Internalising space from a distance

With much zeal but little talent (the instructor implied I was fat, it took me some time before I realized I was wearing my left shoe on the right foot and vice versa) I have taken up wall climbing a few months ago. 

These screenshots from Dutch TV program 'klokhuis' shows climbers at the Dutch championships lead climbing 'reading' the route to be climbed, a physical process that involves moving your hands into prospected future states (like reading with your finger) and projecting your body in imaginary positions. Internalising space from a distance. It happens that when I climb a route that looks new on the ground will suddenly come back to me when I am climbing it: my mind forgot it but my body remembers it. 

There is a lot of creativity in route building. Sometimes you encounter a route that seems to be built around one interesting move. But the best routes are internally consistent and clearly show the builder trying to achieve a certain effect. With time I am expecting to recognize the hand of the maker in each climb. 

Climbing a route is like taking an extremely intensive, condensed and abstracted city walk in an artificial landscape without views but with body-torquing-novelties and spectacular assemblages of jumps, turns, uncomfortable grips, deviations, distractions and sometimes a little redemption. 

My favourite part of climbing is when I hit a hard or confusing part of a new route and must then try to figure out where to go next, testing different approaches, moving a hand here or a foot there to decide what is the way forward. In reality this is probably bad practise, the best climbers I have seen move with slow (almost slow-motion) deliberation, clean, efficient and precise. Climbing has to do with creativity, learning and knowing place and all those other cliché's of psychogeography.  

When I began it never occurred to me that climbing is a sport (I was thinking of it more as something different to do with your body) and my body is being shocked out of decades of lethargy with lots of pain and suffering. Ouch.

Eskimo Psychogeography

The first is a a map of the Cumberland Sound-Frobisher Bay region drawn from memory by an Eskimo named Sunapignanq, The second map is a modern cartographic map.

The above image and the quote below are excerpted from Barry Lopez fabulous 'Arctic Dreams, imagination and desire in a Northern landscape'. I opened it at random the other day and the following fragment about the definition of 'space', 'place' and how the transition from one to the other is brought about through narrative and long term contact seems to be in perfect alignment with forage psychogeography. It is a wonderfully compact quote, a large segment of the book is concerned with Eskimo (ethno)psychogeography but Lopez here manages to find universal facets. Italics are mine.

 The American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes in his writing between concepts of space and a sense of place. Human beings, he says, set out from places, where they feel a sense of attachment,of shelter, of comprehension, and journey into amorphous spaces, characterized by a feeling of freedom or adventure, and the unknown. "In open space," writes Tuan, "one can become intensely aware of [a remembered] place; and in the solitude of a sheltered place, the vastness of space acquires a haunting presence." We turn these exhilarating and sometimes terrifying new places into geography by extending the boundaries of our old places in an effort to include them. We pursue a desire for equilibrium and harmony between our familiar places and unknown spaces. We do this to make the foreign comprehensible, or simply more acceptable.

Tuan's thoughts are valid whether one is thinking about entering an unknown room in a large house or of a sojourn in the Arctic.  What stands out in the latter instance, and seems always part of travel in a wild landscape, is the long struggle of the mind for concordance with the mystery entity, the earth.

One more thought from Tuan: a culture's most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye - spots on the land one can point to. They are made visible in drama - in narrative, song, and performance. It is precisely what is invisible in the land, however, that makes what is merely empty space to one person a place to another. The feeling that a particular place is suffused with memories, the specific focus of sacred and profane stories, and that the whole landscape is a congeries of such places, is what is meant by a local sense of the land. The observation that it is merely space which requires definition before it has meaning - political demarcation, an assignment of its ownership, or industrial development - betrays a colonial sensibility.   

Fabulous eye candy: Greenland Inuit shoreline maps.