Merlin Coverley > Quotes

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear13”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“Debord’s oft-repeated ‘definition’ of psychogeography describes ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’2 In broad terms, psychogeography, as the word suggests, describes the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of calibrating the behavioural impact of”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“Lost in this vile world, elbowed by the crowd, I am like a worn-out man.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“are even earlier claimants to that title, it seems to me that it is Stevenson’s nightmarish dreamscape which has proved the most enduring of London’s many literary portraits, offering us an unreal but eternal landscape and colouring forever our experience of the city.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“Walking, in all its simplicity, is the activity that links Machen’s experience of the city with our own, an activity which through its very resistance to prescribed routes becomes an expression of both personal freedom and radical disregard for the conventions of the day. By”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“We live our lives not once, it suggested, but again and again: entering the same dilemmas, making the same mistakes, coming to the same crossroads and always, after much anguished weighing of possibilities, taking the same road as before. We encounter the same delights and the same miseries, every time as fresh as they were before – though sometimes, at some apparently meaningless moment, there may come like an echo of a familiar phrase of music a sudden momentary flash of memory from some point along the spiral we have already travelled, bringing with it the déjà vu sensation that Priestley put into his title, and that almost everybody has experienced at some time: I have been here before. And then the flash is gone, and our lives go on, repeating their pattern over and over again.97”
― Merlin Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past

“Sinclair, the act of walking is ever present in this account. This act of walking is principally an urban affair, and in cities that are often hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion. Walking has long been seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“Thomas De Quincey was never to attain quite the affinity with London which Blake was to achieve; but his depictions of the city reveal exactly that visionary intensity which was to animate Blake’s work, creating a pioneering account of urban alienation in which the solitary walker comes to symbolise the modern city.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.6”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“The literary representation of London as a two-fold city in which outward privilege masks poverty and despair reaches its zenith in the late nineteenth century”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“Ballard depicts modern life in advanced industrial societies as characterised by a loss of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of imagery to which we are all subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our environment.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’2 And in broad terms, psychogeography is, as the name suggests, the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact of urban place.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography

“the act of urban wandering; the spirit of political radicalism; allied to a playful sense of subversion and governed by an inquiry into the ways in which we can transform our relationship to the urban environment. This entire project is then further coloured by an engagement with the occult, and is one that is as preoccupied with excavating the past as it is with recording the present.”
― Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography