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An errant Psychogeographer once wrote a limerick that ended with a rhyme along the lines of “The ineluctable modality of walking”.   As poetry, the piece lacked focus: the scansion was wrong, and it was not a lewd commentary on social impropriety. However, as insight to our various shared walks across Pittsburgh, it seemed to demand a response. I began to frame my own limerick, goes something a little like this: 

There once was a pilgrim in Pittsburgh
 With a face full of beer and deBord.
 With mind psychoge'graphical bent
 along rivers he went
 to seek out the scent of Blake's buttocks. 

 Although I liked the forced elision in line three - and frankly delighted in the reference to bums - this is not my best foray into the genre.  (I think fondly of a few lines written in the early hours of morning after an unexpected arrival at some one or another of the Paris train stations, and which included the lines “they drank beaujoulais..on the Champs Elysee” ).

That distinction is still held by an early effort, written in the bowels of an office job, and includes the couplet “He sat in his cubicle//a kafka-esque boobicle...” . (To include the full limerick would open myself up to legal charges of slander initiated by my still current employer.) 

 A limerick is the perfectly psychogeographical poem. It is strictly controlled in structure, but intentionally transgressive in content. Poetic form is architectural, it is perceived outside of the progression of sounds, words, images, memes. So is musical form, but it is perhaps easier to apprehend poetic structure because we see the entire work on a page in front of us.  

The extraction of form requires an act of Tickling Time, removing the events into a space equal to their 'perceived dimension' +1. The perceived dimension (p) would be something like the moment of sound for a piece of music, or the current physical experience for a life.   The extracted abstract dimension (eAB) is equal to p+1. eAB could be the reckoning of a piece of music within the memory of mind as opposed to the beating of instant rhythm.  eAB could also be the nostalgic view of a torn map, representing a year in the life of a person in a place.  eAB is the flash of recognition that life is mortal. 

 The same is true on each of three levels: the Human Body, the Sacred City, and the (freaking) Cosmos (dude). The human body is a three dimensional object drawn towards mortality in a fourth, identified as a totality in the fifth. It is a structure populated by memory and meaning. Likewise, this Sacred City (Kaiser's Pittsburgh, Wordsworth's London, Blake's Jerusalem) is a landscape populated by structures that have acquired meaning through interaction with human bodies. Further, an element of consciousness draws together the Cosmos, leading towards an omega point of eschatology. The task of reconciling this progression in eAB is daunting. But a good walk on a brisk morning will do the job, and that's what this series of posts intends to elaborate upon.