Telluric Psychogeography (part 1)
Choreography in the score for Poulenc's 'Sonate' for 2 Pianos (1953)

Telluric Psychogeography (part 2)

Telluric Psychogeography part 2

[1 2 3 4 5 ]

I awoke one morning to find that I was a hair on Blake’s Buttocks.  Peering through a dense miasma at the cold grimace of a Pittsburgh morning, I was startled to see William Blake himself.  At first, I thought that perhaps he had contorted his body in such a way as to place his rotten teeth in close proximity to my unusual position within his anus.  A moment’s thought showed me how unlikely that was:  this was clearly an astral projection of the author, and one to which I was accountable in some as yet undisclosed fashion. 

I have seen a self portrait of William Blake, a pencil sketch in which he is walking along the street, turning back to look at the artist.  He is wearing a hat - a hat the same style as one given to me by Kathryn as a gift in winter 2008.  I assume that this is somehow responsible for the situation - inserted in Blake’s rectum -  in which I now find myself.

Blake spoke to me from this obscure advantage:  “In  the body, as the city, to the land” , he says.

I know  that when I am walking, my stride begins with some hesitation.  I am counting malas, laboured with my early morning breathing, muscles still tight, alignment of the spine to skull base still unsure (each morning feels like I am reliving our purported ape ancestors' descent from the trees and ascent  onto 2 legs).   The snot I blow directly to the ground, the odd occasion when I am forced by necessity to urinate upon the street.   This is a metabolic understanding of my self, the gradual deepening and strengthening of breath as my legs loosen to the hip.  Lungs, heart, skeleton:  all organs holding a specific pattern reflective of immediate experience – the drink I had last night, the food I ate beforehand – and of my genetic history – complex and challenging. 

The city responds to this .  The lark rises in the morning chirping merrily for the flaxen milk maids.     Blake wrote about a 'vegetal'  intelligence.  Victorian ancients discuss leylines and green men in gothic carvings, stomp across the dales and vales.  This human activity  activates the cityscape - recall Wordsworth on Westminster bridge 

“The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air."

 But No - a grimace crosses Blake’s face (and a surge of gas supports his displeasure).  I am obviously not answering.   Let me pull a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses  from my own behind, and quote: “ Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.  Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past”.  I am ejected!  Oh what sweet release.   With a finger in the snow before blessed forgetfulness removes the thought, I draw this table with the stains of my tribulation:

BODY:   Metabolic, Neurologic, Akashic.
CITY:  Local, Remembered, Sacred
LAND:  Geology, Manipulated, Cosmic.

 A sequence to which no doubt I will refer in future walks and writings.  There is a space in which the human body, the developed City, and the evolving cosmos can all be viewed as a resonant structure - one that 'plunges to the past', extracting architecture from chronology.

Comments