May 30, 2017. Prague, Czech Republic. Palmovka metro station. The hollow, metallic morning rush hour din. Air heavy with unified intent: to arrive at a prearranged somewhere. A battered public telephone’s ring seeps through the crowd. Its invitation goes unnoticed. I pass it by, then pause and turn around. Operational public telephones still exist? Who is calling a metro station? I take a deep breath and reach out. A tingle of apprehension. The ringing ceases just before my hand touches the grimy black receiver. My hand falls to my side. A pang of regret as I continue on my way. Even if I had answered, would I have understood? I speak only the most basic Czech. I may not have picked up the phone in time, but I sure got the message: do not hesitate when you are called. Or be left wondering forever.
It was sometime during my time in Los Angeles, back in the early 1990s, when I began to drift. I could barely afford rent, let alone recreation. My mental health was not conducive to socializing. And so I walked. Around my neighborhoods of Brentwood and West Hollywood. All the way to Santa Monica and sometimes Pacific Palisades, Beverly Hills, or Westwood. The steady rhythm of my feet on the pavement. The immersion into the elusive soul of LA - the vibrant billboards of Sunset Boulevard, the gritty detergent stench of the omnipresent smog, the erratic sermons of sidewalk preachers. These micro adventures kept me alive. This form of meditation has been a part of my life ever since.
My Budapest wanderings, in the early 2010s, were epic. Hours upon hours through a city enamored with its own decay. All that fabulous neon, flickering or forever gone dark. The barely discernible ghost signs, whispering the sweet, gnawing grief for a city’s lost dreams.
It was during this time that I learned I am not alone. Back in 1955, French philosopher Guy Debord had attempted to define this obscure pastime:
Psychogeography (n): the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
Debord admitted the definition was “charmingly vague” and open to one’s own personal interpretation. How to define the state of enchantment one enters when one drifts into elsewhere? The delicious fugue. A silent voice calls; an invisible hand beckons. Deep within, an echolocation.
The key tactic of psychogeography is the walking practice of dérive, drifting with no set route, which is similar to the concept of flânerie. While flânerie is deliberately languid and aimless, dérive is curious, playful, defiant. A quest without a destination.
After Budapest came Bratislava, Prague, and Angers. Vivid chapters of my existence are written in footsteps on pavement.
Dear City: show me your faded, your forgotten. Your discarded. Show me who you really are. And I will do the same. Left or right or straight ahead? A nudge. This way. No maps, no compass. Just trust in yourself to find the way in your own way.
Same streets. Different hours, different seasons. Each successive drift revealed another facet. New graffiti. A familiar ruin demolished. Each modification was a cause for mourning or celebration. Stride like a ghost among the dopamine zombies, their gazes held captive by tiny screens.Their eyes devoid of curiosity once lifted to the world.
Along the shores of the placid Lac de Maine in Angers, France. Summer 2017. I drift past a man and a woman who are deep in conversation. “J'ai un sens d'orientation très particulière!” she proclaims. I have a very unique sense of direction. I smile to myself. So do I, dear strangers. And isn’t it delightful?
The more you acknowledge the synchronicities the more they intensify. A countryside walk along the Mayenne sometime later that summer. I was traversing a vast wildflower-filled meadow. Black-spotted cows reclined on the opposite riverbank. Not so far from the city, but a different universe. Faint music was transported in the breeze. The warped carnival music of nightmares. It intensified, rippling across the field, drowning out the birdsong. I paused amid the swaying wildflowers and watched the ridiculous vehicle pass. It had driven by me the previous day in the city. I giggled to myself as I continued on my way.
When I travel, I devote at least one entire day to drifting. Forget the Top 10 Must-Sees. Show me the heart and soul in all its perfect imperfection. Santiago. Taipei. Minsk. Vilnius. Beijing. Valletta. Papeete. Skopje. Sofia. Cape Town was so, so seductive, but, sadly, too dangerous.
Alleyways and boulevards. Dead ends. Back down streets already meandered. Experience a different view of the same path. The local quirks. The symmetries too perfect to be anything but random. I sometimes catch looks from those rare souls who notice my luxuriation. A nod of solidarity. A twinkle of mischief exchanged. Each place now inhabits my spirit, and I leave a bit of myself behind.
Urban exploration, or Urbex, has emerged in recent years as an offshoot to psychogeography. It’s the exploration of abandoned buildings and industrial sites in the borderlands of a city. Rurex is the rural version. Both of these practices are largely dependent upon one’s willingness to trespass in ruined or abandoned property.
It was sometime back in the early 1990s. I was home on a visit from LA. My sister Pebby, two high school friends, and I set out to explore an abandoned house in the countryside. A house we’d all driven by many times. There were no No Trespassing signs. We piled into Pebby’s car, a beat up burgundy land yacht that was having transmission issues. Sometimes she could only drive it in reverse. But we made it out there. It was some gloomy, snowless month. The sky was that one gray all-encompassing cloud of early spring or autumn. April, maybe. Or was it November?
We parked in the dirt driveway and walked up to the house. The windows were intact. The front door was unlocked. The house was still furnished. No one had vandalized or looted the place. A rusted cast iron skillet sat on the stove. The table was set. The faintest traces of food remained on the plates. It was as if they had just disappeared right in the middle of their meal. We ascended the warped wooden stairway on tiptoes. Clothes lay in piles in the bedrooms. Stuffing oozed out of the bare mattresses. I held up a white skirt with pink polka dots. A young teen’s skirt. I suppressed the urge to keep it as a souvenir. I plucked a piece of paper from a pile of detritus on the floor next to the bed. It was an eviction notice from 1946. I showed it to the others, then laid it back where I found it. 1946. Were we the only ones to have been in there since? What became of these people? They were forced to leave, yet no one took their place? We walked back to the car in silence.
Back then, the threat of encountering vagrant meth or heroin addicts was almost nonexistent. These days, I would not dare to venture into such spaces. The memory of that farmhouse haunts me to this day. Like that recurring dream so many of us have, in which we wander through a house of infinite rooms and secret passages. Sometimes pursued, sometimes lost, sometimes both. Always curious. It’s as though I had trespassed into a three-dimensional manifestation from my subconscious.
My psychogeographic expeditions continue, even here in remote northern Michigan. Pavement has been replaced with deer trails, concrete with Earth, buildings with forest. No two drifts are the same here, either. New wildflowers and birds appear and disappear with the seasons. The river bends shift with each deluge. Abandoned nest holes in fallen trees captivate me with their mystery.
