(...with Wormholes to Virginia and to the assassination site of a goddess)
Some texts by Phil Smith
Without discipline or principle there is the still confluence, the neo-Platonic structure, the mathematics out there, the fundamental physical, fictional structure, the archaeological remains of natural philosophy – and then, on the other hand, there is the fabric, the texture, the details, the irreducible clues, the twists in the plot – and between these two is the mythogeography.
1.
When the virus came to Exeter it found the water, trickling down the leets, congregating at the Carfax, carnivalling in the Shittbrooke, making short work of anyone washing in the Longbrook. At the time these waterways were open, unculverted, explicit veins and guts and bowels of the city. Today the ghosts proceed up Well Street and Old Tiverton Road carrying their clothes for burning, unable to find the buried waters. Sidwella carries her head – unable to find her way back into the city. Bouncing off the wall. Giving up, the water springs from where she drops her bonce.2.
At St James Park the Grecian Whigs fight the Trojan Tories. In Totnes Brutus lands and rides through Exeter on his way to found a New Troy on the Thames. His quay is marked on Totnes High Street. He makes his way from the gorsedd under Totnes Castle, to the gorsedd under Exeter’s redundant law courts, to the triangle of gorsedds by the Thames, a triangle within a triangle.
If you draw enough lines you can link everything.
On the cholera graves in Bury Meadow a Ronic altar is displayed, hundreds of children dressed in druids’ smocks beat cymbals while pantomime Romans on horseback engage in bloody battle. It is 1909. I found a drainage cover in Teignmouth, and beside it, in engineer’s paint, the word “adjust”.
When the gravediggers refused to carry the cholera dead on their shoulders, but in webs they strung beneath the boxes, the working class of Exeter mobbed the graveyards. The eyes of the decapitated water goddess ran. The people demanded that of all times, in the face of death, performance should be properly conducted, that mummery and helpless tradition should not be denied by a virus.
One discovers that so much of one’s life - because it is not planned – is significant. It’s a kind of universal Foucault’s Pendulum we’re all living in. We make it up, to find out that it’s always been here. Our scribblings and doodlings are sets of figures and geometries that were always in the textbook… yes, this is the life!! Chinny Diamond escaping across the rooftops, Artful Thomas walking with a windmill on his head, the dissident maths students on strike from St Lukes marching to Fore Street, 1887, Tommy Shilston leading the carnival up Buddle Lane carrying a live fox: “Slabda on the water, Sladba on the sea, Slabda, Slabda everywhere”… in the West Quarter the piss of the poor is collected to encourage the fibres of the wool to intertwine. For this fulling, the piss of the poor is collected in buckets, and loaded on to the piss cart. A braid of water and virus and piss reaches along the trade roots and brings back Phoenician clotted cream and Moroccan pottery.
As the city spread and reaches out, the animals of the wild are increasingly forced to seek their prey in the suburbs. Crocodiles in swimming pools, bears in dustbins, giant bull seals on slipways bullying station wagons, seagulls murdering pensioners, a pair of deer rejected by their herd, which live amid the quiet of the necropolis of Glasgow Cathedral. Somehow the pair managed to turn up three miles away in the west of the City. Jo Herne’s son Charlie, 11, spotted them from the flat of a window in Anderson Street. Student Jo said: “They were having a wee nibble on the grass next to the Safeway superstore. They seemed intent on going to Partick bus terminal.”
When I told the stories of abc’s for my Crab Steps Aside show one of the audience told me of a wallaby he had seen near Wolverhampton, another how his parents had won at bingo thanks to cork from the tree at Combeinteignhead. I saw a deer near the path at the end of Danes Road – it must have come down through the university campus. According to the theory of psychodemiurgics such sightings have more in common with tulpas than with zoology. The absence of performance and ritual in modern society has resulted in the neglect of all sorts of fictions, symbols, deities and traditions and these abused energies are forced to feed on the matter around them, manifesting themselves at feeding time.
I walked for three hours in London, between the Strand and Monument. And I did not see a single child. I had discovered a wilderness in the heart of the busy city
3.
Lay-dees – an’ – gentlemen
the nex’ zong will be a dance
Played by a vemale barry-tone
Readin’ a pome off of a one stringed trombone
Whilst zittin’ on the corner of a round table
Drinkin’ square oranges
In a peculiar state of mind
An’ eatin’ coconut vinegar off of a vork!
The heads are carried through the county and beyond. Sidwella carries hers like a football. Agog at David Blaine and Michael Jackson, conducted around the cow shed by that magician who takes his orders from Rhombus 4D, the mechanical voice of Planet Hoova:
“We - are – com – puter - ised, com – plete - ly com – puter - ised, we are com – puter - ised, we - are – com – puter - ised.”
At Ashcombe, Dawlish Water, Devil Water, or Dark Water springs from the head of St Nectan, beheaded by two thieves who stole his cows. Foxgloves grow from every drop of blood. James The Lesser’s church is an octagon, uniting square and circle, earth and heaven. History has two accounts of the martyrdom of St. James the Lesser. According to Flavius Josephus, St. James was stoned to death in 62 A.D. According to Hegesippus, a second century ecclesiastical historian, James was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem. When the fall didn't kill James, he was beaten to death with clubs. He is the Patron Saint of apothecaries, hatmakers, the dying and fullers.
At Watcome Hall a brief British Hollywood at least managed to squeeze out ‘Where The Raindow Ends’, a trial run for Narnia, the invocation of St George to a middle class garden, the martyr that would not die, slain and decapitated endlessly and endlessly regenerating. Model your own head – as a spring or as a different viewpoint or as looking inescapably refreshed. On the Ness the god Argus was gouged away to leave only his hundred eyes. Video cameras record the changing shape of the sandbanks at the mouth of the River Teign, sending the images by wire to a laboratory in Oregon, where they are turned by computer through the appropriate degrees into birds’ eye views and distributed to laboratories around the world… the changing shape of sand in Teignmouth circles the world, changed, planed, flattened…
“The walker can never resolve the multiple and conflicting spaces of the city into the place itself…”
Elizabeth Loosemore and Mary Loosemore were indicted for stealing two heifers on the Thursday the 11th last at Maryansleigh. The prisoner Elizabeth was dressed in male attire at the time of the robbery, and was committed under the name of John Hill… the disguised prisoner called herself a tailor, and the other prisoner her wife. The jury immediately returned a verdict of guilty and on his lordship directing death to be recorded, R. Harding Esquire, committing magistrate rose, and very feelingly commended them to mercy, “they appeared extremely penitent… though he believed they were light characters…”
4.
My Gran had that print ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, the one painted by Millais, with Raleigh and another boy sitting at the feet of an old sea salt, a dead Toucan for a prop, on the stones at Budleigh Salterton. My Gran used to make mince pies that were all pie and no mince. The milk in her larder was never cold. Of course, there was no village there in Raleigh’s day. Raleigh was a pirate stealing gold from Catholics, an imperialist who created a planning committee for his new colony at Virginia: John Dee the magician, Thomas Harriot the mathematician and Richard Haklyut the political philosopher. What magical imperialism, what chivalrous piracy were they cooking up in Durham House on the Strand? Was it the same magical imperialism and chivalrous piracy that still inspires rogue elements within the security forces, informs the dialogue of ‘My Dinner With André’, that gave Guy Debord his independence and self-reliance?
There is a courtly, knightly, submarine idea of empire, cruising like a Robert Anton Wilson leviathan, a giant squid beneath the Thames, out of place and lengthy of reach. Huge eyes, strong beak, long, long arms. The maintenance of something other than simple conquest, the seductive trap for those who hate repetition, who despise only surviving and long, long for golden times.
“Black Square Street Art Censorship Project: this artwork has been chosen for obliteration because it was too good. Stencilled street art is too interesting and creative. It makes graffiti more accessible and makes our tags and scrawls look crude and unimaginative.”
5.
The pataphysical means to the construction of these mythogeographies is walking. Disrupted walking. Crab walking, drifting, dériving. The setting in motion of the landscape’s rumours, hiddens, fractures, buried treasures, decayed trademarks, precious litter, accidental haikus, tourist industry lies and unexpected associations, by the striking of feet and the sideways glances of the trained crustacean mind. To the shuffle of the drifter the city’s deck is dealt a devastating blow. Granular things are liquifacted. What had seemed wasted flows, the hieroglyphics of old mass productions float free from their former functions and write themselves again, dead labour sprouts wings, the bones in the Well House rearrange themselves romantically. This is the pataphysical means for the construction of a mythogeography. Or is it the government bunker in Coombe Street that I’ve never been able to find?
“A television speaker who advises airport bosses on Al Queda terrorist threats is to speak in Exeter in November. Mr Coates is well known for his ability to speak prophecy – telling the future through God’s Holy Spirit – over people and situations. He continues to keep in touch with British Authorities. It is free entry for all events. The services are being held at the leisure centre. Normally the church meets at its 51-room base on Okehampton Street, 189 paces away.”
6.
Two lines stretch through South Devon, like vectors on washing day. One is the Michael Line, the other is the Science Line. The Michael Line rises at the Mount off Marazion, follows the gold to Crediton and beyond, its waymarkers the flightpaths of the Neffilim spaceships – the traces of whose fire in the snow of February 1855 were misinterpreted as the footprints of the devil: “wherein the play of Dr Faustus the Evil One himself suddenly appeared by the side of Mephistopheles to the dismay of the audience who fled from the house” pouring out into the High Street through what is now Parliament Street, the narrowest street in the world, haha, around the skirts of the former Halifax Building Society where the manager rode a horse through the banking hall on the day of his retirement.
In the white tunnel under the hotel Anjali and I found huge sea slaters, prehistoric and armoured, sticking to the walls. Here Colonel Smith had walked privately to the sea, arm in arm with his secret Indian wife.
“I asked him if he could give me any information about the harbour at Exmouth.
“Information? Don’t know as I should be giving away information to strangers.”
“Why not?”
“You might be paid by the Russians?”
“Do you think I look like a spy?”
“Maybe not, but no more did that Lord Haw Haw what broadcast for the Germans. He used to live at Topsham, nice enough chap he seemed.”
“And what did you make of him?”
“Well, I had my suspicions on him; same as I have on you.””
Every day at low tide the commandos at Lympstone run the same code into the mud of the Exe: 860 RNMC. And every day it is washed away.
“Exeter: Golden City of the West”. Lord Haw Haw.
Found on a street in suburban Zurich, 2005:
“USEFUL SENTENCES.
Grüezi, ich bin… von der Sicherheit.. Hello, I am … from the security…”
“If you take interesting Snaps at Exmouth you are invited to submit them to the Information Bureau. What we want is “Baby’s First Dip” or “Grandma On The Donkey”. If accepted for publication 5 shillings will be paid.”
7.
In a field near Scoriton Arthur Bryant saw a craft landing. Stepping from it was his doppelgänger, the recently deceased George Adamski, the saucerer from the other side of the pond, accompanied by high-fore-headed aliens - Nefertiti and Akhanaton.
Mister G. R. Aspin of the Exeter Astronomical Society – their “UFO chap” – arrived at Scoriton to remove the metal machine parts that Bryant had recovered from the landing site, taking them back to Exeter for analysis. Bryant never saw them again. Whereabouts in Exeter are the ufo’s mechanical parts now? Does the city have a tiny Area 51, perhaps in the bedroom of a very old man? Or in a grandchild’s loft? Will these gears and shafts begin to turn and spark and speak when huge textured plains hang over Devon? Where is G. R. Aspin and the student who accompanied him? Where is George Adamski? Could Exeter Astronomical Society help? And where are the aliens Nefetiti and Akhanaton – were they suffering a systems malfunction on their way to Crediton to collect the gold for their power units? Were they part of Alternative 3? Had they shot down Mantell? Where have all the ufos gone? Where have all the ufological societies and bureaux and associations disappeared to? What will be history next?
Fred Karno billeted his army at the Hippodrome in London Inn Square, on the site of the present Boots. “Week commencing November 25th, The Loss of the Titanic’ in eight tableaux.
Number one: The marine effect of the vessel leaving Southampton.
Number eight: the vision.”
8.
The Green and the Gold is of some significance in the book ‘Rex Deus’. They were also the flying colours of Lord and Lady Westenra – in the 1920s, new arrivals to the Haldon Hills. Were they any relation to Lucy, the convert of Dracula? Were they aristocrats re-making them themselves into nouveau riche, settling down near the Hoares of Luscombe Castle, learning how to fly and suck blood? When Lord Westerna was lost in the Mediterranean aboard his yacht, Lady Westerna recruited the local professional flyer and set off across Europe, from airfield to airfield. They found him at Montelimar.
Lord Dracula’s estate agent had his offices on the Cathedral Close in Exeter. I sat a little off the Southernhay – among the office of banks and building societies - listening to the ventilation systems, like the fluttering of the wings of capital, the bat in flight, dead labour in transit. On the letters pages of the Fortean Times a correspondent named only as “Simon” reported seeing a bat the size of a human being over Magdalen Street. The gold of the dead was hurled down the green of the well by the mad monk, below the aerodrome, above Teignmouth and the home of the Hoares, to emerge in Kent’s Cavern, where God died at the hands of Pengelly, father-in-law of the alchemist of Shaldon.
Let me quote from the book ‘Diana, Death of a Goddess’ by David Cohen:
“In this chapter I outline the evidence that Prince Charles spent a number of holidays at le Barroux in France, a small village where the Order (of the Solar Temple) had a centre… Di Mambro (leader of the Order) had brought the property (called the Clos de la Renaissance) … Two of the dead from the Morin Heights massacre, in which more than 50 of the Order’s members would die, were from the nearby town of Sarrians, living in a house owned by the Order called “Le Relais de Silence…. Guy (Cohen’s informant) claimed the (local laundry) man had been very nervous because one of the dressing gowns he had been asked to clean was made of such luxurious material… (it) belonged to Prince Charles. At the same time, he had also had to do some dry cleaning for di Mambro. This would place the Prince and di Mambro in a tiny village at the same time. All this, he alleged, took place three or four years before Diana died… From the window of the small medieval castle at La Barroux you can see the large house that used to belong to Baroness de Waldner. She was the mother in law of Oliver Hoare, the art dealer Diana had a crush on. The Prince often visited the Baroness… until her death…”
In a recent article in the esoteric journal Temenos the Prince of Wales wrote:
“As I have grown older I have gradually come to realise that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal - to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soil; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind, body and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame; … and, above all, to heal the mortally wounded soul that, alone, can give us warning of the folly of playing God and of believing that knowledge on its own is a substitute for wisdom.”
It is clear that the Prince is involved in a war within the ruling class between those who continue the magical imperial, piratic chivalry of Raleigh, continued by Diana, the beautiful huntress, and those who favour a return to the sacrificial and sacrificing rite of kings.
Jackson had no real idea what he was coming to, and the lack of staging resources left him exposed and struggling – had Geller offered him some sort of sacred site? The ground is situated right next to the ‘well’/spring of St Sidwell at Lions Holt (about 30 yards from the turnstiles), culverted water from the spring can be heard running under the railway platform that serves the stadium (20 yards from the turnstiles) - a Christianised version of a pre-Christian water goddess – the story is that she was working in the fields outside the city when she was accosted by reapers – this from Wikipedia:
“The cultus of Sidwell has been active at Exeter from early times. Pilgrims were visiting her shrine by 1000, and their activity is mentioned both by John Leland and William Worcestre. The Catalogus Sanctorum Pausantium in Anglia describes her as a native of Exeter who was beheaded by reapers, who were incited so to do by her stepmother. This legend bears a striking similarity to that of both Saint Urith and Saint Juthwara, her supposed sister. She is said to have been buried outside the city, where the sick could be healed at her grave.”
So, had Geller told Jacko that he’d be working on a healing site?
This from a Guardian report the day after:
"We come here to support children with Aids," he went on, "and help the people of Africa find a solution against the spread of HIV." Then, with the unimpeachable logic of a man who had just vowed to stamp out a pandemic, he threw in an afterthought for good measure: "And malaria!"
With a 10,000-strong crowd cheering him on, Jackson delivered his piece de resistance. Ordering everyone in the ground to hold each hands, he simpered: "I mean it! Right now! Go ahead! Don't be shy. Do it! Do it! Now, tell the person next to you that you care for them. Tell them that you love them. This is what makes the difference! Together we can make a change of the world. Together we can help to stop racism. Together we can help to stop prejudice. We can help the world live without fear. It's our only hope! Without hope we are lost! I see Israel!!! I see Spain!"
Was Jackson attempting to enact some improvised magical spell?
Then this from BBC Devon Online:
“Apparently he had been scheduled to talk for just three minutes, but he stayed longer than that, at times hardly being able to make his speech because of constant appreciative shouting and his occasional laughing at the reaction.
But what was most thought-provoking was that this was a man who was used to generating this reaction in people. He wasn't bemused at all. He laughed it off and then carried on.”
The reporter doesn’t express this very well, but he notes that Jackson is somehow laughing at the reactions – why? Because he knows he’s following another agenda. The reporter writes that it was “thought-provoking”. Was Jackson covertly-healing?
9.
In Newton Abbot, we climbed from the Leisure Centre, still the ghost of its old name on the cooling tower – everyone calls it Dyrons… can’t change such names… through the council estate, excavated cat’s eyes follow us, through a trelliced alley, on the noticeboard a new sign says: “what do I do if I find a sick or dead bird?” – as if it were a meditation, or a moment of panic escaped from a sign writer. Derek, who’s a GP, says he has received a thick book of emergency directives. Travelling here by train I’ve been imagining these streets empty and suspicious – Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, 28 Hours Later, the Crazies, Phantoms, The Stand, Virus (not the later Jamie Lee Curtis one)…. Past the sign we climb, past the mobile phone watchtower, through a hedge to some guise of an older hill… an older time… look down on the town and it makes no sense – 44,000 people – the skeletal Tesco’s slowly fleshing up… cities don’t make their own meaning clear anymore… there are no squares, no statues, no stone banks… everything is a warehouse, empty through-space, retail leaves no trace but the movement of a bar code through a laser, there is something so sad and poignant about these places, malls, halls, wide pavements and pedestrian ways, people out of their cars, not knowing how to behave, the adult-lost share their time with adolescents who find meaning in the window reflections of prices, the warmth of shop heaters, the creak of trolleys, like the dead in Dawn they return to the supermarkets, because it’s something they remember…
The cities are returning to an older architecture, becoming trajectories, bollards and gateposts revert to menhirs. Squares and rectangles break up in favour of vectors. The movement of capital, dead labour, has now infected the living, the town’s streets are corridors rather than living rooms and in the houses the living rooms are corridors, everything is a passageway to something else, there are only promises, superhighways, escape routes, alleys for bedrooms and bedrooms for alleys, the urban becoming nomadic again, every logo a wormhole. And as the signs and shapes float free from their functions they become readable, in strings of sentences, in titles and marks, the ‘wings of god’ flies from sea level. Routes will become political again, browsing and window-shopping, loitering and running, watching and stalking, surveying and straying, marching and wandering, and striding through them all the remaining monsters of structure, repressions no longer able to hide in the doorways of institutions, but forced to release themselves into the streets, asbo’s, cctv, security.
The cattle market that morning was half filled with a large car boot sale, pewter with meaningless inscriptions, videos, cuddly toys and an 18th century book of English grammar, at this vantage point people act out rituals of meaning and intensity, condensing as once a city might do the excitement at itself here people do it with themselves, the booze tins, the condoms, the black gaffer tape for bondage, the narrative is quite clear, a scrap of paper, a banal rhyme of funkiness, they were conjuring death, sexuality bound and doped, they were burying life up here, on the big tree is a large area of blue paint and a big blue sign which reads: BLUE. It’s the one hope, to have contradicted Magritte. In Exeter the day before I had seen stencil graffiti on a number of walls: “ceci n’est pas un mur”. Hmmm. We find there are blue arrows and follow them through tress, along paths, they take us to an old oak full of nails, nails in the eyes of the devil, nails relieving or reliving toothache, nails in the statue of St Guirec at Plouman’ach, twinned with Teignmouth, women place pins in his nose to bring them husbands, the blue arrows end at what must have recently been a huge pool of blue at the foot of a tree, on its trunk arrows pointing into the ground as if there might be a body or treasure or a gate to hell, returning to the Leisure centre we climb up the hill on its other side.
Now, to understand the city you must escape from it, find its ancient hills, find its undergrounds, its edgelands, its worthless and superfluous Nielsen space, only from the old hills can you regain the vista, the eye of the designer, of human activity, from the old shrines and bunkers an anachronistic meaning throws the traceless trajectories into a ghostly outline, a huge tottering and ungainly machine, wild armings swinging, clumsily geared, huge reaching things, claws flapping by their side. While binary streams drips from its incompetent and Parkinsonian jaws. This is the monster that can help us to see ourselves, the old road overgrown, the ruin that is our present.
A church at the top, All Saints, but getting up there we see a pair of houses we’ve passed, an ancient track seems to have been left, evident at this distance, now just the bottom of a garden, but. The two houses are in agitation, as if they have not been able to stem the movement, a lawn against a parking space, sculpted and decked against natural and ha ha, all this is somewhere else, a Spain that does not exist. In the graveyard we find a wooden cross on the grave of a 2 day old baby, dead 70 years, the wood repainted surely many times, a small metal penguin badge pushed into the joint, we walk back to the Leisure Centre along the old corpse way, talking about walking our own funeral paths. Nancy says that when she was ill with pneumonia she planned her funeral, she told people where she wants her ashes scattered, on Aune Head, she thought about the different kinds of walkings that people would make their depending on the time of year. The centre of the mythogeographical universe is in the cellar of the Well House Tavern, the text on a glass cabinet of jumbled male and female bones reads: “Birth Is The First Step Unto Death”. On a summer’s day, beneath the picnickers on Cathedral Green, are 100,000 dead.
10.
There is a floating and dispersing mythogeography out there, a set of routes, shapes, spaces, which if walked and shared will reveal a set of processes, conspiracies, decompositions, decommissionings, repetitions. This is a motor which is malfunctioning, a motor powered with huge resources, which might be re-geared, an energy exchange which might be re-channelled, a strategic reserve waiting, sealed beneath the hills on which the city is built, hinted in the rupture of pavements, a hundred steam engines loosed without rails, the empty camps of the home guard, run by communists and exiled miners from the Basque country, windswept and yearning, an imaginary aircraft carrier made of iceberg sails down the Strand, melts in an icon’s hot bath, history is fluid again.
Wormholes: places that take you to somewhere else.
Dreamscapes: abandoned bedsteads and mattresses.
Neilsen spaces, sites of pleasurable waste, where excess and abandonment can be equally enjoyed, under flyovers, behind warehouses.
Walls Hill, Babbacombe, Barnstaple Leisure Centre car park, Chudleigh reservoir off the A38 on the moor, Haldon Forest on Haldon Hills, Ashclyst Forest near Exeter, between Broadsands Beach and Elbury Cove, car park on road between Brixham and Paignton, Bride End car park, Totnes. This is a map of South West doggers’ delights.
Devon. Golden county of the West. Lord Haw Haw.
“The Bond crew also filmed at the celebrated Eden project for ‘Die Another Day’. But a less well known location was the old RAF airfield at Little Riddlington… it was here that the crew constructed fake icebergs – it was too cold to do them in Iceland. As Sue Craig puts it: ‘The South West is very good for being somewhere else.’
Goodnight, and good luck.
