Peripheral Vision

I wanted to do this drift because of a feeling I got when we

were drifting in woods during the Taxi To Westwood and
Featureless dérive:

----- Original Message -----

From: Phil Smith
To: sandra reeve
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 8:42 AM
Subject: yesterday and in the woods
Dear Sandra,
Yesterday we went on the 'drift', taxi-catapulted. The
experiences of the resulting journey have brought
back to me questions that we corresponded on just a
short while ago.
The taxi left us in what the driver described as a
"featureless" place. Which was a strange remark as
the landscape there was distinctively featured with
huge electric pylons humming and buzzing overhead,
a theatrical driveway to one side and a large strange
structure (never did find out) maybe two miles away.
After some adventures - confronted by 24 hour video
security, a public footpath blocked by a new barrier of
chickenwire, the burnt and transported remains of a

1
house which we remade, and finding a church "for
sale" - we arrived at and entered a wood. Simon saw
deer in the trees but our arrival scared them off and
we followed deer tracks deeper and deeper into an
increasingly closely-grown wood of slim trunks. The
deer paths bent us over sometimes. For forty minutes
or so we were searching through the woods. For
what? For me, it was searching for the edge of
strangeness, lightly felt at the entrance to the thicker
part of the wood, that is the beginning of Pan-ic, for
the sense of 'everything' in a non-human place to
which one's presence adds the final ingredient, the
key that turns the lock to 'everything'. But, except for
one moment, when the large tree trunks on the
opposite side of a bridle path appeared in an illusion
through the narrow trunks as the classical pillars of
some folly or old house, the realisation of
strangeness never came. And I began to ask myself
"how should I be moving here?" "How should the four
of us be moving?" And I thought of moving on the day
with you in the woods.
I was very aware of always leading with my eyes.
Tending towards the linear. Not working enough with
peripheral vision. Not feeling enough. Not letting the
shape of the wood's floor lead us. Not letting our
body weights be drawn by the shapes in time/space.
Too Newtonian and not enough General Relativity!
Using peripheral vision only to stay in contact with the
other members of the human group and not
extending it beyond. I see that I made a note on the

2
print-off of your email: "like to move with others
through site... looking ahead - peripherally my
colleagues… (a seeking outwards) not into mirror of
others, but in moving (bonding?) thru' site". I'm not
quite sure what this note means - me struggling for
understanding - but what I do understand of it
seemed inadequate in the wood yesterday.
This engages, for me, with comments you made in
your last email. "Presence" being the "there is
context/I am context" - presence being what one is
present in - perhaps a perfect description of 'site-
specificity'. The place as "imaginary partner", the
everything (else) as "imaginary partner". In the
presence of others (and properly present with
them.......... so how should I have been properly
present with my companions?

Working with fallen branches felt no different to me from

working with the discarded rubbish from a house fire – the
forestry on this estate is a factory for making trees. There is
nothing ‘natural’ here. Nowhere that I have been is.
Everywhere one is playing on a patina, and sometimes
along great shafts or planes of human intervention and
organisation. And I can love that. In the shadow of the
trees, the apparent aridity of the forest floor under the
closely planted trees… this is the dark overgrowth of
mythical pre-city, pre-village Europe, the thick green
brown roof of trees. That may be just a nostalgia, a
utopianising of the deep past – for the deep past may in fact
have been more like a swathe of New Forest, more like a

3
human landscaped
estate, with clumps of
trees and small copses
with clearings
maintained by the
feeding of deer, a
friendlier, less Tolkein-
esque, less darkly
Teutonic European
wood. But here modern forestry has re-made the non-
existent past – and in its aridity we find a hill of ants the
shape and size of a small tent, alive with tiny scraps of twig
and leaf.

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 9:02 AM
Subject: Finally - a moment to say thank you too!
Dear Phil
Thanks for your email ...is it really almost a month
ago ?
The day of drifting stays fresh with me which is
unusual in itself as I usually have a very bad memory.
I had such a good time, such a relief to just drift once
I had got over relatively minimal anxiety about was I
going to do it right etc.?
I enjoyed having the theme to relate too, to remind
myself of.
I was interested by the whole interweaving of drifts
and how as a group we lead, followed, did together,

4
 came to certain decisions and not others.
I enjoyed relating to people I did not know through
drifting and sharing patterns of movement in time and
space, exchanging preferences and memories as
well as allowing myself to be taken by surprise. It
almost felt as if you provided a situation and a space
where I could share moments of perception through
saying, building, walking, stopping which normally I
take for granted and therefore hardly notice
myself but suddenly they take on a completely
different value as I realise that others are in fact
noticing something completely different and in an
utterly different way.
I kept getting flashes of some black and white photos
I have somehwere of the Pilgrimage /Stations of the
Cross we all did in Wales in the snow.

Some time into the drift Cathy became anxious about getting
back – either to the car we had left in Newton St Cyres or to
Exeter. I had no idea what the land between Newton St Cyres
and Exeter was like, which was why I had chosen it. And I
was surprised – we all were - to find that for 4½ hours we
could walk through a single ‘property’, the estate of “Sir John
and Mary Quick – the cheese people” we were told by a
woman walking her dog, a woman with a scarred face…

I went so see Dr Chris Williams, a clinical psychologist at the

Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. To talk about patterns in
the mind, patterns in the world – he told me about work he did

5
with members of the rescue services, who in danger situations
have to repress the brain’s natural response to close down its
reception to a narrow tunnel of vision (focusing on a far point
of safety) and instead widen their vision to the peripheries.

The woman with the missing flesh

warned us off a path with “dangerous
rocks” though we followed it and found
only a few loose stones; she had worried
that the deer cull might have begun, and
advised us “if you see their
farmworkers…I’d run!” She expressed a
deep sense of inequality. “I’ve got a
degree just like her,” she said of Lady
Quick.

Once Cathy had introduced the idea of

getting back, she also introduced, unspoken, the idea of not
getting back, or not getting back without discomfort. The split
halves of some predator’s jawbone intensified the peripheral
vision for a while. Or did it narrow it? The ‘drift’ changed
because it now had a dominant function – (to realize a safe
and relatively comfortable return within a reasonable amount
of time.) Sandra would write a month later:

“ …as soon as that concept arrived, something changed

in my way of being there, which I worked with but it
became harder to just be there and see what was
happening. I guess that WAS what was happening, but I
felt that it immediately separated us humans from the
environment in some way. I guess I had not even

6
thought about going back as I did not know how long we
were planning to be and although I had forgotten my
sandwiches (!) I felt too happy to bother at that point
really ...The road back felt more like a hike as we had a
goal, although there were still some magic moments for
me around the guide dog centre.”

And it was what was happening. In some ways the ‘drift’

could retain playfulness in the game of ‘hike’ and ‘tracking’
and guessing directions, except there’s no game in playing
with people’s anxieties. Not only for obvious moral reasons,
but also because ‘anxiety’ or ‘dread’, (Dread, Route and
Time at www.reconstruction.ws/home2.htm ) met without
discomfort, without the actual pan-ic (even though one might
be mindful of its potential), is a key state for drifting, an
elemental component of the low level paranoia that heightens
the senses, widens the wide-eyed look of a drifter. Four
months later, on a train to Dawlish to meet Nicola Howard by
the sea front railway bridge, to discuss at Dawlish’s own
Tilly’s Tea Rooms a mis-guided tours project, I asked Cathy if
she would write something about her feelings on that
Peripheral Vision drift. Specifically on her desire to ‘get
home’ or ‘get back’. I was surprised at the intensity of what
she wrote, of the way she opens up a description of the
collapsing and widening connections between what Sandra
calls “us humans” and “the environment”. The letter arrived
that night, after dark, an envelope dropping through the letter
box onto the tiles.

7
Drifting home

We climbed into a field, beyond which lay another field, a

wood and other fields. Phil said we would aim to walk back
to Exeter. Then he said we would make no attempt to get
there.

Perhaps, if we had been in the city, I wouldn’t have minded

these paradoxical statements. It would have been clear that
should it begin to grow late, should we fail to stumble
across ‘home’, it would be easy enough to take a bus, call a
cab or at least take a break in a warm café – a home-
surrogate, a place of safety. But here, it might well take
hours to find the right road, let alone reach our destination.
There were no shops or cafés in sight, no places of shelter
apart from the pine trees. Surely we could at least use a
compass?

Or, if we were not going to look for the way home, could
we not state openly that our walk was aimless? Somehow,
it was not the lack of aim, but the lack of logic that
frightened me.

Because I was, in a sense, frightened, yes, experiencing a

slight feeling of panic, feeling that I was in the grip of
Pan’s natural wilderness (however cultivated and managed
it actually was). I had the sense that I was being tricked off

8
the path somehow, that the decision to lose myself was not
mine. Was it magic that was being invoked?

The pine forests are full of wolves and witches and strange
men, as every little girl knows. And all of them want to
trick you off the path. Just keep your eyes on the light in
the distance.

My nightmares are usually of a home whose locks are

broken, whose walls go missing, a house which is both
inside and outside at once, or which is invaded by stalkers
and burglars and unidentified watchers. The panic of
undifferentiation.

And here, not unrelated to that, the panic that often sets in
when someone makes a decision for me. Particularly when
that decision seems utterly divorced from logic. Particularly
when that decision is made with absolute conviction.

Bacchus trying to make a Bacchante of me, against my

will. Just like my mother always warned me.

Found a space on my own, twisting grasses together,

making a delicate structure, a skeleton building there in a
clearing, like a miniature shelter. Sandra moved gently
among the trees. Simon and Phil lifted logs and balanced
them on top of one another. We played there for a while,
and I felt better.

9
We found a city of ants and watched them working. I
wandered round writing messages on leaves. Leaving an
‘almost invisible’ trail. Gretel dropping pebbles in a wood.

Somewhere, there
were deer in the
darkness of the pine
trees. Somewhere,
(so the ‘No
Trespassing’
notices said) there
was a shouting
farmer. We did not
know whether the teeth we found belonged to a dog or a
fox. I kept remembering the girl in ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’
who was so good at tracking and found her way home over
thousands of miles. I know that my limit for a day’s
walking in Devon is not much more than 26 miles. I kept
hearing a road that wasn’t there.

A field scooped out like an amphitheatre. One banana

shared between four. I let myself sit still at last, watching
the green stage show me nothing.

I know that I want these adventures, small as they are. I

know that I seek out people who will trick me off the path.

I don’t know how we managed to find the city. Suddenly,

at the edge of the wood, there it was. Perhaps it was some
kind of homing instinct. I don’t believe in magic.

10
But by the time we found it, we had, in fact, been looking
for it for some time.

Cathy Turner 28.10.03

Cathy’s experience was a reminder to me that drift is a

disruption, a disruption of the norm of fear and fright (as
well as of the norms of work, institution, commodity
consumption, etc.), taken to unfamiliar places (even those
within familiar spaces). I’m not convinced of the model of
‘drift’ as a way of life, like Gilles Ivain’s wandering,
apparently, for months, or the devout Hindu saint who
walked naked into pilgrimage leaving her sari in her
husband’s hands. Rather than the
extreme action of special
individuals I hope the ‘drift’
becomes a model for many people,
an emergent model. But not
everywhere is susceptible. Places
of art seem to be deadly for the
drift. Places of commercial leisure.
Unless disrupted in turn. But the
meme of drifting becomes rather
more complex in conflict. And less
accessible in allowing people to
meet ‘dread’ without fear. Rather
than the explosion of reactionary space or/and the
construction of utopian space, ‘drift’ is about the
heterogenous sliding of different spaces together, creating
change not in binary subversion/construction, but beside
the hybridity delayed of Third Space, not a

11
conflictual/simple synthesis of opposites, but in allowing
complexity, in allowing meshing, in finding and energizing
ambient hubs. This is a practice of delicacy rather than
revolution.

The day after Cathy dropped off her writing, I came across,
looking for something else, a piece on the Fortean Times
website by Jim Colquhoun, a psychogeographer – who
coincidentally I’d been put in touch with two days before
by Bess Lovejoy, who had come across him in connection
with the Pre-amble Festival in Vancouver:

PAN(IC) IN THE WOODS

Jim Colquhoun, Glasgow

I was around 10 years old when I had my one
and only encounter with The Great God Pan. I
was walking alone through a place known
locally as the 'Witches Wood' in Pollok Estate
(now Pollok Country Park) on the south side of
Glasgow. It was a bright summers day and the
wood was well known to me. All I can really
remember is a sudden and shocking increase
in the insect noise in the wood. As is
appropriate in these situations I panicked and
legged it right out of there! It's one of those
instances that has stayed with me all these
years (I am 41).

12
It was as if that ordinary summers day had
somehow suddenly 'intensified'.

(www.forteantimes.com/happened/panic.shtml )
Just before we found the field/amphitheatre near Rowhorne
House Farm ‘showing nothing’, a great weighty emptiness
hanging in it, the city of Exeter had appeared painterly
through some trees – like one of those 18th century
canvases of the city occasionally retrieved for display from
the store rooms of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 20:04:34 -0000 Phil Smith

< > wrote:

> Cathy,
>
> Thank you for the absolutely
wonderful piece of writing! I
want to put it all into the
pamphlet. Do you have it on
file and could you send it me as
an attachment or in the body of
an email? It's a tremendous
description of the drift and a
wonderfully vivid account of
your feelings about it. I made
some major errors that day - I
didn't find a way of engaging
with the whole 'moving' thing,

13
the going to Exeter/not worrying about going to Exeter
thing was contradictory - but one tries to learn from
mistakes.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Phil

----- Original Message -----

From: "Catherine Turner" < >
To: "Phil Smith" < >
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: thank you

Ø Glad you like it. I'm not sure the contradiction was
really
> a mistake.
>

The taxi back alone was strange! I realised as you

kindly paid for it and waved me goodbye that I had
had the expectation that whatever happened we
would all go back to the car and then I would deliver
people to their door steps! (perhaps I secretly wanted
the role of a Javanese local bus where they go off
their official route and take people to their doors. ) (or
else it is just my childhood terror of abandonment
rearing its head again)
It was such a strong feeling that I had not imagined
any other kind of closure so it was quite a shift to chat
with the driver, although fine as he started to share

14
his memories of where we had just walked, so it was
as it was, but I thought I'd let you know that bit.
Other than that, I wish I had had a little bit more
courage to do more movement in the woods to
explore that within the context of the drift, but I wasn't
sure if it was "allowed", or at least I guess I wondered
if it might be seen as odd, showing off etc. The ways
we trap ourselves into not doing what we need to do,
or being who we need to be. I would also like to have
moved very slowly but I did not want to get left behind
or hold people up!
So many thanks Phil for sharing the day with me. and
I would love to join another drift when possible. I'd
like to do an urban drift too.

"I like to just have the faith that the deeper in you go
the more likely you are to magically pop out just
where you want to be ...” (Phil Smith)

Me too!
With love Sandra x

Without claiming any specialness, I think of this popping

out in the right place as a giving up of some of the
decision-making to the ‘field’. Not walking blindfold. Not
us backing ourselves against the alien. But the negotiated
exchange of different kinds of geometries passing through
each other. “Intuition”, the angel at the crossroads,
twinkling astronomical consciousnesses – I recall a
moment on that ‘Pilgrimage/Stations Of The Cross’

15
paratheatrical walk along Offa’s Dyke in the snow that
Sandra had remembered, sometime around 1975, I saw up
ahead of me Yvonne (now Anna) running and then David
running, around each other, then I lost sight of them and
when I gained height again I saw Yvonne alone, holding a
large stake, blood dribbling down her forehead and I was
scared, but I was there, I wasn’t running away and I walked
straight towards her and I remember almost nothing of this
and maybe she would tell it another way, but she drew back
the stake and I just blacked out for a moment as I walked
into it and the next time I was aware again I had the stake
in my arms clutched to my chest, nursed like a baby, with
no clue how it got there – the Grotowskian ‘total act’…

… like carrying Steve on my

back that day far further than I
would usually be physically
capable of, playing Mau Mau
– a card game almost purely
based on chance – with Roger,
for hours and hours, and
knowing absolutely clearly at
one moment that I was going
to win even though I was well
behind, but only if I could stay
in the particular mental state I
knew I was in, holding myself
there for a few hours as the winning cards flopped down in
the way I knew they would… in some way connected up,
gently trembling like a too much coffee feeling at the same
frequency as the probability of the cards. Resonance. I

16
don’t have any resource to know or not know if there is a
connection between our ‘classical, Newtonian’ physicality
and the quantum ‘world’ (for Sir Roger Penrose that
connection may be consciousness – quantum ‘choices’ in
the microtubules - for Rupert Sheldrake it’s the map of
preference among pigeons), but I can as-if walk in the
publications of others, in the diaphanous academic gowning
of the landscape, on the knobbly, wobbly, gulping, lavic,
probabilities – knowing that knowledge of place and
momentum are not simultaneously possible, that it is best
not to know too much about where you are or where you’re
going lest you collapse that wonderful bouncy castle of
probability into a sclerotic or viscous map and pitch into
Bunyan’s Slough of Despond.

“Already the present and immediate future are beginning to

gel. To escape from its ever-hardening clutches requires
that you project your desires into the future – project them
too near and the effects of the past will have already loaded
the temporal disc to such a degree that it may be unable to
accommodate the program you envisage.”

(p. 282 Geneset: Target Earth, David Wood & Ian

Campbell, Sunbury-On-Thames: Bellevue Books, 1994)

But that means explaining more. And that is why I’m

hanging on to ‘documentation’ – not as the ‘real’ artwork,
not as a post-mortem, but as a provocation to others’ next
walkings – in the hope, one day of a virtuous loop in which
I become continually so provoked by theirs. This is why
I’m still struggling in my head about what kind of form,

17
what kind of technology, could a mythogeography be?
How it can be added to and notated and emblazoned and
redrawn, while all the time it travels as it grows as it is
exchanged? Widens as it becomes more detailed and
probable? On the web – it is only relatively flexible – but
how portable? Would a pocket book be best – essentially a
plastic pocket-book-shaped holder with fragments of maps
– overlaid maps of dread spaces, Third Spaces, intuition-
space, historical space - and annotations to which the
walker could add and subtract and carry, site and non-site?
(Perhaps a thing cheap enough to buy multiple copies of
and to add to and then leave for others to pick up and add to
and leave and so on… “…please feel free to leave the book
on a bus when you next come to London… have you heard
of this project where there’s a little note inside (the)
bookcover to invite the finder to read the book and pass it
on, by leaving it again in public space…” (letter from Anna
Best, author of Occasional Sights – a London guidebook
of missed opportunities and things that aren’t there,
London: The Photographers Gallery, 2003 ) There’s
something appealing about the ruined nostalgia of a
collapsing book shape: transparent, dismantleable,
accumulative.

“To overcome a limitation in a conceptual space, one must

change it in some way. One may also change it, of course,
without yet having come up against its limits. A small
change (a ‘tweak’) in a relatively superficial dimension of a
conceptual space is like opening a door to an unvisited
room in an existing house. A large change (a
‘transformation’), especially in a relatively fundamental

18
dimension, is more like the instantaneous construction of a
new house, of a kind fundamentally different from (albeit
related to) the first.” (p.27, ‘What Is Creativity?” by
Margaret A. Boden in Creativity In Human Evolution
and Prehistory, ed. Steven Mithen, London: Routledge,
1998)

What if the change fell between the

two – like the house in Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House Of Leaves –
unvisited rooms that sink into
caverns, halls that stretch and yawn?

Steven Mithen proposed a change

from specialised ‘chapels-minds’ to
an overarching ‘cathedral-mind’, a
modern human mind of cognitive
fluidity that appeared between
50,000 and 30,000 years ago. So,
what variation on the modern mind is appearing now?
What shape is the dériviste mind being walked in/to?

Mythogeography is a history that can be physically

constructed, in fact, it is only realisable in a process of
multi-dimensional modelling (of course, two dimensional
maps may be deployed in jest, to emphasise an absence, or
assist a sliding between planes, for a drift in Flatland, etc.).
It can only exist as the geometrical text of a half-serious
ritual, a wholly (multi-dimensional) walking of space and
time (landscape and history), walking in the field of tension
between the big shape (relativity) and the small exchange

19
(quantum), at present un-resolvable, and express it
historically as the stress between overlapping utopias
(rational and official) and nostalgia (hoaxful, boastful,
esoteric, heritage haunted, tourism deceived), realised as
webs of signs and symbols. “A carpet of understanding”
(Sandra Reeve.) Linear narratives of individual strands of
journeying soon webbed by multiple walkings, then broken
up into simple memes, winding back the clock to primary
units of ideology and then re-running the whole process of
meme-complexing forward
again, and then back and
forward, again and again,
like a BZ process, creating
spirals, branch shapes,
camouflage – all in a neo-
symbolist astronomical
charting of the ideological
reproduction of what it
serves. Ideology, de-
narrated, becomes
psychological – so we can
think it backwards.

Mythogeographical maps
are blatantly provisional,
their surfaces unstable,
inviting meshing and
welcoming translucent
others to bounce through.
The new dériviste mind
should be a ‘bouncy castle

20
mind’, a pneumatic, crenellated wobble in a patchwork
landscape of grids. A bouncy castle of bouncy castles –
with the smooth outlines of a ‘mother castle’ and the
granular surface made of miniature populations of
bouncers; so the whole, apparently smooth surface is
seething with probabilities.

The bathos should be explicit. The ‘cathedral’ is too

medieval an architecture to serve as a metaphor for the
postmodern mind, but it is saved from redundancy by the
bouncy castle in the Close on Cathedral School Fete Day.
The hybridity goes on in the master-masonic manner, but
also in absurd, delayed, trashed, deflatable discourses too.
Hybridity is hybridded and disrupted.

The map should become more architectural, inflatable and

ruin-like. The city more map-like: so, draw new, poetic
symbols on the city’s surfaces and across its existing signs
and symbols like The Interdimensional Pixie Broadcasting
Network have done in Exeter –
(http://www.mythogeography.com/2009/12/presents-
exeter-3182000-coming-soon.html or p.164-5 World
Without Words, Michael Evamy, London: Lawrence King
Publishing, 2003). Construct new ceremonials on the site of
the old Bonfire riots, Cholera burials and Skimmerton
Riding, insert mythogeography into the city’s planning
process – submit plans for filling all the empty plinths in
town, on St Peter’s empty plinth at the Carfax a crystal
statue of Uri Geller, his big house somewhere else under
his arm, crushing the Conference beneath his shoe (to
monumentalise the stamina of mythogeography in cryptic

21
or imaginary stone), plans for an empty museum waiting
forever to display the
artifacts dropped at
Scoriton by the ufo
carrying the recently
deceased George
Adamski and brought to
and lost in Exeter by a
‘researcher’, the
reopening of the
Catacombes for
simultaneous burial and
tourism, a tent at the
Living History weekend
for dead things, for the
removal of the signs for
the Two Counties Way to
be replaced by an official
signing of the path of the
Devil’s Footprints, for
the purchase of a small
piece of land to be
advertised widely as
empty but its location
never revealed – and
likewise with the local
history industry, flooding
it with Mis-Guides and
mis-guided tour-guiding,
among the commercial
racks everywhere

22
deploying pamphlets like those of A Company of
Vagabonds’ Jim Colquhoun.

This was a city bathed in sectarian theology with a

nationalist tint, yet its susceptibility to narratives
(particularly ones of class) meant that a non-evangelical
Catholic figure like that of Father Oliver, and his theatrical
presence during the Cholera outbreak of 1832, could
deflect ideology inwards (away from the scapegoat). St
Michael and All Angels, Mount Dinham is a defiant
symbol of visuality against the protestant textual
ascendancy, just as gothic romanticism of the same century
‘saved’ the murders at Lidwell Chapel or whatever it is
they might filmically bathe through the dissolution of
grammars and the escape from the melodrama of dialogue.
Gothic eyes work a darshana: “a way of touching, of
making actual contact solely through the gaze… based on a
theory of the eye as an active transmitter rather than a
passive receptor”, but one that disrupts “the ‘optical
unconsciousness’ triggered through the structure of film
grammars and image flow (its diegesis)… connected to
hidden emotional drives of the spectator…”(Negotiating
New Systems of Perception, Margot Lovejoy and
Preminda Jacob, in Reframing Consciousness, ed. Roy
Ascott, Element). Exeter and Exmouth’s cinemas are rare
provincial points of occasional defiance (of the digital) of
the passive; the naked spectator attempting to climb into
the X Files Movie at the Savoy, Exmouth – where
everything else was being purged, washed and dispersed –
the West Quarter, death (no longer would a city entertainer
and leader like Andrew Brice display himself in life or

23
death as he did for 6d a gawk at his corpse in the Masonic
Rooms on the High Street), idea amputated from popular
theatrical performance and divided between different
theatres, the 100,000 bodied graveyard of Cathedral Close
leveled for picnics – the skeletons in the Well House
subversively pop through the pub’s foundations, labour de-
centred despite the march of insurrectionary working class
mathematicians from the college explicitly defined at its
foundation by its exclusion of Catholics and Jews,
criminals silenced and hidden – all under the slow throb of
low-level iconoclasm, discouraging and punishing all
visuality: “two persons fantastically dressed in garments of huge
proportions and gaudy appearance, followed by a mob … of 700
to 800 persons… Charles Bragg was dressed in a huge light grey
coat of vast dimensions, with a hat of corresponding extent…and
carrying a birch broom. (John) Croker was disguised in a lady’s
dress, ornamented with a profusion of ribbons of divers colours,
and led a dog, trimmed in the same …(Bragg and Croker) were
overtaken by (Inspector) Stuches, who desired them to disrobe,
which they did with much dissatisfaction… The bench fined
(them) 10s (shillings) each, and in default of payment ordered
them to be committed to prison for a week.” (p.5, Woolmer’s
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 1.3.1851) Local and global
synchronicity, the role of the mediated working class
educational and institutional organisations of the nineteenth
century now taken over by a global media manifest in the
verbal abuse from casual passers-by of Sue Palmer’s
cycling ghost bride in Pilot Navigation (1998), the dark
shadow of what has been claimed by the authorities in
exchange for ‘democratic’ empiricism, the ‘leisure’ space

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exposed as performatively unfriendly and visually
intolerant.

“The human eye constitutes a vulnerable, unscreened

surface, always prone to intolerable intrusion, in its position
within a vast network of ostensibly enclosed, homogenous
urban façades; in that process, film forms a kind of archaic
ally with the human eye, with its historical capacity to
pierce urban surfaces, to unsettle…”

(p. 155-6, Stephen Barber, projected cities)

Filmic bathing, nostalgic alliance-making and ideological

washing need to be charted by an ambient geography – one
that can chart turbulence in the meeting of one fluid meme-
complex with others. The city as ocean of sound,
interpreted by the geometry of tone.

Ended up at The Mill On The Exe eating mediocre food –

so much better if we had ended it at doorsteps. Or parted in
the middle of woods. Avoid retail outlets. Avoid
compliance with the cash flow. Avoid ending before its
ended. End the drift before returning to the circulation of
commodities.

This ‘drift’ – like them all – became something other than

itself.

Phil Smith

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