Friday March 12

Denton, Texas’s NX35, originally a panel for Denton bands at SXSW, celebrated and produced a formidable first in what one could only hope becomes more in-town annuals March 11-14. I had attended the first Denton-anchored event and was experiencing this bloated annual with every bit of awe and elation as, I expect, those who had put it together must have also felt.

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Jennifer Dumpert runs the Urban Dreamscape site, which is an oneiromantic map of the San Francisco landscape. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this sort of psychographical topography fascinates me. As she mentions on the site, the Situationists used a technique they called the Dérive to create an artistic impression of their urban habitats*. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in From Hell chart Sir William Gull’s psychogeographic explanation for the rationale behind the Jack the Ripper murders. Iain Sinclair has written at least two books that rely on psychogeography for structure and theme (London Orbital, about the M25 roadway; and Edge of Orison, a reconstruction of poet John Clare’s stroll from a lunatic asylum to the beach and then back to his home).

So what is psychogeography? Clinically, it is the study of the manner in which the environment effects those who inhabit it, and by “manner,” I mean, the quantifiable and articulated rules and laws that can be objectively presented about a given environment as they relate to the behavior and emotional reactions of those individuals who pass through. In short: it’s how your city shapes you the longer you live in it.

Every environment starts off with its natural patterns and pathways of influence, be they geographical, electromagnetic, magical, or biochemical. Mountains influence our ability to travel between plains; rivers divert us as well as afford us ways to bypass areas through which we’d otherwise have to slog. Forests provide shelter and sustenance, thereby luring us to create permanent encampments near to them. Any natural landscape has its own rhythm.

In a microcosmic fashion, the way in which we accrete history in a defined space creates rhythm as well. We lay down desire lines (we call them ley lines when they correspond to a natural flow of energy), and over successive generations, these paths become an indelible part of the landscape.

Psychogeography is an effort to understand how we’ve come to haunt the world we live in.

[*The French have also given us Parkour, which is sort of an anti-Dérive approach to interacting with an urban landscape.]

A while back, I was asked what the Moon meant to me, and as I thought about the question, I realized the answer was a suitably good way to start off a new year.

The Moon is the eighteenth card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, and in its modern incarnation it features a swollen moon hung low over a landscape that is dominated by a river and two towers. Usually a crustacean floats in the river and two canine-like animals sit on the opposite shores of the river, faces lifted toward the moon. Rain (or tears or drops of blood) falls from the Moon. The Thoth deck has nine drops; the Noblet deck has twenty-two.

The Moon typically represents the presence of a secret wildness, an untamed aspect of the querent that lies just below the surface. The two towers are typically said to represent the Pillars of Severity and Mercy, the outer pillars of the Tree of the Sephiroth, and numerological math reduces the card to a “9,” the value for endings. And beginnings.

Aleister Crowley says of the Moon:

One is reminded of the mental echo of subconscious realization, of that supreme iniquity which mystics have constantly celebrated in their accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul. But the best men, the true men, do not consider the matter in such terms at all. Whatever horror may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, whatever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage: “How splendid is the Adventure!”

There are all manner of things to be terrified of in the 21st century, and it is easy for us to become wrapped up in being afraid. The Moon forces you to consider that we are children of darkness as much as we are children of light. But the pillars on either side of the river represent hope. They are a reminder that we can react in two ways to the dark water that flows through this card (and through our hearts). There are two paths by which one can ascend the Tree and realize the light of Kether. In every situation, there are two ways to proceed: looking back or looking forward; in fear, or in exaltation. Yes, the Moon fills a dark sky, but its light is a reflection of the sun.

In the Meditations of the Tarot, the anonymous author suggests the Moon is a card of retrograde movement, i.e., one of internal reflection versus external growth. There are, he posits, three lights as manifested by human consciousness: creative light, reflected light, and revealed light. The light of the Moon is the reflected sort, and it concerns itself with the manner in which our intelligence comprehends and classifies that which is considered “matter” (all perceivable objects). He quotes Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution in a definition of intellect as that faculty which, upon receiving stimuli, considers and formulates a response based on what has gone before. This, then, is the basic principle of existence: like produces like. The Moon, he suggests “in so far as it is a spiritual exercise, has no other aim than to evoke the conscious desire to go further than intelligence, and to decide to make a ‘leap’ in order to leave this sphere.” (Meditations on the Tarot, p. 497.)

There was a full moon on the last day of last year. It seems fortuitous that we end our first, frightful decade of a new millennium with an anomaly. A blue moon. Whatever came before is behind us now, and in those final few hours, we could look up in the sky and freely wonder what comes next.

You tell ‘em, Asheville!

Asheville, NC—11/24/09