Walking Backwards
Walking Backwards – or – The Magical Art of Psychedelic Psychogeography
Greg Humphries & Julian Vayne
The Universe Machine
This was an uneasy read for me. I feel comfortable interpreting and repurposing journey narratives told within the Christian tradition. I have no faith in their ‘magic’, but they are ‘everyday’ enough for me to be comfortable with them and with détourning them. So my reservations about the multiplicitous ‘paganism’ of Greg Humphries and Julian Vayne’s Walking Backwards are hypocritical and inconsistent; yet I baulk at the exoticism.
If you struggle with the same prejudices, I recommend a disrupted reading and dive straight into the journeys. Start at page 57 with the two writers around Roughtor, framed by an Easter Egg Hunt and the leaving of a bodhrán in King Arthur’s Hall. Their venture begins in farce, with clumsy encounters with bog, electric fence and quad biker, and passes through the abjection of “burnt plastic and animal remains” as preparations for the powerful emergence of a symbolic path, a setting loose of a magical child-other, a connecting “with what is not my ‘self’” and a loop back to an influence (psychedelic and plant-based) that is “integral, interconnected and inseparable from myself”. This setting of a ‘self’ in motion, in parts, and then within the play of familiarity and strangeness, is a particularly strong dynamic pattern and might be transferred and used by other walkers at different levels of intensity and ‘faith’.
The sub-title here claims the book for ‘psychedelic psychogeography’, but the accounts of the walks are closer to an altered-state-of-conscious version of what Dee Heddon calls ‘autotopography’; the inscribing of landscapes with an (in this case, visionary) autobiography. “Energetic” parts of a self appear “as externalised physical beings”; a lexicon of symbols by which to interpret the appearances of lamb, star and other entities that completes Humphries and Vayne’s first journey at Hartland Point. Yet, this is also where I begin to struggle with the ‘magical art’ approach; finding the balance between exploring the ‘art’ or the ‘self’ and the landscape. At times it feels as though, in the blizzard of Kabbalah and Santo Daime Catholicism that comes to the fore in the latter parts of the book, the immediate terrain is in danger of being lost beneath the dressings of landmarks with prayer flags, altars and offerings. Not that such things should not be done, but within their practice there need to be more ‘holes’ for the landscape to coming flooding back through.
This is a well-written and usefully illustrated book, a vivid introduction to a particular kind of walking art, and a challenge to any walker to pick their way through an unfamiliar territory of ideals, symbols and entities without losing touch with the dust.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
Greg Humphries & Julian Vayne
The Universe Machine
This was an uneasy read for me. I feel comfortable interpreting and repurposing journey narratives told within the Christian tradition. I have no faith in their ‘magic’, but they are ‘everyday’ enough for me to be comfortable with them and with détourning them. So my reservations about the multiplicitous ‘paganism’ of Greg Humphries and Julian Vayne’s Walking Backwards are hypocritical and inconsistent; yet I baulk at the exoticism.
If you struggle with the same prejudices, I recommend a disrupted reading and dive straight into the journeys. Start at page 57 with the two writers around Roughtor, framed by an Easter Egg Hunt and the leaving of a bodhrán in King Arthur’s Hall. Their venture begins in farce, with clumsy encounters with bog, electric fence and quad biker, and passes through the abjection of “burnt plastic and animal remains” as preparations for the powerful emergence of a symbolic path, a setting loose of a magical child-other, a connecting “with what is not my ‘self’” and a loop back to an influence (psychedelic and plant-based) that is “integral, interconnected and inseparable from myself”. This setting of a ‘self’ in motion, in parts, and then within the play of familiarity and strangeness, is a particularly strong dynamic pattern and might be transferred and used by other walkers at different levels of intensity and ‘faith’.
The sub-title here claims the book for ‘psychedelic psychogeography’, but the accounts of the walks are closer to an altered-state-of-conscious version of what Dee Heddon calls ‘autotopography’; the inscribing of landscapes with an (in this case, visionary) autobiography. “Energetic” parts of a self appear “as externalised physical beings”; a lexicon of symbols by which to interpret the appearances of lamb, star and other entities that completes Humphries and Vayne’s first journey at Hartland Point. Yet, this is also where I begin to struggle with the ‘magical art’ approach; finding the balance between exploring the ‘art’ or the ‘self’ and the landscape. At times it feels as though, in the blizzard of Kabbalah and Santo Daime Catholicism that comes to the fore in the latter parts of the book, the immediate terrain is in danger of being lost beneath the dressings of landmarks with prayer flags, altars and offerings. Not that such things should not be done, but within their practice there need to be more ‘holes’ for the landscape to coming flooding back through.
This is a well-written and usefully illustrated book, a vivid introduction to a particular kind of walking art, and a challenge to any walker to pick their way through an unfamiliar territory of ideals, symbols and entities without losing touch with the dust.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews