Summer of 2020 rising like a wave off plum-coloured crags, and I was good again. I’m not even sure how I knew of the technique back then; I can’t trust the politics of any younger version of me. And yet, yet again, it was the summer of 2020. I was fresh off the heels of an associated depression and in want of movement and freedom, and so I’d learnt to perform the dérive in the backroads behind my house and a little farther afield.

Psychogeography as a term is not something I can responsibly recount the history of, not here at least. But I will say that I was obsessed with it. It has most plainly been described as the collusion or collision of the landscape on the emotions and behaviours of people, focusing on urban environments, focusing in on interpersonal relationships and arbitrary routes. It is the understanding of cartography through a psychological lens.

I wanted to use it. As an answer, to name the pressures and near-mystic tuppences being in a place got on to me. I wanted to term the sentience I ascribed to the land, in a way that would allow for my emotions, that marked them as important. Even as young as I am I could not imagine someone so lost at such electric age. I was having frustrations with my inability to translate, to say what I mean. Caught in the thoroughfare between ideology and artistic movement, which might texplain my continued usage of the term psychogeography, whose roots and ideas refer/reference Dadaism, Surrealism, anarchich tought and Marxism. Not surprising for me to like, if you know me well enough.

The dérive is considered a practice or technique formally, or called a pretentious promenade by opponents. But ultimately I prefer augury, out of anything. It is walking or moving through the city while letting go of your usual, near-muscle-memory instincts for work or leisure and some other reason you might go to a place. Instead, you walk with an appreciation of natural yet man-made landmarks, to analyze and reflect, calculate its itinerant possibilities. To walk in the airs of a fresh scrape. To seek something you haven’t even thought of looking for.

The dérive is, not surprisingly, associated with psychogeography. I call it an augury because in some ways it is. You trust the layout and infrastructure to enrich you, under the superstiton that it will guide you a definite resolution, to somewhere you want, or, on a higher degree of faith, where you need. Of course, one might call the city a designed experience as well; same time as my love for psychogeograohy was my love for urban planning. It was urban planning, out of anything, that corroborated my sense of haunting. But others might trace that to the land itself.