How to love an unlovable place
Using psychogeography to turn a place you hate into somewhere beautiful.
There is something about cities and towns on the British Isles that make me feel at home in a way I’ve never felt in the United States. The feeling is instinctive: I felt it the very first time I went when I was 15, as the bus our school had chartered drove us from Heathrow into London’s city center. I first remember the feeling in the moment I saw the chimney pots on top of the houses.
Once we made it into the city, I was further thrilled by just how chaotic London’s roads were — they were rarely straight lines, and when they were, the street name would inexplicably change from one block to the next. It was also honeycombed with alleyways that were too narrow for cars, making it a far more wanderable city than any other I lived in.
What London felt like — outside the more recently bulldozed and developed districts like Canary Wharf, which feels like any American city — was a city that was designed for people, rather than for cars or business. London, unlike American cities, had already congealed into a metropolis before the car arrived, and thus couldn’t be as easily warped by it. On top of this, most English (indeed, most European) prime real estate was taken a long time ago, and the buildings were more often built to last. Many English buildings still wear the soot of the early Industrial Revolution, and it’s not unusual for a corner pub to be older than American Democracy. All of this history makes you feel connected to the past city, which, for me at least1, is a cozy, warm feeling.
I have never had the same luck in connecting with any of my homes in the United States. Everywhere I’ve lived has been built for cars, most of the buildings I’ve lived in were built in living memory. with the exception of New Orleans and prohibitively expensive parts of Boston, New York, I’ve never come across a place that feels old, lived in, and for humans in America. We tend to demolish old buildings when they become inconvenient, and our towns are built on grids to maximize the efficient movement of capital.
For better or worse, though, I live in the United States, not Europe, and at some point it occurred to me that spending the rest of my life plagued by “wanderlust,” or otherwise homesickness for a place I could not live, was not a healthy state of things. As such, I would need to figure out how to learn to love my home in the United States, which is built for capitalist expedience, and not trifling things like human love or history.
Wondrous Creatures
I found my answer where I usually do, which was in the bizarre philosophy of the writer/wizard Alan Moore. During an interview with Will Menaker of Chapo Trap House, Moore began discussing his seminal work From Hell, and his ideas about how our homes influence our mindsets and moods:
The landscapes that we exist in, we're going to internalize them, aren't we? So if you're living in a place that appears to you to be a kind of rat trap, then inevitably, you're going to come to the conclusion that you're probably some kind of rat.
Whereas if you know anything about the place in which you're living, if you can invest all that brick and mortar with some history, some mythology, whatever, then you can transform the place that you're living in to somewhere out of the Arabian Nights, into a fantastic, magical wonderland, and if you're living in that kind of environment, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you could be a wondrous creature.
Moore applied this philosophy to both From Hell and his enormous magnum opus, Jerusalem, which I’ve recommended a few times on this newsletter.
The concept is rooted in psychogeography, which is fairly obscure in the United States, but popular in Europe — psychogeography was first created by the Situationist International, a group of primarily French libertarian Marxist intellectuals who have also been credited with being the intellectual forefathers of punk rock2, modern street art, zine culture, urban exploration, adbusting, Occupy, and the 1968 French uprising, among other things.
At its most basic, psychogeography is the study of how a place influences your mind and your emotions. The Situationists believed that modern cities were built not for people, but for capital. The only way you’re supposed to travel through a city as a capitalist is to go from your home to work, or from either to the stores where you will purchase things. This has the effect of alienating you from the place you live, as the landscape around you is just the area you pass through in the execution of your duties as a money earner and a consumer. But the Situationists also believed you could hack your way out of this nightmare by doing little more than wandering.
Try this the next time you have some free time to go for a walk. Don’t pick a destination, instead, pick an arbitrary rule. Some examples:
Only make left turns
Spend as much time as possible on roads you’ve never walked down
Stay as close as you can to a stream, river, or ocean
Seek out anything that’s purple
Always follow cats
In doing this, you’re inevitably going to discover something new, possibly minutes away from your home. You’re going to pay attention to the landscape that you usually ignore as you zip by on your way to work. The more you do this, the more reconnected you’ll become to your home.
Down the Shore
I moved to New Jersey in 2014 and found it hard to love. It’s my wife’s home state, and she adores it, but she has memories of growing up in a boardwalk town and all her friends and family are from here. I do not have that, so I felt lonely, isolated, and depressed. When our daughter was born in 2018, I realized that my time in New Jersey was not temporary, and that I had to make a choice to either be miserable in this bizarre state for decades to come (possibly poisoning my marriage and my ability to parent), or I had to find a way to love it.
So, adopting the ideas of the Situationists, I decided to go for a walk, down the entire length of the Jersey Shore, from the cliffs of the Palisades along the Hudson River across from New York, all the way down through the poisoned swamps of the Meadowlands, through the “Chemical Coast,” and then through every single Shore boardwalk town to the tip of old-timey Cape May.
My rule was simple: keep the water to the left. Thanks to the pandemic, it took 2 years and 187 miles. It left me blistered and chafed, alternately sunburnt and hypothermic. For each leg of the walk, I researched the local history, and found ways in which it connected both to my larger interests — climate, anarchism, zombies, etc., — and to my personal family history, as the walk included Ellis Island and the site of my now deceased Grandparents first date.
I am happy to report: it worked! New Jersey is my home now, though my reasons for loving it are personal — I don’t connect with most of the nostalgic clickbait fodder as to why Jersey kids love New Jersey3, and instead have attached myself to New Jersey's catastrophes (the Black Tom explosion, the sinking of the S.S. Morro Castle, the Bridgegate traffic jam), its monsters (the Matawan Maneater, the Jersey Devil, The War of the Worlds aliens), and its wildlife (ospreys, humpback whales, bog foxes). I even wrote a forthcoming book about it! I’ll announce that when it happens.
Anyway: New Jersey is not a place that’s begging to be loved. But it has a rich history regardless, and no amount of American capitalism can bury that history. So I suspect these psychogeographic methods could be applied anywhere that you’re stuck that doesn’t feel like home.
All you need to do is go outside and start walking.
Plenty of British friends have expressed the opposite feeling, of being oppressed by the history and irritated by the inexplicable warren of London, and find the freedom of being unstuck in time in glistening, new America liberating. Others look at our towns and infrastructure with barely-disguised horror, so who knows which I’d be if I grew up in the UK rather than Cincinnati.
Not to mention Chumbawamba!
Pork Roll vs. Taylor Ham, Action Park, “What exit are you?” etc.