Desire Paths

Bayfield Roy

Description

A book about walking and the art of walking.

Sujets

• Walking

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911193210
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2016 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, England

[phone]
[e-mail]
www.triarchypress.net

Copyright © Roy Bayfield, 2016

Roy Bayfield has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Cover Photo: Jennifer Woodward
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-911193-04-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-911193-21-0
pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-05-0
...only the one who travels every road will not find the limits of the soul.
– Heraclitus (Betegh, 2009)
I believe that I know everything worth knowing about roads: soft roads, hard roads, wide roads, narrow roads, stony, muddy, cemented, boggy, snowy, hilly, gravelled, slippery, dusty. My feet have taught me everything worth knowing about roads...
– Legion of the Damned (Hassel, [1957] 2007)
I Am the Walker
– The Creation, title of studio out-take recorded c.1967
Contents
Intro: Mythogeography
What You Are About to Read
One: Walking to the Green Heart
Two: Out With Baby
Three: My Life in ‘Spoons
Four: The Summoning and Banishment of a Spirit
Five: Novel Ideas for Great Days Out
Six: Touring the Six Realms
Seven: Caught in the Middle of Time
Eight: Stardust Falling
Nine: Destination: Argleton!
Ten: ‘A local habitation’
Eleven: Into the Abyss
Twelve: Red Nightfall
Thirteen: Sunken Lands
Fourteen: Terminalia
Fifteen: Along the Promenade
Outro: (De)Mythogeography
Appendix One
Appendix Two
References
Bibliography
Not an Afterword – Cecile Oak
Intro: Mythogeography
On Thursday 11 th November, 2010 I discovered that I was existing inside a book.
I was on a train at the time, travelling through Shropshire towards Cardiff, heading for an art exhibition titled Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, dividing my time between looking out at the hills and reading. The book was called Mythogeography. It had no apparent author, apart from some implausiblynamed individuals and organisations. It was a book about walking.
In those days, I walked ardently. For nearly three years I had been making a long, piece-by-piece journey through England, a DIY pilgrimage from where I lived in North West England back to my home-town on the South coast – attempting to experience the territory of my half-century of existence as directly as possible. A journey I had made many times at speed in trains and cars, now being done a step at a time, with side-trips and digressions. Mostly, I had avoided places of beauty and tourist highlights: my route tended to meander through the outskirts of towns, on footpaths that had been absorbed into suburbs and alongside railways and motorways, with rest-stops in corporate motels and refreshment breaks in chain pubs. Unnamed instinct had led me away from landscapes such as the hills that surrounded my train journey – for some reason, wilder more ‘natural’ places and officially-designated beauty spots held little interest. Instead I found a certain exhilaration in hiking through the margins.
Between walks I wrote a blog that consisted partly of travelogue and partly of poeticised musings. And I read widely on the topic of walking, finding provocative inspiration in various texts under the ambiguous banner of ‘psychogeography’. As someone trying to hack into the reality of the terrain I was walking through, the “study of the specific effects of the geographical environment ... on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (as Guy Debord [1955] of the SituationistInternational described the practice) had a definite appeal. The idea that I could be like “the wanderer, the stroller, the flâneur and the stalker” described in Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography was attractive, joining a lineage whose experiences ranged “from the nocturnal expeditions of de Quincey to the surrealist wanderings of Breton and Aragon, from the Situationist dérive to the heroic treks of Iain Sinclair” (Coverley, 2010). I had a sense that these perspectives would help my dimly-apprehended quest to experience the true nature of the places I walked within. However, I also had a niggling awareness that adopting tactics devised by others was basically just following instructions. ‘Doing some psychogeography’ could just be a leisure activity, an intellectualised version of spotting items in an I-Spy guide book – ‘Surveillance Camera: 2 points’; ‘Occult Graffiti: 5 points’... not that there was anything wrong with that, but I wanted adventure rather than formula.
I had bought the newly-published Mythogeography book as part of my ongoing search for interesting input. I liked the title, hoping that mytho geography would prove to be a fresher version of psycho geography, like Tarzan being more exciting than Mowgli: the basic idea taken and given more energy, the narrative opened up and multiplied. Seeing the book mentioned online I had ordered it through the post, then brought it along on my trip to Wales for something to read. It was a slightly oversized paperback, the cover matt-laminate-serious, the silky white pages filled with symbols, codes, photographs and illustrations. It looked like several books combined into one – an academic tract, work of fiction, art-prank, guidebook, scrapbook, notebook waiting for more things to be written in it. The covers and early pages made many wild statements of intent:
A Guide to Walking Sideways
Compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectuses, records and everyday utopias of the Pedestrian Resistance
Theoretical and practical sections compiled, edited and annotated by The Central Committees from the documents of the radical and philosophical walking movements (confessions, memoirs, pamphlets, ghosts, various)
Deceitful and hopeful, this is the first manifesto of a new kind of everyday.
Walking 4.0
After I changed trains at Chester I started to read in earnest, knowing that I had a couple of hours of undisturbed time. I was pleased to find that the book wasn’t just a retread of well-worn ‘psychogeography’ concepts. Having said that I didn’t quite know what I was reading–the pages contained a bizarre admixture of text and images, a palimpsest of concepts and allusions unfolding with no comfortable structure or solid ground (‘everybody knows this is nowhere’).
On page 113 I was interested to find a Manifesto, comprising 18 points, starting with:
1/ mythogeography is an experimental approach to the site of performance (in the very broadest, everyday sense) as a space of multiple layers.
2/ it is also a geography of the body. It means to carry a second head or an appendix organism, in other words to see the world from multiple viewpoints at any one time, to always walk with one’s own hybrid as companion. 1
These points resonated with me and I began to warm to the book. On my walks I had indeed begun to see ‘multiple layers’ in landscapes around me, for instance the way officially-planned public and commercial spaces were crossed with ‘desire paths’ etched by the way people actually walked; the strange symbolism created by combinations of discarded objects; the hidden narratives that waited beneath the surface of just about anywhere. It was clear that I walked through places with ‘multiple viewpoints’, as a repertoire of contrasting selves, spawned by roles I played (husband, employee, writer, online banterer, patient) and the places where I played them (towns where I had lived, galleries and university campuses where I had worked, pubs I had frequented). And recent personal events had made me keenly aware of the ‘geography of the body’.
Outside the train window, seen from above, a cluster of buildings: a small castle, a church, a manor house walled with yellow stone on a wooden frame. ‘Do you know what that castle is called?’ asked a fellow passenger, a young American woman. I recalled the many visits made to the place, when my wife Jennie and I lived in nearby Wolverhampton. Visiting heritage places a hobby we had discovered together; the period when we were members of both the National Trust and English Heritage; weekend freedoms; a respectable pursuit for grown-ups. Sometimes we would arrive at those buildings and there would be an event happening there with wooden swords, painted shields and a hog roast. Not really a castle, a fortified manor house, built during peacetime, the ‘castle’ form merely an echo of long-ago, nevertheless stamping its presence into the borderlands, wealth and power. Now maintained with public funds, anyone with the price of admission could walk through it and peer at its formerly-private inner spaces. “Yes, it’s called... er... wait... no, I can’t remember, sorry. It’s great though if you get a chance to visit.”
I read more of Mythogeography, the text returning to a collage-like mode, my eyes roaming the pages, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the mass of information. It seemed that this ‘mythogeography’ wasn’t an attempt to rebrand, update or improve on ‘psychogeography’, or to launch a new movement. Whoever wrote this aimed, in a generously playful way, to provide a “toolbag of ideas” for “mis-guidance”, an “invitation to practise, to share and to connect”... “connecting the diverse layers and exploiting the gaps between them as places of revelation and change” (110-116). I experienced a slightly delirious sense of there being worldsful of stuff to explore. A reference to comic books caught my eye, an interesting little passage, something about Captain Britain... a passage which I realised I had written myself. Yes, there was my name – how did that happen? Hah! A quote from my blog, obviously...
Amused, I read on a bit more. Three