Too much dark, not enough light, often leads us inwards, into those dark regions of the mind where memory resides. Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday evening) echoed the mood of the month by taking us on a journey back into that hinterland of darkness where names begin to disappear, places can no longer be recognised, the fridge becomes the oven, and words become jumbled so that the Radio 3 announcer no longer makes sense.
What happens to us when the memory begins to go? Is it just a loss of self, of personality? After all, most of us have no memory at all of those first three years of life, when everything is astoundingly new and fresh and challenging? Should we instead embrace amnesia as a way of extending the boundaries of self, as a way of becoming?
Peter Blegvad’s Use It or Lose It (produced by Iain Chambers) took us on a radiophonic journey through the wild wastes of forgetfulness, while also suggesting what memory loss means for both the victim and those who stand by looking on. Through tracing the gradual slide into an absence of mind of an imaginary GP, Dr Charles Proctor (played by Blegvad himself), and interweaving Proctor’s experiences with a soundscape of distorted noises, snatches of dialogue, musical clips, as if twiddling the knob on an old-fashioned valve wireless, we, too, experienced those feelings of distortion, of not quite tuning in, of things sliding into one another and losing their real meaning, of panicky misunderstandings and ‘presque-vu’ — the sensation of being on the brink of a discovery. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue.’ ‘What is?’ ‘I don’t know…Something momentous.’
We also heard from the weirdly wonderful Madame Aladdin (voiced by the brilliant Harriet Walter). She visits Dr Proctor in his moments of absence, promising ‘something new and amazing every day’, tempting him further away from the reality of dealing with his patients, his researches into neuropathology and his grief for his dead wife. She says, ‘You don’t need your memory any more.’ But we think, ‘But everything was in it.’ How can we survive without it?
I wish I’d heard this in the car, while travelling through time. The sense of movement, of ideas racing through the mind, of getting jammed, and then unstuck, was palpable.
December and January are my favourite months for walking. You notice so much more when nature is in hiding, taking a nap, bereft of decoration. Taking a day walk also forces the lethargic spirit into action. On Radio 3 on Sunday we were able to experience the art and action of walking without even leaving the house. In Walking with Attitude (produced by Jolyon Jenkins) Ian Marchant went in search of the psychogeographers, who search for mystic meanings beneath our everyday landscape of semi-detached houses, arterial roads, pylon-peopled floodplains.
I almost switched this off halfway through, so fed up with the litany of maledom. Not a single female voice was heard to leaven the descent into pretentious intellectualism. Marchant and his team ferreted around the 11th arrondissement in emulation of the Parisian Situationists of the 1950s, who poured scorn on the capitalist petit-bourgeois with their smart, lamplit boulevards and rows of shops. They tramped round the outer edges of Edgware in search of the North Middlesex South Hertfordshire escarpment, feeling meanwhile ‘the edge of the city’. But they never thought to involve a woman walker.
Where was the voice of A.L. Kennedy, whose cryptic comments would have added a different flavour to the talk, or even Radio 4’s Clare Balding, who has tramped across enough miles with microphone in hand to merit involvement in any discussion on the art behind walking? It was also disappointing to discover that their promised reworking of a Situationist game — to walk a route using a map for somewhere else quite different — involved visiting the model village of Bekonscot and taking a walk round the miniature streets, shops and parks following a map bought in Legoland.
But then Will Self started talking about the impact of Canary Wharf on the London landscape, describing it as if ‘the cosmological Feng-shui’ had been ‘terminally disrupted’, and I was hooked. That’s exactly what it felt like to be cooped up in that ghastly mockery of urban living, the sheer banality of all that glass and concrete producing tears of frustration.
Self began taking long urban walks to counteract the sense of alienation engendered by finding yourself in the manufactured space that is Canary Wharf, on the lookout for the beating heart within the most desecrated parts of the city. To become alert to the qualities of place, to its possibilities, no matter the debris in the gutter, the decaying brickwork, the graffiti on the wall is to rediscover your belief in the human spirit. ‘This is serious,’ he says, not a game dreamt up by French intellectuals who were playing with ideas rather than trying to find out how much our surroundings impact upon us. If psychogeography means anything, it is walking not so much with attitude as with your senses alert to what has been eroded.
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