I was recently introduced, by my son Charles, to the realm of psychogeography, something I really should have known about as it has been going on for years and, according to some, has almost exhausted its possibilities. Usually though it is to do with urban wandering, so the rural dimension is, perhaps, a rare variant. However, urban or rural, it is new and interesting to me. I won't try and define what it is because it is easy to look up on the Internet, but I have appended below one of many examples of the genre penned by myself without knowing what I was doing. Solvitur ambulando , it is solved by walking, a Latin phrase normally attributed to St Augustine of Hippo. But quite what is solved by walking I am not sure, though it sounds good. Anyway, here is my rural psychogeographic text (from 2001): 8 July 2001 (A walk from Coleford in the Forest of Dean where I was staying for a couple of days with David and Vicki Thornton. I got up early one Sunday morning and, since ever
My almost successful arrival in the land of evolution makes me feel a bit like Uncle Toby on Tristram Shandy and his fascination with fortifications and their technicalities. By following my nose on this I discovered that Michael Nyman, one of the modern composers I like most, had written something called The Nose-List Song as part of a Tristram Shandy opera (still under construction). This shed no light on evolution, but was good to listen to. Suzan Mazur talks with Vincent Fleury of the differences between French and American (Anglo-Saxon) thinking, particularly as it relates to evolution and morphogenesis/self-organisation. But what is Chinese, or Indian, or Australian aboriginal thinking going to contribute towards the debate? In the latter case both animate and inanimate objects are said to have been brought into being by song. This somehow chimes with the Music of the Spheres, the Musica Universalis of celestial motions, an idea dating back at least to the time of Pytha
I surveyed a small back garden on a slope facing the sea. There was a bank of grass, a patch of brambles and convolvulus. A late cabbage white flew down the road and back. There were woodlice and garden snails under the stones, even a few sandhoppers far from the shore. A Chinese woman from Beijing brought me a cup of green tea full of cornflowers, rosebuds and assorted leaves.
Comments