The Best Australian Essays 2015 (16 page)

It would be nice to make some theoretical claim here (many have) that meandering walks represent the creative process. But you could walk forever and not end up with words on a page. That doesn't seem so terrible to me. I listen to politicians engage in rhetoric, semantics and blatant lies. I attempt to use language to describe various concerns, and fall into apocalyptic cliché. My dad, sitting in a home losing words by the day, is yet another reminder of the ways in which language can fail us. It is images I turn to now: a hundred-year-old photo of a man standing atop a pile of bison corpses; Pacific Islanders trying to sweep the rising sea from their homes; the Adelaide Hills on fire.

Not long ago, an article from the
Washington Post
described American psychologist Martin Seligman's experiments of 1967. ‘He put a dog into a box with two chambers divided by a barrier that could be jumped over. When one chamber became electrified, the dog ran around frantically, finally scrambling over the barrier to escape the shock. In later trials, evading the shock becomes easier and easier for the animal until it would just stand next to the barrier, waiting to jump. But the outcome is much more grim if a dog first learns that electric shocks are uncontrollable and unavoidable. If animals were repeatedly shocked while tied up beforehand, then later placed in the same box free to roam, most didn't jump the barrier. Instead, they lay down while whining and taking the jolt. Subsequent trials showcased the animal's same passive, defeatist response.'
⁴
These experiments seem horrendous to me, and the lesson obvious: helplessness can be learned. The findings, when published, went on to inform CIA interrogation techniques.

*

So: walking. We walk to get to one place from another, but in doing so we insist that what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present. They bond us to place, to people. Walking opens our hearts. Thoughts stop swirling in tight circles. They loosen up. Meander. Slow down.

My walks are usually contained and urban, but that is not always the case, and more physically challenging treks take on a different cast. The undertow of history exerts its subtle force on city walks but is more constant in older landscapes. The second day of the Inca Trail in Peru took us over two passes 4000 metres high, a series of extreme ascents and descents. The first was called Dead Woman's Pass: something to do with the silhouettes the mountains form, though it felt more ominous than that. When I got to an Incan ruin after about nine hours of this and saw there was another hour to go before we reached our camp, I cried and swore. (‘I loved it when you said, “Fuck this for a joke,”' an Irishwoman in our group enthused.) The pain quickly receded, and what I remember now are vertical gardens hanging from sheer cliffs, cloud forests, humming birds so tiny that at first I thought they were colourful bumblebees, orchids growing between the cracks of stones in abandoned ruins, and terraces, breathtaking in their scale, stepping their way down the Andes.

At first, ruins seem picturesque, but the more of them you walk over the more the specific details grab you: you find yourself wondering how massive granite boulders were carved so particularly. We asked, and were told that cold water was poured into natural fissures when the boulders were hot from sitting in the sun. This would cause the cracks to widen so that wedges could be inserted, and over time the rocks would split. How long would it take to build a city in this fashion?

While I walked leadenly through the rain, porters sprinted past me. I imagined the young messengers who ran relays across what are now several countries, barefoot. I asked our guide if the Incas had a written language. He became frustrated as he answered me, because the ways in which his ancestors communicated were not recognised as language. He told me that messengers carried ‘talking knots', or string arranged like a necklace with knotted strands that look – to a modern eye – like macramé. The knots don't relate directly to spoken words, but the Spanish were quick to ban them on the grounds they could not interpret them. The Incas could, in effect, talk about them behind their backs.

Then there was Machu Picchu. I had been so focused on the journey, on simply breathing at high altitude, that the destination quite took my breath away. As I stood at the Sun Gate and looked down upon it, a dozen stories came to life: tales of lost cities, Tintin's
Prisoners of the Sun
(1949) brought to life. Grey stone buildings and terraces sat against vivid green jungle in the clefts of several mountains. The precision of the layout reflected sophisticated agricultural and irrigation systems, nuanced astrological understandings. Houses were a mix of the humble and the grand, alongside temples dedicated to the sun, the moon, and the condor. It was a shock to realise that, despite such impeccable planning, the city was inhabited for only a century before emptying out. This was not because the remote Machu Picchu was discovered, nor because it was attacked. It was smallpox – introduced by the Spanish – which destroyed much of the population. The end, when it came, was swift.

On our last day in Peru, we walked around Saqsaywaman, a ruined settlement above Cusco. The remaining boulders had proved too heavy for colonists to use for other purposes. Monumental, they formed the base of walls that jutted this way and that for hundreds of metres. Some said the zigzag represented lightning bolts, others that the walls were stylised puma's teeth. I walked across a plain to the hill opposite to decide for myself. As I stood there, I tried not to think of the Andean condors we saw at an animal rescue centre earlier that day, nor the de-clawed pumas. Both Peruvian national symbols, they are now endangered. The walls, I decided, were lightning bolts, but it was hard to get a proper perspective.

As you move through history, history moves into you, more surely than if you read it. Writers mark the page, but walkers mark the earth, and the earth in turn marks us. In Incan constellations, animals are found in the negative space, the black between the stars. When the Incas first saw the Spanish, they believed they were part human and part animal because they arrived on horseback; man and horse were considered one creature. I carry these ideas with me: that there is meaning in the space between, that we and the creatures that carry us are one.

*

The writer Ray Bradbury lived in Los Angeles and walked its streets for sixty-eight years without driving a car, fantastically obstinate in a city that is a monument to the oil industry. But Los Angeles is not alone in its abandonment of human scale. It is New York that is the odd city out, New York that has invited people to walk its streets for hundreds of years. Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville not only walked New York's streets, they also wrote about them, as many have done since – as I am trying to do. More recently, William B. Helmreich, a 68-year-old professor of sociology at CUNY, walked almost every street in New York City: 120,000 blocks, or about 6000 miles.
⁵

In Teju Cole's first novel,
Open City
, walking the streets of New York appears, at first, to be an expression of engagement and curiosity for Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist who wants to embrace his new home. Rousseau-like, Julius's walks lead to a series of pronouncements and observations: on the flocking of birds, on failed relationships, on race, on class, and on history. But his digressions take on a bitter edge. Random observations and the rambling narrative structure that sustain them become attempts to erase the past, a past that includes a mistreatment of women. A meditation on gender is not where I intended to end up, but it is certainly one of the places Cole does. Sometimes there seems to be no way of escaping it even when all you want to do is walk, or read about walking. It was when doing the latter that I noticed this casual aside from
The Art of Wandering
, that the walker ‘remains, despite notable exceptions, predominantly male'.
⁶

I compare this bald statement with Rebecca Solnit's exploration in
Wanderlust
of the ways in which women are discouraged from walking, the oft-cited concerns for safety that are motivated by a desire for control. She goes on to posit that, ‘Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public.' As I read her, I have a memory of a midnight walk one hot summer night, pacing down the middle of Nicholson Street, arms flung wide for no reason other than joy at being alive, the freedom of walking without scrutiny.

Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head, so I argue with Merlin Coverley, the author of that aside. I imagine telling him about Australia's Sorrel Wilby, who trekked through the Himalayas in 1991, wrote about that experience, and who has been walking ever since; of Lisa Dempster's 1200-kilometre walk through Japan and her book,
Neon Pilgrim
(2009). I remind him of Robyn Davidson's extraordinary 3000-kilometre pilgrimage through Australia's deserts, enshrined in
Tracks
(1980), of Cheryl Strayed's hike from Mexico to Canada, the subject of her bestseller,
Wild
(2012). Coverley, I say, do you not know of Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre? ‘I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.' Of Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
, whose heroine Elizabeth Bennet walks everywhere, often unescorted, much to everyone's consternation? ‘I do not wish to avoid the walk,' she insists. ‘The distance is nothing when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.'

My preoccupations collide in unexpected ways when I return from such a walk, and listen to a podcast on philosophy and extinction. In it the Australian environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren quotes a line from the feminist theorist Donna Haraway: ‘We need to “stay with the trouble”.'
⁷

Walkers stay with the trouble. The Situationists called their walks
dérives
to distinguish between the unconscious act of strolling and their more politically charged way of moving through Parisian streets. Women march to reclaim the night. Between 1863 and 1881, William Barak, an elder of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woiwurrung people, walked the 60 kilometres from the Coranderrk Estate to the steps of Parliament House some three times: to call for his people be paid for their labour; to seek the right for his people to have their own community; to insist on their freedom to keep their children within that community. A hundred years later, during the civil rights marches, African Americans attempted the 54-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery on three occasions, despite the brutality of the beatings that battered down upon them. Here in New York, fifty years on, people are walking the streets, crossing the bridges, outraged by the fact policeman Daniel Pantaleo was not to stand trial for the choking of African American Eric Garner. ‘I can't breathe,' Garner had gasped. ‘I can't breathe.'

There is so much trouble to stay with. Breathing becomes harder and harder. Can we stay with the trouble? Will the distance mean nothing if we have a motive? Can we, like Thoreau, make every walk a ‘crusade', a reclamation of our cities, our lives, our land, our planet?

I think of the Horseshoe Crabs once more and come to realise that my attachment to them isn't entirely random. In their plight I recognise our own. It is not just the crabs being left to float aimlessly in ruined seas. It is not just the dogs we live with, walk with, experiment upon, left to whine, to take the jolt. The knowledge of our undoing flickers, as if in the periphery of our vision, and such a flicker comes to me unbidden. I am in Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory, driving (not walking, it's too hot) back to the campsite at South Alligator after dark. There is no moon. Dingoes race along the road's embankment and keep pace, momentarily, with the car. They are powerful and pale. Wild. Endangered. Their paws move steadily over the red earth. Small fires lick all around us – it is burn-off time – and the flames light the dingoes' way through this darkest of nights.

Notes

1.
Elizabeth Weil, ‘The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years',
New York Times
, 25 September 2014.

2.
Rebecca Solnit,
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
, Penguin Books, 2001.

3.
‘Extinction: A Matter of Life and Death?',
The Philosopher's Zone
, ABC Radio, 21 November 2014.

4.
Meeri Kim, ‘Why Are Some Depressed, Others Resilient? Scientists Home in One Part of the Brain',
Washington Post
, 5 June 2014.

5.
William B. Helmreich,
The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City
, Princeton University Press, 2013.

6.
Merlin Coverley,
The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker
, Old Castle Books, 2012.

7.
‘Extinction: A Matter of Life and Death?',
The Philosopher's Zone
, ABC Radio, 21 November 2014.

Australian Book Review

Re-reading the Famous Five and Biggles

Jeff Sparrow

After he suffered a heart attack in Darlinghurst, doctors thought Robert Dessaix would die. Instead, he emerged from hospital with a book,
What Days Are For
, a bittersweet rumination about how one assesses a life as it draws to a close.

Always a writerly writer, Dessaix contemplates his mortality via his wide and eclectic reading: the great religious traditions (which he generally assesses aesthetically), Gogol, Larkin, Turgenev and Dr Johnson. And then comes this: ‘Enid Blyton … shaped me in a way no other writer or book ever did.'

Sorry? Blyton? That Enid Blyton? The Famous Five? The Magic Faraway Tree? Noddy?

Enid Mary Blyton sold perhaps 600 million copies of her stories for children, mostly in the days before blockbuster movie tie-ins. Plenty of people have read her. But few would announce, as Dessaix does, that that ‘Enid Blyton … moulded my day-to-day imagination in a more profound way than either Shakespeare or Gogol'.

As it happened, Dessaix's reflection on Blyton resonated with me because, just before reading
What Days Are For
, I'd been browsing a junk shop and found a job lot of books by Captain W.E. Johns, whose Biggles series I'd devoured as a child.

An almost exact contemporary of Blyton, Johns has suffered as she has. Like Blyton, he was remarkably prolific, pumping out some 160 books; like her, he sold by the trailer-load. Yet despite that popularity, in recent years he's become reduced – perhaps even more than Blyton – to little more than a punchline, with Biggles remembered merely as an aggregation of preposterous verbal tics (‘By Jove, Bertie!').

Dessaix acknowledges the obvious black marks against the Famous Five: the repetition, the clunky writing, the undertones of racial and class prejudice. But he continues: ‘I forgive them their peccadilloes. I refuse to watch the cruel spoofs on their adventures, too – what are they called?
Five Go Mad in Dorset
,
Five Go Mad on Mescalin
and so on. The Famous Five were my friends.'

I think I bought the (surprisingly expensive) Johns titles for the same reason. When I saw the books in the shop, the lurid dust jackets were instantly familiar. I recalled how much time I'd spent with Biggles as a kid; I wanted to meet him again.

Suffice to say that some acquaintances are best not renewed. Johns – how to say this kindly? – is not a great writer.

He can't do dialogue (and let's move quickly past Biggles' tendency to the terse ejaculation). Nor can he do character. The gaggle of chums who support Biggles through his various exploits are allocated extravagant marks of differentiation – Bertie's a toff; Ginger's a naïve teen and so on – but these ostentatious distinctions only accentuate their essential interchangeability. The Biggles mysteries are never particularly mysterious; the later books, in particular, manifest all the racism you'd expect from an Empire loyalist writing in the sour era of British decline.

Moreover, reading as an adult, I realised that as a kid I'd entirely missed the most impressive aspects of the books: the genuinely frightening depiction of Great War aerial combat. Johns himself had been a fighter pilot in an era in which the average life expectancy of a new aviator was a matter of weeks. The recruits were usually in their teens. Many had never driven a car before and were in the air with only the briefest training; often they died without seeing the plane that shot them down.

In the early stories, we're told of Biggles' high-strung nervous laugh: he doesn't, he says, expect to live long. At one point, his commanding officer notes Biggles drinking heavily and comments that he'll probably be killed soon. Of course, back then I didn't recognise Biggles as traumatised. No, what I liked was the adventures, precisely the aspects of the books that now seem unreadably formulaic.

In his study
Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature
, David Rudd identifies a similar phenomenon in respect of Blyton. It is, he says, common for children to lose themselves in Blyton's books – and then just as suddenly abandon them. If they re-read the stories later, the experience is not only disappointing but positively mystifying.

Of his own return back to the Famous Five books he'd once loved, Rudd writes: ‘I found the magic lacking, while the simple vocabulary and the old-fashioned and often embarrassing attitudes obtruded woefully … We adults are left with empty words, whereas our children, like millions of others, are transported.'

Rudd makes a simple but persuasive argument – namely, that children read in a quite different way to adults.

Blyton's power comes from the creation of a world foreign to our own, a place in which different rules apply. The anachronisms that repel adults – especially Blyton's peculiar and much parodied vocabulary (‘lashings of ginger beer') – help create that estrangement, inducting readers into a realm in which they can safely explore identities and experiences that would otherwise be threatening. The condemnations of Blyton for not providing a realistic representation of English life entirely miss the point.

‘Those that read and enjoy the fantasy,' says Rudd, ‘… are doing so in a way that is, by definition, not realistic: the enjoyment depends on readers engaging in the play of the text, thus making it their own.'

Johns' stories operate in the same way. Like most protagonists in books for young people, Biggles and his pals are neither quite adults nor quite children. They're boy-men, who adventure like grown-ups while lacking all the usual signifiers (homes, families, interior lives, etc.) of adulthood. Biggles books often come with a glossary of terms, a list of aviation lingo that the reader must learn, much like a traveller preparing to venture into strange lands.

No child reads Biggles as realism: on the contrary, the dated language, the peculiar settings and attitude are accepted as a necessary estrangement, like the magic in Harry Potter.

‘Much children's reading,' argues Rudd, ‘… falls outside the way that many adults conceive it; neither slavish identification, passive consumption nor ideological servitude. Basically, children are out to maximise their pleasure, by personalising it, revisiting favourite moments.'

That's precisely what Dessaix says, too. He came, he says, to the Famous Five at the right age; he seems never to have gone back. What did he learn from them?

He notes their neighbour on Kirrin Island, ‘the sulky loner Martin, who has no parents, is artistic and apt to sob, just like me, really, which is, we're told, a feeble thing for a man to do. Men, as we know, are meant to enjoy doing things, not appreciating things of beauty for their own sake … Martin's a boy, but isn't like that at all. Martin made quite an impression on me.'

That's scarcely the canonical reading of Blyton, generally upheld (by supporters and detractors alike) as the zenith of a twee Englishness. But it neatly illustrates Rudd's point about the freedom children can find in reading.

None of this concedes anything to the tedious Little Englanders (or their even more ghastly antipodean equivalents) who hail Blyton's gollywogs as emblematic of Britain's vanished greatness. Of course teachers and parents and librarians should use passages about ‘gypsies' for discussions about prejudice and bigotry. Of course they should! What's the point of a book if you don't talk about it?

Nor should we fret particularly about editions rewritten to remove the more offensive passages. Rudd notes that Blyton herself, a writer who banged out 10,000 words daily, regularly recycled her stories, reshaping them to suit the changing mores. Johns did the same – Sopwith Camels became Spitfires, while later versions of the Great War stories replaced the whisky with which Biggles and his friends sedated themselves with more wholesome lemonade.

Yet Dessaix's example might serve to assuage the perennial anxiety about what kids read or watch or (increasingly) play. He attributes his love of travel to ‘the Famous Five, the first explorers I ever knew'. Blyton's Kirrin Island is, he says, the prototype of the places and tongues he has subsequently investigated, both in life and in fiction. ‘In the end, what we're all doing, we inventors of lands and languages, is refusing to accept the world as we've found it. We are utopians.'

The Famous Five as a gateway to Utopia? Why not? People have got there from stranger places.

The Guardian