The Wellow brook at Stoney Littleton
Yesterday I went for a talk at the Folklore Centre, it was about Antiquarian Psychogeography the application of the mind, also emotional response, as to what you see around you. Not quite an 'ology' but near. As an aside I have done two 'ologies' - sociology and archaeology. So in theory I can group people socially into their class or background or in the case of archaeology, address the history of man through the layered pancake we call history. So be it.
But I always question words as you well know if you read my blog at all. And rather than the pretentious word 'psycho' joined on to geography I prefer to use the term 'sense of place'. It is the way when out walking in an urban setting or out in the open country I feel the world around me. You will see below that I have tackled my responses to my environment, the phenomenology of things which somehow seems nearer to what sense of place means.
Funnily enough it was Andrew the other day, someone who strides ahead purposefully on his walk without taking a blind bit of notice where he is walking through (yes I nag him to see), said out of nowhere, yes since I have got that app 'Merlin' I listen to the birds and now need to name them. ;)
Two words have trickled into my mind as I think - Anima Mundi, the World's Soul is perhaps the doctrine that sits behind all this, the everlasting strain of the human minds that seeks to explain the world and our thinking in it.
John Billingsley the lecturer had to turn skillfully on his subject because psychogeography is related to urban understanding and only recently to landscape depiction, so we would find psychography + megalithic as an outlier.
So one of the 'intellectual' (excuse my sarcastic italics) Will Self did it in his London walkabouts. And a very much more genuine person in the form of 'The Wandering Turnip' did it in his analysis of towns and the breakdown of the closure of shops in the High street.
I of course read my sense of space through the medium of the prehistoric stones and Neolithic long barrows I have visited, Wayland Smithy's barrow lying in peace in the middle of the countryside, or Stoney Littleton Barrow, time and time again. Places visited by those who are enthusiastic over the old stones and the sense of times gone by. And maybe, somewhat sort of magic that radiates from the stone, maybe of course it is just radon!
I can't imagine not wanting to know about the things happening around me - plants, birds, buildings. Stopping and staring and trying to understand is always useful whatever name it has.
ReplyDeleteHumans are curious I suppose, but out walking the mind seems to slow down and become part of the scene Sue.
DeleteI read an interesting book recently "The Hidden Life of Trees" by Peter Wohlleben, the illustrated edition. He explains so many details about how trees communicate and feel. It makes you feel differently when walking through the woods!
ReplyDeleteThe idea that trees communicate is becoming widespread, through their roots they communicate with other trees Ellen.
DeleteI think that there is a something that radiates from stones. I feel a heightened awareness in old churches. Old houses, sometimes. I don't know how to describe it. Once we were in an old house. George Mason's house, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. When we walked out back into the formal gardens, there was this scent and it was the strangest thing, because I knew it, although I didn't at all. It was an overwhelming moment. I didn't understand it then. I don't understand it now. But I don't question it any more. When I am awed by the quiet holiness of an ancient church, I take a moment to savor it. When I feel the power of an old stone, I recognize that I am a product of the ancients as well.
ReplyDeleteWell I for one do think that there is more to life between heaven and earth, though ghosts are a stretch too far Debby. Sometimes I think another world runs parallel to our world and we pick up something that is different. The ancients lived by the sun, moon and stars they were much more 'plugged' in to their world.
ReplyDeleteoh there are some large words there..... i thank you for trying to decipher some of them for people such as me with smaller brains...... i can, however, understand the concept of shadows and energies that run through things and how we leave indelible marks through our footsteps :)
ReplyDeleteEvery now and then I come back to this subject, but of course there is no answer and I have to accept that shadows and energies do run through things A/F. And also I am getting old worrying at a bone which has no answer.
ReplyDelete