Don’t mistake publications for endpoints: a walking interview with Deirdre Heddon

In July 2015, I met Deirdre Heddon at the University of Glasgow, where she is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Dean of the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts & Humanities. Deirdre Heddon is an artist and an academic whose research interests include live art and walking; she is the author of Autobiography and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).

In 2012 she started The Walking Library (https://walkinglibraryproject.wordpress.com/) with Misha Myers. The Walking Library is an ongoing art project that brings together walking and books. ‘Each Walking Library we create’, they write on their website, ‘responds to – is specific to – the context of its walking. Each walk changes the shape – the content and the actions - of the library’. The project launched at Sideways Festival in 2012, with a group walk through Belgium, carrying a library of books. Throughout 2014 Deirdre Heddon conducted 40 Walks – a series of walks with friends, to mark her 40th birthday (https://40walks.wordpress.com/).

Dee Heddon took me on an hour-long walk through Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens and Kelvingrove Park. As she pointed out in our conversation, there is a long history of the peripatetic interview as a way to draw movement, diversion and distraction into a conversation. We talked about walking and writing in relation to academic study, women’s art and experience, and Dee’s personal practices. We talked about walking, writing, reading and remembering as interlinked processes that define each other’s parameters at the same time as they make each other possible. We talked about how these activities train our bodies, our minds and our definitions of ourselves.

I asked Dee to take me on a walk because, in the history of art, walking is associated with a freedom of thought, which assumes the freedom of the walking subject. From my perspective, this conditional freedom also informs the professional cultures of contemporary art institutions – galleries, museums, arts organisations and universities, which produce and reproduce cultural knowledge, and which require frequent and free movement among their workers. Artists attend international residencies, symposia and institutional exchanges. Those of us who cannot sustain the movement, are not part of ‘the movement’. Movement, then, is a pre-requisite for being an artist, and the training we all receive in how to perform our identity, our visibility, and our productivity to our peers.

An academic journal, I thought, before meeting Dee, maps the movement of ideas in order to move them along. It tethers the movement of thought in order to participate in the international exchange of the production of knowledge. And, however much the people who participate – the people who tie the metaphoric flag to an idea and watch it blow on the peak of a gusty hill – might be aware of the borders and barriers that prevent some other people from taking part, as a whole the institutions of publishing, academia and the technology of writing itself are not. Through their own performative histories these institutions, like the art world at large, assume that we are all free to move, that movement is free, and that meaning can travel. This amounts to a silent and silenced training ground that lies beneath artistic discourse: tectonic plates moving slowly, beyond our control, beneath the land.

Although Dee works as a practitioner as well as an academic, the context for our meeting was distinctly academic: in the shadow of Glasgow University, for the purposes of a peer-reviewed publication. Accordingly, our conversation circled around academic training and the training of academics.

The following piece of writing is an attempt to represent my memory of the dialogue between Deirdre Heddon and me, on the page. Just as the physical nature of the walk introduced movement to our conversation, I have tried to use the physical form of text to trace movement in writing. This, then, is not a document of the event; it is not a score for the conversation-as-performance; and it is not a record of Deirdre Heddon’s points of view. Instead, it is a reconstructed memory (or, more precisely, remembering) of my own experience of the walk, using the transcript of my conversation with Dee as its base material.

The material is problematic. I have both worked with the logic of written language and against it. Some parts of the conversation have fixed in language, some have left a mark, and some have slipped away. I have not added any new material but I have edited heavily, and changed the chronological order of parts of the text. My speech is marked in italics; Professor Heddon’s is not. The walk begins on a crisp, sunny day in Glasgow’s West End.

We’re going on a detour that you normally take ‒

If I have time I can loop around the route I’m going to take you on, which is about an hour.

Have you always gone out of your way to walk?

Not really. I’m sure someone else has said this, but walking comes with age. It was just a way of getting around.

What are the characteristics of walking?

It depends on the type of walking.

If I’m thinking about the walk I’m about to do ‒

One: it’s nice scenery; there’s a real pleasure in that. I do find walking good for thinking through things. At the same time, you are distracted by your landscape: both thinking and not thinking.

It’s not empty time (for me).

It can be quite productive time.

If I am going to give a presentation or a speech or a talk or write a paper, I definitely think it out while walking.

Tell me about the histories that you think about or, perhaps, are not attracted to, in terms of walking. Which histories are you consciously aware of? I’ve asked that question to walkers, too.

But when I reflect it back on myself I’m not sure I feel that indebtedness to any of them. Because walking is an everyday activity.

You don’t need to know about the flâneurs or the Situationists or the landscape poets to be attracted to the possibilities of what walking gives you.

In my own walking practice I probably have very little explicit, conscious connection between walking and those histories.

But when I write about it I do. When I reflect on other folk walking then I’m conscious of it.

You’re aware of the power of drawing things into a collective history, even if the experience of it is –

Not in my own walking practice, no. I’m not aware of drawing it in or placing it against, unless I want to write about it.

Then, I would take this walking out of its everyday-ness and frame it as an object of analysis.

Most of the time my walking is not an object of analysis. I don’t think it’s research unless I choose to say: let me think about the everyday in walking.

Have you ever been in a position where you couldn’t walk?

There are lots of conditions to walking.

I’m very aware of how different practices or places of walking come with

different kinds of scripts, depending on who’s there. These things are not fixed.

The conditions of walking are very fluid.

The conditions of this walk for me are:

That I’m able bodied. Time. Right? To have an hour in the morning before I go to work.

I wouldn’t walk this park when it’s closed.

I wouldn’t choose to walk in here in the dark.

Another condition for me is knowing the route, actually. I’m not brilliant at orientation. A lot of the walking aesthetic movement is about getting lost, but on this:

there’s a route. I know where I’m going, and I’m fairly certain that nothing unexpected will happen on this walk.

there’s a good security in that. I’m not a risk taker.

You walk the same route?

Yes, I do.

I tend to walk this route.

You’ll see there’s a choice here, but I actually never, ever take the other choice.

And why’s that?

Because it’s uphill.

Do you remember particular thoughts or feelings or conversations you’ve had with yourself as you go around the route?

Well. This is going to sound very loaded. Yes. There are many conversations or discussions I remember about trying to solve a problem I’ve been working through in writing or thinking.

But.

The loadedness of this is going to come from the fact that when we reach a certain part of the river, I walked there with a friend who took his life. Adrian Howells.. And I have a lot of remembering. And

internal dialogue with myself about that. So that has become a poignant In fact I don’t mind, it’s quite nice, it’s

space for reflecting, remembering.

So,

probably,

now,

there isn’t a time

when I wouldn’t walk along that river and think at some point about Adrian. So.

It wasn’t loaded at the time but it’s

become so.

It’s

(As I say it’s brought)

So I suppose that’s another thing that walking gives you.

Those envelopes of spaces.

To allow for that.

Remembering

Memorialising

Time out of

The busy-ness of life.

I have a similar experience

in Hyde Park.

A friend of mine died, and there’s a memorial in Hyde Park.

She died in a terrorist attack.

I used to walk round the park.

Every week I would have a conversation with her

Just the same conversation

It was the same conversation.

Right. Quite nice, isn’t it?

This walk has already been part of other people’s research, which is fine.

It’s part of your research. And an artist’s called Hilary Ramsden, who did a PhD on walking and desire lines.

I just haven’t made it part of my own. Not explicitly.

I’m not an academic, so I don’t have the same training in academic thought I’m not sure what that is or academic language; well, from my perspective, it’s the ability to think something through, right to its end, to follow a thought all the way through, which you rarely get the opportunity to do, in other contexts.

I’m interested in the relationship between the formal, logical, thought-through writing of academia, along with the system that supports it, and the peripatetic interview: walking and wandering and ‒

It’s interesting you say that academics think things through to the end.

Because the thing that walking will teach you is that there is no end.

It’s just a choice of direction to go in.

Each time I choose a direction I am absolutely foreclosing another possibility.

And if I came back and rewrote it I might choose a different route.

To walk and think through your problem or thought is very embodied. Perhaps writing is embodied in the same way. And the thing that looks like a full stop is just a snapshot of what happened on that walk, on that day.

Don’t mistake publications for end points, because they were moments in time.

Probably.

Almost everything I’ve ever written will have been iterated, in some way, on this pacing.

Actually, this walk has appeared in three things:

Elspeth Owen, who I’ve written about; she’s a walking artist. When I did an article called ‘Walking Women’ (Heddon and Turner 2012), I invited artists to take me on a walk of their choice. Elspeth came up to Scotland and asked if I would take her on a walk. I took her on this walk. That’s when you were analysing other people’s walks? I wasn’t even analysing other people’s walks. I was using the walking as a way of interviewing. You were using walking as a mode of conversation? Exactly.

There’s a tradition of that, right? There’s quite a good tradition of that: peripatetic interviews.

As a way of letting diversions come in.

I’m always looking out for the kingfisher, so perhaps that’s a bit of a distraction.

The premise behind The Walking Library was that it would be filled with books that were good for taking on a walk, because they would be in relation to that walk. Whether that was a book about walking, or a book about a particular landscape, or a particular place, or a particular geography, or a particular history.

They were intended to be in some way connected to the movement and the place.

I think of you carrying the books, and I think of the physicality of it.

Are you carrying that weight of knowledge, making it explicit what you bring with you?

Or are you trying somehow to embody this other knowledge, travel with this other knowledge, which is bringing something new to the environment?

A bit of both of those. And I’ll be honest with you, in the first performance of The Walking Library, Misha and I thought we’d carry all the books. But of course we didn’t – it was too hot, it was too long, and they were too heavy.

That’s the joy of improvisation in theatre – we very quickly began to make rules for ourselves that were flexible. So we’d say: it’s 30km today, let’s just pick one book each. And that gives a whole new set of challenges. What will be the book –

the one book out of the 90 or 100 that are there –

that you will choose to accompany you on this very long, very hot walk?

How will you use that?

We’ll go down here. It’s very high – the river’s very high. That’s how wet it’s been. It’s very high, given how sunny it is at the moment.

So this is the place where.

This bit of the walk is most likely to be the place where I think of Adrian. Partly because of the kingfisher.

(I’m trying to think of an open question, not a leading question.) Do you ever think of yourself as a single person when you’re walking?

Do you ever have an out of body experience?

In a paper about The Walking Library you wrote about

walking as a space of knowledge-production ‒ It goes right back to autobiography. Maybe it goes right back to knowledge as following something through; academics as following something through.

Knowledge is a fulcrum of all sorts of modes of contribution. So that could be the personal, the historical, the cultural, the geographical. The material.

The biological. The environmental.

That notion of walking as a space of production is very simply a reference to the fact that people write about walking.

They use walking

I use walking

to think.

The thing about knowledge is it does get circulated.

If you put it in a book it literally does get circulated.

Which is a literalisation of mobilising it.

Opening it out into the world. Opening it out to rewriting.

Revision. Contestation. New authoring.

It’s symbolic?

Now that we’re talking ‒ this walk has been in loads of projects. Monique Besten, who’s a walking artist from Amsterdam, was walking for a long time ‒ months. She asked people to walk with her every day, virtually. We sent her tasks we would do, across the distance, while she was walking. My task was: every 20 steps, take a look back to where you’ve walked from.

(And I have to say) It was very discombobulating for me, actually. Because I really saw myself.

There’s my out of body experience.

But I don’t know what you mean by ‘single person’.

You do this same walk every day; it’s a walk that you make a choice to do, and return to every day. It has an echo with the practice of academic study: returning to the writing and the rewriting and the following through.

I think that’s very true.

Re-walking your writing, but allowing new things to come in;

new looking, new perspectives, for both the walk and the writing.

On this river, there’s a kingfisher.

There’s a phrase that’s always stuck in my mind, about the speed that images travel from your retina to your brain. They travel very slowly. It’s about ‘walking pace’, said the neurologist, RL Gregory [http://www.richardgregory.org/] ‒ Wow, you’d have thought they’d have been fast, wouldn’t you? Yes,

But they’re really slow.

Most of what you see is what you’re expecting to see.

To see something new is really, really difficult.

And slow. So that’s why we don’t see much, because we just see what we expect to see.

(Yes.) It makes you think about what a place is. How this place, when you’re walking through it, is as much the manifestation of your memory of this walk and all the other things you remember –

And all other walks like it.

(Yes.)

You have always walked, because of the nature of Glasgow. Then you became interested in walking as an idea –

I became interested in walking because, when I was writing the book on autobiography, I began to think about place and performance. I kept coming across male artists who used walking, and, genuinely, I couldn’t find any women. Which seems unbelievable now.

But because I put that in print, I couldn’t leave it there.

I thought: is it because I don’t know about them? And if I don’t know about them, why don’t I know about them? Or is it because women genuinely aren’t walking?

Well of course women are walking,

but I just don’t know about them, and the reason I don’t know about them is because

no one’s writing about them.

40 Walks was my birthday present to myself.

That wasn’t intended to be a research walk. It was just intended to be a present.

That was very much about friendship.

I’m always trying to puncture those narratives of walking being solitary. A lot of the times my walks are with people.

I invited people to walk with me: it was about companionship; being with people.

It wasn’t about getting away from people.

In a way the walking and friendship was a reply to that whole history of But, did I set it up consciously as that?

No.

That’s an after-effect, right? That’s an after-the-event.

I thought, ‘well that’s interesting: I’m reading about all these folk who say that to walk is to escape from every-day relations, and I’ve set up this thing which is absolutely about those relations’.

I’m thinking about an essay by Virginia Woolf called ‘Street Haunting’, where she says that when you open your front door, you have to be a banker, or whatever … But actually we are, all of us, living imaginary lives as other people.

You talk about walking through your work problems as if you bring yourself to the walk, and also as if you leave behind your analytical ‒

Can I really leave them behind, that’s the other question?

I don’t know whether I leave any of that behind, or whether it comes with me.

I don’t have a consciousness of it. I don’t think I leave the person in the office behind.

I’m not so certain I know the distinction.

You ask me if I’m different people and, yes, to a certain extent; but only because of the function I play.

The role I play.

What does it mean to walk into the day? To walk out and walk in?

Who am I transitioning from? Rather than what am I transitioning from?

Do you ever lose yourself?

I have a strong sense of self. I’ve written a book on autobiography. Theories of self and subjectivity have travelled with me through most of my academic life. I’m quite confident as a person, so I don’t on the whole, generally speaking ‒ I don’t think I dissemble.

You’ve written about the importance of writing your own self, writing your own history, your consciousness: you are what you do

you are what you do, and what you say and what you write and what you tell

in that sense this routine that you mark out for yourself to think and walk and think through things when you’re on your own: it’s a private space. Definitely private.

Definitely private.

You don’t want to think about where you’re walking. (Do you?) You want to walk, and think about something else.

You’re just in it,

you’re in this landscape,

whatever this landscape is.

You’re just in it.

If I took a book out now of Burns’ poetry in Kelvingrove Park, this walk would rewrite the book.

Take a book about walking through the woods, through these woods, and my experience of these trees would change,

my experience of the content of the book would change.

Because it might allow me to add to the words that had been written there, or disagree with them. Placing those two things in mobile relationships to each other.

The landscape is rewritten. Written, rewritten.

With the book as part of the content of the landscape.

And the book is rewritten as my experience feeds back into it.

(The book does literally move.

As well as metaphorically move.

Let’s hold those two things together.)

Of course. Of course.

So we might see the kingfisher, but it’s very high so I suspect not.

You asked me at the beginning, have I always walked? I think I’ve written myself a walking identity, by walking. And by writing about walking.

How long have you been walking this particular route?

So, when I’m walking. I mean, when I’m walking am I even thinking about myself? Am I thinking about identity?

I now have an identity as a walker.

Books are physical objects. They are fixed and static in their appearance. So let’s, literally, walk with it.

The weight of knowledge is true.

That was a burden, I suppose … does it have to be a burden?

Or can it be a pleasure?

Actually, when you’re walking a long way it’s helpful to have something to distract from the pain. I’m talking about Belgium. It was very flat. It was very dull in lots of ways.

Actually, just reading a line of poetry –

Actually, in my daily life I don’t sit with materials. I don’t sit with things enough.

I’m fast.

(So we might see him.

How big is a kingfisher?)

Different relationships to the time of reading.

Slowing that down

Being able to slow down reading.

Actually, hearing you talk about it now has made me -

About nine years.

Oh, it’s quite small. But very blue.

If you see a flash of blue –