Phil Smith of Wrights& Sites' fame is not the first to walk in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald, whose The Rings of Saturn is an account a walk round Suffolk 20 years ago. What is remarkable is that Phil's own walk was quite as extraordinary as Sebald's and that he matches Sebald's erudition, originality and humour swathe for swathe. On one level On Walking... describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay, Halesworth and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails. On a second level it sets out a kind < em>of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and the Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it. Finally, on a third level, On Walking... is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.
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
