The Mythogeography Of Things To Be

Phil Smith

We come to a T junction. Never go back. And the two other

options are roughly similar. Each one appetising, neither
eccentrically so.

We’re on a group “drift” – Taxi To Westwood and

Featureless. Setting of at 4am in a taxi, blindfolded,
Walkmans on, we’ve asked to be driven to somewhere
without signs of where we might be (our version of a
situationist ‘catapult’). The driver named it “featureless”.

On my own, at such junctions, I usually take a step in one

direction, and jump back, worried at missing things in the
other. I take a step along the other route and, once more,
recoil. Making a Burdidan’s ass of myself. The anxiety is an
economic one, a fear of loss.

On Taxi To Westwood and Featureless we threw a stick in

the air and followed the sharpened end. Coming to the
junction afunctionally, already following irrational ambience
we felt little need to weigh the possibilities.

I’ve been participating in and initiating such “drifts” for

almost 10 years now. For me, they emerged from the site-
specific theatre and performances of the Exeter, UK-based
group Wrights & Sites. Dissatisfied by some of the
impositions of theatre on the sites it was supposed to be
specific to, Wrights & Sites began to explore other
performative options: informed by the psychogeography of
the situationists (at first negatively, defining ourselves in
opposition to them), by English neo-romantics like Arthur
Machen, by the meshing with the ‘everyday’ of Fluxus, and
by more recent explorers of the urban like Anna Best and the
Stalker group of Rome, we began to take ‘drifts’ with no
‘where’ to get to, without fear of what we might be missing
elsewhere.

We were arriving at junctions afunctionally.

I want to explore this ‘break’ in walking as something more
than a simple opposing of
function, but as something more
like a delayed moment just
before a synthesising of patterns
in the physical sciences,
something more than a
disruption in leisure studies.

Before the situationists

popularised and theorised this
break (following, knowingly, in
the footsteps of Dadaist anti-
guided walks and Surrealist
jaunts), it had been prefigured
in walking of which the
situationists were not aware:
occasional experiments within
the more extreme ranges of recreational walking and
tramping, like Stephen Graham’s zig zag walk (in The Gentle
Art of Tramping), and among an esoteric few who saw
walking as an irrational journey, like the Prague writers
whose street wanderings became labyrinthine fictions:
Gustav Meyrink, Paul Leppin, Alfred Kubin, or, in London,
Arthur Machen. But these were still bound in the polar
oppositions of function and pleasure, a sort of ambulatory
‘art for art’s sake’. Now a break from this binary opposition
has been made increasingly possible by long rhythms of
critical-theoretical change, by recent crests in neuroscience,
by the popularisation of non-classical physics and a
resurgent interest in neo-Platonism, morphology and
mathematical biology.

Where reviews of walking were once referenced mostly to

literature (and this still continues, influentially, in Rebecca
Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s very recent
‘Psychogeography’), then visual arts, architecture and
politics (Guy Debord being the obvious example, and
Francesco Careri’s ‘Walkscapes’), and more recently
geography, archaeology and anthropology (see Mike Pearson
and Michael Shanks’s ‘Theatre/Archaeology’), I am
proposing here a pedestrian pseudo-science of limited
motion, crucially ‘simple’ in the sense of using a small
number of invariants by which to navigate ideological flows.
A ‘science’ that slides through its influences, taking gratefully
from them, but abandoning that repetition of origins that
sets up colony within all disruptions; for want of a better
term: mythogeography.

Mythogeography is active on the border

between the respectable and the non-
respectable. Like “researchers” in
conspiracy, it mimics the nomenclature of
science without the obligation to always
maintain its disciplines, (and without
funding or laboratories it is, by necessity,
a borrowed and borrowing practice, it is
not original). Given its few resources it
must deploy its findings in a strategic
game of peaceful conspiring, hopefully
placing itself within the liquid cloisters of
a self-organising enthusiasm for self-
organisation and within the ambiguities
of dynamic forms for which (both for forms and ambiguities)
David Wade has borrowed the Chinese term “li” - because “it
falls between our notions of pattern and principle” (Wade,
2003, p.1)

Mythogeography is a playful geography of traversable space

that has arisen from site-specific performance making, a
practice often contesting the meaning of its sites with their
owners and users. But it has arisen also in contesting this use
of sites – one which, rooted originally in large scale US Land
Art, often seemed to be one of appropriation, and which has
provoked a reaction, exemplified here by Miwon Kwon: “our
understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, physical
location to somewhere or something constituted through
social, economic, cultural and political processes.” (Kwon,
2002, p.10) Mythogeography would like to have this both
ways, to maintain the ‘thingness’ of its sites, while setting
itself in motion, proposing itself as a mobile, ambulatory
discipline, adopting the fictional precedent of Greek
‘pedestration’, aware of this adoption as the adopting of a
simulacrum, a romantic invention to justify serious walking.
Mythogeography can continue to contest the landmarks, the
symbols, the boundaries of material sites, as well as the
processes that run through them, exploiting this friction and
gathering its contradictions: rumours, mistakes, elaborations
and inventions, détourned tourism disinformation, crimes,
personal associations, hidden histories and hauntings that
hang about specific places, valued these equally with the
slogans and detritus of official histories and tourist
geographies.

The opportunity is here to theorise a critical space

somewhere in between the on-going revival of early
situationist-like walkings and the parallel emergence of
walking practise that might, this time, reach beyond the cul-
de-sacs (there often are alleyways inaccessible to the car
driver) of imploding and cultic organisation that condenses
capitalist competition within itself and the market strictures
of art, but deferring any synthesis of these two practices. The
discipline of this geography is its placing in gaps, an attempt
to accumulate ideas before they hybridise, setting them loose
again in their pre-hybrid forms, a gamble with the risks of
condensing, in the hope of circulation and orbit.

The term “mythogeography” emerged, probably by mistake,

in my own description of the performance Page Boy in the
former Maritime Museum in Exeter, (October 2000): “at the
entrance to a site forbidden during The Quay Thing. Body
and books as doors to alien territories. Performed on an
adulterated map of our previous work. Exmouth merging
into Narnia. Tracing new plots onto the mytho-geography,
like Bron Fane's UFO 517 narrative, a 60s trash novel that re-
writes the Exe Estuary myth of The Devil's Footsteps…”
(http://www.mis-guide.com/ws/archive/phil.html) and was
developed by continuing misuse. It has (re-)presented itself
as an opportunity to test, theoretically,
ideas and practises it has come to name,
and to provide a theoretical back(drop)
for others to leapfrog over.

Mythogeography’s account of walking

begins its break from those tensions
within the earlier narratives of Stephen
Graham, Geoffrey Murray or Morris
Marples’s Shank’s Pony: A Study Of
Walking that partly defer to literature
and ‘landscape’ art, but cannot quite
resist the attractions of a practice that
resists reification, that has no need to
dematerialise its art object (having
none), that has retained something of its pre-romantic
combination of amoral natural mutability, uselessness and
low necessity. This turns art history on its head – now the
dissolution of site does not follow the appropriations of the
‘pioneering’ and pseudo-colonialist Land Artists. In
mythogeographical art history, the Spiral Jetty and the
Lightning Field float among the trajectory-practices of
trampers, the titles of whose books, while contaminated by
the values of a class system, imply an art of a peculiarly
ephemeral kind: Murray’s The Gentle Art of Walking,
Graham’s The Gentle Art of Tramping. The “thingness” of
Land Art can be enjoyed by floating rather than
dematerialisation.

So, rather than the processes of art, mythogeographical

walking is more about a meshing of geographical trajectories,
and their ghostly bathing in cultural motion pictures, and
with a geometrical connectivity of a ‘self’, the integrity of
which is constantly being modulated by new neurological
research, fragmentation in the face of critical theory, and the
speculations (for that is what they mostly are) of
consciousness studies (from Roger Penrose’s ‘quantum
consciousness’ to memetics). This geographical ‘softness’ -
comparable to the ‘soft places’ in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
comics, or Jonathan Raban’s ‘soft city’ – welcomes the
academically unrespectable, while refusing to collapse itself
(despite, personally speaking, certain blandishments offered)
into any single branch of small-business esoterica, it
challenges the integrity of the walker in themselves and the
landscape in itself, walking topographies (in both senses, of
‘surface features’ and their ‘charting’, simultaneously and
discretely) in which self is geographical and landscape is
surprisingly autobiographical - a geographical game of Six
Degrees Of Kevin Bacon - challenging political, cultural and
psychological identities. In the mobile mythogeography of
the ‘drift’, setting identity at risk is an essential ‘catapult’.

The working ‘mytho-scientific’ method is a floating of

repeatable experiments with charlatan fictions and hopeful
speculation, conducted according to the evolutionary
psycho-architectural explanation of the ‘creative explosion’
of 30,000 to 50,00 years ago, succinctly articulated in Steven
Mithen’s The Prehistory of The Mind. Mythogeography, with
the benefit of hindsight, uncovers the archaeological record
of Mithen-ology in its own cultural landscape. No surprises
there, then.

“RUPERT: …(I)nsofar as we see

angels… perhaps we can see them as
associated with angel fields. Angels
themselves could be thought of as a
particular manifestation of the activity
of these fields, just as photons are a
particulate way of thinking about the
activity… in electromagnetic fields.”

(Fox & Sheldrake,1996, p.41)

In June 2003 I journeyed with my

then neighbour, the mathematician
Matthew Watkins (author of Useful
Mathematical and Physical Formulae, Wooden Books,
Wales, 2000) on an Angel Dérive through the city of Exeter,
navigating by signs of angels. As a default trajectory we
would visit the four churches dedicated to St Michael and All
Angels. We reached only three – significantly, if you regard
three-plus-one as of significance. At first we could hardly
walk at all for the intensity of detail. Yet, despite the
granularity, as long as “when to end” was not an issue, I
always retained a sense of operating within a ‘field’ of
pseudo-geometrical spacetime, almost tangible, a ticking
away of things being.

We skirt around St Michael and All Angels on Mount Dinham -

the place is such an obvious vantage point - like the sites of Danes
Castle, Rougement and the Law Courts, yet no one seems to know
much about the site - called ‘California’ at one time, used for
drying cloth on racks. Field. Purchased by John Dinham to prevent
a fun fair and prostitution. A contested field. Commandeered by
one who understood the curving pull of ideological and sensual
space. Not a Puritan, a patron of an alternative, fearful sensuality.
The church was built as an “idealistic propaganda tool” for a
sensual Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism, for visuality against
text.

On our way we’d dodged the traffic to climb onto the base of the
Clock Tower and there was a tiny white angel - a brilliant white,
delicate, cross-shaped, miniature moth.

Notes: “electricity and god are indistinguishable” - this seems to

be a quote from someone - it sounds unintentionally Futurist…

“water wings” – found on a discarded shopping list

Outside the church we encounter a tenant from Dinham’s ‘Free

Cottages’. “Free? Not at those rents!” She tells us that she had
been entertaining friends from America at the Royal Clarence
Hotel, in search of their roots, and there they were, sat,
unknowingly, just a few yards from the monument to an ancestor
of theirs. “They were called ‘Bastard’ or something like that…”
“‘Hooker’?” “Yes, that’s it!”
I attend a talk in St Michael and All Angels, Mount Dinham. ‘God
On The Brain’ by the Reverend Anthony Freeman, dismissed from
his parish for his part in
the humanist Sea of Faith
‘heresy’, co-editor of the
Journal of Consciousness
Studies, carefully laying
down a materialist science
for visions and prophetic
voices, explaining how
two ‘everyday’ neural
functions, when
unexpectedly co-activated can produce exceptional experiences,
combining a sense of reality with extreme emotion. Not that there
is any exceptional “thing”, but rather there is creativity – the
unexpected co-operating of simple “things”. Throughout, Reverend
Freeman sat facing the West Door, its doom wall a screen of
angels, and a singularly human devil. “The doors are double, and
above them, in a circular medallion, is a carving of the seven
archangels. In the front are St Gabriel with lily, St. Michael with
his sword and scales and St Raphael with the staff and scrip.”
(Anonymous, undated) Uriel is missing. Or present, but
anonymous.

Does mythogeography/mytho-geography have a hyphen?

It should be spelt inconsistently.

Between smooth, gridded space, where things happen - in every

small town you expect that monster with tentacles that squeezes up
through the macadam, or the big bass spider - and those winged
phantoms with psychology is fecund ground for exploring.
Walking along an empty country road with Vicky and Matthew I
suddenly ‘saw’ a huge computer-animated monster stepping out
into the road - that’s where, maybe, one can explore the maps that
are slowly emerging from walking: the territories of intuition
(popping up like the “eccentrics” of paper architecture), textbook
diagrams of Grotowski’s para-theatrical evolution from Rich and
Total Theatres to a biological singularity running in tiny loops of
time beyond the hybrid into instinct and temporary blackout. And
in the cockpit of some enormous craft, constantly steering and re-
steering itself, resisting the dialectic of Little and Large, of the elite
minority that is always becoming “everything”, in the ship with no
Zion, with no originary, but rather “focus(ing) on those moments
or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural
differences. The ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that
initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration,
and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself….”
(Bhabha, 1994, p.1-2).

This particular good ship Osiris - with its pilot Thoth (St Michael
holding the scales) recording the measurements of a heart weighed
against a feather, while peregrine falcons on the spire of the church
of St Michael (Mercury, Hermes, Thoth) pick a pigeon to pieces,
its bloodied feathers shwoeing down among the children playing in
my daughter’s school playground. (“RUPERT: In the Christian
tradition the principal symbol of the holy spirit - that which
inspired prophesy, shamanic-type gifts of healing, all the gifts of
the spirit, including… intuitions of various kinds - is the pigeon…
assimilating to the state of the pigeon, is the basis of the gift of
knowledge, prophesy and spiritual power…” (Abraham et al,
1998, p.76) “Look, daddy, snow!! Red snow!!”- this Osiris vessel
resists a banal hybridity, resists the ‘progressive’ slap that gets the
blood moving in the murderer’s brain. It must sail among the sharp
reefs of archaic and modern, ‘original’ and copy - each delayed
synthesis threatening to bite the hull and fill the ship with
itself/themselves. Bhabha quotes Marshall Sahlins on ‘difference’
in Western bourgeois culture: “…between an open expanding
code, responsive by continuous permutation to events it has itself
staged, and an apparently static one that seems to know not
events…” (Sahlins, 1976, p112) and against it he proposes “The
intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the
structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys
the mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is
customarily revealed as an integrated, open expanding code.”
(Bhabha, 1994, p.37)

The contest between tourism and drift. In the latter’s resistance to

totalisation, it deploys the trash and ceremonial of its enemies:
“…that Third Space, … unrepresentable in itself, … constitutes the
discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning
and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even
the same signs can be, ‘that element in a translation that does not
lend itself to transition’…” (Bhabha, 1994, p.224) It is the piece
of grit that sees, not the eye it irritates, its is the granularity of
trash, gossip, mistakes, sci fi-sudden freezings of time, monsters,
poor theatre, marginalized theology and film, rather than their
critique in studies of popular culture, it is return to the un-
translatable ‘thingness’.

“Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC because the

hybrid, wingless, featherless things they used in the food were no
longer officially chickens” - not true, but an imaginary animal
flies; it remains for mythogeographers to create a habitat for it in
Third Space.
Despite an antipathy to the anti-sitedness of theatre
(exemplified by Peter Brook’s concept of “the empty space”),
it’s hard not to acknowledge the half-
life of theatrical presence on the
‘drift’, so openly marginal and
manifestly diminishing, its very
willingness to publicly decay
theatrically grants itself a diffusive
quality, in “direct, physical,
celebrative interaction with
spectators, acting out her/his (its)
own performative functions with
them through the text, as well as
behind it and beside it” (Soule,L.
2000, p.6) - when the text is place.
What Lesley Wade Soule perceives
here, in the anti-mimetic actor, or rather in the actor who
plays on the border between mimesis and its dispersal, is
what - when the spectator is abolished and made an actor in
the art of walking - we can be:

“celebrative, inviting (and inciting) … to playful response

and/or carnival participation, and… liminal/liminoid,
namely, free from sociocultural associations (often including
gender), as well as from fixity of mimetic character. As an
intense and liberated celebrant, the actor is… demonic, that
is, perceived to possess potentially dangerous charisma… in
collusion… with oppositions between reality and fiction,
identity and disguise, ignorance and knowledge.” (Soule, L.,
2000, p.8)

Soule characterised this “actor” as “rebellious but

unrevolutionary” (Soule, L., 2000, p.11). When the walkers
on the performative drift are “actors” this formula breaks
down into the probability of an emergent fracture in
‘consensus reality’: not a simple disruption of ideology, nor
the emergence of an alternative tortality, but a probabilistic
disruption of the striating operation of its phantomic
reproductive system. This is starkly delineated in those odd
moments when drifters meet ‘ramblers’, in the uncertainty of
what each other is, the fishing for anything to say to each
other. In appearance the two sets of walkers may be similar,
but there is only a genealogical connection between the
ramblers and their dériviste anti-particles: “they were of the
species Bacchae… they were no longer textual (ie., conveying
or possessing meaning), but purely performative (ie., having
indefinable significance and the power of perpetual
becoming).” (Soule, L., 2000, p.31) Always becoming, never,
unlike the rambler, arriving. Destinations on drifts, if ever
reached, have significance only as catapults to other places.
Mythogeography is a nomadic art.

Starting from the site-specific theatre of Wrights & Sites this

might seem like the return of a repressed theatre, finally
raising itself, with the help of Land Art, from beneath the
censures of Fried and Greenberg, to the locus of art. An
spiration that that Buci-Glucksmann, in the context of
painting, calls “the height of modernity… the great angelic
utopia of the baroque,
which consisted in
making something
visible, in being a pure
apparition that ma(kes)
appearance appear,
from a position just on
its edges… the theatre
of a painted visible
where the eye would be
at once in the wings
and on stage.” (Buci-Glucksmann, C., 1994, p.61.)

Mythogeographical anti-mimesis retains this binocularity of

vision through space and not art, through the exploration of
the wings as parts of the machine for theatrical product, ie:
appearance, through exploration of ‘the stage’ as a road on
which is next it is never possible to take more than one step.
Theatre has sought to revivify itself in the specificities of site.
Performance the same in the specificities of body. ‘Drifting’
pitches itself between the two revivals, resisting a synthesis
with either - placing itself in the wings, angelic and
architectural, both feathery motion and edgeland, an ironical
process/landscape not unlike that of Vitaly Komar and
Alexander Melamid’s Most Wanted paintings, ideologically
overloaded, multiple and bleak, unhomely, both stalled and
transcendent, culture as natural history; unrefined and
multiple atomistic desires keeping the picture from
coalescing within its frame, it will not sit still: not quite
sublime, not quite laughable. It is from this particular flavour
of iconoclasm - not the destruction of images, but rather the
delaying of their synthesis - that mythogeography can form
its political interventions: democratic, participatory,
resistant to completion, in the temporal and cultural mish-
mash where symbols can clump about, free of their usual
moderation and mediation, similar to the play of accidentally
collaged images in museums so beloved of Robert Smithson:
“… a fantastic plan to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Some
bones from Hannibal’s elephants are neatly displayed, and so
is Nero’s “fiddle”.” (Smithson, R., 1996, p.98-99). These
images are not so much floated free, as stalled; their memetic
complexifying, their ideological integration, pre-empted.
These are playgrounds, the queasy foundations of change.

Margaret Boden, deploying the metaphor of “conceptual

space” with a geometrical bias - “What was wrong with
Cézanne’s advice to a fellow-artist to ‘deal with nature by
means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’?” (Boden,
M., 1990, p. 249) has questioned assumptions about
‘genius’, ‘inspiration’ and the experiencing of rich structures
“all at once”, perhaps not difficult targets, and in their place
suggests that while “(T)he more richly structured (and well
sign-posted) the (conceptual) spaces, the more possibility of
storing items in a discriminating fashion, and of recognizing
their particularities in the first place… Mere systematicity…
is not enough… creativity requires that systematic rule-
breaking or rule-bending be done in domain-relevant ways.
Consistently H(historically)-creative people have a better
sense of domain-relevance… Their mental structures are
presumably more wide-ranging, more many-levelled and
more richly detailed.” (Boden M., 1990, p.252-3) So, rather
than an elusive ‘genius’ or mystical openness to synchronic
experience, Boden is suggesting that the creative mind is one
that can be developed by the storing and arranging of low-
level patterns of thought (these are ‘early’ thoughts, hence
the importance of a nostalgia (and hence the angels) that
can re-make the past as a utopia, of an iconoclasm that can
rescue simple, changeable, memes, before they become
complex) which can then be embroidered and reassembled,
changing the dimensions of conceptual spaces, refining them
complexly, but made up of simple patterns.
Mythogeography can have both. Indeed, in the cathedral
structure of Mithen-ology there is no contradiction between
Boden’s cyber-creativity and Freeman’s accidental
mysticism. They are both a drama of chapels of information-
storage, both describe the architecture of ‘information
retrieval’.

If conceptual space-changing is a
‘destination’ that is always on the
move, then it is a suitably iconoclastic
device, for a transcendence that
ignores the anthropomorphic idol in
favour of the abstraction of forces and
geometry, of nature-in-general; a
phantom draughtboard tongue placed
gently in a generalised cheek. This
places mythogeography towards the
sublime end of an iconoclastic
continuum which is at its most
unforgiving in the smashing of images, moves through
decorative art and ends at an aspiration to re-present the
unrepresentable (the angelic baroque - the aniconic
sublime). Here the human subject is de-centred. The role of
art is historical fodder for détournement: the means to a
rejection of a future for art, a rejection of the pseudo-
iconoclasm of modernism and its clearing away of the
remnants of religious representation to make art (and the
artist) its own idol. Representation, frame as border,
art/non-art – at last, can we have these back as everyday
“things”?

The situationists’ rejection of art - without abandoning either

practice or, even, ‘creativity’ (in the programmatic and
materialist sense that Margaret Boden uses the word) - is a
rejection of modernism’s self-appointed privileges and
dispensations, its defensive ‘difficulty’, its appropriation of
the right to interpret itself. In their place the situationists
assert the ‘simple’, nostalgic, anachronistic act of walking,
the streaming dérive, at the first praxis of their project. It
became suspended theoretically in mid air. But the action-
idea remains to be used. The project of mythogeography
shamelessly purloins it for the development of exchanges of
the most provisional of ‘mappings’: from ‘pure’ un-
catapulted, disorientated, urban exploring in search of
ambience, to structured drifts with catalytic themes, even an
‘iconoclastic’ use of a ‘drifting consciousness’ while
performing functional journeys - to work, to shops, to
multiplex. All these are accessible at a ‘simple’ level,
explainable in a sentence. Once engaged and in motion, by
learning an increasing vocabulary of ‘simple’ patterns, the
walker refines their ‘creativity’ by re-assembling the orbits of
memetic units that an aesthetic of delayed synthesis keeps
stalled but in permanent fall - like international spaces-
stations.

This version/inversion of the ‘dérive’ is described in process

by Lawrence Brady when he comments on his and Carl
Lavery’s wandering in Norwich in 2005, and Lavery’s use of
the city as ‘an art of memory’, a series of storage spaces for
ideas: “The empty street behind the car-valeting service was
a paragraph from Marc Augé on non-spaces; the riverbank at
Fuller’s Hole was Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space; the
concourse of the library was Bergson’s ‘la duréé’. The
Situationists wanted to use ‘lived experience as the true map
of the city’ but your peripatetic discussion was the mirror
image, using the city as the true map for ideas.” (Bradby &
Lavery, 2007, p.47)
Single sentence-based mini-drifts or wanders through a
series of theories-places, the pattern is a common, dynamic
one.

“…performance alone is not enough - the walker must walk the

element of resistance in the process of transformation
appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew.” (Bhabha,
H., 1994, p.37.)

“(God said:) “I, who am at home in all the ends of the world,
revealed my work in the East, the South and the West. But the
fourth quarter in the North I left empty; neither sun nor moon
shines there. For this reason in this place, away from all worldly
structures, is hell, which has neither a roof above nor a floor
below.” (Hildegard of Bingen, 1844-91, 197, 812B)

The parentheses around “God said”

are mythogeographical goalposts.
Moveable. The anomaly that is
always in the way of theology,
disrupting the binary. The three plus
one. Hell is a particular place. Evil is
no angel, but a kind of landscape
gardening. Hildegard describes the
darkness of the North as the contrast
that reveals the light from other
points. Sheldrake makes this into a
wave function. But hell is too
‘placed’ for all this; too grittily,
granular-historically, awfully there: “The landscape repeats
itself… borne round and round in never-ending circles of the same
rooms, fields, offices… toward an overwhelming disaster… The
universe has performed itself into exhaustion… ” (Oppenheimer,
P., 1996, p.7) Yet Gilles Ivain’s Dark Quarter, in his Formulary
For A New Urbanism (1953), and Bess Lovejoy’s goth “anti-
brightness”, pitching black against the “wide-scale denial of the
darker aspects of life within Western industrial culture”(the e-peak,
issue 4, vol 100, 28.9.98 at <http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/98-
3/issue4/brightness.html>), are alive with resistances. Even in
Hildegard’s “hell” the roofless and floorless emptiness is that
which has granted the Planet Earth its complexity of existence - the
unequal distribution of the universe’s one atom per cubic metre.
On this the walker ‘surfs’: the virtual vacuum from which virtual
particles burst on borrowed energy before paying it back and
disappearing. The mythogeographical map of Exeter must include
hell, virtual particles, a ludicrously specific paradise, Kirk Radio
and anatomy: neither “the assimilationist’s dream, (n)or the racist’s
nightmare, of a ‘full transmissal of subject matter’; (but)…an
encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity
that marks the identification with culture’s difference… the
irresolvable, borderline culture of hybridity that articulates its
problems of identification and its diasporic aesthetic in an
uncanny, disjunctive temporality that is, at once, the time of
cultural displacement, and the space of the untranslateable’.”
(Bhabha, H. 1994, p224-5)

Yodeling cowgirl/performer Misha Myers told me that there

is a real “Hell” in Exeter. Mount Dinham rises out of it. The
old name for the dark quarter around the North (!) Gate,
once guarded by a basilisk taken from the long-gone
structure, ignored on a tall pole, and recently disappeared.

Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible: Raphael,

Gabriel and Michael. But four angels are linked to the four
directions. In the People’s Park, Crediton, a sprayed tag on the dog
shit receptacle looks very like “AZREAL”. There is a fourth,
secret, monkey: “feel no evil” - its hands cupped over its genitals.
Three plus one.

Devil – monkey – basilisk - angel - human. Shape-shifting old

texts. Dragons in the Aromatherapy window on the Exe Bridges.
Guinness: angel/harp hybrid. Thru’ Swan Yard into Cowick Street.
We enter a shop full of angels - “Angel of the Month: £7.95”. The
proprietor explains that she is “responding to demand”. For reasons
I can no longer remember I have written in my notebook:
“Batman, Thumberlina, Jeepers Creepers… “Marconi, My father”
… Pan/Angel (Franklyn House) angel on one shoulder & devil on
the other. Wu-Tang World Wide on a jacket. Notice: “Fun Dog
Show. Class no 16. The bitch the judge would most like to take
home.”

We are in a motorway underpass. Just had a conversation with an

old farmworker. Understood maybe one word in twenty. Class,
relation to production, time. On the concrete are great jeepers
creepers winged Wu Tang Clan beasts. Some ‘wings of God’ - /|\ -
on old GPO concrete stumps. Even out here, on the very edges of
the city, the trail of wings continues…

We come across a mosaic tribute to a homing pigeon, Mary of

Exeter, she was decorated with the Dickin medal, the animal
bravery award, “Wounded In Action”. Matthew mentions Rupert
Sheldake’s book The Physics of Angels but I end up reading stuff
of his on pigeons in The Evolutionary Mind; failure to account for
pigeon-homing, his “fantasy” that pigeons “consult a very detailed
three-dimensional map of the entire planet”. Something “maybe
us” do too.

The more we walked and talked and looked the more we were
drawing out a new web of associations, with the translucent quality
of an insect wing: how can such things be distributed, dispersed?
How can they communicated in a state of constantly being ripped
up and rearranged, but without completely disappearing, how can
they be accumulative and instantly consumable? Is there emergent
form that is both map and consciousness? What?

Is this what the Atmospheric Maps are one version of,

among many more – routed in the failed history of Brunel’s
Atmospheric Railway, mapped by disparate walkers on four
separate ‘drifts’ around the route of the line, guided by
ambience? The maps are free, but difficult to follow,
encouraging their users to ignore them and find their own
way, distributed through libraries, shops, by hand, from
walker to walker (a mobile machinoeki)? And the Wrights &
Sites’ ‘mis-guides’ to Exeter and to Everywhere? And Will
Morris’s psychogeographic poems of the Exmouth coastline?
Will there come a point of critical mass when these
fragments can liquefact, become a process, rather than an
art, become a mythogeography of “things” in motion?

At St Michael & All Angels, Alphington, a baby Herring Gull

wanders about the graves, its parent swooping. I duck. Matthew
wanders confidently between the curves. We are shocked by the
violence of Alphington’s statue of St Michael and the Devil. We
walked to St Michael & All Angels, Heavitree, but lost track of
angels. The granularity of the walk from Mount Dinham had
undergone a liquefaction at Alphington:

“… when the earth shook, these wet sandy soils turned to a slurry
that flowed like treacle. This property of granular substance
naturally enough known as liquefaction… manifestation(s) of the
fact that a granular substance is a peculiar state of matter:
composed of solid grains, yet able to show liquid-like behaviour…
a convenient model system for studying complex phenomena as
diverse as the fluctuations of stock markets and the formation of
large-scale structure in the Universe.” (Ball, P., 1999, pp.199-
200)

Had the swooping Herring Gull shaken me? Or the statue of the
angel killing the dragon/demon/itself/its/elf above the porch? And
this sinking feeling on entering a kind of pre-edgelands between
suburban housing and industrial estate after the ripe baroque of the
city? The route was grey and yellowed, smoothed, creamed, water
concreted in but not over, bright sunlight ironing out things,
pulling towards the River Exe down a hemmed tributary, Alph, to
the fluids of the hospital, the capillary actions of the gorsedd Yew
at Heavitree. I had shivered at the granularity of feathers, my eye
on swooping wings and stone angel - wormholes to beaches and
sand dunes. The long curve of sunburnt grass, sliding beside
‘longeurs’ of unpolished smoothness, the industrial estate’s barely
differentiated “units”. Walking frictionless by unwanted,
disowned, estranged water. A shedding of belonging. Losing one’s
grip. From the picaresque entertainments of the first part of our
drift, it is only now - in retrospect - that I begin to enjoy the sea-
sickness of the second part.

To walk is to enter an occult mechanism for the raising of

patterns.

To be socialised, mythogeography will require an ‘art of

memory’.

“Did I send you a Peripatetic Randomiser?”

(personal email, Jim Colquhoun, 10.1.04)

Something cheap enough to buy multiple copies of, add to

and leave for others to pick up and add to… “…please feel
free to leave the book on a bus when you next come to
London…” (personal letter from Anna Best, author of
Occasional Sights).

The missing archangel, California as a field- funfair or

temple - the gaps, fictional pasts, ambiguities of statues and
un-built plans of the city turned up by the
mythogeographically sensitive walker. Setting the walker at
odds with the local reproducers of ideology. The granularity
of mythogeography – a multitude of suspended particles,
behaving like a liquid; the dynamic of a deferred hybridity -
exposes the few banalities that pass for heritage here,
meaningful detail is feared. Wrights & Sites are asked by the

local council to dress as pirates. Perhaps one day we will.

Wormholes render “local” meaningless’. On that Angel
Dérive the city felt like a sieve against my fingertip, like the
grid of one of those three dimensional depictions of
Einsteinian ‘gravity as space’, and then the smooth
emptiness of the pre-edgelands; there is a mytho-geometrical
map to be made of this city, any city - it would be politically
controversial, making meaning from curves that are there to
control flow and texturalities that function as friction to
delay customers only long enough to purchase, made comical
by their place in a pattern of ignored details; former mass
productions faded into hieroglyphics, past faiths and
certainties in splinters. Punctuated by void places in which to
play seriously.

There will be closer and more distant observations to come –

from the satellite of Doreen Massey suspended above the
city, defining space as trajectory not boundary, and from
those ideal walkers – two-way mirrors for the city, reflecting
experience on one side and a map of ideas on the other, slid
between the strata of the street, picking up its scratches and
scores – these will slow the city, disrupt processes, move
things again, begin the re-knitting of tissues: make strange
and repair.

References

Abraham, R., McKenna, T., Sheldrake R., The Evolutionary Mind:

Trialogues At The Edge Of The Unthinkable, (1998), Santa Cruz:
Trialogue Press.

Anonymous (undated) The Church of St Michael & All Angels, Exeter,

A Short History and Guide.

Ball, P., (1999), The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation In

Nature, Oxford: OUP.

Bhabha, H., (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Boden, M., (1990), The Creative Mind, London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson.
Bradby, L. & Lavery, C. Moving through place: itinerant
performance and the search for a community of reverie, Research In
Drama Education, Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2007, pp.41-54, Abingdon:
Taylor & Francis.

Buci-Glucksmann, C., trans. Patrick Camiller, (1994), Baroque Space,

London: Sage Publications.

Fox, M., & Sheldrake, R., (1996), The Physics of Angels, San
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Graham, S., (1929), The Gentle Art of Tramping, London: Ernest

Benn.

Hildegard of Bingen, (1884-91), Patrologia Latina, Paris: Migne.

Julius, A., (2000), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and

Jewish Art, London: Thames & Hudson.

Kwon, M., (2002), One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and
Locational Identity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Massey, D., (1993) Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place

in Mapping The Futures ed. Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T.,
Robertson, G. & Tickner, L., London: Routledge.

Mithen, S., (1996), The Prehistory Of Mind, London: Thames &

Hudson.

Oppenheimer, P., (1996), Evil and the Demonic, London: Duckworth.

Rutherford, J., (ed) (1990), The Third Space, Interview With Homi
Bhabha, in Identity; Community, Culture, Difference, London:
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Sahlins, M., (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: Chicago

University Press.
Smithson, R., (1996) Establishment in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley: University of California
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Soule, L., (2000), The Actor As Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Devil

and the Boy Rosalind, Westport, USA: Greenwood Press.

Wade, D., (2003), Li: Dynamic Form In Nature, Presteigne, Wales:

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Sites.

Phil Smith perform.smith@ukgateway.net