Rethinking Mythogeography In Northfield Minnesota 1st Edition by Phil Smith 1911193384 978-1911193388

2. Pilgrimage – how can we weave the practice of pilgrimage  in and out of our daily lives? We need to seek two things: 1) to appreciate the sacredness of the road itself;  2) to find in ourselves the edge of the hidden and unrepresentable part and learn how to protect it. 

3. The big picture and the zero – i.e. event horizons. Local history, tourist guides, our own story telling always start from somewhere – everything before that gets deleted. A genesis story generates excessive idealism and energy by denying the things destroyed in order to begin from ‘nothing’.

4. Breadth & Narrowness – the ‘narrowness’ of everyday lives is often compared to the ‘openness’ of history. But mythogeographers do not escape from one place to the other; they find and explore them curled up inside each other. Breadth and narrowness are different characteristics of the same places. 

5. Individual embodying an idea – 
let us prefer anonymity and give priority to the ideas, not the personalities that represent them.

6. The mob – “I want people to walk mythogeographically, but under their own steam; not led, not guided by anyone, least of all by me.”

7. The compromised body as an agent of joy – let us put our bodies (not ideas) back at the centre of walking and drifting.

8. The “talented” walker ready to pounce – leaving an action until the last moment keeps open the ‘edge of chaos’ for as long as possible. This is not to advocate improvisation, rather to say that by their preparedness and transparency “talented” walkers can illuminate their route.

10. Walking with your imagined self  – we can enter our own fancies and fantasies about and in a place, scripting and recording our encounters with objects and empresses as we go.  Walking alone is a fine way of learning how to blend hard things with soft imaginings.

11. From classic pilgrimage to ambulant architecture ​- the next step for everyday pilgrimage is towards ambulant architecture: building new shrines to divert travellers, installing trip hazards, overlaying mazes across the path, building trick-walls and digging trenches and tunnels, taking down signs and planting trees.
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12. Ritual and repetition – walk a place repeatedly, turn your body over to it, through repetition  make up your own ritual of the place. 

13. Using architecture as a magic wand – Find ‘new menhirs’, touch them, lean against them, hold them as connectors to something or somewhere else, channels to thinking and wands for moving things (but not by broadband).

14. Provisional mythogeography –   
Allow your careful research or structures or maps or plans to dissolve and unravel in the face of the place’s own disorientation.

15. Fighting the Spectacle with the power of zero – look for the ‘zero’, that infinitesimal change that can disrupt and unravel the forces of the spectacle, deregulation, globalisation and terror.

16. Evangelising –  there is no point in a reader who agrees with me; but only in one who is getting mad enough to do this stuff in their own and better ways. If you are; I’m in the wobbly drift-mob by your side.