The Mythogeography of Things to Be

8/14/2019 The Mythogeography of Things to Be

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The Mythogeography Of Things To Be

Phil Smith

We come to a T junction. Never go back. And the two otheroptions are roughly similar. Each one appetising, neithereccentrically so.

Were on a group drift Taxi To Westwood andFeatureless. Setting of at 4am in a taxi, blindfolded, Walkmans on, weve asked to be driven to somewhere without signs of where we might be (our version of a

situationist catapult). The driver named it featureless.

On my own, at such junctions, I usually take a step in onedirection, and jump back, worried at missing things in theother. I take a step along the other route and, once more,recoil. Making a Burdidans ass of myself. The anxiety is aneconomic one, a fear of loss.

On Taxi To Westwood and Featureless we threw a stick inthe air and followed the sharpened end. Coming to thejunction afunctionally, already following irrational ambiencewe felt little need to weigh the possibilities.

Ive been participating in and initiating such drifts foralmost 10 years now. For me, they emerged from the site-specific theatre and performances of the Exeter, UK-basedgroup Wrights & Sites. Dissatisfied by some of the

impositions of theatre on the sites it was supposed to bespecific to, Wrights & Sites began to explore otherperformative options: informed by the psychogeography ofthe situationists (at first negatively, defining ourselves inopposition to them), by English neo-romantics like ArthurMachen, by the meshing with the everyday of Fluxus, and


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by more recent explorers of the urban like Anna Best and theStalker group of Rome, we began to take drifts with nowhere to get to, without fear of what we might be missingelsewhere.

We were arriving at junctions afunctionally.

I want to explore this break in walking as something morethan a simple opposing offunction, but as something morelike a delayed moment justbefore a synthesising of patternsin the physical sciences,something more than adisruption in leisure studies.

Before the situationistspopularised and theorised this break (following, knowingly, inthe footsteps of Dadaist anti-guided walks and Surrealist

jaunts), it had been prefiguredin walking of which thesituationists were not aware:occasional experiments within

the more extreme ranges of recreational walking andtramping, like Stephen Grahams zig zag walk (inThe Gentle Art of Tramping), and among an esoteric few who saw walking as an irrational journey, like the Prague writers

whose street wanderings became labyrinthine fictions:Gustav Meyrink, Paul Leppin, Alfred Kubin, or, in London, Arthur Machen. But these were still bound in the polaroppositions of function and pleasure, a sort of ambulatoryart for arts sake. Now a break from this binary oppositionhas been made increasingly possible by long rhythms of


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critical-theoretical change, by recent crests in neuroscience, by the popularisation of non-classical physics and aresurgent interest in neo-Platonism, morphology andmathematical biology.

Where reviews of walking were once referenced mostly toliterature (and this still continues, influentially, in RebeccaSolnits Wanderlust and Merlin Coverleys very recentPsychogeography), then visual arts, architecture andpolitics (Guy Debord being the obvious example, andFrancesco Careris Walkscapes), and more recentlygeography, archaeology and anthropology (see Mike Pearson

and Michael Shankss Theatre/Archaeology), I amproposing here a pedestrian pseudo-science of limitedmotion, crucially simple in the sense of using a smallnumber of invariants by which to navigate ideological flows.A science that slides through its influences, taking gratefullyfrom them, but abandoning that repetition of origins thatsets up colony within all disruptions; for want of a betterterm: mythogeography.

Mythogeography is active on the border between the respectable and the non-respectable. Like researchers inconspiracy, it mimics the nomenclature ofscience without the obligation to alwaysmaintain its disciplines, (and withoutfunding or laboratories it is, by necessity,a borrowed and borrowing practice, it is

not original). Given its few resources itmust deploy its findings in a strategicgame of peaceful conspiring, hopefullyplacing itself within the liquid cloisters ofa self-organising enthusiasm for self-organisation and within the ambiguities


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of dynamic forms for which (both for forms and ambiguities)David Wade has borrowed the Chinese term li - because itfalls between our notions of pattern and principle (Wade,2003, p.1)

Mythogeography is a playful geography of traversable spacethat has arisen from site-specific performance making, apractice often contesting the meaning of its sites with theirowners and users. But it has arisen also in contesting this useof sites one which, rooted originally in large scale US LandArt, often seemed to be one of appropriation, and which hasprovoked a reaction, exemplified here by Miwon Kwon: our

understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, physicallocation to somewhere or something constituted throughsocial, economic, cultural and political processes. (Kwon,2002, p.10) Mythogeography would like to have this both ways, to maintain the thingness of its sites, while settingitself in motion, proposing itself as a mobile, ambulatorydiscipline, adopting the fictional precedent of Greekpedestration, aware of this adoption as the adopting of asimulacrum, a romantic invention to justify serious walking.

Mythogeography can continue to contest the landmarks, thesymbols, the boundaries of material sites, as well as theprocesses that run through them, exploiting this friction andgathering its contradictions: rumours, mistakes, elaborationsand inventions, dtourned tourism disinformation, crimes,personal associations, hidden histories and hauntings thathang about specific places, valued these equally with theslogans and detritus of official histories and tourist

geographies.

The opportunity is here to theorise a critical spacesomewhere in between the on-going revival of earlysituationist-like walkings and the parallel emergence ofwalking practise that might, this time, reach beyond the cul-


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de-sacs (there often are alleyways inaccessible to the cardriver) of imploding and cultic organisation that condensescapitalist competition within itself and the market stricturesof art, but deferring any synthesis of these two practices. The

discipline of this geography is its placing in gaps, an attemptto accumulate ideas before they hybridise, setting them looseagain in their pre-hybrid forms, a gamble with the risks ofcondensing, in the hope of circulation and orbit.

The term mythogeography emerged, probably by mistake,in my own description of the performance Page Boy in theformer Maritime Museum in Exeter, (October 2000): at the

entrance to a site forbidden during The Quay Thing. Bodyand books as doors to alien territories. Performed on anadulterated map of our previous work. Exmouth merginginto Narnia. Tracing new plots onto the mytho-geography,like Bron Fane's UFO 517narrative, a 60s trash novel that re- writes the Exe Estuary myth of The Devil's Footsteps(http://www.mis-guide.com/ws/archive/phil.html) and wasdeveloped by continuing misuse. It has (re-)presented itself

as an opportunity to test, theoretically,

ideas and practises it has come to name,and to provide a theoretical back(drop)for others to leapfrog over.

Mythogeographys account of walking begins its break from those tensionswithin the earlier narratives of StephenGraham, Geoffrey Murray or Morris

Marpless Shanks Pony: A Study OfWalking that partly defer to literatureand landscape art, but cannot quiteresist the attractions of a practice thatresists reification, that has no need todematerialise its art object (having


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none), that has retained something of its pre-romanticcombination of amoral natural mutability, uselessness andlow necessity. This turns art history on its head now thedissolution of site does not follow the appropriations of the

pioneering and pseudo-colonialist Land Artists. Inmythogeographical art history, the Spiral Jetty and theLightning Field float among the trajectory-practices oftrampers, the titles of whose books, while contaminated bythe values of a class system, imply an art of a peculiarlyephemeral kind: Murrays The Gentle Art of Walking,Grahams The Gentle Art of Tramping. The thingness ofLand Art can be enjoyed by floating rather than

dematerialisation.

So, rather than the processes of art, mythogeographicalwalking is more about a meshing of geographical trajectories,and their ghostly bathing in cultural motion pictures, and with a geometrical connectivity of a self, the integrity of which is constantly being modulated by new neurologicalresearch, fragmentation in the face of critical theory, and thespeculations (for that is what they mostly are) of

consciousness studies (from Roger Penroses quantumconsciousness to memetics). This geographical softness -comparable to the soft places in Neil Gaimans Sandmancomics, or Jonathan Rabans soft city welcomes theacademically unrespectable, while refusing to collapse itself(despite, personally speaking, certain blandishments offered)into any single branch of small-business esoterica, itchallenges the integrity of the walker in themselves and the

landscape in itself, walking topographies (in both senses, ofsurface features and their charting, simultaneously anddiscretely) in which self is geographical and landscape issurprisingly autobiographical - a geographical game of SixDegrees Of Kevin Bacon - challenging political, cultural and


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psychological identities. In the mobile mythogeography ofthe drift, setting identity at risk is an essential catapult.

The working mytho-scientific method is a floating of

repeatable experiments with charlatan fictions and hopefulspeculation, conducted according to the evolutionarypsycho-architectural explanation of the creative explosionof 30,000 to 50,00 years ago, succinctly articulated in StevenMithens The Prehistory of The Mind. Mythogeography, withthe benefit of hindsight, uncovers the archaeological recordof Mithen-ology in its own cultural landscape. No surprisesthere, then.

RUPERT: (I)nsofar as we see

angels 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 theactivity in electromagnetic fields.

(Fox & Sheldrake,1996, p.41)

In June 2003 I journeyed with mythen neighbour, the mathematicianMatthew Watkins (author ofUseful Mathematical and Physical Formulae, Wooden Books,

Wales, 2000) on anAngelDrive through the city of Exeter,navigating by signs of angels. As a default trajectory wewould visit the four churches dedicated to St Michael and AllAngels. We reached only three significantly, if you regardthree-plus-one as of significance. At first we could hardly walk at all for the intensity of detail. Yet, despite the


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granularity, as long as when to end was not an issue, Ialways retained a sense of operating within a field ofpseudo-geometrical spacetime, almost tangible, a tickingaway of things being.

We skirt around St Michael and All Angels on Mount Dinham -

the place is such an obvious vantage point - like the sites of Danes

Castle, Rougement and the Law Courts, yet no one seems to know

much about the site - called California at one time, used for

drying cloth on racks. Field. Purchased by John Dinham to prevent

a fun fair and prostitution. A contested field. Commandeered by

one who understood the curving pull of ideological and sensual

space. Not a Puritan, a patron of an alternative, fearful sensuality.The church was built as an idealistic propaganda tool for a

sensual Tractarianism and Anglo-Catholicism, for visuality against

text.

On our way wed dodged the traffic to climb onto the base of the

Clock Tower and there was a tiny white angel - a brilliant white,

delicate, cross-shaped, miniature moth.

Notes: electricity and god are indistinguishable - this seems to

be a quote from someone - it sounds unintentionally Futurist

water wings found on a discarded shopping list

Outside the church we encounter a tenant from Dinhams Free

Cottages. Free? Not at those rents! She tells us that she had

been entertaining friends from America at the Royal Clarence

Hotel, in search of their roots, and there they were, sat,unknowingly, just a few yards from the monument to an ancestor

of theirs. They were called Bastard or something like that

Hooker? Yes, thats it!


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I attend a talk in St Michael and All Angels, Mount Dinham. God

On The Brain by the Reverend Anthony Freeman, dismissed from

his parish for his part in

the humanist Sea of Faith

heresy, co-editor of the

Journal of Consciousness

Studies, carefully laying

down a materialist science

for visions and prophetic

voices, explaining how

two everyday neural

functions, whenunexpectedly co-activated can produce exceptional experiences,

combining a sense of reality with extreme emotion. Not that there

is any exceptional thing, but rather there is creativity the

unexpected co-operating of simple things. Throughout, Reverend

Freeman sat facing the West Door, its doom wall a screen of

angels, and a singularly human devil. The doors are double, and

above them, in a circular medallion, is a carving of the seven

archangels. In the front are St Gabriel with lily, St. Michael withhis sword and scales and St Raphael with the staff and scrip.( Anonymous, undated) Uriel is missing. Or present, butanonymous.

Does mythogeography/mytho-geography have a hyphen?

It should be spelt inconsistently.

Between smooth, gridded space, where things happen - in every

small town you expect that monster with tentacles that squeezes up

through the macadam, or the big bass spider - and those winged

phantoms with psychology is fecund ground for exploring.

Walking along an empty country road with Vicky and Matthew I


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suddenly saw a huge computer-animated monster stepping out

into the road - thats where, maybe, one can explore the maps that

are slowly emerging from walking: the territories of intuition

(popping up like the eccentrics of paper architecture), textbook

diagrams of Grotowskis para-theatrical evolution from Rich andTotal Theatres to a biological singularity running in tiny loops of

time beyond the hybrid into instinct and temporary 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, in the ship with no

Zion, with no originary, but rather focus(ing) on those moments

or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural

differences. The in-between spaces provide the terrain forelaborating 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.

(Bhabha, 1994, p.1-2).

This particular good ship Osiris - with its pilot Thoth (St Michael

holding the scales) recording the measurements of a heart weighed

against a feather, while peregrine falcons on the spire of the church

of St Michael (Mercury, Hermes, Thoth) pick a pigeon to pieces,

its bloodied feathers shwoeing down among the children playing in

my daughters school playground. (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 intuitions of various kinds - is the pigeon

assimilating to the state of the pigeon, is the basis of the gift of

knowledge, prophesy and spiritual power (Abraham et al,

1998, p.76) Look, daddy, snow!! Red snow!!- this Osiris vesselresists a banal hybridity, resists the progressive slap that gets the

blood moving in the murderers brain. It must sail among the sharp

reefs of archaic and modern, original and copy - each delayed

synthesis threatening to bite the hull and fill the ship with

itself/themselves. Bhabha quotes Marshall Sahlins on difference


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in Western bourgeois culture: 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 (Sahlins, 1976, p112) and against it he proposes The

intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes thestructure 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.

(Bhabha, 1994, p.37)

The contest between tourism and drift. In the latters resistance to

totalisation, it deploys the trash and ceremonial of its enemies:

that Third Space, unrepresentable in itself, constitutes thediscursive 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, that element in a translation that does not

lend itself to transition (Bhabha, 1994, p.224) It is the pieceof grit that sees, not the eye it irritates, its is the granularity of

trash, gossip, mistakes, sci fi-sudden freezings of time, monsters,

poor theatre, marginalized theology and film, rather than their

critique in studies of popular culture, it is return to the un-

translatable thingness.

Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC because the

hybrid, wingless, featherless things they used in the food were no

longer officially chickens - not true, but an imaginary animal

flies; it remains for mythogeographers to create a habitat for it in

Third Space.


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Despite an antipathy to the anti-sitedness of theatre(exemplified by Peter Brooks concept of the empty space),

its hard not to acknowledge the half-life of theatrical presence on thedrift, so openly marginal andmanifestly diminishing, its very willingness to publicly decaytheatrically grants itself a diffusivequality, in direct, physical,celebrative interaction withspectators, acting out her/his (its)

own performative functions withthem through the text, as well as behind it and beside it (Soule,L.2000, p.6) - when the text is place. What Lesley Wade Soule perceives

here, in the anti-mimetic actor, or rather in the actor whoplays on the border between mimesis and its dispersal, iswhat - when the spectator is abolished and made an actor in

the art of walking - we can be:

celebrative, inviting (and inciting) to playful responseand/or carnival participation, and liminal/liminoid,namely, free from sociocultural associations (often includinggender), as well as from fixity of mimetic character. As anintense and liberated celebrant, the actor is demonic, thatis, perceived to possess potentially dangerous charisma incollusion with oppositions between reality and fiction,identity and disguise, ignorance and knowledge. (Soule, L.,2000, p.8)

Soule characterised this actor as rebellious butunrevolutionary (Soule, L., 2000, p.11). When the walkerson the performative drift are actors this formula breaks


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down into the probability of an emergent fracture inconsensus reality: not a simple disruption of ideology, northe emergence of an alternative tortality, but a probabilisticdisruption of the striating operation of its phantomic

reproductive system. This is starkly delineated in those oddmoments when drifters meet ramblers, in the uncertainty of what each other is, the fishing for anything to say to eachother. In appearance the two sets of walkers may be similar, but there is only a genealogical connection between theramblers and their driviste anti-particles: they were of thespecies Bacchae they were no longer textual (ie., conveyingor possessing meaning), but purely performative (ie., having

indefinable significance and the power of perpetualbecoming). (Soule, L., 2000, p.31) Always becoming, never,unlike the rambler, arriving. Destinations on drifts, if everreached, have significance only as catapults to other places.Mythogeography is a nomadic art.

Starting from the site-specific theatre of Wrights & Sites thismight seem like the return of a repressed theatre, finally

raising itself, with the help of Land Art, from beneath thecensures of Fried and Greenberg, to the locus of art. Anspiration that that Buci-Glucksmann, in the context ofpainting, calls the height of modernity the great angelicutopia of the baroque, which consisted inmaking something visible, in being a pureapparition that ma(kes)appearance appear,from a position just onits edges the theatreof a painted visiblewhere the eye would beat once in the wings


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and on stage. (Buci-Glucksmann, C., 1994, p.61.)

Mythogeographical anti-mimesis retains this binocularity ofvision through space and not art, through the exploration of

the wings as parts of the machine for theatrical product, ie:appearance, through exploration of the stage as a road onwhich is next it is never possible to take more than one step.Theatre has sought to revivify itself in the specificities of site.Performance the same in the specificities of body. Driftingpitches itself between the two revivals, resisting a synthesis with either - placing itself in the wings, angelic andarchitectural, both feathery motion and edgeland, an ironical

process/landscape not unlike that of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamids Most Wantedpaintings, ideologicallyoverloaded, multiple and bleak, unhomely, both stalled andtranscendent, culture as natural history; unrefined andmultiple atomistic desires keeping the picture fromcoalescing within its frame, it will not sit still: not quitesublime, not quite laughable. It is from this particular flavourof iconoclasm - not the destruction of images, but rather thedelaying of their synthesis - that mythogeography can form

its political interventions: democratic, participatory,resistant to completion, in the temporal and cultural mish-mash where symbols can clump about, free of their usualmoderation and mediation, similar to the play of accidentallycollaged images in museums so beloved of Robert Smithson: a fantastic plan to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Somebones from Hannibals elephants are neatly displayed, and sois Neros fiddle. (Smithson, R., 1996, p.98-99). These

images are not so much floated free, as stalled; their memeticcomplexifying, their ideological integration, pre-empted.These are playgrounds, the queasy foundations of change.

Margaret Boden, deploying the metaphor of conceptualspace with a geometrical bias - What was wrong with


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Czannes advice to a fellow-artist to deal with nature bymeans of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone? (Boden,M., 1990, p. 249) has questioned assumptions aboutgenius, inspiration and the experiencing of rich structures

all at once, perhaps not difficult targets, and in their placesuggests that while (T)he more richly structured (and wellsign-posted) the (conceptual) spaces, the more possibility ofstoring items in a discriminating fashion, and of recognizingtheir particularities in the first place Mere systematicityis not enough creativity requires that systematic rule-breaking or rule-bending be done in domain-relevant ways.Consistently H(historically)-creative people have a better

sense of domain-relevance Their mental structures arepresumably more wide-ranging, more many-levelled andmore richly detailed. (Boden M., 1990, p.252-3) So, ratherthan an elusive genius or mystical openness to synchronicexperience, Boden is suggesting that the creative mind is onethat can be developed by the storing and arranging of low-level patterns of thought (these are early thoughts, hencethe importance of a nostalgia (and hence the angels) thatcan re-make the past as a utopia, of an iconoclasm that can

rescue simple, changeable, memes, before they becomecomplex) which can then be embroidered and reassembled,changing the dimensions of conceptual spaces, refining themcomplexly, but made up of simple patterns.


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Mythogeography can have both. Indeed, in the cathedralstructure of Mithen-ology there is no contradiction between

Bodens cyber-creativity and Freemans accidentalmysticism. They are both a drama of chapels of information-storage, both describe the architecture of information

retrieval.

If conceptual space-changing is adestination that is always on themove, then it is a suitably iconoclasticdevice, for a transcendence that

ignores the anthropomorphic idol infavour of the abstraction of forces andgeometry, of nature-in-general; aphantom draughtboard tongue placedgently in a generalised cheek. Thisplaces mythogeography towards thesublime end of an iconoclasticcontinuum which is at its most

unforgiving in the smashing of images, moves throughdecorative art and ends at an aspiration to re-present theunrepresentable (the angelic baroque - the aniconicsublime). Here the human subject is de-centred. The role ofart is historical fodder for dtournement: the means to arejection of a future for art, a rejection of the pseudo-iconoclasm of modernism and its clearing away of theremnants of religious representation to make art (and theartist) its own idol. Representation, frame as border,art/non-art at last, can we have these back as everydaythings?

The situationists rejection of art - without abandoning eitherpractice or, even, creativity (in the programmatic andmaterialist sense that Margaret Boden uses the word) - is a


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rejection of modernisms self-appointed privileges anddispensations, its defensive difficulty, its appropriation ofthe right to interpret itself. In their place the situationistsassert the simple, nostalgic, anachronistic act of walking,

the streaming drive, at the first praxis of their project. It became suspended theoretically in mid air. But the action-idea remains to be used. The project of mythogeographyshamelessly purloins it for the development of exchanges ofthe most provisional of mappings: from pure un-catapulted, disorientated, urban exploring in search ofambience, to structured drifts with catalytic themes, even aniconoclastic use of a drifting consciousness while

performing functional journeys - to work, to shops, tomultiplex. All these are accessible at a simple level,explainable in a sentence. Once engaged and in motion, bylearning an increasing vocabulary of simple patterns, thewalker refines their creativity by re-assembling the orbits ofmemetic units that an aesthetic of delayed synthesis keepsstalled but in permanent fall - like international spaces-stations.

This version/inversion of the drive is described in process by Lawrence Brady when he comments on his and CarlLaverys wandering in Norwich in 2005, and Laverys use ofthe city as an art of memory, a series of storage spaces forideas: The empty street behind the car-valeting service wasa paragraph from Marc Aug on non-spaces; the riverbank atFullers Hole was Gaston Bachelards poetics of space; theconcourse of the library was Bergsons la dur. The

Situationists wanted to use lived experience as the true mapof the city but your peripatetic discussion was the mirrorimage, using the city as the true map for ideas. (Bradby &Lavery, 2007, p.47)


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Single sentence-based mini-drifts or wanders through aseries of theories-places, the pattern is a common, dynamicone.

performance alone is not enough - the walker must walk theelement of resistance in the process of transformation

appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew. (Bhabha,H., 1994, p.37.)

(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 moonshines 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, 1844-91, 197, 812B)

The parentheses around God said

are mythogeographical goalposts.

Moveable. The anomaly that isalways in the way of theology,

disrupting the binary. The three plus

one. Hell is a particular place. Evil is

no angel, but a kind of landscape

gardening. Hildegard describes the

darkness of the North as the contrast

that reveals the light from other

points. Sheldrake makes this into awave function. But hell is too

placed for all this; too grittily,

granular-historically, awfully there: The landscape repeats

itself borne round and round in never-ending circles of the same

rooms, fields, offices toward an overwhelming disaster The


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universe has performed itself into exhaustion (Oppenheimer,P., 1996, p.7) Yet Gilles Ivains Dark Quarter, in his Formulary For A New Urbanism (1953), and Bess Lovejoys goth anti- brightness, pitching black against the wide-scale denial of the

darker aspects of life within Western industrial culture(the e-peak,issue 4, vol 100, 28.9.98 at ), are alive with resistances. Even in

Hildegards hell the roofless and floorless emptiness is that

which has granted the Planet Earth its complexity of existence - the

unequal distribution of the universes one atom per cubic metre.

On this the walker surfs: the virtual vacuum from which virtual

particles burst on borrowed energy before paying it back and

disappearing. The mythogeographical map of Exeter must includehell, virtual particles, a ludicrously specific paradise, Kirk Radio

and anatomy: neither the assimilationists dream, (n)or the racists

nightmare, of a full transmissal of subject matter; (but)an

encounter with the ambivalent process of splitting and hybridity

that marks the identification with cultures 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.

(Bhabha, H. 1994, p224-5)

Yodeling cowgirl/performer Misha Myers told me that thereis a real Hell in Exeter. Mount Dinham rises out of it. Theold name for the dark quarter around the North (!) Gate,once guarded by a basilisk taken from the long-gonestructure, ignored on a tall pole, and recently disappeared.

Only three angels are mentioned by name in the Bible: Raphael,

Gabriel and Michael. But four angels are linked to the four

directions. In the Peoples Park, Crediton, a sprayed tag on the dog

shit receptacle looks very like AZREAL. There is a fourth,


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secret, monkey: feel no evil - its hands cupped over its genitals.

Three plus one.

Devil monkey basilisk - angel - human. Shape-shifting old

texts. 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. The

proprietor explains that she is responding to demand. For reasons

I can no longer remember I have written in my notebook:

Batman, Thumberlina, Jeepers Creepers Marconi, My father

Pan/Angel (Franklyn House) angel on one shoulder & devil on

the other. Wu-Tang World Wide on a jacket. Notice: Fun Dog

Show. Class no 16. The bitch the judge would most like to takehome.

We are in a motorway underpass. Just had a conversation with an

old farmworker. Understood maybe one word in twenty. Class,

relation to production, time. On the concrete are great jeepers

creepers winged Wu Tang Clan beasts. Some wings of God - /|\ -

on old GPO concrete stumps. Even out here, on the very edges of

the city, the trail of wings continues

We come across a mosaic tribute to a homing pigeon, Mary of

Exeter, she was decorated with the Dickin medal, the animal

bravery award, Wounded In Action. Matthew mentions Rupert

Sheldakes bookThe Physics of Angels but I end up reading stuff

of his on pigeons in The Evolutionary Mind; failure to account for

pigeon-homing, his fantasy that pigeons consult a very detailed

three-dimensional map of the entire planet. Something maybe

us do too.

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: how can such things be distributed, dispersed?

How can they communicated in a state of constantly being ripped


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up and rearranged, but without completely disappearing, how can

they be accumulative and instantly consumable? Is there emergent

form that is both map and consciousness? What?

Is this what the Atmospheric Maps are one version of,among many more routed in the failed history of BrunelsAtmospheric Railway, mapped by disparate walkers on fourseparate drifts around the route of the line, guided byambience? The maps are free, but difficult to follow,encouraging their users to ignore them and find their own way, distributed through libraries, shops, by hand, fromwalker to walker (a mobile machinoeki)? And the Wrights &

Sites mis-guides to Exeter and to Everywhere? And WillMorriss psychogeographic poems of the Exmouth coastline? Will there come a point of critical mass when thesefragments can liquefact, become a process, rather than anart, become a mythogeography of things in motion?

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

wanders about the graves, its parent swooping. I duck. Matthew

wanders confidently between the curves. We are shocked by the

violence of Alphingtons statue of St Michael and the Devil. We

walked to St Michael & All Angels, Heavitree, but lost track of

angels. The granularity of the walk from Mount Dinham had

undergone a liquefaction at Alphington:

when the earth shook, these wet sandy soils turned to a slurry

that flowed like treacle. This property of granular substance

naturally enough known as liquefaction manifestation(s) of thefact that a granular substance is a peculiar state of matter:

composed of solid grains, yet able to show liquid-like behaviour

a convenient model system for studying complex phenomena as

diverse as the fluctuations of stock markets and the formation of


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large-scale structure in the Universe. (Ball, P., 1999, pp.199-200)

Had the swooping Herring Gull shaken me? Or the statue of the

angel killing the dragon/demon/itself/its/elf above the porch? Andthis sinking feeling on entering a kind of pre-edgelands between

suburban housing and industrial estate after the ripe baroque of the

city? The route was grey and yellowed, smoothed, creamed, water

concreted in but not over, bright sunlight ironing out things,

pulling towards the River Exe down a hemmed tributary, Alph, to

the fluids of the hospital, the capillary actions of the gorsedd Yew

at Heavitree. I had shivered at the granularity of feathers, my eye

on swooping wings and stone angel - wormholes to beaches andsand dunes. The long curve of sunburnt grass, sliding beside

longeurs of unpolished smoothness, the industrial estates barely

differentiated units. Walking frictionless by unwanted,

disowned, estranged water. A shedding of belonging. Losing ones

grip. From the picaresque entertainments of the first part of our

drift, it is only now - in retrospect - that I begin to enjoy the sea-

sickness of the second part.

To walk is to enter an occult mechanism for the raising ofpatterns.

To be socialised, mythogeography will require an art ofmemory.

Did I send you a Peripatetic Randomiser?

(personal email, Jim Colquhoun, 10.1.04)

Something cheap enough to buy multiple copies of, add toand leave for others to pick up and add to please feelfree to leave the book on a bus when you next come to


23/26

London (personal letter from Anna Best, author ofOccasional Sights).

The missing archangel, California as a field- funfair ortemple - the gaps, fictional pasts, ambiguities of statues andun-built plans of the city turned up by themythogeographically sensitive walker. Setting the walker atodds with the local reproducers of ideology. The granularityof mythogeography a multitude of suspended particles,behaving like a liquid; the dynamic of a deferred hybridity -exposes the few banalities that pass for heritage here,

meaningful detail is feared. Wrights & Sites are asked by the

local council to dress as pirates. Perhaps one day we will.

Wormholes render local meaningless. On thatAngelDrive the city felt like a sieve against my fingertip, like thegrid of one of those three dimensional depictions ofEinsteinian gravity as space, and then the smoothemptiness of the pre-edgelands; there is a mytho-geometricalmap to be made of this city, any city - it would be politically


24/26

controversial, making meaning from curves that are there tocontrol flow and texturalities that function as friction todelay customers only long enough to purchase, made comical by their place in a pattern of ignored details; former mass

productions faded into hieroglyphics, past faiths andcertainties in splinters. Punctuated by void places in which toplay seriously.

There will be closer and more distant observations to come from the satellite of Doreen Massey suspended above thecity, defining space as trajectory not boundary, and fromthose ideal walkers two-way mirrors for the city, reflecting

experience on one side and a map of ideas on the other, slidbetween the strata of the street, picking up its scratches andscores these will slow the city, disrupt processes, movethings again, begin the re-knitting of tissues: make strangeand repair.

References

Abraham, R., McKenna, T., Sheldrake R., The Evolutionary Mind:Trialogues At The Edge Of The Unthinkable, (1998), Santa Cruz:Trialogue Press.

Anonymous (undated) The Church of St Michael & All Angels, Exeter,A Short History and Guide.

Ball, P., (1999), The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation InNature, Oxford: OUP.

Bhabha, H., (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Boden, M., (1990), The Creative Mind, London: Weidenfeld andNicolson.


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Bradby, L. & Lavery, C. Moving through place: itinerantperformance and the search for a community of reverie, Research InDrama Education, Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2007, pp.41-54, Abingdon:Taylor & Francis.

Buci-Glucksmann, C., trans. Patrick Camiller, (1994),Baroque Space,London: Sage Publications.

Fox, M., & Sheldrake, R., (1996), The Physics of Angels, SanFrancisco: Harper Collins.

Graham, S., (1929), The Gentle Art of Tramping, London: ErnestBenn.

Hildegard of Bingen, (1884-91), Patrologia Latina, Paris: Migne.

Julius, A., (2000), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm andJewish Art, London: Thames & Hudson.

Kwon, M., (2002), One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art andLocational Identity, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Massey, D., (1993)Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place

in Mapping The Futures ed. Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T.,Robertson, G. & Tickner, L., London: Routledge.

Mithen, S., (1996), The Prehistory Of Mind, London: Thames &Hudson.

Oppenheimer, P., (1996),Evil and the Demonic, London: Duckworth.

Rutherford, J., (ed) (1990), The Third Space, Interview With Homi

Bhabha, in Identity; Community, Culture, Difference, London:Lawrence & Wishart.

Sahlins, M., (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press.


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Smithson, R., (1996) Establishment in Robert Smithson: TheCollectedWritings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Soule, L., (2000), The Actor As Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Deviland the Boy Rosalind, Westport, USA: Greenwood Press.

Wade, D., (2003),Li: Dynamic Form In Nature, Presteigne, Wales:Wooden Books.

Wrights & Sites (2003), An Exeter Mis-Guide, Exeter: Wrights &Sites.

Phil Smith [email protected]

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The Mythogeography of Things to Be

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