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Praxis 2003Phil Smith

1. Theres 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 setout 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 Michaels and All Angels on MountDinham but well 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 awall on which I maintain a chalk graffiti.

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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 avery 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. Lets take a short walk back.

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

Even though its 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 thats because there are things in common that this place

has with those others. There is something of foreboding as well asquietness 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 its 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.

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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 somethingthat other people could bodily, and metaphorically, get into

when I stopped trying to control spaces and started to choose

spaces I didnt 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, myattic 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 oftransparency. 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 (inthe best moments) like photographic transparencies projected on

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to a screen. In these moments they were, in Simon Persighettis

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 highlightedby 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 theirenjoyment. 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.

Its 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 thefact that the performers had no character to stay in - we all

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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 themelodrama 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 bookActor As Anti-Character - Dionysus, the Deviland 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 ofChurch, 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, Ill just play

you a part of the sound track that ran alongside about half of the90 minute performance.

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(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-operanaturalism, 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 likethat 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 onsomething of the materiality of the site itself. This camouflage

this physical taking on of the site extended to the audiences

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 dizzyingarray 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.

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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 thecharacters in Forest Vague Panic were not unlike

those of the characters of Commedia dell Arte

Pans scraping his feet along the carpet as if

sweeping up his victims was suggestive of Pierrots

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. Asphysical, 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! fortransparency and camouflage isignored. Its a shame, because I think the idea ofcamouflage 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 wasnt for my use of a

single word to describe my earliest attempts to grapple with site. Icant even remember how or when I started using it. But I began

to describe my work in site as mytho-geographical. Ive no idea

what I thought I meant. I think Id 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 dont

even think I knew what psycho-geographical meant at the time.So I used the word mythogeography first and then it filled up

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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 Exeters Cathedral Close. Partly

through tour-guide monologue, but also by recordings of sances,

the mummery of pouring Special Brew onto the dead

underground, and by the out of the corner of the eye performancesof 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 Exeters mythogeographical

features.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. Ihope you enjoy the next half hour.

I am not an official tour guide. Though I have grown abeard to look a little more like one. But I havent doneanything with my beard, its just the way its grown.

And I havent adopted a fictional character like sayfrom C. S. Lewiss stories of Narnia or anything likethat. Though you might think that in thesesurroundings that might be appropriate.

For today we are in the ancient Cathedral Close. As youcan see, everything here is very old.

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In fact hardly anything of what you see today haschanged for thousands and thousands of years.

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

place of matrimony. Things are written in stone. Thereis 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 itssleeve, has a higher density of reported hauntings persquare metre than anywhere else in the countrywhich is true of many tourist destinations. Some peoplehave put this down to the enthusiasm of local touristboards, others believe that tourists and ghosts havemuch in common.

If you did want to model yourself on a fictionalcharacter you might do worse than choose that ofCharles Villiers, one of the main characters in ArthurMachens story of the uncanny: The Great God Pan,published in 1897. He is a sort of super-tourist likeyourselves. A spectral psycho-geographer walking thestreets quite separate from history:

Such a person, once called a ghost-hunter is now moreoften called a ghost-watcher, rather as television hasreplaced the big game hunters with a sort ofadventurous audience.

Our particular haunting today is the result of a love

story, so, of course, it ends in a well rather than endswell.

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I like this, from one of the ghosts:

(Reads:) When you appreciate we live in a stateno less material than your own, you will

understand that with our greater age andexperience we are much in advance of you.

But how can the past be in advance of the present?And surely whats interesting about ghosts is that theirideas, unlike actors in soap operas, have floated freefrom their experience. Maybe the ghosts are okempirically, but not to be trusted when it comes totheory?

Were going to pass the scene of a recent murder in amoment. I dont really want to dwell there, so I shall

just indicate the place with a gesture. (Makes thegesture.) There, a homeless man, Nicholas Noall-Strutt,a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland and inBosnia died from stabs wounds in the early hours ofSeptember the 27th, two years ago.

A man came forward later and described himself as the

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

Then I got a new flat,said the manand therewas no room for Nick. The last time I saw him

we walked down to the Cathedral Close onSunday... He was a bit upset because he did not

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know anybody in the city. He started to cry andasked if he could come with me, but there wasno way I could help.

I often see desperate men walking together here.

After the Dean of Exeter had, and I quote from thelocal paper:..cleansed and blessed the cathedralgrounds, he spoke of a sub life that had comevery visibly to the surface. What we wantedto do was to reclaim the Cathedral Green as aplace of goodness and purity, he said, Thereare tens of thousands of people buried under ourfeet.

But what if the place was somehow implicated in thecrime?

Please follow me.

(The Misguide leads the spectators to the just beforeThe Well House. Then makes the gesture to indicatethe site of the murder of Nicholas Noall-Strutt.)

The second chapter in this story of the exploitation ofmurder and death by the tourist trade starts here in thebar of The Well House. You can perhaps see from herethe chalked sign advertising the bones of anunidentified woman. The dead have been pushed bythe movement of earth from the burial ground acrossthe road into the cellars of houses, hotels and

restaurants. But I dont want to show you bones, onlysigns.

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(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 Stokers Dracula.

This is where the Vampires 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 theres 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 Exeters 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. Its a

man. The bones change sex. Narratives run like streams of lava

through the city. Cooling and melting, fusing with the things

about them.

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Creating these mythogeographies was an ambitious aspiration.

Spaces and places didnt 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 placesfor 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 Persighettis 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 Ive been part of a number of

organised exploratory walks they sometimes get called drifts

or drives , 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 eachjunction. 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 Sues Drift document.)

phil is like a drifting sniffer dog

Im in a state of heightened or certainly altered consciousness on a

drift. This is not the languorous dreamy wandering of theflaner inured from the world by their own reverie rather this

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exploratory walk is an expos, 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 didnt 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.

3

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

magnetisation of 190 declination and -10 upwards inclination)

shows that at the time this rock spewed molten from the ground

the part of the planets skin we now call Exeter was close to theequator: 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

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transient mountain just passing through moving at the speed

our fingernails grow.

But its not just the things about us that are in transit. We are too.

Our selves are always in movement. The meeting of self withplace 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 thats what working in site should like like trying to

measure the world with a snake.

Out on the edge of town we found the Bishops 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 its 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 windchopped 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 Im writing is washed with

the movies. This bathing seems to be in either utopian or paranoidcolours. 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 inGeorge Romeros Dawn of the Dead - still the overwhelming

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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 Im 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.

Theres 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 grandscale the transformers this time not bombers, but monsters like

Konga or alien invaders or even in the case of Quatermass and

the Pit theghosts of alien invaders

But heres 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 thoselandscapes never left me. Now Im nearly fifty Ive suddenly

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discovered that Im allowed to take them seriously. If you ever

feel the same way, you probably dont have to wait so long before

you do something about it.

(Rubbing fingers together. Mystic smoke.)

But I wouldnt want you to think that Ive stopped performing in

site. Some of the walks that Ive 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 Gordons 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 laysand melodies

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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 Arrowof the Government.

But theyre also on the helmet of Hermes. Theyre

reminiscent of the remaining sacred shape of Exeter the

cathedral being the central ray with the two churches of St

Michaels 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

Michaels 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 ofa party - ripped underwear, bottles, scooter ruts in the grass,

food. And there was another kind of disturbance:

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(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 heuse 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 Michaels

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 doesnt 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 Michaels and All Angels, Mount

Dinham, the spire can be viewed from the Iron Bridge, where theNorth Gate once stood, against which the Falcon public house

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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 andfrom 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 daughters schools playground.

Perhaps all these connections will eventually turn out to be dead

ends. Or perhaps this is the beginning of a mythogeographicalmapping 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 dont want to leave you with the idea that this is all aboutstories. Instead, I want to suggest that maybe its as much about

shapes and atmospheres.

For on the various walks Ive participated in Ive 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 andatmosphere similarities that might be describable in a mytho-

geometry.

Heres a couple of the shapes of atmosphere that Ive 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 Featurelessdrift; thanks to a so-called catapult that involved us being driven

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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 beturned 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, evenmore sweet, sticky, libidinous and looming. Its closed over

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the path. Closing something off. Something we havent

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. Ive read Stephen Kings TheGirl Who Loved Tom Gordon a girl lost in the woods.

Ive 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 thetelltale details.

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This feeling has been best described by the Danish

philosopher as dread:

there is peace and repose; but at the same timesomething 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 isable 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 ourrelationship 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 issomehow magnified.)

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Wormholes: being places where there is swift transport to a

distant and connected one

Places that are almost there : the sorts of places you comeacross and can never find a second time, places youve 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 likeancient 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 apylon (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 wed 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 wed

failed to enter first time round.

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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 wecould sculpt crevasses and ice floes.

A few miles along the same stream of energy pylons their shapes

would remind Matthew of a childens TV programme called The

Changes.

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

couldnt 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 terracottaooze. 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 Dads vegetable garden.

Breaking small chunks between my fingers to make the red smoke

of artillery fire. MYSTIC SMOKE FROM FINGER TIPS.

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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 houses turret is (just) part of the skyline atNew North Road rail bridge. Its 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 theshapes 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 mans 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 wasadded after Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of

him, suspended in space.

This is from William Kingdon Cliffords 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.

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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 articlefrom 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 thepost, 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..?

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Well, I hope that if you like any of the ideas Ive been talking

about this morning I hope youll 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. Well 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.)