Praxis 2003

Praxis 2003 Phil Smith 1. There’s 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 set out 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 Michael’s and All Angels on Mount Dinham – but we’ll 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 a wall on which I maintain a chalk graffiti.

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 a very 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. Let’s take a short walk back. (PLAY: first 3.48 of Track 2 of Hoopern Valley Slow Walk.) Even though it’s 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 that’s because there are things in common that this place has with those others. There is something of foreboding as well as quietness 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 it’s 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.

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 something that other people could bodily, and metaphorically, “get into” when I stopped trying to control spaces and started to choose spaces I didn’t 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, my attic 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 of transparency. 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 (in the best moments) like photographic transparencies projected on

to a screen. In these moments they were, in Simon Persighetti’s 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 highlighted by 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 their enjoyment. 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.” It’s 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 the fact that the performers had no “character” to stay in - we all

seemed to know what Mim meant – to maintain throughout a heightened behaviour and sensitivity, and not to betray selfconsciousness but to stay self-possessed. A transparent way of performing, unencumbered by the melodrama 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 book Actor As Anti-Character - Dionysus, the Devil and 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 of Church, 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-cumcharacters 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, I’ll just play you a part of the sound track that ran alongside about half of the 90 minute performance.

(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-opera naturalism, 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 noncharacters 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 like that “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 on something of the materiality of the site itself. This camouflage – this physical taking on of the site – extended to the audience’s 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 dizzying array 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.”

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 the characters in Forest Vague Panic were not unlike those of the characters of Commedia dell’ Arte – Pan’s scraping his feet along the carpet as if sweeping up his victims was suggestive of Pierrot’s 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. As physical, 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!” for transparency and camouflage is ignored. It’s a shame, because I think the idea of camouflage 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 wasn’t for my use of a single word to describe my earliest attempts to grapple with site. I can’t even remember how or when I started using it. But I began to describe my work in site as mytho-geographical. I’ve no idea what I thought I meant. I think I’d 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 don’t even think I knew what psycho-geographical meant at the time. So I used the word “mythogeography” first and then it filled up

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 Exeter’s Cathedral Close. Partly through tour-guide monologue, but also by recordings of séances, the mummery of pouring Special Brew onto the dead underground, and by the out of the corner of the eye performances of 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 mythogeography of this most central of Exeter’s mythogeographical features. “Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoy the next half hour. I am not an official tour guide. Though I have grown a beard to look a little more like one. But I haven’t done anything with my beard, it’s just the way it’s grown. And I haven’t adopted a fictional character like say from C. S. Lewis’s stories of Narnia or anything like that. Though you might think that in these surroundings that might be appropriate. For today we are in the ancient Cathedral Close. As you can see, everything here is very old.

In fact hardly anything of what you see today has changed for thousands and thousands of years. The forest, the clearing, the graves, the grove, the place of matrimony. Things are written in stone. There is 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 its sleeve, has a higher density of reported hauntings per square metre than anywhere else in the country… which is true of many tourist destinations. Some people have put this down to the enthusiasm of local tourist boards, others believe that tourists and ghosts have much in common. If you did want to model yourself on a fictional character you might do worse than choose that of Charles Villiers, one of the main characters in Arthur Machen’s story of the uncanny: ‘The Great God Pan’, published in 1897. He is a sort of super-tourist like yourselves. A spectral psycho-geographer walking the streets quite separate from history: Such a person, once called a ghost-hunter is now more often called a ghost-watcher, rather as television has replaced the big game hunters with a sort of adventurous audience. Our particular haunting today is the result of a love story, so, of course, it ends in a well… rather than ends well.

I like this, from one of the ghosts: (Reads:) “When you appreciate we live in a state no less material than your own, you will understand that with our greater age and experience we are much in advance of you.”

But how can the past be in advance of the present? And surely what’s interesting about ghosts is that their ideas, unlike actors in soap operas, have floated free from their experience. Maybe the ghosts are ok empirically, but not to be trusted when it comes to theory? We’re going to pass the scene of a recent murder in a moment. I don’t really want to dwell there, so I shall just indicate the place with a gesture. (Makes the gesture.) There, a homeless man, Nicholas Noall-Strutt, a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia died from stabs wounds in the early hours of September the 27th, two years ago. A man came forward later and described himself as the dead man’s only friend. He told how he had given the dead man shelter in his single room flat, the dead man sleeping in the bed while he slept on the floor.

“Then I got a new flat,” said the man “and there was no room for Nick. The last time I saw him we walked down to the Cathedral Close on Sunday... He was a bit upset because he did not

know anybody in the city. He started to cry and asked if he could come with me, but there was no way I could help.” I often see desperate men walking together here. After the Dean of Exeter had, and I quote from the local paper: ‘..cleansed and blessed the cathedral grounds, he spoke of a “sub life” that had come “very visibly” to the surface. “What we wanted to do was to reclaim the Cathedral Green as a place of goodness and purity,” he said, “There are tens of thousands of people buried under our feet.”’ But what if the place was somehow implicated in the crime? Please follow me. (The Misguide leads the spectators to the just before The Well House. Then makes the gesture to indicate the site of the murder of Nicholas Noall-Strutt.) The second chapter in this story of the exploitation of murder and death by the tourist trade starts here in the bar of The Well House. You can perhaps see from here the chalked sign advertising the bones of an unidentified woman. The dead have been pushed by the movement of earth from the burial ground across the road into the cellars of houses, hotels and restaurants. But I don’t want to show you bones, only signs.”

(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 Stoker’s Dracula. This is where the Vampire’s 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 there’s 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 Exeter’s 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. It’s a man. The bones change sex. Narratives run like streams of lava through the city. Cooling and melting, fusing with the things about them.

Creating these mythogeographies was an ambitious aspiration. Spaces and places didn’t 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 places for 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 Persighetti’s 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 I’ve been part of a number of organised exploratory walks – they sometimes get called “drifts” or “dérives , 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 each junction. 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 Sue’s “Drift” document.) “phil is like a drifting sniffer dog” I’m in a state of heightened or certainly altered consciousness on a “drift”. This is not the languorous dreamy wandering of the flaneőr – inured from the world by their own reverie – rather this

exploratory walk is an exposé, 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 didn’t 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 190º declination and -10º upwards inclination) – shows that at the time this rock spewed molten from the ground the part of the planet’s skin we now call Exeter was close to the equator: 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

“transient mountain… just passing through… moving at the speed our fingernails grow.” But it’s not just the things about us that are in transit. We are too. Our selves are always in movement. The meeting of self with place 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 that’s what working in site should like – like trying to measure the world with a snake. Out on the edge of town we found the Bishop’s 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 it’s 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 wind chopped 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 I’m writing is washed with the movies. This bathing seems to be in either utopian or paranoid colours. 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 in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead - still the overwhelming

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 I’m 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. There’s 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 grand scale… the transformers this time not bombers, but monsters like Konga or alien invaders – or even in the case of Quatermass and the Pit the ghosts of alien invaders… But here’s 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 those landscapes never left me. Now I’m nearly fifty I’ve suddenly

discovered that I’m allowed to take them seriously. If you ever feel the same way, you probably don’t have to wait so long before you do something about it. (Rubbing fingers together. Mystic smoke.) But I wouldn’t want you to think that I’ve stopped performing in site. Some of the walks that I’ve 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 Gordon’s 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 lays and melodies…”

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 Arrow” of the Government.” But they’re also on the helmet of Hermes. They’re reminiscent of the remaining sacred shape of Exeter – the cathedral being the central ray with the two churches of St Michael’s 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 Michael’s 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 of a ‘party’ - ripped underwear, bottles, scooter ruts in the grass, food. And there was another kind of disturbance:

(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 he use 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 Michael’s 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 doesn’t 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 Michael’s and All Angels, Mount Dinham, the spire can be viewed from the Iron Bridge, where the North Gate once stood, against which the Falcon public house

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 – and from 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 daughter’s school’s playground. Perhaps all these connections will eventually turn out to be dead ends. Or perhaps this is the beginning of a mythogeographical mapping 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 don’t want to leave you with the idea that this is all about stories. Instead, I want to suggest that maybe it’s as much about shapes and atmospheres. For on the various walks I’ve participated in I’ve 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 and atmosphere – similarities that might be describable in a mythogeometry. Here’s a couple of the shapes of atmosphere that I’ve 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 Featureless drift; thanks to a so-called ‘catapult’ that involved us being driven

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 deconsecrated? 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 be turned 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, even more sweet, sticky, libidinous and looming. It’s closed over

the path. Closing something off. Something we haven’t 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. I’ve read Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon – a girl lost in the woods. I’ve 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 the telltale details.

This feeling has been best described by the Danish philosopher as “dread”: “there is peace and repose; but at the same time something 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 is able 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 our relationship 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 is somehow magnified.)

Wormholes: being places where there is swift transport to a distant and connected one Places that are ‘almost there’ : the sorts of places you come across and can never find a second time, places you’ve 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 like ancient 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 a pylon – (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 we’d 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 we’d failed to enter first time round.

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 we could sculpt crevasses and ice floes. A few miles along the same stream of energy pylons their shapes would remind Matthew of a childen’s TV programme called The Changes. Set in a post-Luddite 20th Century. The opening episode in what looks 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 couldn’t 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 terracotta ooze. 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 Dad’s vegetable garden. Breaking small chunks between my fingers to make the red smoke of artillery fire. “MYSTIC SMOKE FROM FINGER TIPS.”

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 house’s turret is (just) part of the skyline at New North Road rail bridge. It’s 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 the shapes 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 man’s 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 was added after Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of him, suspended in space. This is from William Kingdon Clifford’s 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.”

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 article from 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 the post, 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..?

Well, I hope that if you like any of the ideas I’ve been talking about this morning… I hope you’ll 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. We’ll 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.)