Edinburgh morning: it's a song in our hearts, this city. Coming out from out hotel, we feel a great upsurge of love: opposite, spread before us, the Old Town rises up in layers. We tremble with love – don't we feel lighter here in Scotland? Isn't the air fresher, keener? And we have the whole day before us. We have time, the whole day, like an empty expanse.
The relation to a city can be sexual, of course, W. says over breakfast. We remember the graffiti from May 1968: I came in the cobblestones. And wasn't there a woman who recently married the Eiffel Tower? But the young of '68 came collectively; theirs was a collective orgasm, enveloping those who were supposed to stand against them – the men and women of established power.
All or nothing: isn't that what the Situationists demanded of the city? Human freedom, in urban form. A transformed cartography. Wasn't that what they sought in their derives, their driftings – an exodus from the capitalist urban grid to the utopia secreted in the city? Wasn't it the concidence of desire and architecture for which they looked, the free associative passage of meanings and moods, a reading of the city like a book of poetry?
Debord and the others drifted for weeks to find what we've found. They passed through half-demolished houses and dossed down at night in public hardens looking to escape alienation and reification writ in stone, the capitalist transformation of space into its own decor. They wandered in forbidden catacombs in the name of a critique of human geography. They drank – how they drank! – to break their fetters, to usher in the reign of prodigality and glory, of a true metropolitanism.
Some places drew them closer, some repelled them; they sank into some routes like fissures, following the cracks in the urban network. They drained into sinkholes and found havens in the drift, temporary stopping places: certain bars, certain quarters. But above all, they moved, they kept out of place, and for months at a time. They moved, and the will to change life as it was moved with them. Life as it was, life as it is: they blazed through Paris like a trail of fire …
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