A few hours off the plane, he's in his element, a tall, bent figure bobbing south down an avenue in late rush hour, his back a forward arch. But the closer he gets, the more the potential for a kind of William S. Burroughs version of a merry jaunt....
CORNER OF BLOOR STREET WEST AND ISLINGTON AVENUE,
WEST SIDE OF TORONTO,
WEDNESDAY, 6:45 P.M.
British novelist Will Self is en route and on foot, walking from Pearson Airport with no luggage, and pretty much only a map and the clothes on his back, heading to his hotel downtown. It's a trifle, Self reckons, at only around 26 kilometres and 5½ hours of serious walking, plus another two or so to eat dinner in Chinatown and stroll through the city centre. I joined him three hours into the walk.
For Self, who is 46, an ideal day's hike, often from his door in South London, can take as much as 18-plus hours, he says. Then again, the point isn't to make comparisons, and on this day, he complains about stiffness. Maybe it's a ruse for the two fawning journalists in tow.
Still, each of the many cities he has hiked through has its own flow and function. And that's the whole point of Psychogeography, a new collection of his columns of the same name in Britain's Independent newspaper. The articles, which have the same flavour as his fantastical fiction, detail his - how can it be put - expressionist hikes, travails and memories in various world destinations. As he says, he likes to "slide a psychic scalpel under the skin of a place."
The title Psychogeography comes from a semi-serious school of critical theory which attempts to marry geography with the emotions felt experiencing a place. Its origin, as with so many theoretical things, is French.
But now, the British, with their love of maps, have become psychogeography's contemporary purveyors, notably through writer Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, which Self describes as urban phrenology, and books by Iain Sinclair. And now Self, who is looking east along Bloor with characteristic wide-eyed anticipation.
TRAVELLING EAST ON BLOOR
7 P.M.
Now Self's in gear. His long gait picks up as night falls, with his windbreaker buttoned to its neck-choking top. These long hikes abroad particularly work well on book tours, he says with a smirk, given the tedium of cabs, hotels, public readings, returning to the hotel, flipping on the porn channel, masturbating and doing it all again in the next city. Much better to orient yourself with another vice.
At this point, along a dull stretch of car dealerships and coffee shops, the walk has turned boisterous and matey, with Self making startling exclamations in his smoker's gurgle and slouching further into a hipster stride. As could have been expected, taking dictation of Self's rapid thoughts, while hiking at a good clip, is futile. Thankfully, we had covered the same stuff in a lengthy e-mail exchange a couple of days before.
"What I aim for in such very long walks is nothing save a kind of anoesis, or absence of thought, combined with a strange sort of absorption into the landscape," he says.
"The very necessity of orienting myself, and rigours of the walking itself, cancel out a lot of mental chatter, but there's also - in a country like England, which is so heavily populated - this curious sensation of isolation within the mass. I spend most of my life with ideas - so I don't look to walking to furnish them: on the contrary."
DETOUR OFF BLOOR,
ON TO LEAFY OLD MILL ROAD,
WITH ITS MOCK TUDOR HOUSES
7:15 P.M.
"Can we move here, Dad!" Self exclaims, as we walk past a handful of people night-fishing in the Humber River. It's a beautiful scene and proves how the Humber on the map does nothing to capture its essence.
"A walk supplies its own narrative - that's the beauty of it for a writer. The picaresque is a thoroughly respectable literary form - compare Chaucer, or Bunyan, or whomever - so I try to be faithful to the walk I've actually taken, and if I have no thoughts or observations I report that. That being said, the digital camera is a fantastic tool for this kind of work, since it will faithfully record such nullities."
Self has always been big on location in his writing. His latest novel, The Book of Dave, created a future dystopia thoroughly based on London's environs, while also telling the contemporary story of Dave the cabbie burdened in part by the Knowledge (the detailed mental map all London cabbies must learn) cemented into his thoughts.
It's the kind of fixation on detail that carries into Psychogeography, along with the arch wordplay (such as the summation of adult life as "no Blitz only bits of this and that, epochs of haircuts"), and the healthy habit of not letting a good scatological thought go to waste (such as the "anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf" to describe sitting uncomfortably close to another man on a transatlantic flight in business class).
And as we walk back to Bloor, Self looks up to the comfortable houses and says sinisterly, "I'd like to join in whatever's going on in those houses."
TURN DOWN DUNDAS STREET WEST,
8 P.M.
Somewhere along the line, Self lights up one of his self-rolled, Virginia-blended cigarettes. "I smoke only three a day now, so they've got to be pretty strong!"
After two decades of well-documented drug and alcohol addiction, cigarettes are what's left. The caricature image of a darkly hunched Self, his long legs endlessly propelling him forward, is only half of it. Even after he's finished the butt and we're strolling quickly in the open air, the night air stays flavoured.
Indeed, it adds to the psychogeographical sense of the here and now. The mid-century Situationist movement and its main theorist, Guy Debord, were about breaking down the distinction between art and the everyday. Often compared to the Beats, collectives of Situationist artists were out for a good time and yet also out to undermine what Debord decried as the society of spectacle, that is, the sense of art that isn't a product of daily experience, but handed to you as a spectacle. In practice, a key element of Situationism was the dérive, an aimless stroll through a city or terrain, changing course at whim depending on topography and experiences.
In the lead-in essay for Psychogeography, Self's aim is more purposeful than the dérive when he walks from his doorstep in Stockwell, South London, to Heathrow Airport, takes a flight to New York's JFK Airport, and then treks the next day (with a New York Times reporter in tow) through Brooklyn to Manhattan. His need then was to bridge the gulf he long felt between London and New York, where his mother grew up.
But other times, it's simply to feel freer. "I feel the prescribed mass transit folkways as a metal band, tightening around my skull. Only by taking these dérives, by decoupling personal orientation from the society of the spectacle, can I breathe, talk, emote. Be.
"This is all about being unbound - but not about driving to get to an officially nominated beauty spot. For me, it's to do with knowing where you are, and this entails knowing what you're up against, and who's against you."
APPROACHING SPADINA
AVENUE
AND DINNER IN CHINATOWN,
9 P.M.
The conversation has long since turned quieter and more personable, particularly when talking about his long-standing collaboration with artist Ralph Steadman for the Independent column. The two had worked together prior to the Psychogeography column. But this gig began as "a bizarre column I had for the British Airways flight magazine, where I would take an internal flight in Britain, go for a walk, then fly back to London. This, in turn, mutated into Psychogeography, which is very much a collaborative undertaking. Sometimes I write the words and Ralph matches them with a picture. Other times Ralph supplies me with a picture I write to."
Psychogeography the book also includes Steadman's beautiful, grotesque, irreverent drawings throughout. One of the best is a highly detailed Old Dutch scene with English bruisers scurrying to an Amsterdam brothel. It prompted Self to remark in the accompanying article that "I wonder sometimes if, like Obelix, Ralph was dropped in a vat of some hallucinogenic potion when he was a child."
GRANGE PARK, QUEEN STREET
10 P.M.
We part, as Self heads down Bay Street to his harbour-front hotel, 10 p.m.
It's 3 a.m. London time. Self has had it, after a very large meal. Walking through the quiet downtown, he talks about how crazy people think he is for not bringing any luggage. Still, he has to stop twice on the walk to get toiletries. First it was nail clippers on Bloor, then a razor on Queen. But that's what happens when you give into walking the terrain with little of any baggage. Honestly, it's easier than it sounds.