This is how I feel

These are pictures of a long stretch (500m?) of paving cobbles in the nearby busy Griftpark and the first thing that struck me is that the species diversity is pretty rich. What struck me even more after it had sunk in is that this patch is a perfect metaphor: an empty space providing an unappreciated service of emptiness but one that is also, in the sanction of its obscurity, mildly productive. 

3 Spells by the pseudo Marubo Shaman-Goth

Song 1

I am the first one
That part of me which is blue
Tells of blue snakes
It is speaking of certain truths
& of my dick
I speak
I am the first one
We descend from shamans
We are the children of jaguar-people
We are twigs of jaguar-tree
The place of blood
Creates the demon-child
The blood of bird-person
The place of blood
& to teach is to create
When the last word is spoken
This is what I think
This is what I say
I am dead
I am dead
But I will come back in better shape
Ahhhhhh! This is what I had to say! Ahhhhh!


Song 12.


My body has changed
My head is fly-demon
My teeth are jaguar-demons
My teeth are beyond my control
My body is crooked
And my sisters
Use the foam
Of demon-herbs
To paint my back
& I go dancing
Along sun-paths
Along downward paths
Downwards I walk

Song 15.

I am the first one
I will become the açaí-demon
Above us are clouds
Racing through the sky
This is as it has always been

The shape of demon-keeper
The leaves of tree-demons
Those leaves rustle
They remind me of a swarm of bird-demons
Countless of them are moving
They are the same
While I am singing
I suck from my lips
The juice of tobacco
Ahhhhhh! I say! Ahhhhhhh!
I am the first one
Whom with fresh leafs
Has his chest
Adorned with images
The geometry-demons
Geometry is the teacher
The images on my chest
They control the demons
I am the demon of demons

PS

The above three songs are approximate translations of Marubo shamanic songs. They are are taken from Pedro N. Cesarino's ethnopoetic study 'ONISKA: A poética da morte e do mundo entre os Marubo da Amazônia ocidental', (a brilliant overview of the oratory tradition of the Marubo. I haven't actually read it (I still use my finger when reading a book in my native language) but it certainly looks like a well executed study that came recommended by Brazilian indigestina friends. The songs, or maybe spells, are created with a the help of online dictionaries, a bit of fantasy and my personal need for shamanic-goth texts. Ahhhhhhh!

I enjoyed making them and felt only a little bit redundant when looking at them again after two years. They were initially published at the excellent ZSWound blog for dysfunctional text.

Living in the field, finding evidence of fun (first draft)

Lady Elizabeth Barnaby is a forgotten explorer who abandoned her husband and six children under the age of 13 to live with ‘the Indians’ of South-America. She encountered several isolated village as she wandered through the Xingu with a hired guide, looking for a suitable place to settle. From her guide we know that she eventually found her new home with a nomadic people of uncertain Tupi extraction calling themselves The People. Lady Barnaby had always dreamt of becoming a writer, Conrad was her great inspiration, and she must have tried to keep a journal, keeping an eye out for future publications. There remains no trace of her: maybe she got sick and died, maybe the people she lived with had enough and got rid of her. This happened in a time cannibalism was more common than it is today. Lord Barnaby travelled after his wife hoping to take her back but he never caught sight of her. He did leave behind him a small network of informants who would keep him updated about any news about his wife that might make its way out of the forest. It is through this channel that after 25 years a badly tattered fragment of notebook was delivered by mail at the Barnaby family home in Causton, Midsomer. The handwriting was unmistakably, indecipherably, hers. Most of the writing that could be made out was devoted to a game simply called: The Game. The game board is shown above, the rules and circumstances of the game as documented by Lady Barnaby are as follows:

“Chieftain Sabino the Third taught me to play The Game today, after much hesitation and muttering. The reason of his earlier refusal seems to have been for reasons of protocol and problems of translation. Our earlier conversation that day in which I told him about the stars in the English sky also seemed to have warmed him to me. He sang the Song of the Game with long drawn out sighs and puffs while drawing the patterns of the board in the mud on the floor: a fixed but intricate design described as Milky Way Anus, but my sorry grasp of the language may be at my detriment here. Sabino showed the movements allowed to each of the pieces with finger dancing grace. As counters we used glass beads in three colours that are exchanged with the sedentary villages along the river for the bark they need for fishing. 

- The first player moves a piece representing the jaguar, the second player moves the remaining 14 pieces; which are dogs.

- The first and second player are opponents but they need to deal with a third player who moves a piece representing the Acua, spirit of anteater, overlord of the bestiary.

- The drive is like a game of checkers, turning the houses.

- The Jaguar eats the other dogs and the dogs must immobilize the jaguar by collaring it.

- The Acua eats all and attempts to clear the board.

- The Jaguar player wins when s/he lives at the end.

- The Dogs wins when the Jaguar has been immobilized and the game stops.

- The Acua player wins when all the other pieces have been devoured.”

The fragments ends unreadable but the words, ‘shamanic’, ‘kinship’, ‘pain’, ‘fun’ and ‘depraved’ can be made out.  

(Post dedicated to the Maloka Elektra, Oi-Indigenista who enjoyed the readers of their blog with a fascinating snippet about a (possibly) unique Amazonian Indian board game. Read Here. This story (first draft) was inspired by their post.)

Sloterdijk Pacman Foraging

1) Yesterday's Sloterdijk forage expedition (8 May 2011, Amsterdam) brought together nine people ready to get their hands dirty in the Middle Kingdom of Weeds. Spreading out as two groups we hoped to find, harvest and log edible wild plants in a relatively randomly selected part of Amsterdam. The directions from walking were produced on route by a .walk script generating a wandering path of alternating sequences of 'chase' and 'scatter' based on the mechanism that guide the movements of the ghosts in Pacman, a game that essentially deals with the problems of food foraging in an inhospitable world. The two groups agreed beforehand to meet again at the starting point after 75 minutes.

2) The theme we wanted to explore with this expedition was the caloric content of city greens. Without any claims to scientific precision the final harvest was sorted and weighted and should give us an indication about the balance between the energy invested and gained when urban foraging (see one half of the results). In the end we foraged for diversity, collecting samples of as many different edible food stuffs we could find rather than take all that was usable. We could easily have spend an hour digging up the roots of the thistles we found at the centre of a roundabout, but as we were not prepared to use all of it this would have been bad practise. The momentum for the consideration that a globalized food industry is probably a bad idea is growing and foraging is considered as one possible alternative source of local food. From this perspective any well informed guess on the number of people a city can feed is a strategic piece of information. Our expedition will not answer this question but I certainly felt that resources are not scarce, especially when taken in consideration that through a different regime of maintenance (read: weeding) the overall quantity of edibles could easily be enlarged in a short amount of time.   

3) The concern for caloric value and energy efficiency is a peasant concern. The forager is not a Homo Economicus and uninterested in finding optimal paths between the statistical correlations that map output maximization and input minimization. Diversity is not a luxury but a biological necessity on which calories should unhesitatingly be wasted. In the words of William Burroughs: "It is not necessary to live, it is necessary to travel." The use of game algorithms was a jokish way of criticizing any attempt to discredit foraging on peasantry terms.   

4) As the start of our walk I found myself at a junction with indeterminate exits. With the Sloterdijk station in my back, a three lane bus ramp in front of me, tower blocks to the right and large scale infrastructural works crossing the horizon on the left, our position offered a uninviting perspective with limited views. Where to go? As a group we started scanning the surroundings for patches of green that we might want to take as our target, looking at the code to see what we should do because we couldn't see any. We selected a direction towards an invisible diagonal point ahead of us 500 meters in the distance. After only ten meters we made our first edible weed catch of the day. Growing between ornamental violets in a huge flowerpot, this plant, the name of which now escapes me. This would prove to be the first instance of a pattern that would direct our ghost-steps for the entire duration of the walk: aiming to move ahead, towards an unknown point beyond were we could see, interrupted by the visible reality of omnipresent weeds in the corner.

5) The implicit idea behind the way the .walk code was structured is that a walk always travels between points, between places of use separated by something else. After 75 minutes we had walked only a short distance but we had visited five areas containing specific communities of plants (a flowerpot, a grassy field, the inside of a roundabout, the line of trees hiding the Telegraaf office from the road, an overgrown strip of land between the road and the blind wall of a warehouse). That is at least how I would afterwards order our walk into discrete units of place, but I don't actually recall us moving from target to target at the time. We weren't moving from one location to the next, we were moving though a landscape that was offering something everywhere all the time. The fact that we had to cross several busy roads did not diminish this sensation.

6) The one foraging location that did make a definite impact was a small segment on the inside of an enormous roundabout. Most of it was mowed but a small area was carved with ditches and adorned with little hills of dirt and here the plants could grow without obstruction. On one side the ground had been disturbed more recently and here we found different plants than on the other side that hosted thistles, cow parsley and a few other edibles whose name I don't recall (I am a novice with a terrible memory for such things). In the recent ditch we found several large strands of wild rocket which, we theorized, will mean that it is good at colonizing freshly disturbed soils. Based on this simple observation one can start to predict where one specific plant may be found and how you can bring it closer to you: think of a small observation like this as the beginning of a framework that will make hospitable even the most forlorn outposts of the Middle Kingdom. We spend some time harvesting the roots of milk thistle, a plant that according to my 'Food for Free' guidebook was brought to Northern Europe as an extremely useful pot herb from the Mediterranean. Intellectually I get it. To us novices the wild rocket is a better plant to really get the issues of urban foraging in focus. It looks exactly like the normal rocket an Italian restaurant puts on your pizza but it has a far richer, dare I say wilder, taste than its domesticated supermarket form. Bland products really are the price we pay for industrialization. While we were standing there, chatting, exploring and exchanging bits of information, guide books at the ready, we were laughed at loudly and mockingly from behind open car windows waiting for the traffic light to go green. The Mike-the-Situations of this world are clearly not yet ready to join our shores.

7) Afterwards we sampled a bit of Comfrey (smeerwortel) root: it was the foulest thing I have ever tasted. It was fed to us for this purpose.

 

ps) This report will be added to as fellow foragers will publish their reports and as I rewrite my own. A report by Michelle Kasprzak is already available. 

Theun's Pac-map of our walk.

Our first find, notice that yellow hand.

Caloric table.

The first of two sheets of .walk code.

At the roundabout.

Harvesting Thistle roots.

Found several plants mentioned in Food for Free.

The harvest sorted.

The fabled wild rocket.

Eskimo psychogeography II

Simon Anaviapik (1913-1992) from Pond Inlet, Baffin Island was a Inuit elder and all round cool dude who believed in the education of the Southerners in the Eskimo ways as a way of protecting his people against the invaders. In order to authorize a film he travelled to London in 1976. Hugh Brody was his host and guide and in 'The other side of Eden' Brody gives us the following insight on how the great town and its outlying fields appear to someone at a mature age experiencing the urban condition for the first time. (another instance of eskimo psychogeography) The 'cliffs' are the name Anaviapik gave to highrises. 

To get some relief from homogenised urban crowds, we took a trip to the Norfolk countryside. I wanted to give Anaviapik some sense of England that is not all cliffs and cliff dwellers. We set off, driving northeast, across Cambridgeshire and through Suffolk. I chose a route that was as rural as could be.He looked out onto the green landscapes and said, "It's all built." He did not see the difference between town and country except as a matter of degree: the one had more people and more houses side by side, and the other had more fields and hedgerows. But all of this, hedgerows as much as houses, was made by people; none of it was 'nature' - at least not a form of nature that he would recognize as such. He was always amiable and interested, but he did not like much of what he saw. 

After a long and arduous study the Eskimo linguist returned to her people and said: in the South they have 20 names for town: town, city, village, metropolis, countryside, nature, cryptoforest......  

Psychogeographical publications from the future: Five

Three more newsletters from the London Psychogeographical Association, issues 10, 19, 21. Click to enlarge.

Psychogeographical publications from the future: FOUR

The First Congress of the New Lettrist International was an organization with unknown outcome instigated the LPA and the Neoist Alliance (read: Stewart Home). The name and the texts play a game with a variety of references to obscure events in communist history and unravelling them will earn you a PhD. Tongue-in-cheek neo(ist)-communist backbiting with a dash of white goddessism. Also included in this post is an issue of Re:Action the newsletter of the Neoist Alignment (the alignment of Home with all his imaginary friends).

 

Psychogeographical publications from the future: THREE

The London Psychogeographical Association was 'founded' by Ralph Rumney in 1957 but the incarnation that made a name for itself was hosted by Fabian Thompsett with or without the support of Stewart Home in the mid-nineties. The LPA's newsletters (below are issues 12, 16 and 18, click to enlarge) combine hermetic occult readings of the (political) landscape with slightly ridiculous contrived calls for a proletarian uprising. Truly unique.

\