Psychogeography of souls
I avoided the office today in a desperate effort to wring some kind of creative approach to the material of Chapter 6 from my brain. At the halfway point of the day I had more or less given up all pretense of working when my perfect wife brought home some really great sushi to try to bring me back to life. She left again soon after, watching me moan with wasabi-soaked pleasure, suggesting that I blow off the afternoon, get out my djembe drum and do some pounding. I'm one lucky guy. Palms tingling with kuku base rhythms, I plopped into a comfy chair to finish off the psychogeography primer I'd been reading. Psychogeography is, kinda, a strange multidisciplinary endeavour, mostly started up by raving lunatics as far as I can tell, but founded on the idea that cities (London and Paris in particular) shape feeling and behaviour. What we do in a city is shaped by its organization, structure, history, in ways that are not well-understood but which can be studied by carrying out what is called a derive -- wandering around in a city, letting it 'take' you in a way that's related to the automatism of the surrealists. It's an old tradition, seen first described in the literature of people like Dafoe, De Quincey, even William Blake before being taken up by these madmen in Paris in the 1930s. I really wanted to know about this because of my interests in how architecture and city planning affects feeling and movement.
Hang in there, I'm going somewhere with all this and it's not an undergraduate cultural studies essay.
I found some parts of the book pretty funny, especially as the author described the fact that the practice of psychogeography never really got off the ground because the small circle of French academics who founded it spent all their time arguing over theory and definition and never actually got down to doing anything. It conjured an image of some of the opening scenes of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. If you've seen the movie, you'll know exactly what I mean. Towards the end of the book, the author began talking about more recent psychogeographic efforts, and this is where I really became quite interested. Though I've seen Crash (not the recent movie, which is quite good, but the older, much more controversial Cronenberg effort), I hadn't really understood what the writer on whose work the movie was based, JG Ballard, was really getting at until I saw it through the lens of psychogeography. But then I became even more engaged by discussion of the work of Peter Ackroyd, who had written a novel called Hawksmoor which contains much psychogeography mixed in with some occultism -- that there are peculiar arrangements of buildings (churches in particular) that set into motion certain kinds of resonances that act in defiance of time to keep causing certain types of events to take place. The configuration of places, in other words, influences feeling and movement in a way that defies explanation by current science. As if that wasn't enough to reel me in and send me to the bookstore, I then discovered that Ackroyd had written a very long book called London: A biography, which was a kind of psychogeographical romp through the city, run through with the same kinds of ideas about time, space, behaviour in cities as he'd covered in the novel.
Now. What's most interesting about this is that I was able to wander over to the next room and pluck a copy of Ackroyd's biography of London off of my bookshelf. It was, in fact, the last book that my father ever purchased. He bought it with a birthday gift certificate given to him by my eldest brother (on the same certificate he also picked up a couple of books for me for my birthday -- my brother never loses a chance to chuckle over this). He never read it, but I remember that for many days he rumbled around my house muttering about having to read this 'biography of London' and I remember feeling a bit irked that someone had written what must actually be a history of London and had used this affectation to snag hapless readers like my dad into reading gigantic books that they might not want to read at all if they knew what they really were. Little did I know.... Well, I'm not sure I'll have a chance to read it, but it is actually a biography. London is portrayed as a living, breathing, organic entity composed of equal parts brick and flesh.
All of this delights me because I can think of it as one more small indication that my father has been able to somehow reach forward in time to help me write a book he didn't really know I planned to write. It reminds me of the Minerva map measure that was once one of my father's work tools. It now sits in my desk drawer and I pull it out when I need inspiration to write what, strangely, my contract refers to as a book on, among other things, the 'psychology of length'.
I'm collaborating with an architect who believes there might really be something to this Jung fellow's ideas about synchronicity, causality, and the collective unconscious. That frightens me sometimes but there are moments, like those today, when I have to admit to myself that I'm a little bit intrigued.
Hang in there, I'm going somewhere with all this and it's not an undergraduate cultural studies essay.
I found some parts of the book pretty funny, especially as the author described the fact that the practice of psychogeography never really got off the ground because the small circle of French academics who founded it spent all their time arguing over theory and definition and never actually got down to doing anything. It conjured an image of some of the opening scenes of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. If you've seen the movie, you'll know exactly what I mean. Towards the end of the book, the author began talking about more recent psychogeographic efforts, and this is where I really became quite interested. Though I've seen Crash (not the recent movie, which is quite good, but the older, much more controversial Cronenberg effort), I hadn't really understood what the writer on whose work the movie was based, JG Ballard, was really getting at until I saw it through the lens of psychogeography. But then I became even more engaged by discussion of the work of Peter Ackroyd, who had written a novel called Hawksmoor which contains much psychogeography mixed in with some occultism -- that there are peculiar arrangements of buildings (churches in particular) that set into motion certain kinds of resonances that act in defiance of time to keep causing certain types of events to take place. The configuration of places, in other words, influences feeling and movement in a way that defies explanation by current science. As if that wasn't enough to reel me in and send me to the bookstore, I then discovered that Ackroyd had written a very long book called London: A biography, which was a kind of psychogeographical romp through the city, run through with the same kinds of ideas about time, space, behaviour in cities as he'd covered in the novel.
Now. What's most interesting about this is that I was able to wander over to the next room and pluck a copy of Ackroyd's biography of London off of my bookshelf. It was, in fact, the last book that my father ever purchased. He bought it with a birthday gift certificate given to him by my eldest brother (on the same certificate he also picked up a couple of books for me for my birthday -- my brother never loses a chance to chuckle over this). He never read it, but I remember that for many days he rumbled around my house muttering about having to read this 'biography of London' and I remember feeling a bit irked that someone had written what must actually be a history of London and had used this affectation to snag hapless readers like my dad into reading gigantic books that they might not want to read at all if they knew what they really were. Little did I know.... Well, I'm not sure I'll have a chance to read it, but it is actually a biography. London is portrayed as a living, breathing, organic entity composed of equal parts brick and flesh.
All of this delights me because I can think of it as one more small indication that my father has been able to somehow reach forward in time to help me write a book he didn't really know I planned to write. It reminds me of the Minerva map measure that was once one of my father's work tools. It now sits in my desk drawer and I pull it out when I need inspiration to write what, strangely, my contract refers to as a book on, among other things, the 'psychology of length'.
I'm collaborating with an architect who believes there might really be something to this Jung fellow's ideas about synchronicity, causality, and the collective unconscious. That frightens me sometimes but there are moments, like those today, when I have to admit to myself that I'm a little bit intrigued.
posted by Colin at 8:11 PM
2 Comments:
What does the architect base his belief in Jung's theory say?
I agree that cities and spaces have their own life. One can feel the differences in neighborhoods and what the neighborhoods attract to them. Even the difference life that each spot oozes at different hours of the day. The life one feels on a bridge as oppossed to a cement slab or a tree lined street.
I bet your study is interesting and I think the deeper you dig the more marvels you find will interest and disturb you at the same time. i find it very intriguing all the life within life within life...it never ends. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes I don't explain my thoughts to well. Kinda like sub-cultures and conter-culutures within a culture all having a life of their own.
Do the builders give the building life or is it the elements they use when they build that makes the building breathe? I better stop before I confuse even me. (smile). Anyhow very interesting.
xxxJolie
Hi Jolie,
Thanks for reading my ramble. The projects we're working on have to do with looking at how the layout of streets in an area affects how people move and linger. There are some obscure findings that may suggest that movement and lingering is influence by the relationship between the layout of streets you can see and those you can't. And it doesn't matter if you've EVER seen the streets you can't see. So how can something you've never sensed influence your behaviour? This is where the mystery enters, that my friend solves by invoking Jung. I'm skeptical, but keeping an open mind.
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