What I do when I walk

BEFORE I BEGAN TO WALK, to walk in the way I do now, I had twenty years writing plays for the theatre. I did other things, of course – toured with shows, cleaned libraries, cut grass on council estates, taught in a prison, co-ordinated a community publishers, taught Symbolist Theatre to undergraduates, organised Peoples’ Fairs and helped collect food for the families of striking South Wales miners – but mostly I wrote, co-wrote or devised plays (over a hundred of them).

It was a privileged profession and I am still involved. When it goes right (only ever thanks to collaborations with colleagues far more talented than me), well, it’s hard to decently describe the intense experience of those special times: sitting in the middle of five hundred people who are responding to your dramaturgical caresses as you take them through the introductions, foreplays, revelations and climaxes of terrible returns, unforgivable surrenders and infatuations with monsters. When the to-and-fro between audience and stage, gesture followed by response, followed by look, followed by laughter, a gasp spreading across thirty rows of spectators, reaches a finale and the audience can be held (and this is only when it really works, right?) bursting to shout and cheer… and finally the flood is released. Wow.

By now around 3 million people have been to see the plays I have worked on. I have been to see them performed in theatres in Munich, Warsaw, Shanghai, Krakow and St Petersburg, in smart stadttheaters and in miners’ welfare halls. I would have to be a miserable man to pretend I have not had a blessed and happy working life, and the rest of it has been pretty fab too; serial relationships finally blossoming into twenty years of togetherness and a daughter and son. Part of the fun has been living such a life that most of my friends have no idea what I have done. I rather like not being wholly known or understood. Any transitory heartbreak along these shadowy ways has been down to my own clumsiness. Major tragedies have mostly been avoided, though I will have to face some dark memories on my walk with you; we have sat with our children in ambulances and in hospital wards a few times, but somehow and so far we got away unscathed each time. I have often been angry at the injustices done to others, but I have never had anything to complain about on my own account; and even in the midst of some bitter and occasionally violent political struggles, with a couple of very scary moments along the way, there has always been the joy of comradeship in a shared endeavour (and we won a lot of the struggles too).

It may seem odd, then, that I see walking not as a retirement from political struggle or from the sensual pleasures of entertainment, but as a further intensifying of both.

When I walk I draw upon layers of understanding that I have had to gather together in order to shape performances or to make political arguments; I am sensitive to the ways that the land and the cities are managed, owned, controlled and exploited. I am sensitive to the flows of power: information, energy, deference. I am also aware of contradictions in these places; I look out for those pressures that can, unplanned, open up temporarily free spaces, holey spaces, hubs where uncontained overlaps or the torque of bearing down in one place tears open a useful hole in another: these are places where, until we can at last all be free, we might for a while find space to act as we wish…

I would not want to pretend that there is any one right way to walk. The walking I propose here strides along beside all sorts of other walkings: walking to fetch water, rambling and hiking, walking for health, the walk of hunters, the walk of a crab across the floor of a rockpool, the walk to work and school and shops, lovers walking hand in hand. Neither does the walking I present here take only one form. You are free to use the ideas and experiences here and turn them into whatever kind of walking you wish: romantic, subversive, nosey, convivial, meditational, whatever. I like multiplicity and I think there may be some good in it – so, as long as your walking does not exclude the walking of others, I will be chuffed to think you are using any tactics or ideas here. At the same time I am giving myself the same privilege in the pages that follow: to walk the walk I want to walk and to evangelise about its qualities.

Along the way I will find it hard not to be sensitive to emblems and symbols; I know how they are used by playwrights and I use that ‘insider’ knowledge to guess myself inside the codes and secret languages of those who seek to influence. I know the secret meanings of the logos of Shell, Tate & Lyle, Magnox and the Ordnance Survey and I wonder at the mindset of companies that appropriate images of spirituality and what exactly it might be that they are throwing down a gauntlet to. To nail my symbolic colours to the mast, I am against the broad arrow of government and for the creative breath of the Awen:

The first is a heraldic steal from the Sidney family coat of arms, used to represent the authority and ownership of the British state (that is why prisoners once had arrows on their uniforms, because their uniforms were state property). The second is a symbol that turns up (appears or reappears, according to your sympathies, I am happy with its meaning either way) during the nineteenth century ‘Celtic Revival’ as a representation of both creative inspiration and the ‘breath’ that brings the universe into being.

By walking I have not denied myself the physical pleasures of performance. However, there is a more humbling aspect to walking; for it is not the walker, but the terrain, natural and built, that mostly makes the walk. The walker takes a far more powerful and experienced lover than any audience. Sun, tropical storms, traffic, snow, mists; the terrain is not your backdrop, but seizes the action as its author and agonist. The city jabs you in both eyes with its yawning inequalities pushed so close together; a sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim’s Progress.

It is not all injustices and passions, though. Even more intense for a walker can be a joy in the textures of things. I place my fingertips on an eroded red sandstone sculpture of a horse, a little of the stone comes away and in my palm I hold a 300-million-year-old desert. I run the back of my hand over a rusting name plaque and what I feel missing is the industry it once advertised; dropped so suddenly its owners had no time to take the signs down. As letters fall from old adverts and warning signs, they make a poetry for those who can recognise transformation: DANGER into ANGER. Anyone who comes to enjoy the sublime scariness of modern ruins (and you don’t need to go to university to learn this stuff, any halfway decent horror film will teach you) can take back in pleasure some part of the surplus value used to build these places.

As well as ruins I have gone in search of micro-worlds, green routes in the city, signs of power and apocalypse, things around the fringes of heritage sites, phrases picked arbitrarily from books, the tops and subterranean parts of buildings, wormholes, North, 100-year-old oak trees, vertigo and childhood holiday memories. A walk might be helped or provoked by a theme, a quest, a burden, less often a destination. But I try to always be ready to change tack if the terrain offers a new and better theme.

Some very serious people will think that my walking is escapist (sometimes I wonder if they might be right), but most of the time it feels complex to me. It feels like a fight inside the fabrics of society for access to all those things that overdeveloped economies circulate at speeds just beyond our grasp: inner life, the wild absurdities of our unique and subjective feelings, beautiful common treasures, uncostable pleasures, conviviality, an ethics of strangerhood and nomadic thinking. Walking is pedestrian. Its pace disrupts things and makes them strange; like playing vinyl at the wrong speed. What otherwise flashes by, becomes readable, touchable, loveable, available. However, The Spectacle is not stupid; it has long been ready for such old-fashioned radicalisms, laying down huge and sugary sloughs of wholesomeness and holiness for us to founder in…. The Spectacle? Yes, the enemy of the sensitised walker (and of much more than that). And what is it? How does it smell? What does it look like? At what address can we find its headquarters?

The Spectacle is the growing Nothing in the lifeblood of society. It does not have a headquarters. With the advent of mass media in the twentieth century it manifested itself first as the dominance of images over things (“sell the sizzle not the sausage” as they said in 1950s TV advertising); since the coming of digital technology that virtualisation of life has increased and spread exponentially; what globalisation globalises is the Spectacle, the dominance of representations over what they represent. The Credit Crunch was caused by a crisis of intoxicated numbers not an overproduction of things. This is not to say that things are no longer produced; of course they are. But rather that it is the production of numbers and images that predominates. The vacuum left by things’ fall from power sucks in our invisible private worlds and makes profits from them. We, the users, are the unpaid producers of vacuum-conglomerates like Facebook and Twitter: by our own labour we turn our love, opinions, intimacies, humour, lusts and family snaps into commodities. In 1990 I saw the new poor of post-Communist Eastern Europe literally selling their own underwear by the...