My experience in Manchester has had a much greater effect on me than I ever could have imagined. I had thought of it as a small interlude between leaving the States and the beginning of a long adventure. I hadn't given enough thought to the fact that the whole point of me coming to Manchester was to meet with other adventurers.
The conference/festival that I attended, Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives (TRIP), was a gathering of people who are interested in psychogeography. It's a rather pretentious sounding word that represents the concept that has driven my interest in street art, urbanism, and activism: re-thinking the seemingly banal and benign aspects of the built environment. Through various maps, lectures and art presentations, participants talked about the way that walking frames the experience of the city, ways to intervene in the landscape, the implications of gentrification, and some more metaphysical ideas about experiencing places. In short, it was about purposefully getting lost, critically engaging with the city, and meeting up with geographers, artists, activists, architects, archaeologists, and writers.
Among other things, I went on a number of walks, with varying degrees of structure, with other participants at TRIP. One of them involved walking along the canals of the city, which appear in the interstitial spaces of the city and then disappear just as quickly under the overbuilt city center. Along the canal was the long-gone site of a Roman trading outpost, locks which represented the varying topography of a canal that connected the eastern and western British coasts, the site of the first train tracks and passenger train station in the world, the sites that might be considered the birthplace of industrial globalization, and a few industrial ruins that were left behind as the city scurried to "regenerate" itself as a neoliberal center. At the same time, it was a canal. There were birds, trees growing from the mortar of old brick walls, and beautiful wooden houseboats. Much of this area has been converted from a corridor of vice to sanitized public walkways, but I was most drawn to the traces of the past and the plants that grew from mortar where the groundskeepers could not reach, reminding us that the city, too, is an ecological unit. I got interviewed by the BBC on this walk, but I have no idea how to get the podcast.
The experience at TRIP has reinforced my desire to shape my bike trip as a psychogeographical experience- to drift through countries and cities, paying attention to the minutiae of new landscapes. Beyond looking for magnificent beauty, I'll try to keep my eyes open to the banalities that I might often overlook.
Maybe it might just be because I am in a new place and know I have to move on, but I managed to fall for a wonderful person here. I wonder if only happened because of the near-impossibility of it ever really working out. My time with her has certainly overshadowed all of the other wonderful things I have seen and done in Manchester. It's made me confused, and helped me to realize how emotionally numb I have become.
Emotional openness is like taking photos with a slow shutter speed- it leaves you with an impression of less detail but more richness, uncertain of the elements that will reveal themselves in the risk of capturing a "moment."
Tomorrow morning I need to get a bus to London at 5:30. My knee still hurts, I have a cold, I feel out of shape and emotionally drained. I'm afraid of this bike trip, but I know there is no turning back. I know it will be amazing.
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