About

Murdo Eason is a writer and walker based in Fife, Scotland.

He is the (undisclosed) author of From Hill to Sea: Dispatches from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective 2010 – 2014  (Bread and Circuses Publishing, 2015);

Language of Objects, a collaboration with sound artist Brian Lavelle (Blind Roads Press, 2017);

and various other published writing, poetry, image, sound and collaborative work. 

This site is now largely an archive for the blog maintained from 2014-2020. For more recent work and news see:

murdoeason.com

mastodon: @fifepsy@zirk.us

twitter: @fifepsy

murdo(dot)eason(at)gmail.com

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Fife Psychogeographical Collective 2010-2015.

19th August 2010:

Occasional dispatches from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective.  Field trips and wanderings from hill to sea … mapping the interstices of past, present and possible …

From the Kingdom and beyond …

Why Fife?

The great sites of psychogeographic exploration have perhaps not surprisingly tended to privilege the urban environment with London and Paris the primary lodestones of psychogeographic endeavor.

Taking a lead from Patrick Geddes, the great polymath, regional theorist, activist and (as yet, unacknowledged) proto-psychogeographer, the FPC believe that both urban and rural environments are mutually constitutive and therefore equally valid as spaces for psychogeographic wanderings.

What better a site than Fife?  A virtual island interzone, betwixt and between the cities of Edinburgh and Dundee; an ancient Pictish Kingdom, bounded by the Firths of Forth and Tay.  Where a New Town is built on a 4,000 year old henge and 18 feet menhirs brood on a ladies golf course, under the shadow of Largo Law.  Not far away, the statue of  Alexander Selkirk, gazes out, projecting his own haunting presence into the psychogeographic mindscape.  If Selkirk was the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, it is the ghost of Robinson who wanders and stalks through many a tract of the psychogeographic imagination. Witness Rimbaud’s supposedly derived verb robinsonner (to travel mentally, or let the mind wander) or the unseen and unheard researcher in Patrick Keiller’s films London and Robinson in Space.

Ideas crackle, tussle and fizz, throughout the ether over this Scottie dogs heid:

Kirkcaldy’s famous son Adam Smith  tossed a large brick into the pool of economic theory with The Wealth of Nations (and let us not forget A Theory of Moral Sentiments) written on a site now housing Greggs the Bakers.  The self-interest of the baker to supply us with Steak Bakes is alive and well. (The debate as to whether Smith, the moral philosopher, has been hijacked by the right will be left for another day). There is also a hauntology of radical socialism. In Cowdenbeath, Lawrence Storione founded the Anarchist Communist League and West Fife elected Willie Gallacher as the first Communist MP.  In Lumphinnans you will find Gagarin Way, a street tagged in honour of the Soviet cosmonaut and from which Gregory Burke named his first play.

Concrete hippos and dinosaurs traverse the urban landscape in Glenrothes; cup and ring marks lie mute on Binn Hill whilst a green witch’s shop sits on the high street of Aberdour to deliver up soothing potions to the contemporary unwell.  A secret bunker channels cold war paranoia and the devil is reputedly buried on Kirkcaldy beach, interred by the occult energies of the dark magus Michael Scot.

These are just a few random scatterings from this space of possibilities. ‘A beggar’s mantle fringed with gold’… a palimpsest of histories and vibrations.  A site for exploration.

Inspiration from the patron saints and goddesses:

Patrick Geddes, Henry Thoreau, John Cage, Rebecca Solnit, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Julian Cope, Guy Debord, Bill Drummond, Giles Deleuze, Joseph Beuys, Alan Moore, Sophie Calle, Victor Branford, Colin Ward, Patti Smith, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Robert Walser, Kenneth White, Gary Snyder, John Burnside, Lorine Niedecker, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Tomas Tranströmer, Anne Carson, Italo Calvino, John Rebus, J.G. Ballard, Mark E. Smith, Annette Peacock, Lao Tzu, Paul Auster, Kathleen Jamie, Albert Camus, Werner Herzog, Lewis Mumford, Peter Kropotkin, Keith Jenkins, Yi-Fu Tuan, Laurie Anderson, Joe Sacco, Michel de Certeau, Morton Feldman, Éliane Radigue, La Monte Young, Jean-Claude Eloy, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Verlaine, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Samuel Beckett, Clarice Lispector, Phillipe Petit, Marjane Satrapi, Jah Wobble, Ralph Rumney, George Wylie, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joan Eardley, Iain Sinclair, Nick Papadimitriou and John Rodgers, Ian Nairn, Rainer Maria Rilke, Basho, Wim Wenders, Bela Tarr, Bill Douglas, Patrick Keiller, Andrei Tarkovsky …

All material © 2010 – 2020, Murdo Eason / The Fife Psychogeographical Collective (unless otherwise stated). All Rights Reserved.

All images on the site ©Murdo Eason unless otherwise stated and credited.