To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an Hour.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Blake’s lines have become something of a Radical Stroud motif for a number of reasons.
But this is the fundamental reason:
I started writing A Guide to the Radical History of Stroud and the Five Valleys around 2011, with a narrative history occasionally touched by a comedic Mark Steele/ Mark Thomas style of analysis. A visit to the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library completely changed my approach: no more the lonely writer in the garret burning the midnight oil trope. Instead, collaborative writing on the hoof: ‘Footprints and Footpaths not Footnotes.’
And, also, collaborative texts revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary, in an EP Thompson quest (The Making of the English Working Class): rescuing ‘the poor and anonymous from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ A Blakean optic not just upon the landscape but on social history too.
And that approach led me to a free verse style of writing up my/our walks and the recording of my historical research and consequent blogging: it enabled quick scribbling and composing but with a touch of figurative style. (I include a guide for this approach in a link at the end of this piece.)
I read around psychogeography, the Paris Situationists (‘Underneath the pavement, the beach!’ another of our motifs), Rebecca Solnit, William Hazlitt, Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, Phil Smith, et al so as to contextualise my walking through landscape and history: ‘slipping through wormholes of time.’
But now, all roads lead to Edward Thomas.
And Richard Jefferies.
Edward Thomas on Walking and Cycling
Richard Jefferies on Walking
Bike or boots?
Bikes or boots? A difficult question sometimes, and an obvious one at others. I suppose, it’s a question of what you fancy, or a matter of where you want to travel, or how far, or how much time you have: whether you want to wander across fields, or pursue a path along lanes, or up a succession of hills, and down the consequent dales. Or what you did yesterday.
This is how Edward Thomas compared the two pursuits in 1913 In Pursuit of Spring:
‘It was a still morning … But not until I went out could I tell that it was softly and coldly raining. Everything more than two or three fields away was hidden.
Cycling is inferior in this weather, because in cycling chiefly ample views are to be seen, and the mist conceals them. You travel too quickly to notice many small things. But walking I saw every small thing one by one.’
‘Under elms near Semington the threshing machine boomed, it’s unchanging note mingled with a hiss of the addition of each sheaf. Otherwise, the earth was the rooks’, heaven was the larks’; and I rode easily on along the good road somewhere between the two.
Motion was extraordinarily easy that afternoon, and I had no doubts that I did well to bicycle instead of walking. It was as easy as riding in a cart, and more satisfying to the restless … At the same time, I was a great deal nearer to being a disembodied spirit than I can often be. No people or thoughts embarrassed me. I fed through the senses directly … through the eyes chiefly, and was happier than is explicable … a foretaste of a sort of imprisonment in the viewless winds.’
Robert Macfarlane writes in the introduction to The South Country that ‘Edward Thomas was a compulsive walker’, and mentions Helen Thomas’ assertion that “His greatest pleasure … was to walk and be alone”, spurning roads, often walking in a circle for a whole day, without a map, “guided by the hills or the sun”. Macfarlane argues that Thomas prefigures the Situationists, ‘pioneering the walk as an art-act, as artefact.’
Helen Thomas wrote in the preface to the 1932 edition of The South Country (first published 1909): “for him the most satisfying days were when he wandered far afield alone, rereading forgotten footpaths and hidden lanes, stopping at remote and primitive inns where strangers were rare … to Edward Thomas walking was not merely exercise … Nor was he … only the nature lover intent on observing … Nor was he only the aesthete … the beauty of the contours of the hills, the symmetry of the trees, and the grouping of the villages. Nor was he only the wayfarer meeting fellow travellers … talking … listening… Nor was he only the artist transmuting all this into words. He was all these and much more.”
This is Edward Thomas near the start of the book: ‘I have used a good many maps in my time, largely to avoid the towns; but I confess that I prefer to do without them and to go, if I have some days before me, guided by the hills or the sun or a stream – or, if I have one day only, in a rough circle, trusting, by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right … and to return at last to my starting-point … The signboards thus often astonish me … There is a wealth of poetry in them …’
Another Wiltshire walker is of interest here: Richard Jefferies in his book The Amateur Poacher:
‘Those only know a country who are acquainted with its footpaths. By the roads, indeed, the outside may be seen, but the footpaths go through the heart of the land. There are routes by which mile after mile may be travelled without leaving the sward … village to village, now crossing green meads, now cornfields, over brooks, past woods, through farmyards…’
Macfarlane argues that Thomas prefigures the Situationists,
‘Pioneering the walk as an art-act, as artefact.’
Well, that sort of sounds like walking as a pop-up museum in a way, doesn’t it?
More to follow on Edward Thomas later.
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/creative-writing-guide/