I can’t afford a ticket on an old Dakota Airplane
I gotta jump a ride on a cattle-trucking slow train
I guess it doesn’t matter
As long as I can get my head down in the sun
Ah, the Quo, the mighty, perennial Status Quo who, like poverty and
prostitution, will surely be with us for all time, quite possibly until the day
of judgement.
Who’d have thought
I’d have managed to insert the twelve bar heroes into another doctoral missive?
I can’t help thinking there’s a more than a hint of Catholicity to Status Quo, one that goes beyond the
obvious connotations of the band’s name (though we might discount the fact that
when I was an impressionable thirteen year-old I did think Rick Parfitt was some
sort of blond, be-denimed messiah).
The Quo, like the Catholic Church, are
timeless: little-changing – though not unchanging – with an adherence to their
gospel of three chords and the truth. The same old song, again and again; it’s
not unlike the Holy Mass, all litany and ritual. And, like the Church, both the
band and its followers are growing older and older. The young have found better
things to listen to, they don’t believe any more.
Status Quo’s lyrics came to mind as I sat on
the 09:05 Oviedo to Santander train, meandering through Asturias and Cantabria
at a pace as leisurely as that of a Sunday afternoon cyclist after a
particularly generous lunch. So slow that I had no chance of making my
connection to Bilbao but what the hell: no
tenía prisa – I wasn’t in a hurry. Indeed. I hadn’t been in a hurry since
I’d boarded the 10:30 from Bristol to London Paddington three weeks previously
and I had no intention of rushing my return.
The slow train from
Oviedo to Santander isn’t just slow (four
and three quarter hours compared to two and a half on the bus), it’s intimate; takes you into parts of the
landscape – rural and urban – other forms of mechanised travel can’t or won’t.
Pasture and orchard, the ever-changing reaches of sinuous and sensuous rivers;
the private spaces of back-gardens and backyards; the derelict and the
dilapidated.
And then the
mesmeric thadakh-thadakh of the slow
train weaves its enchantment, enters the carriage and lulls the willing
passenger into its spell. Thadakh-thadakh
and the morning sun flickering through the glades and glittering on the
rippling water; your imagination slips free from its shackles and starts to
play tricks with your perceptive faculties. The experiences and emotions accumulated
during the long, solo hours on the camino begin to filter into daydreams and
reverie.
The notion of the
‘geographical imagination’ was much in my mind during my perambulations in
Spain, in as much as it relates to the role of landscape in influencing the
imaginations of those who journey through it: the relationship between (slow)
motion and emotion. In the introductory chapter to ‘Travel and Imagination’,
Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton argue that ‘rather than being
treated as a surreptitious and peripheral component of the physical travel
experience, the imagination is a facet of travel that warrants careful
examination in its own right’ (Lean, Staiff & Waterton 2014:11).
It’s an idea that,
like Geographies of Emotion, is going to upset a lot of the old school; geographers
weaned on the quantitative ‘revolution’, the lingering impact of which blighted
my geography degree in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘The imagination?!’ you can hear them cry, raising their heads from their
dreaded Burgess, Von Thünen and Christaller models (an isotropic plain? I’ve
never been able to get my head round that).
You might be inclined
to agree with them, even the editors of ‘Travel and Imagination’ concede that
the imagination is ‘slippery, complex and impossible to understand’ (Lean,
Staiff & Waterton 2014:10). In the margin I scribbled ‘so why bother
trying?’, as if everything in Geography had, like Christaller’s Central Place
Theory, to be quantified and subjected to rigorous rational analysis.
But one of the great
pleasures of returning to geography – I mean academically, it never really left
me – has been this radical shift away from the quantitative and a willingness
to accept ‘messiness’ and complexity; to try to make sense of them without
dissecting them out of context. The walker or pilgrim, engaged and immersed
corporeally and emotionally in their landscape, moving through space and time,
is also partaking in an ‘inner’ journey that is fired by the imagination and,
in turn, fires the imagination. So the question becomes, not ‘what is the
geographical imagination?’ or ‘how can we define it?’ – that’s something we can
never tie down, neither should we attempt to – but ‘how does it manifest
itself?’ and ‘how can we represent it?’.
The slow train from
Oviedo to Santander provides the perfect context for the imagination to assert
itself, to emerge from the shadows: a fermentation of landscape, experience and
memory. Not that you need a slow train to let imagination have its say, just
that the thadakh-thadakh of the train
and the morning sun flickering through the glades and glittering on the
rippling water create a different kind of imagination, one that might be quite
different to that experienced by the traveller on foot – the pilgrim imagination – or the airline
passenger. In each case, ‘while the physical journey may be somewhat easy to
map, the mental voyage is a rather unpredictable and unbounded affair’ (Lean,
Staiff & Waterton 2014:9).
The ‘unpredictable’
and the ‘unbounded’: the messy, tangled and often chaotic assemblage of place
and imagination, ‘conjuring the absent, rediscovering the known’, ‘transcending
clock-time’ and ‘transfiguring the habitual’ (Lean, Staiff & Waterton
2014:14). Imagination is political and ideological, liberates the landscape
from the quotidian. It passes beyond the arbitrary divide between fiction and
reality, dwelling in ‘that blurry place where various things converge’. A
mythical landscape, shaped by our imagination, as ‘authentic’ as the contours on
a map.
Slow travel is, of
course, relative. I took the bus from Santander to Bilbao (relatively speedy
and efficient) then, after a quick dash across Bilbao, the Euskotren to Irun on the French border (slow but relatively
efficient). The next morning I caught the morning TGV service to Paris (not as fast as I remembered it, probably
because it was a Saturday), the Eurostar
to London (too fast and efficient, at Paris Gare du Nord I felt like I was
sitting in an airport departure lounge) and, late in the evening, the penultimate
train to Bristol (enlivened by the presence of late night revellers returning
to the bucolic vales of Swindon and Chippenham). It was imperative I didn’t
fly; not for any ecological reasons but because it would have broken the ‘spell’;
it was travel for the sake of travel itself (a bit like my PhD is education for
the sake of education); travel as performance and ritual, as another way of
being in and moving through the landscape which, crucially, kept me in the
landscape.
And there is, of
course, an element of inverted snobbery about it. But then again, I’ve always thought
that in a world of banality and mediocrity, snobbery has a whiff of the subversive
about it.
REFERENCE
Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton (eds): 'Travel and Imagination’, Ashgate (2014)
