Drift With Students

DRIFT with students from an English language school 7.2.03 Arriving in ones, twos and threes at “The Statue” (in Bedford Circus): Ryan, Haejin, Keiko, Bong rok, Etsuko, Mahmut, Matthew, Cathy and me. To walk the word DRIFT in Korean alphabet onto the surface of the city of Exeter (I first typed “the city if Exeter”); tracing it down back streets, cul-de-sacs, demolition sites and alleys, criss-crossing the ancient flint route of the Icknield Way (Sidwell Street and High Street). Finding a tiny Z world in a hole in the city wall. Discussing the graffitied blue stencils of a young woman’s face that have been decorating the surfaces of city buildings for a month or so – “is she a 40s film star?” – and then meeting her at the very moment that she sees her own deep blue image for the first time – she says an artist took her photograph at a party.

Mahmut pointing out the Aladdin pantomime poster, discovering the direction of Mecca from a man in the New Horizon café. All of us in the café chatting under the gaze of ‘Clifford’s Turret’:

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Matthew and I were on the last lap now. Wandering down Longbrook Street, past Park House. Matthew would like to think of the child William Clifford sitting in its turret, looking, thinking. But the turret was added after Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of him, suspended in space. A mythogeometric moment. Clifford the Big Red Mathematical Dog in orbit. (from Z Worlds) Dewey number 510 is where we find William Kingdon Clifford’s ‘The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences’. Number 82 is where we might have found Clifford as a child at home in Longbrook Street, a three minute walk from here from the turret of which we might imagine him watching the executions on the prison ramparts, aware, like the man with the rope around his neck, of the way space curves about time… anticipating Einstein by forty years … but the turret wasn’t built until Harry Hems bought the house and Clifford had grown up and gone. (from tEXtcavation – a Wrights & Sites performance/installation in the underground stacks of Exeter Central Library for the 2003 tEXt Festival.)

A building turned into a hill of bricks. Moss growing into words on a gravestone.

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Cathy later said that this was the first time she’d understood the drift because it moved so slowly, it became possible for unexpected things to emerge from familiar places. A ghostly lamppost. Cathy, Matthew and me, and then finally, just Matthew and me walking into the darkness to complete DRIFT. At the end of a dark alley blundering into a private garden, taking a portrait photo for German visitors, gazing on the hermetic spire of St Michael’s & All Angels from the Egyptian Catacombes. And finally discovering that on tracing our route onto a map, that we have walked/waked the shape of a flying girl, which turns on its side to become an old man leaning on a stick and upside down a tank or artillery gun. The velocity of the movement of the geometries of self/s and place/s through each other affects the probable amounts of contact, the amounts of binding, the amounts of place that detach themselves and attach themselves, the amounts of self that detach themselves and attach themselves. As the walk slowed, the idea of destination disappeared, and then – at the very end of the day, in the darkness, the choice arises again – a ghost on a bouncy castle: to 3

complete the word on the city’s ‘map’. (Halloween, 2003: Last night I walked with about 15 others on a ramble up and down New Bridge Street/Fore Street/High Street/Sidwell Street) led by Raimi Gbadamosi – the maker of The Dreamers’ Perambulator - and as we walked I was very aware of seeing again some of the details of the slow DRIFT 7.2.03 – of the basement of the Debenhams store ready to be a hospital in the event of nuclear war, of the young woman’s blue face still there on Somerfields, a survivor of the conflict between the taggers and the stencillers – and I felt the impulse to spread those memes. Raimi stopped at the meeting point of Fore Street and Mary Arches Road and pointed out the economic fracture here, between the high rent national chains and the low rent local shops, a fracture that ran along the dogleg that the Icknield Way originally took past St Mary Arches Church/Roman Temple. Then we trod across the former ethnic fracture running between the old British/Celtic and Saxon areas. We walked in a ‘straight line and back’ and yet the space was always reaching out sideways like a billowing web – as Raimi pointed out the arcades left and right from Fore Street and New Bridge Street (in and not in the street) and the ‘run through’ I’d never noticed before from the risetop law courts site that Mrs E. O. Gordon mentions as a likely gorsedd site in Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles, down past McGahey the Tobacconist, through a tunnel in the block of shops, across Princesshay and through another tunnel into Southernhay. “What does “hay” mean?”

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“I know, but I can’t remember… yes… ‘hedge’!” And how much further can that line be traced? And how long has it been a path? And of any significance? A few moments ago I took out the aerial photographic map of Exeter and, using the edge of Vera Chapman’s Blaedudd The Birdman, attempted to detect some significance in this route by drawing an extension of it across the map – it seems to be heading for the old yew tree at Heavitree – the meeting place of the Dumnoni – but what I also noticed was that the law courts, from above, are shaped like a trident, threepronged like the /|\ that Mrs Gordon calls God’s NAME: “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.” One of the accidental themes of this year of walking has been the tracing of webs of symbolism draped across the space of the city, hovering in the layers between historical and imaginary. Waiting for someone to read them by walking, waiting to reveal themselves in the most familiar (and sometimes unexpected) sites – the most recent /|\ I found was on a brick (part mortared over) in a wall at the Velwell Road end of the Hoopern Valley Path, a place I had walked past hundreds of times, created a cd walk there with Tom Davies,

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graffitied on… it was only this time as I chalked on the wall that I noticed the /|\ - it had fallen between “mis” and “guide”.) Want to log and map those webs of symbols, the secret conspiracies of meaning not even known to themselves, harmless plots that come to nothing and are now ready for use, mathematics that don’t add up to much, discarded signs that are beginning to drag themselves back towards the simple memes from which they came, rusting, breaking down – this is the crucial moment to capture them, while the narrative is looking the other way, to set them free, float them away from the meaning from which they are almost completely detached. To write a dictionary or a phrase book, for the mythogeographical pocket-book; a critical version of what Michael Evamy has done for signs in World Without Words. The city of Exeter now faces a hollowing out – the law courts moving from the gorsedd mound, the Westcountry Studies Library from its inflammatory/phoenix site, the arrangement of artificial “Quarters” on commercial criteria, tripping up ‘presence’ accountably, rendering vacuums with titles. With the theatrical hollowing of the Telecom building opposite the central library the blunders of the city council may accidentally increase the mythogeographical potential of the lanes off the High Street. In DRIFT the imbalance of experience, and it happened again on Halloween, is an inhibitor. There is a dynamic irony here – the more one explores both the ideas and the streets, the greater the need for inventing one’s own invisibility the more widely to 6

explain the processes, algorithms and ideas of ‘sploring. The more one needs to become A. J. Salmon, a non-existent authority. The greater the relief to be drifting in München in January 2004, accidentally, unknowingly wandering down a high cold stone corridor to view – as if through TV control room windows - the waiting ones on their trestles; the dread space of the window with its grey curtain drawn. Route of DRIFT 7.2.03: Bedford Square, Post Office Street, Eastgate, Sidwell Street, Cheeke Street, left, left, York Road, thru’ recently cleared public gardens, Longbrook Street, Northernhay Gardens, Exeter Central Station Platform 2, New North Road, Richmond Road, Lower North Street, Northernhay Street, Queen Street, Paul Street to the Catacombes and back, Gandy Street, New Buildings, New Musgrave Row to passageway, High Street, Bedford Square. Phil Smith

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