Beneath the Pavement
My therapist drank in my local pub. I realised that after I accidentally drank ten pints in my local pub. I say accidentally, but it was more a mixture of social coercion, gendered expectations, genetic predisposition, self-medication, and the fact that I quite liked booze. My therapist asked me whether I was ok. ‘I’ve had ten pints,’ I responded, absurdly. He smiled. He told me to take care of myself. I remember a glut of embarrassment as I walked back to my table. My friend asked me how I knew the bloke. I lied.
My therapist was a nice man. Every week he ran me through various exercises, including breathing therapy, hypnotherapy, and cognitive behavioural therapy. He would always end the session with a general chinwag about how I was doing. It took me a few weeks, perhaps a few months, before I was man enough to talk about my emotions. Once I had started, however, I could not stop. I felt like I was talking too much, so I asked my therapist what he did for self-care. He said that, whenever the world was a bit much, he went out for a walk.
Thomas De Quincey was arguably the first writer to describe the act of aimless walking in the newly industrialised city, the first ethnographer of urban life. His best-known work, Confessions of an Opium Eater, chronicles the years he spent stumbling around London’s streets, high on opium, mapping out the chaotic distinctions of the city.
De Quincey fell into drug use, he suggests, because he was unable to afford booze. Using opium was a matter of fiscal responsibility. De Quincey often brought friends along for his walks, such as a local prostitute named Ann, someone he cherishes and mourns in equal measure. De Quincey calls himself a ‘necessary peripatetic’ and he lovingly describes Ann as a ‘fellow peripatetic’, a partner in wandering.
De Quincey claims that, in order to witness a spectacle with which his ‘sympathy was so entire’, he would hunt for London’s markets. Once there, De Quincey would chat with everyday Londoners, laughing and joking in the comfort of the crowd. De Quincey found peace of mind on the pavements, escaping ‘the anxieties that demanded all of [his] philosophy’, walking for the sake of walking, seeking liberation on the streets of Soho and Oxford Circus.
Ever since I was a teenager, friends and family and teachers and civil servants have told me that I think too much. I overthink, they all said, which made me think. People have used other terms to describe my condition – several doctors, for example, have called it anxiety.
I tried to overcome anxiety the way most people do, through trial and error. I tried drugs, legal and illegal, some of which worked a little, some of which worked a little too much. None provided long-term relief. I wanted peace of mind, a break from racing thoughts, an idea of calmness. My GP suggested therapy. I laughed.
I laughed because I did not think therapy was for people like me. Men, I mean, or at least men conditioned to project toughness. I always thought strength came in the form of silence. I admired men who did not display emotion, men who fought, physically and emotionally, against threats from the world. But I noticed a loophole in the system of masculinity. I didn’t have to tell anyone. So, within a few weeks of therapy, after a couple of chinwags and one drunken pub encounter, I started walking around the city, as a small act of self-care.
My mum says I’m over-the-top. My dad, in an always pejorative tone, says that I don’t do things by halves. My brothers say that I latch onto things and tell me not to get carried away. I tend to become interested in specific topics and spend weeks, months, or years studying that topic with no particular direction. I imagine my tendency for often arbitrary research has something to do with anxiety, but I’m not interested enough in anxiety to look that up. Regardless of the cause, the effect is bookshelves close to buckling under pressure from loads of different works about, among other things, vegetarianism, chess, Shakespeare, semiotics, London, ornithology, libraries, the history of Wales, the history of whales, and walking.
In one book, I read about the history of pedestrianism, a nineteenth-century form of competitive walking. Pedestrianism was once among the most popular spectator sports in the Western world. Thousands of fans would line the streets to watch races and tens of thousands would pack stadiums, just to watch people walk, an absurdity to our modern sentiment.
Ada Anderson was a brilliant walker. She practiced constantly, mastered the art of sleep deprivation, and perfected her strides, fuelled by a diet of oysters, corned beef, and champagne. Anderson’s manager sought to launch her US career with a 1086-kilometre race at Gilmore’s Garden, a venue that later changed its name to Madison Square Garden. But Anderson was rejected by the owner, who said: ‘The woman will never accomplish the feat and nor can any woman.’
The venue was moved to Mozart Garden in Brooklyn. Anderson completed the race in style, using short breaks to entice the audience. The details are not clear, but at one point, during a break, Anderson sat at a piano and performed a rendition of one of Verdi’s arias to the adoring crowd.
The race lasted twenty-eight days and Anderson survived on nine minutes of sleep per rest period. With half a mile to go, Anderson again sang to the crowd. She completed the final quarter mile in 2 minutes and 37 seconds, the fastest quarter mile of the entire twenty-eight days.
So I was reading about walking and I was walking. I was walking as a therapeutic tool, one that made me feel present in the world, part of the world, and apart from the world. It seemed to be working. I found that walking offered a reversion to a simpler form of existence, close to the state of nature, something that existed before the fetishisation of commodities and the commodification of everything, before the saturation of media and the pressures of self-imposed expectations. I walked slowly, taking in the landscape. I did not use my phone, not at all. I was a pedestrian, nothing more, walking for the sake of walking, trying to lose myself.
In Reflection of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, De Quincey estimates that one of the great writer-walkers, William Wordsworth, managed between 175000 and 180000 miles during his lifetime. Wordsworth, according to De Quincey, used walking as a substitute for over-indulgence in other vices, presumably a nod to opium. Walking informed Wordsworth’s creativity, ensuring his wellbeing as a person and his success as a poet.
In the Prelude, Wordsworth writes: ‘I love a public road: few sights there are/ that Please me more; such object hath had power/ O’er my imagination since the dawn/ Of childhood,’ The regimented nature of walking allowed Wordsworth to disregard the concerns of everyday life and concentrate on the self. His poetry was informed by the emotional reaction to walking, to the sights he uncovered, to the feeling of feet hitting public roads and pavements. Walking paved the way to poetry through the sensory experience, the experience of being-in-the-world.
The writer and historian of walking Rebecca Solnit says that Wordsworth would often take long rambling walks with a scribe, who took notes as Wordsworth spoke aloud. Sometimes Wordsworth spared the scribe agony and walked alone, memorising lines as he strolled. The poet possessed an exceptional memory. So exceptional, in fact, that he could walk for hours, conjuring poems in his mind, arrive home, and jot down entire full drafts from memory.
Shane O’Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College Dublin, claims in In Praise of Walking that walking vastly improves mood, clarity of thought, and creativity. And, importantly, O’Mara claims that walking connects people to urban and natural worlds, a form of connection often lost in the miasma of late modernity. The benefits depend on moving through the world with an awareness of the self in the environment, moving with purpose, moving with your senses attuned to the world’s wonders.
By the age of twenty-five, I had developed a routine. I walked whenever I noticed emerging signs of mental illness, whenever the thoughts got too relentless or too oppressive or too dark. The walk became a small source of protection. I’d notice that I was struggling, take some time, and just stroll around parts of London, starting in Ladbroke Grove or Limehouse or Angel or Archway. I’d stop, read a book, sip coffee, and I’d start walking again, spending entire days amid the pavement, letting my mind settle.
Walking is an act of privilege. Experiencing the joys beneath the pavement does not necessarily depend on the physical act of walking but is better understood as consciously moving through the world, in any direction, finding meaning in one’s environment. That does depend on access.
Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research at Norwich Medical School, emphasises the importance of access to travel for people with disabilities: ‘The disabled rights dream is for barrier-free transport, where no special provision is needed, and where, regardless of sight, hearing, mobility or other differences, the disabled person can use the same bus, tram or train.’
Despite progress, largely secured by the disability rights movement, issues around accessibility remain. Only 25% of London Underground stations are wheelchair accessible, for example. Buses and taxis offer more provisions, but access depends on personal finances, the driver, and the facilities available. The streets themselves are barriers. Cobbled paving can prevent wheelchair access, for example, and public toilets lack accessibility. Shakespeare notes that many of the changes needed to improve widespread access do not require excessive expenditure but are usually a matter of adaptation. Changes thus depend on public pressure and the will of certain government bodies and institutions, all of which are lacking.
Walking as a white man is a privilege, too. I have never been catcalled, harassed, followed, or sexually assaulted while walking. Far too many women have. Nor have I been racially abused or assaulted, subject to insults, stopped by the police for ‘random’ searches, or wrongfully arrested because I fit a description while walking. Far too many people of colour have. I have never had such experiences. And I walk a lot. I walk so much I wrote an essay about walking.
I have had a few negative experiences while walking, none of which have been due to my race, gender, or any other characteristic. One occasion stands out, mainly because it was quite grim, but also funny. Grim at the time, funny in retrospect.
I was fifteen or sixteen. It was midnight and I was walking from a friend’s house. I know it was midnight because I’d just bought a chicken donor as the kebab shop was closing.
I was walking down my road, salivating fifty metres from my childhood home. Someone riding a bike pulled up – roughly sixteen, white, shaved head – and shined a torch in my face. I smile, presuming I might know the person.
‘What you got for me?’ he said.
I looked down. I saw a knife. Or maybe a tool. It was dark and my mum told me it was rude to stare. All I remember was that it was silver and pointy and it looked like it belonged in the kitchen, or maybe the shed. I stopped smiling. I started rummaging my pockets, pulling out what remained of my change. I passed the money over.
He nodded down, shined torch on plastic, and asked what was in the bag.
‘Kebab,’ I said.
‘What kind?’
I was starving. ‘Just a kebab,’ I said, pulling the plastic bag to my body, firmly trying to indicate the kebab was off limits. The bloke head-butted me – lightly, more of a peck than a kiss – and again asked what kind of kebab.
‘Chicken-donor-with-cheese-and-chilli-sauce,’ I said, quickly, indicating that the kebab was not actually off limits. I hoped the bloke was lactose intolerant, but he licked his lips.
I laugh at the story now. I am strangely proud of it. I do not know many people who can boast that they’ve been robbed for a kebab at knife point. Still, though, at the time I was scared. I remember walking into my mum’s house, broke and kebab-less, and hearing my brother’s friends upstairs. I could not face them, so I went into the bathroom and sat in the bath for an hour, until someone knocked needing the toilet. Memories last, regardless of the humour we ascribe to them. They tend to dig some place deep in the psyche, manifesting in strange and subtle ways. I’m vegetarian these days, for example.
In younger years, Arthur Rimbaud often left home without warning and travelled across national borders, largely on foot. ‘I loved empty places, burnt orchards, faded shops, tepid drinks,’ Rimbaud wrote in Illuminations. ‘I hauled myself through stinking lanes, and, eyes shut, gave myself up to the sun, god of fire.’ After ceasing to write poetry at the tender age of twenty-one – he was the most enfant of all the enfant terribles – Rimbaud made a living in various absurd ways: circus cashier, foreman, mercenary.
In 1885, fancying another change in career direction, Rimbaud decide to become an arms dealer. He took a caravan full of weaponry to Choa in Abyssinia to sell to King Menelik. Rimbaud walked most of the journey, in front of the caravan, stumbling through arid deserts. After two months of travel, Rimbaud arrived in Choa and the King was nowhere to be found. Apparently, Rimbaud simply turned around and walked away.
Rimbaud, the lover of walking, developed cancer in the knee. Amputation was deemed necessary. The surgeon cut just above the knee and the wound seemed to heal correctly. Rimbaud wrote to his sister, not long after the op: ‘I’ve ordered a wooden leg. It only weighs two kilos, it’ll be ready in eight days. I’ll try to walk.’
Rimbaud continued to walk after the op, but soon found himself back in hospital. Doctors gave him weeks, months at best. Nobody told the poet-cum-arms-dealer the news. Dying, but unaware of impending death, Rimbaud wrote a note: ‘I am awaiting the artificial leg…I’m in a hurry to get out of here.’ He constantly talked about the artificial leg in his final days. He apparently hallucinated on his death bed and dreamed of walking.
Rimbaud left the bourgeois world behind, the poetry world behind, the entire world behind. He walked away from everything and towards nothing. He was precocious, melancholic, and profoundly modern. He never seemed particularly proud of his poetry, nor any of his other trades, but he did seem proud of his walking. ‘I’m a pedestrian,’ Rimbaud once wrote. ‘Nothing more.’
Emma Sharp was a professional pedestrian, despite no formal training. She was a working-class Londoner, though, and she considered herself pretty resilient. Sharp was the first woman to complete the Barclay Challenge – 1000 miles in 1000 hours – despite critics, including her husband, claiming it was too difficult for a woman.
During the journey, Sharp’s food was drugged, the audience threw burning embers at her feet, and people tried to trip her on several occasions. She carried a pistol to warn off potential attackers – she supposedly fired more than twenty warning shots – and she just kept walking.
To their astonishment, 25,000 people watched her cross the finish line. Pedestrianism was a sport for gamblers and reports suggest that Sharp was the only townsperson to bet on herself. She finished the race, pistol assumedly in hand, and netted herself a comfortable fortune.
I was not a pedestrian, but I had further developed my routine, which proved broadly successful for a few years. And then I made a mistake. I introduced the pub. The predictable occurred. My walks became pub crawls. And then I stopped crawling. The original idea of spending rare days I had to myself floating around London, clearing my head, became days spent in pubs. I would read entire novels, drink nine or ten pints, and stumble to the closest Underground station.
Drinking is not conducive to mental liberation – it does, unfortunately, make everything worse. After four or five pub crawls, and none of the previous benefits I used to experience, I decided to implement some rules. I did not want to slip back into old routines, old habits. On walking days, I decided, I was not allowed to touch booze before four o’clock and I could not drink more than four pints. I broke those rules a few times, so I instituted a policy of not drinking, a rule that I’ve also broken, only twice.
The Situationists stemmed from anti-authoritarian Marxism and the avant-garde, mainly Dadaism and Surrealism, the ideological offspring of Rimbaud. Like the Frankfurt School, the Situationists sought to extend Marxist critique into the realm of culture. They critiqued the transference of leisure time into consumption, the pervasion of the image, and the extension of commodity fetishism into the everyday.
The most famous Situationist, Guy Debord, developed the notion of the Spectacle. The Spectacle is the banalised, image-driven mass media that accompanies much of late capitalism. It is the image that has superseded the thing itself, rendering the image valueless. Such images, pushed through new and old media, intrude on social settings and personal associations, encroaching on the everyday, destroying ‘real life’.
Situationists sought to counter the Spectacle by championing the return to ‘real life’ situations, borrowing from Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘moments’. The Situationists argue that the individual should draw the abstract back to the personal, reawaken authentic desires, and revolutionise the everyday. One of the primary tools for revolutionising the everyday is the act of walking, the act of experiencing one’s environment as one moves through the streets.
They called it psychogeography, though they were not the first to use the term. Psychogeography is the act of walking as negation, walking against the Spectacle, walking against the banal. It is theory applied in practice, moving through the world as praxis, finding meaning in the streets, an act essentially phenomenological, an act of being-in-the-world.
Finding meaning on the streets, amid the buildings, and beneath the pavement depends only on the knowledge that moving through the world is meaningful. It is a distinct advantage to have no understanding of architecture. You do not want to turn the objective – the curve of a particularly beguiling roof, for example – into the subjective, nor do you want to internalise supposed objectivity. No building, no street sign, no lamppost, no roof is objectively meaningful. It depends on interpretation. You ascribe meaning. You aim to get lost, to focus on nothing in particular but anything you deem meaningful. The act of walking as such helps to clear the mind and liberate your thoughts. Psychogeography thus understood is critical theory’s answer to mindfulness, an immersive act of the present, theoretically defined.
Virginia Woolf walked through London in search of a pencil, as detailed in her essay ‘Street Haunting’. Woolf was drawn to second-hand bookshops where she would sift through piles of books trying to find something interesting. Searching through stacks, Woolf claims, allows the reader to ‘rub up against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world’. The joy of reading random books is the complete mystery of entering into an arrangement with no pre-conceived notions, no influence from the pernicious world of gossip and book clubs and criticism.
I have a small bit of advice: books improve almost any situation, including walking. I learnt to skip pubs and visit bookshops, finding little havens en route. You can start your walk at any bookshop, pick a book at random, and let the wandering begin, stopping on occasion to read your new purchase. More advice: pick a book that calls to you, without too much forethought. Perhaps something horrific is happening in the world, as tends to be the case, and a work of non-fiction calls from the shelf. Perhaps someone else in the shop is taking about a novel they’ve recently loved or hated, an authentic recommendation because you have no allegiance to that person’s taste. Judge books by their covers. Try something dull or colourful, dependent on mood. Buy seven poetry pamphlets. Read in bulk. If the choice does not come to you, ask the bookseller. Tell them you’ve had a shit week. Tell the truth because booksellers, unlike librarians, are not judgmental. Booksellers are lovely, not because they’re inherently lovely, but because unlike almost everyone else, they don’t hate their jobs.
The streets of Paris in 1968 witnessed the most intellectual revolt of the modern era, influenced by the thoughts, theories, and words of Rousseau, Rimbaud, the Frankfurt School, and many others. The dominant intellectual influence, however, were the Situationists. Signs and placards and graffiti graced Parisian streets, parroting Situationist slogans. Some slogans highlighted ideals of revolutionising the everyday, others emphasised the importance of meaningful situations.
The Situationist writer René Viénet was responsible for arguably the world’s most poetic and profound graffiti, found on the streets of Paris in May 1968, literally adding meaning to the walls and the buildings. The most beautiful example borrows a phrase from student activist Bernard Cousin. The words exemplified the need to subvert society towards aimlessness, allowing individuals to form new connections with environments and find meaning in ‘real life’ situations. The graffiti read: ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach.’
Last year, I noticed the emerging signs, but I didn’t act. I was working late, drinking heavily, relying on old habits. Despite years of difficult lessons, I still convince myself I can crack on, push through. Despite knowing better, I still push myself that little bit further, balancing on the edge of breaking point. And then something breaks.
The manifestations of mental illness shatter my sense of self. They make me feel unhuman. It’s strange because I know that walking alleviates some of the strains, yet I still struggle to walk during acute moments. But I remember my first walk after days stuck inside. It was short, maybe thirty minutes around the area in which I’d grown up, an area I walked around when I was struggling at seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-five.
I walked down streets close to my mum’s house, around housing estates and passed my primary school. I walked up to a residential area that had a lake, which has been known to house small turtles. There were no turtles, but I wandered around, looking up at the towering buildings, glancing at the trees, focussing on my feet. I let my thoughts breathe, the dark and delusional making slightly more sense in their liberated form, disorder finding order, chaos moving towards calm. I walked down my road, the very same road I once lost a kebab at knife point, and I focussed on each foot hitting the pavement, immersing myself in the pavement, finding meaning beneath the pavement. It is not a solution, not a cure, but the act of consciously moving through the world, the act of purposeful walking, always seems to give me back my sense of self. It always makes me feel profoundly human.