boredom is always counter-revolutionary

1

Psychogeography is not what it once was. In tracing what it has been, Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography attempts to consolidate this awkward term into a tradition that dates back to Defoe and the literary arrival of the figure of Robinson. From here, psychogeography develops as a tale of two cities: the London school, and the Parisian approach. London’s ‘visionary tradition’ progresses from Defoe, through Blake, De Quincey, Stevenson and onto Arthur Machen and Alfred Watkins. The contemporary wave of psychogeographic practise is represented by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Stewart Home (the latter, I suspect, in pastiche of the two former), who gather this vague tradition and produce an occultist and antiquarian archaeology that unearths poetry and literary adventure from urban planning and everyday ritual. Parisian psychogeography, Coverley contends, orbits around the archetype of the flaneur, so we’re talking Baudelaire and Benjamin, having begun with Poe (who, schooled in Stoke Newington, seems to be equally as affiliated with London) and later, intermittent, appearances of Robinson. The arrival of Rimbaud – so concerned with movement and so close to Baudelaire (yet also who declared of Baudelaire that he ‘was the first visionary… Unfortunately he lived in too artistic a milieu…Inventions of the unknown demand new forms’) – in London represents a moment of confluence of these two psychogeographic traditions.

2

For the Situationist International, with whom we would more immediately associate the term, psychogeography is altogether less rooted in literary history, and despite (or because of) their pro-plagiarism stance, psychogeography is vaunted as a unique conception within the declarations and mission statements of the nascent Situationist International, as a tactic to be used alongside détournement and ‘the construction of situations’. So, as the Lettrist International morphs into the Situationist International, Ivan Chtcheglov’s surrealistic ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’ (1953) is written (although not yet published) and Debord, in 1955, provides ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, which contains the most reproduced definition: ‘Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’ Debord is very good at providing rulebooks and comprehensive definitions: ‘Theory of the Dérive’ from S.I. #2 explains all the variables of a psychogeographic experiment (or: a walk) from group size to duration (“In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us” writes Chtcheglov in 1963). However, as soon as psychogeography is pulled back from abstract and speculative theory to applicable uses and practices, it becomes difficult to delimit. Accounts of drunken walks through the Latin Quarter do not match Debord’s precise and sober schema, and whilst the Lettrist article ‘Proposals for rationally improving the City of Paris’ (1955) attempts to make Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary’ realisable (‘The rooftops of Paris should be opened to pedestrian traffic bymodifying fire-escape ladders and by constructing bridges where necessary’), psychogeography remains an area of imaginative – rather than physical – adventure, perhaps permitting its later recuperation by the literary establishment.

3

Whilst Rimbaud was still writing in verse and running between Charleville, Paris and, later, London, there are a few poems that have a psychogeographical feel to them: ‘Roman’, for example, with what is apparently the first instance of the French verb ‘robinsonner’ (my book’s bad translation: ‘your heart Crusoes madly through novels’), seemingly to travel within one’s own imagination; ‘Ma Boheme’ (my book’s bad translation: ‘Wandering’),the first two lines of which I have two different translations, ‘I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed/ all holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well’ and ‘I went on my way, fists in my torn pockets; my overcoat, too, was turning into an idea’; and, of course, ‘Le Bateau Ivre’, which begins (something like) ‘I drifted on a river I could not control’. The general impression of these poems is that Rimbaud’s desire to keep moving is unassuageable yet also irresistible and he falls somewhere between the detached historian drawing up new maps of London and the leisurely Parisian flaneur who observes what is external with less concern for introspection. Rimbaud’s early psychogeography (if we can call it that) favours release, abandon and wildness: a desire to go feral. His uncontrollable movement at this time is calling out for Debord-like documentation of what is happening within himself as he moves through these different environs. The tales of his calculatedly outrageous behaviour amongst the literati of Paris is itself echoed in the stunts of the Lettrists and early Situationists.

4

It is when Rimbaud writes to his old teacher, George Izambard, in 1871 that his concerns become more overtly psychogeographical. Shortly after the letter to Izambard, Rimbaud writes and a more comprehensive letter to Paul Demeny, and in these letters he declares his newly configured poetic aspirations and his personal quest. He turns to prose poetry rather than verse, writes Illuminations, and spends an increasing amount of time in London, rather than Paris, although he frequently returns to his mother’s home, so we can’t really think of him as having ‘settled’ in London. In these two letters, as the Paris Commune slowly falls in the background, Rimbaud outlines that he is ‘going in for a debauch. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to be a visionary: you [Izambard] won’t possibly understand…’ The letter to his old schoolteacher, as well as containing the famous ‘Je est un autre’, prefigures a Debordian tract by nearly a century: ‘To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the sense, thats the point’. The letter to Demeny, likewise, could come straight from the Situationist International: ‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it?’; ‘One has to be an academician – deader than a fossil – to finish a dictionary of any language at all’; ‘The first Romantics were visionaries without quite realizing it: the cultivation of their souls began automatically: abandoned locomotives, still burning, that go on running along the rails for a while’.

5

I read recently Aidan Andrew Dun’s ‘poetic lecture’ Rimbaud, Psychogeographer, which combines biography and fictionalised autobiography with literary history to propose that Rimbaud was a spiritual guide, a seer and ‘a prophet of end-times’ who sees as solution a ‘transculture’ emerging from Kings Cross, an area seeped in psychogeographic resonances. This is where Rimbaud stayed in London, where Dun declares to be ‘contrary to all received ideas, the true sanctum regnum of British legend… the true mythological treasure-house of this island’. Dun sees in Kings Cross today ‘a universal microcosm’ (optimistic! He begins to sounds like a stoned Bill Bryson. So easily does occultist psychogeography become faux-spiritual). Rimbaud’s vision is coded into Illuminations, written whilst Rimbaud was in London with and without Verlaine, and most pertinently in ‘Promontory’, which looks back at land from a (not so drunken) boat out at sea. ‘Temples lighted up by the return of theories, tremendous views of modern coastal defences; dunes illuminated by warm flowers and bacchanalia’. The new land heralded by the vision of the promontory emerging from the sea could certainly be the same place as Chtcheglov’s future-city, although Dun’s analysis casts this poem as ‘the song of transculture… it is twelve references to different cultures in one paragraph. Perfectly united’. Whether or not a density of Proper Nouns constitutes a new world vision is less interesting than the religious fervour with which Dun recounts his own epiphany, having already called Rimbaud ‘the most significant religious poet since Dante’. Dun sees Rimbaud, ‘godhead as sunchild’, and explains his movement away from verse and later away from poetry altogether in that vague, hippy, expanded-consciousness rhetoric that sounds stirring but ultimately hollow: ‘I believe the poet glimpsed, in London, precise groundplans of a future world-temple. And yet, aware that a new transcultural religion could not be born before the coming Shift, the earth-changes that face us now, he abandoned the project of an objective art-form, his attempts to sing ‘the new love’ into being’. (Yes, I am a cynic.)

6

Graham Robb’s treatment of ‘Promontory’ appeals more accurately to Rimbaud’s ‘Robinsonner’ approach to psychogeography. Within Rimbaudian biography, Rimbaud’s final visit to England remains vague, and a colloquial reference to ‘Scarbro’’ in ‘Promontory’ has proven to be something of a red herring. Having already rendered Rimbaud with a desire for omniscient knowledge and a fascination with archival media – dictionaries, maps, papers – Robb proposes that: ‘There is no evidence whatsoever that Rimbaud visited Scarborough or, for that matter, Brooklyn. Guide-books should now be corrected accordingly. However, since poems travel without maps or timetables, and since ‘Promontoire’ sounds like a dream digest of a thousand holiday brochures, there may be more reason than ever now to make a Rimbaldian pilgrimage to Scarborough, to read the poem on the esplanade and view through his eyes a scene he never saw.’

7

We can imagine Rimbaud as bridging the gulf between the antiquarian psychogeographer of London and the lone flaneur of Paris – a collision of two traditions – a bridging that is necessary now to temper the occultism and mythologism of the former and to redress the assumed depoliticisation of the latter (hack journalists delight in declaring walking to be an eco-political gesture). Patrick Keiller’s film London reintroduces Robinson to the city, and Robinson has been reading Rimbaud (‘The Bridges’, again from Illuminations). Robinson – who is accompanied by Keiller’s narrator on a series of expeditions (derives) around London – explains his own utopian vision of the city, ‘sometimes I see the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’. Like Rimbaud, Keiller’s Robinson has supernatural powers or, more accurately, supergeographical aspirations: ‘Robinson believed that if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future’.