Month: January 2015

In his essay The Power of the Particular, David Brooks talks about the strangeness of Bruce Springsteen’s universal appeal, how European crowds sing along to lyrics about New Jersey; few of them have seen the Meadowlands, Stone Pony or Highway 9, but the songs still resonate.

Brooks refers to ‘paracosms’ the imaginary worlds we build as children: “These landscapes, sometimes complete with imaginary beasts, heroes and laws, help us orientate ourselves in reality.” For Brooks, the need for such environments continues into adulthood. Brooks refers to the paradox where artists who create “local and distinctive story landscapes” have the widest reach, referring to JK Rowling’s visions of a boarding school or Tupac’s Compton. Audiences are captivated by focussed, detailed realities.

Hip-hop has always been about celebrating places. Growing up, I listened to songs about Compton, Crenshaw and Long Beach. One of the revolutionary things about the Wu-Tang clan was that they didn’t merely talk about their neighbourhoods but transformed them. They renamed the borough of New York they grew up in, Staten Island, as Shaolin Island, and merged their locales with the mythology of the Kung-Fu films that they loved.

RZA (who also goes by the name The Abbot) talks about watching Kung Fu films on 42nd street with his cousin Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The band took the name Wu-Tang from films, as did some of the members – inspiration includes 1978’s Master Killer and the character Ghost Faced Killer from Mystery of Chessboxing. The first album’s title, Enter the 36 Chambers, was inspired by the film 36th Chamber of Shaolin. The lyrics are a stew of references to local landmarks and obscure slang, dramatised through Kung-Fu samples. The band don’t simply promote their neighbourhoods but fill them with myth. Mundane blocks are turned into stories, which are then listened to around the world.

In 2009 I was in my early thirties and unhappy. I had good friends, enough money to live well, and my schedule was busy and exciting. But I still felt empty. A low-grade depression had gnawed at me for years, wearing me down. I wasn’t sure what to do and it felt as if I’d tried everything; work, academia, sabbaticals, living abroad. Nothing felt as vivid as it should do.

The person who inspired me to go to India, Dr Tom, wasn’t someone I knew particularly well, but when he talked about travelling he made it sound worth doing. I had some money left over from a recent contract so I decided to go to India.

I’m not sure exactly why I picked India. I wanted to visit one of the places on what I later learned was called ‘the banana pancake trail’, named after the ubiquitous dish requested by Lonely Planet reading travellers. (I searched for a book on ubiquitous backpacker cuisine, but it’s not been written yet. Maybe I should do it one day?). I think India appealed to me from the little I’d read about it and because of the connections between England and India.

Everyone knows that wherever you go, you take the weather with you. I understood that and was going to India to tour rather than to find myself. And there was no great revelatory moment, no sunrise by the Ganges that made me realise that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. But there were little revelations, a relief in being overwhelmed by the scale of the world.

My mentor had told me of someone she knew who had actual depression rather than the nagging dissatisfaction I dragged around. Whenever this friend’s depression became overwhelming they would head for another country. Forced to deal with the million little hassles of being somewhere new, the difficulty of finding food and shelter, their misery would fade into the background.

A year after that first trip, I read Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand which tells the story of the Beats in India through the life of Hope Savage. A sentence in that book evoked my experience of India perfectly: “And perhaps just as the mysteries of train tables, currency exchange and cheap accommodations were eventually resolved, so might others”.

According to Stewart Home, Grant Morrison is an under-appreciated influence on psychogeography: “Morrison is every bit as important to the popularisation of psychogeography as Sinclair, and on a global scale more important.”

Morrison’s masterwork so far is his 55-issue series the Invisibles. In the first issue, Morrison claimed that the story’s end would reveal the secret of the universe. The plot described a battle between a group of freedom fighters and an extra-dimensional conspiracy that had enslaved humanity. But it was about more than that: magic, politics, Lovecraftian horror, UFOs, transvestite witches, class, India, voodoo and on and on. It was a comic book about everything.

Grant Morrison has always been one for epic statements. He has said that he aims to make the DC comic-book universe self-aware, or that his current series will make the readers into superheroes. The Invisibles, he claimed, was a magic ritual, a ‘hypersigil’, designed to make the world more exciting. It’s arguable that it worked. Morrison was, initially, furious at the way in which the Matrix took on many of his ideas, achieving far greater reach than Morrison’s often difficult narrative, then realised this could be seen as an effect of the magic.

I read a lot of books because they were referred to in the series and saw traces of the way the comics emerged into the world. Submitting to an annotation web-site led to me spending a day in LA with counter-cultural journalist Jay Babcock. I lurked at the Barbelith website, a community started by some Invisibles fans. Out of this came Liars League, the London short-story night, which read one of my stories some years ago.

The book ended in 2000, after revealing the secrets of the universe. Parts of it now seem dated, with a particular nineties glibness and postmodernism, but much of it is still striking, such as the struggles of Dane McGowan, the tragedy of the time-travel romance, the sacrifice of Mr. Six and the revelations about the universe.

According to the Invisibles, 22nd December 2012 was the end of the world. I was lying in bed that night, unable to sleep. For years, I’d followed a twitter account called Barbelith, named after a satellite from the book. There were very few messages on the account, but it came alive that night, tweeting the messages the satellite had made that night in the final stages of the story. Reading those messages, I suddenly felt connected to the Invisibles again, to all the threads it had made in the world. The comic book had meant a lot to me, had suggested so many places to look, and here I was years later, sleeping in an attic, reading the satellite’s transmissions. Something had passed.

I first heard of Alastair Humphreys via Mr. Spratt. While Humpheys has walked across India and cycled 46,000 miles, I was most interested in two of his smaller adventures: walking a lap of the M25 and walking home for Christmas. They had a lovely mix of epic and whimsy.

Some time after, Humphreys began promoting the idea of microadventures. The idea was the simplest expedition one could manage, so short you could do it between leaving work one night and starting work the next day. No need for extravagant gear, just grab a sleeping bag, warm clothes, food and maybe a bivvy bag. Set off into the countryside and sleep outdoors. It’s a simple idea but Humphrey’s enthusiasm acted as a sort of permission. Don’t worry about sleeping rough, just get out there.

My first microadventure was in 2013, the day after my birthday. I cleared up the house, ate a cooked breakfast then set off walking with my friends Trevor and John. We met up with another friend, Michael Parker, and made it to Cuckmere Haven where we drunk a pint; then waved Mike off and settled into some woods as dusk fell. I remember the quiet, the dawn sky through the leaves.

There was a less successful outing with my friend Vicky in 2014, sleeping out on the Downs. The bare hills had little cover and we hid beneath some thorny trees, keeping off the rain with a tarpaulin. As cold and damp as it was, I’m still glad I did it. I loved drinking red wine, the lights of the weald villages below us, wondering what was the searchlight that kept sweeping over us.

It’s only takes a little work to have an adventure. I could bundle together the things I need in ten minutes, be deep in the countryside within an hour. The question is, then, why don’t I do this more often?

When he was 19 years old, Ivan Vladimirovitch Chtcheglov wrote Formulary for a New Urbanism, one of the central psychogeographical texts. Chtcheglov was a member of the Lettrist International, a small crew of artists and radicals formed by Guy Debord. This essay was written in 1953 and published in 1958, with an abridged version appearing in the magazine Internationale Situationniste #1. By this time Chtcheglov had been incarcerated in a mental hospital following a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower with stolen dynamite; its light apparently shone into his attic room and kept him awake.

In the short piece, Chtcheglov sets out a manifesto for what he thinks a city should be, how we should create a new type of city to resist the threats of what he terms banalisation. Merlin Coverley, writing in his book Psychogeography, says of Chtcheglov that “His Formulary certainly seems to display ample evidence of his oncoming mental illness” going on to sneer that “Needless to say, the details for establishing such an environment are absent here”. While it’s true that many of the Lettrist and Situationist projects were left half done, Chtcheglov does not seem to be setting out a plan, rather than making a poetic call-to-arms – one that has has been responded to by, for example, Tony Wilson’s building of the Hacienda.

 (Which is not to say that there are not significant flaws in the Formulary, but it remains a powerful evocation of how strange and beautiful a city might be).

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun…

The formulary demands a new architecture, not one built around absolute truths that have trapped for so long, but a playful city. A fascinating place, where people can explore, whose different zones evoke and heighten particular emotions and sensations. The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation. 

As a child I was always told that the way to learn about anything was to read about it. So, before my first trip to India in 2010, I worked through a pile of books about the country.

One which had a great influence on me was Sam Miller’s Delhi. This is an attempt to explore the city, detailing an epic walk and describing the landmarks and neighbourhoods that Miller encountered. The book made me love Delhi, when many people I know can barely tolerate it.

In his introduction, Miller talks a little about urban walking and says that his first such journey was in was in Paris, a city famous for its walkers. He draws an interesting comparison between the urban poets of Paris and the English romantics.

Miller writes that “If you don’t walk in Delhi, large parts of the city are invisible to you”. It is also a place where life is “lived in the open” albeit one that can be difficult to move through given its traffic, broken pavements and open sewers. He also faces an amusing difficulty of walking in Indian cities: a foreigner attempting to cross the road is often faced by a wall of autorickshaws offering rides.

Around the time he encountered Sinclair’s Lights out for the territory, Miller was considering an exploratory walk. Sinclair had taken a letter V as his route, for reasons undisclosed. At night, when unable to sleep, Miller began to consider the perfect shape for a walk around Delhi. Circles and figures-of-eight left the holes in circles unexplored. Indian letters did not seem to flow well. Reading a book on Old Delhi, Miller saw diagrams showing how Muslim cities were arranged in concentric circles. He settled on a spiral.

Miller’s tour passes through fascinating locations: the Jantar Mantar, slaughterhouses in Old Delhi, Humayan’s tomb, Coronation Park, the new suburbs of Gurgaon. The question becomes: did Miller find these things because he had carefully chosen the chance method; or would any route have revealed such interesting places? If we are carefully selecting the chance methods of exploration, are we really open to chance?

A city is a library of palimpsests. New buildings are erected, streets are re-routed, occupants come and go, each leaving some trace. As Chtcheglov wrote in Formulary for a New Urbanism, “All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.”

There is something mysterious about cities, all those doorways and windows, hidden rooms that might contain anything, whole worlds you will never gain access to. Cities have secrets. There are professions that glimpse some of these spaces (police, removal men, inspectors) but even they will learn only a fraction of a city.

Psychogeography has always been interested in exploring, in finding new routes through urban spaces. Debord saw the dérive as a strategic exercise, mapping territories and lines of communication. Other, earlier psychogeographers were charting courses and Debord referred explicitly to Thomas de Quincey’s explorations of London, trying to find a ‘North-West passage’:

 sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters

Other proto-psychogeographers have had the same feeling that mystical riddles lie somewhere within the city. As Arthur Machen wrote:

“…he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet… All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of King’s Cross Station.”

A sense of such hidden realms occurs in Alex James’ first book of autobiography:

There was a boat at Blackfriar’s Bridge, where scary people played cards, basements in Chinatown full of transvestites, stained attics along Berwick street full of crackheads and prostitures, mansions in Holland Park full of crackheads and prostitutes.  At night the city belonged to all the people who didn’t have to get up in the morning…