Our explorations of Situationism, that eccentric twentieth-century offspring of a drunken amour between avant-garde European art and radical post-Marxist politics, have already led in strange directions. The ground we’ve covered so far extends from postwar Paris to Lower Slobbovia and from Marxist dialectical materialism to the occult perspectives that most Marxists despise utterly. Nonetheless the practical applications mentioned so far have remained on familiar ground.
I’ve done that deliberately, partly because it’s a good idea to take the movement toward high strangeness a step at a time, and partly to reflect current understandings, or misunderstandings, of Situationism itself. Those are inevitable, since it so happens that most discussions of Situationism—at least since the Situationist International blew itself apart in a typical round of fringe group quarrels—have presented the movement in very one-sided ways.
You’ve got the Marxist interpreters whose main concern is to squash the innovative elements of Situationist thought and practice back into the iron coffin of Marxist orthodoxy. You’ve got the libertarian interpreters whose main concern is to pass over in perfect silence those elements of Situationist thought that criticize capitalist culture. You’ve got the people who just think that détournement is fun and borrow such scraps of Situationist rhetoric that justify it. Then, of course, you’ve got the people whose sole exposure to Situationism is some online article written by a guy who skimmed The Society of the Spectacle a couple of years ago and talks about those bits of Debord’s ideas that catch his fancy.
The result is that most current discussions of Situationism focus on the concept of the Spectacle and the strategy of détournement, and neglect most of the rest of what the Situationists had to say, or do. Mind you, that concept and that strategy have plenty to offer, which is why I spent a good deal of time talking about them, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of the movement.
It would be just as workable to found a discussion of Situationism on the concept of psychogeography and the strategy of the dérive, as these were just important as the more popular points just named, but very few people do that. For that matter, there’s the central concept of the construction and development of situations, which has dropped almost entirely out of collective memory. It’s past time to remedy some of those omissions.
Let’s begin with the dérive. The French word dérive (pronounced day-REEVE) means “drift.” The verb dériver means “to drift,” “to divert,” and “to derive.” In Situationist terms, a dérive is a journey without a destination, though not without a purpose.
Guy Debord, in his essay “Theory of the Dérive,” describes the technique precisely: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Start walking in a direction chosen on a whim, with no purpose in mind other than paying attention to what you encounter, and let the experience of each moment guide you in the direction you take: that’s a basic form of dérive.
There are at least three purposes to this deceptively simple activity, beyond the simple playful enjoyments of an activity unconstrained by the pressures of economic necessity or the tawdry seductions of the mass media. First, it is a way to explore and set aside one’s unthinking habits. Debord, in the essay already quoted, describes a sociological study from 1952 that studied the movements of a college student over an entire year, and found that they were limited to a small triangle with its vertices defined by her apartment, her college, and the residence of her piano teacher. In a city as rich in potential human experience as Paris in 1950 or so, this is appallingly limited—but how many of us, in our daily and yearly rounds, really touch on a broader range of experiences than this?
The dérive is one way out of the ruts worn into your life by the force of habit. Let go of your ordinary purposes and goals, let yourself experience your surroundings, and follow whatever prompts you receive from that experience, and you can very easily find yourself in wholly unfamiliar spaces, encountering people, places, and things that would be outside your experience under other circumstances. You step into a wider world, one less constrained by your past and freighted with unpredictable potentials for your future.
Another purpose of the dérive unfolds from this first set of effects. The habits that constrain most people’s lives are not of their own making. The ruts they follow were traced out from infancy on by social forces acting through parents, teachers, and the mass media. Nor, of course, do those ruts exist for the benefit of those who trudge through them day after day, though of course that claim gets made over and over again.
A quirky metaphor from the Discordian tradition may help to clarify this. One of the plot engines in Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s grand Discordian fantasy Illuminatus! involves seeing the fnords. Fnords? According to Shea and Wilson, the word “fnord” is inserted all over written media, in newspapers, magazines, and books, but we’ve all been hypnotized in school not to notice it when it appears. Instead, we get frightened, without realizing why.
The more fnords we see, the more frightened we get, and this allows us to be pushed this way and that by the powers that be, usually without realizing it. To see the fnords—to break through the conditioning and realize that there are words printed in the newspaper that we look right past, but that affect us emotionally anyway, and distort our reactions to the world—is an important initiatory experience in Illuminatus!, and one that liberates certain characters from lifelong burdens of fear that are familiar to us all.
Of course the word “fnord” doesn’t actually appear anywhere outside of certain works of fringe literature like this one, but as usual with Discordianism, the over-the-top absurdity is a way to talk about some of the important but unmentionable realities of our time. Take a good hard look at a news website or any other steaming lump of excreta fresh from the orifices of the corporate media, very much including what passes for entertainment these days, and you’ll see the fnords, all right. A little background in classical rhetoric will help you spot them, but ordinary common sense and a little suspicion directed toward motives can often do the job all by themselves.
Pay special attention to the things you’re supposed to be frightened of. Of course there are things that require reasonable caution and wariness in today’s world. It remains true that more often than not these days, the nice smiling person who offers to save you from the scary thing is far more dangerous to your life and liberty than the scary thing is.
Dérives are, among other things, a way to see the fnords. While there are certainly places that it’s genuinely dangerous to go, and it’s wise to avoid those unless you know what you’re doing, there are many others we shy away from for reasons that have nothing to do with personal safety and everything to do with fnords.
When you set out on a dérive, notice what you avoid, and think about why you avoid it. You don’t have to ignore the intuition, if that’s what it is, and go there anyway, but learn to recognize your reaction, and do some research afterwards. Is the sense of danger you felt, assuming that’s what it was, based on current realities? Is it based on childhood experiences, and if so, are they actually relevant? Or is it based purely on the frenzied production of fnords by the corporate media or some other supposedly authoritative source?
This leads us in turn to the third potential purpose of the dérive, the one that the Situationists themselves considered its most important feature: its possibilities as an instrument for exploring the psychogeography of human environments.
Psychogeography? That’s something we all experience and most of us studiously ignore. Every space through which human beings move has effects on the thoughts and feelings of those who pass through it. Those effects vary somewhat from person to person but they’re not wholly subjective: most people are affected by the same spaces in broadly similar ways. There’s been a lot of discussion of the zeitgeist (literally, “time spirit”) of different historical periods, but too little of the corresponding concept of the raumgeist, the “space spirit” of different locations.
Natural environments are very powerful in their effects on human beings, which is why people fly thousands of miles to gaze down into the Grand Canyon or walk to local parks to sit on the grass and enjoy sunlight filtered through leaves. Built environments, however, are equally potent. Outside of a scattering of famous monuments, those don’t get much attention, because the most important things that structure built environments are differentials of power, privilege, and status—and especially the thing we don’t talk about in modern industrial societies, the power, privilege, and status of different social classes.
I’ve noted in previous essays here and elsewhere, for example, that the standard architectural forms used by corporate and government bureaucracies are images of domination. The faces they turn to the world outside are blank, sterile, and forbidding, a rejection of human scale and human interaction given physical form in glass, steel, and concrete.
None of this is accidental. It’s meant to communicate something very specific to those outside the walls: “Your opinions don’t matter and neither do you. We make the decisions and your only role is to do what we tell you, peasant.” Since this is the standard attitude of bureaucracies in the modern managerial state, enshrined in the cult of professional expertise and given teeth by a carefully cultivated obsession with formal credentials in place of practical competence, the psychogeography of the modern office building can be seen as a straightforward expression of power relationships as the designers and builders of office buildings want them to be.
Yet psychogeography also has subtler and more interesting dimensions. A psychogeographical boundary, for example, cuts across the landscape close to where I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. Along Georgia Avenue, and for several blocks to either side, is a built-up area of soaring apartment complexes and office towers. Go a few blocks further east, and you reach a zoning boundary that runs as straight as a laser north and south: uphill to the west, multistory apartment buildings; downhill to the east, small suburban houses from the early twentieth century, each with its own little yard in front and back.
What makes all this particularly intriguing, at least to me, is that the physical boundary is not the psychogeographical one. That’s a block and a half or so further west. There, in among the office and apartment towers, you’ll spot a handful of businesses in one- or two-story structures left over from the days when Silver Spring was one of those sleepy bedroom communities with its own little commercial district along the streetcar line.
There aren’t many of these businesses—an auto repair shop, a boxing gym, a couple of downscale restaurants, a gas station, and so on—but as you pass them the ambience along the street changes. Even though many of the business signs are in Amharic as well as English, reflecting the lively local Ethiopian immigrant community in Silver Spring, once you pass the transition zone the raumgeist of the old neighborhood is still palpable.
It takes careful attention to the landscape to catch such cues, and this is one advantage of the dérive. If you set aside all your ordinary concerns and simply pay attention to your surroundings while moving through them at an ordinary walking pace, your chance of noticing such things goes up sharply. This is especially true if you’re in an area unfamiliar to you, where you haven’t yet laid down a pattern of memories and habitual interpretations to guide your reactions. Again, the art of the dérive includes that among its practical rules.
There is of course another way to understand all this, one that brings all its features into tight focus, though it’s one that the original Situationists would have rejected with quite some heat. In one of the most remarkable examples of convergent evolution on record, starting from the least promising starting point imaginable—Marxist dialectical materialism, of all things—the Situationists succeeded in reinventing the art of divination.
Consider the tarot card reader as she casts and interprets a reading. She has no way of knowing in advance which of the 78 cards will turn up in the reading, nor whether they will be upright or reversed—this makes a difference in most forms of tarot divination. Of those 156 possibilities, those that appear in the reading provide cryptic cues to a kind of abstract psychogeography of the question she is trying to answer. The same attention to half-sensed subtleties that leads a wandering artist on a dérive to turn this way instead of that leads the reader to select this interpretation of the card instead of that, and provide an answer to herself or her client that highlights new possibilities and offers an alternative to existing habits of thought and action.
Other modes of divination, for that matter, come even closer to the dérive. Some ancient Greek oracles, for example, had those who needed advice from the gods make their offering in the temple, then block their ears with their fingers, walk out the temple door into the crowded agora outside, and unblock their ears. The first words they heard thereafter were the gods’ answer to their question. Even further over into dérive territory is the knightly quest, as seen in the Grail legends among other sources; the knights who sought the Grail simply rode out into the Waste Land, and let whatever they encountered lead them to the castle of the Fisher King.
The same principle can be used in other ways, to be sure. One of the best ways to break out of mental ruts in the age of the internet is to make sure that the news and opinion sites you read include those from viewpoints you find baffling, absurd, or detestable. Pay attention to your reactions, especially the automatic hostility such things so often evoke, and see if you can figure out what’s behind those reactions; if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find that abstract love of truth plays a much smaller role in them than you want to admit. When a claim of fact appears, look it up in some neutral source, if you can find one, and see where it leads you.
Mind you, unless you want to be banished to the fringes, I don’t recommend talking publicly about the insights you get in this way. The hatred that so many people fling at their notional opposites in today’s politics and culture is nothing compared to the rage they display when somebody breaks out of whatever rigid binary both sides have embraced, by noting flaws in the positions of both sides or by offering a third option. Still, that’s a risk that creative thinkers tolerably often have to run.
Despite all this, there’s still also much to be said for the old-fashioned dérive as it was practiced by the Situationists themselves. There are complicated forms of it, involving messages and prearranged phone calls, but you can find those in any good anthology of Situationist writings and it’s best to start with the simplest form. You can do it on your own, but Debord mentions that it seems to work best in a group of two to five people; with more than that, it tends to split up naturally into two or more separate dérives. He also insists that dérives can only be done in large urban areas, but there he just demonstrates that he was a city kid through and through; if you know the countryside you can learn just as much there, though the distances tend to be longer and a bicycle is a useful accessory.
Literally or figuratively, give it a try. Head into unknown territory, following no more definite guide than your own intuition. See where it takes you and what adventures you have on the way. We’ll talk more about that in a later post.
Thanks for the taking us on a drift John…
The third part of my essay on the psychogeography of Route-128 MA is up as of last week:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/roadrunning-the-military-industrial-template
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/roadrunning-the-military-industrial
“As the area around Boston got developed, the greenspace around Route 128 became “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and trails and townless highways envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saruman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Transcendental Concord became a note discord. A note with the seed of cyberpunk embedded within.”
I’ve come to think of this as more of a psychohistorical drift, actually… along the way we meet roadrunners, coyotes, and Jonathan Richman in this exploration of a spirit of a place.
Thank you for letting me share it, and the previous entries in this exercise of American Psychogeography here.
John, you and others here might be interested in this slim book by British occultist and musician Phil Legard: Psychoegographia Ruralis, which takes the idea of psychogeography away from its usual haunt in the city to the countryside. Along with occult ideas and speculative music.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/phil-legard-and-layla-smith/psychogeographia-ruralis/paperback/product-16666847.html?page=1&pageSize=4
It does seem psychogeography got much more of a foothold in England than in other places where the Situationists left their traces. As I mention in the intro to my article series: “Psychogeographical practice retains a strong foothold in England. This came in part from the establishment of the London Psychogeographical Association in 1957 by Ralph Rumney, who had been involved with Lettrism, the avant-garde art group COBRA, and went on to become one of the cofounders of the SI. Later, on the musical side it was taken up by the likes of Drew Mullholland and his Mount Vernon Arts Lab project, among many others. On the literary side of things, writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home, Will Self, and Iain Sinclair have made extensive use of the concept to explore the resonance between the hidden histories of place and its psychic undercurrents.”
I also think it is the influence of Arthur Machen and his book The London Adventure: An Essay in Wandering, that left a big influence on the more occult oriented psychogeographers in England. I have it on my desk to re-read, as I read it first some twenty years ago.
Derive sounds a little bit like the Australian Aboriginal tradition of the Walkabout, just on a micro scale. I’ll have to give it a shot.
Does driving on main roads & back roads count? Walking on back roads is frowned upon in my area.
Well timed , John. Intriguing idea of derive as I prep for a multi month bike camping trip across Europe. Heading north from Sicily but each day out has many forks in the road. Clean my mind. No internet fear/anger pushing my buttons as I try to enjoy this beautiful world. Already changing my attitude as I’m doing full load training rides and meeting some seriously interesting folk around southern Vancouver Island.
Yes, we are in a lot of ruts. Contempt is quite powerful and often unreasonable. (I.e. “I don’t have to give a reason”) For example: one time, I was doing work at one of the companies that tracks satellites. I was at lunch with some of the IT people, who are mostly college educated, but not directly involved with the tracking. Talk turned to laughing at flat earth believers. I asked the group what kind of proofs they could come up with that the earth was a ball not a disk. I thought they might say you could go to see Lake Pontchartrain Power Transmission Lines and how only the tops of the towers were visible in the distance, or that the formula for line of sight radio depends on knowing the radius of the earth, or visit the Foucault pendulum at the local museum to show that the earth moves, but I got a defensing silence. The group who accepted that the earth was round seemed to have had no desire to prove it to anyone even themselves.
“Like most Discordian writings, it’s either profound wisdom disguised as utter absurdity, or utter absurdity disguised as profound wisdom.” Really felt more like a both-and to me, and in general a fun brain adventure.
Before I begin, a fascinating data point. It’s rare for me to get a spluttering rage-fit comment as soon as I post something, and normally it’s because I’ve written something that offends one or another side of the political bigotries of our era. Well, I fielded one this time. Curious that it was this post, of all things.
Justin, the green space ideology almost inevitably turns into a stalking horse for industrial parks. Back when I lived in Seattle, the city government floated a big proposal to tear down a neighborhood in the space between downtown and Lake Union. They babbled about greenspace, too. What actually got built was a tiny little park in north downtown, without any grass at all (though they did squeeze in a few trees as an afterthought)…
And a long strip of corporate campuses down ot the lake. I’m sure that when Saruman took out a lease on Orthanc he promised to make it look like the Shire. Thanks for the book recommendation, btw — rural psychogeography is particularly striking in Britain, where distances are smaller.
Calliope, and I should have thought of that! Thank you for the suggestion.
Patrick, it can, though the car can too easily become a filter limiting your access to psychogeographic signals. Park and get out often.
Longsword, delighted to hear it! Have a great dérive.
Bradley, in all probability the people you were talking to didn’t know any of the proofs. All they knew is that somebody in authority told them that the world is round, therefore it’s round — Ipse dixit! The demand for blind obedience to certified experts pervades modern culture, and it’s generating the usual backlash, an across-the-board rejection of claims of expertise.
Heather, I won’t argue!
This had me remembering working for the late Prof. James Graaskamp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 80s. He taught real estate and I recall him telling someone that the new Business School building looked like a mens restroom. An internet search shows a new building with a more classical style.
“When a claim of fact appears, look it up in some neutral source, if you can find one, and see where it leads you.”
My concern is that it’s become so easy to fabricate information, imagery, audio, and now even video that even when I trust the source, I no longer feel confident that it will be accurate: the neutral source might not be lying, but does that really matter if whoever put it together was mislead? I really don’t like where this line of thinking leads, but until such time as all the tools for fabricating information go away, I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe anything I did not see with my own eyes.
I know that this way lies madness; but if there’s a way to remain sane in our current informational environment, I don’t know what it is.
@6 Bradley
1. I’ve seen lunar eclipses. It has been argued that the round shadow of the Earth on the Moon indicates that the Earth is either a sphere or a circular disk aligned just so.
2. Live cam footage of different timezones (or calling friends who live in different timezones and asking them what time of day it is). But it won’t work on those flat-earthers who adopt a spotlight sun model.
3. Maybe different constellations and familiar constellations higher or lower in the sky in different latitudes (something I’ve seen myself noting the slight difference between Cassiopia in TN to Cassiopia in NJ on an autumn night) can be best explained by a round earth model. This is more pronounced with equatorial or southern hemisphere skies, as the firmament covering a flat earth wouldn’t have two (visible) celestial poles.
Ann Sussman has explored this topic of psycho-geography. She refers to it as Cognitive Architecture and wrote a great book with that title.
I can see how the best laid plans of the planned communities and the planners get turned into something other than what was planned. (Mind the gap, & also mind the people who might want to come in and mess with your plans –) I was reminded, in thinking of the people involved in regional planning, of your essay “The Dream of a Managed Society” while at the same time wrestling some of the good that could have been achieved through planning.
The boundary between natural organic development of human habitations, and designing and planning for good architecture and public spaces is an interesting one. …I’d like to visit Arcosanti some day for instance…
I’ve been reading about furniture making and woodworking for a few different reasons, but it has led me to the work of George Nakashima. Beautiful stuff! It’s interesting he was a student of Auribindo. I think of people like him, and Christopher Alexander and Paolo Soleri and others who worked to see what could be done to make our environments more beautiful.
Meanwhile, I haven’t gone past it recently to see if our local brutalist orthanc tower has been torn down yet or not.
It’s interesting to imagine what will become of the industrial park ruins of our big cities like Seattle in the decades ahead.
What they are doing now in our neighborhoods that do have a main street is plopping down 4-above-1 developments that totally mismatch the older architecture like on that street you mentioned. Making more room for the people coming in from Seattle and California (like two of my neighbors) I guess…
…meanwhile I think psychogeography and the derive could be very good for teenagers. When I was one I had the roam of the city with some bus money and a skateboard. These days they have the roam of an internet filled with Steiner’s malicious spiders. Breaking that trance by drifting through the city… I mourn that loss for those teens so afflicted today.
On another note, one of my favorite things to do with my wife is to take a walk in an unfamiliar part of the city, or a place we’re visiting. We’ve used a guidebook for neighborhood walks, which helps us to learn the local history, and embody it by knowing where things happened, are, who lived there… then balance this with going back and drifting, or sometimes the other way around.
JMG & Commentariat,
Well, I decided to put the derive into practice today. There is a road up a hill from the house where I live. I decided to walk along and see what I noticed, with the only footnote being that the road is a dead end and I would inevitably return to where I came from by following the entire road.
I noticed three things: first, a black SUV, which I remarked upon the first time that I walked past. When I returned, I remarked upon the SUV again, and subsequently noticed two other objects: a black trashcan, laying on its back and bottom facing the road, and a black mailbox. I noticed many other black trashcans as I drifted the route home.
Evidently, the neighbors are a little late taking in the bins from trash collection this morning. But so interesting, the psychogeography of my self was quite focused on these black, retangular things. Certainly items that one would not encounter in nature!
I have done dérives all my adult life without knowing it! Always alone however, and of course usually in the first months after moving into new surroundings. I love seeing streets, subway stations, squares and shops I had never seen before. Usually I plan on doing a small walk and it just keeps extending itself. It is safer to do this in Germany or Canada than it was in Brazil, though – I came close to some dangerous situations there.
Bicycle is definitely a good option for “deriving” in the countryside. When I was at university, I would take a backpack with books, water and some fruit and just drive without a fixed plan, maybe for a hour, until I found a good spot to sit down and read a book.
Related to this, years ago colleagues who work with lab rats told me there is an equilibrium between spatial memory, enabling the rats to always take the fastest route to their target they have found so far, and exploration, which looks at first like a loss of memory. If the rat every 10th or 20th time or so “derives” away from the best path it knows, it has the chance to find an even better one (for example because the experimenters have changed the environment).
Hi Jmg,
I had to look up Lower Slobbovia. I remember Al Capp well. His Sunday newspaper comics were hilarious. I was there, then.
Lower Slobbovia, here we come.
Slob is for “slob.” Slob is a great psychological and cultural goal. I eke towards slob daily. I have not evolved into a perfect slob, although I have made distinct in-roads in a couple respects. If I mentioned how I have became a better slob, readers would get royally grossed out so I shall desist.
Bovia is for “bovine.” I have some bovines (“cows”) who live on the family farm across the county road. Out my ‘exurb’ office window, I turn my head slightly from my computer monitor and see the cows munching on hay. It is positively pastoral, in both senses. Those cows calm me. I do need to learn more about cows, so I just bought a book called “The Cow: A Natural & Cultural History” by Catrin Rutland. I hope to someday to reach cow-consciousness.
“Lower” is for water collecting in wetlands. My house is on a hill but we have marshes and other watery areas all around. Maybe even a fen (1800: my ancestral County Norfolk, England). If it is one thing Wisconsin has, it is freshwater wetlands nearby everywhere.
Slob–cow–wetland. I can work with those. Mix the three and come out with a lifetime of art projects. Hmm. Got me thinkin’?.
Lower Slobbovia, here I go.
Now I go read the rest of your essay. (I got ‘bogged down’ on Lower Slobbovia.)
???????Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Oh, I really, really like this challenge. 🙂
It might be days before I could possibly report back. But… yes, I like it. Thank you.
@ Longsword #5
Just to say that I had responded to you in a previous situationist thread… don’t know if you saw it. 🙂
https://ecosophia.net/situationism-the-art-of-detournement/#comment-158484
The dérive concept sounded familiar and is similar to or based upon flânerie. Flâner means strolling or wandering (usually in an urban environment) without a specific destination. The goal would be enjoyment and discovery.
There could be a whole argument over Guy Dubord taking the fun out of flânerie but I’d say both concepts have there usefulness and I hope to start incorporating both concepts when I’m travelling and at home.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
I think this Wednesday current post is very, very interesting.
Situationism can be interpreted in different ways, according different ideological ways, but like John has written, those views forget Situ ideas which don’t match their ideology (or they directly have maimed Situationism to favor their biases).
John, when you’ve remembered libertarians, I understand you wrote about them in the American sense of that label, (right wing capitalists), not in the European one (anarchists and half-anarchists). By the way, it’s interesting to see some anarchists have used partly Situ ideas…when they like them.
“Dérive”:
When I was younger and I began to read Situ writings, I started to go out for a walk in the Situationist way. It was very interesting to me, and I learnt some new things. However, after some years I gave up this custom. Well, after having read your post, John, I’m thinking about beginning my dérives again…
“Fnord”:
I didn’t know this word, because I haven’t never read Discordian writings. It’s a half serious half kidding term, I take note of it and its meaning.
“Psychogeography”:
I knew this word thanks to my Situ lectures a lot of years ago. Of course, it’s a very important idea. Architecture and urbanism are tools for power and domination, an idea less evident for everybody than it should be…
I’ll repeat you what I read in Anselm Juppe essay “Béton”(Concrete). Situs were near geniuses when they pointed modern architecture and urbanism were too eager to serve political/economic power, like in every historic times. They mocked and despised, for example, Le Corbusier buildings, because they thought (with reason) they favored dehumanization and brutality within their dwellers.
Unfortunately, “alternative” Situationist architecture and urbanism weren’t much better than official ones. According Mr. Jappe, they supported the old rehashed “futuristic” architecture typical during past century…
Justin P. # 2:
Interesting. I didn’t know there was a psychogeographical “tradition” in the U.K. By the way, Situationism arrived to my country too, but during ‘50s Spain (as you may know) was under a heavy and hard far right dictatorship, so Situationism reached a few political dissidents here. Main leftist opposition against Franco was Communist, and until last ‘60s (methink) they had some fondness for Father Stalin…
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JMG # 8:
That Seattle “park” photo you’ve shown us, it seems IMHO very sad…
A random drive can be a lot of fun. There is a feature on the map called Boulder Park. I sort of meandered my way to it using several different unpaved roads with frequent stops to admire the geology. I found the “park”.
The glacier got caught in an uphill bowl. The boulders traveled in from the low edge, then couldn’t get out so a large number of impressive rocks ended up scattered in a small area when the ice finally melted.
Along the way I found a piece of granodiorite in a sandbar left over from some Columbia River flood. The sandbar is several hundred feet above current river level. The rock sample matches another rock I picked up two years ago near the top of Foster Coulee about 30 miles further east.
Stop and smell the roses, or admire the geology definitely applies. Having a bird book and binoculars isn’t a bad idea either.
I did ‘derives’ as a kid. Just head out across the fields and woods and see what was there. If the family was on holiday, do the same wherever we were,it’s the only way to really to get to know a place. Plus it really got you out of yourself, a bit of that wonder as a small child of discovering things for the first time.
Michele, late twentieth century university buildings for business departments seem to have been under an unusually dreadful curse. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that looked as attractive as an ordinary men’s restroom. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s why the behavior of MBAs since then has so often been so viciously antihuman.
William, the only thing new about that is the technological basis. Fake information was so common in the Middle Ages that handbooks of divination put a lot of discussion into readings to find out if news is true or false, and a very large number of people in France believed that Englishmen had tails. (Most of them had never seen an Englishmen, after all, and the thought of actually going there to check must have seemed as outlandish as that of flying to the Moon — yeah, some people have been there, but they knew they and their neighbors never would.) There’s a reason why Mercury, the god of news and information, is also the god of liars, cheats, and frauds!
GAP, thanks for this. I’ll see if I can find a copy.
Justin, if you make it to the Ecosophia potluck in Providence one of these summers, talk to Peter Van Erp about Arcosanti. He studied there, and met and married his wife there. I understand the lure of the planned community, but they reliably don’t work, and Arcosanti is no exception. It’s no more effective to plan a community than it is to manufacture a forest!
Mrdobner, interesting. In your place I’d have wondered, “why is the universe showing me the image of a ‘black box’? What is it trying to tell me?”
Aldarion, I do that in new neighborhoods also, but I don’t stop, because there are always new things to find out. It’s not surprising to hear that rats figured this out first!
Northwind, that is to say, you engaged in a linguistic dérive. That’s also an option!
Scotlyn, good. Have fun and pack a lunch. 😉
Scotty, a good point. Flânerie has its own value; it’s not the same as the dérive, but as you say, both have their place.
Chuaquin, oh, granted, I mean the species Libertarianus americanus, not the European species of the same genus. Jappe was quite correct, of course; as Marx showed, it’s easier to produce a good critique of something than it is to suggest a successful replacement for it. As for the Seattle pseudopark, yeah, “sad” is a good word for it.
Siliconguy, of course! The more you know about nature the more rural or wilderness dérives become an encounter with unexpected meaning.
Philip, no reason you can’t do the same thing right now.
Ah-ha. Another reason why Trump’s “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” memorandum has given the PMC a bad case of screaming “hot tamales.” I’d never thought of the vibe of a building as projecting PMC power.
Seeing a new fnord is always satisfying. Thanks for the pointer.
Also – the recent appearance of crumbling brutalist architecture in sci-fi art is interesting in juxtaposition to the new regime’s ideas about architecture. (spiritual brother Sci-Fi over on YouTube has some good examples, btw.)
For the convenience of the commentariat: whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/
A data point to add!
As I read this I was reminded of the phenomenon that popped up a number of years ago called “randonauting”.
Some folk put together a phone app which connects GPS to a quantum random number generator. The idea is that the user comes up with some sort of intention, and then the app generates a randomized latitude and longitude (within perimeters set by the user). Then the user is encouraged to walk to the generated GPS point and take note of any synchronicities that pop up along the way.
Years ago when I was a pot smoking teenager my first query into this was the intention of “Purple Dragon”. The app promptly led me to a neighbors driveway, parked in which there was a car with a large TCU decal of their purple horned frog. We all giggled and carried on our merry life.
Recently I thought about the app, and a friend and I used the intention of “perspective”. The point generated was directly on top of a creek bridge which we used to smoke and graffiti beneath. From on top of the bridge, there was a clear view of a large crucifix atop a tower at the nearby Catholic high school. It was nighttime and the crucifix was the lit up bright and gleaming. On the walk over my friend and I had been talking about how we were both feeling drawn back into a more personal version of the Christian faith recently, with me praying the rosary and him going back to church with his family.
The feeling which accompanied the moment was one of being held, and assurance in my steps.
Nice! With the weather warming up now, I‘ll definitely take a friend or two on a dérive. What a beautifully enriching, low-cost, and offline activity!
As a native German speaker I‘d like to point out that a more appropriate spacial equivalent of Zeitgeist would be Ortsgeist, the spirit of place, rather than space.
Raumgeist is a cool word in itself, though. Considering the common root of Geist and ghost, I‘d translate it as as spaceghost, which is definitely a great name for a band. I’m thinking driving instrumental rock with lots of reverb and a theremin.
The hypothetical German band Raumgeist would make much more etheric music, more like Kraftwerk. Funny how that works.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand ?
“Fake information was so common in the Middle Ages that handbooks of divination put a lot of discussion into readings to find out if news is true or false…”
Now this application of divination systems sounds incredibly useful just now. 🙂
Derive sounds like ROAD TRIP to me. Clearly not as intimate as walking an area, but a similar sense of discovery and openness, perhaps.
Mr. Greer … re. that little house above, with the red awnings .. quaint as it may be .. might be priced out for for most of us Li’l Abners here in Northern Slobodia … although, traipsing ’round barefoot with ragged pant cuffs I’m sure will be all the um, ‘rage’ .. once no one can afford to drive anywhere, let alone heat/cool the place .. or pray tell EAT! We All be Situationistas NOW, or soon, no?
@Patrick, Bradley: I trust the profit maximizing nature of flight companies. They choose the fastest and cheapest long distance routes, which happen to make no sense at all on any flat model of the earth. Look at routes from New York to London. You can verify them by looking out of the window during the flight (if it isn’t dark or cloudy).
@scotty: The funny thing is that signs in Québec read “No loitering – défense de flâner”. I have never understood the significance of the word loitering – it only seems to apply to people of low income. Does it mean walking around aimlessly while being poor, or standing around aimlessly while being poor?
Hi John Michael,
🙂 Oh yeah, doing the unexpected and taking a random path has long been a successful strategy in times of uncertainty. Of course there are risks with that, and failure is always an option, yet there are moments when the time honoured, well trod, and pre-ordained path – simply won’t work. Then you have to do something different, for there is often little choice. And the long dead grandmaster of strategy, Sun Tzu recommended to do the unexpected, and also to employ a competent diviner. Sound advice. Tell you what, if the signs don’t feel right to me, I go off and do something different with my day. Thus probably why you moved recently too (at a guess), although in your circumstances with the loss of Sara, I may have upped sticks as well. A person can be haunted by too many memories. In some ways having Aphantasia reduces trauma, which is probably the entire point of that brain wiring, but I doubt it can be forced.
Evolution of life takes a random approach! So as a species, we’re good with the strategy.
Speaking of fnords. Is it just my observation, or am I observing an under current in writings on the current hot mess, which derive from the rough-ish origins of Western Europe, that they’re all pretty much pulling the apocalypse play-book card due to the breakdown of the rules based order? We wanna return, except it ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
If I may say so, the recent double back blockade strategy is one straight out of Sun Tzu. And the fact that a stand over ransom toll payment was even mooted in the first place, suggests to me what the power brokers in that country thought of the intelligence of the US leaders and their predictable response. Turns out that they were wrong and discovered consequences. It’s a real cat and mouse game over there.
By the way, speaking of such things… Out-of-control fire rages in Geelong at one of Australia’s two oil refineries. Oh poop!
Lot’s of moving targets my friend. Heaps, and then some. 🙂 What an interesting time to be alive. I do wonder about the next harvest though with shortages of urea and diesel fuel. I’d be prioritising some, and cutting back on others with energy availability, but that’s me, and agriculture has long been thrown under the bus down under. Nice to do, until ya gotta eat.
Cheers
Chris
Cool about the Great Khan of Pot Lucks. I dont think I will make it, though I would love to one of these years. Traveling to Maine hopefully for the memorial celebrstion of a dear friend of ours who passed in January. There was a funeral a few weeks ago, but this is another gathering of friends/family… only one trip to New England for me this year, I am afraid. I do love the area.
I agree about the failure of the communities themselves as such. I have not much desire for a commune… I was thinking more along the specific kinds of buildings made for the arcology. The planning & situation of roads, homes, places of worship, etc. Thats what I want to see there, how the architecture feels.
After all, I learned from the GSF/SGO that it is important where you put the points on the tracing board.
The old cathrdral builders knew the power and placement and orientation of a building, as did the mound builders, sacred site architects…
…how all this interfaces with geomancy in the broad sense of the term, is something I think about often.
And, if an architect plans a building or structure, that can be good … so, then it seems, some community planning can be good without slipping into utopian commune schemes.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 3/13). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused; may mother be blessed and invigorated.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Open Space be filled with the strength he needs to heal quickly from his current bout of Chicken Pox; may his will remain strong, that he does not scratch; may he be healed completely, and suffer no scarring in its wake.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May Cathy N. of St. Marys, Ohio heal and recover from injuries caused by a fall.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, be healed of a recently discovered heart condition.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
I just had a thought but maybe Guy Debord pre-determined in some way the outcomes of his derives is that he was expecting to encounter fnords? He was in opposition to the current capitalist society and expected fnords along those line.
I’m not devaluing what he was trying to do with the dérive technique and I’m definitely going to explore this more but my thought is that something like how one’s main thoughts / astral level at death will determine one’s experience in the afterlife, one’s thought’s going into a dérive may determine the outcome.
What is interesting is the concept of paying attention to those things one is supposed to be frightened of. Wondering if Debord took that literally and not only thought about and explored what mainstream society was telling him to be frightened of but also what he hated or was afraid of (e.g. any stronghold or cultural outpost of the current regime)?
@JPM #1 & #2,
Thank you for the links. I’ll be reading your MA posts with interest.
@Everyone,
If anyone has more resources and links to psychogeography topics, I’d love to see them.
Wow, another situationist practice that I already have done on occasion!
I almost always do this when I stay in a location (longer than a couple days) the first time, there’s nothing like a solid directionless amble to teach you a neighborhood.
I will say that both city and wilderness derives have been more rewarding than suburban derives. There’s just a lot more out of the ordinary to see.
Also, having walked through Silver Spring, I know exactly what you mean. Outer DC is great for stark changes in character like that. The walk from the Pentagon to Crystal City is like that, and so is North Bethesda and South Bethesda.
dérive sounds like it would go good with slack
I wandered like that a lot when I was young. I should take up the practice again. Though now living in the town I grew up in, there are few places within 30 miles I have not been.
Fake information was so common in the Middle Ages that handbooks of divination put a lot of discussion into readings to find out if news is true or false
Could geomancy be used for that purpose? It would be less ambitious than trying to use it to predict future political and world events, so I think it could be more likely to yield reliable results.
Rhydlyd, exactly. Classical architecture is an architecture of civic engagement — the pillars mediating between inside and outside space produce a sense of interaction and mutual access. The Roman architect Vitruvius points out that the pillars take their proportions from the human body, so that a classical building surrounded by pillars suggests a group of people gathered together to talk about something. That’s anathema to the bureaucratic-managerial class, most of whose members want to tell everyone else to do from behind their faceless ramparts of institutional privilege.
James, interesting! Debord didn’t approve of using randomness as a guide to dérives, but that’s just one opinion, of course.
Eike, so noted and thank you for the correction. I’m amused to note that Space Ghost was the hero of a Saturday morning cartoon in my childhood:
That said, I’ll probably put a band named Raumgeist into an upcoming Ariel Moravec novel!
Scotlyn, in geomancy and horary astrology alike, it’s a standard third house question and may be interpreted by the usual means.
Elkriver, a case can be made that the road trip is the American equivalent.
Polecat, at the moment, yes. Let’s see what happens as the financial collapse now under way in private equity companies picks up speed.
Chris, as von Neumann pointed out in his works on game theory, on average, a strategy that contains a randomizing element is more successful than one that doesn’t, because the random factor messes up the opponent’s ability to predict what you’ll do. As for my recent move, too many memories was certainly part of it, and so was the downside of Rhode Island’s local culture — it’s the kind of place where people don’t show up, can’t be bothered, and never get around to things, and that got very wearing — but yeah, one thing I’ve had the chance to learn in this life is that if your life isn’t going anywhere, a sudden move to an unfamiliar place is one way to jolt things into motion.
Justin, there’s a continuum that extends from pure vernacular architecture on one end to the work of professional architects on the other. It’s in the middle that you most often find astounding works like the Gothic cathedrals, which were the product of hands-on craft traditions rather than head trips by college-educated architects who never in their lives handled stones and mortar. My take, at least…
Ecoprayer, thanks for this.
Scotty, Debord didn’t discuss fnords, and he was more interested in psychogeography than in using dérives as a way of deprogramming. That was my spin.
SirusTalCelion, I haven’t yet wandered into any of outer DC other than Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Glenmont (the best Asian grocery in this end of things is halfway between the latter two Red Line stations). Thanks for the heads up!
KAN, “Bob” approves of this message!
William, you should indeed. How have they changed since you were last there?
Patrick, not only can geomancy be used for that purpose, it constantly was used for that purpose. I can’t think offhand of an old geomantic manual that doesn’t cite “is the news (or rumor) true or false?” as one of the standard third house questions.
“William, you should indeed. How have they changed since you were last there?”
I am living in one of the few places in America that has not changed much since I was a kid. There is more money here, many of the houses on the lakes are much bigger, but there are lakes where little has changed. Even the main town in the county looks much the same.
Though, there are signs the State Government of MN means to flood our county with immigrants the county does not really need, like they have in counties south of us. Which is one of the reasons I talk to just about everyone I meet, if the liberals who rule this State win the next election, outstate should secede from the Twin Cities and become East Dakota.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/why-minnesota
JMG,
I read your comment and discovered the psychogeography of the derive. I was thinking about my cell phone.
This thing holds billions of people in its sway.
Well, well – Situationism certainly is chock full of surprises! “Head into unknown territory, following no more definite guide than your own intuition” – why, that’s singing my tune! I have done this periodically throughout my life and I firmly believe that my life has been all the richer and more rewarding for it. Sometimes this unknown territory has literally involved living in disparate locations on this globe; and sometimes it has been extremely different cultures, religions and philosophies from what I was raised on. This varied experience has turned me into an oddball – but I am at peace with such a destiny.
I feel sorry for those who have never ventured beyond the “fishbowl” of what is familiar – seems rather Hobbitish to me – but to each his/her own. I am sure that it has certain rewards that are alien to my experience in life.
I am surprised, and to be honest a bit puzzled, by your comment on Situationists reinventing divination. Your description of the tarot reader’s process of divination is familiar enough – I do it, too. But is not geomancy – which I am intimately familiar with – also somewhat similar? Yes, once the four mother figures are produced, the chart is no longer “random”, but at least the way that I read a chart relies a great deal on intuition based on the cryptic clues (as you’ve put it) of each figure that are based on traditional interpretations and associations of the figures. Was this also not done during the heyday of geomancy, centuries before it was whittled down to tables of canned answers at the time of the Golden Dawn? Or am I missing something in your description of Situationist influence on divination?
Lastly, I notice that the cover of the “Illuminatus!” book includes an illustration of [gasp] a Yellow Submarine! Was this printed before or after the Beatles’ release of the song by the same name in their Revolver album in 1966? Was Ringo Starr a secret member of the Illuminati communicating classified information to his Illuminati brethren via some obscure code embedded in the lyrics of his fanciful and seemingly innocent song? (my first question is serious; the second just plain silly) Sorry, I have not read the book (yet); I should probably remedy that situation soon.
JMG,
The purest form of the Derive that I can think of was wandering the local neighborhood as a small child ( 1st and 2nd grade). This may sound unbelievable, to those from later generations, but at that age we were allowed to leave the house and wander far and wide as long as we got home by dusk. The hilly part of SW Portland where I lived was filled with creeks, vacant lots, woods, blackberry bush patches and little used gravel roads.
At that age kids are not guided by maps or plans, but just curiosity, wandering from one neat thing to the next. I think this is actually essential to fully development of humans and its loss may be responsible for much of the disfunction in modern industrial society.
I could say that something like Dérive is about a good quarter/third of my hours. It is a nice way to be.
One third in intention, one third in wandering enchantment, one third sleeping. 🙂
Reminds me of an occult meme I came across said “Source? It was reviled to me on my walk.”
@JMG “the standard architectural forms used by corporate and government bureaucracies are images of domination. The faces they turn to the world outside are blank, sterile, and forbidding, a rejection of human scale and human interaction given physical form in glass, steel, and concrete.”
I have been seeing some younger folks start to use nature as inspiration for architecture. Doing things like taking a curled up leaf, a seashell or a mushroom and modelling structures on this. Sometimes just sketching over a photo of these. While none of these have been constructed, seeing this thinking coming up in the world actually brings me some hope. If we wise up, we will shape the world in beauty rather than oppression.
I have always been a stroller, or saunterer by foot, by bike, by car, by kayak, whatever, though I am somewhat limited by my ankle now in my 80s. I have a pleasant memory of a few months spent in NYC many years ago. I didn’t particularly want to be there, but every weekend I would randomly go on my bike to some different part of the city and have lunch in whatever place looked good to me. I ended up having a really good time.
This reminds me that Thoreau, who was a great saunterer, said that the word derived from either the French ” sans terre”: landless, or “Sainte terre”: going to the holy land.
Stephen
Hi JMG,
This made me think about the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. It was about how our inhabited spaces shape our dreams and our imaginations and how our imaginations create spaces. That every space has meaning. Bachelard is a little more inward looking by focusing on the home but he did say that it was necessary to move around and find freedom in our surroundings and become different. Each new place is a new world of experience.
William 10
> My concern is that it’s become so easy to fabricate information, imagery, audio, and now even video that even when I trust the source, I no longer feel confident that it will be accurate.
This is exactly how I feel. I don’t know when a reading is true,— or not. I gave up trying to distinguish. I put all prose into one pile called, “story,” which I categorize as fiction. All is fiction. We had storytellers of old, and we have storytellers of now.
Photos, I don’t “believe” either. I go by the aesthetics of the image. I assume a photo has been photoshopped. Films I don’t “believe” either. Or phone calls. I assume everything is fraud until it shows its true nature. It has gotten so bad that I decided I don’t care anymore. No-one can hoodwink me because everything is fiction.
Now, JMG’s writing on his blogs, I categorize as non-fiction unless he says not.
Each medium, whether phone, email, text-message, knock on the door, text on a page, images, films, does not pass by me without my saying, “What is the party who created this (text; image; whatever) trying to defraud me of?” Maybe it is that I had a biological mother who figuratively ate her two kids (me and my brother). After a certain point with her, in her every transaction with me, I was worse off. I asked myself, “How am I going to be worse off because of this ‘story’ she is presenting me with?”
Our environment never used to be this way. In the 1960s (for example), most people, at least in America, were well-fed, ESPECIALLY poor Americans; poor Americans were better fed than the lower quarter of wage-earners because the fedrel gubbermint was overly generous with taxpayers’ money (money they did not earn, but happy to disburse). Currently, I can’t say that Americans are well-fed. That means hungry, unskilled people use their “un-skills” or “un-skilledness” to extract stuff from others in a deceptive way,— in a desperate way, not in an even exchange. I believe lying is an instinct; if need be, people learn to get better at it over time. They get their needs met chiefly through lying (fraud). They don’t know one iota about how their actions harm other beings, whether those be people or animals. They just “want,” and those wants come first. They don’t know that they must learn how to give another being something in ‘a fair exchange,’ or die.
I see “the believing media less over time” as a symptom of a declining society. I have adapted by assuming everyone elicits fictions: Is a party telling a ‘good’ story? What is the plot?
Having had a practice of meditation for fifty-odd years (as spotty as it was), keeping silent was always an option. Quietness is often a better option than saying something. Remaining tight-lipped ofttimes is better than uttering any story.
As I am writing this, ir occurs to me that staying silent may, as it was ‘once upon a time,’ turn into a virtue,— silence that can save our lives. The less background noise, the better.
??️??Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG # 24:
OK, thanks for confirming my idea about American libertarians vs. European libertarians. By the way, American English has sometimes its own words and meanings, for example I think “football” isn’t the same thing in British English (and continental Europe) and in USA English, he he…
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James # 26:
I take note of the term “randonauting”, which was unknown for me until now (thanks).
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JMG # 41:
Indeed, Gothic Cathedrals weren’t planned nor directed by professional architects who came from universities (they only appeared during Renaissance times), but they were built by “works masters”. Well, I hope my translation of “maestros de obras” is good (at least in Spain, they were called with that name).
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“Dérive” looks like my mother tongue word “deriva”, which usually means when a ship is in the sea without being directed toward this or that place, under the sea streams and winds. Interesting…
************
The opposite attitude to Situ idea of “dérive” was what J.M. Barrie (who wrote “Peter Pan”), remembered about his mother. Barrie loved his mother, but he wrote about her that she was a hard line Scottish Protestant woman. She didn’t like to go outdoors for a walk, like another women did in her town, because she thought it was a waste of time, near a sin. She only went out of her home for shopping or visiting a friend or relative. Oops! It seems IMHO a sad attitude and behavior to live a life…
Hi John, I like how you turned that spectrum of the line into a triangle, with vernacular builders on the one point, professional architects on another, and the artisan / guild / master craftsmen builders in the middle. I can get behind that. It reminds me of an engineer I knew who was the father of two of my friends growing up. He worked at GE and hated his job making “paper airplanes” -designs on paper that went nowhere.
If I look at that some spectrum/ternary, I would see down home funk on the one end. Or down home punk as I like it. (Know three chords and call it good enough start a band.) On another end you have the New Alchemists with their design heavy systems. In the middle you might have the Integral Urban House.
In any case, I think of certain visionary architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. Some of his buildings are amazing, but he was also kind of a dictator in wanting the person who lived in a house to also have all this particular kind of furniture, etc.
And I definitely agree that the colleges and universities put out lots of paper plane architects who don’t have the grounding in folk architecture. I’d like to see those guilds and craft schools return myself in their place. Visionaries can arise out of those as well.
I think too of the ternary I wrote about recently involving folk art, commercial art, and experimental art. My favorite things aesthetically show a little bit of all three elements, and I am seeking ways to find that place in my own work.
Thanks for allowing this to drift into the architecture of the raumgeist.
@Aldarion #32 – I never noticed the No Loitering / défense de flâner signs in Quebec but I’ll be sure to look for them next time I’m able to travel there. They may serve as way points while on a dérive. When I trying to recall the word flâner and researching online, the results did say that in Quebec, the meaning is more towards loitering and aimlessness than enjoyable wandering.
Those défense de flâner signs would affect the local psychogeography, especially as warnings against homeless or teenagers hanging out.
During research, I’d get search results saying that Guy Dubord considered les flâneurs as “privileged” and as much as I roll my eyes of that now overused phrase you could say bro had a point in that only the relatively privileged would have the time, money and inclination to wander around 19th Century Paris in the hopes of serendipitous discoveries. Working class wouldn’t have the energy (Ref: George Orwell, Down and Out in London and Paris).
@JMG #41,
I used the word fnord deliberately in that I think a trap that les adeptes de la dérive could fall into. A goal is to pay attention to things one is supposed to be frightened of. Fnords are not real but there is a chance that I’ll find them sure enough if I bias myself one way or another in a certain area or situation. An example may be that Debord would purposefully choose to wander in a rough working class neighborhood because he was always told to avoid such places in his privileged upbringing but what he truly fears in a psychogeographic area are places of state power or cultural power.
In his essay Dubord states: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. I’ll agree that “interventions of chance” are less likely in a rural setting but open country side being naturally depressing….I think that’s where Dubord has populated many of his personal “fnords”.
Lot’s of words to say that one thing I’ll will look out for is my own biases both on a dérive or flâneur.
JMG re: Raumgeist band
Oh yeah, please do so! I love the Ariel Moravec novels btw, haven’t read the newest one yet and am looking forward to it ?
@Chaquin et al: Yeah, the London branch of SI influence seems to have gotten intensely interested in the psychogeography side of things. Though, with Malcolm McLaren and his influence in starting the Sex Pistols, there is also the whole detournement of rock music that developed into punk. (See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces.) Over here, the main geographical location for SI influence was in San Francisco where its influence can be seen in various anarchist circles, such as Upshot whose members included John and Paula Zerzan. The influence also went into Gary Warne’s Suicide Club, with its focus on urban exploration. I’d say the urban exploration subculture in America got a real good kickstart from the Suicide Club. I wrote about it here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/gary-warne-communiversity-and-the-suicide-club
But one of the other things that came out of the San Francisco scene and bears the imprint of Situationist ideas was the Billboard Liberation Front, who also had members from the Suicide Club.
Scotty: Thanks for checking out my articles. Out of all the things you can do with your time, I really appreciate you taking the time to read.
Hi JMG,
This really resonates with me as I found your writing back in 2009 through an I Ching–informed dérive.
Bravely (or foolishly), I experimented with this approach during my architecture thesis in the late ’90s, right in the middle of a creative block and despite plenty of academic pushback. I was inspired by John Cage’s use of the I Ching to “get out of whatever cage you’re in”, as well as Sadie Plant’s writing on psychogeography and the Situationist International in her book The Most Radical Gesture.
The method I used was simple: from the Wilhelm translation take the 8×8 grid key used to identify the hexagrams, overlay it onto a map, and then explore the zones where the generated hexagrams land.
The synchronicities don’t always appear exactly on the marked spot – they may show up nearby, or even along the path between locations. Sometimes, the jolt of recognition only comes after you’ve explored all the sites.
In 2009, I tried this on a global scale, and the primary hexagram landed on Alberta, Canada. Since I’m in the Southern Hemisphere, the dérive was digital. While exploring Alberta online, I came across one of your articles on Resilience.org – it stopped me in my tracks – and I’ve been reading your work ever since.
Good Morning JMG.
This current post has been highlighted in the comments section over at moonofalabama.org. Comment #522.
Your viewers are everywhere!
Best regards,
Donna
So, it seems you touch on a long time interest of mine, which is borders. Rivers tend to make good psychogeographical boundaries, and my understanding is that crossing a river tends to have an influence on conciousness.
However, rivers do not always make the best political borders dispite of this. The Rio Grande for example, is the boundary between your country and Mexico, but its tendency to meander is the source of border disputes that seem to happen every 1-2 decades as land switches sides. In fact, the Chamizal dispute was so bitter, that a dual political assasination of presidents Taft and Díaz was attempted.
Rivers however are effective at defining a “cultural boundary”, a seen if Mesopotemia and the Indus River valley. So, how come politics, which is so dependent on psychology, is where rivers seem to stop behaving as good bounderies dispite their functions as psychogeographical ones?
Interesting tidbit on the etymology of “dérive” and, for me, on the hidden magic of words:
Our gracious host is correct on the modern translation as “drifting”, although that would translate back in French into the full expression “être à la dérive” (a passive state of being).
Originally “dé” (un- as in undo) and “rive” (-shore, -moor, specifically from a river) is more akin to the active verb of unmooring, which starts with a very clear action and then a very directional drift (the river flow).
It feels like the “situational dérive” being a conscientious act is more an unmooring than just a passive drift. Both approach may bring mind and magic benefits but i feel would lead to very different outcomes.
I have done this all my life. Never knew there was a name for it. I just called it rambling.
One thing I have encountered is the spirits of the hills. Being a Roman Polytheist, I am familiar with the names of Rome’s Hills and of course the local Lares. However, the various hills that I go up and down all have names like Fred, Oscar, Pluto, and Henry. I had expected more Native American names, but I guess they have been walked on by English speakers for so long that they took those names.
I was reading about Neolithic sites in Ireland and England that the writers were describing as either ‘dead’ or ‘alive.’ It depended on the intent of the peoples these days visiting them. If the site is presented to tourists as ‘this was used by such people to do such things’, the tourists don’t give the site any new energy. If present as a holy site, it gets zapped with energy by the people.
I started pondering that with the hills – Fred feels the most alive since He commands the view and respect of people going up and down Him. He is a very steep hill to drive or walk up.
Is this something that anyone else encountered?
Thank you for the new word, fnord. Fnord reminds me of the scene from the John Carpenter film They Live where the guy gets a special pair of glasses and is able to see all of the insidious subliminal messages aliens are planting in the media and on signs all over the city, such as CONSUME, OBEY, and REPRODUCE. I was scrolling on Facebook Reels, and I noticed that the algorithm was showing me lots of single women gloating about their perfectly decorated, immaculately curated houses and apartments. 9 out of 10 times they were shown doing manly construction things like using a power, sander, sawing boards, or putting up wallpaper. There was one video where a woman was married, but she shamed her husband in one moment during a short video for not being able to do framing as well as she could. It was really gross. She obviously had some massive hatred for her husband (they had at least one child) and saw him as vestigial. I don’t think that the younger me saw the agenda behind videos like these. It’s pretty obvious that they are geared towards making women of my age group dissatisfied with our husbands so we blow up our marriages and go the single route. It’s teaching women that we don’t need a man, because we can do all of the heavy construction ourselves, never mind that we might have to raise children, have jobs in order to make ends meet, etc., and do not have time to be general contractors or professional decorators. So much of media seeks to sow drama and animosity via hidden fnords, because someone who is happy and satisfied does not not buy expensive things like travel, new homes, and divorces.
“Lastly, I notice that the cover of the “Illuminatus!” book includes an illustration of [gasp] a Yellow Submarine! ”
More proof the remaining Beatles are members of the Illuminati! (The others are in cryofreeze.)
@Frankster: #57 That is awesome! Big fan of JC here. I also do I Ching…
I have thought of using a pendulum to dowse places on maps to visit for drifts / psychic questing. Creating an 8 x 8 grid and doing I Ching… that has a lot of potential. Thank you for sharing!
I think the work of John Cage has a lot to teach us in the coming age. But maybe I’m biased. I was listening to 44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 this morning, as played by the Arditti Quartet. One of my favorites from the many Cage pieces I enjoy…
https://cageedition.bandcamp.com/album/complete-john-cage-edition-33-44-harmonies-from-apartment-house-1776-mode144
William, good luck. The state government has to consent to any such division, unless the state government is in full military revolt against the national government — see the origins of West Virginia for the details.
Mrdobner, you can get rid of it, you know!
Ron, I used tarot as an example, but all forms of divination can be understood as a form of dérive, or — more to the point — dérive can be understood as just one more form of divination. As for the yellow submarine et al., the Illuminatus! trilogy was first published in 1975, and the yellow submarine is one of several Beatle references in it — along with references to everything from ceremonial magic and Sixties drug culture to H. P. Lovecraft and the last words of the gangster Dutch Schultz, just for starters. It’s a wild ride.
Clay, I remember those days well, and it’s true, nobody thought twice about letting children roam free.
Michael, I’m glad to hear this. Anything that offers a way out of the sterile academicism of modern architecture (and the arts generally) is worth celebrating.
Stephen, hmm! I took a moment to look it up and found to my delight that nobody knows the actual etymology of “saunter.” It just strolled into the English language, casually, from parts unknown!
Sean, thanks for this. Bachelard has been on my get-to list for a while, and this is a good incentive to read some of his writings.
Chuaquin, the English equivalent is “master builder” or “master mason” — Freemasonry is descended from the builders’ guilds that raised the cathedrals, which is why we still use the same term. Spanish deriva is a good equivalent of English “drift;” when a ship is in that condition, we say that it’s adrift.
Justin, Frank Lloyd Wright is in some ways the poster child for modern architecture. His buildings look neat but his roofs inevitably leaked like sieves, and most of his buildings have been torn down at this point because he insisted on ignoring the structural limits of his materials, so maintenance costs soared out of control and in some cases the building simply became irreparable. His call for an organic architecture was important, but he never grasped that “organic” means, among other things, a balanced and constructive relationship with the raw materials and energy that go into construction. That said, with some help from the other two points of the triangle, some of his ideas are worth rescuing.
Scotty, granted! No matter where you dérive, there you are…
Eike, glad to hear it. I’m pretty sure that Orion Jackson’s latest band will be opening for Raumgeist in an upcoming novel.
Frankster, ha! I’m delighted to hear this — thank you.
Donna, that’s the secret superpower of the fringe intellectual. 😉
Circle, because politics depends at least as much on wealth as it does on psychology. Who owns what piece of real estate is a matter of cold hard cash, and having something as unstable as a river drawing that line guarantees that people will reach for weaponry on occasion.
Rashakor, merci beaucoup!
Neptunesdolphins, I don’t perceive the genii loci as quite that personalized, but I definitely sense them.
Kimberly, of course! A population of single people rents or buys more real estate than a population of families, not to mention all the other wasteful expenditures involved. Good on you for catching that.
Justin, remaining members of the Beatles? I thought they were all replaced by mouse-powered robots in 1987. 😉
“William, the only thing new about that is the technological basis. Fake information was so common in the Middle Ages that handbooks of divination put a lot of discussion into readings to find out if news is true or false, and a very large number of people in France believed that Englishmen had tails. (Most of them had never seen an Englishmen, after all, and the thought of actually going there to check must have seemed as outlandish as that of flying to the Moon — yeah, some people have been there, but they knew they and their neighbors never would.) There’s a reason why Mercury, the god of news and information, is also the god of liars, cheats, and frauds!”
I’m not saying that people lying, making up stories, and exaggeration are new by any means, but since most of the French would never see an Englishman, how much harm happened from thinking they had tails? There’s always been false information, but it used to be possible to check the information if it was important. I’m not saying that everyone did that, nor that some pretty major whoppers did not become widely accepted: but merely because of how easy certain new tools make creating and spreading false information, I’m concerned that it is no longer possible to sort out fact from falsehood, even about things which are, comparatively, right in front of you.
It’s not so much a difference of kind that I’m worried about as one of degree, but the shift from propaganda campaigns being expensive to run and rather difficult to get right, to being dirt cheap and remarkably easy (just tell a computer what you want) is a pretty major change. I rather suspect that a lot of the problems of the last few decades are related to this, and I’m concerned about what another couple decades of this will do.
I drew the Fool card both yesterday and today in my one-card reading so I think a comment on the derive is appropriate. (I apologize for not having the accent mark, not sure how).
First, it could make a fine will exercise to do one of these, and especially if you have some criteria in place for choosing turns that aren’t just what you like. A coin flip, or going the way you least want to go (as long as it isn’t dangerous).
Second, the derive is a form of play, which Johann Huizinga argues is extremely important in the formation of individuals and cultures in his book Homo Ludens. In reading his definition of play, it struck me that it requires a certain “space” to be defined, which reminds me of circumscribing a space in magic to concentrate power like gasoline in a cylinder. Huizinga says play is “for itself” and that may be, but I think it’s a cop out, and I think it also works to say that in play, we define spaces and take on new rules and roles, new identities, to summon forth certain forces which we hope to carry back into the ordinary world.
In a game, I do things very different from my daily activities and perhaps tap into virtues that are normally sleeping, but the ritual itself also brings in powers to the space (Huizinga in fact considers high religious rituals and ritual magic a form of play by his definition). In the derive, we have to take on the identity of one who behaves differently than we normally do, to bring about novel experiences, which we carry back to the ordinary self in hopes of shifting that self.
The difference here is that it seems no space is circumscribed in a wandering walk, but rather we break out of our ordinary spaces. I think this is geographically misleading. A space IS defined by the rules by which we move, we just haven’t experienced it yet, but it is every bit a definite space as our ordinary “triangles” to refer back to the French student in your example. Not all spaces have to be narrowed from existing ones. They can be shifted or expanded for certain effects.
This brings me to Gregory Bateson. He defines wisdom as the parts (that’s us) listening to the counsel of the whole ecosystems to which we belong. It’s the man telling the pinky finger what to do rather than the pinky finger ordering around the man. Bateson gives four ways we can listen to systemic wisdom: love, the arts, spending time in nature, and religion.
I note that #’s 2 and 4 fit into Huizinga’s definition of play, which is broader so I will add a fifth and say “play” to catch the other types. The derive seems like a great way to step outside the limited self into a play sphere where we can attend to the wisdom of our environment and bring back some of those lessons to our ordinary lives, which will have shifted by a degree or two from the derive.
And regarding psychogeography, would it be fair to call that astral-etheric geography?
I’m afraid I’ve absorbed a little too much amateur knowledge of architectural history for a ramble through city streets to provide the basis for a workable divination method. If I start paying attention to the buildings, an invisible tour guide will speak up in the back of my head.
“The unornamented modernist style first developed in Europe in the aftermath of the World Wars. Unprecedented military use of explosives resulted in unprecedented destruction of infrastructure. The rebuilding had to happen in the teeth of both a shortage of the male skilled labor that had gone into the more ornate styles of earlier centuries and a much reduced economy. The Bauhaus and other modernist theories provided an aesthetic gloss over the need to build quickly and cheaply with a relatively small crew. Pseudomorphosis and the eternal preference of business and local government to spend as little time and money as possible has caused the modernist style to long outlive the conditions that gave it birth.”
“The house with the orange awnings was probably built in stages over generations. It would have started out as a traditional Southern shotgun house. Those were originally oriented toward the prevailing wind to maximize crossdraft. After the electric fan made the use of natural breezes unnecessary, the domestic lifestyle organized for the shotgun house dictated that housing for ordinary people would continue to be built in that style even though efficient use of the lot around it was now the primary consideration when choosing its orientation.”
I’m going to theorize here that the unfamiliar is a factor in the effectiveness of a dérive, not the totally unfamiliar but a certain amount of it. Maybe there’s a C-zone phenomenon at work here: not so much familiarity that you’re bored but not so much of the unfamiliar that you’re too scared to do anything but scan for threats. The Grail knights probably had some wilderness survival skills, especially as regards large game animals, but not a real forester’s knowledge of what they were seeing in the Waste Land. Many Native American tribes have a practice of climbing a mountain when seeking a vision, which has the effect of getting them away from the familiar landscape they depend on for their living and therefore know intimately. The Situationists would not have attempted a dérive in their university’s library or in an art museum because they knew those environments too well, but that might have worked for a member of the blue collar class.
@Scotty: I suspect that part of Dubord’s problem with open country is that one sees a lot of the sky and is thus reminded that the universe is very large and humans are very small.
Thank you for the essay – very interesting! Situationism and Hermetic tradition make really strange bedfellows, but here they are… overlapping. The art of derive reminds me of will exercises in Learning Ritual Magic, such as willfully choosing a place you’ve never been to and going there. That’s why I think that when we translate “derive” as drifting, something important is lost in that translation. Before you drift in the totally unfamiliar place, you have to do a very willful act of unmooring (merci a vous, Rashakor, #60). If you are just drifting, you are in a rut.
Speaking of a rut… you write, “The habits that constrain most people’s lives are not of their own making. The ruts they follow were traced out from infancy on by social forces acting through parents, teachers, and the mass media. Nor, of course, do those ruts exist for the benefit of those who trudge through them day after day, though of course that claim gets made over and over again.” Wouldn’t you say that in this context “rut” is somewhat synonymous with the word “moral” (the kind for wich whiskey and women of a certain kind are bad, not the one with an “e” at the end)?
I’m half-way through The House of the Crows – such a delight!
Per JMG: “Justin, Frank Lloyd Wright is in some ways the poster child for modern architecture. His buildings look neat but his roofs inevitably leaked like sieves…” That reminds me of the Marin County Civic Center, which I’ve visited. Leaky roof, for sure.
Literary derives, anyone? Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” comes to mind. Talk about a rudderless ship! But author Sterne has a theory about rudderless ships; it all comes down to noses. Yes, a man’s large, prominent nose is very much like a ship’s rudder. Without it, you get derives. Check out “Slawkenbergius’s Tale.” In the tale, Hafen Slawkenbergius is blessed with a huge nose (though it could be a fake nose, made of paper mache) and thus as a result, his journey across Europe must be the very opposite of a derive.
Hi JMG,
Thanks again for this series! I was only a tiny bit familiar with the Situationists, but I seem to have stumbled across several of these ideas regardless. I learned a lot about what you are describing here (I believe!) from this odd website I stumbled across in maybe 2001 or so, that disguises itself as a review of Hammer Horror films. I feel like this might be up your alley, so sharing it with you, as looking at it in retrospect the whole presentation is a bit of a détournement, and many of the ideas seem to overlap. It is very possibly based on their work, although it doesn’t reference philosophy directly, only as is embedded in horror movie tropes.
https://www.uncarved.org/turb/articles/karloff.html
I guess I have gone on many a dérive without knowing the word or it’s origin (as an adult, encouraged by this article), enough that I’ve managed to even get lost a few times, in the middle of areas that I would have previously perhaps described as completely developed, and where such a thing should be impossible. Last significant one like this saw me and a friend climbing our way up a small cliff to get back where we started, in a resonable amount of time.
For what it’s worth, younger people seem to refer to this sort of thing as “side quests”, pulling from video game speak.
Thanks,
Johnny
Hey JMG,
Now I’m wondering what that spluttering rage-fit comment was about. I genuinely struggle to figure out which part of your article might have triggered it.
Synchronistically, I visited the once-great capital of my country last week. Berlin has been described to me as extraordinarily ugly but I don’t think that’s quite true. There are a lot of appealing buildings, generally those that survived WWII. These buildings coexist with more modern architecture, which is as bland and ugly as you’d imagine it. Some streets are mostly old buildings, punctuated by a few modern ones, scars left by the bombs. A decent theme for meditation, probably.
A true eyesore is the government quarter. Abominations of concrete and glass, with the sole exception of the Reichstag (fenced off at the time, i.e. inaccessible to the general public). Despite the glass, though, I didn’t see a single soul inside. Fitting residences for the machine.
On an unrelated note, I’ve finished The House of the Crows and very much enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to The Sign of the Phoenix—is that still slated to come out this year too?
—David P.
This post on derive inspired me to start this morning being totally random. It’s a good thing I was ready to go out before 8am, in a casual stroll around campus at will and noticing things like the woodpecker holes in the bottom of a tree trunk, or a flight of several cardinals, and to get back sometimes after 10am, while it was cool enough for shirtsleeves. It was not only good for my soul, my peace of mind, and my attitude – it was also good for my guts!
Now it’s a moderate 82 degrees out, but do not try that sort of ramble in the mid-afternoon in North Florida! Unless you’re used to it.
Thanks incredibly for this post!
As to Ariel Moravec, I found myself thinking that the theme song for this book would be “In the Bleak Midwinter……..” That certainly sums up the flavor of it, offset by the lively Jackson family feast.
Now for another bit of random journeying, flat on my back, shoes off, under a very light couch throw.
@Justin Patrick Moore (#2):
Psychogeography played a large role in Arthur Machen’s life, though he never used the term itself. It’s there in all three volumes of his autobiography: Far off Things, Things Near and Far, and The London Adventure. It’s also a recurring theme in much of his fiction: wandering in the country or in the city chances to lead the narrator into unknown, weird, and usually terrifying realms, as well as in his theoretical work Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in LIterature — a book well worth a read even a century after its publication.
Machen was also a very knowledgeable occultist in his own right. As a young man he was employed by the bookseller George Redway to catalog the extensive occult libraries of Frederick Hockley and of Walter Moseley after their deaths, and he did a fine job of work on those two catalogs. (There are PDFs of both catalogs online at archive.org.)
JMG:
The building pictures got me to consider how I feel about each structure. I find the first building kind of fun and whmisical with it’s jumble of surfaces and a knowing wink that it was purposfully made to look disorganized. Like Habitat 67 in Montreal or the Guggenheim Museaum, it is fun to look at. In these cases someone made an effort to build a standout building
The buildings in the second picture, on the other hand, do convey that sterile, brutalist look and so come off as uncaring but also boring. It makes me consider that the underlying issue for me is whether a building looks like someone took care when designing and building it to make it stand out in some way. If you put the first building among the second set of buildings, the first one is the one that will draw your attention.
Speaking of people getting upset when you refuse to go along with the current conventions, my Dad is currently insisting I install whatsapp on my phone in order to talk to him. Given whatsapp’s large amount of space required that my elderly phone doesn’t really have, their poor privacy policies and worst of all their requirement that I use biometrics to open the thing which I’m very unwilling to do given you can’t change your fingerprint if it gets grabbed by hackers, plus Canada’s Bill C22 that requires that companies keep large amounts of info on file for you for at least 6 months and make it easy for them to get hold of it, I REALLY don’t want whatsapp on my phone.
His reaction to my initial reluctance was to suggest I was being paranoid. On my birthday, no less. The further research and attempt to install it running into the requirement for a fingerprint make me even less willing to do so. But I don’t want my Dad mad at me. I’m offering other ways to contact me that shouldn’t cost him money (he just changed phone providers or something, and now phoning Canada is way more expensive that’s what triggered the whole thing). I’m offering suggestions on other ways to do this, but I still think he won’t take it well.
Suggestions on how to cope with this?
He’s very ‘has he ever had a thought that wasn’t taken directly from mainstream media’ and he doesn’t understand technology or the issues around it, and doesn’t want to. But I don’t want my Dad mad at me or not speaking to me.
This is stressing me out an unreasonable amount.
“dérive can be understood as just one more form of divination” – a light bulb just went off in my brain. And based on your description of dérive as well as my experience, I wholeheartedly agree with this point.
Thank you for the clarification, JMG!
Dérive on foot (after traveling to a town by train and later by car) in and around small towns was my wife’s and my main form of recreation for decades. As an unexpected result of this, we gradually learned to read the character of a street or small neighborhood on sight. This proved useful the two times we were in a position to buy a house, once in 1999 and once in 2018. We went through the motions of comparing listings, attending showings, and making charts of pluses and minuses. But the actual process in both cases was looking at one place after another, immediately (and separately, always agreeing) concluding “no,” until we stumbled over an immediate and mutually agreed “yes” for which we made an offer (with the usual conditions, e.g. no major structural or environmental problems found on inspection) on the spot. Poor negotiation strategy, perhaps, but we got what we really wanted.
There’s your connection between dérive and divination, exemplified. Though we didn’t think of it that way (thanks, as usual, for the insightful alternate perspective!) we were reading environments the way we might have read stars or cards. Dowsing also comes to mind in this context.
JMG 42
> it’s the kind of place where people don’t show up, can’t be bothered, and never get around to things, and that got very wearing
When I was well into my years of college about 1975, I had opportunity to view things from a bird’s eye view. Even back then, fifty years ago, people didn’t show up, couldn’t be bothered, and never got around to things, unless it involved immediate family, like parents, kids, aunts and uncles, first cousins, grandparents, and the occasional great-aunt/uncle.
I see a pattern that this trend was in full-swing in 1946, immediately after World War Two, and it hasn’t stopped. The trend actually goes further back than that, to after World War One, about 1918.
By 1918, ties broke between great-grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles, second cousins, third cousins, on down the line. In other words, this “extended family” had evaporated,—gone. Tons of people right after World War One moved away from where they had lived prior to World War One, and that was a death-knell for Americans, and I bet, for Europeans. As an amateur genealogist, I see the pattern of back then.
That one simple action, right after World War One, where people did NOT return to where they had lived prior to World War One, when it was copied tens of millions of times, was America’s/Europe’s downfall. Then it happened a second time, after World War Two: people did not return to where they had lived prior to World War Two.
That second time functioned as a double-whammy. People’s extended families were located states’ away, and along with it, people’s former networks preventing things like starvation and home-evictions, and such, were gone.
It turns out that people prefer not showing up, not bothering, and not getting around to things,— until it is THEY who are on the receiving side of relatives/others not showing up, not bothering, and not getting around to things. It is okay that they themselves don’t act responsibly towards others, but they take issue when others do it to them.
One family that I kept in touch with since high school, I will call them the Vedders, and yes, they were of colonial Dutch heritage and Palatine German. The parents born 1920s had five kids born 1945 to 1955, who upon adulthood spread out over the USA. #1 died young leaving one kid. #2 had one kid. #3 had two kids, one named Catherine born early 1970s. #4 had one kid. #5 had four kids. The five kids+descendants (numbering over 50 individuals) met every Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. Keep in mind that they had all had moved to even farther far-flung places.
About 2008, Catherine, located California, became gravely ill, ending up collapsed for a couple years. She was on her 2nd husband, and had a kid from a 1st marriage, an adopted kid from the 2nd marriage, and a kid from the 2nd marriage.
The medical system could not figure out what was wrong with Catherine, except exhaustion since by then, she was in her thirties. What the Vedders did, en masse and coordinated, was they visited Catherine+family weekly/monthly to take care of Catherine+family. In the two years it took Catherine to recover, there was not one week went by where one of Catherine’s relatives were on site to care for the family-of-five.
This is what families did prior to World War One. The Vedders had not lost the valuable skill and habit of caring (in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways) for second- and third-cousins, for the hundred-odd years that everyone else had forgotten about it. And all the Vedders did this voluntarily and at their own expense, and even paid airfares, etc. for others when funds were tight. They pooled their resources to make sure one of their own did not “fall through the cracks.” We are talking about an extended family of over fifty people, of all different personalities, political views, levels of income, professions, work, abilities, etc. They put aside their differences, and worked together. Given time, Catherine did recover pretty much fully. Her three kids are fine, although I believe she is no longer married. She moved out of shit-hole California back to the East Coast, and lives within range of some family members who helped her in no small way.
This family-coordination and commitment is a rare occurrence. We can get it back if we concentrate. As societal decline continues, we will need to foster relations with second- and third-cousins, and with neighbors (of all different persuasions) who happen to live nearby,— out of necessity. It is THEY who will bring over the chicken soup when one is sick, make sure the kids safely make it to and from school, ensure the roof stops leaking, etc.
Global elite loves the fact that we peons have lost touch with those who we used to care about. The more we are “there” for locals, the more the global elites grind their teeth at night worrying, “What will happen TO US when the peasants return to caring for their own kind, within their vicinity, and we can no longer milk them for everything they have? When peasants no longer NEED us? When there is no longer ‘an in’ by which we can suck the life out of peasants? What will become of US because, after all, we do no work of our own? We will have to get JOBS, real JOBS, and some will be DIRTY JOBS, like cleaning toilets and shoveling farm livestock shit! The sky is falling.” (with much hand-wringing.)
WARS
I believe global elites are enamored of WARS, because wars destroy ties of extended families and of not-blood-relative neighbors; wars make us peasants dependent on global elites.
We each can give the middle-finger to global elites by re-learning the skills and habits of caring for those we have ignored for over a hundred years, that is, far-flung blood relatives and nearby neighbors, according to resources and talents we have at our disposal. {I guess neighbor implies nearby.}
??????Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Here is my album recommendation of the week, Pere Ubu’s The Art of Walking:
https://pereubumusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-art-of-walking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnlIA6vJIII
A friend of mine synchronistically brought this one up while talking of something else.
@Phutatorius: Literary derive = Dhalgren.
@Robert Mathiesen: I haven’t read the other volumes of his autobiography, but I might. I really love The Hill of Dreams, The White People and his other fiction… I should read some more of him. …I’ll definitely check out Hieroglyphics. Thank you!
I know he translated Casanova’s diaries too, as well as his interaction with Golden Dawn I think, and other occult activities.
@Michael Gray #47:
“I have been seeing some younger folks start to use nature as inspiration for architecture. Doing things like taking a curled up leaf, a seashell or a mushroom and modelling structures on this. Sometimes just sketching over a photo of these. While none of these have been constructed, seeing this thinking coming up in the world actually brings me some hope. If we wise up, we will shape the world in beauty rather than oppression.”
Have you ever heard of Art Nouveau? That was popular around 1900, and was mostly nature based as you say.
@Joan #69, Very good point (i.e. wide open vistas reminds one that humans are actually very small). Dubord was not just urban focused but obviously people focused. He quotes Marx ““Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
I find the dérive concept fascinating and can’t wait to try it out as intended in an urban setting but I will also use that framework in a rural setting and see what affect the local kami has on the rural psychogeographic area.
In your post I enjoyed your architectural inner dialog. Reminds me of 19th century house tour that I was afraid would be boring but the volunteer guide spent a good portion of the tour explaining the history of brick making in the local area, affects of wood on the glaze, etc. In no way I read about bricks in my spare time but her commentary was engaging.
pygmycory #77. Look into Zoom. I forgot the sign up process but they’ll want your phone number at least. A free account allow video calls up to 45 minutes.
Justin P. # 56:
Well, Situ influences in fringe cultural/musical/political groups are weirder and less evident than I could imagine, after Situationist “fashion” declined (and some Situ “seeds” travelled…). I didn’t know that relationships, thank you.
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Four Sided # 59:
Your comment has made me think in the Bidasoa river, which marks the border between Spain and France before it reaches the sea. There’s an island in the middle of this river, which has a strange and special political and legal situation thanks to an agreement between Spain and France Kings some century ago: “Isla de los Faisanes”.
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I’ve also remembered one of the favorite terms which spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías liked to write: the limit (from Latin “limes”). He thought about a “philosophy of the limit”, which I can’t explain well and in the short form now, but it seems very interesting to think we’re always living in the limit between two situations. Political borders are only one of the many limits we can find every day…
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JMG # 65:
Thank you for your comment, my translation was a bit rough (ahem). Yes, Middle Age builders were indeed the origin of today Freemasonry.
And yes, “drift” is a good translation for “deriva”(in a literal naval sense or in a metaphorical one).
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(To be continued)
William, well, believing that Englishmen were less than human helped keep ordinary Frenchmen committed to the disastrous wars between the two kingdoms in the Middle Ages — and I don’t think we have to get into the consequences of the belief, even more widespread at the time among Christians, that their Jewish neighbors were making their Passover matzohs with the blood of Christian babies. Propaganda campaigns have never been especially hard to start or push onwards! These days, furthermore, the countervailing factor of skepticism about digital manipulations and expert opinion has become a powerful force. That has negative consequences of its own, but as I see it, it tends to make technologically mediated propaganda much weaker than the older, more socially mediated methods.
Kyle, two very good points! I get the accent by holding down the Alt key while entering 0223 on the keypad. As for psychogeography, that seems reasonable, yes.
Joan, nice — if you were doing that tour out loud, I’d listen to it. As for the C-zone, very likely yes.
Inna, I think the reason the Situationists chose the word “drift” for this practice is that letting a boat drift is one very good way to find out which way the currents are moving, and they wanted to know about the psychogeographic currents. Morality can be a source of ruts, but it can also jolt you out of ruts — that was more or less the original purpose of moral philosophy, though like all things it rapidly got reworked as a rut-generating tool. Glad you like Ariel’s latest adventure!
Phutatorius, I think Sterne contradicted his own rule, as his own nose was on the large side while you’re quite right that his book is a triumph of rudderlessness!
Johnny, thanks for the link; I’ll check it out. I’ve come to think that Situationism has become a very powerful subterranean influence all through fringe culture these days.
David, the rage-fit wasn’t specific enough for me to guess what triggered it. I’m not yet sure how soon The Sign of the Phoenix will be out — I don’t think it’s on the schedule yet. But I’ll check.
Patricia M, yes, the wintry quality is deliberate, and not just because I’m fitting these stories into a realistic seasonal calendar. Ariel’s still trying to avoid dealing with her unresolved feelings toward Austin — yes, we’re going to see a lot more of him — and, though she doesn’t know it yet, a major plot engine is shifting into gear. More on that in the next volume!
Chris, so noted. What I meant to point out, however, is not whether a building attracts attention but whether it attracts interaction. The first building is still a mass of flat surfaces saying “go away,” it’s just being less dull about it.
Pygmycory, I wish I did; dealing with such things has never been my strong suit. Anyone else?
Walt, Sara and I used to do the same thing as long as her health allowed. Lots of good memories there.
Northwind, sure, but that wasn’t my point. Different localities have different geographical cultures, and the one in Rhode Island was much more into the habits I outlined than the other ones in which I’ve lived.
William # 66:
I think fake information about foreign people is never innocent, in every times. If French people was convinced every Englishmen had a tail, indeed they were slightly dehumanizing them, so…it seems xenophobic.
By the way, a heck of Spaniards during some centuries were told by some Catholic priests and politicians (until my grandparents childhood!) that Englishmen were “children of the Devil”(due to their heresy) and even they weren’t baptized, like Muslims…
Ah, I thought you mentioned something about maybe two Ariel Moravec novels being published this year due to this one taking longer than expected, but maybe I’m misremembering things.
Regarding accented characters, do I remember correctly that you’re entertaining the thought of switching to Linux one day? Should you do, I recommend looking into setting up a compose key, which lets you type accents and such without memorising unicode code points: press compose, single quote, and e (in order) and you get an é. A backtick gives you è, double quote ë. Compose, c, e nets you ě, use a comma instead and you get ę. It’s handy for other things too, like currency symbols (equals + c is €, equals + l £), mathematical symbols (±, ≥, ≤, ⇒, are all typed as you’d imagine them), legal incantations (©, ®, ™, again with obvious combinations), and that’s just what’s set up by default; you could configure your own combinations.
The compose key allows me to use the US keyboard layout while typing German without too much trouble (the German keyboard layout requires very awkward finger contortions when programming). You’ll need to remap one of your existing keys to a compose key; I’m using the weird key between left shift and z you find on a lot of European keyboard but caps lock would be another obvious candidate.
—David P.
Phutatorius, I think Sterne contradicted his own rule, as his own nose was on the large side while you’re quite right that his book is a triumph of rudderlessness!
But if you view it as five-dimensional chess, after many readings, it becomes perfectly linear. And @JPM; same with Dhalgren. (I don’t even want to get into the size of Delaney’s nose.)
@Aldarion (#32)
Not sure about Canada, but I’ve heard that a lot of places in the USA used to have prohibitions on vagrancy, with vagrancy usually defined as not having twenty dollars (or some other amount) in your pocket. It was set up so that the police could pick up drifters, and, if the drifter didn’t have any money, take him to jail. Basically, the laws made it a crime to be poor in public.
And, per the above, it’s also possible that (out of boundless vanity) Sterne paid the artist to make his nose appear large.
Pygmycory, after Skype was closed down, I have installed Yolla to call normal phone numbers overseas. The sound is not great, but it works. No video of course.
Made me think of an old song we sang in elementary school about wandering “with a knapsack on my back…valderi, valdera…”.
I have sudden longing to get outside NOW!
Thank you JMG. Fun, thought provoking essay.
JMG,
How would you compare Rhode Island culture to Ashland Oregon culture with respect to the things you mentioned?
Fnords: up here in Canuckistan we have plenty of them to turn us against our “horrible, no good, awful” neighbours to the south! State-run media combined with a required percentage of Canadian content for broadcasters here ensure we get our daily dose of anti-Americanism. Shameful, really, but I suspect it’s intended to keep us Canadians from consider (often literally) greener pastures in the US.
I am planning a trip with my wife to the US in the next month or so; perhaps that will be our dérive to help shake things up for us.
JMG:
“Chris, so noted. What I meant to point out, however, is not whether a building attracts attention but whether it attracts interaction. The first building is still a mass of flat surfaces saying “go away,” it’s just being less dull about it.”
It makes me want to go in and see how it works on the inside, like the first time I saw a dome home when I was a kid. This makes me wonder if we are getting two different signals, and if it is generation dependent. This is interesting because it could mean the message intended by the architect might have been “go away,” but over time this has turned into “come explore.”
This essay hits home for me because when I visit or move to a new city, I love to walk around and look at all of the buildings. For me, the plain glass boxes say “we didn’t care enough to make this interesting or beautiful.” McMansions say “we fouled up a cut and paste job of the greatest hits of housing because, again we didn’t really care that much.” On the other hand, the first building (let’s call it the mess-o-blocks) says to me at the very least “hey look at this” with a challenge of, like I said above, “come in and see what we did with these odd spaces – did we use them well or was it just a facade?”
David, we’ll see. I’m hoping to have the next one scheduled less than a year from now, certainly. As for the rest, er, I have no idea what “setting up a compose key” involves. This is way outside my tech knowledge.
Phutatorius, this may be the best conspiracy theory I’ve heard so far this year. The Great Sterne Nose Conspiracy!
PatriciaT, I remember the song. Enjoy your dérive!
Clay, Ashland was a jumbled mess, composed mostly of Marin County refugees and wannabees, but people routinely did show up, get around to things, and could be bothered. They had other issues.
Tim, I suspect you’re right. I’ve recently read stories claiming that some very significant share of wealthy Canadians have already fled to the US.
Chris, you may well be right that we’re getting different signals. Interesting.
JMG,
Brutalist buildings are actually a high point compared to most modern municipal government buildings. They have gone from imposing concrete edifices to metal clad sheds that look like they should house a machine shop or a canning line.
Sometimes the most extreme of the brutalist buildings can become more interesting than how they might first be perceived. The Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art( by I.M, Pei) is a brutalist building of extreme proportions that seems incredibly out of place in its setting upon first viewing. But for a full year while I was courting my wife we passed beneath it every night when I walked her home from studying late. It began to grown on me, so that I now view it with much fondness and hurry to climb to the top floor whenever I get a chance to get back on campus.
The one thing that slightly buffled me is the suggestion to go in groups approaching five. Perhaps it’s because I live in a more conformist society than the us (I lived in both, so I can compare), but in my experiance, if I go drifting with people, the collective fnords will kick in, and we would go to the safe and familiar “common denomenator” places, which is why I tend to practice this on my own, or maybe one friend that likes drifting as well.
For example, at some point I had an apple picking gig in a far away rural place. When we were not working, my coworkers and I would go exploring in groups of 4-5. There was a particular mountain nobody seemed to want to go up. Explorations became limited to the same 1-2 natural springs followed by consumption of alchol, food or both in a touristy place, and even when we would be close to going up this mountain, someone would decide they are hungrey and we would go to one of those touristy places, eat, and then everyone would be tired and we would call it a day.
At some point I had a private talk with a friend who also noticed that, so the next day we had off, we just decided to go hiking straight up said mountain on our own. We picked random paths up it, and ended up accidentily going into someone’s yard.
The owner happened to be outside with his family, and they all thought it was amusing we came on foot and picked this particular path the happened to pass through his house, so we had coffee with him, talkd a little, and then they gave us a ride to the village that was on top of it, where they recomanded we check a couple of places out.
That mountain turned out to be a great place, but the odd thing is that over the years my experiance with every group I have ever been part of that explored this area, even different people, is that the moment you get close to this mountain, someone wants to have pizza or something, and everyone stops being adventerous and that’s that.
My experiance is that the bigger the group, the less space for spontiniouty and more fnords show up.
@ Michael Martin #83
“Have you ever heard of Art Nouveau? ”
Yes, I am familiar with it. A lot of what I am seeing nowadays would very be fond of it but then use it to launch off that even further.
It isn’t just inspired by it, but it is that the structures of nature become the raw core of the building. Like taking the makings in Jade and letting it decide were the structure goes. A lot of Art Nouveau was trying to be a middle ground between nature and contemporary architecture, nowadays it is using nature as pure inspiration.
Alas, very few of these ever get anywhere near the construction stage.
Weilong #91:
Laws against vagrancy/drifters seem to have thrived in past times, not only in Canada and USA, but also here. Until the last spanish democracy began, there was a law against vagrancy in Spain called “Ley de Vagos y Maleantes”. Drifters weren’t seen as real criminals, but they were punished too. Romani/Gypsy people were prosecuted by this law, though non-Gypsy people accused of vagrancy was prosecuted too.
@Chris Smith #97,
I’m afraid the architects, builders and investors of the stale office buildings and McMansions, care, they really do but 0% of that care is for general aesthetics, societal well being and God forbid, craftmanship. Most of that care and effort is to turn that quick profit.
It means remapping a key on your keyboard you don’t need to a compose key—that’s the name, like alt key or control key. You can then press the compose key and several other keys, which lets you type characters not available on your keyboard. Rather like alt+number, only that you don’t need to memorise numbers. Typically, this is somewhere in your settings, though where exactly you do it somewhat depends on the Linux distribution you pick.
Should you ever decide to make the switch, I’d be happy to help you set that up, though you’d probably be better served by somebody who can help you in person or over the phone.
—David P.
@Phutatorius and JMG: Your comments are very on the nose!
& while Paris may be the natural habitat of the flaneur, it was really the American Edgar Allan Poe who kicked off the idea in literature with his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (of course it takes place in London, where Poe did live for a time.)
Thoreau was America’s really original walker…
I haven’t read it yet, but the Japanese novel Shank’s Mare by Ikku Jippensha is on my list.
It would be good to come up with a list of literary derives. I will add it to my list of listicle ideas.
Dear JMG, back in the late 80s, I had a brother visit me when I lived in the DC area. This brother was a self-taught student of art and architecture. When he saw the inside of an underground metro station for the first time, he said to me that the design created a great deal of tension. The roof, to him, looked like it was about to collapse. He said “no wonder all the DC bureaucrats are so tense, if they ride this every day.”
I’d be curious what you think.
Sage advice from one of America’s sage philosophers and troubadours: “Keep walking and keep smiling.” -Tiny Tim
@ Northwind Grandma #80
Thank you for that! My husband, my next-of-skin, so happens to have lost his mother at a very young age, after which he was raised by a truly extended family – both aunts and uncles, and also neighbours.
All of whom he remembers with enormous gratitude, because (as he has come to firmly believe) the other alternative would have been a care home, and the likelihood is that it would have been dreadful.
It is true that mutual interdependence is a form of social coherence that gives strength and independence to us peasants. To anyone threatened or impoverished by our strength, of course, this kind of social coherence becomes a target. But, as you say, it is still possible to cultivate – as in “grow your own” – socially coherent networks of mutual interdependence and mutual sustenance which give us some breathing room… if we give them time and attention.
Before the internet, i use to do something kind of similar in the library.
Now of course the library is a lot more ordered than the rest of the world but………
The world doesn’t fit neatly into the dewy decimal system
So i would start off looking for a specific book but find that book i really wanted was a self or two over, or maybe on the opposite book shelf. This method works for both fiction and non fiction.
But i have never started my search with a random pick. Maybe i should try that: start with a random pick from the card catalogue, go to the stacks and start looking for it but keep my eyes open for something more interesting.
The big problem with modern architecture is that they do not take into account the etheric and astral planes and so they cluelessly design and build structures that are ethericly and astrally bad.
I second Chris @ #97’s response. When I see modern buildings, I feel more like “gee, wonder what’s inside.”
I’ve decided that the ’60s and ’70s largely imaginary ideas of the holy-benevolent Native American and more generally indigenous people worldwide are a seed for a new earth-focused religion, rather than being simply mistaken. E.g., the medicine man in “Little Big Man,” the main character in “Hanta Yo,” etc. Every now and then, the facts matter less than the aspiration. These ideas are extremely aspirational. It is good to hope for a harmonious relationship with nature, the spirit world, and our fellow man, and to picture it thus. So, to quote many political advertisements “I approved this message.”
Now, is that conceptual jiu-jitsu a form of detournement?
“Head into unknown territory, following no more definite guide than your own intuition. See where it takes you and what adventures you have on the way. ”
The spirit of Harlen Bretz was nodding approval there. However if anyone was planning to visit Dry Falls the visitor center is closed for renovation. You can still get to the bottom of the falls by going through Sun Lakes State Park.
Back on the topic Jeff Childers had quite a lot to say about a speech Clarence Thomas made in Texas. From the speech; “Progressivism flips the board on the Founders’ original intent. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” Thomas explained. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government,” and “requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with the Constitution.”
But It wasn’t always that way, see the wikipedia article on Teddy Roosevelt,
“As a leader of the progressive movement, Roosevelt championed his “Square Deal” domestic policies after taking over as president, which called for fairness for all citizens, breaking bad trusts, regulating railroads, and pure food and drugs. Roosevelt prioritized conservation and established national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve U.S. natural resources.”
He was also famous for going to Africa to hunt lions with a .405 Winchester. It seems very unlikely that the would be in favor of the current Progressives zeal for gun control.
So in modern speak, when did the modern Progressive movement jump the shark (or take a dérive?) to become a blatantly “all power to the State” philosophy. Was it as early as the US’s entry into WW I when Wilson’s venture into a command economy got everyone all excited about how much productivity could go up if only the government controlled nearly everything? Then that lesson was reinforced even more so in WW II.
Clay, maybe so, but I lived three blocks from a brutalist city hall in East Providence for eight and a half years. It was boring and ugly when I moved into the neighborhood, and was still boring and ugly when I moved away. Here it is:
Four Sided, that’s an interesting point. I used to do dérives with my late wife, but it’s been fifty years since I’ve done a dérive with anybody else; most of my dérives are solo, and I’ve found those very rewarding. Debord may have been more social than I am, or something.
David, so noted. If I ever switch to Linux, I’ll keep it in mind.
Justin, that’s a list I’d like to read. Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” belongs on it — it’s a Zen travel diary written in alternating prose and haiku, published in 1702, and one of the sacred texts of the dérive.
Cyclone, the underground stations are stunningly ugly, certainly — bare concrete in a waffle pattern that makes it look like somebody bullied a hive of bees into following the dictates of the Bauhaus. I never got the sense that it was going ot fall in on me, though.
Justin, you said that two octaves too low. 😉
Dobbs, an excellent point! I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right, and I do library dérives all the time — just plunge into the stacks at a randomly chosen point and see what I encounter.
Anon, that’s certainly one of the big problems. I wish it was the only one.
Clarke, does prophecy count as détournement? Because I think you’re quite correct.
Siliconguy, every political movement turns into its opposite, given enough time. Since “progressive” just means “chasing whatever vision of the future is fashionable this week,” the progressive movement is even more vulnerable to that than most.
@Northwind Grandma (#80):
You’ve highlighted something extremely important for understanding the present decline of the USA here.
Some 25 years ago, when I was still actively teaching at my Ivy-League university, for reasons that don’t come to mind right now, I started asking the undergraduates who came to my office (usually just to talk about their lives, their universes, and pretty much anything and everything, not their coursework) whether they had known all their grandparents.
It turned out that hardly any of these students knew even the bare names of all four of their grandparents, much less anything significant about most of their grandparents as people!
There was only one single undergraduate who, as it happened, knew who all four of her grandparents were, and knew a fair amount about each of them as people. When I mentioned to her how extremely rare that was, she then added that, of all her high school classmates, she was the only one among her very wide circle of friends whose parents were still together as a married couple!
That was when I decided that the USA was probably finished as a functioning nation, at least insofar as it depended on its elites for anything. It would be only families like your Vedders who could maybe keep the country going. And such families seem to be vanishingly rare these days, for all the reasons that you mention.
So thank you for shedding more light on our dire situation.
This reminds me of the Australian concept of “walkabout” where a person…disappears…for…a while…and goes…somewhere. This was socially acceptable as late as the 1980s – I suppose Chris can tell us if modernism has rubbed it out.
Michael Gray 101
> Alas, very few of these ever get anywhere near the construction stage.
Art Nouveau is impractical for buildings. Too many curves.
Art Deco, however, had less curves, therefore was/is practical for buildings. The Chrysler Building, Manhattan, New York City, is a prime example.
Both movements emerged from early 20th-Century.
Talking about INhumane and ugly buildings, Art Deco is the opposite. Art Deco is inviting, organic, inspiring, comfortable.
I love both; each has its place. Art Nouveau is for flat images in frames on walls. Art Deco is for buildings, with perhaps Art Nouveau pieces on flat surfaces decorating interior floors, walls, ceilings, tapestries. Originally, both used dusty, grayed-out colors, but never drab.
Both Art Nouveau and Art Deco are worthy bringing back. Both are classic,— they are neither in style nor out of style. I bet that both hold their value over decades and centuries.
Regarding Art Deco, one thing that softwares have done well are bezier curves. Whomever it was that made bezier curves available in desktop software was a genius, and at the time, in vector graphics during the late 1980s, bezier curve-making made a big splash. Bezier curves were hot. I would stab at what organization and application “invented” desktop bezier curves and that would be Adobe Illustrator. In the 1980s, Adobe had many firsts, including PostScript and fonts. Pierre Bezier invented bezier curves themselves, and Adobe took them much further.
Bezier curves made Art Deco pieces easier to produce, although there are not a lot of Art Deco artworks because its pictures are relatively complicated. But usually astoundingly gorgeous.
I prefer Art Deco when it is relatively simple. The less, the better.
??️???Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Literary derives: “Don Quixote” perhaps. The random wanderings of an imaginary knight errant. Everyone remembers the windmills, but that episode is about one paragraph long. The Fulling mills episode was actually better, I thought. But it is the element of pure, deranged randomness that qualifies it for a derive.
JMG,
That one in providence is bad, but the Boston City Hall takes the cake. If you are not familiar, pull up a photo. Can you believe those that commissioned it thought ,” Boston City Hall was Conceived of as an Open, Transparent, Inviting Structure.”
Having much exposure to municipal government I have an inkling that this is not so much the architects fault, but a complete lack of imagination and taste among local elected officials and staff. In addition to the desire to put off a message of power and domination.
Scotty @103
Agreed.
@Justin Patrick Moore #105
For inclusion in a list of literary dérives I would nominate Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris. During his travels in Britain he went out of his way to travel with wandering homeless and described many of the spikes (overnight work homes for the tramps) and also the psychogeographic terrain of spikes, churches, shelters, etc.
Maybe Road to Wigan Pier also, though it was more an economic and sociological study.
I’m still getting acquainted with Dubord’s essay but found an interesting statement concerning a “static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station.”
JMG # 114:
Yes, the building shown in your photo is very ugly…I think the main problem with modern architecture is the god-like attitudes and behaviors by a few “superstar” architects, whose “genial”
ideas have been copied by most “normal” architects. It doesn’t matter their buildings are built in Scandinavia or the Tropics…
An evident example: Le Corbusier (Situs hated him).
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Phutatorius # 119:
Oh,”Don Quixote”…When I was a teen, I was compelled by my Literature teacher to read it, and I found it boring. However, it’s been always part of Spanish culture, and beyond it, of western culture.
Beyond cultural nationalism, I began to like it really some years ago (I was older to understand it well), as a “road movie” “avant la lettre”, methink.
Nabokov didn’t like the most famous Cervantes novel, he found it “rough”. Well, it’s his opinion (indeed, the fake Quixote written by Avellaneda-a plagiarist-, is rougher than the Cervantes one…).
@Clay Dennis, I agree heartily with your opinion on the modern Boston city hall! Adding insult to injury, there is a charming little colonial house a steps away that once served as city hall. It even has unicorns!
I found this post very thought provoking. I use a technique that is very similar that I just stumbled upon. I call it only paying attention to my five senses. I simply attempt to concentrate my thoughts on only the information that my senses are about my Immeadiate vicinity. This means trying to shut down the constant narration head. It is an attempt to pay attention to the actual reality of my surroundings instead of listening to the story going on inside my head. Sometimes it is the best way for me to feel peaceful.
I wish that brutalist architecture were limited to governmental buildings. The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center, https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/plan-your-visit/top-attractions/jack-c-taylor-visitor-center, opened a couple of years ago with great fanfare, though for the life of me I can’t understand why. It’s very ugly and a poor advertisement for the Garden’s richness, if you ask me. Compare that to the Tower Grove House on the Garden’s grounds: https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/our-garden/gardens-conservatories/victorian-district-sachs-museum-tower-grove-house/tower-grove-house/about-tower-grove-house. So it’s not as if the Garden doesn’t know what is inviting, elegant, and so forth; they just didn’t think we, its members and the public, deserve anything so gorgeous to welcome us to the garden.
I’ve been doing dérives since I was a young girl, by myself (I’d walk home from school different ways, for instance, to see what they looked like, or walk or bicycle the areas near the college and university campuses I studied at) and with my husband. Though it’s been long enough since my husband and I last did a proper dérive that I’ll make it a point for us to pick someplace new to walk around soon. If we hadn’t started walking around our area after we moved here 24 years ago we wouldn’t know about the place that has llamas within walking distance of our house! It’s on a road we wouldn’t drive on because it’s out of the way of the places we go. I’ve also done library and bookstore dérives.
Hi JMG,
The following may be something you prefer not to publish. If so, it is a story for your eyes only, about a fellow writer.
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Clarke aka Gwydion 112
> Native American and more generally indigenous people worldwide are a seed for a new earth-focused religion
Beware., particularly when in relation to American Indians. (I know very little about other pagan, indigenous cultures around the world.)
I think one would find that American Indian groups want no part of endeavors initiated by whites. Generally, American Indians resent whites encroaching on them. Such endeavors of this nature would need to the independent of American Indians, and they resist sometimes wrathfully, accusing whites of copying and impinging.
I will write of author Frank MacEowen here. I write my interpretation of what went on. I may be wrong. These things happened twenty years ago, so I would need to consult him on how he feels about those past happenings.
Over recent decades, members of various American Indian groups have been VERY, VERY, VERY nasty, mean, and threatening in particular instances. In the 1990 to early 2000s, Celtic author Frank MacEowen focused on shamanism, telling of American Indian + Celtic shamanism. He got walloped for it by individual American Indians on the Internet. I personally knew him at the time, where he told me of American Indians’ hostilities towards his personhood, if not outright hatred [my word], by more than one American Indian individual. I feel the whole unpleasant episode was the main reason he stopped getting to know American Indian culture, and a good part why he stopped writing non-fiction for at least a decade. Instead of writing books, he settled down in the American southeast, and used his writing talents for web design.
MY OPINION
Little do whites know, but (I believe) there is an undercurrent of covert hatred on the part of American Indians towards whites. Sometimes the conversation breaks out in open hostility. Once a white is warned off that (s)he is encroaching on American Indian domain, if the white doesn’t willingly stop, American Indians literally plan war against that individual.
In other words, whatever paganism a white wants to garner from American Indian culture, (s)he cannot, under any circumstances, do it in American Indians’ name; one would have to sideswipe. Once even one American Indian says, “Stop,” whites generally withdraw because it just isn’t worth the threats and unpleasantness.
I believe there is an unofficial American Indian stance towards whites, where there is no mixing between Indians and whites. They refuse to get word out how great some of their practices are. They jealously keep their practices close to the chest.
Writer Frank MacEowen found out the hard way. He was super-respectful to American Indians he was in personal contact with between 2000 and 2010; it was ‘other’ Indians who found his writings on the Internet (particularly about shamanism) who threatening to undo him,— several Indians ganged up on him digitally. After that, he just said, “Screw it.” He was done. The noxious Indians didn‘t give one iota that he was being respectful. I have never known Frank to be disrespectful to anyone, and I was in contact with him for a couple years during this time. He no longer mentions American Indian-anything as a potential source of pagan knowledge, and that was due to the dreadful, persistent messages spewed at him by American Indians who did not know him and didn’t want to know him.
Overall, American Indians want to be left to their own devices, where no whites write about them in their name. Whites can write about shamanic practices, etc, but never mention American Indian practices by name or implication; Indians want it that way. Their culture; their choice.
I will go as far as say American Indians would not hesitate to bury someone who defies their “restraining order.”
Due to the personal experiences Frank recounted to me, I believe that American Indians do NOT want to live in harmony with whites.
If a white wants to stand in relation to a red, keep one’s distance and, if one gets too close, assume things will not go well. Pretend one is approaching a rattlesnake.
In any case, Frank MacEowen’s books on Celts and shamanism are as relevant now as they were twenty-five years ago. I still recommend his books.
???⛺️??Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
Different geographical areas do seem to produce varying social outcomes. Makes me wonder if a local climate, or geography impacts upon that? Dunno, but tell ya what, newcomers around here tend to be not taken in initially, for good reasons – they often move on again. The old timers explained this effect to me long ago, in that if a person or family makes it through two winters, and keeps up their good spirits for the area, they’ll probably be around a lot longer and that is when social opportunities begin to present themselves. Winter here can be months and months of just above freezing temperatures, but with 99% humidity. Some folks can’t handle that.
Years ago I inadvertently annoyed the daylights out of a friend by daring to suggest the reality that if he moved around the country a lot, told the new locals that, they’d make the assumption that he was just going to move on again in the future – and not invest time in the person. It’s worth noting that the individual also did a lot of fly in and fly out work, so wasn’t even there a lot of the time, which also puts a strain on local connections. Relationships are a two-way street.
In your case, if I was in your shoes, instead of giving new people you meet a full detailed history of your journey across the country over the decades, just tell them your wife died and you had to move due to the memories, and leave it at that. You’ll get a more sympathetic response. But also, from a social perspective, you’re a single bloke now, and that can also result in different social treatment than what you previously enjoyed with Sara. And that may also explain part of the difference you experienced up north.
Man, this stuff is super complicated! And wishing you the best in finding your place in the world.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Roldy,
Walkabout is hard wired into the land here, although the economic arrangements tend to squelch such activities. You know man, a person heading out into the wide blue unknown, experiences stuff. I did my degree part time at night, whilst working full time. At the completion of the long years of studious pain, my wife and I threw a tent into the back of the hatchback, and just hit the road with no particular destination in mind. Tell ya what, a month in a Tasmanian winter sleeping in a tent, puts some perspective on what a person really needs to have, just to get by. In those days, few if any people travelled due to the recession. Once back on the mainland, we headed north and did a figure eight lap around the continent. It’s a big place, and mostly quiet.
Not sure I’d enjoy the travel now due to the hordes of tourists on the move, but even so, there are heaps of places which are quiet, rarely visited and beautiful.
One of the things which annoyed the daylights out of me when in the corporate world long ago, was that there was little time allocated for cogitation. And I believe that outcome is a deliberate policy. A walkabout gives, perspective.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity?
Chris
JMG #65: From the very informative etymonline.com —
saunter(v.)
c. 1500, santren “to muse, be in reverie,” a word of uncertain origin. The meaning “walk with a leisurely gait” is from 1660s, and may be a different word which, despite many absurd speculations, also is of unknown origin.
Klein prints the theory (held by Skeat and Murray) that this sense of the word derives via Anglo-French sauntrer (mid-14c.) from French s’aventurer “to take risks.” Century Dictionary finds the theory involves difficulties but “it is the only one that has any plausibility,” but OED finds it “unlikely.” For the John Muir story, see here [https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/john-muir-and-‘saunter’]. Related: Sauntered; saunterer; sauntering.
As for “adrift”, it contains the a- prefix for “ongoing state of action”, eg afoot, or to not go a-hunting for fear of little men. One of the more interesting contributions from Appalachian English!
Getting back on topic, I (and others on the Dissident Right) have noticed the post-WWII proliferation of hideously ugly arts & architecture. It’s one of those things where everyone perceives it, but you’re not allowed to discuss or criticize, since it’s an extension of the managerial elite, who are still clinging to power as their time runs out. In fact, arts & architecture represent the spirit of a society, so much so that we can get a feel for extinct societies based on the design of their ruins. I think the pervasive garish ugliness we live with is an accurate reflection of the managerial ethos.
There was an earlier discussion on here about the “Tartarian Empire”, a set of wild claims about a world-empire that existed before the World Wars. While it’s not literally true, there is figurative truth — Tartaria is really an encrypted folktale about how the Western world used to have more vitality, and built beautiful things, until the rot & decay set in after WWII. Again, it’s very politically incorrect to point this out, thus the critique cloaked in fable.
This post reminded me of something a friend of mine who builds gardens said: “A garden is the opposite of a trap.”
Chris at Ferndale 138
> annoyed the daylights out of me when in the corporate world long ago, was that there was little time allocated for cogitation.
Yes. No time to fit new knowledge in with old knowledge. A year or two out of high school, all I could land was a “secretarial” job; that office was so fast-paced. I couldn’t handle it. I left after a month, and it was because of sensory overload. Yeah, in 1970, girls either became nurses, school teachers, or secretaries (which included ‘file clerk’).
I like seeing the cows across the county road eating hay the farmer has put out for them. Cows can cogitate and chew at the same time. Cows are actually quite special beings. I bought a couple books on cows. Heck, I am in an environment where family farms are nearly everywhere so I better darn well learn about cows. I moved here for cows and Buddhism. However, I don’t personally know any cows?. One doesn’t walk up to a farmhouse cold-turkey, knock on the door, and say, “May I spend time with your cows?” The farm family would consider that person bonkers, and has every right to call the sheriff.
Not to mention how the cows would feel. They would step sideways and say to themselves, “Who the heck is this human? Get A-Way. Is she pro or con ‘me’”? The cows have every right to “kick the person” (out). The stranger’s presence would cause cows anxiety, and would make them unhappy campers.
I better find other avenues to familiarize myself with cows. Cows are one of the top two species (dog is the other) which have walked alongside humankind for tens of thousands of years helping humans survive. Hence, I appreciate the ten dairy cows from across the road without bothering them. They are cogit-a-tent, intell-a-gent beings. I shall admire them from afar. Great word, cogitate.
May we help the cogitating environment, and that means time‼️
Cogitators Anonymous.
Old codgers cogitate.
Help younguns [young ones] have time to cogitate and ruminate.
Cows rock??. Hee haw???.
Please sir, may I have some more cheese??
???????Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Nortwind Grandma # 126:
After having read your comment, I think xenophobic attitudes and behaviors seem universal within every human group. So the noble savage myth doesn’t fit to the real Native Americans (or at least a part of them). I see the white people who, according your comment, approached to the Indians in a naïve Rousseaunian way, had some problems.
I haven’t never met an American Native, but I’ve met during my life here some non European migrants who seem to share with those USA natives their hatred against white people. Some South Americans, North Africans, Blacks and Chinese seem to hate Europeans, due to colonialism and another abuses Whites did against their ancestors.
I guess some American Indians hatred against American Whites comes from a similar origin.
Of course, xenophobia is a bad thing, but you can understand (but not justify) it, when its sources are real dirty past events. For example, some Chinese people started to call Europeans “foreign devils” during and after the Opium Wars.
However, I think it’s unfair and silly to blame nowadays white people for the bad things that some of their ancestors did against non European people ancestors. It’s evident today people didn’t invade, rape, killed them.
@ Chris # 127
“Winter here can be months and months of just above freezing temperatures, but with 99% humidity.”
Well, you’ve just nailed a Donegal winter, so… 🙂
Also, your post has generally nailed the slowness with which a well-established community will work at integrating the peripatetic wanderer. Having been such a wanderer most of my first three decades (initially due to decisions made by my parents, and later to my own)… I know how easy it was to make new, superficial, friends and then lose them again, over and over.
And, so meeting my husband, and settling down in Donegal at the start of my fourth decade of life, introduced me to the kind of slow-moving, ent-like relationship that takes time to develop, but grows roots. After three, and a bit more, further decades, I am slowly appreciating those roots. And the steadiness of them.
Northwind Grandma says:
#126 April 17, 2026 at 5:47 pm
Hello, and so on.
Did I not mention this is aspirational stuff and that the facts don’t matter. Native American anti-white hostility goes back to at least 1496, and has not diminished since then. I’m sorry your friend ran into so much trouble. I myself was accused of being an “Indian Wannabe” by a respected elder. Despite that, I am grateful for the chance to have learned directly from many tribal people. The resulting fusions I’m talking about won’t be built either by sympathetic Native Americans or by whites, but in the course of centuries. So, thank you for your warnings. Tribal people were heroically barbaric towards whites and one another through the centuries. Them’s the facts ma’am. I know it. You know it. And it doesn’t matter. The inspiration/aspiration is what I believe will survive the flames.
@JMG: Right, Basho. Thanls for the encouragement. I’ve started a list…
(I do love the music of acoustic guitarist Robbie Basho, but a different beast.)
@Phutatorius: Cervantes, okay.
@Scotty: Adding those Orwell books
To All:
If anyone else has literary derives and drifts, let me know and I will add them to my list for a future article.
So I was just on a walk to do my shopping and figured I’d try something approaching a dérive—clearly not a proper one, as I had a fixed destination, but I tried to avoid my usual route and largely navigated by gut feeling.
There are a lot of trees in my neighbourhood, even more on my “derived” route than on my usual one. This made me think about solarpunk. Now, when you look for solarpunk images, you will probably see cityscapes filled with lush green trees and bushes.
But gardens don’t work like that, do they? I saw trees with green leafs, yes, but also purple, blue, red, and yellow ones. And the greens weren’t all the same; there were bright greens and dark greens, greens dotted with white flowers, variations in leaf shapes, and, for that matter, quite a few conifers too (I guess the needles technically are leafs but I don’t really think of them that way—Sapir-Whorf in action, as German makes a distinction between trees with leafs and those with needles).
Clearly, solarpunk images show tree monocultures, which I doubt is the intention behind them. I wonder what this says about their creators.
—David P.
Your pix and some of the comments reminded me of the new West Conservatory at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA.
Longwood is one of the world’s great public gardens. You’d never know — today — that Pierre DuPont took what was essentially a 1,000 acre cornfield and turned it into rolling, wooded hills with water gardens and everything else you can imagine in a garden built by someone with vision, drive, and dump trucks full of money.
They tore down the west end of the old conservatory (which had some stunning features) along with where the old student garden area was and a walled enclosure that could inspire anyone with a small garden space.
The NEW conservatory is grand, remarkable, lovely in many aspects, and there’s now also a stunning bonsai courtyard that really does justice to Longwood’s bonsai collection.
But. You knew this was coming, right? Much of the West Conservatory resembles, from the outside, a dystopian office park with acres of grass, concrete, and featureless, rectangular pools of water. I’ve had Longwood officials ask me what I thought of the new building and that’s what I tell them.
Dystopian office park. From the 70’s.
It doesn’t go over well.
I state my reasoning clearly: I do not visit Longwood Gardens to see acres of mown grass, swathes of concrete, and featureless rectangles of water.
I want to see gardens! Plants! Life and greenery and color!
Perhaps, eventually, the Longwood staff will plant those acres of grass with something and they’ll install waterlilies in the barren rectangles of water.
I’ve long suspected that the glamour of Futurism is deeply impressed into the mind of the modern urban dweller. How else do you explain the reason why people marvel at the headquarters of Amazon, a trillion dollar company, that looks as if it was built with the architectural competence of a post-modern grad student?
My only plausible answer is that they see The Future and not the steaming pile that actually exists.
Chuaquin # 86:
I have heard of this island! It is a creative way to deal with the situation. Hans Island is also like that – changing hands between Canada and Denmark until 2022. Each country would send a force to “capture” it, leaving alcohol to the opposing force who would “recapture” it, take the bottles and leave their own.
If I did not look it up to refresh myself on the details, I would not know this tradition actually ended in 2022.
After 50 years of doing this, they settled on a meaningless “land border” that goes in the middle of this inhabited island. I am sure the birds are very impressed.
Islands also have their own interesting effects on humans – historically, their isolation made them perfect prisons, which is why in many countries there are stricter laws on islands than in the mainland parts of the same country. In the case of haiti and the dominican republic for example, the donimican republic, if I recall, served as the “white collar prison”, so it had looser laws than haiti, which gave rise to a practicality where a policeman who was interested in making sure a criminal will get punished properly would take him over the border to haiti and formaly make the arrest there, so the criminal would be brought before a judge in haiti. Much like how extridition works today actually.
Note so self: dérive, even a mental one, is better done alone to avoid unpleasantness. To my defense, I didn’t know that I was committing a mental dérive. Here’s a story. A few days ago I was visiting relatives. One of them asked me about a certain legal task that he needed to complete. He knew that I had a personal experience in the matter. I said that a first step before paying lawyers was to educate himself on the matter, and that a local library had a lot of good resources. The guy continued by telling me that he already consulted a thing that we are not allowed to talk about here, to which I replied that it was one of the options, but personally I wouldn’t wholly rely in such an important matter on a stochastic parrot. Well… let me tell you… I’m pretty sure that if I farted loudly the company would be more gracious. I was told that nobody is going to the library these days and why to waste time when intelligence far greater than ours already scouted through all these books and reached the correct conclusions. The guy totally forgot that he was the one asking me for my opinion and went on and on about the wrongness of my ways. It was quite a spectacle.
William Hunter Duncan,
I enjoy your substack and I do feel your dismay. I grew up just east of you in Central Minnesota. Being more German and Polish, we weren’t part of the Elite Class from the Twin Cities.
I was speaking with a Mason who had to work with Scandinavians and he said they were the most arrogant people he’d ever met. Sinclair Lewis wrote about that in his novel, Main Street. I think that attitude survives in the TC and explains their desire to destroy Outstate Minnesota out of spite. Using “outstate” to describe everyone not in the TC is extremely arrogant.
There is a heck of a lot of psychological projection going on these days, from so-called civic leaders, to the PMC and to the No Kings Rally.
Roldy, what makes the walkabout fascinating as a cultural theme down under is that, if I understand correctly, the white settlers borrowed it from the native peoples.
Phutatorius, good.Yes, that works. There’s a whole genre, the picaresque novel, in which the main character wanders through the world, and there’s no plot other than what he or she happens to encounter on the way.
Clay, I see the Boston City Hall as one of the weirdest examples of truth in advertising yet devised. It’s an inverted pyramid that, because of the odd way the first floor is handled, never quite seems to touch the ground — thus it’s perfect for a city dominated by a massively overinflated bureaucracy that makes all its decisions in a state of serene disconnection from the real world. (Here it is, for those who aren’t familiar with it:)
The sheer barren desolation of the plaza in front of it is a nice touch, too.
Chuaquin, Le Corb was one of the worst of the modernists. Nearly all his buildings would be greatly improved by half a dozen howitzer shells.
Pointwithinacircle, excellent! That’s a form of meditation, one that’s much used in some Druid circles.
SLClaire, bingo. It’s the essence of brutalism that the public must feel excluded and dominated, and bare walls and barren flat surfaces are among the favored ways of doing that.
Northwind (if I may), it’s important to be aware that Native American people have many different opinions on this, and every other subject, too. One of my teachers, the late Corby Ingold, was a student of the Samish medicine man Johnny Moses (Whis-tem-men-knee), who accepted people of all ethnic backgrounds as students. Moses got a lot of flak for that from some people in the Native community, but he also had the support of influential elders. So it’s a mistake to paint the picture in the monochrome tones you’ve used here.
Chris, I don’t explain my whole trajectory to people I’ve just met, as a rule! That said, places do differ, and big cities like metropolitan Washington DC are used to the fact that people come and go.
Xcalibur/djs, that’s one of the sources I used. As for a- as an action indicated, it’s much older than the Appalachian mountain dialect: it’s one of many things they preserved when it dropped out of English elsewhere. Regarding the rest, no argument at all — the Tartarian Empire business in particular practically begs for Discordian détournement.
Zak, nice! A fine definition.
David, good heavens. I hadn’t noticed that, but you’re quite right. The trees in solarpunk imagery aren’t real trees — they’re abstract representations of trees. Yes, that does say something interesting about the state of mind that shapes that movement.
Teresa, ha! A good cogent description — thank you.
Jon, exactly. Imagine it as one of the buildings in a Tomorrowland theme park and the reaction makes perfect sense. Of course there’s also the question of how many people actually marvel at it — without being paid flacks, that is…
Inna, no surprises that this is the latest obsession of true believers in progress. As I noted a decade ago…
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-heresy-of-technological-choice.html
…the only belief more heretical than suggesting that the latest heavily hyped technology isn’t better than all alternatives is suggesting that each of us gets to choose which technologies we use.
JMG, I’d forgotten about Boston City Hall. I remembered a photo of Carl Sagan holding the Pioneer plaque in front of the building, and lo, it is available on a reddit site. There is something very Faustian about Pioneer and Brutalism together.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/7b23bb/carl_sagan_holding_one_of_the_two_pioneer_plaques/?rdt=39053
Went to take a walk after my Saturday writing session, and lo and behold, there is a nice package from Sul Books in the mail. My hardcover arrived for House of the Crows. Very nice! Stoked for my evening reading : )
…I was thinking too, that Narcissus and Goldmund might fit the derive literary novel list.
Picaresque novel genre sounds cool too, with the definition in part being about rogues of a lower social class wandering about.
JMG,
Your excellent analysis of the Boston City Hall makes me want to ask about another building that has puzzled me for many years now, Frank Gehry’ Stata center at MIT in Cambridge. Almost 2 decades ago my wife and I toured the MIT campus with our high school son. He was mostly unimpressed with the campus ( it is pretty ugly) and the other kids on the tour ( I am not a nerd dad) but when he got sight of the Stata center he was ready to leave. “These people are crazy if they thought this was a good idea.”
The only thing I can think is that the administration and faculty were so tired of being viewed by the world as dull, nerdy and bland that they had to come up with the most ridiculous, Dr Suess, fun house, of a building to help change their image. Or to show that they are so rich and well endowed that they can squander large quantities of money on frivolity.
A favorite quote from C.S. Lewis. Reminds me of Pointwithinacircle #124 comment – engaging your environment as it is and the Druid style meditation JMG referred to.
“Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. […] He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse.
After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead––a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. . . . . . . . . . In a sense, Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way.”
From the book That Hideous Strength. Yes, holistically engaging with reality as it is. A small child will perceive a tree as a living being. Dead materialism is a poisoned reality filter.
one short novel of Hesse’s came to mind as derivist: Wandering. Kingsor’s Last Summer and Journey To The East also had a derivist feeling to me. There are two books by the English author Laurie Lee. Cider With Rosie is about his childhood in the Cotswalds in the 19teens and 1920s, and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning about his first walking up to London during the depression then wandering around Spain on foot just before the start of the civil war. Thoreau’s Walden would certainly be on my list, as would John Muir’s writings.
stephenn
Four Sided…# 139:
Thanks for your comment. Hans Island’s a new place I didn’t know until now. It seems to me a funny international agreement, and I also think those two countries won’t go to war due to that island tomorrow…
Well, “Isla de los Faisanes” in legal technical language, is a small scale case of “condominium”(I hope to have write it well), where that island goes under spanish sovereignty 6 months, and it goes under french power another 6 months in a year.
I knew Haiti and Dominican Republic are neighbors, sharing a common border which divides their island between these two countries. I also knew they speak different languages, though in a cultural way, they’re Caribbean countries alike. Colonial times had weird effects there, methink.
It’s said Dominicans have more woods in their side than Haitians. What I didn’t know was your story about legal differences between these countries. It’s very interesting.
—————————————-
JMG # 142:
Yes, I agree. “Le Corb” is paradigmatic as an example of “superstar” god-like architect, in spite of his work ugliness and his dangerous political “friendships”. He tried to sell his buildings to the Vichy regime in France during the ‘40s (ahem), and after the WW2, beyond the Iron Curtain. Commie countries preferred their own ugly concrete buildings (ahem).
********
I like your answer to N.G. I think it’s better and more cautious to say that a few/some American Natives think or say this or that, than suggesting every of them think or say the same things. Maybe some natives are xenophobes against white people, but sometimes xenophobia goes in the two directions…(some white people can think every native think the same opinions).
Jon, if somebody had pointed a hubris meter at that photo the needle would have slammed all the way over and right off the scale.
Justin, Hesse wove dérives into his fiction quite often — think of the Steppenwolf, huddled in his raincoat, pacing the streets of the city at night in search of some reason not to cut his own throat!
Clay, Gehry’s work marks the final decadence of architectural modernism, the point at which it stopped trying to pretend to follow the Bauhaus dictum “form follows function” and admitted all along that its real principle was “form follows ego.” Gehry, like a number of other successful figures in the arts, figured out that since everything meaningful had already been said using the language of modernism, the only way to be original was to lapse into self-referential babble. The only thing his buildings say is “Look at me? Aren’t I creative?”
It’s the precise architectural equivalent of the kind of performance “art” that involves the artist dropping trou on a public stage and masturbating.
BeardTree, I’ve long been fascinated by that passage in That Hideous Strength. It’s almost endearing, watching Lewis edge up to an embrace of enchantment before backing frantically away from it. What he couldn’t let himself grasp is that “in a sense” and “some different way” won’t cut it. The old order is the eternal order, and for more than a thousand years Christians (like everyone else) practiced their faith in that order without seeing the least contradiction. The thought that Lewis (and of course his good friend Owen Barfield, from whom he got this argument) couldn’t let himself think was that what we have to give up is the modern superstition that we know better, and that he was as deeply enmeshed in that superstition as the people he criticized. “We can’t go back!” is the outcry that Lewis and the Westons, Frosts, and Filostratos of the world have in common, and the calm reply that Merlin makes to them all is “You never left. You just made believe that you did.”
Looking at the picture of the Boston City Hall and the buildings in the background, I feel like I am looking at buildings in northwestern Europe. I don’t know if it was intentionally planned to create a feeling of un-americanness, but for me the picture could have been taken in any city at the fringes of the Northsea. Especially when looking at the buildings in the background.
– Spork –
@frankster its weird, because alberta is an oil and gas province and yet this blog is and continues to be incredibly relevant to albertans. I am one myself and got here by way of bay area rationalism, but i figure its because urban alberta is super into environmentalism in spite of being equally into fossil fuels.
Another quote by Lewis along the same lines.
“In a letter to his life-long pen pal Arthur Greeves dated the 22nd of June, 1930, C.S. Lewis mentions Tolkien’s thoughts on the spiritual and generational effects of living directly off of the physically surrounding country.
‘Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when the family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.’ “
Northwind Grandma #126
I don’t know who this Frank is, but that hasn’t been my experience at all! I work with a lot of local tribal members and they have always treated me pretty much like anyone else. Maybe it’s because we share common goals in the work we do together? Maybe it’s because our cultures have been slowly mixing for over 150 years? Maybe they just have a different cultural response to outsiders than the tribes Frank was pissing off.
One of my closest (white) co-workers is married to a tribal member and they have two grown children. My perception is that her family and the tribe in general are very affectionate towards him. He is part of their ceremonies and traditions, and well respected.
Another of my friends is a full-blooded tribal member. He is very fair with red hair and freckles (not your stereo-typical Indian). Apparently, his (say this with a Scottish accent) “Great-Great-Grandpappy” came over from Scotland in 1860 or thereabouts. Apparently, those are some powerful genes.
And I myself, with my small relationship with them, have been invited to some of their ceremonial dances.
So, I don’t know if your story is a reflection of Native American culture, or more a reflection of Frank.
A thought triggered by JMG’s last comment: “We can’t go back, but we can circle around”
JMG, while we are talking about the situationalists it seems that recent events have revealed a kind of Détournement in the meme war between the US and Iran. I am sure you have read about the “lego AI video” barrage that pranksters associated with Iran have aimed at the west. They took a well known consumer item and its associated kids movies and turned it in to a powerful set of videos and memes mocking the motives of the western powers in the recent middle eastern war.
What is especially Ironic is that the very AI developed and promoted by Israel supporting tech Billionaires has enabled these Middle East memers to breech the language and cultural barriers that only a year or so earlier would have confined any political and cultural content they created to a local audience.
Speaking of performance “art”… There is a Russian joke:
– What’s the difference between performance art and installation art?
– They ring the bell, you open the door, they sh…t. It’s a performance.
They sh…t, they ring the bell, you open the door. It’s an installation.
Spork, good! That’s exactly what the buildings are trying to communicate. Since colonial times, the elite classes of the US have been trying to pretend that they’re not American, oh, no, they’re superior to all that, they’re European. Quite a bit of our worst and most pretentious architecture, not to mention other dimensions of our culture, have been deformed by that bit of make-believe.
BeardTree, that doubtless makes it easier, but I think the heart of the issue is elsewhere. Every civilization, as it matures, moves deeper into an imaginary world of its own construction, and that distracts its inmates from other-than-human realities. Do you recall the fine passage in Perelandra where the Un-man is tempting Tinidril, and Ransom is horrified to see her put on an expression out of a cheap melodrama? The process I’m indicating is the same thing on a collective level, in effect. Of course reality reasserts itself through the time-honored process of decline and fall, and then the melodrama dissolves.
KAN, I’m far from sure we ever really leave.
Clay, yep. One of the impacts of LLM technology that I think nobody has yet paid attention to is that it lowers the entry bar for visual media very, very far. It’s not just Hollywood that’s doomed as a result — the resulting democratization of visual propaganda is going to have sweeping consequences.
Inna, ha! Very Russian — and very accurate.
Professors are moving back to typewriters to avoid AI generated work:
https://sentinelcolorado.com/uncategorized/a-college-instructor-turns-to-typewriters-to-curb-ai-written-work-and-teach-life-lessons/
JMG #147
About that building……..Wait…………THAT’S REAL? IT’S NOT SOME AI FEVER DREAM? WHAT ON EARTH?
I’m speechless. Really.
I wonder how much it’s going to leak.
And, of course, it’s on top of a gargantuan parking structure.
Re: “I’m far from sure we ever really leave”
Hmm, yes, that is a good reminder of how much progress is embedded in many idioms – going back implies a binary with movement forward, and the third option of being may be overlooked, an option which tends to be expressed so often these days idiomatically as ‘just being’, as though it were somehow deficient. Which then suggests a fourth option of becoming, which is often conflated with progress. So much to meditate upon – a good thing I am a lifelong immortal.
JMG and all,
I saw a mention of Solarpunk by David P. and it reminded me about that term. From what I was able to read in the genre, it seemed like it originally began as a sort of Small is Beautiful/New Alchemy Institute flavored eco steampunk of the sort JMG proposed 15 years ago (Retrotopia was for me a prime example of the genre). But then it rapidly became a sort of revival of 1950’s futurism except with solar panels and anarchism instead of atomic piles and the space patrol.
I notice this keeps happening in science fiction. Every so often a sub-genre comes along to challenge the existing (ie golden age 1920’s-1950’s era) sci fi tropes but ends up reinventing them with currently fashionable futuristic technology. The 1980’s had cyberpunk; it also promised to be a break from the past, it also just reinvented Heinlein and Clarke but with computers and Japanese conglomerates instead of atomic piles and the space patrol.
Why does this keep happening to science fiction? Why is it so difficult for the genre as a whole to move past the big fin rockets and electro the robot era?
Cheers,
JZ
JMG # 149:
That bizarre building in the photo you’ve shown us seems IMHO very pretentious and ridiculous.
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Beardtree # 152:
I see there was already a global market during Lewis times, so his opinión deserves attention. I think maybe there’s some influence of a “cosmopolitan” lifestyle to the current life secularization, to some extent. Nowadays, when near everything comes from China, it’s also difficult for quite people to identify themselves with a sacred place.
I have occasionally done the dérive thing, aka “got lost”. I remember one time in Holland, riding a motorbike through a featureless landscape, coming over a gentle rise to see six army tanks heading straight towards me. Talk about meeting the thing you fear! I damn near shaled myself. They passed on by, the tank commanders standing in the turrets being six young Dutchmen with shoulder-length blond hair and not giving me a second glance.
In a wander around my current neighborhood I found a row of num-num trees. They have small red fruits which most people won’t touch because they look poisonous, but actually they are quite safe with a delicious sweet-sour tartness. The only problem is to get to them before the street people do.
Unfortunately in recent years wandering around alone has become hazardous. It is best to go in a group.
Talk about you can’t believe what you see. I was watching what I thought was the official live stream of Blue Origin’s New Glenn third launch when Jeff Bezos came online during a launch hold to promote a crypto giveaway, just scan the QR code online and send your crypto to this address and we’ll return it DOUBLE! Seemed pretty legit although Jeff did look a bit AI-ish. Fortunately I don’t have any crypto so I didn’t send any, and anyway the live stream was abruptly pulled, no doubt someone reported it as a scam. But a very well done one, I must say.
Now AI-Trump is online promoting crypto from what seemed to be an official Blue Origin live stream. Same offer: scan the QR code and we wills send back DOUBLE!
Scammers don’t give up easily it seems.
Anon, smart of them. I’ve been told that intelligence agencies are beginning to do the same thing because it’s so easy to harvest data from computers. I have a nice Olivetti portable in case something like that happens to writers.
John O, I know. It looks to me as though Gehry got a six-year-old to draw a building and then figured out the blueprints.
KAN, exactly. The myth of progress really is the modern monomyth, and distorts everything else to fit into its narrow limits.
John Z, that’s an intriguing question. Partly, it really was a product of the era when it seemed as though not even the sky was the limit, and has been marking time since the limits to growth started clamping down hard. I suspect that at this point its main audience is among people who are still clinging to the myth of progress, and use fiction to blunt the bitter disappointments driven by the ongoing failure of Tomorrowland to put in an appearance. But that’s a point that deserves much reflection.
Martin, the next time you see tanks, check to make sure they’re not a LLM-manufactured image. 😉
The myth of Progress, IMHO, is “true” while most people think it’s real. To some extent, it’s a prophecy which is made real by itself (people believe in Progress, so it eventually happens). This scheme ha worked until some time ago. Until when? It would be another interesting topic for another comment (or post).
There’s a problem when hopes of Progress don’t match with future reality which becomes the present (technology and science diminishing returns), so the believers must pretend that tiny “progress” is as big as it was in past times.
About the AI image inflation:
I am not sure it’s so novel, perhaps in scale, but doctored images existed for a while. I recall an X Files episode (a scifi show from the 90s about two FBI agents investigating aliens and other cryptids. It predates AI for quite a while) where one of the agents thought he aquired an image of a ufo, while the other, more skeptic agents shows the image is a fake by for example pointing out the moon as seen in the image is in the wrong phase for the date the image is supposedly from.
I successfully applied this tequnique to spot many AI generated images: Look for small details you can easily check. The AI and whoever commisioned the image will only care about what the image shows, and look over physical inconsistancies and other minor details.
@Slink #153. & Northwind Grandma #126
I suspect you’re both right, but are talking about different groups. The problem is that “Native American” is generally too broad to be a useful category. Just like “American” for that matter– if I, from my foreign perch, started spouting about what Americans think and feel, you would doubtless point out that I’m flattening a whole wealth of regional, sub-cultural, and even racial differences. The same applies to Native Americans. The Navaho and Ojibwe might both have been screwed by the coming of the white man, but that’s about all they have in common.
Around here, the “Indigenous Peoples” as we are required to call them are down-right Zionist. As in, blood-and-soil nationalists who dream of getting their ancestral lands back, and aren’t too particular about who else might have moved in. Of course our government backs that rhetoric by putting land acknoweldgements everywhere– even the Catholic Church, perhaps in a misguided attempt to reduce the number of arsons against them, perform land acknowledgements before Mass. (Christ took time out of the Sermon on the Mount to acknowledge that he was on Cananite land, right?) So it’s very different here in Canukistan, and it’s very different in different parts of Canuckistan, too.
Which is kind of my point. It’s different all over. Aside from presenting a unified front when dealing with the white man– something the Native American Movement started doing in like the 60s or 70s–the various tribes and their circumstances are too different to make any kind of generalization other than “the last 400 years could have gone better for those guys”. Some tribes fight hard to stop pipelines; some tribes own shares in pipelines and have their own oil wells.
Even within any given tribe, of course you get enormous variation! People are still people, after all. Some native folk are the most earth-centered conservationists you’ll ever meet; others deliberately overhunt and overfish so whitey can’t have any. Some welcome all comers to their ancestral lands; others openly wish they could ethnically cleanse them.
Ursula K. Le Guin to an extent followed a different path in her science fiction. JMG’s science fiction to my mind is reminiscent of it. C.S. Lewis’s science fiction falls into yet another category. Though all three do have a certain amount of magic disguised as advanced technology as science fiction typically does.
It has already been mentioned by others, but the dérive has quite a bit of an occult subtext; it is about the vibes of a place, a point that got discussed in several Magic Monday threads in connection with forests in different regions of the Earth.
David P., I do think that Berlin was, until recently, well suited for a dérive because of the different character of different parts of the city and the special store that existed there, and because of the extensive network of public transit via commuter rails, subways, buses and, in eastern Berlin, streetcars.
Ran across this marvelous Tolkien quote today.
“You look at trees and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”
I used to do dérives in the web 1.0, drifting from link to link. Anyone remember webrings?
Those days were fun – and educational. Today, the web is an oligarchic wasteland. For the first time, I’m getting so bored with it that I log off and go do something else, which is probably a good thing.
I’m still grateful that it exists, otherwise I’d never have discovered this site! Or the internet archive, with its 24 volumes of The Encyclopedia of Crafts, and the 24 volumes of The Family Creative Workshop (for when I log off). Not to mention all those out-of-copyright books that are free to download. I just acquired “Common Sense – How to Exercise It” in the hopes it’ll do me some good…
Perhaps becoming could be though of as a dérive of being.
Chauquin @167: “The myth of Progress, IMHO, is “true” while most people think it’s real.”
You have hit upon the epigraph to “Dhalgren” (previously mentioned at 82): “You have confused the true and the real.” Attributed by Delany to George Stanley, presumably the sculptor by that name. The difference between the two has puzzled me, but then “Dhalgren” has been puzzling me since I first read it in 1983.
“Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?” A question voiced by Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. Drop the self conceptions and maybe do a dérive thing on yourself? Good words for a discursive meditation.
I first read LOTR when I was 12. I now realize Tolkien salted all sorts of deep wisdom statements in LOTR which I didn’t pick up then. But I did get the love of trees in my upper Midwestern childhood.!
The first trees I fell in love with were the American Elm now gone decimated by disease. Am old enough to remember glorious individual specimens and streets lined by elms arching over to meet high in the middle resembling the interiors of Gothic cathedrals. Also the Eastern White Pine enchanted me .
Just to add my opinion to the indigenous issue: I have spent quite a bit of time and worked with native people in the US, Australia, NZ and Hawaii. one size does not fit all, even within a given group. They are people. Even in a small, rather select group like ecosophia, does everyone agree? I think we might just have proved that in this present discussion.
Stephen
Would Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas count as a drug and drink addled derive?
Chuaquin, every myth inspires the people who believe in it to cherrypick their experiences to find evidence that fits the myth. That can continue for a long time, but eventualy one or both of two things happen — either it becomes so hard to find experiences that fit the myth that belief cracks, or another myth becomes more appealing, or both. I think we’re in the middle of both.
Circle, oh, granted. I remember when digital image editing was brand new and avant-garde periodicals were proclaiming it the end of photography as evidence of anything.
BeardTree, thank you for the implied compliment — Le Guin was a very capable writer! She was one of those fascinating SF authors in the late 20th century who really pushed the boundaries of the genre; I’d include Cordwainer Smith and Edgar Pangborn in the same category. That’s the end of SF that inspires my work; of course it was never as popular as the mainstream stuff.
Booklover, it can certainly be put to good occult use.
BeardTree, good heavens. What is that Tolkien quote from?
Athaia, I remember it well. Thanks for the blast from the past.
KAN, I like that concept a great deal. Thank you.
Stephen, in a weird way, yes.
Source of the Tolkien quote, actually a Tolkien-ish quote I just found out. “These words come from a famous conversation between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis that took place at Addison’s Walk in Oxford in September 1931. The specific prose version you quoted is a reconstruction of Tolkien’s argument found in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), and his later book The Inklings”
The verbiage in this reconstructed conversation can be found in Mythopoeia a poem Tolkien wrote after the conversation had with Lewis referred to above.
https://www.pintswithjack.com/s3e48/ You can read Mythopoeia here, scroll down to get to it.
I miss web 1.0 deeply, too – static HTML websites that were often self hosted with mostly text and a few pictures – and if there was some video, it was incredibly limited, but also remarkably interesting. To a certain extent the same culture lives on in some small Youtube channels – web whatever.0 has not eliminated it.
@TylerA, yeah, the state of Indigenous – “settler” relations in Canada is sad. Consider that Jewish-German relationships are saner, arguably more amicable, and more rooted in reality despite the relatively recent atrocities and weep.
That perception of the cosmos described in the Tolkien-ish quote is the magical perception and feel of the earth and sky I naturally had as a child in my beautiful country surroundings. The default setting we come into this world with. Jesus said to become like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. I never entirely lost this knowing of the earth, plants, birds, animals, the waters, and the sky. My youthful imbibing of Tolkien was part of that preservation.
And Le Guin’s writings helped also.
Context for Tom Bombadil quote [from Book 1, Chapter 7 of LOTR.
Whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days had passed Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be round him. He spoke at last out of his wonder and a sudden fear of that silence:
‘Who are you, Master?’ he asked. {he=Frodo}
‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.’
And also a two year full time immersion and training in the biodynamic horticulture system taught by Alan Chadwick and some direct contact with the man, a visionary, difficult, magical force of nature. I was able to at my work to make a labyrinth with 500 feet of pathway planted with a mixture of California native plants and lavenders. A rosemary is paired with à lavender across from each other at the entrance. In Chadwick’s herbalism lavender was the yin to rosemary’s yang. The center has a Palo Verde tree shedding a ring of log round seats. Scattered among the plants are stones painted in a variety of designs and images by students in art classes at the school where the labyrinth is. The human world still has many beauties.
@JMG (#179, replying to BeardTree on the Tolkien quote):
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/1btxzxq/anyone_know_from_where_this_tolkien_quote/
It’s a prose paraphrase by Humphrey Carpenter of some lines from Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia.” The original poem was first published only in 1988, in the second edition of Tree and Leaf.
Cordwainer Smith mentioned!
One of the most underrated science fiction authors of all time. He makes Phillip K Dick look like a boring square! I’ll also recommend his book ‘Psychological Warfare’, an excellent introduction to how narratives are engineered. It dates from the 1940’s but the techniques are still applied today.
This sort of oddball SF is why I find the genre’s tendency to orbit self referential techno fetishism and desperate desire to be iconoclastic while lauding the status quo to be frustrating at times. The genre has vast possibilities and I want more of it. Too bad I’m an awful writer!
Cheers,
Jz
A thing I love about Ursula K. Leguin’s science fiction is that the “science fiction” was just a device to explore human and environmental situations,as was her fantasy. She never believed in nor hoped for the reality of space travel, unlike many sci fi writers.. One of her best stories: Always Coming Home was set in a post peak Napa Valley.
Another writer whose SF stories I enjoyed for that reason is Mary Doria Russell.
Stephen
Tyler A. # 169:
I agree. It seems American Natives tribalism doesn’t allow to label all that people under the binary option between “noble savages” and “bad guys” as a whole.
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Phutatorius # 175:
Thanks for your comment, I take note of it. Well, in an ideal world, “true” and “real” should mean the same thing, but here in real world they can’t have an exactly equal meaning…
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JMG # 179:
Yes, believers in god Progress cherrypick their “evidences” to support their belief too, under the confirmation bias, but it seems in last decades they need to work harder to find them. Of course, at the same time, more and more people can give up this belief slowly, so I think you’re right in your comment.
In relation to the discussion of the Mythopeia poem (linked in comment 180 by Beardtree), there is a stanza which made me think of Northwind Grandma in comment 16 (“the large slow oddity of cows”)
“The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs, green grass, the large slow oddity of cows, thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry, slime crawling up from mud to live and die, these each are duly registered and print the brain’s contortions with a separate dint.”
It is always a pleasure to do a slow derive through the various links commenters here supply… 🙂
I looked up the Burgess Model mentioned in Debord’s Theory of the Dérive. The concentric rings radiate out from Zone 1 (central business district). Zone 2 is the “Zone of Deterioration” or industrial / slums. Zone 3 houses the working class that escaped Zone 2, with residential Zones 4 and 5 increasing in wealth.
In 1939 Homer Hoyt developed the Hoyt Sector Model or the “Wedge” which emphasized development along transportation arteries railroads and highways.
To me there are positive aspects of this model as they relate to a commuter train network. Sydney, Australia is a great example as the street serving the station also serves as a shopping street and they are still havens for all sorts of small businesses. Tokyo, Japan takes this to the extreme with countless small stations, each a nuclei of local shopping all the way up to major rail stations housed in giant shopping centers. I believe Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia has similar wedges in which rent and real estate prices escalate the closer one gets to a commuting station.
The Multiple Nuclei Model (1945) – The “Patchwork” by Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman
– modern cities have multiple centers (nuclei).
– A city may still have a traditional CBD, but there will be various districts such as a medical district, office parks, industrial park, large campuses, etc.
– lot’s of dead zones through which one is forced to drive by automobile to reach the desired district.
The Galactic City Model was an update by Chauncy Harris in which the old central business district is no longer the center of gravity. Edge Cities orbit the dying or soulless center, are filled with shopping malls, office parks and residential areas and are connected by a beltway or interstate highways.
I see much of the modern American urban landscape as a mix between the Multiple Nuclei and Galactic City model and I’m trying to get my head around the best way to dérive this type of psychogeography. My thoughts:
– Even a mid-sized city would require multiple dérives to explore the different districts or edge cities.
– One dérive would be conducted after arriving by automobile to learn the way the psychogeography has evolved but a follow on dérive would use public transportation, the ease or inconvenience of it providing useful data.
– Once on foot the ease or inconvenience of walking between different nodes in that district will provide good info. Thinking this over most college campuses have a entertainment district nearby serving the students and one could say there is a type of integration with the surrounding landscape but some large institutions may rely on a stale cafeteria and food trucks out front, all to serve the 30 minute “lunch break”.
JMG wrote to Chuaquin: “every myth inspires the people who believe in it to cherrypick their experiences to find evidence that fits the myth. That can continue for a long time, but eventualy one or both of two things happen — either it becomes so hard to find experiences that fit the myth that belief cracks, or another myth becomes more appealing, or both. I think we’re in the middle of both.”
Interesting, I was reading about things along this line this morning in the latest Charles Eisenstein essay, “When the Rituals Stop Working:”
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/when-the-rituals-stop-working
He starts it off by talking about a sangoma ritual healer from Africa lamenting that other sangomas are saying their ceremonies don’t work as well as they used to. Then Eisenstein flips and talks about how the rituals of modernity aren’t working as well as they used to, focusing on medicine for starters.
I was reminded in all of this about how you mentioned in previous posts and essays how many people are turning back to ancient polytheistic deities because their prayers to Jesus and the Jesi aren’t working as well as they used to. Considering some of your recent remarks about how you expect Christianity to be mostly a religion of the well to do, upper classes of society this makes a lot sense. They have the money and clout to get by even if their prayers don’t work as well. Meanwhile rural heathens, trailer trash wiccans, and lower class urban hoodooists and the like will be (re)turning to other forms and emergent forms. It must have been what it was like in Roman times…
prayers to the deities and the traditional pagan religion might not have been going as well as the age of Pisces dawned, but Christ answered, the Buddha opened a path, some kind of savior figure showed up.
Now, as the age of Aquarius continues its dawn, Christ and the Buddha remain silent to many who call out, and so they go their way to find someone who makes a charm. They myth of progress falters. No one is coming to save us. At the same time, the world isn’t ending either… and we grope our way towards the new myths and return to old stories that will carry us through.
If you need to type funny characters you can type “charmap” into Windows search and get Character Map, a file with all the possible characters. Copy and paste what you need. If there’s a keyboard short cut it will show at the bottom right. Note the numerals must be typed on the numeric pad, not the top row of keys.
Chris Smith #76, #97
The first building is the Humanities Building, University of New Mexico. If you want to see it, you’d better rush. It’s been condemned.
“In 2020, an assessment of the building’s condition reportedly identified several issues that were deemed non-repairable. These included: structural failure, frequent flooding, and various safety, code and ADA-compliance issues. Because of the assessment, the decision was made to demolish the Humanities Building and plan a new building in its place.” — https://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/16267167
Could sitting at a sidewalk cafe for a couple of hours watching the world go by count as a static dérive?
@John Zybourne (#187):
To find his books on psychological warfare, you need to know his real name: Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger.
He wrote (so far as I have been able to learn)
A Syllabus of Psychological Warfare (1946) and Psychological Warfare, (1948; 2nd ed., 1954)
as well as other studies, most of which are probably still classified; a few have been published in his Essays on Military Psychological Operations (1966), which I have not yet managed to find available anywhere online.
@Justin Patrick Moore #192 I beg to differ. In my neck of the woods – South Central Valley of California – Fresno to Bakersfield – Trailer Trash Christians, Rural Christians and Lower Class Urban Detritus Christians, Former Addict Christians, Homeless on the Street Christians continue to multiply and find solace and help in good old Jesus. My preferred spiritual habitation and hang out zone. And Chrsitianity is actually a modified polytheism, a tritheism if you please, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and They continue to manifest.
@Martin Back #194: I do hope its replacement will reflect the old Pueblo style of the older buildings, but considering what the last new building I saw go up on that campus, don’t bet on it. Just pray.
Pat Mathews, former Lobo. For something nicer to look at, the bronze lobo wolf outside the entrance to the Plaza, looking like an outtake from the story of Romulus and Remus.
Scotty # 191:
Concentric rings theory seems very interesting, but I’d like to point Zone 1 (central business district) could be also called “gentrified tourist park”, according what I see in some towns here. According a tendence which seems to thrive across EU, the oldest buildings downtown have become to some extent touristic apartments, when they aren’t museums nor another old monuments.
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Justin P. # 192:
Thanks for your comment, I hope I’ll read your link soon…
Justin 181
> I miss web 1.0 deeply, too – static HTML websites that were often self hosted with mostly text and a few pictures
I, too, miss the olden days of 2000 to 2005. I was on the scene, training myself html from books and Lynda dot com (which WrongThinkedIn ruined) along the way.
I will be rebelling big-time in the next few months regarding organizing a website for my husband, “Jethro’s,” woodworking micro-business. The basics are WordPress, but otherwise the correct word that comes to mind is “hokey.” One of the things is that we will us big-time is clipart,— the hokier, the better. We have neither the money nor inclination to go broke buying images on a per-image basis. I buy clipart in sets cheaply. Our team of four: #1 Jethro (the principal constructing objects for sale), #2 a WordPress expert who also hosts the site, #3 me (assembles clipart; bookkeeper; minor writer; organizer), and #4 a writer (jack-of-all-trades; idea-bouncer-off-er; will evolve over time). I fall short at writing,— at best, I am a C-writer (A-F).
I am currently mired in devising a monthly bookkeeping regimen; therefore the website comes fast on the heels of finishing bookkeeping.
Jethro’s website.
I followed the evolution of website-building from 2000 until 2016. By 2016, websites were getting too complicated for a learner like me to do alone. When javascript entered in a big way, I tried to keep up but couldn’t. Web 1.0, one can STILL program that html with ease, but websites would be informational only. Our website will be as Web 1.0 as possible, but since the website will be e-commerce, we must add that function as a necessary complication. We will be WooCommerce-based, but the rest of the site will be informational as possible, using meaningful (no fluff, thank gods), educational text, hokey clipart, and humorous. I consider visual-“movement” (like film) on a website to be painfully-distracting (I don’t like it), and takes away from what a website is for.
Hokey is what I am going for: we can afford and manage hokey. I know what Web 1.0 felt like when it was in vogue, and I will head for that “retro” feel. Much of Web 2.0 was alright, but after that, upgrades got so complicated that one would needs to be independently-wealthy to afford a website (they got so complex, it felt like one needed to program in Assembler language). Not our style. We go retro; “simple” is wha we can manage within present-day e-commerce constraints.
I want to give a shout-out to the person who is slotted to be our writer. I MET HIM HERE. Before that, two years prior, I pulled my hair out (many sleepless nights) trying to find a writer, and then bumped into him here on your blog.
JMG, you have attracted a whole f’in’ lot of super-good-writers here, and I can’t think of a better place to find one. I shan’t name the person; for one thing, Jethro and I haven’t yet embarked on pulling the website together except for assembling big parts we need. Besides, our “Mystery Writer” would be in charge of divulging his own identity, if that is what he wants,— at any point. We haven’t yet started working on “content” of the website, so I am getting ahead of myself. I shall keep him anonymous, referring to him as “Mystery Writer.” Mystery Writer, thank you‼️; I hafta devise a monthly bookkeeping system; we gotta photograph the “pieces” Jethro has already built.
JMG, I believe we are as you have described when it comes to micro-business. It appears our little ”group of four” is part of the entrepreneurial edge you speak of (by accident). Besides coming up with the hokiest website ever, selling our handmade wares, we intend to keep a low-profile for the duration of the business. Wisconsin is enough in the middle-of-nowhere (in the sticks) where I feel our micro-business is safe. Middle-of-nowhere (family farms; exurb) is an asset.
Thank you, Justin 181.
????Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Chuaquin #199,
No doubt. I remember visiting Bern and even though I generally enjoyed the aesthetics of the city center there was a part of me that was dismayed at the tourist oriented businesses. Thai restaurants* and ubiquitous tourist souvenir stores with mass produced goods. When I see this in the EU, my feeling is that at least the buildings are being preserved to keep some sort of fairy tale alive.
There are preserved areas and areas of beauty in many US cities but large sections of the central business districts are overly dedicated to sterile office space or run down.
* Disclaimer – Access to good Thai food is a god given right but I was seeking a Swiss psychogeography that day but besides the beautiful cityscape I was hit with the full force of modern tourism.
Anyone heard of Merlin Coverly?
I discovered him via a Wikipedia link. He’s written a book on psychogeography, which I will be checking out soon. Down below is a link to an interview he gave concerning the literary history of psychogeography, a good portion of which concerns Dubord.
In this thread there has been discussion on works of literature that are dérive related. In the Merlin Coverley interview there is mention of John Bunyan serving as one of the literary origins of psychogeography. Oh man, I really dig that. A dérive of the Town of Mansoul or an extended dérive with Christian on his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, anyone?
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/psychogeography-merlin-coverley/
https://psychogeographicreview.com/the-art-of-wandering-the-writer-as-walker-by-merlin-coverley/
Hi John Michael,
No worries at all. 🙂 And good to hear. With the Aspergers you’ve mentioned, I tend to use an unambiguous choice of words, and also have the belief that it is better to clearly state social circumstances and situations, rather than say nothing at all. Dunno. Have to laugh, I’ve long been accused of over subtlety, but don’t employ that mode of communication with you, because of your special wiring – which I might add gives you the ability to research and pierce the metaphorical veil. I figure that you’re OK with that, despite the occasional misunderstanding and ruffled feathers. 🙂 Life is rarely smooth.
As to the second part of your reply, I’ve never been there so have no valid basis for an opinion. From a larger perspective, western culture does promote a certain sort of rootlessness, mostly for purely crass economic reasons, and to which I’m not much of a fan. But fully accept that my views are not widely shared.
Cheers
Chris
Justin P:
I’ve read your link to Charles Eisenstein post, and I’ve found it very interesting. Modern materialism and rationalism seem to have eroded old school beliefs and magic, but this situation won’t last for much more time. Materialism itself is a belief related with Faustian attitude, so…
However, I don’t see in that link any open reference to the supposed weakening of Christianism (?).
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Beardtree # 197:
Indeed, Christianism maybe is a monotheism disguised as a polytheism, a polytheism disguised as a monotheism, or a religion between mono/polytheism. It depends how do you try to understand the Trinity mystery (which by itself it cannot be rationally understood).
I can tell you here secularization has reached its biggest level within native Spaniards, but maybe Second Religiosity is beginning: at least in my town Catholic churches, since some years ago some adults have been baptized and received their First Communion; these events were more uncommon when I was younger. It’s also interesting that foreign migrants from Christian origins seem to keep their faith (catholic, protestant or orthodox), in spite of our local secularized society. Maybe our nowadays secular culture days are numbered, who knows?
@Beardtree #197:
Hi there. I thought you and some other Christians here might beg to differ. I got no problem with that. I do see some of what you are seeing. I have a close friend/family member who went crazy on meth and converted to Christianity. It has seemed to help him. We used to practice ritual magic together back in the day, before he committed fully (fool-ly?) to the drug path. He confides in me and my wife that he doesn’t know really if God is there and listening or answering his prayers. I do think G-d has answered some of his prayers, but he doesn’t seem to have a deep spiritual experience. That’s just my take, but he was like a brother to me, so we were close. Shared a dorm room, etc. I talk to his mom, my maternal aunt, every week, etc. I’ve seen it too in other addicts and alcoholics and those who’ve been hit by major tragedy, turning to Christ.
In his guise as uinversal healer, that’s a thing Christ is pretty good at… but some people are looking for other Goddesses and Gods.
I like what I call the Johnny Cash strain of Jesus… the ones who really do come from difficult places and find redemption. I don’t see a lot of that coming from the mouthpiece of Hegseth and others in the upper classes and power echelons when they talk about Jesus though. (When they aren’t being detourned by Pulp Fiction that is.)
I’ve seen and heard of a lot of people being baptized with no real spiritual experience afterwards. That might not be there fault. It kind of fades without further devotion and practice of spiritual disciplines. The average church service doesn’t do much to inspire.
That’s just my take. I write this as someone who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church, that none the less had its good aspects and things I thought were nice, and as someone who had six years of indoctrination at Catholic schools… I’ve wrestled with Christianity for awhile. Personally, I prefer it in its gnostic mode.
One of the first people I met who was an esoteric Christian taught me about the Elohim and how that word means many and is plural, so yeah, I get that it can be polytheistic too… but not many mainstream Christians are going to accept that.
I’ve been in services too, since I left my Christian background behind. Went with my parents a few times in my twenties. Of course, plenty of funerals, as in any life. Wedding services too… the ones where they just preach leave me little inspired, and I know I am not alone in that.
Christianity will still be around in the future, for sure, but it will be just one among many different cults. Even now in America, the different ways of being Christian are so different, many of them don’t really look like they are doing the same thing. Think of how wildly different Jehovah’s Witnesses are to snake handlers and how they are to Amish and they are to those going to Orthodox churches, praying the rosary and seeking out liturgical experience and how different those are to Episcopal churches where lesbian priestesses are passing out communion wafers.
It’s like that song Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.
Thinking about ancient Rome and the fall of classical paganism, I don’t see any reason not to think a similar cycle will play out now with the cults that currently dominate the religious scene. As JMG said, we are in an interim phase. We are definitely in the second religiosity… I agree with the point about the second religiosity that it is kind of not a deep spiritual religious need that is being met, but a need to find a bulwark against chaos and I think that is another factor in people returning to the faith.
@Chauquin: Sorry… yeah, Eisenstein wasn’t really talking about the weakening of Christianity. He was just talking about the weakening of some peoples ability with magic / enchantment / ceremony, and also the weakening of modernity. I just linked that in my mind with comments made here in this episode of Ecosophia, and many previous discussions about weakening of the power of prayers to that particular cluster of deity(deities). I think John might have even written a post about it, the idea of old God’s not answering the same way they used to, but I can’t recall off the top of my head what the title of it was, if it indeed was an entire essay.
Hi Justin #205, and others who have commented about the lack of interaction with their chosen deity or deities and return communications, etc.
First of all, unmistakable communication from deities is rare, especially unsought communication.
Second of all, religions are among other things technologies for interacting with the divine. If you don’t use the tools you are provided, but simply sit there expecting miracles, well, I have numerous bridges to sell you, cheap. By which I mean the technology requires actual emotional engagement, even if, especially if, it is of the negative, complaining sort. The psalms provide numerous examples of this. Engagement on a personal and emotional level is key, even if, as I say, you are negative. You can day “Dammit, Lord, prove to me that you exist.” If you’re really asking, you really might be answered. Same for all deities. Rituals, prayer, fasting, and all the rest.
Also, deities, whoever they are, are not vending machines established for your comfort and convenience. They are themselves. If you have any intuitive sense of who and what they are, you have a better chance of reaching them. Simply sending a message into the spiritual void, expecting your requested diet soda, generally has little effect.
Yes, I’m blaming the “victims.” Of course, individual circumstances vary, and reports of the magic not working, whatever its kind, generally lead me to suspect the magician rather than the magic. Again, technology. In Christianity and Judaism, the prophets rail against rote performance without personal discipline.
In Buddhism, for instance, the traditional kinds and not the kinds of practices taught at corporate seminars, ethical cultivation takes place before meditational practices are taught, and they work best under some sort of supervision.
In parallel forms of Christianity, having a spiritual advisor of personal confessor is recommended before committing to a major retreat, for instance. We are all part of a community of souls whether we like it or not, and some sort of actual discipline is necessary even if we are or believe we are loners. Gah. Rant over. My apologies if this all sounded high-handed and judgmental and caused offense. It was, of course, and is to a degree intended to. JMG, please delete this if it is over the top.
BeardTree, thanks for this. I’m familiar with the poem “Mythopoeia” but thought the Carpenter quote was an unusually clear and cogent version of Tolkien’s views. As for the magical sense of the world, exactly — that’s the normal, healthy default setting of human consciousness. The narrow and impoverished state of consciousness so common in today’s industrial countries — well, that’s one of the supreme tragedies of our age.
Robert, thanks for this. I was stirred profoundly in childhood by the little selection from “Mythopoeia” included in the 1966 edition of The Tolkien Reader; the whole poem was a much later discovery for me.
John, oh, I know. Sara was the one who introduced me to Smith’s work — he was one of the authors she praised most enthusiastically on that memorable autumn night in 1982 when our relationship began. I still have, and have read many times, her battered old Del Rey paperback edition of Norstrilia. If I ever wonder whether I’m right to dismiss progress as a myth, all I have to do is compare his soaring imagination with the cliché-ridden crap that passes for science fiction these days, and the matter stands proved.
Stephen, I never could get through Always Coming Home, but her earlier works influenced me powerfully — I’d call The Dispossessed far and away the most brilliant work of political science fiction ever written, for example, not least because she was willing to let herself see the downsides of the system she favored. I’d place it alongside Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao — a SF exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, no less! — as one of the best proofs that SF can be used to talk about sciences very far removed from rocketry.
Scotty, excellent. My experience of dérives has mostly been focused in smaller cities and towns, so I’m having to learn new methods here in the sprawling DC conurbation. The galactic model fits my experience best — every city I’ve lived in still had a functioning downtown, but much of the action was elsewhere, in nodes at various distances, usually best reached by public transit — though a walk between distant nodes can be revelatory!
Justin, I’m still haunted from time to time by the harrowing (and once-famous) article Myths over Miami, which describes a particular set of urban legends among homeless kids in Miami in the late 20th century. The mythopoietic function is still alive and well, and it’s precisely among the despised and discarded that the new myths and religions of the future are being born. Thanks for the Eisenstein essay! It’s one of the standard features of the change of world ages that many old rituals lose their power, and new rituals have to be found — and of course that’s true in the religion and magic of modernity as in any other.
Martin, thanks for this. As for the ugly building, I notice that its problems include “structural failure, frequent flooding, and various safety, code and ADA-compliance issues” — that is to say, its design was incompetent as well as ugly. Sitting at a café isn’t a dérive in the Situationist sense, because you’re not exploring changes in psychogeography; that said, you can still learn from it.
Northwind, that kind of microbusiness is the wave of the future, as I see it, and hokeyness is a useful strategy — it filters out those who are distracted by glossy surfaces.
Scotty, thank you for this! I wasn’t familiar with Coverley and need to change that. As for John Bunyan, that’s an excellent point, and — despite religious differences — his book is a longtime fave of mine.
Chris, thank you, and no, I didn’t take offense. I’ve lived in places where the fact that my grandparents didn’t grow up there closed doors in my face — some parts of Rhode Island culture are like that! — but Seattle’s mostly inhabited by people who weren’t born there. DC is an odd mix of people who are longtime residents and people from every imaginable corner of the planet; I’m still figuring out how that sorts itself out.
Justin (and BeardTree), I’m going to insert an odd little personal reflection here. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve begun attending services at a little Episcopal church here in Silver Spring, since it makes a point of saying that all are welcome irrespective (in their words) “of where you are on your faith journey.” I mostly attend the Wednesday noon service, which is very quiet and reflective, just me and a dozen or so retirees participating in a service straight out of the Book of Common Prayer, but I’ve attended a couple of Sunday services (Palm Sunday and Easter), and in the process figured out why Christian services have always felt spiritually empty to me.
It’s the music. The Wednesday services have no music at all; the Sunday services — well, there are the hymns everyone sings, and the hymns the choir sings, and a few instrumental pieces (which were actually quite nice), but all of it raised a wall between me and anything even remotely spiritual. Add the music, and it has all the sacredness of a high school sixth period assembly before a big football game, just with a different selection of fight songs. I’m still not sure what to make of this; maybe it’s my autism and I’m just a natural Trappist or something, but as I reflect on my past experiences, that was the most important thing that sent me looking for something churches didn’t provide.
…and just off hand, I can’t think of another religion where congregational singing plays a major role in services, which is probably why every other religion whose services I’ve attended felt more spiritual than the Christian churches I visited in my youth. Odd.
I checked out Guy Dubord’s book on situationism back when this subject began showing up here. I failed to get much into it or out of it. But it includes a list of esteemed authors and artists, and the only name that meant anything to me was Louis Ferdinand Celine; an author I could relate to. I read Celine’s first two novels and his subsequent trilogy. But the second novel, “Death on the Installment Plan,” comes the closest to a derive. In it he just goes from one collapsing enterprise to another. He seems to attract disaster. But my favorite was the episode in the English boarding school.
@Clarke aka Gwydion: #207: I certainly think you have to put the work in, which is at least part of my point about baptism and the “getting saved” experience. A lot of Christian churches teach that works don’t count, only faith, so people seem to put little faith in. Of the many Christians I know, some really do have deep and connected knowledge of the Bible and active prayer lives. Others just go through the motions. The main injunction seems to be to go to church… I know it goes deeper for some people who do have mentors for spiritual formation and the like, but I’ve heard of many people getting saved without much apparent change to their life. It makes me think that perhaps not every soul needs saving. It also makes me think the power of the holy spirit isn’t always present when these things happen. And I’ve had Baptists who wanted to put the power of the holy spirit in me, and I’m not sure it is what I would think of as the “still small voice” I associate with the holy spirit. They wanted to put something else into me altogether. Such are the trials and travails of dating Baptist Christian baiters in highschool.
@JMG (and Beardtree). I totally agree about the music. Bleh. Praise music is the worst. The old hymns are better. There it was at least a communal feeling… but for Christian music I have to go to the plainsong chants, specifically Hildegard von Bingen, and a few different strains of it from various countries, Armenian for example.
But there, I would argue, it is the frequencies sung at and the way that it is done that creates the spiritual cleansing effect, usually in a high note register.
The overtone and lower guttural chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, has a totally different effect, and seems to connect me to the underworld / grounding / spirit below, for instance.
That’s why I have recordings of each to use when I need them for something specific. Of course Trappist leanings are good too. That’s why I’m always ready to cue up a recording of 4’33” or longer as needed ; )
The Myths over Miami story has haunted me as well… something along those lines could be used to could effect in deindustrial fiction.
Thanks for the conversation.
P.S.: Re: Baptist girls… It was a classic Flirt to Convert situation. I met her while on a camping trip and we made out the first night we met. Turned out she lived just over in Northern Kentucky, just across the river from me (Greater Cincinnati area) even though we were hours deep into Kentucky in Daniel Boone National Forest, Cave Run Lake Area.
We started seeing each other and talking on the phone a lot. I think I presented a challenge to her because I was really into Aleister Crowley and anything with the word magick though I’d settle for magic too.
We had some fun times, then she took me home for dinner to meet her parents. I was excited that her father was into Doctor Who. This was lng before the series reboot. But I was scared when at the dinner table, he said, “Son, have you ever had the Holy Spirit put into you?”
All I wanted to do was get upstairs into her room with his daughter, or get out of there so we could go to the park or a coffee house… (but really up in her room).
As a raging Thelemite, I told him I already had the Holy Spirit, so, no thanks, I didn’t want him putting anything in me. I could really see him wanting to put something in me… She never took me back for dinner…
It was a fun few months, but things really went downhill for us when I took her to the robo rave: a party in my friends basement where we drank bottles of cough syrup and listened to industrial music.
There really was no saving me.
@JMG (#208), replying to Justin Patrick Moore (#192) and mentioning “Myths over Miami.”
“Myths over Miami” is indeed haunting, and it got me thinking, too, long, long ago.
Did you ever run across a similar account of street-kids’ mythopoeia in Eugene, Oregon, written by Alley Valkerie, and titled “The Lost Lords of Neverwhere”? (It can still be found online at
http://wildhunt.org/2014/05/the-lost-lords-of-neverwhere.html#disqus_thread)
“Myths over Miami” started a years-long train of thought, which still hasn’t come to the end of its journey. Where it has gotten to, at least so far, is that everyone lives, moves and has their being in at least two utterly distinct human worlds: There is the material world of matter and energy, situated within the dimensions of time and space, on the one hand, and the immaterial world of storytelling, situated outside of time and space, on the other. Living in each of those two worlds requires careful observation and adaptation, and each world can kill you if you don’t pay respectful attention to its realities. (Also, each can heal different parts of you, though each does so in its own way.) And so forth … There are also what is sometimes termed “other-than-human worlds,” which encompass such things as living stones and mountains, and also Spirits and Deities.
All this is not quite the same thing as what Tolkien expounds, but not unrelated.
P.P.S.: What can I say? I guess I was used to Catholic girls.
As regards congregational singing. It’s rarely done well, but when done well – whoa! singing with the angels!
JMG
I go to Evensong at magnificent cathedrals in the UK sometimes. It means you don’t have to pay to enter but also, I found the services to be more spiritual than what the Catholic Church had to offer. The music is first rate sung by those trained to do it well (vicars and boy choristers) and is very soothing. It’s always bizarre to notice the size of the cathedrals and how tiny the congregation is though.
Not sure what goes on in Protestant churches in the US but a selection of fight songs sounds ominous, but appropriate given what the US is currently doing in the Middle East.
@Chauquin, et al: Hey, did you know that it was Stanley Kubrick they got to film the Artemis II mission (faked, obviously)? Yeah, from what I’ve heard he was put into cryofreeze by the illuminati and they had thawed him out just for this special mission. Check it out:
https://imgur.com/a/3OPToQt
Scotty # 201:
Gentrification is everywhere in old Europe. Historical towns centers become big museums where hotels and flats for tourists prevent new dwellers to live there, due to expensive rents.
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Justin P. # 206:
OK, I was quite puzzled because the essay you linked wasn’t about what you wrote. No problem…
—————————
JMG # 208:
I read “The Dispossessed” some years ago, and I liked Le Guin view about how could work an anarchist utopia in a planet (spoiler soon). It’s true her fondness for anarchism, but she was honest enough to depict some elephants in the room for a libertarian (in the European sense) complex society. For example, it’s funny IMHO that, in spite of having promoted an equalitarian world, they needed a small police force. And how are chosen the cops?(nobody’s perfect).
Regular church singing can be pretty bland, but the old-time Gospel music – think of the movie “Sister Act” – is another story. Anything in call-and-response form is an open invitation to get with the spirit.
On the other hand, if you have a congregation/audience that sits quietly and passively when the song – and the song-leaders – are expecting you to join in, sing along, or clap and cheer or rock out, that could dampen anybody’s spirits. I had experience of that at a 3-man group who treated us to a rousing “Down By The Riverside,” and as far as i could tell, the only ones in the audience responding as they could were an old man in a Vietnam Veteran cap, the pones with him, and yours truly, who can’t help reacting to that sort of music and has a child-like streak a mile wide and precious little ability to fake conformity without pain.
And a Vietnam veteran reacting to “Gonna study war no more…” no, that’s no football game cheerleader stuff.
Per JMG: “Scotty, thank you for this! I wasn’t familiar with Coverley and need to change that. As for John Bunyan, that’s an excellent point, and — despite reli…”
Which book? “Grace Abounding…” or “Pilgrim’s Progress”? I’m not really being a smarta__ here. Both seemed very much “from the heart,” which is what made them impressive. I can’t stomach the stodgy church hymns either. The newer, more modern praise stuff and Christian pop are worse. But going back to Hildegard is quite an improvement.
The divination angle is wonderful. Almost 20 years ago, I had an idea for what I called “The iChing of the Radio,” and my husband actually coded this thing for the iPhone. It was briefly available for downloading on the Apple store (very very briefly; it was quite primitive). It worked like this: you opened the app and asked it a question, mentally, directed at a category. You tapped the category (Love, Money, w/e) and it would spit out a pop song snippet (just the lyric; today, you could do a lot more). We built it so it had access to quite a few songs, but not alas everything that was out there, as we didn’t have the technology to do that. Anyway, it was a fun toy for a while, inspired by my random radio button pushing when I was a teenager in the 70s, driving my parents’ car. There was always a song that could appear, as if by magic, about love love love. And it always hit the spot. 😉
Okay so first things first – I freakin love this post and will have to implement it. Now on the topic of Christian signing. I am still very much in the early stages of figuring this thought out. But, I attended Catholic school. There was always pressure on us to sing during mass and in class. There was a very large contingent, who, to the best of I can tell, were singing ironically. They were loud and impassioned but at the same time I could tell they didn’t mean it. Their singing was not beautiful in anyway. They definitely struck an ironic tone. In fact, much of my experience with Catholics is this ironic tone, even when not singing. I don’t know what to make of it at this time. I’m still figuring it out. Maybe Catholicism + postmodernism = irony, but again I don’t know yet. Oh well, don’t know where else to take this so there it ends. Thanks for the post, JMG.
Phutatorius, I need to get to Celine one of these days — thanks for the encouragement.
Justin, since it’s Episcopalian it’s not modern church music — it’s a mix of old-fashioned hymns and, since the congregation’s close to half African-American, a fair amount of gospel. That doesn’t help. I enjoy listening to Hildegarde’s work, but I enjoy it as music, not as anything spiritual.
Robert, yes, I read that a long time ago — thanks for the reminder! I think your train of thought is headed toward interesting destinations. I’m thinking a great deal these days about how storytelling interfaces with the other-than-human — there’s a lot of overlap, and some of it’s really strange.
BeardTree, I’m glad you enjoy it. For me, it turns the service into just another concert, even when it’s done well.
Bridge, oh, they’re not “fight songs” in that sense. Back when I was in school, every school had its own school song, always bland and vacuous, which the students were supposed to belt out with enthusiasm at assemblies and games. Each state also has a state song, and they’re worse; Washington state, where I grew up, has this dismal ditty called “Washington, My Home,” which I rewrote in high school:
“Washington, my doom,
A place of endless gloom,
It’s gray and cold
And stinks of mold
In Washington, my doom;
Washington, my doom,
As cheerful as a tomb,
Hanford’s hot,
The summer’s not
In Washington, my doom.”
(Hanford is one of the federal facilities where the Manhattan Project manufactured bomb materials back in the day. It has off-limits zones nearly as dangerous as the Chernobyl zone.)
Chuaquin, that’s exactly it. She also noted the use of language and peer pressure as a system of social control, and explored the way the DivLab (“division of labor”) became a bureaucratic power center.
Patricia, I enjoy gospel music as music, and since there’s a lot of African-American parishioners at this church, there was a fair amount of it in the Sunday services I attended. It wasn’t any better. Just me being autistic, I suppose.
Phutatorius, sorry — The Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s a fine fantasy novel complete with heroes, villains, difficult journeys, and a happy ending.
Yule, I like that! If there were a website that hosted that, especially if it had a button to give you a choice of genres — one vote for progressive rock! — I’d use it.
Luke, that must have been interesting to listen to! I haven’t met a lot of ironic Catholics, but it’s good to know that they’re out there.
JMG,
Not all fight songs are dreary. I am particularly found of Tom Lehrer’s satirical fight song, ” Fight Fiercely Harvard. My own alma mater’s fight song is about drinking too much and flunking out.
Just to chime in on music. I do think the main function of music during service is to “put everybody on the same wavelength”, and if you don’t want to or for some reason cannot “tune in”, then it is a distraction. I usually enjoy, to some point, most songs sung by the entire assembly with enthusiasm, which is a rare thing nowadays. But I don’t really like any 18th or 19th century hymns, which are the “traditional hymns” in English-speaking countries, and modern worship music even less.
There is an old tradition of songs to be sung in individual devotion. I have often sung alone at home while playing hymns by Paul Gerhard, Niklaus Herman or anonymous older ones on the piano…
Omygod the insight that the situationists convergently evolved divination is Glorious! In college I lived in the house that age mushrooms instead of drank beer in a sort of serious wildness opposed to the frat culture that bore Animal House. The crew that I was at the tail end of encountering, we loved the Situationists and the derive and indeed treated group mushroom adventures quite with this spirit while the people coming in as I was leaving did not have the spirit of collaborative adventure and destabilizing perspective taking with shared reflection that my era did. Not at all. And it came to be for me one of those bellweathers of the death of the culture that I was always feeling that I caught the last wiff of it before it disappeared. Later I spent many years becoming quite adept at divination which, since the cards have always been charged and responsive and the curious relational situations in which I found myself have always been curious and open, was actually a practice of learning another language more than learning the process of opening myself up to the derive, this had earlier roots in my experience! Backpacking between high school and college in central America in the season of the Lonely planet guides was also a great education in this, as one decided whether to stay or move and in which direction so fluidly. Thanks for the memories and a certain new connection between them!!!!
Can we say that photographers have been doing this in some form since the invention of street photography? There’s one particular American photography movement which nailed this, “New Topographics: Man Altered Landscapes”. In the whole bunch Robert Adams is my favorite photographer. But Lewis Baltz was the most angry one. There are two other photographers John Gossage and Gerry Johansson who deal with this.
Thank you for writing this, John Michael Greer. I would love to hear your take on Photography’s relation to derive and psychogeography.
FWIW, after reading the open post until #103 yesterday, I can’t access it today.
The vagus nerve is itself the organ that both promotes and benefits from a dérive mindset, and is itself a wanderer, a stroller about the body…
https://www.physio-pedia.com/Vagus_Nerve
etymologically its name comes (apparently) for the latin for wanderer, stroller (which also gives us “vagabond” and “vague”)
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=vagus
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=vagabond
I’m rather fond of the vagus nerve and its wandering pathway, functions and associations… 🙂
April open post 2026 not findable for me
@Justin Patrick Moore, JMG & others interested in the antecedents and influences of Dubord’s dérive I highly recommend Merlin Coverley’s The Art of Wandering, The Writer as Walker and also his book titled Psychogeography.
The Art of Wandering’s starts with The Walker as Philosopher and discusses Aristotle in the Lyceum, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and I have just got to Kierkegaard and his wanderings in Copenhagen.
I’ve only scanned Psychogeography but one point I picked up was Debord was very jealous of his dérive
concept and was “…clearly anxious to promote the originality of his ideas. In the London and the Visionary Tradition chapter, Coverley begins discussing Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Robert Luis Stevenson.