Praxis 2003

Phil Smith

1. There’s a path at the end of my street. Strange for a street in the

centre of the city. At the end of it is a green and partly wooded
valley where a herd of Jersey cows is kept.

In the valley people sometimes

make temporary homes. A man
built a shrine from which he set
out to rape and probably
murder. But his first attempt
was foiled and he was
imprisoned.

If you look along the valley

you see the spire of St Michael’s and All Angels on Mount
Dinham – but we’ll come to that later. If you look across the
valley from the path you see the campus buildings of the
university.

Among the trees of the valley I make

improvised shapes that remind me of the bugs
from Starship Troopers. Next to the path is a
wall on which I maintain a chalk graffiti.
2

I made a cd for this path with a sound designer – we used found

text, overheard conversations, questions from my daughter,
research about the place, our own associations. The tape is for a
very slow walk along the path – first one way and then back. On
the outward journey all the voices are female. But this is the start
of the backward journey. Let’s take a short walk back.

(PLAY: first 3.48 of Track 2 of Hoopern Valley Slow Walk.)

Even though it’s made for that path – the Hoopern Valley Path –
people take these cds away, or copy them, and listen to them on
other walks, bathing those other places with the associations from
the Hoopern Valley – the meanings and images mutating as they
travel. Specific and yet also transportable.

Perhaps that’s because there are things in common that this place
has with those others. There is something of foreboding as well as
quietness in its winding and uneven way. There is something
sinister as well as banal in the jumble of university buildings, first
designed to a grand parade scheme but eventually built piecemeal.
The ghost of the original hubristic plan perhaps still lurks. Or
maybe it’s the looming science towers that challenge the churches
for altitude.

(PLAY: from 3.48 to 6.50 of Track 2 of Hoopern Valley Slow

Walk.)

When I first began to create work that is specific to its site, I was
terrified of the sites. The sites seemed, and were, so big. They
were full of other people. And noises. And things. They were
uncontrollable. They were inconveniently alive and excited.
My reaction was to throw everything I could at them. I had Sue
Palmer dressed as a piece of text peddling madly down the side of
the Exeter Canal. I cluttered the sides of the River Exe with cut
outs of noses, huge decapitated heads, wardrobes.

The experience was disturbing, upsetting – almost all the

performers expressed some sense of professional crisis. And I felt
it myself. I was accustomed to controlling the sounds, climate,
look of a studio – or to playing variations on generally understood
conventions of behaviour in an auditorium.

I only really started to enjoy myself and, I hope, make something

that other people could bodily, and metaphorically, “get into”
when I stopped trying to control spaces and started to choose
spaces I didn’t feel a need to control.

I chose spaces I found friendly. I made performances for our back

garden, the Natural History Room of the Royal Albert Memorial
Museum in Exeter, a deconsecrated church and its graveyard, my
attic workroom, the Cathedral Green in Exeter.

In these performances I was, very slowly and uncertainly, feeling

my way towards different ways for performers to ‘be’ in site
performance. In the piece in the former church – imaginatively
entitled Church – and in the performance for my attic – called
Forest Vague Panic – two very distinct ways seemed to emerge.

In Church it was a kind of transparency. Church was a

performance based on young performers’ associations with the
site. If there was a structure to the performance it was not a
narrative one, but a pattern to let these associations and the places
in the site enter into shifting relationships with each other. The
performers in Church were not ‘absent’ or self-denying, but (in
the best moments) like photographic transparencies projected on
to a screen. In these moments they were, in Simon Persighetti’s
words: “there but not there simultaneously”. Their performances
were encoded with colours, shapes, depth, ideas, images, but these
did not obliterate the screen-like site. Rather the site could be read
both through the performers’ transparency and was highlighted
by the light thrown and the shadows cast on and by them.

There was no attempt to pretend that the performers were

innocently or directly revealing the site, but rather that the site
was illuminated in a mediation, in an overlay of diaphanous
images.

There was one particular sequence that was picked out by a

number of audience members as highly effective – this was a
scene made in a kitchen off the nave of the church and only
visible through an open hatch. I was frustrated at first that the
promenading audience did not move to look through the hatch
into the kitchen, but from the accounts of audience members
afterwards it became clear that not seeing was crucial to their
enjoyment. One spectator wrote: “One of the most evocative
moments for me was in the kitchen sequence where the
performers were out of sight and the institutional acoustic of the
place became the performer. The audience were visibly animated
by this invisibility.”

It’s important to emphasise here that this “invisibility”,

transparency, the token marking of an idea of character rather
than the “acting of characters” does not represent an absence of
the performer from the site, or any diffidence or incompetence on
the part of the performers. On the contrary, it was very revealing
when twice, once in rehearsal and then just before the
performance, the school student performers were encouraged by
their teacher Mim Fishwick to: “Stay in character!” - despite the
fact that the performers had no “character” to stay in - we all
seemed to know what Mim meant – to maintain throughout a
heightened behaviour and sensitivity, and not to betray self-
consciousness but to stay self-possessed.

A transparent way of performing, unencumbered by the

melodrama and individualistic psychology of contemporary
naturalism, can let the stories, expected roles, urban legends and
myths familiar to us from the playground, the streets, mass media,
play through us, enabling us to re-negotiate our own attitudes and
roles in relation to dominant ideas and images in the sites of our
world. Referring to earlier popular forms of theatre Lesley Wade
Soule in her book Actor As Anti-Character - Dionysus, the Devil
and the Boy Rosalind (Greenwood Press, 2000) – wonderful
book! – Lesley Wade Soule describes the possibilities of such a
“free” performance style, here in relation to dominant character
roles, something that a transparent way of performing might
aspire to: “The free actor plays with … ideological figures,
subverts and humanises them and keeps them moving and
changing, perpetually recreating them as fluid living presences.”

In contrast to the transparency of Church, in Forest Vague

Panic – the performance in my attic office - the exotic costuming
and make-up, the high, but unpredictable emotionalism of the
performances and the picaresque dialogue (it was all about
conspiracy theories) all served to identify the performers-cum-
characters as part of the ‘enhanced’ rooms, hall, stairs and attic;
neither revealing nor illuminating the site, but rather becoming
extrovert parts of it – we were, in estate agent jargon, like bogus
“original features.”

Just to give you some idea of the bewildering pile-up of details,

half-heard stories, the whirl of images and references, I’ll just play
you a part of the sound track that ran alongside about half of the
90 minute performance.
(PLAY: - from the FVP - track 2 )

In Forest Vague Panic there was no attempt to pretend that the

performers were creating organic individuals or performing that
elision of character and performer familiar to us from soap-opera
naturalism, but rather we wore these characters’ artificiality, their
swirling fragmentariness and grotesque detail, their hybrid
combinations of object, animal, human and idea, all that was part
of a site set in its habitual motion (a place in which just such non-
characters are dreamed up; my attic workroom.) One spectator
described the performers in Forest Vague Panic as having
“carried what must have been a rather difficult script well.” I like
that “carried”. The script was so heavily laden with detail it had
become another prop, a piece of the site to be “transported,” an
element of the architecture to be lowered into place during the
performance.

So here was not transparency. But something closer to

camouflage – in which the text and performing takes on
something of the materiality of the site itself. This camouflage –
this physical taking on of the site – extended to the audience’s
reception of the piece. The composer David Haines compared it to
falling asleep during a “late night showing of the Russian sci-fi
film Solaris…” “The blue of the room is beginning to suffocate
me.” wrote lecturer and performer Dee Heddon: “The collage of
materials like the mix of the soundtrack lead me down a dizzying
array of roads, in which this world becomes more blurred, in
which what is real and not real becomes more indistinct, in which
stories and facts and givens become tossed up, tossed together,
confused, in which links between this attic-forest-world and the
world outside cross each other…. And here, in this hot, dark, blue
underworld that is an overworld, it is the very non-sense that
makes sense, our drive to sense-making laid bare.”
So, just as in transparency there is no absenting of
the performer, so in camouflage there is no absenting
of character; the performer can deploy all sorts of
strategies from naturalistic performance, more
abstract populist theatre; the signature “figures” of the
characters in Forest Vague Panic were not unlike
those of the characters of Commedia dell’ Arte –
Pan’s scraping his feet along the carpet as if
sweeping up his victims was suggestive of Pierrot’s
waving his sail-like sleeves in distress. The camouflage character
is, then, always “performed”, never an imitation of a person but a
physical illustration in circulation among other illustrations. As
physical, as detailed, as contradictory and as extra-human as the
site, so that at times these camouflaged performers might seem to
disappear into the suffocating heat, or the blueness… or whatever
physical and associative qualities the site might have.

Whenever I describe transparency and camouflage I almost

always get: “oo, lovely!” for transparency and camouflage is
ignored. It’s a shame, because I think the idea of camouflage is
very helpful in responding to certain kinds of very intense, very
busy, very baroque sites that tend to blanch out the transparent
performer.

Well, that might be the end of this talk if it wasn’t for my use of a
single word to describe my earliest attempts to grapple with site. I
can’t even remember how or when I started using it. But I began
to describe my work in site as mytho-geographical. I’ve no idea
what I thought I meant. I think I’d probably mixed it up with
psycho-geographical; a term used by the situationists to describe
the travelling of cities to discover their unconscious zones and to
radically affect the psyches of the people in them. But I don’t
even think I knew what psycho-geographical meant at the time.
So I used the word “mythogeography” first and then it filled up
with meaning later – and the meaning? - an approach to places
that values the rumours, lies, inaccuracies, anachronisms,
obsolescence, ruins, mysteries, associations, marginalised
information, banalities, inventions and hauntings of a place just as
much as its official history or municipal mapping.

But I was still performing this search to others, for others, on

behalf of others. I created a piece called A Carnal Tour; a sort of
mis-guided tour for visitors to Exeter’s Cathedral Close. Partly
through tour-guide monologue, but also by recordings of séances,
the mummery of pouring Special Brew onto the dead
underground, and by the out of the corner of the eye performances
of a vampire solicitor, a spectral psychogeographer with an
unfeasibly large map that threatened at one moment to engulf the
bishop, and the ghost of an amorous nun who lept with her friar
lover into a well on the Close, I endeavoured to provide a mytho-
geography of this most central of Exeter’s mythogeographical
features.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I

hope you enjoy the next half hour.

I am not an official tour guide. Though I have grown a

beard to look a little more like one. But I haven’t done
anything with my beard, it’s just the way it’s grown.
And I haven’t adopted a fictional character like say
from C. S. Lewis’s stories of Narnia or anything like
that. Though you might think that in these
surroundings that might be appropriate.

For today we are in the ancient Cathedral Close. As you

can see, everything here is very old.
In fact hardly anything of what you see today has
changed for thousands and thousands of years.

The forest, the clearing, the graves, the grove, the

place of matrimony. Things are written in stone. There
is volcanic rock in the walls of the restaurant there.

One item of fact: this small enclosed area…

The heart of Exeter, which it does not wear on its

sleeve, has a higher density of reported hauntings per
square metre than anywhere else in the country…
which is true of many tourist destinations. Some people
have put this down to the enthusiasm of local tourist
boards, others believe that tourists and ghosts have
much in common.

If you did want to model yourself on a fictional

character you might do worse than choose that of
Charles Villiers, one of the main characters in Arthur
Machen’s story of the uncanny: ‘The Great God Pan’,
published in 1897. He is a sort of super-tourist like
yourselves. A spectral psycho-geographer walking the
streets quite separate from history:

Such a person, once called a ghost-hunter is now more

often called a ghost-watcher, rather as television has
replaced the big game hunters with a sort of
adventurous audience.

Our particular haunting today is the result of a love

story, so, of course, it ends in a well… rather than ends
well.
I like this, from one of the ghosts:

(Reads:) “When you appreciate we live in a state

no less material than your own, you will
understand that with our greater age and
experience we are much in advance of you.”

But how can the past be in advance of the present?

And surely what’s interesting about ghosts is that their
ideas, unlike actors in soap operas, have floated free
from their experience. Maybe the ghosts are ok
empirically, but not to be trusted when it comes to
theory?

We’re going to pass the scene of a recent murder in a

moment. I don’t really want to dwell there, so I shall
just indicate the place with a gesture. (Makes the
gesture.) There, a homeless man, Nicholas Noall-Strutt,
a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland and in
Bosnia died from stabs wounds in the early hours of
September the 27th, two years ago.

A man came forward later and described himself as the

dead man’s only friend. He told how he had given the
dead man shelter in his single room flat, the dead man
sleeping in the bed while he slept on the floor.

“Then I got a new flat,” said the man “and there

was no room for Nick. The last time I saw him
we walked down to the Cathedral Close on
Sunday... He was a bit upset because he did not
know anybody in the city. He started to cry and
asked if he could come with me, but there was
no way I could help.”

I often see desperate men walking together here.

After the Dean of Exeter had, and I quote from the

local paper: ‘..cleansed and blessed the cathedral
grounds, he spoke of a “sub life” that had come
“very visibly” to the surface. “What we wanted
to do was to reclaim the Cathedral Green as a
place of goodness and purity,” he said, “There
are tens of thousands of people buried under our
feet.”’

But what if the place was somehow implicated in the

crime?

Please follow me.

(The Misguide leads the spectators to the just before

The Well House. Then makes the gesture to indicate
the site of the murder of Nicholas Noall-Strutt.)

The second chapter in this story of the exploitation of

murder and death by the tourist trade starts here in the
bar of The Well House. You can perhaps see from here
the chalked sign advertising the bones of an
unidentified woman. The dead have been pushed by
the movement of earth from the burial ground across
the road into the cellars of houses, hotels and
restaurants. But I don’t want to show you bones, only
signs.”
(break off from performance.)

… quite recently these bones were re-examined and revealed to be

not from one body but two, the mingled bones of a man and a
woman – the nun and friar lovers hounded to their suicides
perhaps?

The Close is the setting for a scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

This is where the Vampire’s property conveyancer has his offices,
and where Jonathan Harker brings his wife in order to hide her
from the vampire. Dead labour still circulates electronically
through the banks here. Maybe there’s more. This from a recent
Fortean Times:

“About 12.30 on the night of 25 May, I was walking past the

small cemetery off Magdalen Road in the St Leonards area of
Exeter (three minutes walk from the Cathedral Close) when I saw
something flying above the gravestones that I took to be an owl.
However, as it circled closer, I saw that it was a huge bat, with a
wingspan of around 3ft to 4ft…”

Perhaps the Count is still looking for Mrs Harker. Bram Stoker
knew Exeter from his visits as business manager for the actor
Henry Irving (on whom Dracula is based). He would have known
of Exeter’s theatre The Seven Stars – had he something in mind
when he wrote his story of the reanimation of an Egyptian
princess – The Jewel of the Seven Stars. The actual mummy on
which this story is based has recently been re-examined. It’s a
man. The bones change sex. Narratives run like streams of lava
through the city. Cooling and melting, fusing with the things
about them.
Creating these mythogeographies was an ambitious aspiration.
Spaces and places didn’t always yield up their secret stories
easily. The effort to discover covert information meant I was
becoming just as interested in the sites as I was in the possibility
of performances in them. Rather than a reconnaissance for places
for performance, the investigation of places became almost an end
in itself: a way to trace and sometimes to summon the
performances already trodden into, branded onto, drifting about
the places. In Simon Persighetti’s phrase for site-specific theatre:
“The actor becomes a signpost.” I was becoming a walking
signpost. More interested in exploring sites with groups of people
than pre-emptively interpreting the sites for them.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been part of a number of

organised exploratory walks – they sometimes get called “drifts”
or “dérives , borrowing terms from the Situationists. Mostly these
have been collective events that challenge the conventional
singularity of making art. Some have been with my daughter,
Rachel, who is five years old. She chooses the directions at each
junction. She calls it “’sploring”.

Many different things have arisen from all this “’sploring”.

One thing is a kind of consciousness linked to a kind of behaving -

Sue Palmer described my behaviour in her “Drift” documentation
of the recent “Z Worlds” walk as:

(Quote from Sue’s “Drift” document.)

“phil is like a drifting sniffer dog”

I’m in a state of heightened or certainly altered consciousness on a

“drift”. This is not the languorous dreamy wandering of the
flaneőr – inured from the world by their own reverie – rather this
exploratory walk is an exposé, an investigation, an excavation of
the real wonders that are denied us if we keep off the grass, if we
follow the Code, if we “Keep Out!”, if we only travel to work, to
shop, to buy organised leisure from a multi-national company…
the “drift” is a safari in search of pleasure.

An ever more connected and entwined mythogeography has

continued to emerge from all this exploratory walking. As more
and more connections are made one begins to feel as if one
walked streets visibly pulsing with arteries, alive with brain
activities, throbbing with conspiracies and chemical reactions.

When I said that “Narratives run like streams of lava through the
city.” I didn’t mean that metaphorically. Lava literally runs
through the streets of Exeter. There are long walls built of it. The
Museum frontage is constructed as an educational display of it.
All about the city it erupts in buildings, walls, monuments – a
challenge to the assumption that all is stable, all is basically
sound.

The magnetic polarity of this volcanic rock - (mean directions of

magnetisation of 190º declination and -10º upwards inclination) –
shows that at the time this rock spewed molten from the ground
the part of the planet’s skin we now call Exeter was close to the
equator: the city is a site in migration, a dead volcano on the
move…

At a recent symposium at the Tate Britain Gallery in London on

the work of the walking artist Hamish Fulton, Doreen Massey,
Professor of Geography, Social Sciences at the Open University,
described the Skiddaw peak in the Northwest of England as a
“transient mountain… just passing through… moving at the speed
our fingernails grow.”

But it’s not just the things about us that are in transit. We are too.
Our selves are always in movement. The meeting of self with
place is that of two transients “just passing through” each other.

And every kind of measurement or judgement is always made by

just such an instrument in motion. I love it that somebody called
this playful mutation of an archaeological ranging rod – a snake!
Because that’s what working in site should like – like trying to
measure the world with a snake.

Out on the edge of town we found the Bishop’s Court Quarry. The
sandstone there was formed first as ‘aeolian dunes’, laid down by
the action of the wind; from the distribution of cross-bedding
azimuths in the stone it’s possible to say that the prevailing wind
that blew this rock into its present shape blew from the south-east
to the north-west. The quarry is an old map of breeze. A wind
chopped up on the outskirts and frozen in hundreds of buildings in
the centre of the city.

Sometimes those buildings, walls and pavements of fossilised

breeze seem bathed in an eerie half-light of TV and film. I find
my autobiography of everywhere that I’m writing is washed with
the movies. This bathing seems to be in either utopian or paranoid
colours. Usually both. It offers the prospect of a changed, but
more volatile and more conspiratorial world. Like those old
Avengers episodes when the world had been put to sleep and the
characters have the play of the whole world – every shop open for
shopping, every square a stage set to act out a fantasy…

Even when the narrative was one of darkly comic threat – as in

George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead - still the overwhelming
impression for me was the excitement of contravening the rules of
shopping rather than the peril of being eaten by the living dead…

(SHOW: clip from THE DAWN OF THE DEAD)

In the most degraded parts of cities I’m in that setting of so many

post war British films - the bomb sites left over from the second
world war. As a child I remember the few remaining craters and
clusters of ruined houses not yet filled in or dragged down. They
were our play areas. But they also suggested to me a world that
was not as stable as the rest of our red formica-topped lives might
suggest.

There’s a rather good book on British made sci-fi films with a

whole chapter called Trashing London on the films of the 60s and
70s: made by directors who had lived through the Blitz, bizarrely
celebrating the fictional devastation of their native city – their joy
at the reduction of the industrial, political and economic city to a
wasteland playground, a stage cleared for melodrama on the grand
scale… the transformers this time not bombers, but monsters like
Konga or alien invaders – or even in the case of Quatermass and
the Pit the ghosts of alien invaders…

But here’s another film of the same period, Daleks Invasion Earth
2130 with Peter Cushing as Dr Who…

(SHOW: clip DALEKS INVASION EARTH 2150)

Ever since I first saw that film, I could be sitting on a beach

looking out to sea or looking out over hills or along a valley and I
would know I was watching a landscape just moments before that
Kenwood Chef of a ufo looms into view. Actually, the ufo never
loomed for me. But the feelings of anticipation bathing those
landscapes never left me. Now I’m nearly fifty I’ve suddenly
discovered that I’m allowed to take them seriously. If you ever
feel the same way, you probably don’t have to wait so long before
you do something about it.

(Rubbing fingers together. Mystic smoke.)

But I wouldn’t want you to think that I’ve stopped performing in

site. Some of the walks that I’ve made have included some
element of performance. Sometimes spontaneous, improvised.
The conjuring of some bogus spirit form for example. Mystic
Smoke. Impress your friends.

Drifting recently with the mathematician and psychogeographer

Matthew Watkins my eyes were opened to a whole realm of
symbols and signs engraved, carved and sprayed onto the city.
Particularly Matthew drew my attention to the sign of the wings
of god, scored into the foundation stones of older government
buildings. For the origins of this symbol let me quote from Mrs E.
O Gordon’s Prehistoric London:

"The announcement of the Divine name is the

first event traditionally preserved and it occurred
as follows: God, in vouchsafing His NAME
said /|\ and, with the Word, all worlds and
animations sprang co-instantaneously to being,
and from their non-existence, shouting in ecstasy
of joy /|\, and thus repeating the Name of the
Deity. Still and small was that melodious
sounding voice (that is the Divine Utterance)
which will never be equalled again, until God
shall renovate every pre-existence from the
primary utterance of which emanated all lays
and melodies…”
This symbol - and I quote again from Mrs Gordon –

“The sacred symbol.. the three rays or rods,

survive in two forms, in the three “feathers” of
the Prince of Wales, and in the “Broad Arrow”
of the Government.”

But they’re also on the helmet of Hermes. They’re

reminiscent of the remaining sacred shape of Exeter – the
cathedral being the central ray with the two churches of St
Michael’s and All Angels being the others.

St Michael the Archangel was a popular substitute ‘god’

for Christianised pagan sites to Hermes. The yard of St
Michael’s in Heavitree contains a huge yew tree – called
the Head Tree, the Heavitree, or the Heofed treow – which
appears to be a 500 year old side-shoot from a much older
tree that stood on the site where the church now stands.

“The yew is no ordinary tree, and is capable

of renewing itself in a variety of ways,
frequently for instance an aerial branch will
descend down into the hollow of the trunk
and root itself in the earth.”

On a previous drift we found the graveyard covered in the ruins of

a ‘party’ - ripped underwear, bottles, scooter ruts in the grass,
food. And there was another kind of disturbance:
(the photo of smoke/mist in graveyard Photo: Bob Butler) –

Later on we climbed a hollow path, up from the Ludwell Valley -

Ludd the multi-user name, Ludd the ruler of Britain, the great
builder who gave his name to Ludwell Gate in London – did he
use the wings of god on his constructions? – the climbing path is
roofed with leaves until, a little way from its summit, we see,
framed in its opening … the spire of the Heavitree St Michael’s
and All Angels, the church looming up where once the giant yew
might have been framed. The next day I received an email from
one of the others walkers describing this moment as one of his
highlights and making a comment that he doesn’t explain –

“Heavitree Church - which I am unsurprised to learn,

given its position, is dedicated to St Michael - framed as
if in heaven.”

On the other wing, at St Michael’s and All Angels, Mount

Dinham, the spire can be viewed from the Iron Bridge, where the
North Gate once stood, against which the Falcon public house
once stood, where one of the houses still sports an empty recess
where once the stone carving of a falcon marked the absence of
the pub and from where now – under a weathervane from the old
gate that consists of part snake, part cockerel – identical to the
design of a flask in the alchemists’ tower in Prague Castle – and
from where now one can see living peregrine falcons hunt about
the spire, as if some god-animal had breathed on their feet; the
birds of prey sending an occasion shower of bloody pigeon
feathers onto my daughter’s school’s playground.

Perhaps all these connections will eventually turn out to be dead

ends. Or perhaps this is the beginning of a mythogeographical
mapping of patterns of symbols, rhizome-like historic
connections, real dynamic patterns of property borders and
underground lakes of pleasure that drive the city on – more
materially descriptive of what energizes the city than any story in
the evening paper.

But I don’t want to leave you with the idea that this is all about
stories. Instead, I want to suggest that maybe it’s as much about
shapes and atmospheres.

For on the various walks I’ve participated in I’ve felt some things,
experienced some atmospheres very strongly. Sometimes felt
similarly in different spaces that might be connected not by cause
and effect, but perhaps by some similarities of both shape and
atmosphere – similarities that might be describable in a mytho-
geometry.

Here’s a couple of the shapes of atmosphere that I’ve detected…

the first is dread. This is my account of coming upon a place of
dread – a recently redundant church at a remote Devon crossroads
that we stumbled across on the Taxi to Westwood and Featureless
drift; thanks to a so-called ‘catapult’ that involved us being driven
at 4 in the morning, blindfold, by a tax driver to whom we paid a
couple of notes and asked to be dropped somewhere we were
unlikely to recognise:

the crossroads with the old red telephone box and adverts
for bus services and an orchestral concert in Exmouth, the
vintage Jaguar dealers, the house, the bus shelter like a
mossed shell the animal gone but still useful, and then the
church with a “for sale” sign leaning, its metal spike raw
and exposed, against the gate. Simon walked ahead, up the
suspiciously untrodden grassy path, past a large, ominous,
garish bush, him like a disappearing Kim Novak. I began to
feel the beginning of that feeling. The purple flowers and
the not quite right crosses on the ridges of the church roof in
the not quite right light. Amy spotted a large black slug that
was sliding itself beside the gravestones of the Sluggetts
family. In the porch, tucked into the eaves, Simon found
fragments of the electoral register; names and addresses.
There was nothing on the noticeboards. Was it already de-
consecrated? How can they do that when the dead are still
here? With what authority in history, in symbolism?
Another purple flowering bush humming like a radio. Full
of bees. Grapes in stone on the porch. “Blue apples”.
Honey. Gold. Is it so easy to turn off the energy of this
place. Just close it down? Like the “grid” of pylons could be
turned off? With what consequences? For the dead?

How old is this site of death, of stone, of honey? And how

many things have been worshipped here? And turning it off:
what is blacked out? What disorder, what incivility to
corpses? Turning back just before the gate and the “for sale”
sign. The purple bush seems to have darkened now, even
more sweet, sticky, libidinous and looming. It’s closed over
the path. Closing something off. Something we haven’t
seen: uncanny. Uncanny – unheimlich - unhomely – because
there is the possibility now. The shutting of orthodoxy is the
opening of ‘everything else’. This is the uncanny of
attraction of lanes with turnings off into who knows what?

This is a place of Pan-ic – the pattern of place and

atmosphere described by numerous correspondents to the
Fortean Times recounting their sudden experience of terror
(or Pan-ic) at the presence of everything else but
themselves, at the presence of the possibility of everything
else.

This is like the woods where every way looks like every
other: later in the woods when we walk for maybe thirty
minutes or more through unchanging terrain – not fear, but
the imaginary possibility of walking in circles. I know from
race-walking that one of my feet is set in the ankle at a
wider angle than the other. I’ve read Stephen King’s The
Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon – a girl lost in the woods.

I’ve been lost in Cannock Chase. A potent absurdity: the

church, locked, unused, the paths being retaken by grass.
The suicide of orthodoxy has opened the (obscure) paths to
everything (else). Henry Ford and Herr Deisel, General
Motors and Dunlop are gods here. History not two thousand,
but less than a hundred year old: in the orientalist form of
Jaguars, E types, and their struggle for immortality against
rust. The slug god, huge and a treacly black, creeps over the
stones of a gelatinous family of former human matter in the
ground. A god that puckers to the human touch. An
intelligence unlike that of a father, but like everything
(else). The empty church: looking so regular, except in the
telltale details.
 This feeling has been best described by the Danish
philosopher as “dread”:

“there is peace and repose; but at the same time

something different, which is not dissension or strife,
for there is nothing to strive with. What is it then?
Nothing. But what effect does nothing produce? It
begets dread… …the reflex of freedom within itself at
the thought of its possibility.

the alarming possibility of being able… What it is he is

able to do, of that he has no conception… There is only
the possibility of being able, as a heightened expression
of dread,… he loves it and flees from it.

the infinite possibility, which does not tempt like a

definite choice, but alarms and fascinates with sweet
anxiety.”

There is a tendency to mistake this uncanny energy for ominous

aggression, to fear it; the writer Arthur Machen encountered its
scale in the Welsh valley of Caerleon in his youth, but could
only, and, he admitted, unsatisfactorily (if famously) transform
and betray it into horror in his much anthologised short story The
Great God Pan. But it is much more to do with fear of our
relationship with the immensity of everything else than with the
incarnation of an ancient god.

Other kinds of shapes cum atmospheres might include:

Ambience: (being the coming together of all sorts of

differences to make a place where action to change things is
somehow magnified.)
Wormholes: being places where there is swift transport to a
distant and connected one

Places that are ‘almost there’ : the sorts of places you come
across and can never find a second time, places you’ve heard
about but can never find precise enough directions for.

And micro-worlds : these are miniature worlds that can be made

or appear quite by accident: sometimes caused by commercial
pressure, sometimes art, sometimes forgetfulness; little worlds
contained to themselves that spring up - ready to be visited like
ancient sites.

Recently I participated in a Z Worlds ‘drift’ specifically to seek

out these worlds and to maybe create some of our own.

Along the way we found a world of fire and a travelling village of

firefighters, we found death walks, we found a world under a
pylon – (I heard on the TV the other day, or I think I did, that the
pylon shape comes from a Pylon Temple in Eqypt, is that right? Is
that another part of the pattern of shapes and symbols stretched
across the country?) – we were excluded from a world of military
redundancy. We made microworlds on a council dump, in a
redundant horse trough and around an old, isolated stone gatepost.
Later I re-walked the route we’d taken first with my daughter
(partly in a snow blizzard) and then with Matthew. One world had
disappeared, another had been dismantled, another survived
largely intact. (In fact I even caught a glimpse of it a couple of
days ago from a bus some few months since it was built.) And we
found more worlds and even trespassed our way into ones we’d
failed to enter first time round.
Each world represents in some way a tiny playground, but also a
utopia. A tiny model in which or on which to construct an ideal
playground.

Under the pylon Rachel and I found an arctic world in which we

could sculpt crevasses and ice floes.

A few miles along the same stream of energy pylons their shapes
would remind Matthew of a childen’s TV programme called The
Changes.

Set in a post-Luddite 20th Century. The opening episode in what

looks like 1975 Bristol, residents smash their electrical goods,
overturn cars, assault all “wicked machines”. The announcer on
the TV that the father of Nicky, the main character, smashes up is
Jeremy Carrad, presenter of a BBC religious broadcast I wrote a
play for and appeared in, in 1976. Just after the changes, then.
“MEETING PLACE” it was called. “Recdg No:
VTC/6ST/B.04265/BS. TRANSMISSION: Sunday, 28th
November, 1976, 1100 – 1145 BBC-1”. Matthew was scared, but
couldn’t let himself be seen to be too scared to watch.

In the dread world of The Changes Nicky can walk into a pub
and help herself to soft drinks. In the world under the pylon
Rachel can help herself. To a world of rich red watery clay under
a sugar ice crust. Poking and hammering to release the terracotta
ooze. A map of mud, fractures, like fractal lichen. And then
striking a valley through the ice. “’Splorin’.” A wet and cold
equivalent to those Indian Summer evenings of the 1960s when I
would fashion red Mars landscapes, North African forts and Death
Valleys from the hard, dry clods in Dad’s vegetable garden.
Breaking small chunks between my fingers to make the red smoke
of artillery fire. “MYSTIC SMOKE FROM FINGER TIPS.”
Almost home, Matthew showed me Park House on Longbrook
Street, the birthplace of William Kingdon Clifford, the
mathematician who declared that space was bent some four
decades before Einstein. The next day I noticed for the first time
that the tip of the house’s turret is (just) part of the skyline at
New North Road rail bridge. It’s the same geometry in the ice as
in the pylon.

Matthew would like to think of the child William Clifford sitting

in the turret, looking out, thinking. The boy in the tower in
Longbrook Street thinking over and through his maths homework
like it was a geometry of the city he can see sweeping up to the
shapes of the County Gaol. He sees the executions. The city
reaches out a finger and begins to write in him of the relativity of
every position. He feels the noose round the other man’s neck. To
the dying man, energy and matter are simply different types of
curvature of space. The non-Euclidian boy molds mind stuff as if
it stood out visibly in space. The general theory of relativity in
Longbrook Street 40 years before Einstein.But the turret was
added after Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of
him, suspended in space.

This is from William Kingdon Clifford’s The Common Sense of

the Exact Sciences, from an manuscript unfinished at the time of
his death in 1879 :

“The observations that we make are:-

First, that a thing may be moved about from one

place to another without altering its shape.

Secondly, that it is possible to have things of the

same shape but of different sizes.”
So perhaps there is hope for some mytho-geometry that is
more than my subjective fantasy.

A couple of days after this “drift” I received an email from

Matthew:

Hi Phil,

I just went up to the School of Maths to check my pigeonhole for

the first time in a while. There was a letter from my PhD
supervisor's wife in Canterbury including a photocopied article
from the Express and Echo about William Clifford and the house
in Longbrook Street - The remarkable thing about this was that
the letter was dated the 16th, which is the day of our drift!

A few nights ago, I dreamed I was walking through a city with a

friend. We encountered a busload of kids, and one kid ran
up to a lampost, sort of jumped sideways in the air, grabbed the
post, and spiralled downwards, his body remaining horizontal.
When I woke up I remembered having read *years* ago in a little
biographical piece on Clifford that he was an athletic child who
invented a thing he called a "corkscrew" (the thing the kid in the
dream did). So Clifford *as child* appeared in my dream, - he
lived in Longbrook Street as a child, and it was presumably in
Exeter that he practiced his "corkscrews".

Last night it was a busride from Stonehenge to Israel with a load

of OAP's who were hassling the driver…

What can it all mean..?

Well, I hope that if you like any of the ideas I’ve been talking
about this morning… I hope you’ll take them and walk with them.
Make your own explorations. Make your own maps. Organise
your own walkings and ‘splorings.

Until then – one last walk with me. We’ll finish the Hoopern
Valley Path…

(Play Hoopern Valley Slow Walk from 6.50 to the point where
listener is invited to sit on the bench.)

63 + 64 + …. Etc. (to the end, one every 30 secs.)