Liner Notes to a critique of urban geography

From my experience the most often cited text of classic psychogeography is 'Theory of the Derive' (1958) with its opening lines: "One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll." At the first Psy Geo Con Flux in 2003 it was included in every talk and I thing it was Karen O'Rourke who observed that it became the mantra of the festival. 

While backtracking the original sources and quotes I discovered that Debord's slightly earlier 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' (1955) is a far richer source for usable quotations but I don't recall anybody ever referring to it and I certainly don't remember reading it myself even though I must have come across it online and it is also present in my copy of 'Leaving the 20th Century' that I must have lingering on my shelves for at least 10 years.....

Do I read Guy Debord? Does anybody? really?? I find his texts unpalatable as a whole, while at the same time they undeniably contain a certain cultish attractiveness through it condensed argumentation, epigrammatic style interlaced with the venomous sneers he is best known for. Was he a great theorist? Probably not. Was he as brilliant as his friends claimed? Well, it is certainly an achievement to write a few little rants that are still read and discussed 55 years later.

Here are a few quotes from 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' that I found instructive and which should have come to me earlier, the images above are the two painting by Lorrain that Debord refers to as prime examples of the "the arrangement of the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke, entails bold hypotheses that must constantly corrected in the light of experience, by critique and self-critique". 

Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved blatantly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest detachment. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets.

...

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.

....

The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit). A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London This sort of game is obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult realizations, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

...

I scarcely know of anything but those two harbors at dusk painted by Claude Lorrain — which are in the Louvre and which juxtapose extremely dissimilar urban ambiances — that can rival in beauty the Paris Metro maps. I am not, of course, talking about mere physical beauty — the new beauty can only be a beauty of situation — but simply about the particularly moving presentation, in both cases, of a sum of possibilities.

What has always been problematic about Situationism is that as it developed a hardline Marxist demand for the total revolution of every day life, it tried to be so radical and unspecified that it could never make friends. It was meant to be like Debord's book with the sandpaper cover. The brutalism of it is also its charm but there is no way to go from there. I also think that in our society there is no longer a real home for true, theory-based radicalism that is also self-critical. 

Guy Debord did not deserve to be credited as the inspiration for stupid, irrelevant IPhone apps.  One last quote:

The first moral deficiency remains indulgence, in all its forms.

Fight the Google-Jugend!

We are miserable creatures.

We are stunted in our growth.

We are mostly naked.

Our faces are hideous, bedaubed with paint.

Our skins are filthy, green tobacco slime drips down from our chins.

Our voices are discordant.

Our gesticulation is violent, without any dignity.

Our language is like the clearing of a throat.

Our language is hoarse, guttural, clicking.

We are savages.

We do not need search.

We know everything we need to know.

Please do hide that look of total and utter surprise, but yes, I do, to my own surprise as well as yours, very occasionally publish essays in things that get printed. Today arrived my latest enterprise in print: Tresholds 38, themed Future, edited by the great Orkan Telhan and published by the MIT's department of Architecture. My piece is called 'Fight the Google Jugend' and it is a kind of Amazonian enthnopoetic compendium of local voices kept together by a fat sauce of anarcho-sentimentality. The footnotes are about 30% of the text in the version published here, the ratio in the manuscript was closer to 60% and it apparently looked so daunting that the text managed to pass peer-review. It was illustrated by the wonderful Lucy Cheung. Proper publications are, to a certain extent, the justification for my, to a certain extent, marginalization and I was pretty chuffed about this piece when I submitted it, after months of waiting for the final result a certain emptiness has come over me. I take this to be the universal hangover that is part of writing. Am looking forward to read the rest of the magazine.

Our ancestors could never have believed that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intellects cool, dogmatic and unsympathetic (Yeah!), who regarded our world with envious eyes, and who slowly and surely drew their plans against us (Yeah!). Early in the sixteenth century came our great disillusionment, we were all counted amongst the dead when the pananakiri came. We are the feral children of the forest (Yeah!). The collateral damage of the search for that mystery land of liquid Inca gold (Yeah!). Doomed orphans of El Dorado (Yeah!). We have survived the euro-germs, for now, but as long as anyone of us dies from the common cold, the measles or the flu, the discovery of America is not yet over...

(Yeah!)

(Go on!)

(Yeah!)

Earth scraped bare (Yeah!) ! Plunder and deforestation (Yeah!) ! Rubber Rubber Rubber (Yeah!) ! Death Death Death (Yeah!) ! Sold into slavery (Yeah!) ! The state will eat us all (Yeah!) ! The centre cannot hold (Yeah!) ! Anarchy unleashed, chaos and turmoil (Yeah!) ! Fire and pain, disease and suffering (Yeah!) ! The shabono teargassed, the maloka nuked ! (Yeah!) Thousand corpses, grinning missionaries (Yeah!) ! Deluded anthropologists (Yeah!) ! Post-crash Tupi-Surrealism (Yeah!) ! Myth verified as history (Yeah!) ! The blotted-out forgotten past announces our second coming (Yeah!) ! The raised mounds of Marajo Island (Yeah!) ! The garden cities of Xingu (Yeah!) ! The lost cities of Z (Yeah!) ! The forest islands of the Beni (Yeah!) ! The geogplyphs of the upper Purus (Yeah!) ! They are all coming to the surface like badly healed broken bones scarring the skin from underneath (Yeah!) ! Red and blistering (Yeah!) ! Infected and rotting (Yeah!) ! It all started with the wrath of Viti-Vití (Oh Yeah!)!

 

The Fungi of justice

Yesterday I went on a walk to make some pictures of a small cryptoforest with an extremely rich plant life but when I got there I learned that the builders beat me to it. Perambulating onwards, in a completely different part of town, I spotted this fungi hotspot on top of the above sign. I have never seen anything like it. The sign is attached to the fence of the court building. Two meters away attached to the same fence was another sign but this was clean. My guess: the cleaners didn't dare to clean this hideous smiling bulbing fungi mess.   

Jivaro shamanic chant

Drawn by a Jivaro shaman in trance 

The main part of this post is a Jivaro shamanic anent or sung incantation recorded by Philippe Descola and given in The Spears of Twilight (earlier). There is quite a bit of neo-hippie rubbish about on Amazonian shamanic practise but surely even the most severely confused and mentally disturbed middle class American seeking for spiritual redemption does not believe that his of her illness is caused by invisible darts propelled into your body by an enemy shaman. Darts that can only be removed through various voice operations (singing, blowing, sucking) of a drugged out shaman with the appropriate spirits under his belt. There is nothing lovely or tender or wishy-washy about Amazonian shamanic practise, its dark and dramatic, gothic materialism, it deals with death directly, uncosmetic and without excuses. I can imagine that a small, properly delivered, compendium of anents like these could become a underground classic. Anyway here it comes....  

Me, Tsumai [river spirits], Tsumai ....
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!
Tsumai, Tsumai...
Me, me, me, while I make my projectile penetrate
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, I am in harmony
Making my Iwianch [spirits of the death] spirits rise up
I make them pas through the barrier of darts
I make them penetrate the wall of little arrows
Giving them an immediate way out
Leaving them a free passage
In this way I blow, me, me, me...
Launching my blown projectile
Submerging everything, saturating everything
I am blowing me, me, me...
Tarairira, tara, tariri-ri-ri-ri-ri
You the extraordinary one
Tarairira, tara, tariri-ri-ri-ri-ri
As remarkable as you are, I am blowing
Tsunki [river spirits], tsunki, my spirits I am summoning you
Violently leaving a path, I am blowing, I am blowing

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

Tsumai, Tsumai...

Me, me, me...

Like a river carrying away its bank, I cover everything with my flood, I overflow everywhere,
Unmoving on this very spot
Stretching into the depths, I am blowing
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. . .
Even when they are embedded, out of reach, I unhook the tsentsak [magic dart] with a dry tap, blowing
Clearing a path for myself, I completely beguile the stranger who has invited himself into your body, by blowing, by blowing, me, me, me, me, me, me!
Tarairira, tara, tariri
Tsumai, Tsumai...
Making my breath penetrate, making it desirable, I work hard to make them let go
I work to get rid of them completely, absolutely, by opening the exit
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!
Tsumai, Tsumai... me, me... rari ri ri, rari ri ri...
Supai, supai, supai, supai, supai, supai, me, me...
Like tsunki himself, I know how to speak, me,me, me...
In your head that is so painful, in your painful head
However embedded the pain is, I unhook it with a dry tap
Leaving you perfectly well, I sing and sing, I blow and blow
Tarairira, tara, tariri, me, me ... ri, ri, ri, ri
The pasuk from the entrails of the earth, him too I call, me, me, me
The death that I now ward off, I am brushing it away with my sheaf, proudly

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

Like the pasuk [shamanic helpers] of the great trees, like the pasuk all striped, I am in the grip of natem [Ayahuasca]
Unmoving, I wear the pasuk like a necklace and death itself I beguile, carrying it far away, me, me, me, me

Tarairira, tara...

Tsumai, Tsumai...
Relentlessly drawing the pasuk from the skies, all bleeding
Wearing it constantly around me like a necklace
Death itself I sweep away with me sheaf, that's what I do with the death that inhabits you, that's what I do to the death to which I reveal myself, me, me, me
Superpowerful me, me ... tsumai ... tarairira...
With the pasuk from the entrails of the earth, with the multicoloured pasuk I make myself a necklace
Unmoving, I pass you the necklace and, repairing your lack of appetite, me, me, me, I leave you well recomposed, me, me, me ... tsumai ... tsumai ...
Pasuk from the entrails of the earth, it is you that I summon
Multicoloured one, it is you that I call
It is to you that I speak and I carry off with me all the creatures of natem
That is what I do, me, me,me,me,me,me,me!
The one that is almost unreachable, that is the one I nevertheless wear as a necklace
Unmoving, I am here on the very spot where Tsunki is preparing to do his work, there where he will unleash the floods
My Iwianch spirits, I make them turn blue in my very soul, I make them turn blue
I make them come out quivering 'puririri!', me, me, me!
Tsumai, Tsumai... 

The one called Tsunki, I make him come in that flood that roars 'shakaa!'
Relentlessly I go, unleashing my flood in his very heart, the flood of my own river, ceaselessly summoning the flood, making the waters roar, I go padding on 

I have the power of rivers in flood, ceaselessly I call for the waters to overflow
Formidable I am, like the waves rolling on the pebbles, without respite ensuring my victory, all fragrant, all perfumed, I make Tsunki roll, me, me, me

Tsumai, Tsumai... 

I become like a porcupine, wearing spines like a necklace, clothing myself in quills, I am covered with them

Your very death, I shall chain it up faraway, confident of my fearlessness

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

Having summoned the soul that is here, I seize it and hold on to it firmly

In the golden ink I have spread myself

Imbued with my valour, I am proud of myself

All adorned with the necklace, all arrayed by the porcupine, I sweep away death with my sheaf of leaves, intrepid and confident.  

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

The one called the porcupines of the heavens, that is the one I seize to make a crown of darts and definitely make death draw back from your head

By the shivers I am seized, tsumai, tsumai...

To my call Tsunki has responded

In this golden pot where your soul was enclosed, boldly I make death flee

Dressing myself in new cloths, dressed all brand new, brought by the natem, I adorn myself with them as with a necklace, me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

Tsumai, Tsumai... 

You are girded by the bow of Iwianch spirits

Twisting and turning without cease, I summon death and seize it

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me!

I summon the Iwianch spirits relentlessly and my voice makes them tremble

I make them come , brushing with my sheaf of leaves so that they leave you in peace...

At first sight this anent, as a translated text to be read in silence, may appear repetitive and unwelcoming to read. But once you get it into it you soon notice that it builds up incredible tension as the shaman, at the same time curing and telling about his cure, demands the spirits he commands to come out and help him, accumulating power(s), with each new sentence rephrasing and elaborating on a theme brought up in the sentence before it. But the shaman is not reading aloud from a imaginary book, he is performing a ritual at the edge of several colliding planes of reality, with death lingering at each intersection. He sings, pauses and whistles a melody again, emits strange sounds, deep sighs from his gut, ventriqualistic grunts as if a pack of animals hides inside his chest. It's a jam,  a DaDa performance without chicanery.

Amazonian ornaments without information

Regarding art from the Amazon and ways to present it. Earlier & earlier. 

Hjalmar Stolpe (1841-1905) was a Swedish archaeologist and ethnographer. From his book "Studies in American Ornamentation — a Contribution to the Biology of Ornament", a fascinating title but unknown to google books and other reference sites, Dover collected 190 rubbing of wood carvings in a book called "Amazon Indian designs from Brazilian and Guianan wood carvings" in 1974. What anybody would get from this book is a mystery: this book that lacks all information regarding the makers, the circumstances and the date of production, a good foreword would have redeemed it but no. 

Oh My!

Boskoi, the augmented foraging app for Android (earlier) was mentioned on the front page of the NRC.Next newspaper yesterday. It was also included in a list of apps that might be helpful to fill your weekend. I suppose the main reason for its inclusion is its novelty value because some of the actual information given is misleading. 


Everybody knows that so-called journalists are to accurate information what scabs are to a strike.

But it was funny because I just got back from Amsterdam for a productive meeting with Boskoi's Theun when I heard about his 15 minutes and for a moment I too, by sympathy, could bask in the glory of fame and respectability that national publication bestow on a project like this. 

Thoreau & the great forage revival

'Wild Fruit' (1991) is a collection of field notes and observations rescued from Thoreau's enormous backlog of unpublished illegible manuscripts and beautifully presented with illustrations and annotations. 

To most people this book will be as boring as watching paint dry and the comparison is apt because Thoreau is almost doing just that. With painstaking detail this book layers tons of observations on all sorts of weedy and wild edible (fruit) plants through the year,  commenting on their blooming season, taste, form and their history of domestication. This makes 'Wild Fruit' a kind of food-for-free augmented foraging guide of the Gutenberg age, informing you how to recognize plants, what can be eaten and when it is best eaten, and its place in history with quotes from 19Th century botanical sources as well as the 'classics'. 

The fruits are listed by their consecutive period of fruitation throughout the year, an interesting way of organizing the material; appropriate but unusual when you are looking for a specific plant. (Did I ever tell you about 'Six Records of a Floating life' by Shen Fu?) This is not so much a guide as a database, a Xanadu machine for fieldnotes and perambulation about species and sometimes individual plants. You could very well imagine a online version of this book, and you can very well imagine this book as a model for a story telling approach to Boskoi and similar edible city Gmaps.  

But this is Thoreau and what makes Wild Fruit essential reading as a precursor to the modern edible city / urban foraging revival is that his observations can at any moment issue and answer a philosophical question of the most basic nature: what do we know (we don't even know our own backyard) and how do we know it (hearsay and trust or direct observation and experimentation). The choice to be 'boring' is Thoreau's ultimate philosophical point.  

The Preface by Bradley Dean is worthwhile.

The uncivilized & the inhuman in literature [updated]

Bonobo Kanzi behind the Lexigram board.

Two trajectories have lead me to this quote from Robinson Jeffers preface to his 1948 book of poems 'The Double Axe':

The first part of The Double Axe was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.

One is remote and one is only a twitter message away. 


Gary Snyder, Zeus of cryptoforestry, cites Jeffers as one of his initial role models and this is not hard to see for someone called 'the poet laureate of deep ecology'. Apparently Snyder has an e-mail address and if I had it I would maybe send him an message. In an interview he also said that he would only mail back when the writer states his location. The old man really is a kind of beatnik Miss Marple.


The Dark Mountain project is a post-environmentalist call-to-arms to artists and writers to, hmmm, wellll, like, eeuhhmm, you know.... I find DM engaging but also infuriating vague; loud on the outside and shallow on the inside, full of ideas on the surface, muddled and confused when held up to the light. This blog is like that as well so I don't mind and I still maintain high hopes for DM. 


Anyway: DM takes its name from a Jeffers poem and his inhumanism is a direct influence on DM's demand for a new 'uncivilized writing'.           

Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy—to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures. 

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed—but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves.“

Here is my problem: inhumanism is not inhuman & uncivilization is not uncivilized. It defines a humanism and civilization with a greater scope, as if the human object just inherited a full class of non-human attributes: can I suggest extrahumanism and extracivilized as alternatives?  


As it turns out Henry David Thoreau anticipated Jeffers without needing to invent a fancy new word. In 1851, at the end of his life, Thoreau described the poetry he wanted to write as giving expression to nature: 

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. 

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

PrimatePoetics, my own long term project, explains my own commitment to the spectre of extrahuman literature. 


Thank you.

The Middle Kingdom of Weeds around my corner [Updated Twice]

The middle kingdom of weeds is a kingdom in the psychogeographonomic classification of environments, not in the regal sense of authority. These weeds are the citizens of the in-between, comrades of the cryptoforester. I went out to take these pictures two days ago, when the sun was lovely and the ground dry but somehow I managed to delete them from the camera without saving them to the computer first. This morning it had been drizzling all night and the pictures are the better for it: the leafs are now lush restaurant-salad green. 


When going over them I noticed that all grasses are missing, are they too middle-class? What a strange preconception. Must learn from that. 


To purpose of this expedition is to find out what is there & to learn the names what is now a void. 


I don't count many species. The first time I went out I found one stem of nettles but missed it this time. I also thought I found one kind of plant quite often on one side of the street that was completely missing on the other but the pictures do not corroborate this. Robert Walser's micro story is worth more than all the books of Deleuze put together. But is that really saying much?

Several times I have been looking to purchase a guide but they tend to be 

- expensive (and I rather buy another book of Amazonian anthropology) 

- too limited or too complicated

- lacking the information that I am really keen on: edibility and plant histories.

There is Wikipedia but that is not really helpful...

.. So I confess my innocence and my cluelessness about determination but with the help of you, the reader (thank you!), many of these civilians of the lumpen plantariat are now identified. The job would have been much when these plants will be in bloom.  

First I thought this plant, the most common in my street, was Dock leaf or Ridderzuring, then I thought it maybe was Sorrel or Veldzuring. But Readers Ed and Schildpad suggested Hollyhock or Stokroos.

Taraxacum officinale or Common Dandelion or Paardenbloem

This one might or might not be different from the above, and this might, as reader Petr suggests, then be Sheperd's purse or Herderstasje

A little cryptogarden growing on a heap of soil, notice the snowdrops but what is the dominating plant called? Reader Phil comes up with the answer: Ranculus repens or Creeping buttercup or Kruipende boterbloem. Thank you!

Despicable and fatty, but how do a gardeners call it. Reader Petr suggests Common Whitlow Grass or Vroegeling

Common plant, hard to make pictures of because they are very small, but what are they called? Four readers suggest Common chickweed or Vogelmuur

Lichen are just so photogenic.

Dandelion or Shepard's purse?? Reader Becky suggests Dandelion, 

Rare in my street, no idea what it is.

Dog shit unites us all.

Reader Becky suggests: Sheep sorel or Schapenzuring

Reader Becky sguggests Prickly lettuce or Kompassla

The middle kingdom of the middle kingdom.

Reader Ed suggests Hairy Bittercress or Kleine veldkers for this.

Galanthus nivalis or Snowdrop or Sneeuwklokje

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.”