The Lower Way

Walk along the bike path this morning. The weather was mild, everything was peaceful and comforting. A Sunday morning walk like I've always liked. For the first time I realized that there was ANOTHER path, parallel to the one I use like every walker, paved, well cleared, wedged between the railroad (inaccessible, fenced) and thick, inextricable thickets. This other path is located below, behind the thickets; it is almost invisible but very real. It is dark, unused, the more one advances, the more the hedges and the intertwined shrubs, with the tortuous, clawed, threatening branches, prohibit the entry to the curious ones. But it is incredibly attractive. One suspects that it leads to dark but unseen things. It is almost an unintentional metaphor, in the landscape, of the two paths a man can take in his life.

Ghostly countryside

I'd arranged to meet F. at a specific place, and when I got to the village entrance, I saw her walking along the road in my direction. We had arranged to take part in this popular march together. There are hundreds of participants, cars parked everywhere, others maneuvering, as well as bikers, press crews, organizers' stands everywhere, etc. This crowd and this activity quite surprise me and make me see in a different light this flat, ghostly, usually deserted countryside, which I only travel by car when I go home to my parents for the vacations.

We insert ourselves among the walkers and cover several kilometers, almost in silence, she and I, in the village itself and then on dirt roads in the middle of no-man's-land.

There's something archaic about it. The genetic memory of a lively, crowded, even teeming countryside; fantasies of a people on the march, as in scenes from the Bible or perhaps certain fairy tales. Something that can resemble a fascist rally as much as scenes from the Liberation. Something Dionysian, shattering the dreary everyday order where everyone is holed up at home, where everything is static and silent.

Failed apocalypse

C'était les champs derrière la ferme – une lumière de rêve, de mythe, d'apocalypse que les photos ne retranscrivent absolument pas, ne peuvent pas retranscrire. Je regardais les arbres au loin ; ils flottaient dans une légère brûme que transperçaient les rayons du soleil, et derrière cette porte naturelle, on devinait un champ, d'autres arbres, jusqu'à l'horizon. J'ai remercié Dieu de m'avoir conduit là, et nous avons franchi la barrière d'arbres. Tout était silencieux, et avec cette lumière si intense, on aurait dit que le monde allait nous livrer un secret. Mais il n'y avait qu'un autre champ. Nous sommes retournés à la voiture.

Zones

I recently went with F. to the medieval festival held every year a few kilometers from her home. We drove (I was driving) through several villages on the way, where I hadn't set foot since the day I emptied out L.'s grandmother's house and had no memory of.

The weather was unbelievably beautiful and F. herself remarked that it smelled like a vacation; the blue sky, the lush vegetation, the very fact of driving... I'd never driven in these communes bordering the big city, and it put me in a rather strange mental state; it was like finding myself "for real" in these dreams where I'm walking or driving alone in the city, but in a foreign, parallel, unknown version.

It was also like returning to certain memories, or revisiting an old, forgotten photo from my youth, but widening its frame to the surrounding landscapes, and having a chance to enter and explore them. A journey through time, space and memory.

These villages are part of the strange zones that abound around the city, or more precisely, non-zones, non-places, incoherent, dream-like juxtapositions of ancestral farms bordered by an ACTION store or a pizzeria, where in a few dozen meters you pass from allotments to high-rise apartments, Phoenix houses, warehouses and wasteland. We're not in the city, or the country, or a commercial or industrial zone. It's precisely nowhere.

Exercises of presence to the world

It happens about ten years ago. I leave my house one morning, around 7:30. It is cold and dry. The sky is an intense blue, beautiful.

I have to go to a training center where I have to spend the day, for my work.

It's actually an old house at the edge of the city, on the edge of fields and forests, converted into a place to receive groups, seminars, meals, etc. There are meeting rooms, bathrooms and a kitchen. There are meeting rooms, a kitchen, dormitories, bathrooms.

I walk quietly across a large square in the center of town, almost down the street from my house, thinking that something is wrong; but I don't know what. Then I really SEE, and really hear the world around me; I come out of the autopilot where I live most of the time.

I realize that the air is saturated with crows' cries, deafening. And at the same time, in the distance, a fire engine siren sounds – the kind of sound that evokes bomb threats in movies. At the end of the square, a thick, very white mist. The whole scene is incomprehensible, as if someone had placed random elements of atmosphere.

I arrive at the training center, almost in shock. I feel like I'm beside myself, like I'm living a daydream. Everything feels both unreal and much more real.

There is an apple tree, in the grass, near the building. A basket is on the ground, at the foot of the tree, filled with apples.

I spend the day almost unconscious of the people and activity going on around me, writing in my notebook ideas for a personal typology of moods and what constitutes them, as well as basic techniques for creating aesthetic and poetic shocks like the one I had had, unexpectedly, on the street. With the postulate that it was possible to reproduce it at will - in the framework of creation, of aimless reverie, or of personal work on one's own consciousness. It is fundamentally a work on one's own view of the world.

*

Here is a transcript of my notes in bulk:

What is my purpose?

To study the processes (any element of a text, in terms of content, as well as form) to study the effects produced on the reader / player.

Start from stories / scenes that have marked me, that have spoken to me, and analyze them.

Insofar as it is not a question of studying narratives, but immobile scenes, visions (even if they are "evolving"), the term narratology is surely not right. What should we call it? Poetics?

The poetry I want to analyze is not that of the form of the narrative, but that of its content.

*

Azure blue sky, clouds of sheep. Incomprehensible fog. Fire alarm sirens in the distance.

Olfaction

Colors

Elements of the decor

Weather data

Contradictions or Great contrasts (sensory and emotional)

Sound elements

Impression of discovery

Impression of dream

Impression of meaning impossible to formulate or that escapes

Impression that something is going to happen, or that one has something to do

Incongruities, surrealism

Profusion of signs. The human world is a world of signs.

The cold, analytical, topographical description of a place and its elements, and of possible events taking place there, as a new literary form – for a technical age without lyricism.

Influence of the visual arts, of multimedia.

A writing of the presence, of the being there, more than a narration.

Micro-narratives. Refusal of the psychological spreads. No obligation of the "character".

Breaks in rhythm. Three years in five lines. Three minutes in five pages.

A clearing, a spring morning. Corpses on the ground. Bells in the distance. Bloody corpses, green grass. Children singing on the right.

No need to be "an author". Poetry is in the very nature of what is described or told.

The sound of trains running slowly on rails. We are in a large empty room in an abandoned building. It has many windows, on the left, from which enters a golden light. Curtains that fly in the wind. On the right wall, a cross, painted. Furniture and traces of life in some rooms. A platform. One hears dialogues coming from adjacent rooms.

These are exercises in presence in the world.

Techniques:

Opposition (cemetery + children's laughter) // Radical strangeness (cemetery + machinery noise)

Breaks between coherence and incoherence (church + sound of bells, then cemetery + noise of machines)

Interaction and placement in the center of the world and of the attention // Indifference of the world, position of external spectator

Temporality:

- Fixed scene // Flow of time

- Slow / Normal / Fast

- Ellipses or continuity

Weather: weather (depending on the season, snow, rain, sun, heat or not, fog) - color of the sky - outside temperature.

Natural and artificial light sources.

Types of sounds: human (voices, noises, music), mechanical (machines, vehicles, work), animals, sounds related to the weather, related to events (war, holiday, etc.).

Types of places: natural, urban (period? style?), industrial, ruins (period, style?), particular architectures.

Fires, floods, storm, earthquake.

Events : fire, festival, war, religious rite...

Objects: work-related, vehicles, organic, artistic, military, family / daily life, media (posters, newspapers, records, films), animals

Olfactory data: clean air or not (smoke, etc.), odors present (good or bad).

Narrative-camera. Succession of perceptions.

*

The basket of apples at the foot of this tree in the orchard that surrounded the training center. The near ecstasy I felt when I saw it.

Anachronistic, out of step with current life, current jobs, etc.

At the same time, coherent with the place (an orchard, a district at the exit of the city, near the fields)

In short, it is an amplification of the anachronistic aspect of a place.

Trace of human activity.

An immemorial human activity moreover.

The fruit itself is archetypal.

Appeal to archetypes (human activity, place, object)

Human trace, but no other visible or audible human on the premises.

*

Scene with a cheerful / soothing appearance, or sad / distressing

Scene with a cheerful/soothing or sad/anxious feeling

Apparent coherence or incoherence between the elements

Felt consistency or inconsistency between elements

Sense of familiarity or discovery / disorientation

Impression of meaning impossible to formulate

Interaction and placement at the center of the world // Indifference of the world and placement as a spectator of external events

*

Fictitious dream that came to me while walking in the forest yesterday: to advance, at night, in a dark, cold, inhospitable forest, and to arrive, on a summit, in a small, warm, lively village, or in front of a restaurant with illuminated windows, or anything of that kind.

Effect of rupture, of contrast, unexpected, and as well aesthetic as moral.

Let us specify:

Darkness // Light

Cold // Hot

Solitude // Crowd 

Feeling of depression and possible or probable danger // Feeling of security and joy

Death // Life

When we say rupture, we mean tension, beforehand.

When the contrast or contradiction between two elements of a scenario do not follow each other in time (a dark forest, THEN a reassuring restaurant) but are superimposed (a dark and sinister forest but where one walks with innumerable pilgrims, each holding a candle, in a moving scene, without any anguish), we are in something else.

Is every break based on a contrast (or even a contradiction)?

The restaurant, the tavern, any lively, illuminated, warm place, remains despite everything "expected", after a dark and sinister forest. There is rupture, contrast, but no contradiction. The contradiction would be to advance in the Sahara, and to fall on an igloo surrounded by polar bears.

The restaurant is expected because it fits with reality, and it is also, deep down, something expected in fiction, the imaginary story, the tale, etc.

The rupture introduced by the unexpected-but-expected place provokes feelings (comfort, etc.) whereas the rupture based on an absolute contradiction only surprises; it provokes nothing else.

Distinguish the wonderful (or magical) from the nonsense.

If instead of the tavern in the forest, or the igloo in the Sahara, we had a flying saucer (both in the forest and in the Sahara), it would be yet another category.

*

I never managed to take the time to organize and enrich these notes, to make them into something usable, like a kind of method. And these famous exercises, as a creative process and as a free and legal method to get high, are something I never pursued. Unfortunately...

Explorations

I open this blog called "Psychogeographical Explorations" without really knowing what I'm going to do with it. I have always liked to walk, to wander, both in a restricted list of favorite places where I come back again and again, as if to haunt them and to revive in less certain memories - and in totally unknown places, new ones, where I let myself be carried away by the pleasure, the excitement of exploration. Often I notice that in these moments I find myself in somewhat strange mental states, which I would like to deepen and explain here.