Angel Walk

“RUPERT: …(I)nsofar as we see angels as organised

holarchically, 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, the energy, carried in electromagnetic fields.

MATTHEW: Somehow we’re talking about photon and

field coming together in the light. Angel light.

RUPERT: And their traditional role is as interconnectors,

as messengers…”

(p.41, The Physics of Angels, Matthew Fox & Rupert

Sheldrake, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996)

We skirt around St Michael and All Angels on Mount

Dinham – the place is such an obvious vantage point – just
like the sites of Danes Castle, Rougement Castle and the
Law Courts, yet no one seems to know much about
previous uses of this site – it was called ‘California’ at one
time, and prior to the church being built it was ‘Turner’s
Field’, used to dry cloth over racks. Field. It was purchased
by John Dinham to prevent a fun fair getting hold of the
land, with, at least in Dinham’s mind, the potential for the
site becoming an operating pitch for prostitutes. A
contested field. Commandeered by someone who
understood the pull, the curving of ideological and sensual

1
space that could happen in this field. Not by a Puritan, but
by a patron of an alternative sensuality. The church was
built as an “idealistic propaganda tool” according to guide
Richard Parker, who leads an Exeter Open Day tour, for
Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism, for visuality against
Puritanism. For stone symbol against the ‘word alone’.

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
angel-shaped miniature moth.

Notes: “electricity and god are

indistinguishable” – this seems to be
a quote from someone, one of us? –
it sounds unintendedly Futurist…

Matthew and Vicky had been drifting and went in Crediton

Church – on the Michael Line, the former centre for local
ecclesiastical power before its usurpation by Exeter’s
growing economy – lately I’ve read the move was for
defensive rather than economic reasons, hmm - (the Bishop
of Crediton lives in a green mossy world off the Cathderal
Close in Exeter) - in the church they found a memorial to
Redvers Buller, complete with four archangels and a
dedication to Godfrey de Bouillon, Crusader conqueror of
Jerusalem in 1099...

Notes: “awareness, among the elite, of esoteric currents”

2
“The figure to the right of the cross bounded by wheat
– Godfrey of Bouillon.”

Notes: “An astral plane: Tony the Tiger, Michelin man,

Ronald MacDonald… interacting...”

… and initiator of such architectural events as the

rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the
construction of the dome over the Rotunda – inspiration for
the round churches of the Templars – the Temple in
London, just down the river from Somerset House. What
was Buller’s interest in this soldier conqueror of mythic
space? Of pseudo-origins? In de Bouillon, the imaginary
founder of a secret society within the Templars, the
conspiracy within the conspiracy, the “Prieuré de Sion”, at
the heart of ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’
mythos?

“Designed by W. D. Caroe, 1911.” Who is he?

“Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the knights leading the

Crusade, is as noble as his counterpart Ibn Khaldun,
who believes that Christians, Jews and Muslims are
fundamentally the same, and hopes that peace may
be forged between the disparate religions.”

(From an unfilmed treatment of Crusade, intended for

Arnold Schwarzenegger. p112, Tales From Development
Hell, David Hughes, London: Titan Books, 2003.)

“water wings” - on a dropped or discarded shopping list

3
Once you become sensitised to the arcane layers of
esoterica that sediment the world, as with rats in the city,
you find you are never very far from them. They offer little
hope of an explanation of ‘what is really going on’.
Somewhere in the distant past each empirical piece of
esoterica has disrupted the official history of things,
changed views of the world, but too quickly they become
collections of ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ cases, solidifying
confirmations and re-confirmations of that first life-
changing transformation of point of view; the repetition of
the everyday survival of the novelty. Such is the urgency of
this task some people are willing to embrace dangerous
views with violent histories in pursuing the logic of the
conservatism of their ‘revolution’. Then, there is an
obligation to contest, to expose empirically. But to have
debunk as a default mode is an arid way of being. It is
certainly antithetical to mythogeography, for which these
diaphanous layers of the weird and the conspiratorial can
serve as a useful ideological-pseudo-geology: not there for
excavation or investigation, but like free-floating versions
of geological diagrams of sediment, lapping up against the
city’s buildings, grain by invisible grain building up into
drifts against some places and swept bare from others. Like
diagrams of space/time they bend in attraction to certain
strong ideological masses. A ghostly means for reading
ideological gravity in the city.

Outside the church we are engaged in conversation by a

lady from the Free Cottages. “Free? Not at those rents!”
She tells us that she was entertaining friends from America

4
at the Royal Clarence Hotel, in search of their roots, and
there they were, sat, unknowingly, just a few yards from a
monument to an ancestor of theirs. “They were called
‘Bastard’ or something like that…” “‘Hooker’?” “Yes,
that’s it!”

I attended a talk in St Michael and All Angels, Mount

Dinham – ‘God On The Brain’ by the Reverend Anthony
Freeman, occasionally officiating at the church at Crediton,
editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies – carefully
laying down the material science for visions, prophetic
voices, etc. and leaving a gap for ‘faith’. Throughout
Reverend Freeman sat facing the West Door screen of

angels and a singularly human devil, so individually

characterised it is hard not to think the face was intended to
be recognised. “The doors are double, and above them, in a
circular medallion, is a carving of the seven archangels. In

5
the front are St Gabriel with lily, St. Michael with his
sword and scales and St Raphael with the staff and scrip.
Behind these are the four others, each blowing his own
trumpet.” (The Church of St Michael & All Angels,
Exeter, A Short History and Guide)

There is a mythogeographical ground between the

conscious stars and the statues of angels, held uncertainly
in the tension between a worked psychological stone and
big space, between fields and quantum packeted exchanges
of energy, complex consciousness and those big wings,
light and the a-real body of Uriel/Azreal (missing from
Mount Dinham, present at Crediton): between person and
physics: “And they were standing under a tree in Eden and
the fruit of the tree was like the appearance of a bunch of
grapes on the vine. And behind the tree was standing
something like a dragon in form, but having hands and feet,
just like a man’s, on his back six wings and six on his left.”
(The Apocalypse of Abraham, quoted p. 4, Paranoia,
Issue 33, fall 2003) The ‘David’/’Michael’ in the North
transcept of St Michael’s & All Angels, Mount Dinham –
the possible impersonation of an angel – feet on the ground,
wingless: the only grounded, rooted angel/dragon in Exeter
statuary? That slab of angelic array at the West End is
disrupted by a human-faced devil/dragon/lizard of war
(sectarianism?), the construction of a temple to the neo-
Platonic visuality of a theory of angelic everything
disrupted: “…in another old document, called the
Testament of Solomon, which refers to the building of the
temple at Jerusalem by Solomon. Dated to the 1st Century
AD and written in Greek, it describes how the dragon

6
interfered with the construction of the temple… ‘a
wallowing dragon, having the limbs of a dragon and wings
on its back…’ Solomon subdued it and put it to work
cutting stone for the temple.” (p.4, Paranoia, Issue 33, Fall
2003) The dragon becomes a mason. This is
mythogeographical limbo, flitting between the myths,
springing the icy embrace of originary bas reliefs –
carefully containing the oscillation between nuts and bolts
visits from the conscious Star Brothers and Ice Theory.
The peregrine falcons – pigeon-eating winged dinosaurs.
Feathers falling between angels and devils.

In the limenal mythogeography between smooth, curved,

gridded space and those bouncy, winged phantoms with
psychology - (every small town you expect that monster
with tentacles that squeezes up through the macadam or the
big bass spider – walking along an empty country road I
suddenly saw a huge computer-animated monster stepping
out into the road in front of us) – that’s where, maybe, one
can explore the maps that are slowly emerging from
walking: the territories of intuition (of popping up – like the
eccentrics of paper architecture), textbook diagrams of
Grotowski’s para-theatrical evolution from Rich and Total
Theatres to the biology of a policy of singularity running in
tiny loops of time beyond the hybrid into instinctive and
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” to “everyone” else, in the
ship with no Zion, with no originary, but rather “focus(ing)
on those moments or processes that are produced in the

7
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….” (p1–2,
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London:
Routledge, 1994). This ‘Osiris’ resists a banal hybridity
that revivifies the elite. It must sail among the sharp reefs
of archaic and modern, ‘original’ and copy – each synthesis
threatening to bite the hull and fill the ship with themself.
Bhabha quotes Marshall Sahlins on ‘difference’ in Western
bourgeois culture: “…this gross difference in design...
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…” (Culture and
Practical Reason, Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1976) and against it 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.” (p.37, The Location of Culture) That is the contest
between tourism and drift. “Cultural difference… changes
the position of enunciation and the relations of address
within it; not only what is said but where it is said; not
simply the logic of articulation, but the topos of
enunciation. The aim of cultural difference is to rearticulate
the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the
signifying position of the minority that resists
totalization…” (p.162 The Location of Culture) and in
that resistance it can deploy the trash and ceremonial of its

8
enemies: “…that Third Space, though 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 appropriated, translated, rehistoricised
and read anew.” (p.37,The Location of Culture). The
symbol can be floated free, the meme-complex confronted
with its own constituents, not in a designated space (“spot”)
of “beauty” or “heritage”, nor in some reversing of it, but in
an unrepresentable space, which then can only be realised
by action, by walking it, by setting its symbols and units of
meaning in orbit about the actor/walker, sliding down its
conceptual curves, poking and pinging through its roofless
and floorless squeezy Funhouse phantom hell. Bhabha’s
example, from Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness is
literary/geographical, but the dériviste walks a similar
wormhole-ridden Machen-landscape: “the street of tall
houses takes on the profile of the tribal skulls on staves; the
percussive pounding of a heart the deep beat of drums…”
(p.213, The Location of Culture). This is what Bhabha
calls “daemonic doubling” – the walker acts not in
character, but in the “daemonic doubling” articulated in
Lesley Wade’s ‘Actor As Anti-Character’. But this is not
enough – the walker must walk the “element of resistance
in the process of transformation, ‘that element in a
translation that does not lend itself to transition’…” (p.224,
The Location of Culture.) It is this piece of grit that sees,
not the eye in which it irritates. It is on this grit that the
walker nano-surfs – eased by all the previous walkers -
hence mythogeography’s integration of trash, of gossip, of

9
mistakes, of sci fi-sudden freezing of time, of monsters, of
poor theatre.

KFC reputedly changed its name from Kentucky Fried

Chicken because the hybrid, wingless featherless thing they
used in the food was no longer officially defined as a
chicken – not true, but now there is a new imaginary animal
in the mythozoological bestiary.

“(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, 197, 812B, Patrologia Latina, Paris: Migne, 1844
- 91)
The parentheses around “God said” are mythogeographical
goalposts. The anomaly that is always in the way of
theology, disrupting the binary in the patterns. The 3 + 1.
Hell is a particular place. The area around the North Gate,
at the southern end of the Ironbridge, was once known as
“Hell”. Evil is no angel, but a kind of landscaping. Anjali
expressed her amazement at this ‘devil’ that is only and all
evil. We ate a lot – at The Wild Goose pub, at the
Langstone Cliff Hotel, at the Ness House Hotel – Ganesh,
the remover of obstacles, is a glutton. Hildegard describes
the darkness of the North as a contrast that reveals the light
from salubrious points of the compass. Sheldrake makes
this over into wave motion. But hell is too ‘placed’ for all
this; too bittily, grittily, granular-historical; it is real places

10
and it is ‘placing’: “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… … not
anarchy or disorder but a yawn, a gap, nothing.” (Paul
Oppenheimer, p.7, Evil and the Demonic, London:
Duckworth, 1996) Gilles Ivain’s Dark Quarter and Bess
Lovejoy’s “anti-brightness” are alive with a dark resistance,
there are no yawns there - except perhaps luxuriously
pleasurable ones. In Hildegard’s “hell” the roofless,
floorless emptiness is that which has granted the Planet
Earth and its neanderthals and humans and insect gods their
complexity of existence. It is the one atom per cubic metre
on which the walker ‘surfs’. It is the darkness of the womb
– virtual emptiness, from which virtual particles are
bursting into being on borrowed energy before paying it
back and disappearing again. Not “a drainpipe in the
universe”. The mythogeographical map of Exeter must
include hell and 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’.”
(p224-5, The Location Of Culture)
Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible:
Raphael, Gabriel and Michael. The four archangels are

11
linked to the four directions. On Buller’s memorial in the
church in Crediton, to Michael, Gabriel and Raphael is
added Uriel (Azreal). In the People’s Park, Crediton, a
sprayed tag on the dog shit receptacle did look very like
“AZREAL”. There is a fourth, secret, monkey: “feel no
evil” – its hands cupped over its genitalia. 3 + 1.

Richard Parker thought there was no organised

iconography in St Michael & All Angels – “maybe the
beginnings of one…” So is the propaganda purely
decorative? What is a statement “in itself”? Is there no
metaphor in the tower reaching up to the sky city of
heaven? “Have a great ride, Jim” as McConnell (Gary
Sinese), or rather mainly his memories, shuttles into a
spiral galaxy (Mission To Mars). To the angel layer
(field)? Is there no pattern in the built and unbuilt imagery
– the never-made dog guarding the spire? The beasts – with
floral décor in their coats like Grandad’s Indian table -
guarding the West Door. The screen of huge-winged angels
with the fiercely human devil in their midst? The animals,
including a winged cow (for jumping over the moon?), in
various narratives of spiritual theft – wolfing forbidden
fruit – on the corbels along each side of the nave? What
picture of which machine is this? Cherub heads on wings –
severed-head worship? Anti-text, words decapitated? The
acoustics are so appalling and unconsidered that almost no
one heard the opening sermon at the building’s
consecration by Bishop John Medley of Frederickton,
Canada. What bodily communication from a slum church
of “smelly people and incense – real spirituality” in the
words of Walter Daw, late Tory Councillor for Exeter and

12
child of the area. The alpha and omega in the Rose
Window. This church that never was properly provided
with clergy. Never properly a place, never a parish.
Surviving by spirituality alone? A magical headless body
floating above the ground? A de-intellectualising, a
fantasticating, a de-wording and an
embodying/disembodying. Not just propaganda, but a
working machine of the impossible. A totem that draws
things to it: the falcons, the school, the alley, the “free
cottages” are all exceptional as the ground of California
once drew the fun fair and the fun fair drew the people.

Devil – snake – reptile – griffon – angel – human. Shape-

shifting through old texts and present day conspiracy and
paranoia. 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 light catchers – Austrian
Crystals”. The proprietor
explains that she is
“responding to demand”.
One customer will buy
anything she can get hold
of. Winged bells with
eggs. (Easter in Belgium.)
Aquila Muscas Non
Capit. (on Buller Hall) For reasons I can no longer
remember I have written: “Batman, Thumberlina, Jeepers
Creepers, - wings… --- “Marconi, My father” “Lord
Beaverbrook, The Buddha” } media” and then “Pan/Angel
(Franklyn House) angel on one shoulder & devil on the

13
other” (I have always thrown fallen salt over both shoulders
– essential paranoia for operational sensitivity.) “Wu-Tang
World Wide” on a jacket. Dr Who and The Pyramids of
Mars. Volvo, Vauxhall, Mini – winged motifs (Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang, Harry Potter’s flying car.) Notice: “Fun
Dog Show. Class no 16. The bitch the judge would most
like to take home.”

We are in an underpass – under the motorway. Just had a

conversation with a farmworker. I understood maybe one
word in every twenty and if I hadn’t
been asking the questions I wouldn’t
have guessed those either. This is
class. This is rural/city – and this is
right on the edge of the city. In the
concrete underpass there are great
jeepers creepers winged Wu Tang
Clan beasts. Even out to the very
edges of the city the trail of wings,
angelic/demonic. Some ‘wings of
God’ - /|\ - on old GPO concrete
stumps.

On sale were photos of peregrine falcon chicks that nest in

the spire, and an adult falcon with its prey in the road. The
prints are so grainy they look like photos in ghost-hunting
magazines – the Christian symbolism has gradually fallen
off the spire – a whole number of crosses have had to be
removed for reasons of safety over the years - to be
replaced by the falcons… one day I arrived to pick up
Rachel, my daughter, from the adjacent school, and falling

14
into the playground like bloody snow were hundreds of
pigeon feathers. The altar window represents the main
appearances of angels in the biblical story. In the North
transept is a wingless carved figure, rescued from another
church, that some think is Michael (for in biblical accounts
of humans and angels meeting the humans do not recognise
their visitors initially as superhuman and wings would be a
giveaway). Others that it is David.

There is something extraordinary about the proportions of

the spire to the building. It is like a spiked tool – for
working with leather or suchlike.

Under the railway bridge across Cowick Street. Heading

for St Michael and All Angels, Alphington, without
knowing the exact directions, we come across a mosaic
tribute to a homing pigeon, Mary of Exeter, decorated with
the Dickin medal, “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; he describes the failure to account for
pigeon-homing by smell, memory, magnetism etc. - that
leaves him with a “fantasy” about an “unknown sense,
force or power, …a kind of invisible elastic band…I’m not
bothering at the moment to theorize about the possible
physical basis of this, whether it’s part of existing physics,
an extension of nonlocal quantum physics, or whether it
requires a new kind of field.” (p.60 The Evolutionary
Mind Trialogues At The Edge Of the Unthinkable
Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna & Ralph Abraham,
Santa Cruz : Trialogue Press, 1998). Sheldrake proposes

15
an experiment with mobile pigeon lofts. His “fantasy” is
that the pigeons can ‘see’ or “consult a very detailed three-
dimensional map of the entire planet”. This is a something
that “maybe us” have too.

We ate at the Cowick Barton Inn.

A couple of weeks earlier I’d
been here at the suggestion of
Alexis Lykiard to hear a talk by
Bob Mann on High Weirdness in
the work of West Country writers
like Eden Philpotts, John Trevena,
M. P. Willcocks and others. This
was given to a meeting of the
Exeter Centre For Cryptozoology
and presided over by the stately
figure of Jon Downes who gave a
long and engrossing matters-
arising speech at its opening, including an account of the
Centre’s search for a British Bigfoot in Cannock Chase. He
mentioned the proliferation of communications
broadcasters and boosters in the area as a probable reason
for the area’s high incidence of weirdness. “Downes’s and
Wright’s hypothesis is that thought can create intelligent or
semi-intelligent entities (thoughtforms) which strive
(thrive?) on some energy that humans can provide. This
may be thought energy (“attention”) or reaction energy
(fright) or some pheromone. So long as the temples and
churches are full, then the entities are happy. Once
congregations start to drift away, either because they leave
the area or they become irreligious or they switch from the

16
Old Religion to Christianity, then the entities are no longer
fed. After ten years or so they begin to hunger, then they
start to manifest themselves as an apparition and feed off
the reactions of the observers…. A ghost, a big black cat, a
flying saucer in the sky. If the reaction is not big enough…
the animal mutilations and chupacabra attacks begin…”
(p.12, Psychodemiurgics, Gilbert Nelson, Corby: Domra
Publications, undated.)

Mothman. Owlman. I liked the story of the grey ghost who

physically directed actors during shows at Drury Lane
Theatre. There might be more to this than a pleasing story
to interweave into A Courtauld Mis-Guide: “…there is
acting in the cinema, but it takes place mechanically in the
theatre, the actors literally act out the part. Perhaps, when
an actor – especially a very intense actor – “becomes” his
part, it is the equivalent of a prayer, and he creates a
thoughtform. Perhaps when the particular actor departs the
theatre the character he has created has taken on a life of its
own and needs to be “fed”.” (p. 13, Psychodemiurgics) I
like the idea that just as theatre might have placed
characters into a mytho-geographic layer (for mytho-
geography is just as much a part of relative space as
anything else, it cannot stand outside a universe that is
never in a fixed state) so these performances, the absences
of religion and disembodied radio communications are now
bathing everywhere with fields of hungry fiction. This,
even, opens the door for a return of theatre as a means of
“feeding” phantoms. Isn’t that what soap operas are now –
the feeding of ever-more ravenous phantoms? As more
cinemas disappear to be replaced by the multiplexes and

17
digitisation will more hungry films be released
psychodemiurgically onto the streets’ surfaces, to be passed
on orally and performatively?

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; veined, vibrating. The
question remains: how these mythogeographical layers,
organic and fibrous, can be distributed in interactive maps
or notebooks... or whatever… so they can be constantly
ripped up and rearranged without disappearing, be added
to, be both accumulative and instantly consumed… a
working, portable palimpsest – but how? I still don’t really
know… some kind of binding of maps… laying one on top
of another with heavy notations and plenty of spare blank
space – there must be some emergent form, a form that is
both map and conscousness:

“The answer of how the pigeon finds its way home is that
a portion of the pigeon’s mind is already home, and never
left home. …our assumption of the unknowability of the
future creates a problem where there is no problem….
…the consciousness of the pigeon is a continual awareness
extending from birth to death, and the particular moment in
space and time in which an English-speaking person
confronts a pigeon, is, for the pigeon, not noticeably
distinct from all the other serial moments of its life… My
expectation would be that what we’re seeing when we
confront these kinds of edge phenomena in biology is a set
of phenomena which, when correctly interpreted, will bring
the idea of quantum mechanical biology out from the realm

18
of charge transfer, intracellular and subcellular activity, and
into the domains of the whole organism.”

(Terrence McKenna, The Evolutionary Mind)

I like this because it begins to mess around in physics in the

same way as I feel when I’m moving through space. Not
like an arrow. But a sliding of grids through each other. A
meshing. A complex inter-meshing that renders decision-
making not irrelevant, but far less important than usual.
There are plenty of universes in the multi-verse, but the
meme of self-importance is such that it keeps us choosing,
it keeps moral questions important, rather than as a
clearing, a making safe, of the ground for everything else.
In drifting the questions are generally choices between
combinations of different pleasures. A disengagement from
responsibility for consequences, from having to be self-
important for the sake of others.

“Terence: Do you have a theory about how it works? I

don’t see how morphogenetic fields are particularly helpful
here.

Rupert: Yes. I think the morphogenetic field would

include both the pigeon and the loft. … part of a single
system. … linked by a field. The pigeon is attracted within
this field, back toward the home which functions as an
attractor… the pigeon is pulled back toward the field, not
needing a road map… A road map is irrelevant. It just feels
a pull in a particular direction.

19
Ralph: It’s like the angel theory; that when I come to a fork
in the road, a guiding angel appears from behind a tree and
tells me which way to go.

Rupert: Roughly speaking, it is. You just feel the pull in a

particular direction… like a gradient within the field
towards an attractor which is its home…”

(p.71, The Evolutionary Mind)

I would like to have that field for my thoughts as I walk. I

want its basins of attraction, its relativistic geometry of
gradients. A field that is not dominated by the moral and
social necessity of self-importance, but rather by invisible
geography. The chance to socially fragment with each
other, to allow each other’s grids to mesh along geometrical
rather than social or erotic planes. I realise that I don’t
notice I’m hungry when I’m drifting. Or tired. Until I stop.
I don’t like buying anything, (except maybe a bus ticket for
a catapult).

“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
speaking in tongues, prophesy, healing, and intuitions of
various kinds – is the pigeon… right from the beginning the
pigeon is a messenger who can find out things in distant
places and return, bring back information. You could say
that… somehow entering the mind of a pigeon, or in some
way assimilating to the state of the pigeon, is the basis of
the gift of knowledge, prophesy and spiritual power.”

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(p.76, The Evolutionary Mind)

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

Gull is wandering about the graves – its parent swooping at
us again and again. I’m ducking and weaving, while
Matthew wanders confidently under its curves. Then we
walked to St Michael & All Angels, Heavitree. But we had
lost track of the angels. They had disappeared into the
spaces between the three churches.

Phil Smith

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