Strolling smacks of introspection

"It is becoming hard these days to justify the pleasures of simply 'going for a walk'. In a world of sponsored hikes and mass marathons, strolling smacks of introspection and an unhealthy lack of competitive drive. Ambling about with no badges of purposefulness (shell-suits and dogs are the favourites) you are looked on as a figure of fun or, worse, of danger. Children cross the road as you approach. Long-distance trekkers elbow you aside, a cissified obstacle not worthy of consideration. Even the physical act of walking is now being streamlined by the health industry. Going for a stroll, one of the most civilized of pleasures precisely because it can be indulged in purely for its own sake, is now expected to do something, either for you or the world." 
- Richard Mabey, A Walk Around the Block (1988)

[The picture of course shows writer and long distance walker Will Self, appropriately clad, making a walk work for him.]

John McPhee: Dostoyevsky in the age of Discovery Channel

Annals of the Former World (1989) brings together John McPhee's four previous book on US geology with a new closing essay and the sum surpasses its parts. Geology is a descriptive science and McPhee's book is above all a kind of dictionary fieldwork in the depths, shales and dispositions of a technical language. It's a Dostoyevskian book because you have to live with it for weeks. Not because it is that big (it's less than 700 pages of medium typeset, not the 1500 pages of fine print of The Brothers Karamazov) but because the abundant descriptions of rock and outcrops are the reading equivalent to a 7+ grade boulder climb. The second thing that is at the heart of McPhee's geological project is his sly but constant coupling of geological and human time frames. This book deals with geology but its subject, in the last analysis, is the human condition. Annals of the Former World is the great non-fiction competitor to all the great American novels. It's view of America in geological time is itself a critique on the basic assumptions of, say, the religious right and all other short sighted voices. And it has great maps to boot.

A GPS night drift

After my complaint in a previous post about my GPS's failure to capture my postal rounds with the accuracy I was hoping for, three readers came up with possible explanations. I still think it has to do with recording rates (there is more time between 'clicks' than it takes me to walk in and out of a front garden) rather than any technical or strategical reason. But I was intrigued by the suggestion of GPS drift, the phenomenon of a GPS device recording movement while it is just laying motionless on a table somewhere. So overnight I left my device next to the window recording while I was sleeping and the above shows its paths, a random walk with one outlier travelling 588 meters. The squares blame technical inaccuracies, but I prefer another explanation: the earth is playing while the satellites are obeying the routines of the military-industrial complex.

The North Pole #Brainfuck [Ps-y.co[ph]ysi,x Night.Walk]

THE NORTH = A POINT EXPRESSING AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS PASSED

"The navigator knows the geography, he watches the stars at night, watches the sun at day; when it is dark and cloudy, he watches the compass." - Zhu Yu (1119)

"Right under the Pole there lies a bare rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic stone. And is as high as the clouds, so the Priest said" - Mercator (1577, IMAGE E)

"As the magnetic needle which points to the north necessarily indicates thereby the south, so the power disposing to rest has necessarily a counteracting influence disposing to mobility, between which lies the point of indifference" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1848)

"I suppose this desire to reach the North Pole is only a piece of vanity" - Fridtjof Nansen (1897, IMAGE F; first polar magnetic observations)

"The two poles wander independently of each other and are not directly opposite each other on the globe. They can migrate rapidly: movements of up to 40 km per year have been observed for the North Magnetic Pole" - Wikipedia (2012)

THE NORTH = THE NAVIGATIONAL TAR PIT 

It is really hard to know what the earth is doing, but we do know that it must be doing something.

The Real North wobbles [IMAGE C], the Magnetic North drifts [IMAGE B], the North Star shifts in and out of focus [IMAGE D]. Eventually all places will be a North Pole of some description for some time.

Psychogeophysics is the art of knowing a place for a million years and finding ways to compress that knowledge into a shareable experience.
 

THE MAGNETIC NORTH = THE POINT AT THE END OF EVERY COMPASS = A MILLION WALKS

The North Pole is like the moon, a symbolic place to wave flags and risk your life [IMAGE G].

 

The North is a point everywhere but here: let's move a little closer [IMAGE H] with a compass in hand, Polaris in sight, following declinating path[s] as we assume all former states of Northern Poleness to exist simultaneously, as forking paths confused and amalgamated, our directions calculated by threated #brainfuck loops. A .walk that wobbles and drifts with the earth itself.

THE NORTH = THE POINT THAT EXPLICATES THE POINTLESSNESS OF ALL POINTS FOREVER FIXED

IMAGE B

IMAGE C

IMAGE D

IMAGE E

IMAGE F

 IMAGE G

 IMAGE H

What is Psychogeophysics?

The following 'explanation' I wrote for the London Psychogeophysics summit in August 2010. I am a great fan of Martin Howse and Jonathan's Kemp, the organisers, but for some reason, probably sleep deprivation, this is mostly taking the piss. But in a deep and fascinating way that will revolutionize us all. Thank you. It is slightly rewritten. My own contribution to the festival was a .walk in brainfuck. 

A plate of spaghetti has many beginnings and many ends, but these 'functions' are trivial, easily reversed effects of direction not products of divine teleological purpose. You can eat the plate from the outside in or from the top down, the result, when the cook is not a hack, should be the same. Cause-and-effect and psychogeography are the substance and sauce of the world.

Question: you enter a room, what happens to you?

Answer: psychogeography.

Question: what is happening to you from outside the room?

Answer: Psychogeophy.

Question: What?

Answer: Psychogeophysics!

Just as the entire weight of the earth conspires to pull down suspended objects (gravity; weak but keystone) the human condition is being shaped by the entire earth: psychogeophysics (duh) is plate tectonics of the mind (yes, go kill yourself).

Psychogeographers have deluded themselves in their petty INMB (In My Back Yard) regionalism and general lack of ambition to look beyond the city and beyond the contemporary. Cities come and go, neighbourhoods go from bust to boom in cyclical fashion. The psychogeophysical angle, which is has everything going for it, is already deluded by procedural navel gazing (the big fat belly of the google-jugend) and an irrational belief in the supreme objectivity of measurement and raw data. Leave the 'spectral ecologies' to the teletubbies; at least they come with a native antenna. Do not quote some boring ass with cheap glasses just because s/he knows how to calibrate a seismic sensor. Death to the White Coats!

Quote Vladimir Nabokov: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

Time does not exist: our lives are too short to 'measure' it, time has astronomical minutes and geological seconds. Time is non-human. What we experience as time is background noise 300 decimals behind the comma. Our time is part of the margin of error, a fluctuation too small to spawn butterfly effects even in geological time. The study of Deep Topology (a tail between the hind legs approach to the depths of the soul here under investigation) gets it get in so far as it rightfully takes aim at the ‘psychogeographical sneer’, the Oh-Look-At-Those-Stupid-Fucks superiority that is the birthright of those art fashionistas who for a time claimed the practice for themselves. But the Iain Sinclair’s and the Stewart Home’s of this word have moved elsewhere, in pursuit of newer fashions in predictable proper disciplines (literature and porn respectively, both equally detestable). Now we are left to ourselves, in the shadow of obscurity, unobstructed by careerists we can get back to the real work.

The conventional hierarchies of urban space (the non-urban has tended to be a dead zone to be regarded with savage contempt ever since Debord and his wife-beating minions polluted the waters of psychogeography) from rooms, to houses, to streets, to neighbourhoods and upwards; the rifts and sensation experienced through drifting along the rigged, non-seamless man-made portmanteau environments are understood by psychogeographers as critical situations to diagnose the human condition. Can't they see that this is rubbish? Or rather, can't they see that this marginalizes the human artifact (the realm of input) to the point of wafer-thin, almost invisible, absurdity? Is a flaneur defined by the street and shops s/he wanders and explores? Is a magnetotactic bacteria navigating up and down the magnetic field through crystalline magnetosomatic pathfinding-techniques defined by the compass? Ley lines draw connections between unwobbling pivots of earthen magic and this reveals their status as pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo; complexity is my jinxed sextant and I have burned my collection of London Psychogeographic Association newsletters. A weak and dirty yellow flame, smelly.

Making use of their native head-mounted antennas the teletubbies (strangers from a strange land making house in the “Tubbytronic Superdome”) are daily invaded by incoming parasitic signals beamed from a golden-skinned dome. Unknown forces are hijacking the metallic silver-azure rectangular “screens” adorning their abdomens to transmit evil images of play and fun enacted by zombie-child actors. They are psychogeophysics' iconic martyrs, defenseless against a violent and oppressing world of push-media. We are tipsy on the heroics of Dipsy. 'Uh-oh' is our battle cry as we lay siege on the Vesuvius.

 Cosmonauts returning to earth after years in space (the Russian approach) will want to take a deep breath of real unprocessed fresh earth air: what stands out is not freshness but stench. The earth stinks. It smells of pond scum and volcano snot. Earth's background olfactory may have al sorts of effects, may be chemically programming us, may be manipulated to make us do or not do certain things, nobody has researched it. Psychogeophysics takes on board the entire immaterial world of rock and stone (the salt[s] of the earth) and translates them into one big global transmutational conspiracy of selfless mind control. Hurray!

Emotions are strange things: real and unreal simultaneously, like a dream or a Chinese poem in modernist 'translation'. Reread the Crystalpunk Manifesto.

Psychogeographers are laughed at in the same streets they adore. A mountain is more important than Paris, a volcano is more important than Cairo, an earthquake is more important than Dubai, the geomagnetic north is more important than all cities in the Americas together. A billion+ years of void, Los Angeles sinks into the ocean (cataclysm), a billion+ years of void. A billion+ years of void, a garden fence falls to the ground (cataclysm), a billion+ years of void. Geophysics not geography defines us. Lat/Lon systematics can not contain earth masses on the move. Mount Fuji does not need Google.earth.

Quote Dogen (1200-1253):“All mountains ride on clouds and walk in the sky. Above all waters are all mountains. Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water. All mountains walk with their toes on all waters and splash there”.

The landmasses move, seas wander, 'continental drift' does not need punning by a contemporary Walter Benjamin. The Holocene is ending, the anthropocene, in which an ever expanding human realm acts as a “new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth” is the great accelerating compliment our presence is bestowing on the planet.  But (‘Art’ always takes you back to yourself), but… behind these impersonal forces might hide another intrusive force, life itself,

Quote William Balee: “The atmosphere is partly an artifact of the unfolding of life. In this context, one may consent to the view that Earth and its Latin equivalent, Terra, are misnomers; our planet should have been called Vita - for it is life itself, rather than any single life form or species (even the human one), that distinguishes it from the other planetary bodies of our solar system, at present. Life as a total phenomenon may even have affected plate-tectonics and other supposedly organic processes…”

All these thing do not need measuring they need awe: horror and terror in stroboscopic alternation. Psychogeophyiscs revolves around the open secret of human frailty, the dark heart of finality.

Quote Joseph Conrad: ”There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”