Totnes High Street, early 2007.
The sky was a slate grey shade of Victorian oppression as we were walking up Totnes High Street1, as my steps began to slow, I could feel my voice faltering in the half light and knew it was setting on again, that slow, retching tide of incomprehension at my current situation. Before I could manage to speak the words “I don’t think I can be around people right now” or “I don’t think I’m going to make it tonight” or, the more truthful “You go on ahead, I’ll catch you up”, spoken with the full knowledge that I would not catch her up, El2 had already registered that I would not make it any further that evening, that I had to go home. El consented, almost silently, and left me there, standing in the loneliness of a summer holiday destination on a winters evening, she went on ahead. I turned around, and wept. I turned around and let my self fall out. I wept at the incomprehension of it all, I wept at the guilt of it, and the anger, and the isolating nature of it, but mainly I wept with incomprehension, without control or consolation.
My father had died, probably six months ago at this point, I had received his ashes by courier in the post, perhaps a few weeks ago, and I had recently moved house with them, carried them upstairs again into another new place to call home. That evening, I had been invited out god knows where, with god knows whom, and I was reading already, Duncan Minshull’s Vintage compendium. 3 So that evening I went home, and I sat at my desk, and I opened the urn that contained my fathers’ ashes. I peeled off the brown parcel tape the crematorium staff had thought would suffice for keeping them all locked in there, and I unscrewed the lid of the matt green plastic urn. My father fell out in particular matter, sprang from the thread and tumbled onto the deep pile carpet and was lost forever.
It is amidst the context of this evening, that Why Walk the first of what have become nine text/drawings was written or begun.4 I had for weeks by then been walking a nondescript and unofficial path, from my front door to the edge of Dartmoor National Park5, writing upon my return and then clipping through my own writings, seeking out elements that could be of interest, I picked out short phrases, uncertain as to why, for their malleability, for their lack of particular detail, for their porosity, and inviting latitude, for their open horizon. I treated the authors presented within Minshull with the same intuitive manner with which I treated my own work.