Shed Summit

On a blistering hot day – 14th July - we went to explore the area

around Welcombe Barton – recycling shed on our way in, then a
long walk down to the Welcombe Mouth beach – “geology! The
earth crushed together and rising – process the hut to the beach like
Spanish penitents… – each of us wearing hut hats…” - failed to get
to either Ronald Duncan’s or Rev. Stephen Hawker’s sheds –
between two ignorances, the rocks of the combe shimmered in the
heat. At his church in Welcombe, opium-soaked Hawker not only
invented Harvest Festival he also introduced the practice of
opening the North Door during baptisms in order to let out the
Devil (brought in by the un-baptised child) and then locking the
door and keeping it locked until the next baptism. Along the way to
the beach and back again by a different route we found many
locked sheds and huts, ready for weekend owners. During the Shed
Summit the people were there, weekending, and in one case they
invited us all into their garden to process about their shed, to
present our shed to theirs, and to photograph them and us together
with the sheds.

I was overwhelmed
with associations – The
Last Battle by C. S.
Lewis where, in a shed,
the ape presents a
donkey in a lion’s skin
as Aslan – I hired a
joke lion skin from
Fantasy World on Fore
Street (I couldn’t quite

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remember the name and I just looked it up in Raimi Gbadamosi’s
The Dreamers’ Perambulator, couldn’t resist running over more
pages, walking through names, most but not all commercial, no
longer a directory, already ‘out of date’ when it was never ‘in’, but
a route ‘in itself’). I brought along various clothes for Simon, to
dress as the ape – but there was never a right moment to perform
this. We saw an advertisement for a performance by the “amazing
suicidal birdman” and I remembered I had written The Village
Project while living in a shed; a play based on the life of
Blaedudd, King Lear’s father, who tried to fly and died in the
attempt. I remembered the dystopian shed in Ambitions, written
for the same company – Gog Theatre, full of smoke from exploded
pc’s, written twenty years ago, after visiting some early-days-of-
pc-games designers.

The difficulty of performance and the ease of ritual; parade,

pseudo-pilgrimage stripped of belief. I was to ‘lead’ the parade
with a staff made from pieces of the cut
up shed. The best part was being able to
hand the ‘staff’ over to various
‘pilgrims’.

Stephen made a Schwitters-esque

speaking scarecrow, Cathy made poetry
with potting plants, Simon made a mini-
shed-gallery of shed imagery. I made
mini-performances. I wrote with a piece
of Cynheidre coal into soil, listening to a
tape my friend the poet and former miner
Mogg Williams sent me, recorded in his
shed not so long before he died. On the

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tape he says something like: “maybe then it’s all been worth it, this
time in the shed, the loneliness in the shed, if the poetry has been
recognised…” It was odd at the Summit. I lay dozing with a
candle, ‘Blaedud the Birdman’ book by the sheet I was under.
There was a strange post-theory air about the talks I attended, a
return to empirical nuts and bolts. Death of the theorist. Next to our
shed within a shed a large shed was being constructed from pallets
over two days. Rubbing hands Simon and me squashed raspberries
(loganberry substitutes) into our hands, the robbers, beheaders of
St Nectan. Inflatable buildings, smooth skins off which slid
causality, all marks of manufacture disappear by expansion,
empiricism stretched thin becoming flat and smooth and
unquestionable, an a-skin. We were swamped in our shed early on
by national and agency photographers sent by editors with a
skewed impression of the event. Should we always refuse to pose?

Discovered the North Cornwall mythos of St Nectan: how on his

decapitation, at which he picked up his head and walked back to
his shed, he lay his head on a stone, which
remains stained. The church at Welcombe
is dedicated to St Nectan. At the start of our
walk I handed out pieces of modelling clay
for the walkers to make little models of
their own heads, to carry in their hand or
pocket, to be aware of seeing things from
more than one view point, to offset the self
as the ‘only’ walking consciousness.

Susan Blackmore concludes her

Consciousness: An Introduction
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003) with ‘waking up’ – she

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describes the poisoning of Douglas Harding by robbers. Waking he
realised he had begun to see differently: “Past and future dropped
away, and he just looked. ‘To look was enough. And what I found
was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown
shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands,
and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in – absolutely nothing
whatever!’ We can all do what he did next. We can look where the
head should be and find a whole world. Far from being nothing, the
space where the head should be is filled with everything we can
see… For Harding, this great world of mountains and trees was
completely without ‘me’, and it felt like suddenly waking up from
the sleep of ordinary sleep. It was a revelation of the perfectly
obvious.” (p.408, Consciousness: An Introduction) Another saint
beheaded – productively - by robbers.

“I felt that the possibility of producing a culture which both

articulates difference and lives with it could only be established on
the basis of a non-sovereign notion of self… The fragmentation of
identity is … a recognition of the importance of the alienation of
the self in the construction of forms of solidarity.” (p.213, Homi
Bhabha, The Third Space)

“Only the visually self-disassembled body can explores the states

of resistance to the digital city.” (p.158, Stephen Barber, projected
cities) The a-violent version of this works through a mathematical
and geometrical visuality rather than the surgeon’s knife and its
nostalgic ripperology, instead a self-disassembly of granular
visuality into grids, meshes, curves, probable or potential surfaces
and deconstructed, conscious flowfields with their landmarks,
simple variables and dynamic-triggers, all wedded to a
mythogeographical ‘history’/geography/rumour.

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The man I recognised from
Bristol wrapping and
bandaging the damaged shed on
the beach at Welcombe Mouth,
so we could carry it, now salty
from the Atlantic, back through
the lanes, past the S&M holiday
home with its thick curtains,
someone limping now, everyone sweating under the sun cream,
pleasurable weariness.

The walker becomes an extended organism, a materiality of

consciousness and everything else in dynamic process: eddying,
consuming, digesting, two acids eating each other, two pans of
seething oil melding and interacting. Two metaphors accumulating.
A translucent, mobile, pocket scrapbook. Something that might
explain the feeling of well being that a number of people have
expressed the day after drifting

thanks for monday's drift, Phil: had a fine old time of it, and felt
very
>> grounded and relaxed and happy on Monday evening

and though I hesitate to begin down the way of medical

explanations, I might very tentatively suggest that this resting of
the overburdened meme-complex of discrete self has a
psychological as well as a philosophical effect. I’m hesitant, not
because I don’t think drifting can be a real, easing pleasure for
people, but because I fear that there’s a petit-bourgeois junction not
far down that route that leads to small-business and the closing

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down of the drifting meme’s uncontrollable wandering far and
wide.

I went to talk with Rev. Anthony Freeman at his house in Newton

St Cyres. He is the editor of The Journal of Consciousness. He
talked about how he took up painting when “a village parson” and
how for six months he saw brighter colours and more distinct and
striking shapes. The next day I go to speak with Dr. Chris
Williams, a consultant at the Department of Clinical Psychology at
the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. We suddenly get into a
discussion about the Debenhams building in the High Street after
he has raised the question of educating the mind, programmed to
appreciate and enjoy certain harmonic intervals and organisations
of shape, to appreciate atonality and asymmetry. And I suddenly
think, and this is a banal and obvious thought, that most people are
out there suffering minor levels of trauma because no one has ever
bothered to let them even know about the predominant
atonal/asymmetry of the modernist environment. And that such a
courtesy might help people who suffer more extreme traumas to
create for themselves safe and enjoyable places along familiar
routes. Chris explains that that is exactly what they do with
patients, giving them the skills to create imaginary safe places if
they are subject to a panic attack in public. Developing a mytho-
geographic appreciation of places - I explained to Chris how I had
learnt to enjoy the generally disliked Debenhams building for its
simple proportions and its sense of mass and because I know its
basement was to be a nuclear war hospital – could give to people
with problems about going outside, or into public or crowded
places, an alternative map of safe and pleasurable space.

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As we approached the church of St Nectan I shouted ahead, the
possibility arose for us to carry the shed through the North door,
but I couldn’t grasp the idea of carrying it through or around the
church (the audience walked three times round the deconsecrated
church in Church), I couldn’t relate what we had been doing with
a religious practice, even to its subversion.

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I felt by then we had floated free from the angel/devil binary.
Laughter and hurting feet on the beach stones and the sweat of the
hot day and the shocked hospitality of the shed people welcoming
in thirty-plus visitors, the pseudo-ritual with nothing in the sedan-
shed-coffin to bury, nothing to put in the ocean but the shed itself:
“we thought you’d
brought a dead pet to
bury”. We had floated
into a cloud of
associations larger than
good and bad angels. Is
that the place – the
layer that meshes the
angels and their
shadows. Not the naughty boy/girl embrace of the devils and
vampires, but the space that is neither haunted by pseudo-
revolt/pleasure in violence over others (the state in miniature) nor
scared into submission to the big state’s ideologies. Able to fly in
and among floated-free ideologies making a precarious play of
themselves.

When Stephen Barber proposes the memories of film as a means to

“pierce” the city’s surface, evoking the ‘situationist’ image of a
bottle thrown through a cinema screen in Howard Brenton’s
Magnificence, he quantifies the effect as “to unsettle and
revolutionize the city” (p.156, projected cities), underestimating
the city’s capacity to repair points of disruption. Far harder for it to
repair or expel are those disruptions which slide in, self-
disciplinedly two-dimensional. A flatland dissidence. A phantomic,
diaphanous practice; self-organised, emergent. An a-violence
‘offering’ itself as a grid to mesh with. A quantum entanglement,

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androgynous, neither penetrative nor enfolding. A
mathematicalisation of disruption. In Exeter and Exmouth there are
still city centre, communal, comforting screens – in the brief years
of this anomaly the digitalisation of action offers a bathing of space
compatible with that of film – so cinema/space disappears, a
disappearance and consequent bathing of the city for the dériviste
dependent on the archaic presence of the Odeon and the Savoy.

The discrete ‘self’ is eroded, by the geological/intellectual process

of a neo-Symbolist floating-free and the synthesising of unlikes,
setting in motion the explicit machinery of persuasion and
deception and power, but dislocated from its material base, so that
it becomes (if we avoid falling off either side of morality) our thing
to play with, to aestheticise, the recovery of ‘art’ from the
repetitive survivalism of everyday life for the purposes of
détournement.

Walking: into the city, into the rural landscape, into these already
pre-conceived naturalities and artificialities, is released from these
two eyes, offset by the consciousness of ‘nothing’ in the head, of
‘nothing’ behind the eyes, of eyes offset to one side – a seeing that
already contains previous perceptions of the world, meme-soaked:
for it seems that we are never able to see the world ‘fresh’ – our
seeing is biologically enabled by electrical memories, and before
that by hard-wired expectations of shapes and meanings,
inheritances from our very meaningless luck of being here that we,
legitimately and meaninglessly, grant all sorts of significance.

“The appearance of ‘phosphenes’, colloquially called ‘seeing stars,

is well known to everyone. On entering a completely darkened
room, colour spots start to appear in the eye, once the eyes have

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become accustomed to the
darkness… colour patterns and
shapes appear which do not
enter the eye in the normal
way, but are produced within
the eye and the brain…
phosphenes originate all along
the visual pathway and it is
possible to stimulate visual areas in the brain to produce such
phosphenes. Stimulations of this kind produce visual experiences
of the past… patients who had been blind for a long time began to
see phosphenes after similar treatment. It was not possible,
however, to achieve such results with persons who had been blind
since birth.” (p. 26-7, Art and Science Dolf Reiser, London:
Studio Vista, 1972)

“RODS – the DVD Jose Escamilla’s ground-breaking discovery of

“critters” in our atmosphere! Includes “how-to-film” RODS
around you. DVD $19.90” (ad in Paranoia magazine, Fall 2003)

There were things I realised that I didn’t do in the Lost Tours

fortnight: Skimmerton Riding, a hoax drift as wandering bishops, a
pylons walk, a movie walk bathing the city in film sequences…

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