Uitgelezen 55

‘Walks for their own sake, furiously enacted but lacking agenda. Strategic walks (around the M25, the walls of the City) as a method of interrogating fellow pilgrims. Walks as portraits. Walks as prophecy. Walks as rage. Walks as seduction. Walks for the purpose of working out the plot (from Albion Drive, by canal and river, to Springfield Park: coffee and bacon roll). Walks that release delirious chemicals in the brain as they link random sites (discrete images in an improvised poem). Savagely mute walks that provoke language.
Atkins and I undertook a number of one-off jaunts that carried us along the length of the tidal Thames: from the Isle of Grain to Teddington. And on into territory in which we had no business. Breaking off at Shepperton, in homage to J.G. Ballard.
There was nu ulterior motive, no commissioned or projected work to justify these riparian exercises. Days in the air. An early breakfast, a pub lunch. Odd esturine landscapes previously glimpsed during river trips. Gull islands. Sewage farms. Oil refineries where Count Dracula’s abbey once stood. My jottings in the red notebook could be glossed as poems that failed the audition. Misdirections. Shadows infecting a shoreline that resisted metaphor.’
[Marc Atkins and Iain Sinclair, Liquid City, p. 15.]