On Not Walking, Part II

(read Part I of Alec Finlay's "On Not Walking" here)

II.
Coronavirus has, once again, collapsed my cycle, scratching my lungs and tightening my heart. Six months in and there’s no easing, no medical explanation, and no official medication – only the remedies I find on chat rooms and pay for myself.

Walks have diminished to walklets. My legs ache as if I’d run a half-marathon.

I tried taking a walklet each day, to the lamppost over the road, then as far as the birch, 100 yards, and next day on to the pine, 103 yards. It hasn’t worked. The breath isn’t there.

If I talk on zoom for an hour my diaphragm strains, and my glands burn.

People are bound to make quixotic attempts to elude pain. On good days they will take walks, recalling what they could once do. But, eventually, as people accumulate pockets full of harsh experiences, the repetitions of pain become unbearable.

To find yourself in a landscape, unable to walk – or walk far – is to feel exposed. Fright is gauged in terms of fight or flight. Those who can’t walk feel, deep down, that they have to face tigers and trolls. (Try walking into the middle of a moor and then binding your legs with parcel tape).

up there
where my legs can’t go

For the constrained walker limits aren’t precise. The effect of a walk depends on how a person is on a particular day. The mind learns to draws imaginary lines – far enough, too far, far too far – and a rough-and-ready regimen is improvised. It isn’t easy to account for the effects of heat or cold, and how you react to steps.

How the land strikes the legs differs when a body has lost some of its walking rhythm. Gradients matter as much as distances. Can I? Should I? Walking up a brief incline has different aerobic consequences to a slow wander along a lane.

Do the sums and calculate the likely pain – what have I got planned for the next few days, can I afford to pay the cost?

there are the things to walk away from –
ah, but what when you can't walk?

Confronted by sceptical doctors, I fantasised an expedition: my (I’m at the end of my) endurance walk. Medics, wearing white coats and hiking boots, walk on either side of me, wary, but politely encouraging. I’m carrying a tartan blanket. We continue together, or I continue between them, across hills, through pinewoods, fording rivers, until the crucial moment comes. Is it on the first day, do I walk into the night, did I go even further, impossibly far? Wherever we are: I can go no farther.

The medics nod approvingly. There’s no denying I tried my best. In their minds the experiment proves I can walk some distance without collapsing, therefore I am well. But I reply: hold on, stay a while. This is my experiment and I’m going to make sure they see the symptoms of lag as the pain takes hold. Day one and they’re already becoming impatient. Well, of course you’re stiff, it was a long walk. Day two, I have to insist, you’re not leaving yet, and lie across the door. The pain reaches a peak on days three, four, and five – spindleshanks stuck full of pins, dark shadows under my eyes, feet cramping into ugly shapes, sour sweat.

I can’t describe the end of my fantasy. The medics lost interest on the second morning and left while I slept, before anything is proven.

the walk is behind us
the pain is ahead of us

Crash, relapse, boom-and-bust, wabbit. Just-let-me-rest-a-while-I’ll be fine. Phrases that gesture at the inability of the compromised body to recover from a cykotine storm. You look so well, people say.

she says I’m glad
you’re recovered
I’m not ­ – well then
I’m glad you’re better

he says he hopes
I am as healthy
as a cucumber
so I sit a little longer
in the window sun

Walk and sleep, pain and energy: the essential measures of life for the chronically ill. The disciple of recovery depends on what one doesn’t do, as much as what one does, and that’s what makes the imagination vital. Words and images can move more rapidly than anyone can walk or run.

she says he’s
  not the battle

he’s the battle-
  field

Anyone with a chronic illness develops a picture of their disease, like pages of automatic writing scribbled down in the middle of the night. Some meaning can be discerned, if you turn the pages upside down.

why?
(who can help asking)

everyone ill has to learn how
not to think this is my fault

sure-as-sure-is the thought comes
this must be a lesson

The desire for cure runs deep. It’s hard not to be drawn towards all manner of nature cures, tinctures, remedies.

blessings on the oil burner and tea tree
blessings on the bucket of hot water for my feet
blessings on pillows between sore knees
blessings on a patch of sunshine to lie in
blessings on a cup of tea
sort-of-blessings on a cold bath

Walking is intrinsic to human worth. I didn’t stop walking – or wanting to: what changed was the consequences. Over time, wariness comes in the wake of weariness. Episodes of pain mount up until they block out too much light. There are too many holidays in which the too-long walk to a beach or hill made in the excitement of arrival lead to too many days in a strange bed.

In the rolling hills of Clichéland, the application of willpower offers the disabled their share of triumph over adversity. When chronic pain and fatigue impose themselves, the banal human will is obsolete. I have friends whose Inaccessible Pinnacle is their back garden.

Managing chronic illness is playing Patience. Wanting to walk doesn’t make walking possible. It’s what someone can manage, or imagine, that matters. Some are at liberty to hike, climb, and run. A few scale their mountain on crutches – and I get that medals are due for this kind of heroism, which it plays well on TV – but there are fewer victories for the people of The Bedlands.

healing loves to hide
care is love transferred

everything that is not pain
is happiness

disability heroics is
the Live Aid of wellbeing

Say it over: rest and limit have to be learnt.

do a little
               find a nest

too much
               by the riverbank

My philosophy: doing too much is inevitable, but being careful, learning to draw the line, pacing, avoids repetitive hurt. A relapse is never worth it.

I have not walked in some beautiful places.

let the letting go
pull the blankets
around your nose

If I can’t walk through a landscape, the alternative is to imagine a conspectus to look out from, following along paths with my gaze. Wittgenstein’s view from his house at Skjolden overlooked woods, a green lake, and mountains. When I sat on the foundations – the house was removed after his death and is now being rebuilt as a museum – I could see the physical image he chose. Language is a series of paths and turnings and the job of the philosopher is to install signposts along the way.

The job of the poet is to describe the view as it was, is, and could become – even if, like Shiki, or William Soutar, it is only the view from their bed through a window.

only the ill
can explain
how much

the trees out-
side their windows
mean

Sometimes I’ve also been walked for. If a walk has an aim, it can be fulfilled for me. It isn’t walking, but in my mapping projects as an artist I’ve worked with poets and artists who can go where I’m unable, in what could be termed, walking for.

Years ago, I composed a poem describing the Dalwhat Water and its tributaries, in the hills above Moniavie. Piper and I stayed a week in a cottage living off the local bread, made by a baker who cast pots Monday-to-Thursday and used the kiln for bread on Fridays. His loaves were as dense as river clay.

The Dalwhat poem was a word-map, stitched together like a renga, made from linked haiku. And, being a river, there were two versions of the poem, one reading upstream and the other down. The source was too far for my legs, so Piper hiked to where the poem began (and ended), in a cleuch between Cairn Hill and Black Hill. He brought back a description of a chipped enamel cup chained to a rock by the spring. As he drank, a fawn leapt away.

No, I didn’t taste the water, or flinch with surprise at the fawn, but, with the help of his eyes, the poem was complete. I’m furious I can’t walk the river, only be driven between the confluences, but working with friends does make the poems into a chain of shared consciousness.

I’m scared I may not walk again. But I still don’t feel like I can’t walk – the last 3 days have been a delayed relapse after a 1oo yard walk at the beach, because I felt able to. I’ve learnt, I’m learning, that I mustn’t do this, for now. I’m telling you this to remind me.

My for now has stretched out for 211 days. I may never regain the half-mile range I had before – it was limiting but allowed so much. I’m determined to heal, but perhaps I will have to rely on those who walk for, those who deliver, the chap-chap at the door leaving a parcel, or bags of food.

A couple of years ago I came up with a walking for art project: the proxy walk. For this a recipient choses a place they loved to walk, when they could, and the walker does the walk for them. On the same day, for an hour, they write down what they say – one, in memory, the other, for the first time. I have yet to realise a proxy walk and, thanks to coronavirus, my role seems to have changed from walker to recipient. I’ve since been told of another artist who gifts walks – a woman making them for other women – and of a nurse in a Perthshire care home who does the same for elderly residents.

All limits create new possibilities.