Desire Paths 
Author: Roy Bayfield
Imprint: Triarchy Press
Extent: 142pp.
Size: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 978-1-911193-04-3
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Tags: walking, drift, dérive, Roy Bayfield, mis-guides, phil smith, Argleton, mythogeography,  psychogeography.
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“Roy Bayfield really walks in Desire Paths. But not only does he really walk, we accompany him on these 'real walks to nonreal places'...  we drift with him through the personal and three-dimensional landscape of his voyages in the physical, spiritual, virtual and human realms. This book is for both those already involved in urban walking and for the novice. For those who are new to it, its format is especially designed to open your eyes to the features of the landscape, and at the same time provide you with experimental walking exercises.”
– Dr Tina Richardson (Editor: Walking Inside Out)

Desire Paths
​Real Walks to Nonreal Places  
Roy Bayfield


Unpromisingly – for a walking book – Desire Paths begins on a hospital gurney as the author prepares for open heart surgery. Thereafter, it dances back and forth in place and time between an array of obscurely connected walks that Roy has undertaken over the years. 

Among the book’s many characters and diversions are Wetherspoons, Capt. Picard, the Navy Cut sailor, the buried ‘Spirit of Brighton’, Wendy Craig, Harrods, Buddhism’s Six Realms of Desire, ‘Things to Do...’ tourist brochures, Argleton redux, the abyss, strip-lynchets, punk residues, Milton Keynes, multiple identities and an inkling of what the future may hold for thoughtful walkers.

Each chapter starts with a quote from Phil Smith's Mythogeography, specifically from the ‘Legend’ given in that book – ‘legend’ as in a set of definitions of symbols used on maps to define landscape features. Roy uses these symbols to organise the book. 

The main body of each chapter is an account of a walking journey he has done. These are not chronological: structuring the book around the mythogeography Legend has (dis)organised the walks into a sequence that wanders in and out of time. 

Towards the end of each chapter, Roy reflects on a Landscape Feature that corresponds to the Legend – exploring the workability (or playability) of mythogeographical concepts and illustrating how they have manifested in his own walking. 

Finally, the Jump Over the Back Fence notes  in each chapter suggest further actual walks which readers could make. 
“Roy Bayfield rises from the dead and re-discovers walking as a way of life. Desire Paths
is another fine mythogeographical grimoire.”
– Gareth E. Rees (Author: Marshland)
“Welcome to the world transformed as possibility. Where the smell of bread from a bakery
demolished decades earlier still lingers in the air. Where Princess Diana lives as a lipstick
smear on a Harrods wineglass. What is real (or seen) is ‘intercut’ with the unseen (but
not unreal) so as to create new realities of seeing. Ultimately, these Desire Paths converge
beautifully in a book that mythogeographically maps the moments of a life, searching
restlessly restlessly for what might appear at any given turn, on any given road.”
– James Byrne (Author: Everything Broken Up Dances)
I read a book called Desire Paths by the psychogeographer and poet, Roy Bayfield, and I keep returning to the following passage:

If I was the most important element of the landscape, if everything revolved around me, then the growth of blanket weed in the canal, the fading paint on the narrowboats and the additions of graffiti on the underpass would have been measured to quantify my absence. The St. George flags on the new canalside apartments would be there to celebrate my slain dragon. But none of these things were the case so we were free to just walk and notice: meadows visible through the hedges; a heron, with a whole fish in its neck; features of rail and canal architecture collapsing into the natural environment; empty chairs at the back of a factory. (Bayfield 2016: 22)

I admire the way he combines magick, art and spirituality. The book is a nexus of all three. This passage shows how he achieves it: a delicious letting-go of any sensible, central I.

It is because none of us is at the centre that we really are free. Things are never more themselves when unmeasured in relation to us. Letting drop the urge to find ourselves in everything is a hallmark not just of psychological maturity, good poetry, and meditative practice, but also – evidently – of Bayfield’s unique flavour of psychogeography.
​
Accompanying him in his enchantments of meaning from space and place is a vicarious and intense magickal pleasure.
- Gabriel on Sermons to the Unborn (www.sermonstotheunborn). Read the full review here.
"I liked that Desire Paths is a down-to-earth book about mythogeography and psychogeography... [it] is easy to read, and easy to take inspiration from. You can follow the walks Roy Bayfield makes. He begins each one with a pertinent quote from Mythogeography and he gives clear notes about a landscape feature that corresponds. He also gives suggestions for walks readers can make inspired by the theme.

The subtitle of Desire Paths is ​Real Walks to Nonreal Places. At the end of the book Roy explains this and offers a deconstruction of mythogeography, pointing out that the walks are both real and a totally made-up fantasy. We physically put one foot in front of the other, often for long distances, but the stories the walks inspire are unreal. Does this make mythogeography invalid then? No, as Roy says: 'Actively participating in DIY myth-making develops insights that help unmake all myths: a form of liberation.'"
- Lucya Starza (badwitch.co.uk)
 As the author says:
"I carried on [walking], accepting the commission to be an 'ambulatory explorer' or someone 'wandering about like David fucking Carradine' as my friend John Mainstone put it. Adopting an identity as a walker.  But when I look at this identity I don’t just see a single image, a jaunty icon of a pedestrian from a road sign or map, a lone figure in a landscape. I don’t just see me at all. The remembered roads have various Roys on them – pilgrim, patient, psychogeographer… and less defined figures. 

I decided to reflect on my walks, search amongst the signs and wonders of my various journeys for clues – what are these walking identities? Where might they have come from? Where are they heading? 

I have walked for many reasons – as creativity, as spirituality, as a route back to reality, to get to work and go to the shops. Connections that can only be made on foot, things best seen from a pedestrian viewpoint, sneaking backstage in the spectacle of the everyday to glimpse the inner workings. Walks to make sense of uncertain times. Gathering up the shredded maps to make a new one, I wrote this book."   

Readership

Desire Paths is a book for walkers and ramblers, walking artists and performers, urban walkers, admirers and decriers of Phil Smith and Mythogeography, students who are discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking.