(prepared by Phil Smith, March 2001)
Vampire Solicitor: Dan Fisher
Nun Bride: Becky Smith
Psycho-geographer: Simon Persighetti
Misguide: Phil Smith
(Misguide, bearded, in green suit and anorak, carrying a red/white stick entwined with foliage, carries a folder of images, a tape recorder, tapes, a bucket in which is a spider plant, a can of Special Brew and string, cigarette lighter, mirror and lots of breadcrumbs in pockets. He waits by the statue of Richard Hooker, in the Cathedral Close, Exeter, for the spectators to arrive.
The walk to be led by the Misguide will follow the roads around and the paths across the Cathedral Close, Exeter, making a shape; part-bird (soul gone to heaven), part-fish (soul gone to hell).
As the spectators gather, the Nun Bride in casual dress, but carrying over her arm the inscribed white dress worn by Sue Palmer in Ghosts Writing (from Pilot Navigation, Wrights & Sites, 1998) and the Vampire Solicitor in smart suit and carrying papers, speaking into mobile phone, blood around his mouth, holding bloodied paper hankies, are already walking their own circuits of the paths and roads. The Vampire Solicitor should pass the spectators at least once before the sequence when speaking on the mobile phone and dabbing at blood.)
1.
(At Richard Hooker’s Statue, once the spectators have all gathered.)
Misguide: (Back to the statue addressing the spectators.) 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.
(Moving to have back to no 5 restaurant.)
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:
(The Psycho-geographer, dressed in the inscribed cream suit used in Cancelled Menagerie (performed in Royal Albert Memorial Museum, 2000), stands at the gateway to No 5 Restaurant, head in a large map, a red and white stick in his hand.)
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?
(The Psycho-geographer sets off around the same circuit as the spectators will take with the Misguide, but the Psycho-geographer will always be some way ahead, he never seems to look around him, but always with his head in his large, flapping map.)
We’re going to pass the scene of a recent murder. 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 stab wounds in the early hours of September the 27th, last year.
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.
Misguide leads the spectators to The Well House and stops.)
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.
(Approaching the County Monument, the Misguide stops.)
2.
I’m sure you are all familiar with that image of a dog sitting by a gramophone listening to His Master’s Voice. The corporate image of the HMV label. The HMV store is through the Broadgate there if you want to make any purchases later. What you may not know is that in the original painting, the dog and the gramophone are actually sitting on a coffin. The implication being that the dog is listening to the voice of its deceased master. And in fact in the original it isn’t a gramophone, it’s a phonograph, which can, of course, record as well as play the voices of the dead.
Not far from where we are now was the theatre where famously the actors abandoned a performance of Dr Faustus when they encountered an extra devil on stage.
The thirteen bells in the cathedral are never rung together.
If you place a piece of pork next to a glass of milk, the pork will move towards the milk.
I’ve slept in two death beds as far as I know and, though I don’t believe in ghosts, I did say a few words.
The County Monument you see behind me has been fenced off from the homeless. Just as the whole Green was enclosed after the murder of the cathedral’s Precentor, Walter de Lechlade, in 1129. Then, twelve-foot high walls were put up.
As if the place had been, again, an accomplice to the murder.
In ‘The Great God Pan’, the psycho-geographer finally tracks down the killer; it’s everything.
Please follow me.
3.
(Turning left down the path towards the Cathedral, pausing some way past the County Monument. Looking towards the West Door of the cathedral.)
Did you see that bit in Celebrity Big Brother on the infra red camera when they were talking in their sleep... damaged celebrities remind us of the religious relics that were once held here in the cathedral:
(Reads:)
"… from the tooth of St Basil, from the head of St Conogan, from St Saviola, the innocent virgin who, guiltless, was killed by her father’s pasture man, from the stone which St Silvin thrice carried to Rome, from the precious tree..."And that’s what ghosts do, they reduce history to bits. In programmes such as 100 TV Moments From Hell, or It’ll Be Alright On The Night Thirteen or Auntie’s Bloomers.
Usually with murder the murderer is the celebrity, but the exception is martyrdom, when the church canonises the ghost.
The young Saint Boniface called the congregation here “carnally minded”.
As we move on, we’ll be walking past the buried remains of a Roman military bath. After the Romans left, the forest grew back, obliterating the multicultural city … but I don’t suppose that could happen again.
Until a few years ago it was possible to make out an early fourteenth century painting in the Lady Chapel. It was still fairly visible in 1897 when W. R. Letherby made a sketch of it, but now nothing can be seen.
In the stained glass windows faces have dematerialised… leaving blank spaces like light bulbs on the shoulders of saints.
(They walk, turning right towards the West Front and then left along the North side of the cathedral. Pausing a little way along and looking away from the cathedral.)
4.
“When hell is full up the dead walk the earth” – that’s the publicity tag for Dawn Of the Dead, the second film in George Romero’s zombie trilogy, a film I first saw at the old Odeon in Coventry. I once went there to see another film and when I got through the door the whole cinema was empty; no people, no chairs, no carpets - just the wooden floors and this great cavernous space… and there like some magic rood screen was this laughing face – sixty feet wide - and then I heard, as if from up in a choir, the laughter of living people
Inside the cathedral, Scott of the Antarctic has his monument. Never returning from his marble world. The same is true of many who chase after the mythic island of giants: Ultima Thule. They become ice men or abominable nazis.
(As they walk, Misguide talks.)
It struck me the other day, watching my baby son, that the zombies in these movies are like babies… they can’t speak, they’re unsteady on their feet and they put everything in their mouths… of course there is another kind of movie zombie… the dancing ones from The Carnival of Souls. … directed and financed by the car salesman, Herk Hervey and starring Candice Hilligloss, the only professional performer in the film … The zombies are sophisticated, they have fun.
But mostly the dead are rather sanitised, whispy women in white dresses floating about in churchyards. I’ll see if I can find you something a bit better than that. But I’m not hopeful.
(Misguide attempts to record from grass alongside the path, he uses the tape recorder, recording on tape that has been already recorded on, but then wound forward. Misguide holding the microphone to the grass. Stops when they get to the North Door. Turns off the machine. Then winds the tape back, further back than what he has just recorded and to the start of the tape so it can play a pre-recorded tape.)
(At the North Door) Inside the cathedral it’s like a grove, huge trunks rise to a canopy of white leaf patterns, drained of chlorophyll.
You know, for me the most terrifying episode of Fireball XL5 was the one… actually, my mate was banned from watching after the Tyrannosaurus Rex episode… but the one that really terrified me was with the plant man… living off blood….he had a kind of syringe… and it was all too real…
According to the philosopher Giacomo Vico, when we lived in the forests we were lonely brutal giants who met only briefly. And then we started to bury our dead and mark their graves, which was like planting family trees, … and then came marriage… which was like making promises to the future…Civilisation began in the forest clearings, which became the villages which became the cities and finally reached its zenith in the universities, but according to Vico, the next step is a return to the brutality of the forest : lonely giants wandering the city, the collapse of marriage… the desecration of graves. Murders committed out of boredom... what Peter Ackroyd calls “active tedium”.
(The Misguide plays pre-recordings of anomalous radio receptions. Then Misguide leads the spectators off. As they walk away from the North Door turning left away from the cathedral, they are approached by the Nun Bride who walks sorrowfully towards them. She is dressed in modern casual clothes, carrying the inscribed white dress from Ghosts Writing.)
5.
Nun Bride:
“One evening her mother heard a noise like weeping in the girl’s room. On going in she found her lying, half undressed, evidently in great distress, crying: “Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest?”You know that a person can just panic in the countryside. For no reason they will suddenly feel utter terror and panic. This is where the word comes from. Pan. Panic.
Her flight remains a mystery to this day. She vanished in broad daylight. Clarke tried to conceive the thing, but his mind shuddered and shrank back, before him stretched the long dim vista of green causeway reaching into the forest. In the distance two figures moved towards him. One was the girl.”
(She carries on her journey. Misguide leads the group in the opposite direction, turning right towards the east gate.)
6.
Misguide: (As they walk.) Have you ever seen the children’s programme – Oakey Doke? Oakey Doke is a character made of an acorn, some leaves, twigs, that sort of thing. At the end of one particularly terrifying episode he finishes with a little rhyme: “Just as you can’t see the wind in the air, You can’t see the monster that isn’t there.” Which I think the writers intended to be comforting. Have you see any children’s television? It’s ghost, ghost, ghost, monster, ghost, monster, monster, monster, Ant and Dec, monster, monster, ghost!
(Walking along, parallel to the cathedral, towards the east gate.)
(The Vampire Solicitor passes the group walking in the opposite direction, carrying papers and shouting into a mobile phone:)
Vampire Solicitor: The man’s a fucking count… “Count!” … (Listens for a moment.) …well get someone who speaks Hungarian… he’s from Hungary isn’t he? … what’s he paying with… Jesus Christ… this isn’t the fucking mafia is it? Where do we get the earth for the coffins? Well, tell bloody Harker to fuck off!
(He has gone.)
Misguide: (As they walk.) I once asked the famous medium Doris Stokes if there was equality after death, and essentially her answer was “no, the class struggle goes on.”
Did you know that Samuel Morse was raised from a coma when a doctor tapped on his chest? The binary “yes”, “no” tappings of the Rochester Rappings that began spiritualism in 1848 in Hydesville, New York anticipate the technology of the computer – and note that revolutionary date, just as the Virgin Mary was raised by the Bolsheviks at Fatima.
Why do I go on about bad films and fringe esoteric ideas? Because I am wary that:
“what is going on in the lower reaches of society is probably very much more potent and effective than what happens in intellectual circles.”
So said Ekkehard Hieronimus when the World Ice Theory – which proposes that all matter is made up of ice crystals - was adopted as official policy by the Nazi Party.
In The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis, the final instalment of the Narnia saga, Aslan defeats the Anti-Christ. The giveaway is in the publication date. 1957. The year after Suez. The hordes of the demon are very clearly Islamic.
I’m always coming here to the Close and I never meet anyone I know. That must be how the ghosts feel. Or that man who was murdered.
(At the meeting of the path with the road.)
Nietzsche believed the past was inaccessible to the will. Yet everywhere here the past seems constantly accessed. Those two great towers of the cathedral, that seem so inevitably part of a giant cross, were probably once free standing.
(Misguide leads the group left along the road towards Mol’s Coffee Shop.)
7.
In olden days a new church might be inscribed with the words: “Eirthig had me built” or “Haworth had me wrought”… as if there was a me there already…. This is rather like container theory, the idea that the body is an empty container awaiting the arrival of spirits cruising the universe like the stricken ship on the planet in Aliens. I thought the corpses of the Heaven’s Gate cult members, in their matching black costumes and trainers… looked rather like drama students doing a relaxation exercise…
(Pause, to look at the Cathedral.)
In 1942 the St James Chapel, on the far side of the building, was bombed and destroyed by an air force directed by a party founded partly by members of a Munich based esoteric society, the Thule Society, inspired by the idea of a previously existing society of giants, made of ice crystals, in the frozen north, on the island of Ultima Thule. The thousands of broken pieces of the chapel were collected by the local master mason and painstakingly re-assembled… as if denying that the second world war had happened.
(Walks to the point outside 5 Cathedral Close, the Nun Bride and the Psycho-geographer gaze disinterestedly from the gateway. The Nun Bride now dressed in the inscribed dress and carrying an early twentieth century telephone.)
This is 5 Cathedral Close … the site of the well.
(Pause before re-entering the green) …
The man who murdered Nicholas Noall-Strutt was known on the streets as “Aslan”. According to “Aslan”, Strutt claimed that “Aslan”’s imminent child would be the Anti-Christ, which is why he slew him. Strutt was a tiny man, half my size. “Aslan”, six and a half feet tall, must have seemed like a giant to him.
(Misguide leads them back on to the Green, towards and past Richard Hooker’s statue, passing by on the left hand path. By now the ‘tourist performers’ are moving like zombies, spread out across the grass, ambling very slowly towards the spectators from the direction of the eastern gate.)
8.
(Takes out a newspaper clipping of the picture of the Buddha giants recently destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Takes out mirror and string.)
We had our own Taliban once. The faces of saints were smashed out of the windows in the cathedral and then books and paintings were dragged out here to be destroyed.
In dreams I used to see this incredibly bright light and I would be squinting through almost closed eyes.
(Misguide sets fire to the picture.)
I first read Arthur Machen’s story when I was a child, in one of those collections with earth coloured covers, I remember very distinctly the incredibly bright sunlight, the trees, the grass, and the conjuring of Pan… with smoke and string and mirrors… but… when I read the story again … only the sun and the trees and the grass are there.
I’d imagined all the theatre.
9.
(Turning right, parallel with the cathedral. Pausing, looking towards the North side of the cathedral.)
I look at the cathedral and I see a great grey battleship on the bottom of the ocean, my half-uncle floating through its space.
Am I present in that robot body I’m manipulating at the bottom of the ocean? No, I’m both in my control booth and I’m here.
If you get a chance to go into the cathedral later, look at the misericords. Because they would brush up against the arses and genitals of the choir, pagan rather than Christian imagery was used.
According to the wonderful archaeologist Steven Mithen, when the modern mind was coming into being 30 to 50,000 thousand years ago, the separate compartments or chapels of thinking in the brain, that each specialised in, say, tracking animals, or remembering their behaviour, or attracting a mate… these compartments collapsed in on each other and the brain became like a single cathedral … with free movement of ideas between the different chapels … suddenly we were not so good at hunting, … but we could synthesise human with animal history, we could make metaphors …
The misericord carver made two kinds of images for human souls: for the souls that went to heaven: birds … and for those that went to hell: fishes caught by a mermaid who seems… just like these centaurs… (shows pictures) … to be dressed in an animal costume… indeed maybe she’s wearing a woman costume too… the breasts look like prostheses.
The shape you are about to complete is both angel and fish and bird.
10.
(Misguide opens a can of Special Brew. He sprinkles Special Brew over the grass.)
You know that film, Dead of Night, where Michael Redgrave’s vent act gets taken over by his dummy… maybe that’s what this is; I’m throwing my voice into a grave.
Or maybe I was entirely right, and our cities have become places of spiritual solitude where savagery lurks in the hearts of lonely people and bored and angry giants roam.
After the murder “Aslan” went home and shaved off his beard.
11.
(Reaching the place where the path reaches the road opposite Mol’s Coffee House.)
In that bit in Vertigo where Kim Novak is among the giant cedars, she points to those unfeasible dates on the rings of the tree stump and says: “this is where I was born and this is where I died” as if time were a place. Hitchcock re-drew the map of San Francisco to create a sexual skyline of phallic buildings for that movie. The place was implicated in the crime.
My grandfather always said that he never went into churches because they gave him vertigo.
(The Nun Bride comes forward, dressed in the inscribed dress, carrying an old wireless. The Vampire Solicitor hovers nearby speaking into his mobile phone and wiping blood from his mouth.)
Nun Bride: Didn’t I laugh when my unknown acquaintance sang “Thou art so near and yet so far!” “Why did you laugh?” asked the Invisible One, at the conclusion of his song. “Did you hear me?” I said, “my mouth was some distance from the telephone.” “I heard you perfectly,” he said, “now, hear me breathe.” When that breath came to my ear I was startled. Then we whispered to each other and finally the Invisible exclaimed “Just one more experiment” and he kissed me! It is not likely to supercede old fashioned osculation, but faute de mieux, it will serve!
Misguide: (To Nun Bride.) You be careful. See that man over there, hovering? (Points to Vampire Solicitor.) This Close is where Count Dracula sent Jonathan Harker to secure his property deal. (Nun Bride returns warily to the gateway of No 5 Restaurant.)
(To Spectators:) I was watching Shakespeare’s King John the other day and he dies and I thought maybe I should do something about my own death for this piece.
(The Psycho-geographer takes a couple of steps forward and raises his red and white stick like a gun towards the spectators. A little way off, the Vampire solicitor, bares his plastic teeth.)
But what I really need to do is have a shave.
(Nods, a bow as if it is all over. After any response if any.)
The Nazca Indians walked the shapes of animals, probably attempting to possess or access the power of those beasts. Erik von Daniken said the shapes were landing strips for flying saucers. By walking the shape this afternoon I hope you have become aware of a natural history here of competing units of ideologically charged ideas. Or maybe you simply interfered with the aliens’ radar and that’s why they didn’t land.
Thank you for coming on this carnal tour. I must go and have a drink now, and a shave. I’ll see you later.
(Misguide walks away, the Vampire Solicitor follows him, menacingly. Psycho-geographer and Nun Bride walk off and disappear towards the East Gate of the Close.)
