As a change from poetry, but related to it, here's an article I wrote about that wide-ranging and imprecise activity, psychogeography.
Beyond the Pale.
Rewilding Psychogeography.
Beside
an old church in the pretty village of Rudston, in the heart of the Yorkshire
Wolds, a vast needle of stone, said to be the tallest single megalithic
standing stone in Britain, bursts out from the earth and pierces the broad sky.
For
me, this monument, which I have always referred to simply as The Stone, has strangely
powerful resonances. Those people who have a more than averagely finely attuned
sense of place know particular spots like this which, for reasons either
conscious or subconscious, have a deeper psychical and psychological association
than their surroundings. It is these that psychogeography is concerned with: discovering
those points where each individual – and from that, each different community –
engages with intimate aspects of our environment and records the impacts that
occur. For the
Situationist, Guy Debord, one of the creators of the modern concept of
psychogeography, these relationships
happen primarily in an urban setting, lately reaching out to the edges of the
city with books such as London Orbital by ’the godfather of psychogeography’, Iain
Sinclair, and Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands. Will Self moved the bar up a few notches when he walked
from London to New York and recorded the experience in his Psychogeography. But for me, as a writer who gains most of
his inspiration whilst out walking in the countryside, I have always found those
profound, acausal connections that seem to hit you in the pit of the stomach, happen
beyond the pale of big urban settlements. Looking into the history and
developments of psychogeography, however, there are clues that its roots do, in
fact, stretch beyond the city limits. Merlin Coverley, in his book, Psychogeography,
hints at this when he says, “…as soon as one looks beyond the narrow
context that gave rise to it, it becomes apparent that psychogeography is
retrospectively supported (or undermined) by earlier traditions and precursors
that have been neglected or wilfully obscured.”, adding, “…this sense of an eternal landscape underpinning our
own has been termed genius loci or
‘sense of place’, a kind of historical consciousness that exposes the psychic
connectivity of landscape…”.
In 1955, Debord, whilst paradoxically admitting
to the vagueness of the whole concept of psychogeography, defined it as, ”…the
study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals…”.
It is coincidental that in the year he made this statement, Professor
W G Hoskins published his seminal work,
The Making of the English Landscape, the first definitive explanation of
how our surroundings have developed across the centuries. It reinformed the way
we engage with the landscape, both physically and emotionally, inspiring Oliver
Rackham’s The History of the Countryside
and later Francis Pryor’s The Making of
the British Landscape.
I
begin with The Stone as a pivotal point not just because of the impact it has
on me, but because of its long historical and topographical significance in the
landscape where it stands. It is the quintessential landmark, in that it marks
an area of land that was of particular importance to those who erected it. It
marks a place where man’s own views
and burgeoning psychological constructs met and harmonised with raw nature in a
very particular way; it marks a time when
he began to see and develop the surrounding landscape as a place that was sacred
– a place that he adapted to record time itself, not in days, months or years,
but in generations, using the resting places of ancestors as way markers for
successors. These philosophical themes of time, history and society, which Debord
himself tackles in his Society of the
Spectacle, and Michel de Certeau,
in his 1988 The practice of everyday
life, calls "a symbolic
order of the unconscious", became an integral and essential part of
everyday life and, when viewed with the appropriate receptivity, still resonate
across the ages.
To
a casual observer, The Stone stands in the churchyard. This is, of course, a
misinterpretation because it was erected here three thousand years or more
before the church, whose presence ensures that its continuity as a sacred place
remains unbroken across time and religious interpretation. On the tops of the
rising Wolds that surround it, barrows that hold the bodies of different
generations look down upon it and these in turn can also be viewed from it and
from the four or five ceremonial cursuses that spread like spokes from the axis
of The Stone. The true significance of this place - its real psychogeography - for
the people who erected it does not, however, come from land but from water. We
are told by those who know such things (such as Mike Williams in his Prehistoric Belief and David Lewis
Williams and David Pearce in Inside the
Neolithic Mind) that water had a special sacredness for our prehistoric
ancestors, and The Stone marks the corner where an itinerant and mysterious
stream, known as The Gypsey Race, turns abruptly from flowing due south, to continue
its course directly eastwards, towards the sunrise and the mighty North Sea. This
intermittent and irregular watercourse is believed to owe its coming and going
to underground reservoirs and it bursts into flood seemingly regardless of
recent rainfall. This gives it a magical property which is demonstrated by the
number of significant prehistoric sites along its course, of which The Stone is the most
prominent. The name Gypsey is derived
not from its itinerant nature, but from the old English 'Gypsia', meaning to
suddenly spring into life.
So
The Stone represents a psychogeographic midpoint between the prehistoric wilderness
and the modern world. Go beyond The Stone and you cross a threshold and begin
to venture outside the pale of civilisation and ever backwards into the depths
of the wilderness itself; not just a physical wilderness, but a subconscious
one that only the visionary and the dreamer seek to penetrate. Peter Ackroyd,
in his lecture entitled The Englishness
of English Literature, suggests that there is a persistent visionary thread
of English consciousness and that it is “….possible that within our sensibility
and our language there are patterns of continuity and resemblance which have
persisted from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond
that.” Far beyond that, I would suggest.
In fact, it stretches back millennia and right into the heart of the landscape even
before it was settled. In his New Science, the 18th century Italian theorist,
Giambattista Vico, said: “This was the order of human institutions: first the
forests after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally
the academies.” And, at the time when we were moving from forests to huts, when
our human impact on the landscape was becoming visible and permanent and,
instead of being subjugated by the natural world, man was seeking to impose his
control upon it, a relationship with our surroundings was developing that was, millennia
later, to be reinterpreted by those who had escaped the relentless grip of the
academies and the tyranny of logic as psychogeography.
~~~~~~~~~
Although
its origins go back even before writing itself – back to the prehistoric
images, carefully inscribed on the walls of dark caves - the tenets of landscape
psychogeography are embedded in a rich legacy of our literature, from Beowulf and Piers Plowman to the works
of P D James and Bill Bryson - not just the ‘nature’ writers such as that perennial
wanderer and commentator, Richard Jeffries; the prodigious perambulator, George
Borrow; the supertramp poet, W H Davies; and early ecologist, John Stewart
Collis, but also the likes of Thomas Hardy, the Romantic Poets, the Brontës, Rudyard
Kipling, A E Housman, Laurie Lee, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes - look on practically any eclectic bookshelf
and you’re likely to find evidence of some kind of psychogeographic influence.
It’s
through the works of these and a myriad of others that we can understand how people
have always engaged psychologically with the landscape and the wildness of the natural
world. Henry Thoreau didn’t just go back to nature to live in the Walden woods,
he provided a detailed account of his action, thoughts and feelings. Wordsworth
did more than tramp across the mountains and fells, he allowed them to sink
into his own psyche and re-emerge in the words and phrases that make his poetry
so inspiring. Ancient landscapes and their psychic associations to the modern
world are inseparably entwined in the prose and poems of Edward Thomas and lying
just below the surface of the land and the subconscious in the novels of John
Cowper Powys. When his beloved countryside is parcelled up by enclosures and he
is denied access to it, John Clare goes mad.
Hoskins
starts the first chapter of The Making of
the English Landscape by praising William Wordsworth’s Guide through the District of the Lakes, “...for poets make the
best topographers…”, thus immediately creating a link between landscape and
literature. Hoskins’ book was, in turn, revered by writers such as W H Auden.
Poets
probably make the best psychogeographers as well. Wordsworth is a classic
example of how the psychological influence of his surroundings was profound and
fundamental to his thinking and writing. From his childhood he keenly felt the
influence of nature. In The Prelude
he writes:
“…………..for I
would walk alone,
Under the quiet stars, and at that time
Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound
To
breathe an elevated mood, by form
Or
image unprofaned; and I would stand,
If
the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The
ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or
make their dim abode in distant winds.”
This
is reiterated, later in life, in Lines
Written Above Tintern Abbey:
“………………….For I have learned
To look
on nature, not as in the hour
Of
thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The
still, sad music of humanity,
Nor
harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To
chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A
presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of
elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of
something far more deeply interfused,
Whose
dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the
round ocean and the living air,
And the
blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A
motion and a spirit, that impels
All
thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And
rolls through all things.”
The
nature writer and poet, Edward Thomas, before he was cut down in the trenches
of World War l, found not just the broad landscape but its minutiae enthralling
and an antidote to his bouts of chronic depression. In his piece, An Old Wood, published in the
collection, One Green Field, he
describes the onset of evening:
“….the rich blue evening comes on and severs
me irrevocably from all but the light in the old wood and the ghostly white
cow-parsley flowers suspended on uneven stalks. And there, amongst the trees
and their shadows, not understood, speaking a forgotten tongue, old dreads and
formless awes and fascinations discover themselves and address the comfortable
soul, troubling it, recalling to it unremembered years not so long past…”
In
Haymaking, echoing Wendell Berry’s claim that, “Nothing exists for its own sake, but for a
harmony greater than itself, which includes it.” he brings together the essence
of a rural landscape with its timeless combination of the works of man and
nature in the quiet way at which he was so adept, transferring the picture in
his mind onto the page:
“…………………………………….All
was old,
This
morning time, with a great age untold,
Older
than Clare and Cobbett, Moreland and Crome,
Than,
at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,
A
white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.
Under
the heavens that know not what years be
The
men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered
even what they will at times far hence –
All of
us gone out of the reach of change –
Immortal
in a picture of an old grange.”
The
environmentalist/writer, Richard Mabey, also used the healing properties of the
countryside when depression laid him low. In Nature Cure he explains that:
“Turning
down that road less travelled, I can’t any longer duck the questions which have
been so unsettling me for the past few months – and in a more general form, I
suppose, for much of my life. Where do I belong? What’s my role? How, in
social, emotional, ecological terms, do I find a way of fitting?”
The
answer is not quite as he expects:
“The
idea was to submit to nature, to hope that it would ‘take you out of
yourself’…..What healed me, I think, was almost the exact opposite process, a
sense of being taken not out of myself but back in, of nature entering me, firing up the wild bits of my
imagination.”
Today,
as it always has, the psychogeography of the British landscape still exerts a
profound influence. Although it has few areas of actual wilderness that are
untouched by humans, there are still many wild places in Britain. Ever since
the first of our ancestors cut down a tree to build a hut, our destinies have
been intertwined. Sometime nature predominates, sometimes man, but ideally
there should be a balance. In the preface to his The History of the Countryside, Oliver Rackham says:
“The
ordinary landscape of Britain has been made both by the natural world and by
human activities, interacting with each other over many centuries. …..In the
last century [by this he means the 19th]
people (that is, writers) often thought of the country as the world of Nature
in contrast to the town. The opposite exaggeration now prevails: that the rural
landscape, no less than Trafalgar Square, is merely the result of human design
and ambition……In reality the countryside records human default as well as
design, and much of it has a life of its own independent of human
activity……With many features, such as ponds and hedges, it is still not
possible to say where Nature stops and human activity begins.”
Jonathan Bate, when discussing the theories of
T W Adorno in his excellent book, The
Song of the Earth, sees it in a different way:
“Nature only appears to be not man-made…..Air, trees, rocks, grass, water and so
forth exist, but they only become ‘Nature’ when they are mediated by human
consciousness, when the subject makes them its objects of attention.”
Martin Heidegger looks at it from yet another perspective:
“What seems natural to us is probably just
something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source
from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange
and caused him to think and to wonder.”
For
novelist John Cowper Powys, it was “…the fatal force of Inanimate
Objects over human destiny…” and he illustrates this to great effect when, in A Glastonbury Romance, he spends seven
pages describing the effect that Stonehenge and its environs have on the main
proponent, John Crow.
All this could as easily be termed phenomenology
as psychgeography – as Christopher Tilley does in A Phenomenology of Landscape - but it shows that our psychological
relationship with the countryside is as personal and immediate as it is with
towns and cities. For urban psychogeographers like Debord it was a movement,
practiced by groups who had the same – or at least similar – values and
ambitions, often overtly political: Situationists, Lettrists, Surrealists,
Unitary Urbanists. Rural pyschogeography is usually more of a solitary pastime.
Post Debord – and especially in more recent years – psychogeography, although
not necessarily under that name, has been undergoing an exponential and ineluctable
spread back into the countryside, with visionary individuals like Richard Mabey;
my much-missed friend, Roger Deakin; Robert Macfarlane; Jonathan Bate; George
Monbiot and many others at the forefront. These, whether they like the mantle
or not, are the new rural psychogeographers and they are encouraging more and
more people to reconnect with their landscape in a meaningful way. It is these
writers, and those unnamed individuals who engage daily with the countryside in
a thoughtful way, who are testament to the words of Heidegger, echoing across
the ages:
“The
song still remains which names the land over which it sings.”
Sources:
Guy
Debord, Introduction to a Critique of
Urban Geography, Les Livres Nue, 1955.
Merlin
Coverley, Psychogeography, Pocket
Essentials, 2010.
W G
Hoskins, The Making of the English
Landscape, Hodder & Stoughton, 1955.
Guy
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle,
Black & Red, 1984.
Michel de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
Translator: Steven Rendall,
University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.
Peter Ackroyd, The Englishness of English Literature: The
Collection.
Ed. Thomas Wright. London: Vintage, 2001.
Giambattista
Vico, New Science, Penguin, 1999.
William
Wordsworth, A Guide through the District
of the Lakes, Francis Lincoln, 2004.
William
Wordsworth, Complete Works, Delphi
Series, 2012.
Edward
Thomas, One Green Field, English
Journeys, 2009.
Wendell
Berry, Standing by Words, North
Point, 1983.
Edward
Thomas, Collected Poems of Edward Thomas,
Faber & Faber, 2011.
Richard
Mabey, Nature Cure, Vintage, 2008.
Oliver
Rackham, The History of the Countryside,
W & N, 2000.
Jonathan
Bate, The Song of the Earth, Picador,
2001.
Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time,
Translators: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1978.
John
Cowper Powys, Wood and Stone, Village
Press, 1974.
John
Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, Macdonald,
1966.
Christopher
Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape,
Berg, 1994.
Martin
Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track,
Editor and translator: Julian Young, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
