Walking off the Map

Another mad traveller, another guide in the endless work of decoding is the so-called peasant poet John Clare, whose 1841 cross-country flight, from a madhouse on the edge of London to his hometown some eighty miles north provided Sinclair with the notable path he retraces in Edge of the Orison, the masterpiece among his walking books. Clare is an artist of the kind Sinclair loves best: misunderstood by literary London, eventually discarded because he was past his best-before date—only recently, rustic bards had been all of the rage among the metropolitan cognescenti, but were out of fashion by the time Clare reached the big city—insane, a fugitive abroad in the vast gravitational field of London, another exemplary pursuer of discomfort who also walked somewhere and left an account of his walk.

A picture from Edge of the Orison: the author abed, having paused for the night at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, on this walk in the steps of Clare and checked into one of those stripped-down, seriously sterile hotels you find in small European places where nobody wants to be. It’s part of the hotel chain called Ibis. Sinclair can’t sleep. “I put my head on an unyielding foam pillow, shut my eyes, and opened them a nanosecond later to a lion-sun climbing over a palm-fringed desert. Stevenage: Cairo of the Great North Road. The sacred ibis, a water bird, lends its head to Thoth, god of Hermopolis; scribe of the gods, inventor of writing.”

On the way to finding where we are, we are reminded, the mind as well as the body must be surrendered to la dérive. Knowledge must become complex, a twisting within the grid of customary logic. It must be a roundup of all we know, forgetting nothing, linking everything, no matter how far-fetched the connections may seem in the clear light of day. In the walking writings of Sinclair, doing this work of imagination assumes the shape of a spiritual discipline in life-giving contamination, prophylaxis against simplicity—walking as resistance to the simplifying effects of globalism, a new urbanism for writers. “We remember what we want to remember and forge our own autobiographies,” Sinclair writes on the last page of Edge of the Orison. “The Clare I found will not be your John Clare. The track we travelled, coming from London, is no longer Clare’s Great North Road. Through error, perhaps, we arrive at a richer truth: in the telling is the tale. The trance of writing is the author’s only defence against the world. He sleepwalks between assign­ments, between welcoming ghosts, looking out for the next prompt, the next milestone hidden in the grass.”