Walking Through The Streets of Memory

by David Carr

trolling through Glasgow recently, I paused. This was the No.7 bus stop where a stranger once asked me if I was OK. I wasn’t OK. I was in a deeply depressed place, my sagging demeanour obvious and signalling the internal weight I was carrying. I mumbled something and got on the bus, close to tears.

The memory of that bleak time still haunts. Passing that bus stop, surrounded by a hostile architecture of omnipresent scaffolding, cast up a reliving of that dreich, dark day when I just didn’t want to be here anymore.

Location is a strong trigger for me. Both my depressive and manic episodes carry with them powerful and painful memories which can come rushing back, unrelated to my current mood state, but dragging me back to a place or time.

There’s the Clyde Tunnel, which calls to mind driving to work, in tears, to a job that was doing me harm. Or the Asda’s branch where it all became too much, and I had to abandon my trolley. There is the derelict belfry at Leverndale hospital, which loomed over my stays there.

Memories of my manias come rushing back when I pass by places where I acted strangely, misbehaved, or had a public freak out. I shudder when I recall certain bars and cafés. Or the street where I buttonholed passers-by to harangue them about something or another –some grand theory constructed by my delusional mind. Certain locations are ‘cringe points’ which remind me of my disordered behaviour, and I self-stigmatise, unable to let myself off the hook for being unwell.

The issue for me, even years down the line, is how to process my episodes when I am surrounded by and immersed in them. My way of taming the memories came from a somewhat outré source:

In the 1960s, the other avant-garde Marxist art theorists of the Parisian

Situationist International, coined the term ‘psychogeography’ to describe the effect of a geographical location on the way people feel and behave. One of the tools the Situationists employed to explore psycho geographical concepts was the ‘dérive’ – the technique of wandering around an environment. The purpose of the dérive is to wander through a landscape, usually urban, with the aim of letting go of daily concerns and becoming aware of its psychological features.

My entry point for psychogeography has been through the novels of Alasdair Gray, which are imbued with a strong sense of place. Glasgow permeates his work – and his work permeates Glasgow. For me, to walk around Glasgow is to walk through Gray’s landscape. More than once I have wandered through Kelvingrove Park to Park Circus in homage to Gray’s ‘Poor Things.’

But that is arguably mere tourism. The dérive can have a deeper purpose.

I recently had the experience of supporting a close relative through a psychotic episode. They had memories –some powerful, some vague – of places they had wandered while ill. But they have a switched-on circle of friends who have helped them to process by walking them through events and piecing together the fragments. This walking through has been literal: revisiting places in safe company and acknowledging their disordered state, rather than letting painful memories fester.

I was given no such support following my episodes, and for many years I would simply avoid certain places. But that is life-limiting and can’t go on forever. At some point, I will have to pass that bus stop, that bar, that street.

So now as I drift through the city, I have inoculated myself against my memories. That is, rather than letting those memories sneak up on me, I have confronted them, sought them out. I have become a tourist in my own mind.

Confronting the psychogeography of my illness takes me through a contemporary city but reminds me of a landscape and a state of mind removed from my present, mentally healthy self. The ability to wander around places I have haunted in the past has given me strength, perspective, closure.