"A sensitive walk up any High Street is a Pilgrim's Progress" Phil
Smith - playwright, walk-performance artist and author (Mythogeography
and Counter-Tourism) - recently retraced W.G. Sebald's famous 'Rings of
Saturn' walk round East Anglia. At one level On Walking describes this
blistered walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in places
like Dunwich, Bungay, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo and Rendlesham
Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs,
white deer and alien trails. Phil Smith's walk soon becomes every bit as
remarkable as Sebald's and he matches Sebald's erudition, originality
and humour swathe for swathe. At a second level, the book sets out a
unique kind of 'hyper-sensitised' walking for which the author is
quietly famous. It burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks
beyond the shopfront and Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and
aches of the everyday. The Suffolk walk described here is an exemplary
walk that goes beyond 'wandering around looking at stuff' and shows how
every walk can be art, revolution and pilgrimage. At a third level, On
Walking is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism,
alchemy, dancing, jouissance, geology, psychogeography, 20th century
cinema and old TV, architecture, grief, pilgrimage, WWII, the Cold War,
Uzumaki, pub conversations, somatics and synchronicity.
