Walking and not-walking
Gradually the Day of Access project is expanding. The aims are that people whose lives are constrained can gain creative access to wild nature – with an awareness that this will benefit the whole of culture.
The ideas include minor walks, recuperative walking, foraging, and ways to walk-without-walking, such as the proxy walk. They
Some of this recent work is supported by Paths for All, whose approach is focussed on the social healing that walking together makes possible. Rather than physical exercise and distances covered, they understand how walks encourage acts of solidarity and empathy, helping people feel less isolated and recover a sense of belonging.
paths – & gates – show how
we’re made to be together
Paths for All taught me to value the walk someone makes across their living-room, just to take in the view from their window, if that’s all they can manage.
From their walking groups I also learnt that whenever people make regular walks together in a place, they also tend to take care of the landscape – improving, planting trees, adding benches, renewing paths, adding signs, pedestrianizing.
I’ve been devising, adapting, and modelling a series of concepts and forms that relate to walking and not-walking. The unprecedented rise in disability that Covid has inflicted – and will continue to, given an estimated 10% of people who are infected go on to develop Long Covid – makes it a priority to help the millions of people who experience not-walking.
I adopted the term not-walking to describe the in-between experiences that are imposed by chronic fatigue and post-exertional malaise, where walks are constrained and walking too far – not very far at all – leads to relapse. I have in mind someone who may have the ability to reach their kitchen, garden, or a fragment of the world, but who's walking will never amount to what is commonly known as ‘a walk’.
When it first happens the experience of not-walking is profound and shocking. That shock never leaves, but one adapts, or wraps it in a blanket. Not-walking affects the body, obviously, but it also makes the act of changing one’s life a challenge. Havi Carel says: ‘It is not only physical possibility that suffers in the hands of illness. It is ways of being and being with that suffer’. The chronically ill know how essential walking is to being with, and what they lost, in terms of impetus and agency, when they fell into the status of a not-walker. This post is about acts of solidarity that may help to heal that loss.
Window poets
Someone may be resting most of the day with a single window view.
ill, after VW
the clouds
are not
the same
clouds then
these clouds
are wrong
Some of the most refulgent writings on chronic illness are by the artist Marion Michell, who has severe ME. Her texts describe a microtonal world: “One day this summer, when too unwell to step outside, I scooped a little air through an open window, surprised at its warmth. It was as if I'd bridged a greater distance than an arm's length. Nowadays, so little can feel so much.”
“Garden out of reach today, but could watch the feasting frenzies of four rose-ringed parakeets around my bird feeding station. I like it best when they alight, for an instant gravely vertical: wings wide, bellies and throats exposed, as if offering their colourfast glory to the arrow of my eye.”
They remind me of one of my favourite haiku poets, Shiki, who wrote thousands of poems from his bed, describing his view and small garden.
Shiki’s journey
“today’s so warm
I should clean your room?”
“aye, OK Mum”
she lays a bed out
in the living room
“through you go son”
on all fours
those few yards
are 5,000 miles
my left leg’s limp
from pain
so I put a foot-
pillow under
my knee and drag
my body bit-
by bit over
the dangerous floor
without any trouble
let myself down
on the futon
feet to the sliding
door and garden
head pillowed north
now Mum’s in
a dwam standing
broom in hand
mumbling “is
that the crowd
I hear at the
athletics in Ueno?”
AF, after Shiki, My Illness, from an original translation by Masako Hira
Proxy walks
A bed isn’t made for a voyage. If I’m unable to walk across a glen, or reach the end of the street, how do I envisage change? Is there someone who would walk for me? Would that help?
One of the frustrations for the not-walker is how to get an onion, garlic paste, almond milk, or post a letter, when the cupboard’s empty and the corner shop and post box are 100m too far to reach.
When the network of the walked world no longer connects, then they need someone to walk for them. The experience of those with chronic illness is that friends peel off, it's difficult to ask for help, and many people don't grasp the limits someone with ME or Long Covid is living with.
This new project takes walking-for others and not-walking and translates them into an art project: the proxy walk.
The idea is simple: someone gifts a walk in a landscape for someone who can’t, and they both describe a place. Their descriptions are a collaborative text combining memory and sensory impressions.
The focus of Day of Access is offering entry to wild places for those who live with chronic fatigue, pain, or other constraints. With the proxy walk those constraints are too severe for the ill person to elude, except using memory, imagination, and solidarity.
The Day of Access project began as a way of sharing my experience using Landrovers to drive into wild landscapes. You can read about the first event here. In terms of the forthcoming program of events, in some cases I’m now too disabled to take part. Long Covid changed the project when it changed my life. That means that, rather than being a place-aware guide, I'm organising events at which others walk for me.
Again, think of all those people who now have Long Covid. If you know one then offer to do a weekday shop for them, and gift them a Sunday proxy walk.
Proxy walkers
As with all good ideas, proxy walks already exist.
Emma, from Paths for All, told me a nurse in a Perthshire care home was already making walks for residents, going to places hey could see but not reach. The Walking Artist’s Network gave an enthusiastic response to the proxy walk concept, and artists told me of similar projects.
Amy Starecheski walks for the incarcerated, working with oral history and proxy walks, at Columbia University.
Louise-ann Wilson made a walking project inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s uses of memory when she was bedbound.
Anita Bacic conceived a guided walk in which a storyteller tells a walker which route to take through the town of Blato, in Croatia.
Gudrun Filipska tells me there are virtual residencies for disabled artists in Canada’s network of National Parks.
My friend Marcus Coates made a journey down the Amazon River, for Alex, a patient in St John’s cancer hospice, fulfilling his dying wish.
Alistair Lawrie made a Stonehaven stravaig.
Before I introduce the first proxy walk that was made within the framework of my concept, I want to share the manifesto, which sets out the idea and invites you to adopt or adapt it for your own needs. Let me know how you get on.
declaration of St Fillan’s Hill: manifesto for proxy walks
“I will walk for you”
– Davie Polmadie
for a proxy walk we refer to the participants as
the walker, the recipient, the artist
on the same day, for one hour,
the recipient remembers a walk
in the place they have nominated,
and the walker describes that place,
making notes as they walk through it:
the result is a proxy walk
the artist composes a collage text
from the remembrances of the recipient
and the walker
the texts belong to the participants
the artist may also draw a map
of the nominated place
a proxy walk is usually an hour long –
there are no set upper/lower limits
in terms of distance and duration
the recipient and walker don’t discuss
the place beforehand – only the location,
route, date, and time are agreed
if the recipient wishes to make
a specific request of the walker
they may do so
a proxy walk can happen anywhere
a proxy walk is a remembrance
and a walk made in memory
consider the social implications of people
undertaking proxy walks, placing their walking
at another person’s disposal
proxy walks redistribute energy
between people
a proxy walk can achieve great distances
using memories rather than milestones
proxy walks and day of access
bring new perspectives to bear
on disability, landscape, and ecology
in a proxy walk who is the performer
and who the audience?
proxy works are acts
of altruistic Romanticism
proxy walks can be made using
photography and video, but
only writing allows the recipient
and walker an equal status
the Covid pandemic created
a million new recipients
for proxy walks
simple forms, such as the proxy walk,
always evolve – people are free
to develop the concept as they wish
St Fillan’s Hill
I chose St Fillan’s Hill because it's a walk I could once do – though with some pain afterwards. It's a wee hillock among big mountains, positioned where the old kingdom of the Picts and Gaels once collided, which explains the remains of a Neolithic hill-fort.
The hour I spent on the summit – a rather grand word for a hill which is only 175m. high – sitting on St Fillan's Chair, was crucial to my realisation that viewing offered an alternative to walking. I suppose my work on disability perspectives on landscape and ecology began that summer’s day in 2010. And this work continues with an act of remembering a dozen years later.
I'd had the proxy walk on my 'to do' list for months when my friend Tamara Colchester offered to go a walk for me wherever I wished. That synchronicity – she'd no idea the proxy walk was a concept I was developing – was a blessing.
She knew the region from the work she does with stalkers, but she'd never been up this wee hill – a pre-requisite for a proxy walk is that the walker has no previous knowledge of a place, so their impressions are fresh.
Proxy Walk: St Fillan’s Hill (Dùndurn)
28.VIII.22
walker: Tamara Colchester
recipient: Alec Finlay
I remember an old Celtic chapel on the way in
but we parked by a sewage works
the hill ahead is small and sits among larger ones
the hill had the appearance of a model mountain
it does not feel young, maybe even more potent
because of its compact size?
as if in a railway diorama, with different textures –
sand, grit, lichen, and moss
it was like a perfect wee walk hillock
(I have a theory that short men are packed with
more vim than tall ones
when I looked at its scale
I was excited and confused
the energy doesn’t have to travel as far)
with ME any mountain is so far beyond me
I can only look at it
but this hill had an air of possibility
there was temptation
I knew there was a possibility of relapse
likelihood even
but it was too within my reach to refuse
we walked across a field
a sheep-trod field
dry, until the pocked squelch of a stream
I think there was a fence to climb
signs of absent drinkers
and the fuss of getting the dog over
I head towards a pair of birch trees that seem
to form an entrance
we reached
one on either side of a fence
when I get closer I see that they are actually
on the same side
over the fence
the foot of the slope
and I wind myself among the birch’s
arched roots
lying still, I listen to the movement of its leaves
the hill a hint of a traditional fairground helter-skelter
in the way that the paths curl around
a heron flies past in an elegant line
there were trees, probably birch, hazel and rowan
an enormous ash, one of the biggest
I’ve ever seen – it looks sick, it’s outer limbs
dead and dry, but looking again I see new life
sprouting from its trunk – tufts of green
along its many limbs
was there a still stretch of scree where Colin spotted
some stonecrop
a patch of violets at its base
was it English Stonecrop?
a single furled flower
up again, a deer track
maybe the scree
fell from the old fortifications
another
from when it was a dùn
another
I’m sure there were foxgloves
I enter bracken that quickly gets too thick
there must have been bracken too
stuck
but the way I remember the hill
drop down and find a perfect path
it wasn’t a covered by one dominant species
more a mosaic
I kneel, become smaller
so that the space gets bigger
crawl for a while
stand and my path disappears
before the summit I take a diversion
in a circle of bracken
there was a rowan or maybe a pair
no way out
growing in the lee of the cliff
I wade through green, collecting ticks
one was leaning out vertically
up
it might be gone now
up
but it was a lovely image of persistence
I want to feel the warm ground
I climbed around precariously
up
to tie a poem-label in the rowan
I watch many peacock butterflies
drinking nectar from the lilac rounds of scabious
drier now – the plants change
less sphagnum and more mint, buttercup, and yarrow
I climb the steep rock using the patches of dry moss
that tuft the seams as footholds
I feel elated as though I’m the only person
who has ever climbed this hill
then - a discarded sandwich
I remember the plateau as flat
the summit is flat
and on it was the famous chair
a large stone seat
or throne
as Alec said there would be
named for Saint Fillan
the surface of the rock wrinkled
as though the wind
once moved its surface
for investitures and coronations
I gather a handful of herbs for tea
yarrow, plantain, wood sage
these found architectural forms are odd
they aren’t cut neatly, and they don’t
necessarily face the way of the view
from where I stand, I can see Alec
way down below
a piece of stone dropped there by a glacier
a small figure writing
when the valley was scoured out
a pair with the throne stone
on the summit of Dùnadd
occasionally looking upward
it’s remarkable how similar in scale
the two hillocks feel
it was a warm day
sitting on the hill
looking around at the mountains
surrounding us, Mòr-bheinn behind
and the entrance to Glen Artney in front of us
I don’t wave – he knows I’m here –
I began to get the glimmer of the concept
of the 'conspectus'
I felt the small hillocks
many of which had dùns
set among mountain ranges
were always places of power
because of the way they define a view
I walk a circuit
it was a day when my experience of disability
and the different scales of the hillock and the mountains
taught me that viewing could be as meaningful as walking
letting my feet re-meet the place on his behalf
it was a moment when a sense of belonging settled inside me
‘when people walk
I don’t remember the walk down
they enact the future
or if there was pain
in the days afterwards
I imagine there was
it’s hard not to become stuck when you’re static
it was one of those rare days
and the pain was worth it
seeing you go up there and become small
there’s a photo of me sitting on the chair
with my dog Barney
I wonder if that was his first hill?
it’s a long time ago now, twelve years
is beautiful, but it hurts
with Long Covid I can’t walk across the field now
seeing you come down with the light in your eyes
is wonderful, but I can’t
but the exhilaration I see in that younger me
it’s almost like being dead
maybe I can gift that to Tamara
and see if it’s returned in the joy that Saint Fillan’s Hill,
or Dùndurn, gifts to her
and having passed on a gift
it’s hard’
Notes
The concept of the Proxy Walk was inspired by discussions with the poet Chelsea Cargill and first presented as part of ‘Day of Access’, Travelling Gallery, 2019.
Marion Michell, in Artist Newsletter: https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/sleep-drunk-i-dance/page/23/
Images:
Proxy walks poem-label, AF, 2022
Paths for All walking group in Drymen, with a walking stick by AF, 'a walk is something we take with us as we leave it behind'; photo by Sam MacDiarmid, 2021.
Counterpane blanket landscape, concept AF, photo by Hanna Devereux, 2019, thanks to Rachel Smith. Photo of William Soutar's window courtesy of Soutar House. 'word-mntn (Mor-bheinn), AF, photo by Alistair Peebles.
Declaration of St Fillan's Hill: manifesto for proxy walks, AF, 2022.
word-mntn (St Fillan's Hill), AF 2022.
Thanks to Heritage Lottery Fund, Lapidus Scotland, and Paths for All, for making this event possible.
