Intro: Mythogeography
On Thursday 11th November, 2010 I discovered that I was existing inside a book.
I was on a train at the time, travelling through Shropshire towards Cardiff, heading for an art exhibition titledEverybody Knows This Is Nowhere, dividing my time between looking out at the hills and reading. The book was calledMythogeography. It had no apparent author, apart from some implausiblynamed individuals and organisations. It was a book about walking.
In those days, I walked ardently. For nearly three years I had been making a long, piece-by-piece journey through England, a DIY pilgrimage from where I lived in North West England back to my home-town on the South coast – attempting to experience the territory of my half-century of existence as directly as possible. A journey I had made many times at speed in trains and cars, now being done a step at a time, with side-trips and digressions. Mostly, I had avoided places of beauty and tourist highlights: my route tended to meander through the outskirts of towns, on footpaths that had been absorbed into suburbs and alongside railways and motorways, with rest-stops in corporate motels and refreshment breaks in chain pubs. Unnamed instinct had led me away from landscapes such as the hills that surrounded my train journey – for some reason, wilder more ‘natural’ places and officially-designated beauty spots held little interest. Instead I found a certain exhilaration in hiking through the margins.
Between walks I wrote a blog that consisted partly of travelogue and partly of poeticised musings. And I read widely on the topic of walking, finding provocative inspiration in various texts under the ambiguous banner of ‘psychogeography’. As someone trying to hack into the reality of the terrain I was walking through, the “study of the specific effects of the geographical environment ... on the emotions and behavior of individuals” (as Guy Debord [1955] of the SituationistInternational described the practice) had a definite appeal. The idea that I could be like “the wanderer, the stroller, the flâneur and the stalker” described in Merlin Coverley’s bookPsychogeography was attractive, joining a lineage whose experiences ranged “from the nocturnal expeditions of de Quincey to the surrealist wanderings of Breton and Aragon, from the Situationistdérive to the heroic treks of Iain Sinclair” (Coverley, 2010). I had a sense that these perspectives would help my dimly-apprehended quest to experience the true nature of the places I walked within. However, I also had a niggling awareness that adopting tactics devised by others was basically just following instructions. ‘Doing some psychogeography’ could just be a leisure activity, an intellectualised version of spotting items in anI-Spy guide book – ‘Surveillance Camera: 2 points’; ‘Occult Graffiti: 5 points’... not that there was anything wrong with that, but I wanted adventure rather than formula.
I had bought the newly-publishedMythogeography book as part of my ongoing search for interesting input. I liked the title, hoping thatmythogeography would prove to be a fresher version ofpsychogeography, like Tarzan being more exciting than Mowgli: the basic idea taken and given more energy, the narrative opened up and multiplied. Seeing the book mentioned online I had ordered it through the post, then brought it along on my trip to Wales for something to read. It was a slightly oversized paperback, the cover matt-laminate-serious, the silky white pages filled with symbols, codes, photographs and illustrations. It looked like several books combined into one – an academic tract, work of fiction, art-prank, guidebook, scrapbook, notebook waiting for more things to be written in it. The covers and early pages m
