From Hereford through wind and bright sunlit rain resilvering and quenching the day, reflections shivering & amazed across blurred tillage pocked with rain, pleached hedgerows, the sun barely lifting above the churned earth’s rim but to be ploughed under/where outlying rains trace & retrace lines of descent… to Hay.
Something was wrong and walking couldn’t solve it. Francis speaks frequently of ‘pressure’; pressure to perform, refine, perfect. Pressure of circumstance. Being in London, in the hospital, getting away; roaming, reading, making notes for undefined future projects. ‘I’ve turned this sort of “get-beside-yourself-in-London-then-jump-into-a-car-and-drive-to-some-where-remote-and-walk-around-by-yourself” into something of a genre.’
Francis killed himself in December 1992. The collection edited by Kevin Jackson opens with an essay on ‘William Harvey and the “Motion in a Circle’ ”. This is reprinted from Bart’s Journal (Summer 1982). And what a useful prompt it proves: microcosm and macrocosm, the alchemists of St Bartholomew’s Close, circuits of blood that mimic the passage of the sun. Dr Dylan Francis carrying me straight back to Dr Francis Anthony’s memorial in St Bartholomew’s Church. Nagging away, at the back of our orbital walk, were recurrent themes, unsolved puzzles.
Paracelsus, ‘the Swiss physician, alchemist, mystic and pioneer of chemotherapy’ (as Francis glosses him), is the presiding influence.
He held that:
Man and the universe had the same form and had behind them the same reason. He likened the circle of heaven to man’s skin, and discerned a pulse in the firmament, spirits in the winds, fevers in the motions of the earth, and chiromancy in minerals.
My superstition, sympathetic to Fludd and Paracelsus, persists: the walk around London’s orbital motorway is personal. From Harefield to Purneet, the rushes, surges of excitement, are connected to an imagined — solar powered? — circulation of blood. We can’t resurrect the period when the ‘objective method’ (scientific induction) co-existed with older notions of mystical correspondences; a time (the 1620s) when John Donne was a patient of Harvey, folding the surgeon’s ‘research into the capacity of the heart and other hollow viscera’ into his verse.
Dr Francis concludes his essay with reflections on Robert Fludd’s Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623). As with Blake’s cosmological epics, his forcing of humble place names into a mythic structure — and, on a humbler scale, Mary Caine’s zodiacal configurations — Fludd reads topography in terms of the human body. The walk we take, from that first step, progresses by analogy:
Since, as the sun travels around the earth daily in a circle, it impresses on the winds — which contain the breath of God — a similar circular motion, this moving air is breathed by man, reaches the blood, and from the heart the spirit of life is thus carried around the body in an imitation of divine circularity.
The spaces under Runnymede Bridge, cool shadows, flicker of sunlight, wash from passing rivercraft, encourage metaphysical speculation. We should stay here, stretch out on our curved shelves. Dream. Follow the Egyptian script, the journey of the sun boat.
But that’s impossible, without aborting the tour. We labour up a grassy slope, at the side of the bridge, and on to the M25. For the first time in our half-circuit, we are actually walking the motorway, and also (courtesy of Mary Caine) walking the Dog. After the oracular opulence of the space beneath the bridge, M25 reality has us rocking on our heels. Blamblam-blamblam. Ssssssssss. Grey bitumen (courtesy of Shell): the mantle of choice for Associated Asphalt, French Kier, W.C. French, London Roadstone, Redland Aggregates and Wimpey Asphalt. Blamblam. Ssss. Light is harsh and scouring. Air is filled with stinging particles. We walk towards Egham, inches away from speeding metal projectiles.
Standing on a thin strip of ground in the central reservation, traffic snarling on both sides, I stared through my long-focus lens at a range of facial expressions that would have fitted into a Victorian Bedlam collection: Criminal and Subnormal Physiognomies. V signs. Drooling narcolepsy. Trance. Fugue. Rage. Idiot grins. Nobody signalled their pleasure at the miracle of motoring over the Thames. They were part of a thrashing comet-tail. Mary Caine’s Dog was no guardian of the mysteries. It was a ravening beast, a mastiff on a chain. On Runny-mede Bridge, Cerberus claims his victims for Hades. The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.
2
In less than half a mile, the M25 spurns us, it’s picking up momentum, a straight run on the junction with the M3 (‘a major freeflow intersection: continuous span bridges with hollow reinforced concrete decks’). We walk Indian file, Kevin has to boom to make himself heard. You can smell the panic. ‘These crazies mean it,’ he realises. ‘They are actually going to walk around the motorway.’ It’s true, I would be perfectly happy sticking with the hard shoulder if it got me through Surrey in a day. The treadmill experience is fine. Conversation dies, the countryside vanishes (tactfully screened and baffled).
‘Economically viable, environmentally sound’. The sponsor’s message. Tony Sangwine (well named), senior Highways Authority horticulturalist and expert on motorway landscaping, boasts of ‘interventions’. Drought-resistant dust. Salt-tolerant, low-maintenance grasses. Plantings of hawthorn, dogwood, the Wild Service Tree. To foster the illusion: the road is a rippling brook. Sangwine is talking Dunsinane forestry, forests that move in the night (the A2/M2 road-widening scheme). Forget your National Parks, footpaths clogged with pedestrian traffic, mountain bikers and plague-ridden beasts, the M25 is the ecological fast track. Kestrels nest on gantries. The central reservation is a wildlife sanctuary, taxonomies of flora and fauna are located in land trapped between the M40/M25 interchange.
Rudely woken from hard shoulder reverie, we find ourselves in Egham. A chainlink fence, on the edge of the escarpment, is patrolled and protected by ON-SITE GUARDING LTD (LAPD-style enforcers whispering into handsets). Security, when it got its start in the East End, was run by hoods and armbreakers. Ex-Parkhurst. ‘Security advisers’ to banks and art galleries were old Yard men who had taken early retirement (before they were found out). Down here, among the soft estates, asylum seekers carry out the night patrols. When multinationals boast about their record in employing local inhabitants, they mean issuing them with dog leads and shiny peaked caps.
Someone is building something, right on the road. JCBs, noise, a fence. No flags as yet, so it’s probably not a housing development or a motel. Renchi, perversely, takes a special interest in this hole. He sees it as a direct response to the charms of Runnymede Bridge (with its Alma-Tadema steps leading down to the river, a bathing pool for draped and languorous Roman sirens). Every time we walk the river bank, he suggests checking out the rapidly evolving building at the Egham end of the bridge.
Two years passed before we made our tour of inspection. The incongruous lighthouse that Renchi spotted from road trips and railway excursions was revealed as one of the wonders of the orbital circuit, ‘SIEBEL,’ it said. The vulgar security precautions of our first sighting were gone. Amazingly, there were no obvious CCTV cameras. No uniforms, no dogs. No checkpoints. Siebel, I recognised at once, was the future. Post-surveillance. A discretion so absolute, so understated, that criminality and vandalism were impossible concepts. Siebel was the visible manifestation of Ballard’s coming Mediparc psychopathology: intelligent buildings for soberly dressed, quiet, indecently healthy people. Health is the only valid currency. Credit-rich vampires from the old capitalist empires buy new faces, fresh blood. Middle management sweats in medieval gyms. The real players, the Siebel lighthouse-keepers, have health as part of the employment package. A few feet away from the clanking, shuddering, diesel dust-storms of the motorway, Siebel immortals float through a chlorine-glass tank. Doing nothing.