Psychogeography: Words by Will Self, Pictures by Ralph SteadmanBloomsbury, 2007

Though I didn’t go to any events at the Conflux Festival this year, it nevertheless seemed like the weekend of the festival would be an apt weekend to start reading this book, which I checked out from the library a while ago. The festival, which used to be called Psy.Geo.Conflux, is centered on psychogeography, a word that comes from Guy Debord and means, basically, the exploration of the physical environment and how it affects us psychologically. The Conflux events I’ve been to have often emphasized experiencing a place differently: by consciously shifting our focus as we walk through the city, we learn about what we normally overlook, which in turn has lots to say about how the city is structured, how we think about it, how we’re expected to move through it. So for example, several years ago, Megan and I went on a Psy.Geo.Conflux event that was a walking tour/exploration of service entrances (e.g. at Grand Central); last year we went on a traffic-cone viewing tour and a soundwalk/writing event where we listened to city-noises (in a park, or walking around) then wrote what we heard.

So there’s the general background: now, for the book. With the exception of the 58-page introductory essay, “Walking to New York,” the pieces in this book first appeared as a column in the Independent between 2003 and 2007; they’re short pieces, three or four pages each. So far I’ve only read the first essay, but I feel like there’s lots to say about it: so I’ll talk about it here, then perhaps add another post later about the rest of the book.

The first essay gives Self a chance to give his own background, and to talk about some possible modes of psychogeography, all of which are centered on the question of, as he puts it, “the manner in which the contemporary world warps the relationship between psyche and place” (11). There are those (he gives the example of Peter Ackroyd) who “see psychogeography as concerned with the personality of place itself” (ibid.). Others are interested in “minutely detailed, multi-level examination of select locales that impact upon the writer’s own microscopic inner-eye” (ibid.). Self goes on to talk more about things that his own mode of psychogeography is not: it’s not travel-writing; it’s not about “discovering” a place or culture; it’s not walk-as-random-discovery; it’s not walk-as-protest in the same manner as the walks of Iain Sinclair, who Self describes as “that Celtic Englishman whose circumnavigation of the M25 (London’s orbital motorway), or travail along the A13 to Southend, were dogged, shamanic attempts to storm those concrete bastions — with their bark-chip, shrubbery-planted revetments — laying siege with the trebuchet of his prose-poetry; and catapulting great hunks of stony verbiage into them, so that the capitalists abandoned their cars and ran, screaming, tongues cleaved to the roofs of their mouths” (13). Phew, as long as we’ve got that clear.

So, what is Self’s mode of walking/working? It seems practical, personal, and also absurdist: to take the first essay as an example, he was going to New York to do work and “to explore,” and he wanted to explore, in particular, his identity in a post-9/11 globalized world as a part-Jewish child with one English parent and one American parent; he also wanted to “walk” to New York (walking from home to airport, sleeping on the plane, then walking from airport to city on the other end) to write about it and because no one else had (13-14). As he puts it: “I was certain I would be the first person to go the whole way, with only the mute, incurious interlude of a club class seat to interfere with the steady, two-mile-an-hour, metronomic rhythm of my legs, parting and marrying, parting and marrying” (13).

Eventually we get to the walks themselves, which I found to be the best parts of the essay, especially the London walk.”Bucolic London” starts at Self’s South-London home and proceeds from there to Heathrow, walking down early-morning streets, past apartment blocks, through Battersea Park, past Richmond Park, blending the observed present with Self’s personal past experience of these places and also their larger historical past, as in the below paragraph:

In Battersea Park a few commuters are hurrying along the gravel paths and pot-holed roadways. The gondola that adverts the Gondola Café is heeled over in the muddy waters of the boating lake. On the far shore rises the rockery, where my smaller children like to clamber in teensy ravines choked with empty beer cans. So the sublime ends. I work my way down through the glades and avenues, a Victorian conception of a municipal garden-for-all, impose atop this old shambles where once gypsies camped and knackers boiled horses’ corpses down for glue (23).

Though the New York part of Self’s trip is more splenetic and discontented, it’s still interesting, and pleasing to read as Self does manage to figure things out, doubts and grumpiness aside. “No one walks through East New York, I am forced to conclude, because it’s so fucking dull,” he writes (54), though things pick up as he hits Glenmore Avenue and lists the names of the churches he walks past. Eastern Parkway, with its Lubavitchers and subway stops and book vendors, is more populous still, and then there’s Manhattan itself, though it’s not until he takes the train out to Kew Garden a few days later that, finally, he sees where he’s come from, in more ways than one.