Psychogeography
At a Young Hearts Run Free event this week, Karl Whitney talked about psychogeography. To say the least I identify - once it was explained to me - Actually I’ve been identifying for decades, only I hadn’t narrowed the concept down so succinctly. Psychogeography is ethereal nostalgia but with a specific physical expression too… your own personal Arcadia.
Imagine you’ve stopped habitually inhabiting a particular beat -maybe you never even noticed you had - but find yourself transported emotionally right back when for some reason you return to that place or thing. You may have a sense of melancholia about it all being different now, an awareness of getting older, a growing insight into the fact that it’s all a cycle and someone else’s world is now where ‘your’ streets or ‘your’ buildings were....
Psychogeography establishes these places as still yours - the music, the scent, the building - all part of your unique association with that physical place or thing and that link at least can never be taken away from you.
Yes, I identify... I also say that this mechanism works with almost anything – I think I actually tested this in an earlier entry. Right now, however, as I’m absent-mindedly looking at mushrooms growing by a tree, I'll go with my own personal mushroom psychogeography…
And I'm tuning in to the mushroom factory which is where the chips of mushrooms of my childhood emanated...(are there still chips of mushrooms?). On the way home from visiting my grandmother we used to pass the factory, and in fact the factory only existed at night for me – no recollection whatsoever of seeing it during the day. In my mind's eye it's lit up for the Sunday night hops held there for the workers – I see fairy lights and possibly a marquee for a big night after Christmas, although that could have been sleepy wishful thinking on my part. Hops is a word from mother’s psychogeography, by the way, covering dancing and situations where so-and-so was doing a line with so-and-so - Doing a line is hers too, and means courting with a view to marriage (as opposed to any other)(line) (just to be clear).
Because everyone locally knew someone who worked in the factory, we'd invariably be sent home with a chip of fresh mushrooms, and their damp woodland scent would waft from the back window where they'd have been set so as not to spill all over the car. Fragments of conversation would occasionally break through my drowsing... the mushroom factory brought life, employment, prosperity to the area - my parents approved. So did I - next day we would eat mushroom soup or fried mushrooms and I liked mushrooms.
A decade or more later, and a whole trip later, a group including me went mushroom picking in a park at the foothills of the mountains - musherooms, as one friend called them. And as I pointed out already, I was keen on my mushrooms and didn’t tend to hold back, which explained why one moment everything seemed normal, but then suddenly everything was framed in rainbows and simultaneously the funniest and most beautiful thing …. So I was trying to explain to a bearded man in an anorak that I didn't know from adam that I'd like him to know he was emanating an amazing rainbow like a human prism, and also that in his pupils I could see the cutest little windmills... when luckily a friend with a lot more sense than me - a friend who had not eaten any mushrooms - moved me along quickly before I got in any further trouble...
And it was actually quite true (because the sane friend bore this out later as solid fact unrelated to mushroom consumption) that, as we meandered through afforested greenery beaming our good vibrations at the birds and trees, we reached a hill where we were suddenly set upon by a yelling, yowling group of possibly eleven-year-old boys in full military kit... who suddenly descended from god-knows-where, brandishing sticks and we really did not dream this up. With hindsight, this may well have been a local entertainment of course (and I suppose you could see why opening a portal of psychogeographical terror in the brains of seasonal menaces to feature in their nightmares indefinitely might seem quite a worthy past-time actually).
But obviously we disintegrated completely, and it was left to our sane friend to get us home in a hurry, or at least to some quiet corner where we could be left undisturbed until the horrors abated. She led us away - four of us clinging to one of her like a litter of blind whimpering pups - and out onto the busy road, where the noise and traffic were now more horrific to us than even the small soldiers in the park.. It's a tremendous testament to her tenacity that she managed to walk us, shivering and shying at every shadow, to a bus stop, and talk us onto a bus (after first having to let several go on without us), which ferried us to a place of greater serenity and where a few hours later some kind of equilibrium was restored…
Someone said there was an unusually strong mushroom crop that year, but I never was prepared to test that as a theory or in any way stir up any new mushroom psychogeography for myself