YOU TAKE THE HIGH ROAD, MR WHITMAN

I'LL TAKE THE LOW

Photo by Aldric RIVAT on Unsplash

A reminder that this week’s Streetwalking is free, but next week’s is for paid subscribers only. Just saying…

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, 

Healthy, free, the world before me… 

Of course those words aren’t mine – they’re Walt Whitman’s.  Song of the Open Road.   I don’t do light-hearted.  And although the idea of the open road appeals to me as it does to everyone the minute they learn to walk and decide it’s time to leave home, it takes too long to get there if you live in the centre of a big city as I do.  By the time you get to the open road from the West End of London it’s dark, you’re tired, and you’ve forgotten what you’ve come for.  Oh yes – health and freedom.  But first let’s find a hotel to bed down in for the night.  Something with a 2.5k high density pocket-sprung mattress, Hungarian goose down pillows and a mini-bar.  Let Whitman, strong footed and light-hearted, take to the open road; weak-kneed and heavy, I take to the open bottle.

Don’t read that literally.  I am not a drinker, or at least not a compulsive drinker.  But Streetwalking, as I title this Substack, owes a debt to the French symbolist poet Baudelaire for whom idling through the city’s street was both a poetic and a critical act and who, along with other symbolist poets, had a taste for absinthe.  I don’t much care for absinthe myself, but just about every Impressionist, Post Impressionist, Cubist, Symbolist and Surrealist did. 

With what justice I don’t know, but I imagine Whitman to have been an abstainer.  And there you have the difference between the road walker and the streetwalker, the hiker and the flaneur – the one is all sobriety and bodily health, the other a connoisseur of impressions, a chronicler of now, an ironist forever fevered in pursuit of contradictions new.

I declare my allegiance to streetwalking, for which occupation you don’t need mind-altering anise-flavoured alcoholic spirits, but you most definitely must refuse the allure of trainers, jogging pants and wrist-watches that tell you how many miles you’ve run and how many years you have left to live.  Baudelaire’s flaneur does not run marathons.

Walking, not running.  Looking, not measuring.  Listening to the city, not your own heart rate.  Streetwalking, not roadwalking.

A street implies urbanisation, houses and offices, bookshops, galleries, arcades, a certain density - and cafes.  I doubt I can convey the importance I attach to cafés.   It’s partly fantasy.  Not on the open road but at a street café will I encounter a fellow-flaneur, perhaps Baudelaire himself, watching, no doubt smoking – for this is a nineteenth-century fantasy, before the health of the body trumped the principle of pleasure and the practice of philosophy, and for that very reason, he will almost certainly be drinking as well.

The fantasy clears before Baudelaire is able to invite me to his table.  But a real café without him matters just as much.  A café is a promise of the arts of civilisation, to practise most of which one needs a chair and table. I never feel safe if I am more than a quarter of a mile from the smell of coffee and patisseries.  I don’t say I will call at every café I pass.  On some walks I might not call at any of them.  It’s the knowing they are there – just in case - that’s important.   Just in case what?  Just in case I fall prey to any one of the thousand mortal shocks that flesh is heir to – rain, thirst, fatigue, actual, or spiritual loneliness.

So you could say I am a precautionary walker, an ambler and shuffler through the city’s street, alert to every peril, in no rush, in search of interest rather than freedom, though I claim the freedom to be interested or not.  Which includes the freedom not always to like what I see, for it is not the job of the flaneur to be a passive recipient of impressions, however vivid.

Alien to those opportunities for individual contemplation which the Streetwalker seeks is what we might call the collective-festive spirit.  With summer here, festivals of comedy and music take up half the fields in the country.  In the sense that you have to hit the open road to reach those fields you could say that music festivals are the children of Walt Whitman.  And so long as they stick to fields they have my blessing.  But they are beginning to encroach upon my streets, I don’t mean by putting up stages and sleeping on tents in the middle of Oxford Street, but by insidiously importing to the city the festive longing to be part of a crowd, to experience the exultation of shared taste and conviction, to love what your neighbour loves and wear what your neighbour wears.

In Soho, where I live, long lookalike queues form from the early morning to the early evening outside shops which seem to have no stock but which I guess sell trainers and t-shirts which the buyers change into for queuing at the trainers and t-shirts shop round the corner. 

In the good old bad old days – when Soho was a red-light district, the haunt of artists and their models, poets, actors, bohemians and absinthe drinkers – such shops sold pornographic magazines, latex corsets, dungeon equipment and sexual favours.  Into Soho came men who wanted to wander the streets on their own until they found what they had come for or grown bitter in the search.   They were not quite flaneurs in that their wandering had an object, but they were a million lights years from the new festival shoppers whose only aim is to become a single commerce-driven will, an anonymous, swaying body with a thousand arms.

Step out of Soho through Chinatown and you come to Leicester Square, home to a Lego store where again a single mass of humanity congregates from early morning.  Be among the first to enter the shop on any day and the staff will applaud you.  Is this the ultimate accolade that awaits us all – applause for being a consumer?

I have to hold my nerve.  I must not say, ‘If these are the city streets then I will turn my back on them and join Whitman on the open road.’  Instead, I grab an early morning table at a café opposite the Lego Shop, order absinthe, watch the homeless stir on their benches, and wait for the clapping to start.  Not impossibly, the homeless think the applause is for them.  It’s in order to be witness to ironies as cruel and heartbreaking as these that I Streetwalk.