What I've learned in the past 4.5 years

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This post was first published on 29th March 2024, but was edited on 11th April 2024

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Hello readers.

I'll say it first: it's good to see you. You look... well?

Maybe too well...

...like you haven't missed me at all.

That's okay... I deserved that.

I know, I know.

Well: I'm here now. I'll be doing this thing... here... a bit like the old thing, but different.

Very different.

But also very similar.

Psychocart's (not-so) mysterious origins

The oldest post on this blog dates to January 2008. It is a re-post from an older blog, formerly hosted by the now defunct social networking site Myspace, and was migrated here following the apparent disintegration of that site as a functional space. It is satisfying to note that the effort to somehow "futureproof" this content was successful, as blogger has endured wars, economic crises and shift in digital habits that have defined the intervening sixteen years since that post was made. For how long blogger remains immune to Google's caprice remains a mystery. In the era of Tik Tok and endless podcasting, blogging is not what it once was.

Those early posts were made at a weird juncture in my life, and the liminality of my existence seemed to spill over into the content I was producing. These pages couldn't quite decide whether they were a repository for poetry or the digital sketchbook of a design student, and in a peculiar alchemical process that liminality fed back into my life, "art" imitating life imitating art imitating... 

Chicken or egg: was I lost because of the blog, or was the blog lost because of me? 

If I have learned anything since this blog began, it is that dichotomies are false. In truth I was lost because of the blog and the blog was lost because of me. But also at the same time, neither and both of us were lost: instead we were pretending to navigate a non-locally real universe.

Time passed. Psychocartography took on shape and gained weight as a journal of my design education, but a journal whose fat margins were filled with doodles and tangential notes. It was a derive in text.  It was journey without destination, a life raft set adrift.

It was all those things until—without realising—I stopped drifting.

Dead wood

I have plans for this place. Here is where the carnival in my head will make itself a new home. 

But first I need to clear the ground upon which the Big Top might be pitched.

Is it correct to call it a carnival? Maybe it is more like a garden: rather than start again—to scorch the earth in an effort to create a tabula rasa—let us tidy it up a little. Now knowing how inextricably tied these pages and I once we were, this act becomes a ritual of sympathetic magic.

There is great power in ritual with clear intention, not merely for effecting change in life/art/both. Ritual is cathartic in extreme... and in catharsis, it is easy to lose oneself. So I did.

If you are returning to these pages after a prolonged absence you might notice that they are lighter: both in weight and in illumination. This is what happens when, in the early days of spring, we cut back the dead wood... perhaps becoming a little eager with the pruning sheers. But what is dead, and what yet lives? Almost as soon as the process began the criteria for what constituted "living" or "dead" shifted dramatically. 

The past is not a foreign country: it is a pit of corpses beneath your feet

I found—between pretentious lines about London's labyrinths and throwaway posts about public transport and noise rock—a horrible, heavy sadness. I don't think it's entirely obvious to readers all the time, but it was painful to go back and relieve those feelings again. I was incredibly depressed for what I've only now come to realise was nearly seven years of my life.

That's a long time.

The past is dead: but as it rots in the ground, it fertilises the present. 

Easter Rising

It hadn't occurred to me until now that today is Good Friday: fitting that this death should be acknowledged today, with a suggestion that before the weekend is out we shall witness a resurrection!

As noted, I have plans for this blog, and while I'm not going to provide anything concrete here right now, I'm going to sign off with a few indications as to what territory might be explored in the future.

Landscape

I began my degree in landscape architecture the same year I started this blog, which then turned into a journal of that degree (and subsequent post graduate study), right up until 2014. Over the next few months I'll be embarking on the final phase of that process as I prepare to become a chartered member of that profession.

At the heart of being a landscape architect is the word "practice": it refers both to the professional conduct of the landscape architect (the "practitioner") and the business that employs them. But practice also calls to mind spiritual practice: the rituals conducted to develop and enrich the spirit. A spiritual relationship with the landscape is what I wish to bring into my daily practice as a landscape professional, and I intend to document that journey here.

 

Animism & magic

Connected to that intention—that wish to build a spiritual relationship with the landscape, and to communicate that process—is a growing acknowledgment of the environment as an intelligent and conscious actor. This is not something that has occurred entirely spontaneously: it is a feeling that has been cultivated and encouraged, rather than through revelation or research.

I have invited this notion to live inside me, and it has enriched and illuminated my life.

It is something I still don't fully understand, but I'm hoping to explore this ontological framework both academically and experientially in these pages.

 

Creativity and play

Since the last post I made on this blog in 2019 my principal creative outlet (beyond my day-to-day work) has been in the playing and making of analogue (i.e. tabletop) games. Specifically, I am talking about the genre of cooperative narrative games known as RPGs, though this is a term I have really come to dislike because of the very specific manner in which this term is applied in video games. 

 

While most of my work within this field is recorded on my sister blog, Alone in the Labyrinth, I want to continue to cross-fertilise as I began to in the final two posts before the most recent hiatus. 

The project I am involved in that is perhaps most ripe for cross-fertilisation is White Chalk, but more on that later: for now, get it into your heads that this blog is going to be more Ursula K Le Guin than JG Ballard... not that the latter is getting cast to the wayside, but perhaps left stranded on the central reservation (concrete island?) while I tread leylines spinning off the carriageway. 

Now is probably a good opportunity to note that over the past five years or so, as I've come to be more involved with the TTRPG "community" (especially the indie RPG, OSR and NSR scenes) I've met (both online and in the flesh) some incredibly intelligent, kind, creative and talented people and made genuine new friendships, as well as had the opportunity to collaborate and cooperate in play and production. The hobby is poorly understood beyond its own boundaries, and I hope I can contribute to a change in the way it is perceived.

 

Authenticity

Finally, I'm hoping that I can use this digital space as a continual expression of my desire to live authentically. Over a number of years (Perhaps since COVID) I've found myself operating in a space that feels increasingly detached from base reality, whatever that is. This might seem ironic following on from a paragraph about all the friends I've made online while pretending to be someone else (or something else, or someTHINGS else), and I'm acknowledging that here but also pointing out this... this is a separate phenomenon. Indeed, analogue RPGs allow people to express themselves with a degree of authenticity that I find lacking in a lot of the casual relationships I experience. 

But that's extraneous noise. What I'm really talking about is the desire to experience culture that transcends the chaos of the present. As with my efforts to cut back the dead wood and allow the living parts of the plant to flourish, my understanding of what authentic culture looks like is nebulous. But I'm looking for it, because within me I hunger for it.

 _

That was intense.

Apologies.

But...

...yeah.

It's good to see you x