Sidewalk Contemplation
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One way to read Mythogeography is as a primer for a spatialised way of thinking, for an intellectual-spiritual discipline, a form of embodied contemplation for the ambulatory soul.
All of the following are mental exercises for honing a mobile decentred (selfless) self, the ambulatory and embodied soul of a Walker.
One way to read Mythogeography is as a primer for a spatialised way of thinking, for an intellectual-spiritual discipline, a form of embodied contemplation for the ambulatory soul.
All of the following are mental exercises for honing a mobile decentred (selfless) self, the ambulatory and embodied soul of a Walker.
- Putting one foot in front of the other is a good way of tripping over – so learning how to place things (including oneself) to the side of other things is the start for a more general thinking “to the side” of things.
- Learning how to be an unexceptional part of the multiplicity of optic flows is a discipline to be practised in high streets. It requires de-focusing from commodities in shop windows or on inward concerns. It means forefronting your existing capacity for reducing the multiple informations of the crowded street to simple, necessary affordances of slope, swirl, surface, obstacle, eddy, angle, etcetera. But now you deploy them knowingly as you weave a way through the crowds, leaving something of the pattern you make with each passer-by. (Check de Certeau’s chapter on Walking in the City in The Practice of Everyday Life for an inflated account of this production of the city.)
- Camouflage is about as much of an identity as is necessary in the city, but there is also a mythic-ethic aspect: hold yourself in preparedness. A glove or toy dropped from a buggy. A fallen pedestrian. A major accident. An assault. Depending on what mythic character you have developed and to whatever layers of mastery of compassion and anger you have ascended, hold yourself always ready to accept whatever are affordances for you. As with the leaving of patterns, what you leave is not an act of heroism or random kindness, but a frayed edge of a pattern of heroines and heroes.
- Alone, walk the street or the hillpath or the beach into yourself. This is not a simple self-negation, it is not an opportunity to empty psychic filth onto the world. This is a geographical act, raising and reforming memories, feelings, self-images and setting them at the mercies of the far vistas, of the straightness of the path, of the massing of the flocks. Allow all those inner things nattering in heart and head to be softly contoured by the dale, torn apart by corvine parliaments, bordered by barbed wire fences, monumentalised by the faces of mountains and cliffs.
- The mythogeographical Walker will eventually (or quickly) learn to wander with an inner geography, a psychic tent filled with story-maps, and an ever shifting companion – sometimes a shadow of themselves (a ghost of what they were), sometimes a shadow of the invisible college of Walkers (a frayed edge that is never resolved into either fiction or organisation), sometimes a quiet and powerful crowd, sometimes a shadow of a possible encounter.