psychogeography

I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence. The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.

He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which he__ stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any old how.I helped him.Then he asked me, straight out, __hat would you say was the true centre of Paris?__ was taken aback, wrong-footed. I thought this knowledge was part of a whole body of very rarefied and secret lore. Playing for time, I said, __he starting point of France__ roads . . . the brass plate on the parvis of Notre-Dame.__e gave me a withering look.__o you take for me a sap?__he centre of Paris, a spiral with four centres, each completely self-contained, independent of the other three. But you don__ reveal this to just anybody. I suppose - I hope - it was in complete good faith that Alexandre Arnoux mentioned the lamp behind the apse of St-Germain-l__uxerrois. I wouldn__ have created that precedent. My turn now to let the children play with the lock.__he centre, as you must be thinking of it, is the well of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. The __ell of Truth_ as it__ been known since the eleventh century.__e was delighted. I__ delivered. He said, __ou know, you and I could do great things together. It__ a pity I__ already __eyond redemption_, even at this very moment.__is unhibited display of brotherly affection was of childlike spontaneity. But he was still pursuing his line of thought: he dashed out to the nearby stationery shop and came back with a little basic pair of compasses made of tin.__ook. The Vieux-Chene, the Well. The Well, the Arbre-a-Liege On either side of the Seine, adhering closely to the line he__ drawn, the age-old tavern signs were at pretty much the same distance from the magic well.__ell, now, you see, it__ always been the case that whenever something bad happens at the Vieux-Chene, a month later _ a lunar month, that is, just twenty-eight days _ the same thing happens at old La Frite__ place, but less serious. A kind of repeat performance. An echoThen he listed, and pointed out on the map, the most notable of those key sites whose power he or his friends had experienced.In conclusion he said, ____ the biggest swindler there is, I__ prepared to be swindled myself, that__ fair enough. But not just anywhere. There are places where, if you lie, or think ill, it__ Paris you disrespect. And that upsets me. That__ when I lose my cool: I hit back. It__ as if that__ what I was there for.

Here, in a few words, you__e said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don__ talk. It__ remarkable. I__e investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I__ the only person who knows that it__ the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.

An age-old city is like a pond. With its colours and reflections. Its chills and murk. Its ferment, its sorcery, its hidden life.A city is like a woman, with a woman__ desires and dislikes. Her abandon and restraint. Her reserve - above all, her reserve.To get to the heart of a city, to learn its most subtle secrets, takes infinite tenderness, and patience sometimes to the point of despair. It calls for an artlessly delicate touch, a more or less unconditional love. Over centuries.Time works for those who place themselves beyond time.You__e no true Parisian, you do not know your city, if you haven__ experienced its ghosts. To become imbued with shades of grey, to blend into the drab obscurity of blind spots, to join the clammy crowd that emerges, or seeps, at certain times of day from the metros, railway stations, cinemas or churches, to feel a silent and distant brotherhood with the lonely wanderer, the dreamer in his shy solitude, the crank, the beggar, even the drunk - all this entails a long and difficult apprenticeship, a knowledge of people and places that only years of patient observation can confer.

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, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l__rbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?

The deep map configures narratives. It is a matrix of intertexual storytelling, charting our movements through the landscape.

It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them. ...After all, perhaps Stevenson had only half of the matter. It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds. ("The Axholme Toll")