work—he doesn’t want to start writing: “Always, or almost always, I have had the horror of beginning a new book. I have burnt my fingers to the bone again and again in the last forty years and I dread the fire of literature” (12).

Nevertheless, that sense of wonder in an apparently banal space is important enough that the narrator tells another story about it: he describes “with absolute veracity” strange events he experienced while in chambers at Gray’s Inn (he must have been a law student, once; he discusses his career as a journalist at length later), and, he states, “I have never forgotten my almost incredulous amazement when I found out, seven years afterwards, that some of these experiences of mine had also been experiences of the monks of St. Columba’s congregation at Iona in the sixth century” (13). This sense of a mysterious connection between past and present events seems to be a characteristic of occult psychogeography, but I think (if The London Adventure is a model for occult psychogeography) that it has other characteristics as well.

One of those characteristics is an anti-materialist, anti-scientific belief in wonders and miracles—wonders and miracles which are, apparently, experienced, like the eerie parallels between the narrator’s experiences and those of sixth century monks:

so corrupt and bewildered is our nature; on the one hand inclined to the crudest, most bestial materialism, to the simple, easy, natural explanation of all wonders, all miracles; on the other, so sickened with sham marvels, with pantomine-chorus fairies on photographic plates, with ghosts that gibber indeed in the vulgarest, silliest manner possible; so bewildered are we, I say, between these two sides that we hardly dare to testify to the things which we have actually known, seen, experienced with our own senses and our own souls, if these experiences go beyond the limits laid down in some twopenny “science” text-book. (13-14)

The narrator continues, “I do my best to conquer this ‘scientific’ nonsense; and so, as I have noted, I try to reverence the signs, omens, messages that are delivered in queer ways and queer places, not in the least according to the plans laid down either by the theologians or the men of science” (14). Those who seek to know, or are certain about their knowledge, are this narrator’s enemies; those who accept mystery are his allies.

The narrator tells another story, this one about how one such message came to him two and a half years earlier, in another tavern, at a time when he was being bullied by his employer and mocked by his co-workers, facing dismissal, which would have meant ruin for his family (14-16). (This experience, and others, seems to be at the root of his dislike of journalism as a profession.) A man walked up to him and asked how the Latin word exaltavit, from the phrase et exaltavit humiles, “and lifting up the lowly,” according to Google, is spelled (17). Being reminded of that phrase—our narrator has had a classical education and sprinkles his text with Latin tags—allowed him to begin to hope, “to life up a little corner of the black curtain of despair” (18). For the narrator, the man with his question about Latin orthography was a messenger, one of two or three he had met in his life, and he states, “I never think of them without great wonder, awe, and reverence” (19). Was it just a coincidence? “It may be so; and I am too keenly aware of the dangers and follies of credulity to deny that it may have been so,” he writes. “Yet, I am a practical man above all things, and coincidence or no coincidence, I know that I was comforted and sustained and enabled by that word through many months of horrible and shameful suffering” (20). 

For the narrator, and for Machen himself, for all I know, those supposed coincidences are significant: they suggest something about the world itself. “It is possible, just dimly possible,” the narrator suggests,

that the real pattern and scheme of life is not in the least apparent on the outward surface of things, which is the world of common sense, and rationalism, and reasoned deductions; but rather lurks, half hidden, only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye; a secret pattern, an ornament which seems to have but little relation or none at all to the obvious scheme of the universe. (21)

This is, I think, the occult psychogeographer’s sense of the city: it is a text with multiple levels, and the hidden level(s), its “secret pattern,” can only be apprehended by the initiated, in “certain rare lights.” Reason has “nothing to say in the presence of the unknown” (22); forty years before rational people would have dismissed ideas like radio as mere fantasies (23-24). “[W]e know nothing of matters concerning which we know nothing,” the narrator states. “And so this applies to the ghostly world—always allowing that there is any such world. What do we know?” (24-25).

In fact, it seems pretty clear that the narrator does believe in that “ghostly world.” “I firmly believe that the two worlds”—that is, the world of the living and the world of spirits—“have that gulf between them, that magnum chaos, which yawns, let us say, between painting and music”, he suggests, (25) and while one can make analogies between them, or speak of one in metaphors of the other, they “remain worlds apart” (25). The relationship between the two is like that between an actor on the stage, and the actor’s life off the stage (25). Taking that analogy further, he suggests that, just as the world of King Lear is a dream of Shakespeare’s, “it may turn out that this world of ours is but one of the dreams of the Supreme Artist” (26). His sense “of the probable order of things at large” inclines the narrator “to believe that very high messengers—in the play, in the mystery which we are enacting—may be quite ordinary fellows in private life” (27-28). Again we see the sense of (at least) two worlds, which is picked up on by psychogeography, and the belief that the ordinary might actually be extraordinary. Also—and I don’t want to push this too far, because it’s clear that Machen (or his narrator) was an actor as a younger man—the emphasis on performance here might be important as well, given Smith’s belief that the best forms of “new psychogeography” are performative and relational rather than literary. The narrator acknowledges that all of this has been a digression, but he notes, in a manner that is almost metafictional, that such digressions will be characteristic of this book. The point of the digression was “to show that one should hear and weigh all sorts of messages delivered in all sorts of places” (28). 

The narrator’s plan for the book, The London Adventure, “originated in old rambles about London, rambles that began in 1890 when I lived in Soho Street and began to stroll about Soho and to see that here was something very curious and impressive; this transmutation of late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century social solidity and even, in some cases magnificence, into a wholly different order” (30-31). He imagines the previous residents of buildings in Soho, what those buildings might have been over time—the residence of an ambassador, a pickle factory or printer’s works, “a camping ground for poor people, a place where almost every room sheltered a family”—or how one particular building that “looked as if it had been built for a Doctor of Divinity, c. 1720,” now houses (apparently) the sex trade (31-32) (I’m not entirely sure because Machen’s description is somewhat obscure). Like occult psychogeographers, the narrator is reading the past over the present, exhibiting an awareness of multiple possibilities for a space, at least in historical or antiquarian terms. 

But rather than Soho, the narrator wants to focus on the years after 1895, when he began exploring London’s suburbs:

when I first found out the wonders that lie to the eastward of the Gray’s Inn Road, when Islington and Barnsbury and Canonbury were discovered, when Pentonville ceased to be a mere geographical expression. And there was a later time still that was to yield fresh fruit; the days when I ran errands that were often in themselves of inconceivable folly, but led me all the same into queer outland territories that otherwise I should never have seen. (33-34)

Those errands were stories he was assigned to write about by his editor. He recalls one experience, when he went to Enfield (one of the destinations in Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital) to “taste the newly brewed Government ale—some horrible teetotal concoction of those bad times,” but even though he couldn’t find a pub that new anything of this new drink, the journey was not a failure: 

I had passed through such unsuspected countries in my voyage and travel from Enfield through Enfield Wash to Enfield Lock, through fragments of market garden and fragments of wild thicket, by sudden apparitions of grey houses built in the early ’sixties when it had dawned upon the mind of some madman that the day of the Wash was at hand and that the time for ‘development’ had come. (36)

He walks through apparently abandoned suburban developments and shops, ghost estates interspersed with remnants “of much older days,” such as Georgian mansions, now fallen into disrepair, about which the narrator creates a story: “There a substantial man, maybe an Alderman, had once lived; now, everything was falling down, broken, discoloured, desolate, uninhabited” (35-36). This varied suburban cityscape, the mixture of things he saw, and the stories he imagined about them, pleased the narrator: “And while I journeyed back to the office, I felt that I had been enjoying a rich and various experience” (36).

At this point, the narrator interrupts himself to point out that his point of view “is totally  removed from the ordinary tourist, guide-book point of view. I hope I am not without a due sense of the historic and literary interests of London, with which the guide and my guide-book are very properly occupied” (36). The narrator he respects the past, partly because of “literary and historical association,” partly because “of the love of antiquity for its own sake; a curiously compounded pleasure,” although “the more noble, terrible, notorious the associations called up, the less I am moved, in my heart of hearts” (36-37). In other words, he prefers ordinary histories. Nevertheless, he notes that “this love of antiquity for its own sake, apart from any particular literary or historical associations, has always been a great puzzle to me and still remains so” (37). Sometimes the associations that attract him are fictional: the remaining wall of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison reminds him of Dickens’s Little Dorrit, even though she never existed (37-38). “[W]hy should we be interested in places more or less connected with the fortunes of people who never existed, outside the brains and the pages of the romancers?” he asks. “I do not know why we are thus interested, but I know that we are so and that this interest constitutes one of the gentlest of pleasures of life” (38). So, when the narrator goes to Tower Hill, he thinks of Dickens’s characters Mr. and Mrs. Quilp (38-39), the way that the Marshalsea’s wall reminds him of Little Dorrit. “Perhaps, the explanation may be that the historic people are actual people,” he surmises, “creatures of fact not of fancy; and that fancy is infinitely more impressive than fact, partaking, as it does, not of actuality, but of reality” (39). Again, there is a suggestion of multiple layers of associations here, although these associations have their roots in fiction rather than in history, and I think that is another link between The London Adventure and certain forms of psychogeography.

In any case, the book he intended to write “was not to deal in the main with the historical or literary associations of London, nor even with antiquity as such, though sometimes antiquity would form part of the queer pattern that I had in my mind” (39-40). But he immediately plunges into another digression about the strangeness of unknown suburban districts, the individuality of taste, and the notion that life is a play within a play—“that there is no such entity as the thing in itself, there is no absolute existence in things seen,” and that even the “vile, red stones” of a modern suburb “may be transmuted into living, philosophical stones,” that there are mysteries in such places, rituals performed, “though those who officiate are ignorant of the secrets in which they, nonetheless, share” (40-44). Again, the sense of mysteries in the ordinary, which Machen’s book shares with occult psychogeography. This leads to a discussion of Freemasonry: “the ancient rite is duly performed, and so other ancient rites are performed in the rawest, reddest suburbs” (45). Those suburbs would be the subject of his book, even though, on one level, he despises them: 

Well, I was saying, I think, that the book on hand, this famous London Adventure, would have to deal with the raw, red places all around the walls of London; places detestable in themselves, no doubt, from the artist’s point of view, from the point of view of the lover of green fields and woods and shady lanes; but most of all detestable, I think, from my point of view, which is that of a many who loves ancient, memoried things; things of all kinds that have a past behind them, things of all kinds that show use and the touch of men upon them, and have become, in a sense, almost human or, at all events, partake of humanity. (47)

He imagines a worn doorstep, hollowed by a hundred years of feet, and imagines whose feet they might have been: “The feet of the weary and hopeless, the glad and the exultant, the lustful and the pure have made that hollow; and many of those feet are now in the hollow of the grave: and that doorstep is to me sacramental, if not a sacrament” (47-48). The book he intends to write would take all of these things into account: “the old, the shabby, the out of the way; and also the new and the red and the raw. But it was utterly to shun the familiar”—in other words, it would explore the London incognita rather than the London cognita (49).

That book, it seems, would perhaps imagine the lives of people who lived in places in the past, the way the narrator imagines the people whose feet wore down that doorstep. He recalls once wandering into a street between Camden Town and Holloway, where the houses were modest, but where each had a coachhouse and a stable: “for me here were compact histories of the Sketches by Boz period,” he states (50), and he describes the people who would have lived in an 1830s suburb. They are richly imagined in great detail (50-53).  “So much I saw as I passed down that street, Camden Town—Holloway, and I believe that most of it is truly seen; deduced, rather, from the little coach-houses and the little stables; and all a vision of a mode of life that has passed utterly away” (53). 

But, “in spite of the rows and rows of cheap red villas, which we must expect everywhere, there are still remnants of a former age” (55)—such as poltergeists. He concludes, regarding poltergeists, that

a human being is a world and cosmos of forces that reach out to other worlds wholly, or almost wholly, unknown and unconjectured; that, in most cases and probably, as things are, for the best, these forces and powers are dormant and unsuspected; that occasionally and by accident they assert themselves and produce results which prove—nothing. (61)

That odd word, “unconjectured,” shows up many times in this book, and it’s a sign of the narrator’s, and/or Machen’s, interest in mysteries, in the unknown, in esoterica or the occult. For example, he remembers visiting Bath when he was an actor, and how his fellow cast members decided, at a party, to hold a séance. Although he doesn’t believe “that the spirits of the dead can be conjured into a parlour by people sitting round a table in the dark” (66), one of the party clearly felt the presence of a spirit and was horrified by it (66). He notes the differences between that party and a real séance, at which the participants are serious: “They are investigators. They are intensely interested. They have a profound belief that the spirits of the departed can and do communicate with the living” (66-67). And yet, despite their lack of earnestness. a spirit appeared (he says) at that party: “I think that something happened; that the doors were opened; that the human spirit came into momentary contact with unconjectured worlds which it is not meant to visit” (68). “I think of all these things as I pass along the interminable wandering of the London streets,” he writes, “of the strange things which may have been done behind the weariest, dreariest walls” (68).

Now the narrator returns to the tavern where the book began, and the demand that he begin writing his book: “here was I well equipped with long-gathered material for a sermon on the great text that there is wonder in everything and everywhere, wonder above all in this great town that has grown so vast that no man can know it, nay, nor even begin to know it!” (69). The notion that there is wonder in everything and everywhere would be the book’s thesis, if it were an essay, which it’s not. It’s also one of the central characteristics of Smith’s version of psychogeography, although he wants it to include ideological critique as well. Those wonders, though, are (I think) neoplatonic and romantic: “We see appearances and outward shows of things, symbols of all sorts; but we behold no essences, nor could we bear to behold them, if it were possible to do so” (69-70). “We see nothing real, we can no more see anything real that we can take our afternoon tea in the white, central heat of a blast furnace,” he continues. “We see shadows cast by reality” (70). Those who attempt to explain the world using scientific methodology are kidding themselves:

The more foolish of us gather up some of the shadows and put them in saucepans and boil them and then strain: and find out that water is really H2O, which is true enough in its way, and will remain so: till it is found out that H2 is shorthand for ten distinct forces, while O is a universe of countless stars, all revolving in their eternal order about an unknown, unconjecturable orb. (70-71)

“[W]e see nothing at all,” he continues, “though poets catch strange glimpses of reality, now and then, out of the corners of their eyes” (71). 

The suggestion that the world is not real, and that the real world is inaccessible, might bother anyone, and our narrator admits as much: “the recognition of these obvious truths cast me down a little. I had not, then, got the unique object for investigation that I had supposed. London, it was true, was unknowable, an unplumbed depth, but so was Caerleon-on-Usk, that you could see in its totality form the top of the hill; so was the pebble on the path” (71). He looks into an old notebook, and wonders if there is a recurring pattern in his writing. He finds one; it is

the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes. Nay, I think that in this age, which has probably lost what I may call the epic sense, as it lives in villas and flats instead of castles, and goes in tweeds in place of chain mail, for us, I think, it is easier to discern the secret beauty and wonder and mystery in humble and common things than in the splendid and noble and storied things. (75)

I could be wrong—it’s 30 years since I took a course on romanticism—but this strikes me as an example of one form of Victorian romanticism. Nonetheless, the narrator describes himself as “a determined realist,” because he demands “a certain degree of assent in the reader to the propositions which are laid down before him,” and he wants his work to be seen as “credible . . . in the artistic sense, as Micawber is credible, though there never was, in actuality, any such person” (79). 

Back to his notebook, where he is disappointed by various sketches and outlines that led nowhere. “I find my destiny a hard one,” he writes. “Here am I, born apparently with this itch of writing without the faculty of carrying the desire into execution” (91). But he thinks about being a newspaper reporter, and its primary benefit—not being forced to write something to its end, but having seen “queer things and odd prospects” which he would not have seen otherwise, particularly strange places and neighbourhoods (96-97). He tells a story about climbing a mountain when he was a young man, and feeling something spiritual or religious in his encounter with those hills, so that the only expression in words for that feeling was “For ever and ever. Amen” (99). That experience is evidence that “the unknown world is, in truth, about us everywhere, everywhere near to our feet; the thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall of the next street communicates with it” (100). “Men of science”—those who would disagree, perhaps, with that claim—“are always wrong” (100). The stories about his experiences as a journalist are all about running across something mysterious, something that suggests that “we . . . live in an illusory world” (105). He recalls being sent to investigate a dispute over a will in which a man named Campo Tosto left all of his possessions (Flemish paintings and candlesticks) to a man named Turk. He writes, 

here was a man called Campo Tosto living in a place called Burnt Green, which is, practically, a translation of Campo Tosto. Here was a man whose property consisted chiefly in Madonnas and medieval candlesticks, who shot at intruders with the bow, either long or short. Here was his heir, with the good old English country name of Turk. (110-11)

The narrator wrote the story, and his editor didn’t believe it: “He understood, better than I, that one order of illusion must not be allowed to impinge on another” (110-11). He tells similar stories from his career as a journalist, but what the narrator considers to be his strangest story had nothing to do with journalism: he was walking along, thinking about a passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson about a fashionable baronet named Sir Michael Le Fleming, “when suddenly I saw on a brass plate on the garden-gate the very name that had just entered my mind”—an incident of “mad inconsequence,” meaning nothing at all (118-119). That story led nowhere, he admits:

But I do think that in each there is a hint of certain things. We move, as I have said before, in a world of illusions, but of illusions on one plane. We are mistaken if we think that there is, in ultimate reality, any such thing as a cube, any such thing as a cow; but, at all events, these two are apparently on the same surface of being. But, now and then, there are intrusions upon us from other worlds, probably quite as illusory as our own. And we are accordingly left stupefied. There is no “therefore”; no ratio. (122)

The moral is that the world is infinitely strange, “that even in the rind or surface of it the strangest essences are lurking, that tremendous beauties, amazing oddities are everywhere present,” even if they appear commonplace “123). “Such things are constantly happening in real life, or, at all events, the only life of which we know anything” (124). 

In case you don’t believe me about this book’s romanticism, take a read through this quotation, which presents two pastiches of Keats (one from a letter, the other from a poem): “Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that, when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land” (127). The narrator recalls living in Notting Hill Gate 40 years before, and how, on one October day, dreaming about becoming a writer, and “seeing the stones glow into a spagyric gold beneath his feet, seeing the plane trees in the back gardens droop down from fairyland, seeing a mystery behind every blind, and the infinite mystery in the grey-blue distance, where, as they tell me, for I have never sought to know, the street becomes dubious, if not desperate” (131-32). That is the way he sees the world, and I think the way occult psychogeographers see the world: there is mystery everywhere, if it can only be sensed.

“But here we are, still delaying over the great work, The London Adventure; and nothing done,” the narrator states:

I begin to reflect on the matter very seriously, as the summer wears on. It strikes me that I had better try an old recipe of mine, and start out, on a book of a totally different kind, in the hope, I suppose, that the one undertaking, going prosperously—as of course it will—may stimulate the other. (137)

That story would symbolize the soul through “exterior things” (137). He would write of a man on summer holiday, who goes to the hills he climbed as a young man, where he would see “something outland,” and then to Caerlon-on-Usk to see the sunset and the river and the Roman walls: “He should go wandering away, this unfortunate fellow, into such a country as he had never dreamed of; he should lose himself in intricacies of deep lanes descending from wooded heights to hidden and solitary valleys, where the clear water of the winding brook sounds under the alder trees” (137-38). Then he would return to London “and perceive that wonderful things have been wrought in him”—that everything he saw “discoursed to him a great mystery, whereby his soul has been renewed within him” (138-39). But this is a story he will never tell, even though he has been thinking about it for 40 years (139). He doesn’t explain why—perhaps because he has just told it.

There is one more story, though, another one about his sense that the real world is hidden from us. Once, while writing an earlier book, he went out for a walk and lost his sense of direction. He couldn’t tell where his lodgings were, or what was north or south, east or west (140-41). “I got home somehow by complicated and dubious calculations,” he writes, “and in a some[wh]at confused and alarmed frame of mind. And odd as it may seem, this perplexity has never wholly left me” (141). That, he thinks, is a story he might be able to tell: a man “who became so entangled in some maze of imagination and speculation that the common, material ways of the world became of no significance to him” (141). 

It’s easy to see the intersection between The London Adventure and occult psychogeography. I don’t know that much about that form of psychogeography, to be honest; I’m still gathering string on the subject of psychogeography in all of its forms. If I were to read Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out For The Territories, for instance, I’m sure I would see more connections. I also see intersections between the form of psychogeography that Phil Smith advocates in Walking’s New Movement and The London Adventure. I wonder, for instance, how close the process of coding or recoding spaces is to the stories Machen’s narrator invents about the places he passes when he walks around London. I think there might be other echoes or resonances, and that wouldn’t be surprising, given the powerful influence of psychogeography on Smith’s version of radical walking, and given the importance of The London Adventure to a particular branch of that activity. The more I read about psychogeography—the more I read about any and all forms of radical or aesthetic walking—the more I’m going to understand about it. So I’m happy I tackled one of the practice’s primary texts.

Work Cited

Machen, Arthur. The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering, Martin Secker, 1924.

36. Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

london orbital

After I read Thelma Poirier’s Rock Creek, I found myself thinking about a book that is, in many ways, its opposite: Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. But how am I going to find time to read Sinclair’s epic 550-page account of a 120-mile walk around London, tracking the route of the M25 superhighway? I asked myself. The answer was simple: I would find the time by finding the time, I would read Sinclair’s book by reading it. And so I did.

It’s a good thing that I read Sinclair’s book, too, because I’ve learned a great deal from it. The territory Sinclair circumambulates is, one would think, an obvious example of space, as Yi-Fu Tuan describes it: abstract, undifferentiated, open and potentially threatening, defined by movement, and (unlike place) unknown and not endowed with value (Tuan 6). The perimeter suburbs of London, and the orbital highway that encircles the city, are closer to what Marc Augé describes as “non-places,” spaces of circulation, consumption, and communication. And yet, I would argue that Sinclair, by walking and thinking and researching and writing about that territory, turns the kind of location that Tuan would describe as obdurate space into place, something experienced “through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind” (18). In fact, I think that London Orbital has answered my question about turning space into place by walking. It’s true that walking, by itself, isn’t enough to make space become place. But walking and research and writing (or some other kind of response to the experience, the memory, the narrative of the walk) appears to be sufficient. Sinclair, in fact, discloses his method of working at the beginning of the leg of the walk that starts at the former Leavesden Hospital in Abbots Langley, the point where the previous walk ended: “Since our last visit I’d read up on the history of the estate; I’d looked at maps and plans, drawings by the original architects John Giles and Biven of Craven Street, London—who produced the successful application in March 1868” (175). Later in the text, he’s even more specific: “Memory is a lace doily, more hole than substance. The nature of any walk is perpetual revision, voice over voice. Get it done, certainly, then go home and read the published authorities; come back later to find whatever has vanished, whatever is in remission, whatever has erupted” (272). That process is the source of all of the esoteric historical and literary and biographical and architectural information with which Sinclair layers his account of walking; those elements in the text come from research. No wonder every section of the walk takes place at least a month after the previous journey. The lag isn’t to allow blistered feet to heal; no, it’s an opportunity for uncovering the significance of locations visited on the previous walk, to revisit them if necessary, and to begin writing together memory and fact. However the conference paper I am delivering in Ireland this July at the Sacred Journeys 6th Global Conference begins, I’ve found the conclusion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. London Orbital begins and ends with Sinclair’s antipathy to the Millennium Dome (now the O2)—both to the architecture itself and to the financial folly of the project. In between, though, the book tracks two separate sets of walks. The first set, made with musician Bill Drummond and photographer Marc Atkins, takes Sinclair and his companions up the Lea River valley, which separates London from its eastern dependencies, past the Lea Navigation canal and the former armaments factory at Enfield (now, like almost every other complex of Victorian buildings in London’s green belt, being redeveloped for housing, despite the contaminated soil on the site). These walks serve as a preamble; they whet Sinclair’s appetite for more:

I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action. (60)

The descriptive sentence fragments, the tone of cynicism verging on paranoia: that is Sinclair’s operative mode. Passing the “retail park” where the North Circular Road crosses the Lea Valley, taking in the colours of warehouses and road, of river and sky, Sinclair declares:

I love it. I like frontiers. Zones that float, unobserved, over other zones. Road users have no sense of the Lea Navigation, they’re goal-orientated. Going somewhere. Noticing Atkins, foot on barrier, perched in the central reservation, snapping away, drivers in their high cabs see a nuisance, an obstacle. A potential snoop. They’d be happy to run him down. Atkins sees a speedy blur, abstractions, the chimney of London Waste Ltd blasting steam. (60-61)

I must make a confession: I made an attempt at London Orbital, several years ago, but for some reason was defeated by Sinclair’s idiosyncratic prose. This time I enjoyed its inventiveness. By completing the book, I feel I’ve had a significant change in my perception of Sinclair’s writing.

The second set of walks is announced near the beginning of the text. During a walk on New Year’s Day, 1998, Sinclair stops for a break and makes a momentous decision:

I sit, comfortably, with my back to one of the piers, munching my sandwiches and deciding that, yes, I want to walk around the orbital motorway: in the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives. I don’t want to be on the road any more than I want to walk on water; the soft estates, the acoustic footprints, will do nicely. Dull fields that travellers never notice. Noise and the rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed “content” back. An elaborate scheme of planting (two million trees and shrubs, mostly in Surrey and Kent) would hide the nasty ditch with its Eddie Stobart lorries, its smoke belchers. The M25 walk was the next project. The form it would take and the other people who might be persuaded to come along, to liven up the tale, was still to be decided. (16)

Sinclair’s 12-part walk (an essential number, associated with literary epics from Homer to Milton) will be, he tells us, a “pilgrimage” (31)—a key word for my work (and for the conference paper I have to write this month). And that walk, and the writing and thinking and research that it occasions, turns that “nowhere” into somewhere, space into place. London Orbital becomes the “fresh narrative” Sinclair was hankering for, the new story the city has to tell.

I read London Orbital without a London street map beside me, and because I don’t know that city very well, many of the place names Sinclair enumerates, rapid-fire, have little significance for me. Nevertheless, you would have to be sleep-reading not to get the gist. Take this example, a description of a highway heading east, out of London:

East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey-Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains East London’s wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow potato chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald’s in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes. (45-46)

Is that a description of an edge city or an inner suburb? I’m not sure it matters: what is important is the claim that urban life—and the life of the edge cities through which he and his companion, artist Renchi Bicknell (and occasional walkers writer Kevin Jackson and Atkins) will perambulate—is “flux, pastiche,” a “peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated” (45-46). Sinclair and his companions curate their own museums of the territory near the M25; their writing and photographs (for Sinclair is not the only one to respond creatively to this experience) will constitute their individual records of the walk: 

Drummond’s account, should he give it, would sheer away from mine. Marc’s considered prints would contradict my snapshots. The memory of the memory slips. We invent. New memories, unaccountable to mundane documentation, are shaped. The dream anticipates the neurotic narrative. (116)

London Orbital does not pretend to objectivity, to facticity, but its subjective account of the walks Sinclair and his companions make is, I think, a true one.

Much of the territory these walkers cover is part of London’s green belt, land that is, Sinclair believes, under an assault by developers and government rationalization:

In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable “moat effect.” A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, “filth Nastyness & Brutes.” The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers. (83-84)

The government’s explanation of its proposal echoes neo-liberal rationalizations everywhere: 

A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. “A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.” The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become “off-highway,” a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. (84)

In order to save the countryside, it must be destroyed. This is, for Sinclair, a disaster: “Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past” (84). I found myself thinking about Doug Ford’s promise to allow development in Ontario’s Green Belts, and whether populism and New Labour come together at the point where developers make political contributions.

That sense of the green belt’s future, or its lack of one, is a recurring theme in London Orbital; it seems that every estate, every disused hospital and asylum and estate near the M25 is being redeveloped as a housing estate for commuters who will use that expressway to drive into the city for work. Shenley Hospital, for instance, a former asylum whose extensive grounds are being turned into tract housing, occasions these ruminations: 

History is being revised on a daily basis, through the northern quadrant of the motorway, by copywriters employed by the developers. “The historic village of Shenley combines excellent local interest with outstanding travel convenience.” Much is made of the “pleasant undulating countryside” and the “fine views northward over the historic city of St Albans.” To qualify as “historic” you need green belt development permissions, new estates across a bowling-green from an old church. History is an extra zero on your property prices. (151)

The destruction of the green belt occasions a certain paranoia, I think, which is reflected in Sinclair’s accounts of walking where no one is supposed to walk:

Whatever it is they don’t like, we’ve got it. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, that contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. Do they know something we don’t? Are they expecting an invasion from the forest? (69-70)

One of Sinclair’s early walks took him and his companions from Waltham Abbey to Mill Hill, where German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz (an associate of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck) was giving a lecture on art in public spaces, and the juxtaposition of hospital and artist brought out Sinclair’s suspicions:

But the hospital block on the summit of Mill Hill is a real marker, generator of paranoid imaginings. I’m always uneasy when covert research, generously funded, starts to cosy up to subversive art. There’s something awkward about the relationship. To access the art manifestation (conceptual corridor, lunchtime lecture) you have to blag your way into the Pentagon, into Langley. Surveillance swipe, signature in book, electronic barrier, phone call to a higher authority. (103)

It doesn’t take institutional security precautions to generate those “paranoid imaginings,” however. Trying to get to the village of Otford, for example, involves dodging speeding cars on a road without room for pedestrians:

Ugly motors eager to do damage. Rage pods caught between hedges. Better to head off, dodging oncoming traffic in the fast lane of the motorway, than stick with the Pilgrims Way. It’s a rat run, the revenge of the commuters. Deserted villages are coming to life: it’s madness, so we’re told, twice a day. And death-in-life the rest of the time. Lights on, blue TV windows, dogs to walk. 

We manage to get off the road—which has no verge—and into the fields, the heavy earth, but we’re soon returned. There is no other route. Every third car is a red Jag: either they’ve been watching too many episodes of Morse, or they want to hide the roadkill on the paintwork. Otford, with its quaint High Street, its proudly timbered survivors, its pond and Tudor ruins, is notable, so far as we’re concerned, for one feature: the railway station. (408-09)

I’ve been in similar situations before, walking from Marlborough House into Oxford, where a gap between footpaths meant walking along a road, a situation where speeding cars forced me into a thorny hedgerow; or last summer, trudging on the broken shoulder of Highway 2 towards Assiniboia: the place where every car seems to be aiming right for you, as if every driver is playing a macabre video game in which points are given for each pedestrian maimed or killed. What must make this situation even more infuriating for Sinclair is the fact that the Pilgrims Way is supposed to be a walking route. Clearly not a very good one.

After the preliminary walks in the Lea Valley, the main event commences:

Here it begins, the walk proper. No detours. No digressions. We decided to take Waltham Abbey as our starting point, the grave of King Harold, and to shadow the motorway (within audible range whenever possible) in an anticlockwise direction. We wanted, quite simply, to get around: always carrying on from where we left off at the finish of the previous excursion. From now on the road would be our focus, our guide. We’d snatch days whenever we could (when Renchi’s shifts permitted) and get it done before the millennial eve. (125)

“The structure of our walk is elegaic: discontinued rituals, closed shrines,” Sinclair writes. “The funeral service, the emptied pond. The horse-trough near Theobalds Grove station filled with flower petals. Fenced off monuments and gates that are not gates” (133). But if the walk is elegaic, it is also mystical. Sinclair is a psychogeographer, and as such he has a taste (as does Renchi) for occult interpretations of the landscape: ley lines, fields of force, invisible axes, “invisible threads of influence” (144-45). “The markings on the motorway are shamanic,” he states. “Noise takes us out of ourselves into a dispersing landscape. Giddy, we enter movement. We could do the whole thing here, on the ramp. We could dream it” (133). Or take his comparison between the M25 and Avebury Circle: “Think of the motorway in terms of Maiden Castle or Avebury, earth engines, machines designed to provoke enlightenment. The hoop of continually moving light is a gigantic crop circle, visible from space. A doughnut of powdered glass. A winking eye” (530). Such occult or “shamanic” mysteries provide Sinclair with another layer to go along with the history and art and literature and lives of those who have lived in the places through which he walks; an unnecessary layer, I would suggest, but that’s perhaps a matter of taste and my own lack of faith in such things.

Sinclair compares this walk to walks undertaken by French labourers in the nineteenth century, walks he read about in Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travelers (Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses). That book, he writes, “offered one perfectly reasonable explanation of our orbital pilgrimage: an hysterical fugue—attended by the sort of minor epileptic seizures (electrical storms in the consciousness) Renchi suffered in Dublin” (146). There are no seizures, as it turns out, but Sinclair continues to argue that the notion of fugue is the best way to describe the walk:

I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word, a bloody-minded Tommy muttering over his tobacco tin in the Flanders trenches. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. The increasing lunacy of city life (in my case) and country life (in Renchi’s) forced us to take to the road. The joy of these days out lay in the heightened experience of present time actuality, the way that we bypassed, for a brief space of time, the illusionism of the spin doctors, media operators and salaried liars. The fugue is both drift and fracture. The story of the trip can only be recovered by some form of hypnosis, the memory prompt of the journal or the photo-album. Documentary evidence of things that may never have happened. The fugue is a psychic commando course . . . that makes the parallel life, as a gas fitter, hospital carer, or literary hack, endurable. (146-47)

In contemporary representations of the fugue, Sinclair continues, “the walker disappears from the walk:

Landscape artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton erase the trauma, along with the figure of the troubled pedestrian. Minor interventions are tactfully recorded; a few stones rearranged, twigs bent. The walker becomes a control freak, compulsively logging distances, directions, treading abstractions into the Ordnance Survey map. Scripting minimalist asides, copywriting haikus. (148)

By contrast, Renchi’s paintings “merge walker and landscape”:

Chorographic overviews, diaries. In earlier times, the brush-strokes were looser, the paint thicker. Walks were shorter, paintings fiercer. As the fugues extended—London to Swansea, Hopton-on-Sea to St Michael’s Mount—the records were calmer; there was more of a narrative element, transit across landscape remembered in chalk, flint, granite, slate. (149)

Sinclair continues to think of these walks as fugues throughout the book, imagining himself as a “mad traveller”: “We were discovering a useful genealogy: gas fitters, painters, novelists. Through the suburbs and night, the motorway verges by day, we were there, heel-and-toeing it, sucking water from a plastic bottle, trying to find some way to unravel the syntax of London” (158). I really like that last phrase; I wish I had thought of it as a way of describing my own walks, here and elsewhere.

Reaching Heathrow called to mind, for Sinclair, novelist J.G. Ballard, one of the inspirations for the walk:

You couldn’t help being drawn into the tremble, the jet roar, the throb of traffic streaming in every direction. M4, M25, A4, A30; slip roads, link roads, trunk roads, deleted coach roads. Two hundred thousand vehicles a day used the section of the M25 between Junctions 13 and 14. Ballard was absolutely right: if you set aside human interference (aka life), London was a mausoleum. Kensal Green Cemetery with the walls knocked down. Pompous monuments, redundant public buildings, trash commerce, heritage tags. Oxford Street was a souk. Charing Cross Road a gutter. [new paragraph] The city, in its Victorian overcoat, the muck of centuries on its waistcoat, bored Ballard. He promoted this new place, the rim. The “local” was finished as a concept. Go with the drift, with detachment. The watcher on the balcony. Areas around airports were ecumenical. They were the same everywhere: storage units, hangars, satellite hotels, car hire companies, apologetic farmland as a mop-up apron for Concorde disasters. If you see the soul of the city as existing in its architecture, its transport systems, its commerce and media hot spots, then Ballard’s championship of the suburbs is justified. But they’re not really suburbs if they don’t feed on the centre. The Heathrow corridor has declared its unilateral independence, that’s what makes it exciting. The abdication of responsibility and duty; glossy goods, ennui, scratched light. (214)

Later, Sinclair interviews Ballard. “I don’t need what Ballard says, I know what he says, I’ve read the books,” he writes. “What I need is the chance to pay homage, in the course of this mad orbital walk, to the man who has defined the psychic climate through which we are travelling. It’s a romantic foible on my part, the impulse that once had De Quincey tramping off to the Lake District to make a nuisance of himself in Wordsworth’s cottage” (268).

Ballard is not the only literary figure who ends up in these pages; Sinclair writes about H.G. Wells, George Tomkyns Chesney (author of The Battle of Dorking), William Blake, Bram Stoker, and poet John Clare, who walked 120 miles from London to Northborough without a cent to his name, eating grass, drinking nothing except a pint of beer purchased with coins thrown to him by migrant farm labourers (533). “Fugue as exorcism,” Sinclair writes: “Clare’s walk successfully performed the ritual we were toying with. He’d been in the forest long enough to understand the peculiarity of its status as a memorial to a featureless and unreachable past, a living stormbreak at the limit of urban projection” (534). But there is an essential difference between Clare’s walk and the one Sinclair and Renchi are making: “The Great North Road was still a route down which everything and everyone travelled; coaches, gypsies, farmers, the military, masterless workmen. The M25 goes nowhere; it’s self-referential, postmodern, ironic. Modestly corrupt. It won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over” (534-35). 

That isn’t going to happen any time soon. The walk continues. According to Sinclair,

A good day on the hoof should include: (1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise. So far, so good. (230)

The surprise on that day—at West Drayton, near Heathrow—is discovering an unlocked church, which occasions mystical ruminations:

Being inside a church, after the locked doors of the northern quadrant, is a minor shock: the 800-year franchise works its spatial and temporal magic, the narrow building detaches itself form its surroundings, the bluster of West Drayton. 

Hats off, from custom or superstition, we creep and whisper. Cruise the usual circuit, interrogating the fabric: in expectation of some clue or sign. Or confirmation. Thicker air. Stone-dust and candle grease. Stained light. (230-31)

On a later trip back to West Drayton, Sinclair was able to climb the church tower, providing him with a panorama of the land to the north:

To see for myself how the land opened out: the path to St Mary’s Church at Harmondsworth. The crop of torpedo graves. The M25 with its constant flickering movement. We had stumbled on an active, but little used, pilgrims’ path. The Avenue. Heading, through a tunnel of pink blossom, towards the motorway and the site of a Benedictine priory at Harmondsworth. The sequestered principality of Heathrow. (232)

I was collecting references to pilgrimages as I read London Orbital, and this is one of the important ones, from my perspective, because here we see Sinclair once again inventing a pilgrimage, rather than confining himself to pilgrimages blessed by authorities—and a pilgrimage in an unlikely place, under Heathrow’s flight path. 

England is known for its walking paths, its National Trust-approved green spaces, but Sinclair, cantankerously, wants nothing to do with them:

Why let someone else nominate sites that are worth visiting? If you want a shop, you should find a shop. Sainsbury’s (Cobham) has a better servery than Box Hill. The space underneath Runnymede Bridge is more exciting than the National Trust recommended Runnymede Meadows (with “popular tea-room”). Don’t take my word for it, don’t bother with my list of alternative attractions—Junction 21 of the M25, the Siebel building in Egham, Hawksmoor’s gravestone in Shenley; discover your own. In the finding is the experience.” (318-19)

One unrecognized attraction is a footbridge over the M25 in West Drayton:

The footbridge trembles and vibrates. If it ran across the Thames between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, they’d close it down. The West Drayton bridge isn’t a tourist attraction, not yet. It ought to be. All the powers and thrones and dominions of transport are here, angelic orders of diesel, jet fuel, crop spray, animal and human shit. Burial grounds of lost villages. The Perry Oaks Sludge Disposal works. (233)

For Sinclair, such places say more about the contemporary moment than Runnymede Meadows. They are the reason for the walk, its purpose and its payoff.

Nevertheless, Sinclair and Renchi occasionally find themselves engaged in “the kind of walking that guidebooks promote” (368).  It’s a contradiction, perhaps, but a productive one, I would argue. Those guidebooks include The London Loop, The Green London Way, Country Walks Around London, The Shell Book of British Walks. Sinclair finds the latter “a bit odd,” wondering about how those hikes came to be sponsored by a Dutch oil company. “I’m fond of these books with their selective maps, line drawings that try to look like woodcuts, topographic views,” he writes, describing most of the walking books I own (368):

The walking they promote is benign: it begins at a car park, saunters, by way of a quaint church and some “typical high downland scenery,” to “the highest point in south-east England.” Hikers are discreet, eyes averted from contemporary horrors, tutting from time to time at the excesses of developers or upwardly mobile vulgarians. These are strolls for the visually impaired, guided tours with checklists of flora, fauna, archaeological remains. The walk is an interlude of “somewhere between and hour-and-a-half and three hours.” It’s good for you. And it brings you back to the point from which you set out. To the car. (368-69)

Of course, it’s (at least in part) the “contemporary horrors” and “excesses of developers” and “upwardly mobile vulgarians” that interest Sinclair. Why else walk across St. George’s Hill—once the site of the radical Diggers, now the home of mobbed-up Russian emigrés—despite the high security? Why else, in fact, decide to walk through London’s edges? Why else explore the link between golf courses and the illegal dumping of toxic waste (370-71)? Why else walk where they aren’t wanted?

We are on our own in country that doesn’t want us. It’s a strange feeling, climbing and descending, in and out of woods, views across ripe fields of corn, and being unable to get any purchase on the experience. Our walk is compromised. We’re pulled between the territorial imperatives of Surrey, Kent and Greater London. The old Green Way is barely tolerated, a dog path, a route that might, if you stick with it, offer accidental epiphanies. It’s more likely to lose heart, be swallowed by a disused chalk quarry, an agribiz farm, a radio mast. Some unexplained concrete structure, fenced in, and surrounded by tall trees. (375-76)

They are walking in places where walking is unknown (as many walkers find themselves doing). Renchi asks a girl in a corner shop how far it was to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country place. “She couldn’t do distance, miles, metres; didn’t understand the concept,” Sinclair writes (391) She could only report that it was a five minute drive away; the notion of walking there was incomprehensible to her. “These days, as the girl in the newspaper shop so shrewdly recognised, distance has no meaning,” Sinclair continues. “Miles only matter to horses and pedestrians. We have to deal in drives measured by the hour. Units of nuisance between pit stops. Road works, accidents, congestion: a geography defined by junction numbers on the M25” (392). 

On the way to Otford, near the end of the walk, Sinclair loses his glasses (forgotten on a bench after a brief stop), and his camera breaks. The resulting imagery—photographic and purely visual—strikes him as wonderful, and is worth reproducing at length here:

Focus, which had been playing up since we left Merstham, gave way entirely: into the Valley of Vision. My spectacles were lost, abandoned, and my camera had a bad case of the Gerhard Richters: Richter pastoral. Snapshots with the shivers. The results, from here on, were truer to the way I felt, the way I really saw the road, than all my previous impersonal loggings. Incompetence meant: insight. Inscapes. The photograph of ‘Renchi on the Pilgrims Way’ is a painterly stew, not an identity card. The abandoned blue shirt, hanging across the white ground of the T-shirt, is a squeeze of Vlaminck.

There is liberation in these soft images. The road sign I recorded, PILGRIMS WAY, is now a long thin shape that defies interpretation; you can’t tell if it’s stone or tin. But the green that surrounds it, busy with black smears, white floaters, has a wondrous ambiguity. I’ve never (on our orbital walk) had the courage to let go in this way, the economics of photography require a visible return. I’m only doing it to keep a record of where we’ve been, the provocative details I’m sure to forget. (403-04)

The blurred images his broken camera creates push Sinclair “into territory explored and espoused by visionary filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage” (404). But they do more than that:

The blurred images, first, simplify the narrative—then worry me towards a deeper, more considered sense of place. What doesn’t matter—script, commentary, hierarchy of significance—vanishes. It seems that the “faulty” camera is now dictating the terms: I didn’t pass it over to anyone met on the road, no such person existed. And yet, here we are, developed print in hand: Renchi and I in the same image. Two figures standing in a gap in the hedge. Distance is realised by bands of colour. The white lines on the road float free—like angelic footsteps. The camera, unprompted, has produced a double portrait. (403-04)

“The rest of our walk is recorded on the same terms: soft shapes, ripe colour, more dream than document,” Sinclair concludes (404). Perhaps this episode is a lesson in photography for walkers (like me) who try to record their walks with a camera. 

Past Dartford, “a town that can’t be negotiated on foot” (450), Sinclair and Renchi approach the River Thames:

We moved on towards the bridge. Heavy clouds hugged the shoreline, black at base, blooded as the sun climbed above the Littlebrook Power Station. Backlit dredgers. Two skeletal towers, one on each short, carrying power lines. They never fail: river, marshland, the pier that looks like a concrete boat. All the sensory buttons are pushed. Space. Flow. Dereliction. New estates springing up. The thick tongue of oil on the shoreline, its ridges and patterns. (490)

“All the sensory buttons are pushed”: like other walkers, Sinclair is trying to capture the sights, smells, and sounds of the walk. Such sensory data, such witnessing, is a feature of the walk, from its inception to its conclusion at Waltham Abbey on a cold night in December, 1999:

Church and grounds are painted with searchlight beams. Renchi, at long last, pilgrimage completed, finds an unlocked door. We have to witness the astrological ceiling, the wall-painting in the side chapel (a fifteenth-century Doom mural). Unseen, it predicted our journey. In darkness, we set out. And in darkness we returned. (536)

From there, like good Englishmen, they repair to a pub, where they celebrate the conclusion of the walk with double brandies and bandages for their blistered feet.

It’s impossible to summarize a book of such scope as London Orbital, and I have merely scratched the surface of this text, I know. Nevertheless, this book will be important for my research. I intend to follow Sinclair’s methodological example, for one thing. And the freedom of his prose makes mine seem pinched and stultified by comparison. In fact, London Orbital might be an exemplar of the kind of work I intend to do here. I’m going to read Sinclair’s other books about walking as well. But that will come later. My next task is to read about pilgrimage, something I know about as a practitioner, but not as a theorist—which could be a problem for the paper I have to write this month about walking and pilgrimage.

Works Cited

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. Second edition, Verso, 2009.

Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. Penguin, 2003.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

35. Thelma Poirier, Rock Creek

rock creek

My plan had been to spend the past week and a half reading Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, a 500-page account of walking around London, roughly following the route of the M25 expressway. That plan didn’t take into account the vicious chest cold I developed the day after I wrote my Cree examination. It was impossible to concentrate on Sinclair’s ornate prose for the better part of a week. Meanwhile, I saw a reference to Saskatchewan writer and rancher Thelma Poirier on my friend Matthew Anderson’s Facebook page. How had I never heard of her work? Luckily, Spafford Books had a copy of Poirier’s Rock Creek in stock, and Leah was willing to deliver it to the house, as I was too ill to go to the store (and I don’t want to pass this cold along to my friends: let it die with me!). I’ll try to find time to read London Orbital, but I’m happy that I discovered Poirier’s work, even if I had to get sick in order to do so.

Rock Creek is primarily an account of a walk along Rock Creek, which runs through the ranch Poirier works with her husband near Fir Mountain, Saskatchewan. (That’s close to Wood Mountain, the destination of my pilgrimage of last summer.) Rock Creek, or Morgan Creek as it apparently is known on official maps (39), begins in the hills near Wood Mountain, and it empties into the Milk River across the border in Montana. Not only does Poirier live on Rock Creek, but her father homesteaded there, and it’s where she grew up. Nevertheless, Poirier doesn’t feel that she knows the creek very well:

I have seen two oceans, but I have not seen all of the creek in my own backyard. It is as though I have been wearing blinders, only removing them at certain places, long enough for glimpses of the creek, the edges of the water.

The heron knows Rock Creek better than I do. (5)

The heron Poirier mentions is a great blue heron she has seen fishing in the creek; from the direction of its flight, it seems to roost in a heronry at the creek’s headwaters. “If I follow the heron,” Poirier writes, “I too will experience every bend of the creek, every shift of the landscape. If I walk up Rock Creek,  will see what the heron sees” (5-6). 

So that’s what Poirier does: she walks along the creek, beginning in her yard, looking for or waiting for the heron. She makes an overnight journey along the creek to an abandoned homestead, accompanied part of the way by a coyote that is curious about her. And as she walks, she develops another plan: a walk from the point where the creek crosses the Canada-U.S. border to the headwaters. “I plan the walk in my mind, plan how I will borrow three or four days from the ranch after the cattle are moved to summer pastures, after the crop is seeded, before branding, before haying,” she writes (8). She approaches landowners and leaseholders—including Grasslands National Park, since part of the creek runs through it—for permission to walk on their property. She knows she has a limited window to make this walk, because she has a terrible allergy to wolf willow, and she will need to complete the walk before it comes into bloom. She plans to stay overnight at places that were part of her father’s ranch: at the old line camp, which was named because of its proximity to the international border, and at the home place, the homestead where she was born. Not surprisingly, these places, as well as the creek and the valley it flows through, evoke memories for Poirier. What is surprising, though, is her insistence that this knowledge is insufficient:

I have been told that living here, living in this same place nearly all my life, I am like a minnow. I take this place for granted, the way the minnow takes water for granted. Because I live here, because I presumably have not looked at this place through the other end of the binoculars, because I have not sat on a beach in Spain or walked along the Great Wall in China, there are things about this place I will never know. There are things I can not see because I see them every day, and I cannot name them. That may be so, but there may be other things I know because I have lived here. I know the minnows in Rock Creek have been privileged. Water has a way of magnifying the buffalo beans on the creek bank. (25)

One of the things Poirier knows is the sights and sounds and smells of this place. On a drive to the home place, to see whether she could stay overnight in the old farmhouse, she notices “the smell of the creek: the aroma of old clay, old willow bark mixed with new willow leaf, arrowhead, and tender rushes” (14). During a similar trip to the line camp, she writes, “I rest my arm on the open window and breath in the many scents of spring, buffalo bean and psorallea, silver sage” (28). Clearly Poirier knows the names of the plants and animals and birds as well. One of the pleasures of this book is her evocation of those creatures through their names. Another is the intimacy with which she reports what she sees and hears and smells.

The middle section of the book, “Upstream,” recounts Poirier’s walk. Everywhere she goes on this walk has a name or function or something that indicates that it is a place, as opposed to undifferentiated space (to return to Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction yet again). For instance, on the drive south to the border, where she will begin walking, Poirier catalogues the places she and her husband pass:

We follow a winding trail through grazing leases, through park land, sometimes over the Trader’s Trail used more than a hundred years ago by Metis buffalo hunters, pass the site where Ed McPherson’s cow camp once stood, the camp that probably marked the east end of the Turkey Track range, drive past a single coyote, past the lakes until we reach the boundary, turn east and pass boundary markers, until we are opposite Bowerys’ or Davenports’ place. The names changed with the residents. They are left over from adult conversations heard at the dinner table during my childhood. (44)

Despite Poirier’s suggestion that she doesn’t know the land well enough, it’s clear (to me, anyway) that she has an intimate knowledge of these places. All of those places, or the names or stories Poirier knows them by, are echoes of a long-lost past. Nearly all of the homesteads or ranches she sees or walks past have been abandoned, evidence of the way rural Saskatchewan has been emptied of people, of settlers, since the drought of the 1930s. The names linger, but the evidence of human habitation is fragmentary now: cellars, steel objects slowly turning to rust, occasionally a building that has not yet collapsed. This is one of the reasons Grasslands National Park has been able to expand: as they retire, ranchers often sell their land to the park. Poirier is ambivalent about the park, partly because she’s not sure grazing will be allowed there, and without grazing, the prairie grasses will not thrive (47). That’s not surprising; she reports that ranchers tend to be opposed to the park because of their deeply rooted desire for privacy (46).

Poirier is not unaware that others called this valley home before settlers arrived. For twenty years, she notes, she has travelled with her friend Wasu Mato (William Lethbridge), a Lakota man who has shown her places where his ancestors camped while Sitting Bull was seeking refuge from the U.S. cavalry north of the border (26). She reports that Rock Creek was once known as Medicine Lodge Creek, because the Lakota held a sun dance there in 1879 (54-55). On the second day of the walk, she discovers quartzite artifacts—not arrowheads or scrapers, but something else, something knapped by human hands—as well as a “chert point . . . wedged into the clay bank of the creek,” evidence of “a stonesmith camped along Rock Creek,” who “squatted among the pygmy cacti, the stunted grasses and the sedges, and fashioned this simple point form a chunk of chert” (107). Poirier imagines that the stonesmith might have been a woman (107). 

One of the pleasures of this book, as I’ve said, is the catalogue Poirier creates from the creatures she encounters on her walk: ferruginous hawks, ticks, and Canada geese (57-59); mule deer—a herd of 37 at one point (91)—and antelope, including a doe who walks alongside of her (94); a short-eared owl (66); sage grouse (69); rose, buffaloberry, and silverberry (70); ducks, a pair of western kingbirds, cushion vetch or pussy toes, buffalo beans and June grass (87); northern wheatgrass, little bluestem, blue grama, rough fescue, spear grass (93); big bluestem and green needle grass (104-05); a barn owl (98); pelicans (100); long-billed curlews (106); a golden eagle and killdeer and sharptailed grouse (113); nighthawks. Often naming the things she sees evokes a memory: seeing buffaloberries growing along the creek brings to mind childhood experiences of making jelly from their soapy fruit with her mother (71-72). The hill with the Dominion Land Survey marker on the top reminds her of her annual flower count there (120). She remembers the ritual of repairing fences (107), stories about branding cattle (115-16), about the small coal mine that settlers dug near a spring (116-17). Poirier moves back and forth, from memory to the present and back again—this is, not surprisingly, the primary narrative mode of her account, this shifting from present into memories of the past. Other times she tells stories about the creature she encounters, as with the antelope doe that walks beside her for a while, or the barn owl that surprises her at an old farmhouse. Walking, as Poirier has discovered, generates narrative—perhaps because of its rhythms, perhaps because of its slowness. “I am walking with memory,” she writes (128).

Another pleasure of this book is Poirier’s evocation of the things she sees, hears, and smells. She writes of the colours of a cutbank: “Today the cutbanks are not yellow, but mauve and rose and turquoise, colors trembling beneath the thunderclouds” (73). She finds a speckled blue egg in the ruts of the trail (75). The sunrise on her second morning begins with everything being “a mute brown,” but “then a silvery light wavers on the tips of the buffalo berry and the sage. It slips between the silhouettes of the dobies. The brown bottle turns blue. A wash of yellow light. Indigo. Chartreuse. Magenta” (81). “How easily colour comes to the canyon, to the line camp,” she reflects (81). At the end of the second day, she looks back at where she has walked: the horizon is “a blur of mauve and purple shadow,” the creek “an intermittent blue thread” (102). “The day was linked by special moments: quiet mule deer, one blue heron, a solitary antelope, rock wrens, an owl, pelicans, and shooting stars. And best of all was the overwhelming sense of timelessness. How old am I?” (102).

Poirier’s feet blister on the first day of her walk, and she is so exhausted that she falls asleep before sunset. On the second day, when she reaches her own yard, she stops for four days to enable her blisters to heal. That morning, as the sun rises, she turns to survey the land:

A pale light brushes the western horizon, the western slope is brown. I drop into the valley, into the land of shadow along Rock Creek, measure the morning by the first rays of the sun, a strange sensation of light creeping down the western slopes toward me. The sky is smoky rose, the horizon obscure. Then a sudden wash of light spreads across the valley and the only shadow is my own, stretching off to one side as I move northward up the creek in the south pasture. (103)

This close to home, Poirier knows the land intimately. “Where I walk today the landscape is the one that I know best,” she writes. “Over the years I have come to know these hills, the contours as well as my own body” (107). There is a level of intimacy in those sentences that contradict Poirier’s earlier hesitation regarding her knowledge of the land through which she is walking. 

At one point, Poirier experiences what can only be described as an ecstasy of belonging, an epiphany of being part of the land through which she is walking:

I pause on the road and know that as surely as the earth draws me, as surely as I can feel the weight of my hands increasing as I walk, pulling me down, I can also feel the earth surging upward inside of me. I can taste the scent of leaf mold and sweetgrass and a multiple of water weeds. Maybe it is true that our sense of smell is co-dependent on the sensitivity of our taste buds.

Best of all I feel buoyant, almost like the deer in mid-air. It seems I walk on the tips of the grass, float over flowers. Perhaps I do not have to look through the other end of the binoculars after all. I just have to be here. (121-22)

The merging of senses here (smell and taste), and the simultaneous senses of being pulled down by the earth and floating above it, both suggest the power of this moment. And yet this experience is juxtaposed against the mundane: a stop to eat a granola bar and check her legs for ticks. Even the ordinariness of that moment is special, though. “Beside me is a beaver dam, a very small dam, the first of many between this point and the headwaters, each dam larger than the previous one,” she writes. “A red-tailed hawk nests in a hawthorn beside the beaver dam, is nervous because I am there. She lifts her wings, shifts her feet and meets my gaze. Her mate soars and dives. It is time for me to leave” (122). 

As she walks past her childhood home, her memories become even more powerful. She remembers riding with her sister, Marjorie; the land is shadowed by her memories of those rides. She sees the grave of her infant sister, Florence May, who was born 18 years before her: “As I walk I carry her in my arms, bundled against me. And in the house I think my mother still sits at the window, grieving for a daughter that did not live” (130). The corrals her father built and the pasture where her father kept the rams evoke memories: “That was nearly fifty years ago; time keeps getting in the way” (131). Although Poirier could walk up to the house, she decides not to: “I focus on the creek and the headwaters, on finishing this walk” (131). And shortly afterwards, she arrives there and drinks from the spring that feeds Rock Creek: “This water, too, is cold and sweet. Here, I can say with solemnity, Rock Creek begins here. I can sip from the beginning and know something of beginnings at the end of my journey” (135). She climbs a nearby hill and writes in her notebook, “reluctant to leave, reluctant to end this journey” (136). It’s a feeling many distance walkers will experience, although Poirier’s reluctance might be more powerful because of the intimacy with which she knows the land and the memories it contains for her.

The last section of the book recalls a road trip to the confluence of Rock Creek and the Milk River in Montana five years later. It took that long to find time when she and her sister Marjorie could make the drive. She wanted to walk again, but the only time Marjorie can travel with her is in October, a bad time for walking. It is less than a day’s drive to the confluence, which reminds Poirier of the creek’s source, despite the differences between the two places:

Deer paths cross the clearing, wind through a tangle of ash and silver willow, meadow grass and dogwood, all beneath a grove of cottonwood at the confluence. On one side of a “V” is Rock Creek, on the other side, the Milk River. Waters of the larger river drift into the creek, swirl and carry the creek away, a convoluted progression. Morning light shatters on the surface of the water and it seems pieces of mica reflect the sun. . . . And then it comes to me, how this confluence is like the headwaters of Rock Creek. It is the tangle of underbrush, the silver willows, the tall trees overhead and the aroma of mint and moss. It is the blend of light and shadow. I am compelled to look to the tops of the trees, look for a heronry. There is not a single nest or a heron in the sky. (141-42). 

The confluence also reminds her that the Milk River flows into the Missouri, and then the Mississippi: “Last winter I visited New Orleans, and sat on the quay and watched the roiling water of the Mississippi, knowing some small portion of it came from Rock Creek, flowed past this confluence I had not yet seen” (142). Poirier and her sister drive through the canyon the creek has formed, and Poirier is overwhelmed by the differences between that canyon and the valley she knows so well: “It is unlike any part of Rock Creek I have ever seen” (143). The sisters meet an old woman at a farm who tells them that the farm was once a town (144-47). She is auctioning off her brother’s farm three days later, and Poirier and her husband and a neighbour come back. They visit the neighbour’s sister’s farm and Poirier goes for a walk near an abandoned ranch. She wades into Rock Creek and finds that the water is tepid despite the late season: “Rock Creek, I think, dear Rock Creek” (155).

Poirier meets several women at the auction, and at the end of the book she wonders about them, about their relationship with the land and with each other:

They shared their memories, their present realities with me. If they were poets, what poems would they write? Rock Creek bonds us to each other and to other women who live along its banks and tributaries. No boundary can separate us. 

By nightfall most of the Montana women return to their homes in Hinsdale, Opheim or Glasgow. Only a few of them remain on the creek, listen to the night wind yipping like a bunch of Canadian coyotes. Likewise I return to my Canadian home on a branch of Rock Creek. (158)

Why, I wonder, are the coyotes Canadian? What is Poirier suggesting with that adjective? She is thinking about the similarities between women on both sides of the international border, but I wonder why the coyotes are identified as Canadian. In any case, crossing the border on the return home gives the book a circularity. “The journey ends where it began, at the crossing,” Poirier writes. “The water gurgles through the rushes. An elongated cloud stretches across the horizon, blue as a heron’s wing” (158)—like the heron Poirier followed in the first section of the book, the heron whose flight towards the creek’s headwaters gave her the idea for the walk.

Rock Creek reinforces the idea that writing about place—or experiences of place—require a deep level of intimacy. After all, Poirier is writing about the place where she was born and raised, the place she has spent her adult life, and she still wonders if she knows it well enough. I felt the same way when I walked in the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario three years ago, although that’s where I grew up. And yet I know that not every book about place comes from that kind of intimacy. That’s the reason I wanted to read Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital: yes, he knows part of that journey intimately, since it begins in the London neighbourhood where he has lived for 30 or 40 years, but surely the rest of his walk takes place in territory with which he is unfamiliar. Perhaps I will find time to read London Orbital sooner rather than later. And perhaps, at some point in this project, I’ll be able to repeat Poirier’s walk. My experience would be completely different from hers, of course, but I wonder what someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the land might take from the experience. The trick, of course, would be getting permissions from landowners, but my friend Hugh does that before the walks he organizes, and so it’s clearly not impossible. It’s something to think about, anyway, as I consider what book to read next.

Works Cited

Poirier, Thelma. Rock Creek. Coteau, 1998.

Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. Penguin, 2003.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.