[URBAN NOTE] My psychogeography

[rfmcdonald]

Whenever I go for extended walks--like when, yesterday, I walked west from the Osgoode TTC station along Queen Street West and then up Roncesvalles Avenue--I always think of the walk as stictching together another bit of the city into my mental map, of penetrating into the dim grayness of the areas of town that even now I'm not familiar with ("Etobicoke"? what is Etobicoke"?).

Back in February, I created a [FORUM] asking where people saw their community's psychological boundaries lying. It's a fascinating subject, not least because of my above stated predisposition, but because I've recently come across the writings of British author Will Self on what he and others starting with Guy Debord call psychogeography. There's a Toronto Psychogeography Society, complete with a blog that seems sadly inactive, so I'll turn to a Self, first to a Self article about Toronto, then to an extended interview with him by the Toronto Star's Murray Whyte ("Slow down, you move too fast").

For centuries, geography has been disappearing. Slowly, at first: The wheel rendered modest, walkable distances passable in a fraction of the time. Then, it was quicker, much quicker, thousands of miles vanishing at once as carriages, galleons, ocean liners and cars, and finally air travel, made it almost irrelevant, reducing a once epic 5,700-kilometre transatlantic journey to a trifling six-hour stretch of boredom salved with filmic interludes from Will Farrell.

It's all awfully fast. Too fast, Will Self says. So he's trying to slow it down. Six hours, more or less, took him from London Heathrow to Pearson yesterday. Six more hours, give or take, of walking took him from Pearson to Swatow, a Chinatown icon (the grilled pork really makes it) on Spadina Ave. last night.

[. . .]

Self, the iconoclastic British author of such novels as My Idea of Fun and Great Apes, is here this week for the International Festival of Authors. He writes a column in the Independent called "Psychogeography," accompanied each time with an illustration by the artist Ralph Steadman. Four years' worth have been collected into a newly released book of the same name.

It's not as confrontational as it sounds. "Really, it's about being where you are, about trying to infuse human geography with physical geography," Self says.

Then again, maybe it is. Self's position runs counter to modern modes of living taken for granted long ago. Living in a city, for most of us, means a handful of significant nodes – home, work, shopping – connected by high-speed journeys – cars, cabs, trains. The space in between wings by barely visible, unexperienced, untouched.

Self comes by the fascination honestly. His father was an academic whose field was urban planning. Self was surrounded with urban theory his whole life. Then, in his 20s, he experienced "an odd epiphany – I had lived in London all my life, and I had never seen the mouth of the Thames, only 20 miles away."

Self's mother was American, and he was making trans-Atlantic flights as a matter of habit. Yet here he was, at home, yet somehow foreign-feeling, displaced. It occurred to him that modern travel "destroys that sense of where we are," and thus were the seeds of psychogeography planted: Knowing a place from a human perspective, not through the side window of a plane, train or car.

Psychogeography embraces those ignored liminal zones – the spaces in between – step by step, as actual, tangible and real. "The whole thrust of the mass transit folkway is to annihilate those places we seek to recover," he says.

Shawn Micallif at the Spacing blog covered a Self walk in New York City, if you're interested in his further exploits.

In his article, Self mentions the intruiging murmur project, where people can cell phones who find themselves next to a metal icon of a green ear can phone a number and get a snippet of someone's record memory about that place. It makes things additionally concrete, adds them a measure of psychological legitimacy that the walk might have lacked.

Might. Anna Bowness' "Literary History of the Flâneur" makes it clear that, just as Self argues, the mdoern trend is for walkers to create their own realities, their own legitimacies.

Benjamin’s image of the flaneur, wandering the streets idly and with a dandy’swardrobe, was the one that stuck in the popular imagination until later theorists ofwalking – also, notably, from Paris – tweaked the idea a little. Michel de Certeau and Guy DeBord politicized the pedestrian, and turned him from a passive observer to an activist of sorts. Without making him do anything in particular – Certeau’s and DeBord’s flaneur is just as directionless and whimsical as Benjamin’s – these latertheorists showed how the simple act of walking makes a statement as loud as words.Certeau argues that a city – its buildings, streets, and crowds – is a language initself, and that by taking a walk, the flaneur preserves this language and thuspreserves the space itself. Guy DeBord, co-founder of the Situationists, turnedwalking into art and activism. Spawning a whole movement – which endures today,in Paris and Toronto and elsewhere – Guy DeBord and the Situationists coined theterm “psychogeography” and gave a whole vocabulary to walking and the streets.After the Situationists, the flaneur had a purpose if not an itinerary.

Lately I've been finding my planned itineraries really boring. Why go the same old route when there are so many more--not infinite, but many more--possibilities? Spadina Avenue might be nice, but what about Spadina Road? Et cetera. Give me some new space for me to inscribe with my feet, or I'll just have to find some.