Manchester, Mythogeography and Mobile Machinoeki
.
performances at TRIP, Manchester 2008
Before the performance, assemble the ‘key’.
red and white stick: METAPHOR
dice: DEMOCRACY
clay: DREAM
(I takes some salt and place it on a tray, shake the tray.)
(Then hand out pieces of modelling clay)
Can you take a little piece of the modelling clay and while I’m talking maybe you could make a little model of your head… or somebody else’s head.
OK...
Salt
Now, there’s this phenomenon that’s called liquefaction – it happens when you get a lot of granular-type particles – like a tray of salt – if you send a series of shocks through them – then the granules start to behave like a liquid.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I don’t know, is anything happening? – it’s like maybe there are some droplet shapes forming there?
Anyway, the thing is that when you’re walking anywhere, you get a lot of granular experiences – moments, details, overheard conversation, looks, secret signs… generally they don’t add up to very much… it takes a shock to get all the ‘bits’ to flow…
O, and another thing… those granules – they don’t actually turn into a liquid, they just act as if they did – it’s one thing behaving like another.
Which is going to be a bit like this performance – so, in order that you can understand it – I’ve put a little a key or legend here – so you can make your own translation of what I do.
(Put the tray down by the ‘key’ and label it with a caption: ‘“STRAND”’)
Now, I usually start something like this by asking people to draw a picture of “the world” and most people draw something like this…
(Draw a globe. Put it on the floor next to the key and label it “SATELLITE”)
… but what it means is that in order to picture the world like this, you have to place yourselves right outside it.
Now there’s an alternative… proposed by the geographer Tim Ingold… but it’s not one usually used by people unless they fall over in the road…
The Fall
Now, I did that the other day – and I’m going to need a couple of people to help me here… maybe three or four because you’re going to need to support my weight… so no one with slipped discs please…
I was walking with walkwalkwalk through the St Leonard’s area of Exeter… really posh bit… and my foot slips on the edge of the kerb and my knee kind of buckles and I must do this three or four times in a walk.. a little stumble… but this time as I go down I realise I’m not coming up from it!
And now you’re going to have to support me … I get to about here and I sort of realise that I have to go through with this, I really have to commit to the fall… so I just go with it and I throw my hands forward and I hit the street hard… and all the people around me gasp a bit… but I’m not hurt and I just get and.. bit of a wobble in the voice... I carry on talking…
OK, thanks for that… actually can you just hold me again, so I’m close to hitting the ground… because the thing about that second way of seeing things is that rather than being right above and away from it and looking down on the world … you dive right into it.
Spheres…
But it’s not a globe that you’re diving into… it’s a world made up of enfolding spheres, one within another.
(With hands model these layers in the air.)
And in order to understand this world, it’s necessary to explore layer by layer, step by step. OK, I’m going to get up and take those steps…
Thank you very much.
(Let the helpers from the audience return to their seats. Physically walk the steps. During next bit draw chalk lines for steps and label them “Steps”.)
Down where I live in Devon – there’s a beach called Coryton Cove. It’s where I gave the first of my performances about walking – in a beach hut there, but the beach hut got washed away one day in a storm. The waves smashed it to pieces and dispersed it, changing it into a performance.
The beach huts are set on a concrete promenade, and at one end of it there’s a set of steps, and in white paint each step is labelled “Steps”. If you’re ever down in Devon, go and walk them, and as you do, imagine you’re walking from one layer of the world to the next.
(Walk the steps.)
Story: I’m standing on a friend’s back lawn and it’s the end of a perfect day… it’s an evening in my childhood… the dusk is turning the sky orange… when a sphere comes falling out of the sky in a gently winding motion (make winding motion with hand) and settles in the grass of the lawn… now, I know none of this happens, because I read it in an American comic – but it feels like it did… someone fetched a magnifying glass… and we saw – through the glass - that the sphere was a tiny, planet - ruined and wasted … its miniature population running in fear… and then the sphere rose up again, out of the grass - and it disappeared into the tangerine sky…
And now whenever I see those concrete or stone balls – you know – that people put on gateposts – or they’ve often fallen into the yard or ended up as part of a rockery or something – then I remember that planet.
(caption: Delaware Road)
Stick
By the way, if you ever feel the need to measure anything – entertainment, art, a landscape – if someone tells you to assess something or you get a sudden compulsion to give something a value – then you can use a walking stick like this:
(Show the bent red and white stick.)
It’s a détourned ranging rod – it’s based on the staffs used by map-makers and archaeologists – except of course that it’s uneven. It’s really good for evaluating evaluation – and evaluators.
MOD
We’re walking up a long drive… there’s no clear sign as to what it is – we come to a big door and a woman, a friendly woman, comes out and explains that it’s the offices of the local NHS Trust… she finds a piece of paper tucked in the bottom of a drawer, with about 200 words on the history of the place…
(Lay down an A4 sheet of paper with some text.)
This is the final authority on this space - a thin plane of factoids.
(Draw on the sheet of paper, our route.)
“Not that way…” she says as we wander towards some giant trees.
(Draw back over the route – drawing the route I talk about, onto the paper.)
So we retrace our steps, and as we do we see a concrete ball lying on the grass… and we know that things are going to take off. And beyond the concrete ball is the back of some old Ministry Of Defence land that we’ve earlier been turned away from, by an apologetic security guard at the front gate. But here the fence is full of holes, like negative spheres, and we step through… to the next layer…
(Draw this onto the paper. The two sets of routes. In green the old roads. In red the new tracks. In blue our route.)
The place is a palimpsest of different layers of routes – there’s a pattern of disintegrating tarmac roads… linking old rusting warehouses - and then a new layer of tracks, made by dog walkers, mountain bikers and graffiti artists.
I’m with my friend Matthew and together we trace the old tarmac Navy roads… between the warehouses.
(Stepping back and using the whole space.)
The first one is full of emptiness, and a feeling of “What was sent from here?” Absence, and the suspicion that somewhere else in the world are the consequences.
I’ll come back to the emptiness of this warehouse…
… because I keep finding that I come back to this sort of place … it’s a taxonomic category of place – I get this weird feeling, that just before I arrived, something sinister has just left… and that there are consequences somewhere else…
(I draw the three lines of the ‘Awen’, the wings of god.)
So, I’ll – finally – start this performance here at Manchester Piccadilly because it’s here that I started three walks that were important for me.
(Indicating the three arms of the ‘wings of god’)
Down the ramp to Urbis and drifting with Carl Lavery to Celebration Village - this way to Paradise with John Davies for a brief time on his M62 walk – and, then, last year, this way, down the London Road… with John and Patricia and Alex…
On this third walk I was following a journey taken a hundred years before by the Manchester engineer Charles Hurst who was planting acorns, he was worried that the oak trees were dying, choked in industrial soot, and he wrote a book about his journey which I’d found in the underground stacks at Exeter Central Library. And now I was setting out to see if I could any of his hundred year old oak trees.
I got into weird kinds of walking when I was on a theatre tour in Poland, we had a smash in the van on the way back from a sightseeing trip to some old castle. After that I stopped going to tourist places with the actors, and instead I‘d walk around Lenin Flats or rotting tanks or I’d organise visits to weapons factories.
By the way, these three lines are also the symbol of the Awen – or Broad Arrow - you may have seen it as a benchmark on an old building – about this high off the ground – it’s the logo of the Ordnance Survey, or in old cartoons you get prisoners with arrows on their clothes … it’s all the same thing – it’s an ancient Celtic symbol (or so the nineteenth century druid revivalists claim) – it’s a symbol of the sound made at the beginning of the universe – and it was appropriated by the British state as its badge of ownership…
I did warn you that things might be bitty – but here’s the shock – there’s a storyline.
I walked out of Manchester, like Hurst, out along the Hyde Road, bidding my companions goodbye – but not before we’d found a freemasons’ tomb in Hyde cemetery, its compasses and square crumbled but its two pillars intact – Boaz and Jachin.
(I draw a couple of lines – of pillars - on the ground. Caption: Child.)
(Of the chalking:) When the Freemasons were in their early days, before they had their own buildings… they would hire a room in a pub and chalk their ceremonial maps – on the floor and then wipe them away at the end of the ceremony… and I like that idea that you can take any geography with you…
the US War Room…
Solomon’s Temple
the Piccadilly ramp
For the next two weeks I wandered across England… over Kinder Scout on April Fool’s Day, down through Derbyshire…
Just past New Houghton, flags of St George are fluttering over the council estate as if it’s under siege, I walk down a disused layby beside a busy dual carriageway – entering between the twin decapitated pillars of a road sign. Boaz and Jachin. I think of Phillipe Petit tightrope-walking between the twin towers in 1974. “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
I walk along the “Archaeological Way” – its signs in ruins, the stream by the path full of tyres, and then ahead - a road and factory buildings. Dogs bark and I wonder if they’re guarded.
(Look about for clues.)
There’s a man leaning against a van. Woolly hat. Working boots. A big man with big hands. I walk over. Thirty minutes later and he will have taken me on an extraordinary journey through England, and yet neither of us will have moved from the spot.
“That’s where they ‘ad the gun implacement, see – by that chimney, when they were makin’ bullets in Number 2 Mill… now if you want to walk… do you know the Cat and Fiddle, not that bloody road there, don’t take that bloody one, next one, leg it over the field there, but don’t take bloody Derby Lane, though… are you goin’ t’Welbeck! I don’t bloody go round there, I leggit through, right – go and ‘ave a look at them tunnels – big as that ‘ouse, they are - some Duke wi’ syphilis built ‘em, visiting the girls in the village, and get someone local to take you in! – there’s an underground ballroom in there – bin t’ Eyam? See that road that goes nowhere, “Surprise View”, built to gi’ the men some bloody work to do? Well y’know the road by the pub, not there, take the next bloody right and leg it up there, at the top there’s a kissing gate there – but don’t go down bloody there, go through the field…”
I’ve no idea where any of these places are, but it doesn’t matter – because together we go on this fantastic trip – up roads to nowhere and down tunnels to ballrooms.
What a man! A psychogeographer in a woolly hat!
(Walking.)
…In Blid’oth I’m fastened upon by an 82 year old Ukranian man. I’ve just passed through the magic edgeland at the village border where a lad with a shaved head gives me precise directions to a road he’s already admitted he’s never heard of.
(Ukranian voice.) “Where do you think I’m from?”
The old man tells me he didn’t want to go back to the Ukraine after the war.
“The Communists would have killed me.”
And then, as if there might still be a threat.
“Not that I was against the Communists, I was against the Germans! The Germans want me to fight in their army, I say I’m not German, I’m Ukranian.”
He talks to me as if he’s answering accusations.
He was in the army, he says, but he wears an RAF beret.
We pass a girl walking a ferret on a lead.
We part at Tescos and I walk up the hill and out of the village, passing a woman tending a wallflower display shaped like vampire fangs.
I make a detour to visit the site of Bessie Shepherd’s murder. Her murderer’s name is spelt differently on the front from the back of her stone…
I write down the different spellings in my notebook. I once had this idea of a sophisticated tool kit you could take on this kind of walking, I even had the idea of a mobile machinoeki…. Michinoeki are Japanese petrol stations, and ‘machinoeki’ are stations for walkers, and I thought I could be a mobile one carrying theories and stories, food and socks and maps… but it doesn’t work, it’s too preconceived… all you really need are simple things: some chalk, a toy crab (that’s my alternative head) …
O, the clay… there’s this saint in Devon, Nectan, he’s a Celtic water god really, anyway, he got his head chopped off by pirates… and he picked up his head and walked with it… there’s a statue of him on Exeter Cathedral and he’s got a head on his shoulders and another under his arm… So this is to remind you that when you walk to look with more than one point of view.
…multiple personality disorder can be very useful, walking simultaneously as a film director and a pilgrim and a burglar and a… basically “and, and, and”.
And that’s what Charles Hurst became – “and and and” – rather than just an acorn planter, he began to engage with the walk itself – practising one-mile-an-hour strolling – at which pace dewdrops turn into universes, and vice versa. I tested this out with John Davies, along the banks of the Trent – and we found all these miniature works of land art – tiny Robert Smithsons and Nancy Holts and David Nashes. Then something else – wrapped and tied in red cloth, I pick it up… it’s the size and weight of a human heart… I gingerly untie it: it’s a coconut.
At South Witham I explore an the old quarry… where the kids think there’s a sunken steam train… it was a derelict boiler half buried in the ground…
But I liked the idea of a buried steam train.
It made me think of the Strategic Reserve.
In the second world war a bureaucrat was asked to draw up a list of steam locomotives that the army could draw on in the event of a German invasion. Of course the invasion never came, the locomotives were never assembled, but the list remained, and it was found by a railway buff, and the story went around of a secret collection of steam trains somewhere in England, somewhere underground… forgotten, but still steaming….
I like the idea. Of working in the holey spaces that the state abandons. Because the state is constantly taking from us – the idea of the situationist dérive is used by officers of the Israeli Defence Force to inform their incursions into Palestinian refugee camps. The Royal Marines from Lympstone Commando use Exeter as a playground for their covert Parcours club.
Later that day, I wobble down the hill into Stamford and book into Hurst’s accommodation – the 11th century George Inn. Next morning, I go to reception before breakfast –
Past a group of women who are announcing to each other how little they can remember of the night before.
I ask if I could see the crypt that’s mentioned on the history sheet in my room. I’m expecting a polite rebuttal, but Simon the Porter is instantly summoned and he leads me to the cocktail lounge where I expect him to unlock a concealed door. In the architectural equivalent of one of those “I shouldn’t tell you this, but” moments, he begins to move the furniture about. I’m still expecting a door, when he peels up the carpet to reveal a trap in the floor, raises it and I follow him down a metal ladder.
I’m in the same secret England that the woolly-hatted, giant-handed, subcontractor had led me through, this time it’s for real. There’s a hybrid of buildings – 20th century concrete, 18th century brickwork and then vaulted arches stretching into the darkness, the remnants of a hospital of the Knights of St John (now known as the St John’s Ambulance): this is where the crusaders were armed, treated, trained and provisioned – these are the 12th century’s AWACs hangars.
Later that day I walk with a man who tells me he worked as a radar operator in an underground station – on the surface it looked just like an ordinary bungalow. From then on all bungalows are suspect.
Low level paranoia is a useful addition to your toolkit.
(Walk down to audience.)
Twenty five years ago I rang a friend’s house – no one answered – a day or two later I’m in the chip shop and they’re talking about a body being found – my friend had found her housemate dead at the foot of the stairs, the flies of his trousers were unzipped, the toilet upstairs used but not flushed… I’ve always wondered if he died running to answer my call.
Two spaces. No connection made. A consequence.
You can split a pair of quantum particles in opposite directions, send them 30 kilometres apart, and then if you interfere with the polarity of one, the other will instantaneously react. Not a very short time after, but at exactly the same time. In what sense can we say that those particles, miles apart, are in different spaces? Or that the heads of St Nectan, one on his shoulders and the other under his arm, aren’t actually the same one?
The world is unstable.
Doreen Massey says that Skiddaw Peak moves across the earth’s crust about the width of a fingernail every year.
The length of a tongue every decade.
I was 52 this year. So this is me measured out as a mountain’s journey.
(I poke out my tongue five times.)
There’s a fault in the earth’s crust off the South East coast of Ireland that 450 years ago shifted and sent a fifteen foot wave crashing into the coast of north Somerset. The fault’s still there.
And I’m unstable too - I can sometimes walk through that wall… if all the gaps in me and all the gaps in the wall line up… it’s not a very high probability, but there’s a genuine chance that it could happen…
(Take handful of dice and throw them against the wall. They (usually) bounce off.)
But not today.
Matthew and I leave the empty MOD warehouse and enter the next one – it is an accidental museum of corrugated iron sheets… as if all the spheres of the world had been dismantled and their parts stored there.
(I make the winding gesture with my hand.)
The point is that there is never a single explanation to any space – you, me, here. Kinder Scout - there are always multiple layers of meanings – and that’s what mythogeography is – mining all the layers – geological, farcical, unreliable, quantum and planetary, patterns and textures … (I openly rub Mystic Smoke paste between my fingers to create a cloud of particles) … there’s a bench by Exeter cathedral where office workers have their lunch; it’s a murder scene, I attended the trial, the killer’s street name was Aslan, he claimed the victim wanted to kill his pregnant girlfriend who was carrying the Anti-Christ, one of the witnesses was addressed, by everybody including the judge, as Father Christmas.
Let me finish with a walk and a reading:
The walk was from Sidmouth to the Norman Lockyer Observatory and we took a pet-sar with us…
(I hand the ends of a rope to a woman and a man in the audience.)
Lockyer believed that the all the great Egyptian buildings were laid out in alignment to the stars and at the commencement of construction, the Pharaoh and his Queen would hold each end of the pet-sar, the measuring line … it’s the tyranny of straightness, the royal symmetry. But on our walk to the observatory the kids got hold of the pet-sar and it began to sneak down drives and up cul de sacs and into bus shelters, sensing out the route like a feeler or a tentacle: the walk began to be led, not by me, the Pharaoh, but by its periphery.
The reading is from Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure:
(Read quote from Machen’s The London Adventure, p.88-89.)
“How does all this bear on the "psychology"; what reference to ecstasy...… the question of the pattern. (Compare with)… the whorl, the spiral, Maori decoration.”
(Make hand gesture of the winding fall of the tiny planet.)
Bollocks. Many patterns, many mysteries …
Thank you.
(With a damp cloth I clean off the chalk patterns.)
performances at TRIP, Manchester 2008
Before the performance, assemble the ‘key’.
red and white stick: METAPHOR
dice: DEMOCRACY
clay: DREAM
(I takes some salt and place it on a tray, shake the tray.)
(Then hand out pieces of modelling clay)
Can you take a little piece of the modelling clay and while I’m talking maybe you could make a little model of your head… or somebody else’s head.
OK...
Salt
Now, there’s this phenomenon that’s called liquefaction – it happens when you get a lot of granular-type particles – like a tray of salt – if you send a series of shocks through them – then the granules start to behave like a liquid.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I don’t know, is anything happening? – it’s like maybe there are some droplet shapes forming there?
Anyway, the thing is that when you’re walking anywhere, you get a lot of granular experiences – moments, details, overheard conversation, looks, secret signs… generally they don’t add up to very much… it takes a shock to get all the ‘bits’ to flow…
O, and another thing… those granules – they don’t actually turn into a liquid, they just act as if they did – it’s one thing behaving like another.
Which is going to be a bit like this performance – so, in order that you can understand it – I’ve put a little a key or legend here – so you can make your own translation of what I do.
(Put the tray down by the ‘key’ and label it with a caption: ‘“STRAND”’)
Now, I usually start something like this by asking people to draw a picture of “the world” and most people draw something like this…
(Draw a globe. Put it on the floor next to the key and label it “SATELLITE”)
… but what it means is that in order to picture the world like this, you have to place yourselves right outside it.
Now there’s an alternative… proposed by the geographer Tim Ingold… but it’s not one usually used by people unless they fall over in the road…
The Fall
Now, I did that the other day – and I’m going to need a couple of people to help me here… maybe three or four because you’re going to need to support my weight… so no one with slipped discs please…
I was walking with walkwalkwalk through the St Leonard’s area of Exeter… really posh bit… and my foot slips on the edge of the kerb and my knee kind of buckles and I must do this three or four times in a walk.. a little stumble… but this time as I go down I realise I’m not coming up from it!
And now you’re going to have to support me … I get to about here and I sort of realise that I have to go through with this, I really have to commit to the fall… so I just go with it and I throw my hands forward and I hit the street hard… and all the people around me gasp a bit… but I’m not hurt and I just get and.. bit of a wobble in the voice... I carry on talking…
OK, thanks for that… actually can you just hold me again, so I’m close to hitting the ground… because the thing about that second way of seeing things is that rather than being right above and away from it and looking down on the world … you dive right into it.
Spheres…
But it’s not a globe that you’re diving into… it’s a world made up of enfolding spheres, one within another.
(With hands model these layers in the air.)
And in order to understand this world, it’s necessary to explore layer by layer, step by step. OK, I’m going to get up and take those steps…
Thank you very much.
(Let the helpers from the audience return to their seats. Physically walk the steps. During next bit draw chalk lines for steps and label them “Steps”.)
Down where I live in Devon – there’s a beach called Coryton Cove. It’s where I gave the first of my performances about walking – in a beach hut there, but the beach hut got washed away one day in a storm. The waves smashed it to pieces and dispersed it, changing it into a performance.
The beach huts are set on a concrete promenade, and at one end of it there’s a set of steps, and in white paint each step is labelled “Steps”. If you’re ever down in Devon, go and walk them, and as you do, imagine you’re walking from one layer of the world to the next.
(Walk the steps.)
Story: I’m standing on a friend’s back lawn and it’s the end of a perfect day… it’s an evening in my childhood… the dusk is turning the sky orange… when a sphere comes falling out of the sky in a gently winding motion (make winding motion with hand) and settles in the grass of the lawn… now, I know none of this happens, because I read it in an American comic – but it feels like it did… someone fetched a magnifying glass… and we saw – through the glass - that the sphere was a tiny, planet - ruined and wasted … its miniature population running in fear… and then the sphere rose up again, out of the grass - and it disappeared into the tangerine sky…
And now whenever I see those concrete or stone balls – you know – that people put on gateposts – or they’ve often fallen into the yard or ended up as part of a rockery or something – then I remember that planet.
(caption: Delaware Road)
Stick
By the way, if you ever feel the need to measure anything – entertainment, art, a landscape – if someone tells you to assess something or you get a sudden compulsion to give something a value – then you can use a walking stick like this:
(Show the bent red and white stick.)
It’s a détourned ranging rod – it’s based on the staffs used by map-makers and archaeologists – except of course that it’s uneven. It’s really good for evaluating evaluation – and evaluators.
MOD
We’re walking up a long drive… there’s no clear sign as to what it is – we come to a big door and a woman, a friendly woman, comes out and explains that it’s the offices of the local NHS Trust… she finds a piece of paper tucked in the bottom of a drawer, with about 200 words on the history of the place…
(Lay down an A4 sheet of paper with some text.)
This is the final authority on this space - a thin plane of factoids.
(Draw on the sheet of paper, our route.)
“Not that way…” she says as we wander towards some giant trees.
(Draw back over the route – drawing the route I talk about, onto the paper.)
So we retrace our steps, and as we do we see a concrete ball lying on the grass… and we know that things are going to take off. And beyond the concrete ball is the back of some old Ministry Of Defence land that we’ve earlier been turned away from, by an apologetic security guard at the front gate. But here the fence is full of holes, like negative spheres, and we step through… to the next layer…
(Draw this onto the paper. The two sets of routes. In green the old roads. In red the new tracks. In blue our route.)
The place is a palimpsest of different layers of routes – there’s a pattern of disintegrating tarmac roads… linking old rusting warehouses - and then a new layer of tracks, made by dog walkers, mountain bikers and graffiti artists.
I’m with my friend Matthew and together we trace the old tarmac Navy roads… between the warehouses.
(Stepping back and using the whole space.)
The first one is full of emptiness, and a feeling of “What was sent from here?” Absence, and the suspicion that somewhere else in the world are the consequences.
I’ll come back to the emptiness of this warehouse…
… because I keep finding that I come back to this sort of place … it’s a taxonomic category of place – I get this weird feeling, that just before I arrived, something sinister has just left… and that there are consequences somewhere else…
(I draw the three lines of the ‘Awen’, the wings of god.)
So, I’ll – finally – start this performance here at Manchester Piccadilly because it’s here that I started three walks that were important for me.
(Indicating the three arms of the ‘wings of god’)
Down the ramp to Urbis and drifting with Carl Lavery to Celebration Village - this way to Paradise with John Davies for a brief time on his M62 walk – and, then, last year, this way, down the London Road… with John and Patricia and Alex…
On this third walk I was following a journey taken a hundred years before by the Manchester engineer Charles Hurst who was planting acorns, he was worried that the oak trees were dying, choked in industrial soot, and he wrote a book about his journey which I’d found in the underground stacks at Exeter Central Library. And now I was setting out to see if I could any of his hundred year old oak trees.
I got into weird kinds of walking when I was on a theatre tour in Poland, we had a smash in the van on the way back from a sightseeing trip to some old castle. After that I stopped going to tourist places with the actors, and instead I‘d walk around Lenin Flats or rotting tanks or I’d organise visits to weapons factories.
By the way, these three lines are also the symbol of the Awen – or Broad Arrow - you may have seen it as a benchmark on an old building – about this high off the ground – it’s the logo of the Ordnance Survey, or in old cartoons you get prisoners with arrows on their clothes … it’s all the same thing – it’s an ancient Celtic symbol (or so the nineteenth century druid revivalists claim) – it’s a symbol of the sound made at the beginning of the universe – and it was appropriated by the British state as its badge of ownership…I did warn you that things might be bitty – but here’s the shock – there’s a storyline.
I walked out of Manchester, like Hurst, out along the Hyde Road, bidding my companions goodbye – but not before we’d found a freemasons’ tomb in Hyde cemetery, its compasses and square crumbled but its two pillars intact – Boaz and Jachin.
(I draw a couple of lines – of pillars - on the ground. Caption: Child.) (Of the chalking:) When the Freemasons were in their early days, before they had their own buildings… they would hire a room in a pub and chalk their ceremonial maps – on the floor and then wipe them away at the end of the ceremony… and I like that idea that you can take any geography with you…
the US War Room…
Solomon’s Temple
the Piccadilly ramp
For the next two weeks I wandered across England… over Kinder Scout on April Fool’s Day, down through Derbyshire…
Just past New Houghton, flags of St George are fluttering over the council estate as if it’s under siege, I walk down a disused layby beside a busy dual carriageway – entering between the twin decapitated pillars of a road sign. Boaz and Jachin. I think of Phillipe Petit tightrope-walking between the twin towers in 1974. “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”
I walk along the “Archaeological Way” – its signs in ruins, the stream by the path full of tyres, and then ahead - a road and factory buildings. Dogs bark and I wonder if they’re guarded.
(Look about for clues.)
There’s a man leaning against a van. Woolly hat. Working boots. A big man with big hands. I walk over. Thirty minutes later and he will have taken me on an extraordinary journey through England, and yet neither of us will have moved from the spot.
“That’s where they ‘ad the gun implacement, see – by that chimney, when they were makin’ bullets in Number 2 Mill… now if you want to walk… do you know the Cat and Fiddle, not that bloody road there, don’t take that bloody one, next one, leg it over the field there, but don’t take bloody Derby Lane, though… are you goin’ t’Welbeck! I don’t bloody go round there, I leggit through, right – go and ‘ave a look at them tunnels – big as that ‘ouse, they are - some Duke wi’ syphilis built ‘em, visiting the girls in the village, and get someone local to take you in! – there’s an underground ballroom in there – bin t’ Eyam? See that road that goes nowhere, “Surprise View”, built to gi’ the men some bloody work to do? Well y’know the road by the pub, not there, take the next bloody right and leg it up there, at the top there’s a kissing gate there – but don’t go down bloody there, go through the field…”
I’ve no idea where any of these places are, but it doesn’t matter – because together we go on this fantastic trip – up roads to nowhere and down tunnels to ballrooms.
What a man! A psychogeographer in a woolly hat!
(Walking.)
…In Blid’oth I’m fastened upon by an 82 year old Ukranian man. I’ve just passed through the magic edgeland at the village border where a lad with a shaved head gives me precise directions to a road he’s already admitted he’s never heard of.
(Ukranian voice.) “Where do you think I’m from?”
The old man tells me he didn’t want to go back to the Ukraine after the war.
“The Communists would have killed me.”
And then, as if there might still be a threat.
“Not that I was against the Communists, I was against the Germans! The Germans want me to fight in their army, I say I’m not German, I’m Ukranian.”
He talks to me as if he’s answering accusations.
He was in the army, he says, but he wears an RAF beret.
We pass a girl walking a ferret on a lead.
We part at Tescos and I walk up the hill and out of the village, passing a woman tending a wallflower display shaped like vampire fangs.
I make a detour to visit the site of Bessie Shepherd’s murder. Her murderer’s name is spelt differently on the front from the back of her stone…
I write down the different spellings in my notebook. I once had this idea of a sophisticated tool kit you could take on this kind of walking, I even had the idea of a mobile machinoeki…. Michinoeki are Japanese petrol stations, and ‘machinoeki’ are stations for walkers, and I thought I could be a mobile one carrying theories and stories, food and socks and maps… but it doesn’t work, it’s too preconceived… all you really need are simple things: some chalk, a toy crab (that’s my alternative head) …
O, the clay… there’s this saint in Devon, Nectan, he’s a Celtic water god really, anyway, he got his head chopped off by pirates… and he picked up his head and walked with it… there’s a statue of him on Exeter Cathedral and he’s got a head on his shoulders and another under his arm… So this is to remind you that when you walk to look with more than one point of view.
…multiple personality disorder can be very useful, walking simultaneously as a film director and a pilgrim and a burglar and a… basically “and, and, and”.
And that’s what Charles Hurst became – “and and and” – rather than just an acorn planter, he began to engage with the walk itself – practising one-mile-an-hour strolling – at which pace dewdrops turn into universes, and vice versa. I tested this out with John Davies, along the banks of the Trent – and we found all these miniature works of land art – tiny Robert Smithsons and Nancy Holts and David Nashes. Then something else – wrapped and tied in red cloth, I pick it up… it’s the size and weight of a human heart… I gingerly untie it: it’s a coconut.
At South Witham I explore an the old quarry… where the kids think there’s a sunken steam train… it was a derelict boiler half buried in the ground…
But I liked the idea of a buried steam train.
It made me think of the Strategic Reserve.
In the second world war a bureaucrat was asked to draw up a list of steam locomotives that the army could draw on in the event of a German invasion. Of course the invasion never came, the locomotives were never assembled, but the list remained, and it was found by a railway buff, and the story went around of a secret collection of steam trains somewhere in England, somewhere underground… forgotten, but still steaming….
I like the idea. Of working in the holey spaces that the state abandons. Because the state is constantly taking from us – the idea of the situationist dérive is used by officers of the Israeli Defence Force to inform their incursions into Palestinian refugee camps. The Royal Marines from Lympstone Commando use Exeter as a playground for their covert Parcours club.
Later that day, I wobble down the hill into Stamford and book into Hurst’s accommodation – the 11th century George Inn. Next morning, I go to reception before breakfast –
Past a group of women who are announcing to each other how little they can remember of the night before.
I ask if I could see the crypt that’s mentioned on the history sheet in my room. I’m expecting a polite rebuttal, but Simon the Porter is instantly summoned and he leads me to the cocktail lounge where I expect him to unlock a concealed door. In the architectural equivalent of one of those “I shouldn’t tell you this, but” moments, he begins to move the furniture about. I’m still expecting a door, when he peels up the carpet to reveal a trap in the floor, raises it and I follow him down a metal ladder.
I’m in the same secret England that the woolly-hatted, giant-handed, subcontractor had led me through, this time it’s for real. There’s a hybrid of buildings – 20th century concrete, 18th century brickwork and then vaulted arches stretching into the darkness, the remnants of a hospital of the Knights of St John (now known as the St John’s Ambulance): this is where the crusaders were armed, treated, trained and provisioned – these are the 12th century’s AWACs hangars.
Later that day I walk with a man who tells me he worked as a radar operator in an underground station – on the surface it looked just like an ordinary bungalow. From then on all bungalows are suspect.
Low level paranoia is a useful addition to your toolkit.
(Walk down to audience.)
Twenty five years ago I rang a friend’s house – no one answered – a day or two later I’m in the chip shop and they’re talking about a body being found – my friend had found her housemate dead at the foot of the stairs, the flies of his trousers were unzipped, the toilet upstairs used but not flushed… I’ve always wondered if he died running to answer my call.
Two spaces. No connection made. A consequence.
You can split a pair of quantum particles in opposite directions, send them 30 kilometres apart, and then if you interfere with the polarity of one, the other will instantaneously react. Not a very short time after, but at exactly the same time. In what sense can we say that those particles, miles apart, are in different spaces? Or that the heads of St Nectan, one on his shoulders and the other under his arm, aren’t actually the same one?
The world is unstable.
Doreen Massey says that Skiddaw Peak moves across the earth’s crust about the width of a fingernail every year.
The length of a tongue every decade.
I was 52 this year. So this is me measured out as a mountain’s journey.
(I poke out my tongue five times.)
There’s a fault in the earth’s crust off the South East coast of Ireland that 450 years ago shifted and sent a fifteen foot wave crashing into the coast of north Somerset. The fault’s still there.
And I’m unstable too - I can sometimes walk through that wall… if all the gaps in me and all the gaps in the wall line up… it’s not a very high probability, but there’s a genuine chance that it could happen…
(Take handful of dice and throw them against the wall. They (usually) bounce off.)
But not today.
Matthew and I leave the empty MOD warehouse and enter the next one – it is an accidental museum of corrugated iron sheets… as if all the spheres of the world had been dismantled and their parts stored there.
(I make the winding gesture with my hand.)
The point is that there is never a single explanation to any space – you, me, here. Kinder Scout - there are always multiple layers of meanings – and that’s what mythogeography is – mining all the layers – geological, farcical, unreliable, quantum and planetary, patterns and textures … (I openly rub Mystic Smoke paste between my fingers to create a cloud of particles) … there’s a bench by Exeter cathedral where office workers have their lunch; it’s a murder scene, I attended the trial, the killer’s street name was Aslan, he claimed the victim wanted to kill his pregnant girlfriend who was carrying the Anti-Christ, one of the witnesses was addressed, by everybody including the judge, as Father Christmas.
Let me finish with a walk and a reading:
The walk was from Sidmouth to the Norman Lockyer Observatory and we took a pet-sar with us…
(I hand the ends of a rope to a woman and a man in the audience.)
Lockyer believed that the all the great Egyptian buildings were laid out in alignment to the stars and at the commencement of construction, the Pharaoh and his Queen would hold each end of the pet-sar, the measuring line … it’s the tyranny of straightness, the royal symmetry. But on our walk to the observatory the kids got hold of the pet-sar and it began to sneak down drives and up cul de sacs and into bus shelters, sensing out the route like a feeler or a tentacle: the walk began to be led, not by me, the Pharaoh, but by its periphery.
The reading is from Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure:
(Read quote from Machen’s The London Adventure, p.88-89.)
“How does all this bear on the "psychology"; what reference to ecstasy...… the question of the pattern. (Compare with)… the whorl, the spiral, Maori decoration.”
(Make hand gesture of the winding fall of the tiny planet.)
"The problem perplexed him. He took it, as was his custom, for a long walk; and in the dreariest, most grey street of a grey, remote suburb, just as the men were coming home from the city, the thought, with a pang of joy, rushed into his mind, that the maze was not only the instrument, but the symbol of ecstasy: …a pictured "inebriation," …sign of some age-old "process" that gave the secret bliss to men, symbolised also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens…: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery."
Bollocks. Many patterns, many mysteries …
Thank you.
(With a damp cloth I clean off the chalk patterns.)