She reaches a hand towards me.
“And listen to me, my baby.”
“Yes?”
“I think maybe you’re too much up there in your tree.”
“Too much in the tree?”
“Yes. You should come down into the world a bit more. And you should come down and come for a walk with me.”
“A walk to where?”
“To wherever our feet might take us.”
“OK.”
I drop down, out of the tree. Then I put my finger to my lips.
“Listen,” I whisper.
“To what?”
“Just listen. If we listen closely we’ll maybe hear the chicks cheeping in the nest. Maybe we’ll even hear the baby.”
We listen closely, closely, closely. We stretch upwards, turn our heads towards the nest.
“Hear them?” I say.
She shakes her head.
“Me neither,” I say.
We grin at each other.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I say. “Take us somewhere, feet.”
Walking, Pizza, Stars & Dust
We walk out of the street into the park. She says this is an educational walk with educational content. Palaver and Trench have asked for a report on what we’ve been up to. So she will tell them about my writing, my research into birds, our artwork etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera. She will tell them how even walks in the park can be deeply educational.
“So let’s walk,” she says, “and think about a theory about walks by Paul Klee.”
“Who’s he?”
“One of the great artists of the twentieth century. He said that drawing was taking a line for a walk.”
I thought about that, about the way a pencil point moves across paper as you draw.
“So if drawing is like walking,” I say, “then walking is like drawing.”
“Yes, and if you think of it like that, it allows you to wander and to roam and to explore.”
I smile at the loveliness of that. I imagine our feet leaving a drawing behind us. I swerve and skip to add curves and interest to our drawing.
“People said that Klee’s paintings looked like they could have been done by a child,” she says. “Some people hated them. The Nazis, for instance. Burn the lot! they said.”
I listen, and I think some more.
“Maybe writing’s like walking as well,” I say. “You set off writing like you set off walking and you don’t really need to know where you’re going till you get there, and you don’t know what you’ll pass along the way.”
She smiles.
“So writing’s like taking some words for a walk,” she says.
“It is.”
We walk on, close together, our feet moving in rhythm with each other’s. I imagine each step as a syllable, and I breathe the words as I step along.
Each word is a step a-long the way to I don’t know where
“Picasso loved Klee’s work,” Mum says. “He said it took years to learn how to paint like a master, and a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.”
It’s so strange: grown-ups trying to become young, young ones trying to grow up and all the time, whatever people want, time moves forwards, forwards.
I walk the words.
A life-time to learn to paint like a child
A life-time to learn to paint like a child
“Wordsworth used to write as he walked,” she says.
“Did he?”
“Yes. He said that the rhythm of walking. helped him to find the rhythms of his poetry.”
“Makes sense.”
“It does.”
To write is to take some words for a walk
The words foll-ow the rhy-thm of the feet
The feet foll-ow the rhy-thm of the words
To write is to take some words for a walk
“And walking’s also a kind of meditation,” she says.
“Is it?”
“Yes. Meditation’s often about sitting very still and keeping the mind very still.”
“Like I do in the tree sometimes?”
“Yes. But there is also walking meditation. You concentrate on every step. You think of nothing else. You do nothing but walk. You hope to become clear and calm.”
We try it. We walk side by side along the pathway through the park. Now I don’t think about words or lines. I try to think of nothing but taking one step then another step then another step. We breathe slowly and regularly.
“Now think about nothing,” she says. “Just walk while you walk.”
But as we walk through the park, I suddenly can’t help thinking of the tunnel underneath and I get agitated instead of calm. Mum knows somehow. She stops. She looks at me. She waits. I find myself telling her about the day that I ran out of school and went down there all alone and saw the man and the dog. I tell her I thought I’d be able to go down there and bring Dad back, that I was trying to do what Orpheus was trying to do. I manage to laugh about it as I tell her.
“I must have been so stupid,” I tell her. “I must have been so young.”
I keep on trying to laugh, but I’m nearly crying now.
She holds me tight.
“You should have told me at the time,” she says.
“I’m telling you now.”
“And you really saw a dog?” she asks me.
“Yes. A man and a dog. I thought the dog was Cerberus. I thought the man was some kind of guardian of the Underworld. I thought I was going down to Hades!”
“Oh, Mina!”
I manage to laugh again.
“He was probably just one of the workmen,” I say. “The dog was probably just a stray.”
I even manage to giggle now.
“Take me further, feet,” I say, and we keep on walking in the light as I remember walking in the dark.
“I thought if I kept on walking and walking,” I tell her, “I’d see Pluto and Persephone!”
“Oh, Mina! What a girl!”
“I had it all planned in my mind, I think,” I say.
“And what would you have said to Pluto and Persephone?”
I laugh.
