追求你的追求

你的梦想

writing, walking – and exploring the wilderness within

2017-11-07 10:25:16 | 日記

When I set out to cross England on foot, I wasn’t thinking about it in literary terms. I was thinking in terms of survival. The path was long, 320km; the weather, on a good day, unpredictable. I had just sent off a novel that had been five years in the making; the walk was a reward. I would spend two weeks, mostly alone, my head blissfully empty, no book on my back. Just the essentials: food, water, waterproofs, map and compass. A thin, borrowed copy of Tove Jansson’s stories. And the pebble I’d picked up at St Bees on the west coast to throw into Robin Hood’s Bay on the east.

Free of the book, I thought, my mind would wander over landscape and skyscape, the folds of field and forest, fell and valley, moor and mountain. I regarded the dawn of the first day as a child might a holiday. Here you are, it whispered. You’re free.

But it turns out that long-distance walking is, in fact, a lot like writing a novel. The two began to mirror each other in ways I didn’t recognise until the halfway mark, when my negligible navigation skills found me lost, again, in cow-trodden fields, with no waymarkers in sight.

I walked up and down, checked map and direction. There was no alternative but retreat: back to the last village and recalibrate. Bleakly, I stomped down through the rough stubble of the field, erasing my steps. A feeling of familiarity, not quite deja vu, descended: hadn’t I just done this in the final draft of the novel? Lost my way – again – backtracked, erased and rewrote.

But I had sworn to think only of the path, my next night’s shelter. The big decisions: the right track, the right field, the right stile. This section was long and tough. I called on the stubbornness I was born to. Just keep going, I said out loud, to the sky, the birds. Notice. Much like the imprecations I’d whispered daily at the desk, as I navigated the novel’s demands. The terror of them, the work of them, the exposure .

With each day on the manuscript – as with each day of the walk – I found out more about the book, more about myself. Not all of it pleasant. That afternoon, mired in cow bog, what I learned was that when things go wrong, my first response is a punishment: you are stupid, an impostor, not up to it. By evening, stumbling finally into the right village, I felt as I often do at home: not triumph but the relief of the fraudster who has lucked her way through.

In their solitary nature, in their demands both physical and intellectual, writing and walking came together over that two weeks as the rest of my life fell away and my vision tunnelled. There was only the track, or the idea of it. The way forward was often unclear, the trail ambiguous and sometimes impossible to see. Like writing, it was infuriating and freeing, terrifying, and absolutely necessary to me .

At home in Brisbane, I write without questioning it. I get up and go to the desk. My fingers hover over the page and I begin. I write. The work inching forward with the hours, backtracking over errors, moving towards an unseen place. The next day I do it again. I keep going.

Each morning on the walk I got up, pulled on boots, devoured porridge, consulted the map. Swung on my rucksack, not thinking of cold and stiffness, a sore toe, the long hours of hard work ahead. I didn’t question it. My job was to walk. I began. I kept going.

All through the years of writing this novel, I’d wanted to do a long walk alone. At home I often walk in the mountains with a friend, and the looping conversations are part of the rhythm of our boots, each step and sentence a reaffirmation of friendship. But this walk was about something else, something I couldn’t articulate: more than solitude, more than a test or a reminder of competence and strength. I wanted to walk into a landscape on its terms and mine. Wanted, perhaps, a conversation with myself.

And for most of those two weeks, for great stretches of time, that’s how it was. I didn’t see another person, didn’t speak out loud. Got used to the sounds of my own footfall, birds, farm animals. I love to talk – anyone will tell you that – but on the walk, I quieted. Sometimes I sang. If I was afraid I muttered assurances to myself. But I was otherwise silent.

At the top of a page in my notebook from those weeks are the words “radical freedom”. Perhaps I’d been thinking or reading about walking as a political act. Not like the walks people do to draw attention to a cause, which are sometimes about drawing attention to themselves. Solo walking makes its own statement about freedom; despite or perhaps because of its physical demands, it represents an exercise in pure volition. Walking is walking away.

But not from yourself.

It was either Charlotte or Emily Brontë – no one knows which – who said, “I’ll walk where my own nature will be leading”. When we walk, we are fashioning a self. At once similar to and very different from our other, workaday selves. The rest of your life has no tension on the track, it can’t get you. You are encapsulated, apart, orbiting yourself. You fall back on whatever resources you have.

As the rhythm of the walk took over, I found myself scraped back, returned to some original version of me. Increasingly feral. Without comb or makeup, sometimes without shower or mirror, pulling on the clothes I’d taken off the night before, laughing, grunting, singing, squatting among weeds and leaves. I was my own personal wilderness. Or perhaps it was, as the writer William Atkins describes it, “a kind of reply to the portion of myself that remained uncultivated”.

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That, it turns out, was one of the big lessons: I carried my own wilderness with me. It was there, I could turn to it any time, or into it. For me that is the radical freedom of walking and writing. They turn us towards the untamed. Within us, outside us. Both are physical, couched deep in the body, but also emotional and psychological. And wild.

All else dissipates – the merciless world, the routines and claims of home, the marauding self-doubt, daily, excoriating – before this new one. You become more like part of the landscape at every moment. The demands of humanness, of womanhood, even of motherhood and daughterhood, are mediated by other demands. There is, for example, the need to notice: a perfect crescent of water in a crease of hill; a steel-coloured cloud that might presage rain; the warning shriek of grouse whose nest is, for the bird, too close to my boots; the orchestral command of the wind – violins in long grass, oboes high in elm trees. The fields (the pages) unfold and unfold, and you are untethered,This eye-opening tour brings visitors to meet the old masters and tailors of traditional handicrafts in and learn about their stories.

There is a kind of madness that comes with the protracted effort of both writing and walking. With a book, it descends anywhere from the midpoint and onwards, as its demands grow more complex and harrowing. The manuscript is a bloody carcass that must be butchered into shape each day. Or the shadow of a monstrous, two-headed infant who laughs horribly as you pursue it, who leaps on you from behind, wild of eye and sharp of tooth, demanding you rip open a vein to feed it. And again the next day.

At night in the mirror you see the wild-eyed infant is, in fact, you.

As the book or the walk progresses, you become avid in your tunnel vision, your murderous attention. It is a self-contained world you inhabit; all else falls away. All else diminishes, shrinks; there is only this path, this page. This step, this thought. You refuse all other pleasures, at times even food. Not stopping. Until the waypoint has been reached: the chapter end, the inn.

There are small but shining miracles. The path is well marked, you don’t get lost, a church stall is selling flapjacks/one shining sentence arrives complete on the page, a character begins to emerge, shimmering like a photograph in developing fluid. Despite the warning sign, there is no bull in the field/some paragraphs might be salvageable from the day’s work. The breaking wave of bluebells above the forest path/the book reveals itself.

And then you stagger out, blinking into the light, into the old world that has changed around you. Beneath your pen, your feet. It is old, it is new, it means nothing, it means something.

Or perhaps it is you. Because the book has changed you, as has the path: your skin, your hands; the hair wild on your shoulders, in your eyes, your brain tired and half happy. Because of course you haven’t quite done what you’d hoped. You were lost, you weren’t brave enough, the walk/book wasn’t quite how you saw it at the start. But then, it is like this with every book, every walk. Next time, you know, you will nail it.