created 2025-03-25, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025fictionsurrealismlostpsychogeography
rel: Survey of Being Lost
Why I’m reading
I had read Mount Analogue some time ago, which is one of my favorite books. My edition was extremely beautiful and I was scanning the publisher’s site for other books that might bring forth similar feelings (that were not captured in Nadja - Andre Breton.
In reading Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley and working on Survey of Being Lost it continued to be referenced, so I made way for it in my reading list.
In the same vein as Baudelaire and Benjamin,Aragon’s text is a document of a city disappearing before his eyes and it was Paris Peasant that first drew Benjamin’s attention to the significance of the arcades and to the role of walking as a cultural act, leading him to comment on the impact of the book: ‘Each evening in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down.’
Breton says of Aragon: “I still recall the extraordinary role that Aragon played in our daily strolls… The localities that we passed through in his company, even the most colourless ones, were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness that never faltered.”
‘How long shall I retain this sense of the marvelous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fading away in everyman who advances into his own life as though along an always smooth road…’
Thought
Embedded in the pages of my copy of this book, is something pressed flat, serving as a bookmark for the once-owner, who, from the bookmark’s placement on a chapter heading, I then believe to have not finished the book.
At first I think it’s a flattened candy wrapper, but it is a the packaging of a firework.
Megabanger - Ground Bloom Flower Caution: spins on ground emits flames and sparks.
Such a curious find in a book. I’m immediately considering the last owner.
Did they like fireworks?
I also consider this new listaggregator, could I document all of the unusual finds of things found in books? I frequently use strange objects nearby to serve as bookmarks. I am not careful, or graceful with most books. But things you must find in books are necessarily small or smashed.
I also finish the book, and leave the wrapper inside. It was not mine. I wonder if that original person who I misattributed the wrapper to, also was like me. Someone earlier left it and we followed.
On error:
There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics, error which demands that a person contemplate it for its own sake before rewarding him with the evidence about fugitive reality that it alone could give. Surely it must be realized that the face of error and the face of truth cannot fail to have identical features? Error it certainty’s constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally be said about error: the delusion will be not greater. Without this idea of evidence, error would not exist. Without evidence no one would even pause to think about error.
There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions, and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.
How long shall I retain this sense of the marvelous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fade away in every man who advances into his own life as though along an always smoother road, who advances into the world’s habits with an increasing ease, who rids himself progressively of the taste and texture of the unwonted, the unthought of. To my great despair, this is what I shall never know.
The Passage De L’Opera
rel:Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
How oddly this light suffuses the covered arcades which abound in Paris in this vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages as though no one has the right to linger for more than an instant in those sunless corridors.
City planning, imported from America, redrawing the map of Paris in straight lines will spell doom of “these human aquariums.”
Stabbed dove: “…who has taken this stark room so as to live there with a charming girl-friend about whom I will take the liberty of saying that only on certain days she looks strangely liked a stabbed dove.”
Feigned voyage of Letters (proto-spoofing):
I wanted to know if there still existed… a bizarre establishment: an agency which accepted unstamped letters and arranged to have them posted from any desired point on the globe to the address written on the envelope, a facility that would allow the customer to feign a voyage to the far east, for example, without moving an inch from the far west of some secret adventure.
Shops are shuttered, or relocated in the face of the ”robbery” of Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris.
Love thrusts up shoots where no one plants it
There are maniacs possessed by the street’s haunting memory, and only there can they experience the full flow of their nature
The trouble is that you fail to appreciate the limitless strength of the unreal. Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
…that remarkable sage, who keeps strange ships moored in each fold of his brain…
Ephemeral, F.M.R.L (frenzy-madness-reverie-love)
The mind is trapped by these networks which lure him irretrievably towards the final chapter in his destiny, the Labyrinth without a Minotaur where Error, transfigured like the Virgin, reappears, Error with fingers of radium, my melodious mistress, my appealing shadow. The net enveloping her hairs makes a marvelous haul of knives and stars. Superstitions soar up like swifts, to plunge down again like pebbles from a sling and strike uncertain brows along the ill-lit roadways of the night. What has become of my certainty, that I cherished so, in this great vertigo where consciousness is are of being nothing more than a stratum of unfathomable depths. I am just one moment of an eternal fall. The lost footing never recovers itself.
The modern world is entirely wedded to my idiosyncrasies. A great crisis is brewing, an immense disquiet taking shape as it approaches. Beautiful, good, right, true, real… so many other abstract word are crumbling into dust at this very moment. And their opposites, once accepted in their turn soon lose their own identity. Only ideal facts survive, one single mental matter reduced at last in the crucible of the universe. It is my own self that flashes through my mind. And vanishes. Nothing could possibly escape my attention, for I am the transition from darkness to light, I am at one and the same time occident and dawn. I am a limit, a bearing. Let all things mingle in the wind: those are the only words on my lips. And it is a ripple that surrounds me, seemingly the visible waves of a frisson.
A Feeling For Nature
The fact we reproduce on canvas what our sight can register, the sea, mountain and rivers. Going on voyages. Liking gardens.
A Feeling For Nature describes these notions about the universe, of embracing only those objects where man is absent.
What a long path we have traveled since the primeval forest! First, I wore down with my bare feet the grass leading down to the river. It was an imprint and one of my first notions of memory. Then, when my trail endured, the spectre of footpaths began to haunt my intellect. He told me gently what route would bring me back to a girl in love. He led me towards places made for daydreaming, where habit at least fashioned my heart for me.
Love:
Greeting to you, Legendary One: you are a haunted house, and nothing at all would be achieved by sending a delegation of scientists with all their little bits of apparatus to observe the strange phenomena to which you play a martyred host. But midnight is not long enough for your adorable ghosts: even the whole day, even the hours of sleep are scarcely sufficient, between your walls a perpetual sound of trailing robes makes you deliciously uneasy, you in love with this soundcloud.com
The Peasant’s Dream
The world exists in a state of unthinkable disorder: the extraordinary thing about this is that men should have habitually sought beneath the surface appearance of disorder for some mysterious order, one that comes naturally to them, that merely expresses an innate desire within them…
Man’s mentality cannot endure disorder because he is unable to imagine it. Disorder is only imagined in relation to order.
Man clings to this explanation. Yet there is absolutely no difference between one idea and another.
I lead a poetic life. A poetic life, pray engrave that expression.
You are too late about the scene, gentleman, for persons have had their day upon earth.
Force to its farthest limit the idea of destruction of person, and go beyond that limit.