DEC 2019 | Words on Geography

a wonder around

A running essay on the “derive”

A Wonder Around

When we were university students in Edinburgh, Nick was always running around the city. Slim, blonde, spectacled, and Swedish, Nick ran to exercise, often without destination and with a characteristic freedom of direction. One time, he ran to an unmarked path beneath the foot of Arthur’s Seat. The path was lined with a low stone wall to the left, a high stone wall to the right, and overgrown greenery that kept secret what laid ahead. It meandered to the east, so Nick followed it. As he rounded each bend, he uncovered more road and soon, he wondered if it was time to turn back. But then again, what if the next bend finally led to the end?

The path was a tease, an untamed and unnamed thread in an organic city. Tugging between retracing the familiar and venturing into the unfamiliar, Nick was at a junction. To continue forward meant surrendering to sensory observations, forgoing the comforts of knowing, and allowing chance inclinations to guide his passage. He chose onwards, out of the need to know. What began as a simple run turned into a “dérive.”

A dérive, French for “drift,” is a pedestrian practice rooted in the 1950s radical Marxist movement called psychogeography. Performed as a spontaneous walk through an urban environment, a dérive deconstructs the walker’s existing relationships with the spaces they inhabit, as they allow only what fascinates them to guide their travel. In the words of our professor, Fraser MacDonald, “the randomness [of a dérive] doesn’t permit [the walker] to hold onto their likes and dislikes.” In dissolving routines and listening through observation, the dérive coaxes an introspective recognition of a city’s underlying complexities and sociocultural fabrics.

Nick and I went on numerous dérives in Edinburgh and we recently reminisced about our individual and collective passages. “I had this idealist task,” Nick said, “[to go] to as many cemeteries around Edinburgh as possible.” And so, he told me about the time he finally found a way into Warriston Cemetery.

The first time Nick ran by Warriston Cemetery, he tried entering through the main gate, only it was locked. On a subsequent run through the area, he noticed a hole in the wall that lined his running path. Nick stopped and felt that tug again, between the known and unknown. After loitering a while and pretending to stretch as a couple walked by, he thought, “yeah, why not?” and ducked into the wall. There was a dirt path on the other side, paved by previous travelers and draped in wild foliage. He went deeper into this jungle and along the Water of Leith, emerging, to his surprise, at the back end of Warriston Cemetery.

It was a sprawling spectacle of gravestones buried under ivies, reeds, and ferns. The place was cradled among sturdy oaks and elms. Nick walked through the quiet cemetery, basking in his discovery. As he approached the main gate, it dawned on him that he was visible from the outside. The gate was locked. He weighed the justifiability of his presence in this public space against the symbolism of a lock – not to mention the difficulty of a quick escape should it come to that – and the eeriness of the cemetery condensed around him.

This wasn’t the first time Nick would grapple with social conventions on a dérive. A couple months after we graduated and I had moved to New York City, Nick came to visit for a couple weeks. Naturally, we went on walks. It was Nick’s first time in the Big Apple and I was an amateur guide at best. Our walks weren’t exactly dérives. We had a tourist’s giddy gaze, our sights driven by seeing the famed and famous. There was one early afternoon, though, when I let Nick loose and he wound up in the Bronx.

We had visited all the boroughs but the Bronx. Nick wanted the rights to say he had gone to all five before he left. So, he boarded an uptown B train and got off at a station north of Yankee Stadium in Concourse. The architecture and streets reminded Nick of the neighborhood in Queens, where we had Egyptian food a couple nights before. But there was a palpable human layer in Concourse that he didn’t expect. “You could see people noticing me,” Nick said, “I felt a little bit threatened, not by individuals but by the feeling of being out of place – really out of place.”

A white man in a heavily Hispanic, black, and low-income neighborhood in New York City, Nick became hyper aware of his own agency. Having stepped in as a tourist and now an outsider, the fact that “[he’s] not black and [he’s] not poor” became apparent. This was the first time he felt this way. Like at Warriston Cemetery, Nick struggled to justify his presence because of something intangible and unspoken, something cultural. Unlike Warriston Cemetery, though, Concourse had an unavoidable and historical human geography.

A dérive should catalyze an awakening. Cities are mindsets by our design and there are forcefields within them that govern how spaces should be occupied and used, and by whom. To feel out of place in a place you thought you knew, and to examine it through this disembodiment, is an essence of the dérive. Nick eventually found the end to that initial path beneath Arthur’s Seat. It halted at a segment of railroad tracks and a wooden sign that said, “The Innocent Railway.” On a separate journey along that very same path, the same year as Nick’s, I came to the same conclusion.