Burnt offerings (Holocausto) de Robert Marasco

Karen Black, admirando las fotos de los recuerdos de vida de ¨la querida madre¨. Difuntos en realidad. Bajada de thegirlwhoknewtoomuch.com

El diseño de tapa del libro. No ayuda a entusiasmarnos, es mucho más interesante el contenido.

Como he contado hace algunas semanas, compré la novela de ¨horror¨ Burnt Offerings de Robert Marasco  (1936-1998) y la disfruté muchísimo. He visto que el título en español es ¨Holocausto¨ y, creo que está muy mal traducido y no representa la idea de la novela, más cuando ¨Holocausto¨ nos trae memorias de los campos de concentración nazis.

El argumento de Burnt Offerings me  tocó el corazón porque yo soy de esas personas que se enamoran de las casonas antiguas y harían lo posible por restaurarlas con mis propias manos, si pudiera.

Me decía un colega argentino, profesor en Washington, que cuando estamos frente a un edificio, y sentimos esa ¨emoción¨ como si fuéramos parte de él, esa aproximación sensitiva, se llama, ¨fenomenología¨. Esa sensación de que ya estuvimos ahí, y que ¨pertenecemos¨ a la casa o edificio en cuestión.

Compré la novela porque primero ví la película de 1976 -con Karen Black, Oliver Reed y Bette Davis-, y me fascinó. Pues, la película es la fiel reproducción del libro ¨animado¨, salvo por las circunstancias de las muertes al final, que son ligeramente distintas; además el libro deja la trama resuelta, en la película no estamos seguros si Black reemplaza a la vieja dueña de la casa o si la anciana la posee. No es así en sentido literal.

La novela, escrita en un lenguaje claro, entretenido y correcto, trata de una familia compuesta por una pareja joven (Ben, Marian), un niño y una tía de 74 años que rentan una casona a dos horas de New York para las vacaciones del College, de julio a septiembre. El valor de la renta es muy bajo, y no sólo se debe a que la casa no está en perfectas condiciones de  habitabilidad, sino que además, en ella vive encerrada en su cuarto ¨nuestra querida madre¨, como la definen los dueños, una pareja de hermanos de edad avanzada. La condición para aceptar a los nuevos inquilinos es que sean ¨los ideales¨, que mantengan la vivienda y cada día dejen una bandeja de comida por cada servicio en la sala que precede el cuarto de ¨la madre¨,  a quien seguramente no verían, como había sucedido con los otros inquilinos de años atrás.

La escena en que la tía, (Bette Davis) se encuentra postrada y aterrada por visiones de muerte. Foto bajada de http://jigsawslair.blogspot.com/

Karen Black, ya poseída. Foto bajada de http://popreflection.wordpress.com/

A medida que pasan los días, las mujeres van envejeciendo, surgen comportamientos extraños y agresivos entre ellos, Ben siente estar al borde de un colapso nervioso, se dan una serie de accidentes.... Mientras tanto, la casa se empieza a embellecer, las plantas secas vuelven a brotar, las viñas se hacen selváticas, el natatorio se renueva, la pintura, las tejas. ...

La pareja comienza a tener problemas de convivencia, él le transmite sus temores sobre la casa a su esposa, quien, no sólo lo niega sino que sigue obsesionada por limpiar, arreglar y usar todo lo que encuentra, hablamos de vajilla de plata y oro, relojes antiguos, etc. 

Ben intenta con vehemencia de convencerla que algo sucede y debieran regresar a su departamento, mas ella se niega, la idea de partir le resulta imposible de aceptar. En un rapto de lucidez, casi al final, descubre que ella misma es un agente de una presencia malévola que la está poseyendo, y se encuentra en la difícil posición de optar por quedarse en la casa y perder a su familia o alejarse con ellos para siempre. El poder de posesión puede más que los vestigios de amor que le quedan, y le pide a quien sea que esté detrás de la maciza puerta del cuarto de ¨la madre,¨ que la ayude a ¨quemar¨ (burn) ese amor familiar, dando así la vida de su esposo e hijo como ofrendas (offerings).

La gran protagonista de la película es la Casa Dunsmuir, construída en 1899 y diseñada por el arquitecto Eugene Freeman, declarada actualmente de interés histórico, sita en Oakland, California. 

Dunsmuir House. De wikipedia.org

La casa Dunsmuir caracterizada para la película. Foto bajada de http://blackholereviews.blogspot.com/

Phenomenology: E. Allan Poe's example

Fig. 01 Downloaded from Internet

The well known Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an excellent example to illuminate our topic on phenomenology in Architecture. Poe was influenced by John Locke’s Empiricism, in the idea that all knowledge was gained by experiences through the senses. Locke stated that mind was a “tabula rasa” (a paper in white, without ideas) where knowledge was imprinted. Man’s senses allow him to learn from the external world (experience) and inner reflexion also provides ideas as part of the world within us. It is opposite to Rationalism that states man has innate ideas (inborn knowledge).

This theory was sustained by Romantic writers of the 19th Century.

In this story, a man is visiting a former good school companion, after many years since he has not seen him. And this is his first impression at arriving his house (fig 01):

“with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible”……..”with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium-“……. “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (p. 171)

After this glooming impression, reinforced by the decaying and pestilent landscape which creates a peculiar atmosphere “that had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn” (p. 172), he arrives at the unsatisfactory conclusion “that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us”.(p.171)

Here we see how his five senses, including smell, collaborate in the perception. The black, white and grays are seen outside and inside; the description of the stone textures are accurate in the analogy: “the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of external air” (p.173); the pestilent smell, the inquietude of silence …..

Trying to recover himself, he decides to rationalize the whole situation: “shaking off my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building”. So, a tiny description of fungus, fissures, textures, goes on and he finally arrives at the conclusion that the house is closely related to the decay of the family, as a collateral issue for the only line of blood maintained in the family for centuries. His extreme thought is to personify the house in Mr Roderick Usher –the owner- “upon the vacant eyes windows” and his unhealthy body.

Locke’s idea that the objects themselves also produce in us sensations, that are not in the objects but constitute the qualities – the underlaying substratum- we associate with them, is implied in the impression the man suffers while walking in the dark, intricate passages of the house. The familiar objects he knows since childhood, are not familiar anymore, they look hostile and depressing: “Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me …….were but matters to which….I have been accustomed from my infancy –while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this- I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up……….I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.” (p. 173).

The same construction of feelings and posterior ideas arises from Mr R. Usher, who explains that “He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling” (p.175). For fear, he has not ventured through the house, in many years.

The form and substance of the house had influences over his spirit and the morale of his existence. Like the writer, Mr R. Usher at last looks for a rational explanation : “He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin –to the severe and long continued illness….- of a tenderly beloved sister” (p.175)

Regardless the phylosophical background, the story is a clear example of immateriality in architecture, in the sense we take. And we want to emphasize the importance of the environment and objects in all scales. After finding the clues of imminent death even before entering the house, the writer wonders how his imagination could torture him beyond the sublime?.

Fig. 02. Usher's house by Per O.G. Dahlberg

From the essay ¨Immateriality in Architecture¨. By Myriam B. Mahiques

House and body: Sir Rabindranath Tagore’s dream of Calcutta

Calcutta. Image from http://boudoir.files.wordpress.com/

Calcutta street. Image from http://www.timwu.org/Calcutta%20Street.JPG

I had a most extraordinary dream last night. The whole of Calcutta seemed enveloped in some awful mystery, the houses being only dimly visible through a dense, dark mist, within the veil of which there were strange doings.

I was going along Park Street in a hackney carriage, and as I passed St. Xavier's College I found it had started growing rapidly and was fast getting impossibly high within its enveloping haze. Then it was borne in on me that a band of magicians had come to Calcutta who, if they were paid for it, could bring about many such wonders.

When I arrived at our Jorasanko house, I found these magicians had turned up there too. They were ugly-looking, of a Mongolian type, with scanty moustaches and a few long hairs sticking out of their chins. They could make men grow. Some of the girls wanted to be made taller, and the magician sprinkled some powder over their heads and they promptly shot up.

To every one I met I kept repeating: "This is most extraordinary,--just like a dream!"

Then some one proposed that our house should be made to grow. The magicians agreed, and as a preliminary began to take down some portions.

The dismantling over, they demanded money, or else they would not go on. The cashier strongly objected. How could payment be made before the work was completed? At this the magicians got wild and twisted up the building most fearsomely, so that men and brickwork got mixed together, bodies inside walls and only head and shoulders showing.

It had altogether the look of a thoroughly devilish business, as I told my eldest brother. "You see," said I, "the kind of thing it is. We had better call upon God to help us!" But try as I might to anathematise them in the name of God, my heart felt like breaking and no words would come. Then I awoke.

A curious dream, was it not? Calcutta in the hands of Satan and growing diabolically, within the darkness of an unholy mist!

Reference.

Glimpses of Bengal. By Sir Rabindranath Tagore. S.R.Ellison, Eric Eldred, and the Distributed Proofreading Team. 1885-1895. The letter selected belongs to the Shazadpur series and it’s dated 1891

Documentos de la eternidad

The Holy Trinity, Trinity Cathedral, Addis Ababa. Picture by Charles Roffey

¨El mejor documento de la primera eternidad es el quinto libro de las Enéadas; el de la segunda o cristiana, el onceno libro de las Confesiones de San Agustín. La primera no se concibe fuera de la tesis platónica; la segunda, sin el misterio profesional de la Trinidad y sin las discusiones levantadas por predestinación y reprobación. Quinientas páginas en folio no agotarían el tema: espero que estas dos o tres en octavo no parecerán excesivas.

Puede afirmarse, con un suficiente margen de error, que "nuestra" eternidad fue decretada a los pocos años de la dolencia crónica intestinal que mató a Marco Aurelio, y que el lugar de ese vertiginoso mandato fue la barranca de Fourvière, que antes se nombró Forum vetus, célebre ahora por el funicular y por la basílica.

Pese a la autoridad de quien la ordenó —el obispo Ireneo—, esa eternidad coercitiva fue mucho más que un vano paramento sacerdotal o un lujo eclesiástico: fue una resolución y fue un arma. El Verbo es engendrado por el Padre, el Espíritu Santo es producido por el Padre y el Verbo, los gnósticos solían inferir de esas dos innegables operaciones que el Padre era anterior al Verbo, y los dos al Espíritu. Esa inferencia disolvía la Trinidad. Ireneo aclaró que el doble proceso —generación del Hijo por el Padre, emisión del Espíritu por los dos— no aconteció en el tiempo, sino que agota de una vez el pasado, el presente y el porvenir. La aclaración prevaleció y ahora es dogma. Así fue promulgada la eternidad, antes apenas consentida en la sombra de algún desautorizado texto platónico. La buena conexión y distinción de las tres hipóstasis del Señor, es un problema inverosímil ahora, y esa futilidad parece contaminar la respuesta; pero no cabe duda de la grandeza del resultado, siquiera para alimentar la esperanza: Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediata et lucida fruitio rerum infinitarum. Tampoco, de la importancia emocional y polémica de la Trinidad.¨

Párrafos de Historia de la Eternidad. Jorge Luis Borges, página 7

Sobre la interpretación de la naturaleza de los ángeles

San Jorge y el Dragón. (San Giorgio e il drago). Pintura de Rafael Sanzio. Imagen de wikipedia.org

Hace unos días, ví la película Legión, que no es la de la saga del Exorcista, sino otra cuyo protagonistas son Dennis Quaid y Paul Bettany (San Miguel). Una película más de suspenso-horror pero que muestra a los ángeles en su naturaleza guerrera, armados, vengativos, poderosos. Y asocié con la pintura de San Jorge y el dragón, de Rafael, y recordé que los ángeles no siempre son vistos como pequeños querubines. Buscando bibliografía al respecto, dí con un libro del que leí varias páginas on line, y ya lo tengo en mi lista de ¨a comprar¨: The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. De Edward Hirsch. Me pareció muy interesante el punto de vista, de explicar cómo se los ha tomado en la literatura y el arte, en vez de hacer aseveraciones religiosas.

Paul Bettany en su papel del arcángel San Miguel (de google images)

Kevin Durand en su rol del arcángel San Gabriel. Foto de google images

Arcángel San Miguel, jefe de las milicias celestiales, en la basílica de La Merced, Barcelona. Foto de Wikipedia.org

En la página 112, menciona a Borges, quien también escribió sobre el tema. En ¨Una historia de Angeles¨ (título traducido del inglés), Borges dice que los ángeles fueron formados cuando la luz fue creada en el Cielo, para dividir el día y la noche, lo que los hace exactamente dos días y dos noches más viejos que los humanos. ¨The Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheatfields and some orchards beside the waters.¨ 
Una visión muy romántica de Borges, donde los ángeles ven la tierra con campos de trigo y viñas al lado de las aguas. También recuerda que los ángeles primitivos eran virtualmente indistinguibles de las estrellas.

Hirsch dice que los ángeles son usualmente representados como mensajeros del Señor, intermediarios de todos los profetas. El término hebreo mal´ak y el griego angelos literalmente significan ¨mensajeros¨. En hebreo, los ángeles son a menudo llamados ¨hijos de Dios¨ y vistos como en los rangos jerárquicos de un gran ejército, o las hordas de una corte real. Los ángeles sirven a Dios, pero no puede ser asegurado que vivan por siempre. Algunos son efímeros. Walter Benjamín, por ejemplo, estaba cautivado por la leyenda talmúdica que los ángeles están formados en bandas innumerables para celebrar la gloria de Dios, pero tan pronto como cantan sus jubileos, se disuelven en la nada. Como dice el libro kabbalístico, ellos mueren como las chispas en las brasas.

Thomas de Aquino advierte que no debiéramos estar seguros si los ángeles poseen cuerpos materiales (espacio formado de esencia), pero no muchos parecen haber comprendido esta precaución metafísica. Los ángeles son incomprensiblemente híbridos; son, como pájaros, ¨animales que se acercan a Dios¨ (Umberto Saba), ¨aquéllos que siempre cantan en armonía con las esferas eternas¨ (Dante). Ellos son como escaleras de espiral, según se representó en la escalera de Jacob.

Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places Through the Sense of Smell

I was writing my post about scratch and sniff events at theaters and thinking about this emphasis of the senses in architecture, when I found by chance this book Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places through the Sense of Smell. I think it must be really interesting, considering the smell is very important, for example, in the Middle Ages, people thought that diseases were produced by inhaling putrid smells. In consequence, all meals were absolutely spiced and treated with vinegar.

In my experience, one can reject a place, just because we can´t stand the smell. Isaac Asimov, in his book Foundations Edge writes about the smell of the cities and how uncomfortable it could be for visitors.

From The Scented Salamander´s post:

"An extract from Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, is quoted in the book and he wrote: "If we came to go into a church when it was anything full of people, there would be such a mixture of smells at the entrance that it was much more strong, though perhaps not so wholesome, than if you were going into an apothecary's or druggist's shop." He goes on to describe the different smells that would be encountered. This quotation sums up much of what the book is about, but it is brought it right up the present day with the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York with the smell of the dust, consisting of cement, asbestos and paper among other things."

An important aspect of this study is that it also helps you redefine what architecture is,

"The book also raises the question, what is architecture? Most of us have a preconceived notion that it is buildings and the built environment, but if we experience places through the sense of smell, as this book sets out to do, then it is rarely the actual buildings that produce the odour but the activities associated with them."

http://www.mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander/2008/04/invisible_architecture_experie.html

From goodreads.com:

What does a church smell like? Or a movie theater? How conscious are we of the smells that surround us? The idea that places have an olfactory identity is not recent. Even in ancient architecture the dynamics of scents and their permeation were incorporated into the design. The 20th century, however, witnessed an increasing need to dry out spaces and sterilize the air in the effort to eliminate any olfactory perception in the regulation of indoor air quality. The resinous odor of the timber in Peter Zumthor's Swiss Pavillon at the Hannover Expo; the thinness of the oxygen-poor Blur Bar by Diller+Scofidio; the shape-rendering Wind Tunnel by Renzo Piano for Ferrari at Maranello—these are among the most recent signs that architecture is reclaiming it's invisible olfactory dimension to add a further experience to space. This original book maps out places and scents from around the world, in architecture throughout the ages, accompanied by expert "noses": celebrated architects, avant-garde artists and scientists who research perception.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/283669.Invisible_Architecture

Divinity, Creativity, Complexity

The Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas at Austin (http://soa.utexas.edu/CAAD) is proud to announce the 15th volume of its award-winning book series CENTER: Architecture and Design in America.
CENTER 15: DIVINITY CREATIVITY COMPLEXITY, edited and introduced by Michael Benedikt, has chapters by Gordon Kaufman, William Saunders, John Haught, Charles Jencks, Michael Benedikt, Michael Ruse, Richard Becherer, Thomas Fisher, Tom Spector, Wiliam Richards, Sheryl Tucker de Vasquez, Jin Baek, Alvaro Malo, and Stanley Tigerman. For more information and to order, visit http://soa.utexas.edu/CAAD/publications (click on cover image) orhttp://www.amazon.com/CENTER-15-Divinity-Creativity-Complexity/dp/093495111X/

"Architects are rarely invited into the theological debate the way scientists often and artists sometimes are, this despite the obvious analogies between design and Design. Even when they are designing places of worship, the quality of their own faith is given no special place. Nor are the theological presuppositions of what they are doing brought out when designing secular spaces with the ambition to provide (if only here and there) somehow-transcendent experiences. The idea behind this fifteenth volume of CENTER is to think freshly about religion, theology, evolution, and everyday life through the lens of architecture as an art and as a practice. With chapters from academic and practicing architects, biologists, historians, and theologians, CENTER 15 opens new avenues of debate and discussion about the meaning of religious faith in the 21st century, especially in the light of evolution, complexity theory, and creation/creativity with a small and large "C." For not only architects, but also film-makers, writers, composers, painters, scientists, institution-builders, entrepreneurs, and inventors do what they do with similar if not the same constraints, in the knowledge that their creativity has a mysterious source and the hope that it serves a higher purpose.
CENTER 15: Divinity Creativity Complexity sheds new light on the process."

Concepts on Mythogeography: Interview with Phil Smith

Phil Smith is an academic, writer and performer, who lives in South Devon, UK. For twenty years he worked predominantly as a playwright in experimental, physical, community and music theatres, during which time over one hundred of his plays received professional productions.

Phil Smith was one of the organizers of the first symposium on Mythogeography in October 2008 at the University of Plymouth, where he was, until recently, a Senior Research Associate and where he is now beginning three years' funded research making and studying interventions in touristic and heritage space.

He says of himself:

'The Crab Man', Phil Smith, is a middle-aged, gadfly academic and artist currently based in and around Exeter. He admits to having struggled with the vagaries of making politics as a form of performance and to having experimented at length with performances in unusual sites.

He also says that he intends to develop walking as a generator for extreme pleasure and a means of activism and resistance.

His book Mythogeography was published by Triarchy Press on 26th January 2010, here is the link for further information:

http://www.mythogeography.com/2009/09/book.html

The following text is my interview with Phil Smith, on March 27, 2010; the pictures belong to Phil Smith and drifters and can be used only in the context of Mythogeography theory, with permission:

M M: Could you please explain the difference between Mythogeography and the Psychogeography´s theory and practices developed by Surrealists, Dadaists, Lettrists and Situationists from the 30´s to the 60´s?

P S: Psychogeography is the study of how places affect the psychological states of those who pass through them. With a reciprocal meaning: that the places might be changed in order to alter the experiences and mental states of their residents and visitors. This was part of a theory of radical activism for the transformation of cities through the creation of exemplary ways of living (“situations”). In the United Kingdom the concept of Psychogeography has become somewhat detached from its original activist and unitary-urbanist meanings and reconfigured as a literary practice in the work of writers like Iain Sinclair. It has also gathered some occult trappings during this time from Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, the graphic novelist Alan Moore and others.

Mythogeography describes a way of thinking about, passing through and using those places where multiple meanings have been squeezed into a single or restricted meaning (for example, heritage, tourist or leisure sites that are often presented in a singular and privileged way, when they may also be (or have been) homes, jam factories, battlegrounds, lovers' lanes, farms, cemeteries or madhouses). Mythogeography emphasizes the multiple nature of such places and suggests multiple ways of celebrating, expressing and weaving those places and their many meanings.

Mythogeography is influenced by, and draws on, Psychogeography – seeking to reconnect with some of its original political edge as well as with its more recent occult and literary additions. While engaging seriously with academic discourses in areas like Geography, tourism studies and spatial theory, Mythogeography also draws upon what Charles Fort might have described as ‘the procession of damned data’ and unrespectable discourses that it may use for metaphorical or literal explanation. So, occulted and anomalous narratives are among those available to Mythogeography, rarely as ends in themselves, mostly as means and metaphors to explain, engage and disrupt.

The term “Mythogeography” arose from the work of Wrights & Sites (a group of site-specific performance makers based in Exeter, UK).

M M: It is really interesting that you mention the clouds spiral pattern in your text Apocalypsis Cum Spiralis. Do you think that this fractal growing pattern is a means to a ¨walk¨ through the sky while we are still standing on earth?

P S: It is a phenomenon with many associations, which is perhaps why it is particularly attractive to a mythogeographer: natural, military, supernatural, geometrical and popular-cultural.

It is an accidental invitation to a kind of thinking that might well be described as a ‘walking in the sky while standing on the ground’. Such a behaviour resonates with one of the associations of the spiral, which is that of the detached eye; the idea here (taken from the comics and film of the Uzumaki narrative) is that the mythogeographer can learn how to re-site their point of view away from their subjective position (corporeal or otherwise).

The cloud phenomenon in Scandinavia (I rather lightheartedly suggest) is a portent for a more widespread, even apocalyptic, displacement of viewpoint. That it is a natural or covert-military phenomenon with the metaphorical potential to become a social one.

M M: In your book, you are searching for oaks, you had a purpose for your walk. Does a ¨drifter¨ need to have an objective?

P S: No. Indeed it is the very lack of an objective that imbues most drifts with their particular qualities. My search for oak trees was a genuine quest, I had no idea if I would find any not if any of the oak trees I sought were still alive, I was genuinely searching for them, but at the same time the real objective of my walk was not the oak trees, but rather the experiences and encounters of my walk. The oak trees served as a repeated ‘catapult’ for my journey, launching me each day, but most of the time I allowed myself to be repeatedly distracted by whatever atmospheres, spectacles or personalities attracted me along my way, the quest eventually pulling me back to my search. Such an ‘objective’ as the oak trees operates like a MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie – it appears at first to be a defining reason but in fact it is simply an excuse to become involved in an intense engagement with the world. (I was also fortunate in that my quest revealed its own ironies and multiplicities, adding to the drift-like qualities of my journey.)

M M: How do your plays affect the experience of walking?

P S: At first my walking seemed to be a walking away from, a turning my back on, theatre, a rejection of histrionics for the less extravagant poetry of the everyday. However, I have become increasingly aware of how my walking-journeying comes from the journeying of theatre – my work in theatre has been predominantly with touring rather than building-based theatres. Equally, I now draw upon a thinned-out and subtle theatricality to enact intense encounters on my ‘drifts’ and quests. I recently wrote of the double nature of this movement away from and back to theatre:

“a journey from TNT’s touring theatre (its roots in para-theatre and popular performance) – within which, as company dramaturg, I had a brief ‘to enhance theatricality’, resting on a semi-fictional notion of nineteenth century German dramaturgs adapting the conceptual plays of poets for the practical stage - to a dispersed performance of journey, site and ‘walking as art’ with Wrights & Sites. But there has always been a complementary motion, a plane of activity sliding in relation to dispersal that began in the theatricality of a ‘rough’ dramaturgy. Through a spacing and thinning out of that theatricality, this dramaturgy has returned, in certain kinds of performative intervention, as remnant, revenant and trace: assemblage and weaving, vernacular intervention, character in myth, separatedness (the ‘ands’), sitedness (acting machine and theatre building as media not containers), the simultaneous dissimilarities of the grotesque, folding back, and framing.”   (Burning the Box Office: locating the relics of theatricality in a dramaturgy of the everyday”  Performance Research  Vol 14 (3). )

The terms are rather dense here (though explained in the paper), but they each refer to some theatre-like tactic that I draw upon when walking or exploring. They may help me to gain entry to a restricted space or be the means to generate semi-theatrical encounters, they may help me to use senses or body to explore the texture or shaping and massing of a built environment or they may be the means to create one’s own limitedly-mythic persona. Theatre has become a playfulness, but that is not a naïve, childish form of play, but a subtle and crafty play; sometimes subversive, sometimes malevolent.

M M: Is there a prevalence of any of our senses while walking or do we have to experience Mythogeography through all of them?

P S: There is no “have to”. It is more a case of playing the senses like a collection of instruments, sometimes solo, sometimes together; mixing and blending them. But most important is to understand the senses as active, not passive. Our senses seek out the world as if they were tentacles or lophophores. Mythogeography has been much affected, in this respect, by James J. Gibson’s theories of active perception.

M M: Would you recommend to make the same journey many times, for example, after a storm, in winter, in summer, under the rain or is it preferable to change the locations?

P S: I believe that the English psychogeographer Iain Sinclair takes the same walk in the Hackney area of London every day when he is not travelling away from the city. This is probably a tactic best deployed by those with considerable experience of disrupted walking, with the mental tricks and self-provocations to make the repeated walks exploratory ones. Undoubtedly the experience will reveal changes, but it will also reveal longstanding features that the walker has, for reasons it will be hard to discover, never ‘seen’ or noticed despite passing them many times.

We are remarkably selective in what we ‘see’. This seems to be a hardwired skill we have, cutting out the details to see the world as a kinetic environment – what angles suit us, what inclines threaten us. We need to find ways to trip up or disrupt the usual, efficient functionality of our senses. If repeated walking of the same route does that for you (without it making your walking a bore), then embrace it as a useful tactic.

I have walked a great deal in my home city (which is a small city) and recently wondered if I could easily find new routes. The other day I jumped onto a traffic island at the end of the city main street and discovered that its inner grassed area was remarkably sheltered, unvisited and quiet. Leaving this island and walking along a central reservation in between two lanes of traffic, feeling slightly vulnerable, I spotted a small side-street I did not recognize and proceeded to walk for almost an hour along unfamiliar streets, paths and parks, aware that always just a few yards to either side, were roads and tracks I knew well.

M M: It seems that current practitioners drifting in groups, usually to comply with an exercise for College, do not agree to follow the same paths, and some discussions aroused. What would you recommend for a group?

P S: To follow atmospheres, not intellectual opinions. To allow the periphery of the group to lead. To go backwards or stop. To seek tangents. To allow feelings to guide. not to be anxious if the walk takes a while to reveal its gems and treasures. If necessary, to use some instrument of chance for deciding what way to go at junctions. To have some conceptual task to perform – something frivolous, something playful (seek ‘wormholes’ or ‘voids’ or hidden things). But pursue this frivolity seriously; and when serious materials present themselves, allow them to shape a new behaviour, engaging your anger, your active sympathy. Change everything if a new kind of opportunity presents itself.

Groups of more than 5 or 6 members will probably split ‘naturally’ to allow everyone the chance to experience the walk with the intensity they deserve.

Concentrate on experiencing and enjoying the walk and not organizing it. No one needs to take any more responsibility for the walk other than simply looking out for each other’s safety.  Not every walk will (or can) have the intense pleasure of the model drift, but when they do – then there is probably a sign there that that group should keep drifting together; that there is some ambiguous potency in that group,  that it has other identities, quests and exemplary behaviours still to discover.

M M: Let us imagine walks through a battle field, even if there are no monuments, no buildings, just the landscape, as the beautiful poppy fields in England. Can imaginary memories, feelings, help in the journey?

P. S: Do the walkers know that this was a battlefield?

There is a certain sense in which whenever I walk through any fields in England not far from the towns, I sense that I might be walking across a Civil War (1640-1660 CE) battlefield. Because for those twenty years England was a battlefield, the whole of it. With the actual set piece battles simply foci for what was happening everywhere in the country. That plane of history still lies somehow lodged in the landscape, in places dislodged and faulted into institutions, elsewhere tilted into principles that are resolutely defended by small groups. Sometimes the vaguer planes are acknowledged and made a ‘heritage’ and sometimes unacknowledged and yet subtly manifesting its marks and strains and striations.

There are certain cliff-like landscapes that have for me a strange foreboding and I can directly trace this perception to a film I saw as a child – this is my own personal root/route into the general-ideological experience of ‘the Sublime’. Such matrices (or webs) of historical and subjective associations are part of the multiplicities beloved by Mythogeography.

M M: So, based on your research about heritage space, at last it is not important for the drifter to know about the history of the place or the buildings he sees, is then Mythology a discipline of applied phenomenology (in the sense of urban/rural perception)?

P S: There is always a danger that Mythogeography (and the same is true of Psychogeography) can be mistaken for an exotic branch of local history. To learn how to drift without any local knowledge is a useful weapon in the face of this danger. There is undoubtedly a phenomenological aspect to this practice, though Mythogeography prefers the more inconsistent and tendentious branch of phenomenology exemplified by Hans Jonas (rather than the more generally favoured tradition of Heidegger).

The key principle of Mythogeography is the setting in motion of various discourses and the learning from the nature of their orbits about each other. The provocative and willful absence of a discourse such as history will create significant and illuminating instabilities in the understanding of a place. This is a temporary tactic, rather than a celebration of ignorance. It is a gesture of disruption for the revealing of a taken-for-granted familiar.

One further contrast between Psychogeography and Mythogeography is relevant here: whereas Psychogeography was about the collection of emotional and atmospheric data in preparation for the re-sculpting of the city according to the principles of unitary urbanism, Mythogeography’s architectural ambitions are different in tactics if similar in strategy. While Mythogeography may embrace – as an evocative set of aspirations – the exotic quartering of cities (Bizarre, Dark, etc.) - it favours the re-making of the city through transitory interventions rather than New Babylonian planning: informal re-namings, the covert amendment of signs, soft architecture, the protection of rot and decay, the framing of abject vistas, re-assemblage through re-mapping, mental demolitions, absurdly hopeful planning applications, miniature utopias, new nations established on pavement slabs, ceremonies for establishing the centre of cities in side streets, the hijacking of guided tours, tiny parks and sports fields suspended above the commuter crowds, chapels for the saying of prayers for economic well-being, the opening of factories (plus forges and government ministries) as rights of way, radio updates on the status of voids (silence about road traffic), the preservation of libraries as subversive anachronisms…

M M: When I was a child, I used to be unconsciously involved in Mythogeography while walking through the cemetery. Better than this, we had a family and friends walk in the famous cemetery of Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, full of statues and ghost stories, have you ever tried with an environment different from the typical urban-rural?

P S: I am not sure what a typical urban or rural environment might be. In fact, part of the mission of Mythogeography is the disassembling of the idea that there might be such a thing. Very often it is inside what might appear to be (or is designated as) “typical” that the most profound anomalies begin to appear.

For example, I live about 20 miles from an area of “bleak moorland” – there are rocky tors and valleys full of boulders, streams and twisted trees. Nowhere could appear more wild and ‘natural’. Yet if one looks carefully (most people do not) in the ground one may see the remnants of chiseled lines in granite that emerges from the grass cropped by the many wild ponies. These lines are the grooves of an extensive railway track (made from granite rather than the usual steel) and the last remains (but for an occasional fallen wall) of a massive mining and quarrying industry (that ended about 150 years ago). What is taken for “natural” and “wild” on this moor is very often a remnant of industry: piles of boulders that appear to be (and are often taken for) the result of some landslip or avalanche of stones, are broken slabs discarded by the long-disappeared quarrymen.

Equally I could take you to my local shopping centre and in the shadowy corner of an entrance to one of the modern stores (Marks & Spencer), ignored by all who pass by, is a small bricked area within which is a fragment of reconstructed Roman road (so badly done that it appears to be an abstract design).

Such atypicalities are ‘typical’ (!)

Having said all that, cemeteries can be fabulous places to drift. Recently, while walking simultaneously with Kinga Araya (who was walking the line of the Berlin Wall) I entered a cemetery (not far from the moor mentioned above) and studied its map on a noticeboard: this map showed where people of different religious (Christian) denominations were buried (this is NOT a common mapping in a UK graveyard, where such divisions would usually be implicit rather than explicit). A woman passed by and we spoke – and she showed me some of the less explicit (unmapped) but readily observed delineations of this cemetery: the plot of local gypsy families with highly ornamented stones and florid texts and the plot of a local community of WW2 Polish refugees.

M M: What happens if suddenly the drifter feels lost, this feeling could improve the walk or spoil it, if his thoughts are blocked by the concern of being lost?

P S: There is little pleasure in becoming scared. If to be lost is to put oneself at unreasonable risk then there is little virtue in it. However, if all it means is an extra hour’s walking to get back to known territory, then for a while it may be liberating to have no recognizable markers or signposts. Having said that, aggressively seeking to get oneself lost can be a distraction from the mysteries that are present in territories one knows well. 

M M: I presume this discipline could be a psychological therapy, specially for those who are confined to a wheel chair. Is there any medical experience in these respects?

P S: I think there are therapeutic benefits to good drifting. Certainly many people have told me of feelings of wellbeing and relaxation the day after a previous day’s drift. But as far as I know there is no clinical evidence. I have drifted in a motorized wheelchair along with a regular user and this was a revealing experience. My eyeline was lower than usual and I saw many new things – signage and texts that I had not noticed before - while the sometimes forbidding texture of the ground and the bumps and drops became vividly evident to me; a policing of space that I had only understood previously in the crudest of terms.

M M:  Which is the strongest relationship between Arts and Mythogeography?

P S: In common with the situationists, Mythogeography has a somewhat pessimistic view of the arts, and takes it upon itself to enjoy the cultural ineptness of much contemporary public art and to seize and re-use examples of such moribund art in acts of ‘détournment’ (adapting banal art to transcendent functional uses). One of these acts might be the re-use of music as a personal soundtrack for the city, as a catapult to a solo drift, allowing arbitrary juxtapositions of music (using a shuffle setting on a player) to change the walker’s perception of space and their choices of direction.

M M: Dear Phil, thank you so much for sharing your concepts  with us, it has been a pleasure to learn about Mythogeography in your words.

Cosmovision, ¨Bootstrap¨ and the Taos of Physic

Indigenous mysticism.From  www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/anphibius/all/

It was Geoffrey Chew who introduced the term Bootstrap in 1968; from a philosophical perspective, Geoffrey's vision included a strong relational cosmology which included consciousness as a fundamental part of the universal bootstrap.  Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) (Find the link for the book below), made liberal use of this idea to support a Zen based model of physics.  In his book, Capra makes a particular contribution on the parallelism between Physics and mysticism, bringing the science to a more popular approach; what has become the belief of the New Age movement. Capra’s claim is that Oriental misticism provides a consistent and relevant philosophical background to the theories of contemporary science, though the parallels strictly apply to the verbal formulations. In this theory, it is implicit the criticism of current non-holistic (reduccionist) assumptions about the nature of reality. (W. Hanegraaff) What is important, indeed, is that higher understanding can be built on deeper roots with a holistic framework; a possibility that cannot be considered in Western scientific paradigm because its presuppositions are directly refuted by the evidence of advanced physics (W. Hanegraaff). Resuming, Oriental philosophical points of view make sense of science, but do not explain it. Professor Geoffrey Chew’s theory of Bootstrap, states that there are no fundamental entities (laws, particles, fields, principles, equations) in nature, which in turn cannot be reduced to its fundamental entities, it can only be fully understood through the autoconsistency of its elements: there is no entity of main law, since the Universe is seen as a dynamical web of interrelated events. The global consistency of its interrelations determines a spontaneous process of self-organizing emergence that conforms the total structure of the web. Capra considers bootstrap as the culmination of his hyphotesis, and he finds the metaphor in the Avatamsaka Sutra idea of penetration, expressed in the 2500 years old metaphor of the Hindu god Indra’s net: his heaven is portrayed as a network of jewels arranged in such a way that looking at any of them you can see all the others reflected in it. (Sal P. Restivo)

Indra’s net artistic interpretation. http://suejames.com/wp-content/uploads/74443.jpg

“Since motion and change are essential properties of things, the forces causing the motion are not outside the objects, as in the classical Greek view, but are an intrinsic property of matter. Correspondingly, the Eastern image of the Divine is not that of a ruler who directs the world from above, but of a principle that controls everything from within:

He who, dwelling in all things,

Yet is other than all things,

Whom all things do not know,

Whose body all things are,

Who controls all things from within-

He is your Soul, the Inner Controller,

The Immortal.”

(excerpt from the Tao of Physics)

These concepts are tied to Eastern thought, in clear opposition to the Western thought.  Philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, practiced by Chew and other physicists and Western thinkers have contributed to other scientists perceive the physical world differently with a new view of reality based on the territory in harmony with spiritual traditions. Traditional Western science, working with questions formulated with total clarity and experimentally verified, did not accept the ambiguity of  Chew’s theory and hence did not assigned to the Bootstrap approach the character of science.

My reference to this theory is to emphasize the contribution of Eastern thought on the idea of a new paradigm closest to reality, where knowledge is a network without a solid foundation, where the man lives in connection with mysticism and religious beliefs that are often manifested in humble offerings to beings “from beyond”.

In urban morphology, for example, the anthropological studies of the 70’s, focused in the theory of “Central Place¨ postulated by the German geographer Walter Christaller,  have been replaced by current theories competing for an explanation of fractal morphologies related to more domestic shapes of smaller scales, especially in workers’ homes of Mesoamerican cities. Current trends have been to link all the cities, or parts of them, with the elements of a “cosmovision”, cosmology or cosmogony, documented through ethnohistoric writings and images.

Nowadays, it is imperative to have additional research to help clarify the morphologies of the cities inhabited by indigenous people or their descendants, and their relationship with the physical environment and the objects of their daily veneration, including the creation myths. We cannot complete our knowledge of the social practices and the consequent architectural-urban morphologies utilizing only mathematical models borrowed from the Physics, without taking into account the representational spaces derived from the history and spirituality, led by the gestures and actions of those who inhabit it. These representational spaces can be analyzed from mathematical models in combination with other disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, among others.

In a way, this application of cultural-historical concepts in architectural and urban theories takes us back to Kafka’s story, ¨In the penal colony”, where the meaning of the sentence was not understood by the prisoner until the words literally penetrated his skin with needles, and were slowly clarified in his mind. An outsider to the process, could not read the words embellished with several mannerisms, therefore, was not part of the prisoner’s knowledge of the sentence, as we are not part of the knowledge and inner meanings of others’ imaginary. But we can try to be.

REFERENCES

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. New Age Religion and Western Culture. Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. E. J. Brills, The Netherlands. 1996

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. 1975

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/taophysics.pdf

Restivo, Sal P. The social relations of physics, mysticism and mathematics. D. Reidel Publishing Co. Holland, 1985