Map, Demap and Reroute

Somehow I became known as a psychogeographer. I didn’t even know what psychogeography was never mind that I was a practitioner of it. Of course I had to look it up. I found out that it was to do with the Situationist International, Guy Debord and the rest but that actually apart from the naming it had probably been going on for many many years before the term was formalised by the situationists.

Mapping, remapping and demapping of the real physical world and the world of the mind are all part of psychogeography. You’re probably doing these things every day without even knowing it. It’s when it becomes a conscious decision to do them that perhaps art is taking place. Over the years I’ve done a number of things that might be considered to be psychogeography in practice. I renamed what I do as splacism, splacist activities and explorations. There’s even a Splacist Manifesto which of course is open to change by anyone who would like to do so.

Finding that you are categorised as something that you don’t even know what it is, in itself is like being remapped. I used it to re-examine my psyche. My intentions. I discovered that I work best when I set myself actions that are counter to what is expected not only by others of me but by myself too. Turn left when it says turn right. Go through gates that say ‘No Entry’ but are open and the like.

Navigating the world with maps of places other than where one is is an interesting excercise. Try following the lefts, rights and straight aheads of a tourist tour of Rome whilst in London. Visit the site of the Sistine Chapel but in Birmingham, UK. What might you find. In doing so our own minds take a little remapping too.

I remember beginning to believe that I really was viewing the Fountain of Trevi whilst actually staring at a public toilet in central London. I think I enjoyed it just as much as if I had actually been in Rome. I even turned away from it and threw a coin over my shoulder at the toilet block. I made a wish too but I’m not telling you what it was as that would mean it could never come true.

I have had a brain scan. I’ve had a brain scan twice. Both times the things they were looking for weren’t there or if they were they were hiding. I’m glad as the things they thought might be there were not good at all. What they did find was an enlarged pineal gland, yes, what some call the third eye and this made me think of myself in new and interesting ways. I began to think that I might really be a mystic and that a whole field of new possibilities was opening to me. Perhaps I’d go back to reading the tarot and tea leaves with new vim and vigour. Perhaps I’d go travelling the Astral Plane a little more often than of late. Permission granted by an MRI scan.

So I became what people said I was, a poet, an artist, an urban explorer, a psychogeographer, a splacist warrior. At heart I was still the same me just mapped upon differently by outside influences. I was still husband, son, dad and always will be along with being all the other things and more too. Define me at your peril. And it’s double the peril if I try to define myself.

They say walk in someone else’s shoes to really discover what it is that they do and what makes them tick but what about our own shoes? Perhaps we take our shoes and the steps we take in them a little too much for granted. Yes, some of us monitor our steps to check that we’ve made whatever target the latest health agency or guru says we should be hitting, be it ten thousand steps or otherwise but what about our psychological interactions with the spaces and places we take those steps through and to? And their interactions with us, both the places and spaces themselves and ourselves being transformed one way or another by our journeys, physical and psychological.

Walk for too long in someone else’s shoes and you’re almost bound to get blisters. Walk in your own shoes for too long and complacency will surely set in.

We hobble ourselves a little every day that we don’t think outside of our own footsteps. Take some time to map, remap, demap, reroute and walk at least for a short while without purpose.

Sometimes it’s okay to not quite know exactly where you’re heading. A fully mapped out future might feel cosy but get too cosy and and there’s a danger that we will atrophy, mind and body.

If I ever find the map to and of me I hope I will have the courage to strike a match and burn it.