Come, stravage with me.

 

 

‘’What was the word I used this morning?’’ ‘’You used a lot of words this morning. It was like a fucking Will Self lecture.’’

The Thick of It, BBC 2.

I am new to life here in PsyGestan, the land of psychogeography. Like any immigrant to a new country one of the first things you need to do is learn the lingo. And something you notice early on is that there are a lot of words for walking. Psychogeography turns one of those awful pieces of management speak on its head and, instead of encouraging you to ’Walk the Talk’, demands that you ‘Talk the Walk’. Here in Psygestan there are as many words for walk as the Eskimo allegedly has for snow and the Manchunian actually has for rain.

But, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, psychocartographers, mythogeographers, and schizocartographers, I want to champion an underused one. Stravage. As used by Arthur Machen back in the 1890s.

‘’The fact was that one grey Sunday afternoon in the March of that year, I went for a long walk with a friend. I was living in Gray’s Inn in those days, and we stravaged up Gray’s Inn Road on one of those queer, unscientific explorations of the odd corners of London in which I have always delighted.’’

Machen, Arthur. A Fragment of Life.

Stravage, verb (used without object). Scot., Irish, and North England. To wander aimlessly.

I think that’s a great word. A cross between stroll and ravage, it contains elements of both strange and vague.  They say it is probably a shortening of the word ‘extravagate’, which means stray or roam but can also mean “to go beyond proper limits”.

So my definition of stravage is: To roam without limits, aimlessly.

Once I found the word in Machen I went looking for where else it was used, and found it used by T.E. Lawrence…

‘’…if you still stravage the roads of England in a great car.’’

(That is exactly what you should be doing to the roads of England, isn’t it?  Stravaging them in a great car.)

…and in this, from Judge Ferdinand Francis Fernandez of California…

“Moreover, the statute speaks with enough clarity to permit (nay require) one to stop with its own words, rather than undertaking to stravage in a wilderness of possible legislative purposes.”

…but that was pretty much it, as far as Google was concerned.

Well it’s just not good enough. Stravage is a word that demands to be used more.

Not just going forward. Oh, no. In the great tradition of psychogeography, it needs to be retrospectively inserted into appropriate works. Edward Hyde should be seen stravaging the streets of Soho at night, Quasimodo should dream of being free to stravage around Notre Dame, and John Cooper Clarke should write of a stravage down Beasley Street. A film of Travis Bickle’s stravages through New York must be made. A bi-monthly magazine called Stravage, written in French, must be unearthed from the nineteen-fifties. A Blake engraving of an angel stravaging with a lamb in Westminister should be discovered, Thomas de Quincey’s article on drug-fuelled stravages on Oxford Street has to be re-published, and Defoe’s tale of a down-and-out pickpocket stravaging the streets of a plague filled London must be re-printed. A Baudelaire poem about a Parisian prostitute he met on a drunken stravage should be rediscovered.

The word, the idea, the very theory of the Stravage must be inserted where ever possible into the past in order to ensure it has a future.

This post was published a guest blog on the Particulations site, thanks to the generosity of Dr Tina Richardson. (http://particulations.blogspot.com.tr).

Smudging the nudge units.

”…the Spectacle wants our subjectivity, badly. Be wary of your life online. It’s not so much the information it is gathering on you – as the information it is learning how to implant in you. If you don’t know what a government ‘nudge unit’ is, then find out – because if governments have them, you can be certain big corporations, organised crime, charities and public bureaucracies do. If you are fully engaged with life online, you might be surprised by how much online is not just fully engaged with, but, how fully it IS you. For once, modesty, hiddenness and anonymity are radical positions.”

Psychogeography Now, A Talk for Edge Hill University by Phil Smith (2016)

This is part of a presentation I downloaded a month or so ago that managed to implant itself in my mind. Was I being nudged? Ohh, lets not go down that road. Let’s take Mr Smith (Mr Smith!?) as being one of the good guys, which he seems to be from the little I’ve seen of his, erm, on-line presence.

What can I do about this? How can I throw my 1/4 AF spanner (it’s a small spanner, trust me, I used to be an engineer) in the works without wrecking the works altogether. After all, I quite like my on-line life.

Mis-information. That’s what I came up with. Feed the machine mis-information and hope the old adage garbage-in-garbage-out still holds.

So, from tomorrow onwards I intend to do at least one random act on-line that has nothing to do with who I am everyday. I have no idea how to judge if I succeed in confusing anybody (apart from myself) but I am thinking of it as a virtual derive, where I go in directions I would never normally go.

I’ll call it snudging.

Nota bene

I’ve had to leave Psygestan and go back to the real world for a week or two, for work, but I have managed to do a few bits and pieces here, of which more anon.

However, I want to share a thing that struck me recently, but to do so I need to let you know how the thing got close enough to strike.

I like notebooks. I have loads. More than I could ever hope to fill, even if I spent all day writing down every thought that crawled across my mind.

The other relevant point is I used to watch Mythbusters whenever I saw it was on tele, and it is still one of the programs I’ll look for on t’internet when I am stuck and bored. If you aren’t familiar with the show it doesn’t matter, the reason I mention it is because one of the presenters, Adam Savage, was found of saying “Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down.”

That’s when it struck me. The only difference between Psychogeography and going for a walk is writing it down.

I now have a reason to own more notebooks than I have thoughts to fill them.

Schizocartography

 Dr Richardson is one of the first people I (virtual-world) met when I moved here to Psygestan and her site, email newsletter, and magazine STEPZ, have all helped me to  start finding my way around.

Schizocartography is a term developed by Dr Tina Richardson, and more details can be found at her website at http://www.schizocartography.org. Having read her page I offer up my thoughts below.

Cartography is map making. Schizo comes from a Greek word meaning ‘split’, but here it’s being used to mean many voices, different views. So schizocartography means map making from a different viewpoint, with many inputs.

Different from what, then?

Well, maps these days all look the same. Ohh, they do! They do a job. They get you from A to Z. And they all do it the same way, because it’s easier for everybody that way. Everybody understands the A-to-Z without thinking about what they are looking at. But…

There are other ways of making maps. The way maps look today is a result of years of people choosing to make them look that way. And the reason they look that way is because they get you from home to work to shops and back again. Sleep to work to spend. When you go from A to Z you don’t need to worry about B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X, or Y.

Schizocartography offers you more than A-to-Z, it offers you B-through-Y as well. It tells you about the area, not the route. It tells you where you can go, not where you should go.

It does this by listening to the people who live in, and use, the spaces in B-through-Y. By putting what they know about the area on the map you get a map that informs you instead of instructing you.