Rethinking Mythogeography : In Northfield Minnesota [1 ed.] 9781911193395, 9781911193388

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Published in this First Edition in 2018 by:

TRIARCHY PRESS Axminster, England [email protected] www.triarchypress.net Copyright © John Schott & Phil Smith, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-911193-38-8

The right of John Schott and Phil Smith to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the publisher’s prior written permission.

Introduction | John Schott In the spring of 2016 Phil Smith spent two weeks at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota as artist-in-residence at WALK!: A Festival of Walking, Art & Ideas. The festival was a ten-week celebration of walking as an artistic practice and as a remarkably protean theme across the liberal arts. The festival featured over sixty events, including a presentation on virtual pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, an artist-led exploration of Northfield from the sensory perspective of a dog, a phone app enabling walkers to blend individual notes into a musical theme with each step, a Walking Path Memoir Workshop for writers, an ambulatory presentation on the politics of sidewalks as public affordances, and a movement happening that devoured a building.  The high point of these events was Phil Smith’s mythogeographic exploration of Northfield — “The Blazing Worlds Walk” {June 30, 2016} — which is the focus of this publication. Phil Smith is among the leading experimental walkers in Great Britain. He is a gifted writer on walking who has published eleven books, including On Walking, Mythogeography, Enchanted Things: Signposts to a New Nomadism, Zombie Walking, and the recent Anywhere: A Mythogeography of South Devon and How To Walk It. Phil is also a playwright, with over a hundred plays produced. Indeed, his current practice of mythogeographic walking developed from early experiments in site-specific theater and the willful subversion of institutionally-sanctioned guided walks at English heritage sites. Phil Smith’s term for the theory that informs his walking practice is mythogeography, a notion first articulated while working with the English walking collective Wrights & Sites. In subsequent years, thanks to an intellect as restless and curious as his feet, he has developed and refined mythogeography through persistent interrogation and numerous guided walks. His essay here – reflections on his experience in Northfield – takes him another step or two down this path. On a brisk June morning roughly fifteen people assembled at Bridge Square, Northfield’s iconic town square where the Jesse James gang was defeated in 1876 as they attempted to rob the First National Bank. For the next three hours the group hiked about town, stopping at locations pre-selected by Phil including a back alley, a telephone pole, the sign for a pizza chain, a decorative rock, the front door of a law office, a train crossing, the sign in front of a Masonic meeting hall, and two enigmatic abandoned buildings. {Needless to say, this was not a walk that the Historical Society or the Chamber of Commerce would have organized.} At each location, Phil discoursed on a wide range of ideas provoked by our discoveries. His technique — and this walk was both a demonstration of mythogeographic procedure

and an invitation for participants to devise their own walks in future — was a bravura enactment of personal place-making. At each stopping point Phil undertook an archaeology of the devalued and “invisible” that blended post-modern theory and a well-studied command of local history — Phil did his homework! — in an ebullient, spontaneous performance. With its mix of theoretical playfulness and improvisatory poetic association, Phil’s mythogeography of Northfield modeled for participants ways to excavate their own ‘invisible cities’.  In this book readers will encounter two independent yet parallel texts: on the left pages a documentation of “The Blazing Worlds Walk” with photographs made en route by me, accompanied by a brief précis of essential ideas at each location; and on the right, Phil Smith’s essay reflecting on mythogeography and his experience in Northfield, which he began to write during the last days of his visit to Northfield. 

Phil Smith and John Schott would like to thank Carleton College, Studies in the Arts, and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies for supporting the festival and Phil Smith’s residency.

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Introduction | Phil Smith Mythogeography is fidelity to the indecipherable. “Northfield is a cathedral city. Our cathedral is the Farmer’s Co-op Elevator. Not European, American – straight, square, great. Without question, the most beautiful building in Northfield. Paint it, consecrate it, and let flow from the sacred center a fire of love to the world”. —Art White (Note: the Elevator no longer stands.)

In Northfield I realised just how serious the magic of the ordinary is. The grinding and squealing of wagons against the railroad tracks behind my motel and the train horn in the night were strange and familiar to me. They were in my dreams and they were also just out there, right outside my window where the great trucks of stuff were heading for factories and warehouses. Through the night a network of connections was crying out. When, wide awake, I stood in the morning rain and watched the wagons passing over a piece of loose track, pulping mud around the railroad ties into an unearthly brown Cthulhu, and met with Scott, a Union Pacific signal maintenance man (a man mending signals! How more symbolic could it get?) and gave to him a map of Northfield (Worcestershire, UK), I knew that such poetic moments were not exceptional in themselves. Not even in their accumulation were they special. It was their resolute

meaningfulness in the face of all the odds that was remarkable; they come to us in bits and pieces, in the blur of a chance moment or in the miasma of sleep, but somehow we still ‘get’ them. They give us access, like a door suddenly swung ajar, to a heightened reality, a sur-reality – to concrete poems in the sidewalk eroding into a new language, to the giant heap of wood shavings that blocked the path to the public library, to the tiny model of a fisherman inside a fisherman’s bait and tackle box, to the blob sculpture heaving with glass cephalopods – a space where things make their own connections and we must wait our turn for the trucks to pass. Standing above the town, waiting by the tracks, I knew that as a stranger in a friendly town I could try less and engage more. Hardly anyone knew I was there. Yet I felt secure, I could relax intensely and let indeterminate things happen. There was never any anxiety to be across the tracks; I was content to watch the gangling trains of experience and otherness pass me slowly by, like a parade of painted canvases linked in strong but flexible couplings. The magic of the ordinary may at first strike you in flashes or by the sudden falling of a shadow across a scene; but if you can hold onto those moments for a while, stay calm and not grab for the first wonder, then – like the passing freight train – the magic will begin to stream around you in unfolding loops, in strings like movies or stories or chains of DNA.

I am grateful to all those in Northfield who played a part in my learning there: people I met in chance encounters and by arrangement, in classes, on organised walks and at talks and films, those who ate the ‘Golden Puffs’ and modelled the shapes on the walks, those students who dreamed of swivelling whole sections of Division Street around or built an arena waiting for a ceremony from fallen needles, and most particularly to John Schott for the invitation, hospitality, challenge and now revelation.

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Starting Some fifteen or so participants gathered at Bridge Square in Northfield, Minnesota for “The Blazing Worlds Walk” with Phil Smith on a Saturday morning, May 14, 2016. The walk consisted of a guided amble along a prepared path through the city. Phil stopped at selected points — stations perhaps — where in short talks he demonstrated the techniques of mythogeography, an interpretive process through which he teases out complex meanings and associations generated by the objects, places and experiences encountered. His method is a congeries of history, poetry, theory, playfulness and mischief, founded on an embrace of associative thinking, with the goal of opening a new, perhaps third, fourth or fifth eye to the world. The walk was both a demonstration and an invitation to participants to undertake their own mythogeographies.

Above left: First National Bank, Northfield Above right: Phil Smith introduces “The Blazing Worlds Walk” Left: Central Park from the south, Northfield

Rethinking Mythogeography in Northfield, Minnesota Phil Smith

1/ On being touched, but not obliged On my first morning in Northfield, exploring on Division Street, I met Helen on the doorstep of the Prayer Room. She caught me obsessively studying the way the step outside its front door had begun to bubble ectoplasmically; the sun or the frost had disrupted its ceramic surface and a new pattern of unhuman forces was brazen. The praying folk began to descend to the street from their upper room. Deploying my best ‘Khlestakhovian Inscrutability’ – a tactic I use in the street, offering a minimum of response (while remaining polite) so that others can fill the quiet with their own ideas and spaces – I engaged gently in a series of conversations (with one precant it was something about comparing the watches of our dead fathers that we were both wearing) until I was asked in to see the Prayer Room. I was asked if hands could be laid upon me for a prayer. Although I was clear that I was not a believer, I was pleased to accept the offer. Pleased because I felt all these strangers’ hands on me, without aggression; my eyes were open and I saw the shelves of peculiar videos and books, and I heard the words of the prayer as the leader sought in curling sentences to somehow address the immediate future of someone he knew nothing about. I was re-imagined in prayer in ways that were fantastical for their ordinariness; so far from my intentions I felt wholly unharmed. Being turned into something like an erudite and caring octopus with a fan of praying tentacles, I was lifted up in the arms of a community within a community. I was 4,000 miles from home and on my first day in town I was held intimately by six strangers

in an upstairs room. Such encounters, when entered into mythogeographically, as part of one’s questing journey to understand and intervene in places that are strange or simply unfamiliar, leave one touched, sometimes deeply, yet unobliged. There is no surrender of one’s nomadic slipperiness, no surrender to the grand narratives that are all around. Even in places where belief and worldview are strictly codified, the mythogeographical pilgrim presents such a benign ambiguity that even the language of faith struggles to get any grip on the edge of that abyss we all hang onto. In a place that was strange to me, it was a meeting in myth on that first morning in Northfield. I discovered a capacity to shape and hold a kind of void within; around which others had then woven something better than I could. A void worth sharing. There is always an essential ambivalence in such unbalanced but efficacious connections, even when they are very intense. They rely on the mythogeographer paying close, polite and respectful attention to everything and yet being ‘not quite there’; and so able to make a deft, intuitive connection to the big picture beyond (or beneath and within) the big pictures. When I left Northfield I was more determined than ever to be an evangelist for this mythogeography; to encourage more people to take its path – its pilgrimage, even – beyond the big things, through the small things, to the even bigger picture, the picture before decisions. So, now there is an obligation that arises from my encounter in the Prayer Room, though not one intended by the supplicants there. My part in the upper room octopus and my stay in Northfield in general have /9

Jesse James Museum & Bank Raid

Above left: Historical print of the Jesse James gang’s Northfield Raid Above right: The Northfield Historical Society’s First Bank of Northfield Museum and Bridge Square [Google] Below: The body of Jesse James, 1882

We walk to the corner of today’s First National Bank in order to gain some distance — and perspective — on the original First National Bank building across the way. It is now a museum of the Jesse James Bank Raid of 1876 (including brain-splattered ledger). The mythologizing of this raid, at work even during the events themselves, when heroic bank tellers stopped the James Gang, has produced what Guy Debord called “Spectacle” — a socialized media hallucination that is now comprised of contemporary accounts, books, grizzly photographs, movies, and the town’s own annual re-enactment that stands in for the “event” itself. The original incident had all the elements of a proto-Spectacle; before the raid the James Gang were already mythologized in national press accounts. The raid itself was theatrical: outlaws in dusters, six-guns, fine horses, and bank-tellers with premonitions of heroism. Today’s reenactment mirrors the original, even as it threatens to overwhelm all other ways of understanding the town. A mythogeography of Northfield both acknowledges the Spectacle, and yet shields itself from it.

made me aware of how little of the potential, the urgency or the route of the mythogeographical pilgrimage I have shared with others. I am trying to go a little further here. 2/ Pilgrimage The walking I practice (some people call it ‘walking art’, some ‘psychogeography’) is a kind of pilgrimage, though not in a usual sense. It is less of the ‘special’ thing that is usually understood by pilgrimage. I am not on pilgrimage all the time, but I switch in and out from everyday life more regularly than a traditional pilgrim. This is a pilgrimage that anyone can take, that anyone can weave in and out of their daily lives dependent on the pressures and limits that bear upon you. It is a sporadic journey in which, you, the pilgrim, seek two things: firstly, to appreciate the sacredness (in the sense not of any religion, but of its need and right to be venerated) of the road itself; secondly, to find in oneself the edge of the hidden and unrepresentable part and to learn how to protect its borders from algorithms and other attractive invasions. The kind of pilgrimage I am writing of here has no set destination. That, of course, is not new: hundreds of years ago the Grail legend transformed pilgrimage by introducing a shrine (or relic) that keeps moving around. Indeed, many Grail stories seem to go further and imply that – as in alchemy – the material object pursued by the pilgrim-knights is really a metaphor for spiritual discovery and transformation. The route of a spiritual, alchemical or psychogeographical pilgrimage – the actual road with its signposts and potholes, hedgerows and roadkill – is sacred in itself, but is only discovered as sacred by the pilgrim’s own transcendence (or just plain thinking) that might occur at any point in a quest. My walking – disrupted walking, walking that breaks from an everyday and functional walk – adopts this idea, but drops the singularity of the unique Grail (or the idea of one uniquely

good thinking) in favour of a multiplicity, a quantum dance with super-positioned elements. The mythogeographical pilgrim is much less about arriving at a shrine or a mystical state and more about entangling, physically and psychically, with a (not ‘the’) bigger picture. It isn’t that special. On any walk, a stroll or a walk to the shops, there is some engagement with those bigger pictures; admiring a vista that reproduces the values of a particular period of oil painting, or enjoying in advance the taste of a particular processed food. The difference in what I am proposing is that the walker acknowledges and works the big pictures they walk with: critiquing, enthusing, embracing, wrecking... whatever it is you need to do to achieve your two primary aims of veneration and wary self-discovery. And from the ruins left by what you need to do, you can move on beyond pictures, to a zone (before representation) where desires yet to be appropriated by advertisers are a mystery even to yourself. Thus, every disrupted walk is a reflexive one, messing with its own pretensions, setting out for things never done or never experienced or not even entertained, all in a wobbly dance across volatile fields. Wed these to a serious desire to understand what the hell is going on in the world and you have the preliminary constituents of a journey walked in relation to distant particles, in relation to the adopted, rejected or assimilated persona of your role as ‘pilgrim-knight’, on a quest without an object, yet packed with objects. An act of love which can only become evident to others in a moment of vulnerability or super-hypersensitivity, and which, for most of the time, will only get by thanks to the resilient weirdness of bland things; by knowing how to tap the magic in the ordinary. The night before I was to give my first public talk in Northfield an eighty-pound section of the venue’s ceiling fell down onto the seats below. A few hours before, I had sat in an /11

A Doubling and Tripling of Time “Here I am marking in the street the point at which I first discovered a doubling in Northfield. Exploring 4th Street on Google Earth’s “street view” from my hotel room, at this location the street seemed dark and rather blurry, with what appeared to be some very large cracks in the surface. Then, as I moved the cursor just slightly to the right, the image stuttered and the street reappeared as sharp and sunny, just like it is today. So we encounter a kind of doubled doubling precisely in this one spot, right here! Partly this is because I am using an absurd tool of research which places me here while not being here; and partly because we can double the doubleness of a map that is already flickering between different times, by fabricating our own moment here, right now, in the street.” [Note: In 2016 Google Earth’s browser “glitched” precisely at this spot between blurry, dark imagery recorded in 2007 and contemporary imagery from 2016.]

audience, under this plaster ‘sword of Damocles’, watching a movie about the Camino walk to Santiago de Compostela. Though I never found the moment to call upon them, I brought to Northfield some pages from Sir Constant by W. E. Cule (Pilgrim Press, 1899), a variation on The Pilgrim’s Progress of surprisingly high quality. I often thought of it when folk raised their hand in greeting, a gesture of friendship related to a knight lifting his visor to reveal his identity. The gesture put me in mind of the passage in Sir Constant when the eponymous hero is visited at night by a knight “mailed from head to heel, and the colour of his mail was black. A dark plume hung from his helmet, and his visor was fast closed.... The horse that he rode and the horse that he led were black also.... No rocks in the great mountains moved less than he and his steed that bore him, and no shadow of the night could be more silent. Yet sometimes the starlight glinted upon his armour, and the night winds trifled with his raven plume or lifted a while the flowing manes of his horses”. Is there any passage that better expresses the worth of stillness, enigma and quietly reflecting, and reflecting upon, things? The need and requirement, along the busy way, to pause and withdraw. To seek a place in the shadows, or a broom cupboard that admits no light at all. To train oneself in the capacity, in the midst of strong winds, to shut down, to stop expressing, and to be a blank sheet, a slate wiped clean such as is fantasised by venture capitalists during natural disasters, stealing their modus operandi for the purposes of pure contemplation. To find the darkness within. The pilgrimage I am advocating can be brought to a halt, forced to a pause, unable to see the road ahead and retain its poise without any prospect of beginning again. Cule’s book is an accidental symbolist drama. The black knight, visor down, is the bright darkness, the light inside that needs no expression, no audience, no object of desire to command its illuminating; it is the necessary hiddenness of

interior life that for psychoanalysts like Christopher Bollas and Josh Cohen protects the subjective life of each one of us. For the walker, this particular dark knight represents the ideal of trying less and engaging more, of stopping to become entangled with the wind. This knight represents the keeping to oneself of one’s wishes in a darkness of impulses; an inscrutability and a humility that make space for things to become by their own agency. Knowing and loving the darkness in ourselves, mapping the spaces the Spectacle cannot see and re-encoding its codes in our own symbolist doings in the streets. If that seems self-absorbed or indulgent, then see it as the fuel you need to hold yourself in that ‘not quite there’ that gives you a deftness and intuition necessary for connections to the big picture beyond, beneath and within the big pictures. 3/ The big picture and the zero Why this impulse towards the general, towards a much bigger picture, in Northfield? It had something to do with the lack of narrative within the town about anything before 1855. Even about the survey of 1851 or the Dakota Treaty of the same year which removed the Siouan-speaking people from the region, let alone any kind of narrative of geological time. Yet almost every garden in some suburbs of the town sported a glacial boulder. I had felt something similar when I made a series of walks for a National Trust heritage property, ‘A la Ronde’ in Devon (UK). The genesis story there was of a proto-feminist pair of cousins returning from the Grand Tour and designing an eccentric house for their treasures. The traumatic narrative of the family’s near destruction in the Lisbon earthquake-tsunami and the loss of an entire ‘cargo’ of human beings on their one foray into slave trading had been silenced, only accessible by an oblique reading of wallpaper and the arrangement of /13

Grasveld Alley In this alley there is deep scoring on the walls, maybe from delivery vans scraping into the brick. These marks appear like striations, like the grooves made by a glacier; which is how the whole Northfield landscape was formed. This is another doubling: the place cannot resist the pressure of the landscape. The wall also records the names of scores of people who have written themselves, like obstreperous stones stuck in a wandering iciness, into a kind of history. The two shapes in the Tiny’s sign mirror the square (from which we started) and the circle (still to come). Together, these symmetrical shapes prefigure the ambulant alchemy of the path ahead: when we come to squaring the circle, we will circle the square. All the while, the all-seeing orb, like some clouded eye of providence, is floating above the town.

missing monuments. The house’s event horizon had been set everything down to the unitarity of a great 1 (or Great One). at 1799, slightly earlier than Northfield’s. A mythogeographical pilgrim, instead, attends to the mulThe problem of ‘event horizon’ is important here. It is tiplicity of the bigger picture (which may, of course, include one that is solved by the ‘big picture’ (or ‘bigger picture’, we local history and ‘Great Ones’, but only as parts, layers or haven’t escaped Einstein yet!) and it can be compared to the substrates of its swirling orrery of events). recent discovery of the ‘amplituhedron’ in the study of quanBefore the amplituhedron was deduced by theoretical tum mechanics. The amplituhedron is a simple geometrical physicists at Harvard and Princeton, I had somehow intushape (‘a jewel’) which has been found to match observa- ited that the ‘bigger picture’ would be “physical in the sense tions of the universe’s very smallest particles of matter. In of the discipline of Physics rather than in that of its objects, conventional quantum theory, computing the exchanges of conceptual, but geometrical more than theoretical” (from energy between these tiny particles has involved thousands “Crab Walking and Mythogeography” in Walking, Writing and of complicated calculations, but theoretical physicists at Har- Performance, ed. Roberta Mock, 2009). I had been sceptical vard and Princeton have found that these exchanges can be about the capacity of any text or critical theory to articulate reduced, meaningfully, to a volume of the amplituhedron. the ‘general’. Instead I championed “forms [which] leap across The ‘bigger picture’ is like the amplituhedron in that they species and from non-living to living matter as described by both collapse locality and unitarity. In the first case, they Gaston Bachelard (‘stones that imitate a jaw-bone … Orchis, eliminate locality’s requirement for things to be adjacent in Diorchis … which imitate the male organs … mineralogiorder to interact. In the second case, they refute unitarity’s cal collections [that] are anatomical parts of what man will requirement that the sum of all the probabilities of anything be when nature learns to make him’)” and embraced mathin a defined space will be 1, by which (under the orthodoxy ematician Roger Penrose’s “feeling that the mathematics to of the Copenhagen interpretation) any thing is restricted describe these things is out there”, in matter itself. In the to an existence wholly within a (i.e. this) single universe. By simple terms of mythogeography, such connections and meanignoring adjacency and the integrity of parts, a ‘bigger picture’ ings, relations and scales can be directly intuited from the can connect disparate things, while attending to the effects realm perceivable by a body’s senses; it is that capacity that of the parts of an object (like those parts of ourselves) that is celebrated by the painter Paul Nash when he observed “a are, and should be, entirely hidden and inaccessible. peculiar spacing in the dispersal of the trees … which sugThe amplituhedron also avoids the problem of knowing in gested some inner design of very subtle purpose”. conventional quantum theory; whereby in order to observe So, in Northfield, I intuited that the problem of the town’s the locality of the tiniest exchanges such immense energies event horizon was a symptom of genesis stories in general. are packed into such tiny zones that black holes form, draw- My very particular feelings there seemed to fit a model of a ing an event horizon across which almost no information mytho-geometry of an origin tale. How for any thing and any can escape. Similarly, in mythogeography the ‘bigger picture’ where, a genesis story generates an excessive idealism and skirts the obsessive narrowness of the ‘local historian’ (and energy as a result of the denial of things destroyed in order other anti-interdisciplinary expertises) and the reduction- to begin from ‘nothing’, from ‘empty space’. In Northfield the ism of those religions, materialisms, and so on that boil origin story has an ideal nature, and John North’s grid plan /15

Funeral Home “The first time I stood on this corner, I knew I had seen it before on Google Maps. Seen on a computer screen, an area to the side of the building across the way has a portion that is blurred and distorted, rose coloured and wavy, as if viewed through a flame. Such visual anomalies can open up a new layer in the actual location: looking now at this space through the coloured plastic sheet that I hold up for the participants, translates immediate on-site vision back into the abstracted logic of the map. Reconstructing the goggle-eyed Googlevision reminds me (and I say so!) of philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the “event” when an excluded part of reality suddenly becomes visible; the zero of the space abruptly become numeral and counted. My tinted sheet, like collectivised rosy-coloured spectacles, is a response to Badiou’s call for “fidelity to the indecipherable”; a key notion of mythogeography (well, it is from now on).”

for the town is certainly utopian in flavour, settling onto the land as if descending from the sky, only to be kinked at its centre by the river. This utopian sense was amplified by Arthur Paul David (‘Art’) White – formerly a teacher at UC-Berkeley and at St Olaf College in Northfield, a student of architectural design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen – and his evangelism for the ‘Magic Square’ of the town of Northfield and elsewhere. He wrote to President Barack Obama of “a solid foundation for future growth....the 6-Mile Township Grid – made in heaven, by God, and brought to Earth by four of his greatest city planners: St John, Thomas Jefferson, John North, and Art White....Northfield has the greatest city plan of any world city and is the spiritual center of New Jerusalem”. The cousins in ‘A la Ronde’ were no less utopian and so I discovered in their property certain silenced devices, similar to those I found in Northfield. In the case of ‘A la Ronde’ these included a chapel, teaching rooms and iconic monuments that marked the demise of ancient civilisations; instruments for the conversion of the Jews and the termination of imperfect earthly life. The ‘Point in View’ (the name of the cousins’ chapel and re-education complex) was a real place, an ideal aspiration for a coming kingdom and a machine for bringing the two together. In such ideal spaces (and, in some way, every city is a City of God in the sense that it is built on its own negation, as the full title of St Augustine’s book, The City of God Against the Pagans, implies), the silencing of what was there before their creation is the generator for their troubled mythogeographies. It is the zero that determines their complex set of ones; the sum left after extraction and destruction, concealed and silenced by tales of a Great One or of a single idealistic and magic form. This zero, the revenant of the obliteration prior to a place’s genesis, if reclaimed and repaired, is also a machine of future change. When I have written that “the future can be built from the ruins of the

past” I realise now it is as much in this sense as in the reclamation of damaged materials. I got the idea of citing this ‘zero’ from the Grand Event Theater on Washington Street. It reminded me of theorist Alan Badiou’s concept of ‘Event’, his idea about the possibility of revolutionary change which he sees as dependent upon a reality that is founded on a void of “inconsistent multiplicity”. That sounds pretty much like the foundations of any town or city to me. Most of the time this seething void is obscured by the regulatory power of conventional beliefs, a prioritisation of what is ‘obviously there’ over what is not (the ones counted over the zero) and when all that fails by a tap on the head with a truncheon from an agent of the state. Every now and again, however, the zero, the void, the seething multiplicity escapes into everyday life – the Arab Spring is probably the last global example – after which it is not always possible to return things to their former order (and, if so, only with great force). The zero wags the set of ones, at least for a while. For some years I worked at the College of Arts on the Dartington Estate in Devon (UK), teaching on the ‘Site Projects’ module for which students created site-specific performances in, and in response to, the landscapes and architectures of the estate. Strangely, but perhaps not insignificantly, I only ever really got to study the history of the place after the college had been closed down, when I no longer regularly visited it. While working there I was satisfied by the oral histories I heard all around me (from fellow lecturers, from students) of mediaeval jousts on the tiltyard, and, more recently, about visits of famous Indian, European and Russian artists. A dual genesis story – of mediaeval aristocracy establishing a great house, and then of wealthy, twentieth-century philanthropists restoring the old buildings and setting up a community of artists and experimental agriculturalists – had wholly silenced the much older identities of the estate. Now, the careful field walking and collection of a giant Early Mesolithic /17

flint scatter on the estate has revealed how the orientation of the river Dart crossing the estate from northeast to southwest and the migration of large mammals 11,000 years ago along its banks had made that place ideal for capturing and slaughtering animals in very large numbers. It was a giant butcher’s shop and meat packaging operation; a prehistoric Tyson Foods. These kinds of deletions are often shadow silences; they obscure the overspeaking of even older narratives of geological action. In my county there are official information notice boards (put up by councils or park authorities) that refer to “Devon four hundred million years ago”. No such terrain (and, obviously, not the name!) at that time would have been recognisable as the ‘Devon’ of today; not even as the raw constituents of the present landscape. For starters, the whole landscape would have been on the other side of the Earth’s equator; secondly much of it would have been underwater; and, thirdly, most of its rocks – including the county’s characteristic red sandstones and the granite of its tors – had yet to be physically constituted four hundred million years ago. Mythogeography’s generalisation motor, its big picture making, is powered by these absences and difficulties in historical and geological time. We are back at the zero, or the hidden part of any matter; that seems to be at work in stories of genesis and in overarching general descriptions. So here is a mythogeographical principle that I learned for the first time in Northfield: as you assemble all the multiplicity of informations about a place, look for the zeroing and silencing, large and small, originary and incidental, that these chunks of narrative and idea have been produced (at least partly) in order to obscure. Just as you have precious hidden parts, so does a place. Before I had heard of Art White’s Magic Square, I had imposed my own squares on the town; like John North I had drawn up a template (in my case using Google Maps) and

dropped it over the streets. The route of my ‘Blazing Worlds’ walk consisted of three squares. At the corner of the second I performed a little ritual on the decorative stone outside the Delphic corporate mini-fort of Neuger Communications, invoking the different rates of resistance in the nearby river bed that had created the rapids that had brought North and his mill here. What I failed to address, however, was how the glacial lobe had stopped at the Cannon River, and that when we crossed the bridge over its waters, we were passing from one geological system to another, and into an odd, dread and affordant space, that draws its inviting eeriness from deep things beneath, until the township grid re-establishes itself at Linden Street South. When an event horizon swings into view, beware, because the superficial, ironic and poetic fragments that are important to making a mythogeography of a place can sink unsupported into the silence beyond that horizon. Before you lose them, be especially sensitive to how your small observations and intimations of the indecipherable close at hand begin to swing around some huge and general indecipherable, a giant zero that defines the set of ones. Your feelings, and the pulls upon those informations, indicate that a powerful shadow history is present: like that of the missing wooden house of Hiram Scriver floating out of Bridge Square and north up Division Street; like that of the blistered surfaces of Ray Jacobson’s fountain celebrating the now bankrupt Sheldahl Inc., formerly producers of substrates, circuit boards, seals for Polaris missiles and passive satellites called ‘satelloons’ (the first, ‘Echo 1’, at the time of its launch, was the biggest synthetic object in orbit around the Earth, and marks the genesis of the global Spectacle, the birth of a satellite-based worldwide telecommunications system); the black metal silhouette of a dog in Ames Park imitating the shadow of a predator that is never there and is ignored by the flocks of giant migratory geese; the moment in the movies when a traction engine turns into /19

Domino’s Pizza The Domino’s sign overflows with associations. Originally the three dots represented the pizza company’s number of outlets; today, that would require 10,000 dots. In his satchel, Phil has ten tokens, one for each thousand. He has also brought along a broken snowglobe, acquired in Naples, Italy, where he ate pizza at the restaurant famous for the invention of the dish. He brought this snowglobe along as a tribute to the late Dick Heibel, a Northfield resident, who for decades ran a business repairing broken snowglobes sent to him from all over the country. Such wonders are always afoot, wherever we are, and so long as we are attuned to those truths, reckoned as zero by the mean-spirited, they will emerge for the watchful.

Bridge Square and spooks the James-Younger gang (“It’s off its tracks!” – technology floating free); and the expulsion of the destitute members of the Characters’ Club from the cellar of the Scriver Building by the Historical Society for the transformation of the building into a museum. Each of these shadow-moments expresses a kind of excess, an energy bursting beyond the limits of their forms, a blurting out of things generated by the suppression of something else. This is one of the languages of mythogeography; one that you can intuit in the streets and then back up with a little desk-based research or other kinds of nosey-ing around. This excessive nature is the reason why, on a mythogeographical mis-guided tour of such places, it is always necessary to under-tell the narrative, to dampen it down a little, to mimic the grander narrative of sinking into silence in order to draw the audience into its extreme taciturnity, to which much has already been lost and because of which much may still be at stake. In general terms, this silence is the historical manifestation of the mythic abyss, the void around the rim of which we all hang existentially. Hence the personal importance and the social necessity for good faith, fidelity and witness in respect of the accidental poetries, the eroded signs and the textural ironies to be found in any place (and I have found them in every place I have ever visited) which are generated by the silencing of colonialism and other place-making forces; it is not enough to fasten on just any cipher going or to use these things for effect. Hence the need for dampening down; fidelity means connecting to a bigger picture, not always through complexity, but always by a sinking beneath the event horizon of the surface Spectacle, by putting oneself, at least a little, at the mercy of the hidden zero. A woman on Division Street, in bright sunshine, carrying a blue umbrella, said to me: “it’s my blue tree, it follows me everywhere I go”.

4/ Breadth & Narrowness There are no borders in space; a border is the antithesis of space. There is small and there are margins in places; but in space there is only folding and unfolding. Space defies power. Power is necessarily concentrated and bounded; otherwise it would not be power, it would be free energy vulnerable to democratic uses. Space is dispersive and subject to democratic abstraction. Space can be grasped imaginatively and imagination requires no armies. A refugee in a Jordanian camp can invade England if they have access to a translation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. That kind of dispersal is ‘out there’ as well as ‘in here’. For space is finely interconnected; it is both material and imagined. When in the 1960s the UK’s Royal Navy began to train its sailors to lay nuclear devices (on long timers, this was a first strike capability) in Russian ports, they practised with midget submarines on quiet waterways like the River Dart and the Exeter Ship Canal in Devon. The classrooms in a small seaside resort where I once taught improvisation and briefed classes for beach-based forays of site-specific performance, today resound to gunfire; they are used as rehearsal space for anti-terrorist actions. Big things are prepared in small places. The margin folds back to the centre. Those of us who feel left out are doubly tricked – first geographically, then subjectively – any marginalisation is only partly real and partly a belief enforced upon us. We have been recruited into a conspiracy against ourselves. On returning from Minnesota to Devon I plunged immediately into making what was billed as a ‘mytho-walk’ on the Dartington Estate. Re-exploring the woods on the estate, a place I had not visited since teaching site-specific performance at the College of Arts, I wandered up a narrow unmarked path that abruptly ended at an overgrown and impassable gate. I could see beyond the barrier a sweeping vista of green fields /21

Touch and Texture An alley can be an escape route, a tangent, a short cut. It can be a crude innuendo for a part of the body. Its naked bricks provide a solid prop on which figures can lean, pose, support themselves; a place to hide from prying eyes, a sidestep away from the blatantly public. Names are carved in the brick to represent and state identity in self, love, comradeship; baked surfaces with just enough resilience to hold onto the shapes of alliances and statements for around the same time as the most resilient of human bodies. There is something in that brown and red and pink that is fleshly and meaty. There is something in its crevasse, its ravine-like walls, something of the crusher and the adventure, the delivery route that serves as a half-world for audiences waiting for a show, for couples negotiating the ambiguity between desire and reciprocation, for someone exhausted taking a moment away from the world. The sandiness has this sense of torque and anticipation, where the brick is baked smooth it has something of its relief.

and woods and hills. I intended to use this spot as exemplary of the picturesque landscapes that my students had mis-read as the pseudo-early-mediaeval landscapes of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings until Peter Jackson got inside their heads and turned Tolkien’s Middle Earth into a mountainous New Zealand terrain. However, this vista turned out to include that expanse of Early Mesolithic abattoir and meat packaging operation I mentioned above. Such shapes or traces in the ground are rarely celebrated as the marks of an important heritage; never granted the significance of a foundational text like a Bill of Rights or a Book of Common Prayer. Yet, in that quiet field is a blueprint and a ghost of an almost-industrial slaughter and mass-production, at least as important for how we live today as, perhaps more than, Magna Carta. Yet, these killing fields are everywhere unrecognised. And in similarly rarely-visited spaces there is the same history of inclination and flow that was always probably more important than the names, numbers and machinations of the monarchs and their lieutenants. In popular discourses these paradoxes are described in a binary language. The “narrowness” of everyday lives is contrasted to the “openness” and breadth of history. This ‘natural’ tension supposedly explains the impulse of the city-dweller to escape from the encroaching walls of her urban personal life, to spend a while in the outdoors and open air. Such ways of telling things keep the open from the narrow, the everyday from the historic, the geographical from the literary. In opposition to this, mythogeographers do not escape from one place to the other, but find and explore them curled up inside each other. Openness is not in one place and narrowness in another; they are different characteristics of the same places. This is part of the ‘and and and’ characteristic of mythogeography; of speaking of one’s own place as if it were space, never completed, always in motion, floated free from the binding and restraining power of identity and the binding and

restraining identity of power. What is usually narrated as a doubleness or an opposition, in the space of mythogeography returns as a series of folds and loops, writhing and connecting and embracing the open within the narrow and the narrow within the open. The array of reflective surfaces created by this interweaving illuminates the narrow self-interests at work in the open space of grand narratives; the churning of their curved edges excavates the grandeur in the common symbols painted on the sidewalk by maintenance workers. If only we were to start pulling on the connections, the whole thing might swing around. At the end of my first class – on Bridge Square and Division Street – with Cinema and Media Studies students from Carleton College, I set the class, in groups, the task of exploring and generating ideas for a mis-guided tour. One group came back with the idea of turning a building on Division Street through 180 degrees. 5/ Individual embodying an idea As I sat on the train to London, on my way to catch my flight to Minneapolis, the first phrase I re-read from Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World was “he embodied an idea”. The respect accorded to me at Carleton, as both a visiting scholar and a guest artist, magnified the alarm that I now feel as I recall these words. Since, thanks to Facebook’s vendetta against noms-de-plume, I dropped my various thin disguises – Crab Man, Mytho – I have entered an exchange market of ideaindividuals under my own name; and though in the past I have suggested that the proliferation of individualised terms for various psychogeographies (Tina Richardson’s Schizocartography, Nick Papadimitriou’s Deep Topography, and so on) might efficaciously swamp and sink the currency of all such neosophies, if anything, ever since I wrote that, the supply of these new terms has dried up. Instead, the tendency to /23

Sidewalk Poem in Bridge Square “I discovered in Northfield that a key driving force for any mythogeography is in the erosions, erasures and silencings; cultural factors that are often hidden or latent and that “power” the unpeeling of double meanings, simulacra and the like. The usual process for such discoveries combines planned research with spontaneous experiences enjoyed on foot and unpredictable associations, which sometimes become (embarrassingly) whimsical. So, for example, this poem embedded in the sidewalk is eroded just where the words “rain fell” occur, and so “rain fell” becomes “rain felt... at someone’s umbrella”. The poem is developing its own strange imagery as the frost and the sun become its co-poets. Mythogeography invites you to be open to encounters with instabilities in what you thought solid, to work and walk with rain, frost and radiation.”

become a pseudo-commodity has intensified. then, when I did, our conversation stalled. This is where I An idea-individual acquires, by no work of their own, an failed in Northfield; this is where mythogeography is failing aura; plus the illusion that a passing acquaintance or brief too. It lacks the reliable sociability, the ‘magic square’, the encounter (an online exchange, for example) somehow trans- guarantee of spontaneity, trust and web of octopus arms mits something of that aura to another. The ideas themselves that sustains the real nomad. It is partly a personal failing; are increasingly by-passed. All market goods accrete an image, hence the need (expressed above) to fade gently from my role of course, and once a disguise is renounced any mythogeog- embodying an idea. rapher is in danger of selling themselves rather than their When the Carleton scholar Carol Donelan suggested after processes. my second public talk on the Carleton College campus that When I identified ‘Anonymous’ (celebrated with a hooded the walking group of the dérive or ‘drift’ might be thought statue by Miklós Ligeti in Budapest) as a hero, I was right to of as something close to, or a variation of, ‘the mob’, exemdo so. Mythic personae carry ideas, without the misfortune plified by the gathering of many small walking groups to of personality or presence. Disguise is a means to live the participate in mass trespasses like that at Kinder Scout (Derdisembodied life of an author, to set one’s words free to be byshire, UK) in 1932, she rattled my complacency. I had grown re-formed and re-a-lies-ed by others; in other words, to be too accustomed to the mildly stressful leadership of walks taken seriously as ideas rather than as fashion accessories – performance walks and mis-guided tours – which are both or personality traits. I am not sure how easy it will be to useful things-in-themselves and exemplary interventions in re-anonymise, but I have set myself the task of making a everyday space, but are not the motor of mythogeography. pilgrimage into disguise over a year, to slowly fade from the The motor is always the ‘drift’ or dérive, the sociable, leaderpublic real, and slip behind new pseudonyms until the time less and destinationless wander with shifting themes and comes to disappear. pilgrimage-like symbolisms. This dérive is a simple way to take back some of the miss6/ The Mob ing pleasure-surplus that has been subtracted from us – and from our public spaces – by various means including rent, On my first day in Minnesota, John took me to a ‘shit-kickers’ exploitative labour and a Spectacle that turns its consumers bar for something to eat. Outside, across the road from the into unpaid producers. In the ‘drift’ this recovered surplus bar, were two powerful motorbikes, with expensive leathers reappears like the nervous emergence of things the Specthrown across the tanks. I was impressed by this demonstra- tacle has never ‘seen’ before, spectres and unexchangeable tion of trust. Later, after meals and beers, in a place I loved artefacts, and an ‘under-selling’ (a restrained telling) of the to be, by the bikes again, we got into conversation with a route. So, in Northfield, after beginning a ‘drift’ at the Maltfarming family; the children were all sat together in the tipper o-Meal factory on Fifth Street West, we ended up by leaving bucket of a dinky off-road buggy-thing. a small shrine of detritus, centred around a tiny bird skull After the ‘Blazing Worlds’ walk we all went to Hogan that we had discovered in the thing-rich verge of a car park; Brothers for a hoagie. The mother of the farming family in fact, the whole of the ‘drift’ had taken place in the car park. was there and came over; I didn’t recognise her at first and Along the way we had left a narrow museum of finds on a /25

A Blazing Worlds Walk “I took the structure of my walk, and its title, from the novel The Blazing World by Northfield native, Siri Hustvedt. Her title, and some of its spirit, derives from a much older work, The Blazing-World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In this work, Cavendish the writer enters the novel as a character, and becomes amanuensis to the Empress of an imaginary country percolating with intellectual debate. As a scribe, Cavendish the character is dissatisfied with her handwriting, complaining that “my letters are rather like characters than well formed letters”. The basement of the original Northfield Bank was, coincidentally, once a meeting room for a “Character Club”, the original sign for which still survives. This club hosted regular meetings of the town’s “characters”—mostly single, garrulous, sometimes

bibulous and contentious—so they might have a place to gather other than in the streets. When this venue was finally closed by the Historical Society, with its clients returned to the sidewalk, I like to think that the characters might have marched up the steps onto Division Street as characters, as actual letters. For example, as they then spilled into Bridge Square, Pimples Gilligan would have been seen to be an ‘I’, while Walking Charlie Brooks was quite clearly an ‘A’. In the Square we can imagine all of these letterforms milling about. Perhaps, over a day a word might emerge. Over years there could be whole paragraphs assembling. These would appear by chance, and be difficult to read, part of an indecipherability which, if we maintain fidelity to it, will produce a change in our own stories.”

kerb, consisting of stand-out stones picked from a concrete island of ornamental chippings. Recently, I have increasingly been invited to make presentations about walking and to lead walks. These invitations (like that to Northfield) have afforded me platforms to pass on the good news of the drift and mythogeography, but they have also diverted my focus from the drift itself. Being in Northfield – because things went so well – made me realise that what I want most is something different from the role of walking artist. I want people to walk mythogeographically, but under their own steam; not led, not guided by anyone, least of all by me. I want to be a part of walking groups, not lost, not out ahead, not in charge of the score or speaking the script, not unable to see for having to look, not unable to enjoy for having to satisfy. I want to return from my position of responsible leadership and from the obligation of being representative of the ideas to a place among the irresponsibilities and sociabilities of the mob. Before travelling I had sat (!!) for two weeks preparing my walks in Northfield. Such was my anxiety that my feet inexplicably blistered (although I was not walking); so much so that I could barely stand. A psychosomatic reaction to that common feeling of being an impostor, of having to shed a layer of fraudulence; my body had created a false second body of rashes. Involuntary trembling, shaking my certainty, accompanied my obsessive preparation. Like blisters after a long walk, or the dizziness that comes when walking under a hot sun, these psychosomatic signals are friends who join the enchanted things that shimmer all around us – the simulacra, the accidental land art, and so on – making each of us a thing enchanted. The disrupted walker is never alone, even when feeling abject; our symptoms are parts of a crowd, a march, a mob, a Fortean procession of damned data. Having neglected my comrades in the mob, they came back to me in the form of good ideas, nervous rashes and shivers.

In Northfield I learned to be selfish again; to be far more unrelenting in making pleasure a principle. Since returning from Northfield, I have made all the same mistakes, and have had to learn the lessons all over again. But now I am turning down the offers, I am preparing to ease back from public or representative roles, out of the dim spill of the Spectacle that has barely touched my work. I am making contact with walkers, making time to dérive sociably. Maybe when I make my final performance-walk, in Plymouth or Manchester or wherever, maybe I should place myself in a bag and have the walkers drag me where they want. Or hand over my leading to the walkers in a number of conceptual bags; and let the bags lead us. Carol’s suggestion/ question has shifted the ground from beneath my walk; and that means understanding everything differently from now on. Priorities have been rearranged. It has set a time limit on compromise. Because bodies are subject to time and, for me, both time and body are walking out on me fairly soon, I need to use both more wisely; which means less responsibility and more collective joy and jouissance. 7/ The compromised body as an agent of joy On the ‘Blazing Worlds’ walk – my two and a bit hours misguided tour around Northfield – I was carrying a sheet of paper, a form I had found online and printed off. The form was intended for those participating in the Wayfaring Man programme of the Northfield Masonic Center. The programme encourages freemasons to visit other lodges and boost the attendance figures at their rituals. On the form there is a space in which the wayfarer is asked to list any “travelling trophies” collected on their visits. I never found the right moment on the ‘Blazing Worlds’ walk to unveil this document; it remained a hidden foundation (a zero) for the surface architecture of the journey. /27

Picnic Table with Game Top The park table has a patterned game board, like the black and white tiles of a Masonic temple, representative of the binding together of darkness and light. Here, though, the red and black squares signify blood and darkness. Such structures are all around us; little giveaways in the parade of appearances. It has been suggested that Bridge Square represents “planned boredom”, but to a keen eye and a body with an openness to association, it offers a volatile experience where conventional meanings erode and morph.

On the ‘drift’ all the walkers are the ones that embody the power of a zero; for there is no idea other than that which their embodiments can conjure. On these walks, the body is not a figuring of any idea, but an agent of jouissance in the whirling of many ideas, images, principles and materials around each other. This generates a reparative dance (sometimes), an eye for roads to nowhere (perhaps), an attraction to symbolist tangents (always). These are jouissant because without a centre or a sun (only a hidden void) the walking bodies become the points around which everything swings. The wider the freedoms they can express, the deeper the attractions they have to navigate and manoeuvre. I have not been thinking enough about these wonderful bodies. In my head, ‘The Blazing Worlds Walk’, like so much of my work, was all about narratives, ideas, places, textures, images and objects like the domino shapes and the Malt-oMeal ‘Golden Puffs’. However, when I first saw John Schott’s photographs for this book I was very shocked; I had imagined that these would be mostly (maybe, only) images of buildings and vistas, perhaps some signs and a little detritus in the gutter. Something deadpan that allowed the texts and imaginaries of my time in Northfield to float diaphanously across the town. Images of space that would let the mythogeography speak for itself; and allow me to take a step backwards. Instead – pow!! – John had put my body (sometimes in relation to other bodies) in image after image. Not just that, but he had found me in certain efficacious dynamics, in generative tensions, with the spaces and people I was among. Even when I remembered that he would have chosen these images from a host of less promising examples, where my clumsiness would be far more evident, I was still surprised at the shapes I had made with blood, bone, flesh, muscle, my Uncle Les’s suit, my Dad’s watch and my cap. I was particularly drawn to the images of my hands; in John’s photographs they seem to

have poise, as if the shaping of the fingers, and their relation to things and surfaces, had been carefully thought through and competently executed. How had I got there, like that? Half a century ago, while taking my Cycling Proficiency Test (aged about ten), another cyclist knocked me off my bike. The skin on my knuckles was cut away and I hit my head on the road. A cycling safety official bandaged me up, drove me to my home, and dropped me off, but no one was in. Alone, I began to see the familiar spaces of our house in three, four and five versions simultaneously. Perhaps, it was then that I first understood how an altered or heightened body might be a medium for seeing multiplicitously. Well into my 50s, I went for a job interview, to play a part in a performance. I thought they might want me to act as something like a tour guide; something I could do easily. Instead, to my horror, what followed was a three-hour dance audition. Somehow I was chosen, and this led me eventually to touring a 70-minute duet with dancer-choreographer Jane Mason, getting detailed feedback notes from Wayne McGregor (possibly the UK’s leading contemporary choreographer; rather overwhelming but very helpful) and now working with choreographers Melanie Kloetzel and Siriol Joyner on walking, dance and movement-related projects. In Northfield I had participated in a mass improvised dance through one of Carleton College’s buildings (and initiated a little introductory moment for it), but I had not thought of our ‘Blazing Worlds Walk’ as a dance until I saw John’s images. Why not? Had I been too fixated on the contingency and inadequacy of my bodily presence? Not only had my feet blistered just prior to leaving for the USA, but for some months prior to my arrival, my visit had been in question, due a mysterious and never-diagnosed illness (probably an exotic virus) that left me bleeding in one of my lungs and often too exhausted to leave the house. For someone whose recent /29

creative working life has been built around walking, this was painfully ironic, with the potential to be rather more consequential as I was repeatedly tested for life-ending conditions. The tests were always negative. In John’s images I see some of the lines that the illness has drawn in me; they discipline some of my usual sloppiness with a more pronounced marking of time and contingency. I am very grateful to John for showing me that they are there. Given that I had come to Northfield to teach, and to share ideas gathered together across almost 20 years of walking arts practice, I ended up learning an awful lot; including the necessity of reconfiguring ideas that I had thought of as fixed and fundamental to what I do. I became aware of the need to work through pleasure more, to evangelise more and to reconstruct mythogeography as something sociable and convivial, as something people do together. I learned (and continue to learn since) to attend more, not less, to my own body as a site of inadequacy and illness that provides its own route for itself as a vehicle and agent of pleasure. That psychosomatics – and, equally, healthy somatics – can be machines for reaching out and touching each other. That with their tentacular meshing of senses and the way they make observable the spectacle of insecurity in our minds, they – along with buddleia – are among my best and my most important allies in seeking change through enjoying. .

8/The ‘talented’ walker ready to pounce My colleague at Plymouth University, John Matthews, has proposed that ‘talent’ is a kind of suspendedness, a structural capability. On the performance walk I made on the Dartington estate after my return to the UK, I learned from one of the participants that the nickname of the famous eighteenthcentury landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was not a reference to his competence, but rather to his belief in

working with the capabilities of the terrain. When I first heard John Matthews describe his ideas I was minded of those moments in sport when a player suspends thought and reflective choice in order to act spontaneously, what in the context of a performance in the tradition of Grotowski I have heard called a “total act”, an act contained to itself, an act made by an actor not for the audience, but, perversely, instead of the audience. Such a “total act” is not a representation of another action, but is a thing of integrity and discreteness produced without planning or reflection, and yet with balance and precision; it is all about being prepared, ready, ‘on edge’ and open to tripping over into action. In sport this has something to do with leaving an action until the very last moment that it can possibly be done, keeping open the ‘edge of chaos’ for as long as is feasible without missing the opportunity. A performer who can position themselves on this edge can hold an audience breathless at the possibilities of even the simplest action (my example would be watching the actress Maggie Smith pour herself a whisky, the audience on the edge of their seats, in an otherwise mediocre piece). On the sports field the ‘talented’ player puts the opposition in a permanent state of uncertainty and indecision, which, unless they too respond with a similar action-deferring ‘talent’, they will attempt to resolve too quickly, show their cards too early and be defeated, grasping at air. In the walk, this ‘talent’ is manifest in not leading and not choosing too early, but sustaining preparedness and a kind of ‘instead of’ or ‘to the side of’, so that the walker can for a while be just one more factor in the here and now of the space, allowing things to move and act and flow until there is a tide to catch or a good turn to explore. Paradoxically, this has little to do with improvisation, which is likely to bludgeon the walk into the shadows with its overflowing energy. It is more about a rigorous rehearsing, both mental and practical (thinking about, and going on, walks), until the dilemmas /31

Bank Building The walk stopped here to reflect on how corporations appropriate occult or religious symbols. This is the entrance to what was originally a bank. The iconography of its design mimics the shape of an Egyptian “pylon”, the portal through which a soul or spirit energy – the ka – passed on its way through the afterlife. Which may have been how some of its customers felt on occasion...

of choice increasingly drop away and impulses rise and are followed before a decision even needs to be considered, let alone taken. This is the opposite of improvisation’s resort to the most violent or the most erotic impulse when it is not sustained by technical disciplines; instead, by repeatedly walking, the walker learns to become ‘transparent’, practising a calm and extreme openness to the experiences and capabilities of the route, so the walks increasingly take on the quality of narratives without walkers. The route becomes the walker. The prepared walker, by becoming transparent, passes through places as if he or she were the ignored ghost of it. The prepared walker becomes a haunting but not a frightening or interesting presence. The prepared walker’s transparency allows others to see the place through the walker; not by their leading or narrating, but by emptying themselves of leadership and narrative. The walker may be colourful and exotic, like the photographic slide transparencies once regularly projected on living room walls at family parties; through the image the bumps and grooves in the wall are highlighted. So, by their preparedness and transparency, a ‘talented’ walker illuminates their route; and their deferral of action allows those they are with to imagine their own fading into ‘talented’ agency. 9/ Dread space During my stay in Northfield I led a ‘philosophical walk’ beginning at the Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College. Openness to a place’s capabilities and receptiveness to its unrealised probabilities are parts of that philosopher’s concept of ‘dread’; by which a sufficiently sensitive person is able to transform a feeling of sourceless fear into a preparation for an experience or act of liberation. This involves a walker seizing on the opportunity signalled by the ambience of ‘dread’ in a place;

grasping that the absent ‘source’ that triggers this ‘dread’ is the overwhelming mass of possibilities of this particular site and situation. In Northfield I found just such a space on the ‘other side’ of the railway tracks, in a liminal zone between the centre of town and the suburbs. Two functionalist but now mostly unsigned and unmarked buildings were entering redundancy there. In a line of trees between the two buildings a TV lay on its screen (a sign that the Spectacle was dampened here). At the four corners of the rectangle around this dread space were two railroad crossings (at one of which I met Scott, who showed me on his computer the abstracted movement of the approaching and departing trains), a freemasons’ temple and an aquamarine hair salon with a porch full of sea creatures. Facing the salon in a garden, with what looked like Jasper Johns’ ‘Flag’, was a standard garden-store cherub, beheaded, its skull lying at its feet, the empty plaster interior exposed. These exotic fringes all took a pace back to allow the untrodden greens and purples and dandelion seeds of the meadow-like verges to spread themselves out, allowing space for the long corrugated wall of the enigmatic barn or warehouse to amaze by its expanse of grey nothingness, spoiled by three blurry graffiti images, painted over and simplified, sigil-like symbols of what was being deferred here. One like a blank-faced silhouette, the second like a whirling star, and the third like the mathematical constant ‘pi’ (π); the irrational number which ‘prevents’ a circle being squared – and thus the magic of any pillar-like menhir whose surface can be unfolded into a square – except when in a zero equation (that indecipherable Event that will rupture all maths). The three symbols amplified the ambience of ‘dread’, provided the conclusion of ‘The Blazing Worlds Walk’. Myself and two volunteers physically modelled the graffiti images while I explained how the three spectral figures might be interpreted as the three key forces at work in a provisional /33

Traffic Island “Just across the way from the old bank building, I entertain some more ideas from Ancient Egypt: the notion that the universe itself was first manifest as an island. While in the distance the shapes of the city’s power grid are suggestive of Egyptian pylons and obelisks, on the traffic island, we are symbolically stood on a “benben”, a representation of the reef that arose in primordial waters to become the cosmos. To the Ancient Egyptians, this island arrives at the same moment as the first god, Atum the Sun God, appears, similarly unprecedented and ancestorless. As a student of place and myth, I am attracted to an origin story where mythic place and person come into being at the exact same time and are one and the very same thing. As for humankind, they are born from tears of joy that flow down Atum’s face. My own approach to space I call mythogeography; it is an interweaving of place, story and laughter.

Northfield mythogeography: 1/ the whirling of the weir current and the energy for the mill wheel caused by the geological fault, 2/ the hidden face of the proto-spectacle as manifest by the James-Younger Gang’s Raid and the launch of Echo 1, and 3/ the floating free of information from an uncomputable equation. I rather suspect that if the three sigils had been lain one over the other, they would form an amplituhedron. (All this maths? The ‘zero’ and now ‘pi’ (π); given that I can only engage with them as written ideas and not as numbers, algebraic computations or geometry, what possible legitimacy is there in my using them to describe the intuition of space by a walker? Well, there is a paradox here. On the one hand the ‘maths is out there’ – so, leaf distribution in plants occurs according to the mathematical progression of the Fibonacci series of numbers; you can see the maths – while on the other there is a crisis of representation: as Richardson and Mandelbrot pointed out, there is, for example, no measurable length of a coastline, its roughness means that its length is dependent on how it is measured and, therefore, what part of it is measured, rather than on what is actually and wholly there. Representation, no matter how precise its own terms, is always approximate and, once it gets down to the quantum level, can only be measured by (predictable) probabilities. So what if the processes that are hinted at by maths more than philosophy turn out to be accessible to human intuition; as the magnetic poles are to the robin’s eye? Then we have something important to learn; if not – what has been lost, as long as we don’t entertain illusions of grandeur, we have much to enjoy? So, intuit the earth’s turning, the curve of the horizon, your gravitational attraction to the moon...) I am learning to walk without uneasiness in the anxiety of possibilities, enjoying ‘dread’, being comfortable around the unresolved and avoiding snatching at resolutions or jumping to conclusions, finding comfort in the almost-out-of-control at the edge of chaos. I try to retain alertness to the narrow path and stay calm with an understanding that presence on

the rim of the abyss can be sustained and is the mythic reality of existence. Together these constitute the liminal space of dread across which it is necessary to range in order to feel without fear for the frightening expanses, inside and out; the existential space in which it is possible to be by doing and not conform to being by the need to be performing. 10/ Walking with your imagined self Walking in Northfield, I was very often alone. Once away from the Carleton campus or downtown, it was rare to see other people out walking. On sunny days some folks were in their gardens or on their porches. I mostly had meetings with things: an arch of lilacs, a garage sale, a pile of breezeblocks crying out in amazement, angry electricity, a memorial text about a beam of light that had appeared at a memorial service, blossom collected in the shape of a chicken, the Lynchian window display at Larson’s, a leaf relief in the sidewalk, a druidic (really) offering of sunflower seeds left by a stream, signs for ‘Careful Painting’, a cenotaph-shaped chimney stack, glacial erratics arranged as garden ornaments, the Maple Street (Twilight Zone) and Elm Street (‘Nightmare On’, obviously) signs that put me in mind of fantasy horrors, a memorial plaque in the murdered Joseph Lee Heywood’s garden, rust figures fighting on a metal lamp post outside El Triunfo, an elaborate plaque on Division Street describing a mural that’s no longer there, rail tracks that disappear into the lawn of the Canvas Church office... It would be easy to mistake the green spaces and wide streets of the suburbs as ‘uniform’ or ‘characteristic’, but within the weave of the detailed texture plenty of tensions and ironies are thriving. Once the space of the route begins to seethe for the walker, she becomes part of that seething. Because I was drawing on Northfield-born Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World for a four-part structuring of my performance-walk, I had brought with me one of /35

Railroad Tracks “The railroad passes right outside the window of my hotel room. While walking its tracks early in my visit to Northfield, I met Scott, a signal-keeper for the Burlington Northern Railroad. As two people who trade in “signals”, industrial or mythogeographic, I sensed we had something in common. We exchanged small gifts. I gave Scott a map of Northfield, Worcestershire (UK); he gave me a pouch in which I carried small items on “The Blazing Worlds Walk”. This railroad crossing is surprising to me: it is open and without barriers, unlike those we have in Britain. Yet I came to see it as a powerful divider, marking off the final, liminal zone of my walk from the rest of the town. As we stand at this crossing, the town center lies behind us, and the mysteries of the Masonic Center and enigmatic buildings lie ahead.”

Hustvedt’s sources, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess been hinting at above, leavened as it is by everyday disof Newcastle’s The Blazing-World, published in 1666. I’d ruption, but to go for the full surreal enterprise. Don’t. read it before and cited it in my book Mythogeography When I heard Kathryne Beebe at Carleton College describe (2010), but now, on my lone wanders in Northfield, I be- the practice of virtual pilgrimage in mediaeval Europe – which gan to realise how it might be applied in a meditative walk. allowed nuns who were confined to convents or chose not In Cavendish’s The Blazing-World, a young woman is ab- to journey to be able to mimic a pilgrimage in their cells by ducted and taken aboard a ship by men who are soon killed mental images of travel and veneration, and by small physiin a sudden storm. The storm drives the boat ashore and cal and devotional actions translatable into many miles of the young woman discovers that she is washed up in a walking – I could imagine a similarly fabricated provocation land of bear-men, bird-men, fly-men and so on, all of them even for my own walking. physicists and philosophers. On being made Empress of Just as trying to explore a town with the wrong map this land, the young woman begins a set of experiments can trigger its own revelations, and a healthy suspicion, so in ‘natural philosophy’ (physics) and requests that a spirit- a virtual ‘drift’ might provoke a kind of self-aware double amanuensis is provided by her court magicians, preferably walking; a going and not-going in the same walk. The body the ghost of Aristotle. On being advised that the spirits barely moves yet the mind goes far. This turns on its head the of the dead are far too stuck in their ways for entertain- usual pre-digestion of a site by tourists, who before they arrive ing the novelties of experimental discovery, the Empress at the iconic scene already know what they are going to see: opts for a living spirit; that of Margaret Cavendish the “some of us didn’t know how to appreciate the country until Duchess of Newcastle, and so the author enters her own fic- Joe Byrne, the landscape painter, started painting it. Then tion and becomes the Platonic lover of the Empress’s spirit. we could drive out on Highway 246, and say, ‘There’s a Joe Here was a model for me as a lone walker, washed up Byrne’, and admire it” (Fantasy Northfield, Nancy Soth, 2001). in alien suburbs and subject to a storm of my own reveries Given that many of the surviving mediaeval guidebooks and unfamiliar resident objects. By following the example only mention shrines and ignore the roads between them, of The Blazing-World, I could enter my own fancies as the au- perhaps in a pre-romantic period there was very little sense thor of them, scripting and recording my encounters with that the route itself might be sacred, but was, rather, a profane objects and empresses on a plane of sidewalk invention. obstacle to be overcome in order to get to the magic shrine. Be the spirit-amanuensis of your own earthbound ven- The going was but a penance to be endured and transcended tures. Walking alone is a fine way of learning how to blend by arrival. hard things with soft imaginings in the same journey. The neo-romantic and contemporary pilgrimage is different but just as extreme; its walk is privileged and 11/ classic pilgrimage to ambulant Architecture democratised – Phil Cousineau suggests that the Appian Way and a local car park are equally appropriate (our Malt-o-Meal Kierkegaard advocated belief in the gospel story not de- ‘drift’ was a kind of pilgrimage then) – and arrival is no longer spite, but because of, its patent absurdity. There is, then, realised by the transformation of space at the opening of the a temptation to embrace not the pilgrimage-lite I have shrine, but by the transformation of the self along the way. /37

Masonic Meeting Hall Hiram Abiff was King Solomon’s master mason at the Temple in Jerusalem. Hiram was killed in an unsuccessful attempt to steal his ‘keys’ to the Temple and unlock the Masonic secrets: the principles, architectural and philosophical, of the Temple’s construction. Hiram, however, was unforthcoming, and was murdered by his assailants. This story has clear parallels to the Jesse James raid, where clerk Joseph Haywood lost his life successfully repelling the James gang and refusing to unlock the safe [which, ironically, was already open, though the bank robbers never thought to try the door]. The rituals of Freemasonry are said to have been developed from the conversations and gestures of the junior Masons around the body of Hiram, as they sought to remember and recover the secrets lost with the life of their master. This is a classic “event”: the surviving initiates, the junior Masons, struggle to remain true to the indecipherable, striving to find something new and lasting in the face of irreplaceable loss.

Arriving at the shrine is little more than an opportunity to deregulation. Pilgrimage along a road of things, however, celebrate the apotheosis that has already happened. What reorients the focus to the ugly matter of work and production, this removes is the ‘otherness’ – weirdness, numinous and to medieval clumsiness and striation, to the hierarchy as well alien divine – from the heart of pilgrimage; relegating it to a as the dispersal of space. On such a rough journey the pilgrim consumable, if uncomfortable, exotic surplus. Ordinariness is no longer obliged to progressively dematerialise (emptyand the route remain burdens to be endured; this means that ing her rucksack as she goes), but instead to take on a new all neo-romantic pilgrimages are partly virtual, whether they thickness, becoming increasingly loaded in the sustenance are walked in a cell or across a continent. For the shrine of and resilience of the things of the way, an ecological pilgrim the neo-romantic pilgrimage – the transformable self – is wading through, and held up by, sloughs of responsive things. always present and might be reached at any time. Pilgrimage Re-inventing pilgrimage provides no easier a track than becomes, then, a smooth and mobile space. The soul is not the Enchanted Ground of Bunyan’s nightmarish book. The saved, but relocated to the ego. neo-pilgrim’s version of dérive is no more righteous. The word Consistent with the mythogeographical principle of push- “sauntering”, so says Thoreau, derives from French idlers who ing romanticism to be itself but more extremely so; what if collected money on the pretence of being on their way to the we privilege the way of the pilgrim not primarily as a meta- Holy Land, ‘la Sainte Terre’. To be a ‘Sainte-Terre’, a saunterer, phorical or psychological ‘way’, but as a route of cows, soil, is to combine artifice with the relaxed and destinationless gates, whisky bars and trees? What if we make it a rolling occupation of, and immersion in, ill-defined space, getting Canterbury Tale in which animals and things are the main by without trying too hard, a small business New Ageism. characters? ‘The Sleeping Policeman’s Tale’, anyone? Only by This is the evil inside the heart of any ‘drift’. It is the colonial walking with and through such stinking things and squeezy revenant, appropriating the surplus of pleasure not from giant organisms can a sacred way open up for this pilgrim. corporations but from passers-by, which survives inside even There is nothing sacred about the Camino, until a walker the most radical of walkings. Beware, not so much of Giant makes it so. Wherever the priesthood of all pedestrians Grim (you’ll see him coming a mile off), but of The Lust of applies, the things of the road float free from serving as meta- the Eyes (behind your own). phors and can be themselves, in turn freeing the metaphors The next step for everyday pilgrimage, if it is to escape to resume their allegorical duties. Take away the dictatorship neo-romantic, new-age opportunism, is towards ambulant of the shrine and the Camino is contingent upon salvation by architecture. Building new shrines to divert the travellers, pace alone; the landscape lights up in numinousness. installing trip hazards on the way, overlaying mazes across “The city as if it were unborn... fingers of metal, limbs the path, building trick-walls and digging trenches and tunwithout flesh, girders without stone. Signs hanging without nels, taking down signs and planting trees (a taxi driver in support. Wires dipping and swaying without poles”. (Ray Mil- East Anglia told me that the lines of oaks we were passing land in “The Man With X-Ray Eyes”) would once lead a traveller to a monastery. I have no idea if Contemporary spirituality (worked out in memes and that is true. She also told me of a white deer in the forest, inserted into advertising) is generally subject to revelation and, later, I saw it) and turning the hotels and hostels along as a branch of neo-liberalism, part of a process of general the way into labyrinths and funhouses. I think the life-sized /39

An Enigmatic Building This strange building bears no sign of its purpose. It sits here, a question mark in the landscape, leaving us with a sense not of emptiness, but the intuition that there might be even more here than we can cope with. The bush in front blocks its door. At the right, in the trees, a discarded television set, its screen face down in the dirt, is hidden from view: a disavowal of the Spectacle. In the back yard of the building is a weathered post, a modern ‘menhir’ peppered with staples, the messages and proclamations gone; the circular knots in its wood rhyme with the dots in the Domino’s sign.

simulation of a tree trunk made in stone in Oaklawn Cemetery on the edge of Northfield would make a good diversion if placed in view from the pilgrim’s way on a distant hill or in the far part of a field, visible and enticing for being “not quite right”. At the same time, ambulant bricoleurs can get to work on routes that already have their own accidental hazards, temptations, modern traditions, cities of destruction, relics, miracles, puzzles and labyrinths; re-naming and re-consecrating them. Making adjustments and additions where necessary. When a recent discussion broke out on the Walking Artists Network’s online platform and some suggested going on the Camino to disrupt it, while others advocated making new routes, they were both right. Paradise is not a destination but an ambulant architecture. 12/ Ritual and repetition The ideas in this booklet came to me while walking, repeatedly, the same streets, mostly in downtown Northfield, looking again and again at the same unyielding things, scratching at their veneers with a mental fingernail. Then, in frustration, heading off at brief tangents in order to run new analyses into my tracks. Looking behind things; at the reverse sides of symbols and monuments. Stepping to the side; covert dancing with the inanimate. Allowing into my story things that are rarely seen and never pointed to; uncovering them to the gaze of the floating eye above Tiny Johnson’s store. As rehearsal for ‘Blazing Worlds’, I walked and re-walked its route, repeating to myself, under my breath, its narratives, fictional and historiographical. Wondering if the cop in the patrol car thought me suspicious. The stories began to tangle up in each other and in the buildings, with the surface ripples and scratches. I checked repeatedly on the shadow left by the changing of the Domino’s sign, on the unsettling

modernity of the hitching posts outside the museum, on the synergy between the sign warning against falling into the wheeling current of the Ames Mill weir and the recycling sign on the Bridge Square bins. When these tiny landmarks were not snagging and falling away, they were braiding and strengthening. These repetitions were walked at the expense of the explorations and encounters that I might have made more of during my stay. But I think I found things in Northfield, inside and outside of myself, which I would not have found in other places. Repetition and the short-circuiting caused by being speaker and audience both served to occasionally hurl out an unexpected thought; unlikely combinations of details were illuminated by a hybrid way of theory-witness. Or just talking to myself. At Domino’s I was reminded that the company’s ‘Avoid the Noid’ advertising campaign was halted in the 1980s when a real Mister Noid took two of its employees hostage and, among other demands, insisted on receiving a copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s novel The Widow’s Son. At the corner of Second and Linden, opposite the Freemasonry Center, I was re-reminded that, of course, ‘the widow’s son’ is Hiram Abiff (not Hiram Scriver!), for in the genesis story of freemasonry, Hiram the widow’s son is the master mason on the site of Solomon’s Temple. Like Joseph Lee Heywood, who when threatened by outlaws refused to surrender his keys to the safe, Hiram Abiff refused to give away the combination numbers to the secrets of masonry and was murdered. Although Hiram had many apprentices, he had not confided in any of them and so the secrets of masonry were lost forever, indecipherable in the corpse of Hiram, fallen deep beyond the event horizon of his murder. A gaping void of indecipherable multiplicity opened up. So, what freemasonry perpetuates today is a ritual based not on Hiram’s secrets, but on the gestures and comments made by his apprentices as they /41

Gray Metal Shed Another, final, enigmatic structure: a long expanse of gray metal cladding, completely unmarked as to purpose. Nevertheless, we find three marks or figures, “characters” even, at the end of the shed. They represent the three essential themes of Phil’s provisional mythogeography of Northfield. On the right is the symbol of energy in Northfield, a turning figure we mimic by perching one-legged on the diagonal. On the left is a crude Spectacular figure: a symbol of the proto-Spectacle created when Jesse James and his gang rode into Northfield and their faces were as yet unknown. In the middle, is a reminder of π [pi], the computation which never ends, a concatenation of figures that is representative of deregulation and things floating free. The walk ends with this elucidation of symbols; this mythogeographic excursion in Northfield, Minnesota is over.

gathered around the zero of their murdered master’s body and contemplated what they had lost. Walking a place repeatedly is rather like turning your body over to Hiram’s apprentices. You are soon well aware that the deep secrets of that place are never going to become directly available to you; so, instead, by collecting the vague gestures of by-standing detritus and the snatched fragments of conversations between leaves and errant plastic bags, you make up your own ritual of the place. When the dissolute and lonely Characters Club were evicted from their cellar ‘hideout’ under the Scriver Building back in the 1970s, I imagine the members emerging, blinking, nursing hangovers and not quite blurry enough for comfort, stepping into the sunlight and turning into characters, in the sense of letters: ‘Walking’ Charlie Brooks becoming an ‘A’ with two striding legs, ‘Jumbo’ a large ‘D’, and ‘Pimples’ Gilligan something with a dot, like an “i” or a “j”. I see them back on the streets, jobless and a little the worse for drink, mostly solitary but occasionally meeting up and forming the odd word, a sentence over a month, say, a long paragraph emerging slowly through a season, until just as a short story, a hymn or maybe even a whole liturgy seems to be forming, one by one the Characters disappear and the manuscript of Bridge Square is left forever incomplete. What a mystical movement we might have begun with them! 13/ using architecture as a magic wand ‘New menhirs’ are accidental versions of the ambulatory architecture that once combined as waymarking signs and ritual objects for prehistoric people in Europe. They were probably their first architecture. There are thousands of remains of these ritual markers still to be found, stones – sometimes carved, often not (indeed very often the carvings, though

millennia old, were later additions rather than the work of the original architects) – erected to mark a route, or a special point on a journey. More recently, at a time when there seems to be little appetite to mark ambulation architecturally, accident, serendipity and coincidence have combined to provide the walker with a forest of new menhirs. I found a number of examples in Northfield; one behind the liquor store on Fifth Street West with a skewed metal box full of broken electrics, another in the form of a rusty milk churn under the sign for Tiny’s Hot Dogs (“Tiny’s Famous Sauce”), there are some “mysterious monoliths of mystery in Nirthfolde” that have been identified by Northfield artist David Lefkowitz, and a telegraph pole on the corner of Washington and Fourth is so full of nails and staples it might be a giant Nkondi fetish keeping a watch for the malevolent. The one by the railroad crossing on Third Street West has been reduced to the height of a child, its lichen-covered stump topped off with cracked walnut shells, and there is another that stands like a sentinel in the liminal zone between the two anonymous buildings off Linden Street South. The pole of attraction of a new menhir swings things back towards junctions and magic squares, towards connectivity. It is a facilitating symbol of the human octopus and the social web; a mark that – despite its apparent isolation and its relation to journeying – connects and reconciles. While the general motor of the void is driven by loss and trauma, the new menhir is all about reparation and the reconciliation of opposites. It is something ancient and modern, accidental and ideal, holding volatilities in suspension. It represents a pole of opposition to the abyss, silence, vacuum or void. A pole around which things can swing and can be unfolded. Holding nothing up, it is detached from half its function. A good example is the broken pillar often seen in graveyards; though it represents the “break” made by a person from life, it is also a connection between one world and another. The /43

stone tree in Oaklawn Cemetery is a new menhir. It would be a mistake to think of the new menhir as the lingam to the zero’s yoni. It is not a phallus piercing the sky, but more like the obelisk in Ancient Egyptian architecture; it is a frozen ray of sunlight falling downwards, a lightning conductor, a fixed version of the maestro’s baton or the wizard’s wand. It is the successor to the magic tree; (“people look at trees and they think the substance of the tree comes out of the ground... but the trees come out of the air” – Richard Feynman). A new menhir draws down its power from the air, from above and from all around, not from below. It is a conductor. On the street it is a channel that brings big things close to hand. A new menhir marks the spot where ideology touches the ground and becomes substantial. It marks the spot where deregulated images put down a footprint and can be caught. They are there to be touched, leaned against and held as connectors to something or somewhere else, channels to thinking and wands for moving things by something other than broadband. 14/ provisional mythogeography I had already decided on a structure for my mythogeographical guided tour of Northfield before I arrived. This absurdity was certain to unravel. But it constitutes a technique: to assemble a route by using bird’s eye views (in my case Google Maps), or the random fall of dice which “will never abolish chance” (Mallarmé), or some other schema begging to be tripped up. For me, the unravelling happened on the other side of the tracks, when the Freemasonry Center was not where I expected it to be. The space resisted my attempts to walk my map onto its sidewalks. What hid itself from me, left me disoriented for just long enough to transform the ‘Blazing Worlds Walk’. I was lost; not in the sense of not knowing where I was but of

knowing that ‘where I was’ was not there. At first I thought that there was maybe nothing there; at least, nothing of any use to my walk, that I had blundered into nowhere. In fact, I had simply slipped from one space to another, from somewhere full of intense detail to a space that was smooth and philosophical. What I had been assembling carefully fell back; the overarching ‘quest’ of my walk was no longer to make a magical and kaleidoscopic local narrative consisting of multiple tales and artefacts, for now I could develop and describe a provisional mythogeography of the town. Thus the walk in Northfield became unusually generalised, the picture exceptionally big, in a way I have rarely achieved elsewhere; not thanks to me, but thanks to the enigma of the missing Freemasonry Center (in fact, it was there and I was not). It invoked the mystery that freemasonry perpetuates today based not on Hiram’s secrets, but on gestures around his empty vessel. Hiram was Joseph Lee Heywood, without whose sacrifice there would be no Jesse James Days in Northfield, no spectacle of annual re-enactment, nor would the proto-Spectacle (the origin story of something much bigger) have formed on that day in 1876 with so many layers of performances and anonymity, prefiguring the ambiguous, improvisatory, spectacular and violent modus operandi which now pervades virtual space. By finding the ‘zero’ of a missing ritual ‘Center’, I was able to read the three graffiti runes on the long grey metal wall as three mythic motors at work in Northfield. Instead of an entertaining but indecipherable multiplicity built up of local details gathered by careful research, getting lost had allowed me to generalise about Northfield. Not knowing where I was, I had instead to ‘guess’. There can be no finished mythogeography, so a provisional one – one that proposes big pictures based on disorientations not orientations – is the best kind. /45

15/ Fighting the Spectacle with the power of zero Northfield has long been the intense site of a parade of Spectacles: in 2001 when folk turned out to see a promised Pierce Brosnan and found a cardboard cut-out of the actor instead; the dairy princess whose image was carved out of 68 pounds of butter in one seven hour sitting; the detailed and descriptive plaque still displayed on Division Street today for a mural that is missing; the game of Shadow Social played in 1890s’ Northfield when “a girl was placed between a strong light and a sheet” while “on the other side of the sheet, an auctioneer sold her to the highest bidder, and the fellow making that bid had to take her to supper” (Soth); trained alligators at the Airdome; Leo the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion displayed in his “private cage” (a telling concept); a eugenics photoplay which together with the KKK apologia ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and the naive and manipulated pacifists of ‘The Battle Cry of Peace’ constituted the big money reaction in the wake of cinema’s early innovative disruptive thrill of reality overturned; the “three yards of dirt” hauled in for an ‘In Search of Jesse James’ TV programme; Major Drummond’s “clever and Interesting” dismemberment by two lions on West Water Street, “spectators... helplessly watching the carnage” and his funeral procession; the cadavers of Bill Stiles/Chadwell and Clell Miller dug up from Northfield Cemetery on the instructions of Henry Wheeler and shipped as “two barrels of mixed paint” (after medical school dissections, Wheeler kept the skeleton of Miller, the outlaw he shot dead from the second floor of the Dampier Hotel, in his Grand Forks office); the 50,000 copies of photographs of their corpses sold in a month (their eyes held open with cocktail sticks); the tanned breast of a “colored woman” on display in Schilling’s ‘Hobby House’; the spasmodic appearances of the bust of Schiller; the Goodsell Observatory selling time to the railroads; Reformed Druidism emerging from its hoax-like origins to become a

nature religion with internal dogmatic disputes... Before I came to Northfield I wanted to address everything but the James-Younger raid of 1876. I gathered details about the snowglobe repairs of the late Dick Heibel. The meaning of the dots on the Domino’s Pizza sign. The reasons for the bankruptcy of Sheldahl Inc., memorialised at the Bridge Square fountain. The centrality of the seven minutes of the raid to the official narrative of the town seemed unbalanced, oppressive; an arm-twist on the narrative of the place. The more I understood about that raid, however, the more those seven minutes seemed to knit to my attempts to escape it. The Domino dots, my broken snowglobe brought from Naples, the satellite and nuclear missile manufacture: these were not escapes from the web of the raid, but parts of it, and connections to a wider net of workings. The reparative tendency of mythogeography – to interweave small details – is also its way of trapping trauma, defining the losses from a place, articulating the bigger picture in a small town. The more I had tried to put aside the James-Younger raid as an exotic anomaly that had entrapped the town’s narrative, the more that everything else I found out about Northfield was re-appropriating the seven minutes of the raid as part of a singular flow of time. The raid constituted a proto-Spectacle in itself; the ground for the raid had been laid by Jesse James’s attempts to reframe the narrative of his gang by his letters to the press, by the gang’s fine horses and long cream dusters, by their striking collective appearance and yet their capacity to remain anonymous due to the absence of a national visual media (their names were known but not their faces), by the instability of their disguise (making anti-Union jibes in a Northfield bar), by the claim by one member during the raid that there were 40 outlaws waiting outside the town, and by the framing of the raid as an economic strike against deposits made by major players in the Union cause (as the final act of the American Civil War). /47

Photo: Mike Hazard

Jesse James is comparable to the figure of Karl in Schiller’s play ‘The Robbers’. Questioning himself after a slaughter of innocents during one of his gang’s raids, Karl swings around when approached by a Priest who has come to offer an amnesty to his men if Karl hands himself in. Karl denounces the Priest and the authorities for their corruption, greed and hypocrisy – just as Jesse James conveniently accused those, such as landlords, he robbed – instantly discarding his own doubts and warming to an idealistic theme until he offers himself self-sacrificially for his men. Given the James-Younger gang’s origins in the guerrilla-style ‘bushwackers’ led by William Quantrill and ‘Bloody Bill’ Anderson, operating in an ambiguous space of family feuds, punishment raids and unrecognised Confederate affiliation, there is something of a terroristicSpectacle logic to the trope here; the greater the moral doubts of the combatants the higher the ideals expressed and the more ruthless the methods necessary to match them in resolve, realness, slaughter and purity. All together these elements make up a picture of marginal ‘agents’ seeking to engage a nascent and slow, but expanding national media, to wed their immediate theatrical and threatening presence with romantic narratives and news-priorities. This partly explains the continuing appetite (as the ghost desire of Jesse James’s) to re-perform the raid repeatedly; even the official museum tour in the bank is vivid, full of detail and narrative-driven. A few minutes that illuminate no bigger picture, but which are the symptoms of the biggest picture, the Spectacle; that tendency in developed economies driven by the development of mass media and, now, digitalisation, to replace a commodity-driven social order with an image-based one; the victory of the sizzle over the sausage. Such was their state of efficacious suspension (for making Spectacle, but not for successfully accomplishing a bank raid) that, once in the bank, the gang members neglected to try the door of the safe (it was unlocked!) and instead engaged

the cashier Heywood with threats to obtain the combination. Heywood was part of his own Spectacle; only days before the raid he had been asked what he might do in exactly this situation and had replied that he would resist. Now, he had entered his own narrative, but not like the Duchess of Newcastle as a spirit, but as the flesh and blood that would soon be splattering the ledger, flesh and blood which is displayed today by the volunteer museum guide with a flourish as the velvet covering is pulled aside from the pages flecked with Joseph Lee Heywood’s brain matter. The ledger records a day’s break after the raid. Then the bank re-opens. The two large “Union” deposits in the vault of the First National Bank constituted a belated return to bank savings after the Panic of 1857; the James-Younger raid was no cornershop robbery, it was an existential threat to the town. When the citizens reacted and began to fire on the gang, they created a crossfire, a spontaneous web of lead, while the gang were still firing in the air, expectant that their Spectacle was sufficient to cow the raid’s spectators. The locals, however, were not “helplessly watching” the clever and interesting dismemberment of their town; they were running for guns. Guns as saving tools of an economy. The swiftness, resilience and effectiveness of the response was seen by Cole Younger as unparalleled; yet what it manifested was an over-determined violent-economics, a web of promises to protect and pay, a web of golden puffs (of promises floated free from silver and gold), finely traced in bullets, and it cut down Jesse James and Cole Younger’s gang. In that moment, when Northfield stood super-positioned as a ghost town, the citizens collapsed the wave and the viable spectre turned, instead, into a grid of utopian hyper-velocities that would flee to form The Spectacle. As the raid began, Jesse James and five other members of the gang stood at the bridge over the Cannon River, close to the site of John North’s first mill, built there in 1856. The following /49

year, 1857, the run on the banks, the Panic, brought North’s business to its knees. Only by the intervention of Charles Wheaton in 1859, buying out North’s financial interests, was the town able to continue. The Panic had been brought on by ‘paper railroads’ (1857’s equivalent of sub-primes): investment in and speculation on the future of ‘railroad companies’ formed without any material resources and consisting mostly of aspirations and titles. In many ways this was the first moment of financial deregulation, not only by its detaching of investment from something actual to invest in, but in the response of authorities (including the UK government) who, to refloat economies, allowed banks to lend paper money without an equivalent sum of gold or silver in the bank. Here was a floating free of finance equivalent to what would soon be attempted by Mallarmé in poetry, the ‘liberation’ of signifiers from signified: “to define is to kill”. Just as the James-Younger gang were super-positioned in 1876, half-Spectacle and half-force, so the (by then) Ames Mill was entangled (as a generator of part of the capital in the First National Bank) and suspended between ghost town and survival. On my ‘Blazing Worlds’ performance walk, I asked one of the participants to carry a large bag of Malto-Meal ‘Golden Puffs’ for me. At the Ames Mill we broke it open and everyone was invited to consume a handful. After telling the story of deregulation and linking it to the previous narrative layer of Spectacle, I stupidly forgot to make the connection between ‘puffed gold’ and deregulation. But maybe it was not necessary; sometimes forgetfulness is a firm but benevolent editor. The entanglement of two global tendencies – ‘Spectacle’ and ‘deregulation’ in nascent forms (I had already extrapolated the parthenogenetic principle of deregulation from Atum, the creator force of the universe, via the Egyptian Revival pylons of the former 1910 State Bank on Water Street), that together with globalisation and terror, in accelerated

forms, are primary guests on the late late show of neoliberal capital – demonstrates how such spaces as downtown Northfield are never small nor marginal. Instead (with a little paranoid enquiry and obsessive focus) they quickly reveal their connections and meanings. This process of connection is reversible and invisible, effected by introducing an infinitesimal change to some quality or property of the system via its surroundings, but without adding to the ideological entropy (“nothing happens here”, “going downhill”, “not like it was”) that hangs about such places like gangs forever suspending a raid. Speed is of the essence; once an element of change is introduced to the system there will be a window during which its fundamental properties (say, ratio of volume to pressure, or pressure to volume) must race, struggle and labour clunkily to catch up with that initial, graceful (no heat of passion must be lost to the overarching system) and effortless change; during that limited time there is an invitation to change without expenditure. The system, for a moment, is determined by the zero in the entropy column; reality is ruptured. This is the same dynamic as Alain Badiou’s ‘event’, indecipherable because infinitesimal, undetectable by the invasive algorithms of the reciprocal Spectacle, the means to save subjectivity and to recast the situation by allowing the infinitesimal, undetectable and indecipherable zero to briefly dominate the set. This process, explained on the ‘Blazing Worlds’ walk through the fortuitous site of the ‘Grand Theater’ on Washington Street, can theoretically be prolonged by re-encoding the situation, increasing the domain of anomalous indecipherability within the situation. It is this process that is at work when thousands of small, indecipherable units, usually angry and idealistic citizens, combine locally and ‘marginally’ to unpredictably deliver a general or centralised effect on a situation – as with the electoral successes of Sanders, Trump and Corbyn or in activist escalations such as those at Occupy or in

Tahrir Square. These are not revolutionary ‘events’ in the oldfashioned sense of irreversibility; they are (thermodynamically) reversible and can only be sustained for a period by the intensity of the re-encoding of the situation by its participants. The most important strategic position for participants in such events is to understand that a reversal – perhaps defeat, or just stasis, worst of all reaction – is inevitable and to be prepared for, even welcomed; that these settings back are a return to affordance, to the equilibrium in which to seek not to repeat the recent success (which will be fatal), nor to plan for a similar transformation, but by which to return to the paranoid and semi-mystical search for the next zero, the infinitesimal detail that will provide the next unexpected catalyst. Confident that other almost zeros are out there, emptying.

process by which a mythogeography connects texture and detail to the big picture and how, as a common practice it can change situations and not just comment on them. A recent reviewer (author of the eerie, Chris Lambert) of my The Footbook of Zombie Walking, describes me as “less Zombie Apologist and more Zombie Evangelist”, and since visiting Northfield, I feel a greater sense of obligation to evangelise. I feel the Golden Puffs bearing down on me. There is no point in me knowing all these things about lamp posts and milk churns unless others can turn them to their own purposes as wands or batons. There is no point in a reader, you, who agrees with me; but only in one (you, perhaps) who is getting mad enough to do this stuff in their own and better ways. If you are; I’m in the wobbly drift-mob by your side.

16/ Evangelising

17/ How can we do this stuff in our own ways?

Preparing for Northfield, walking in Northfield, performing in Northfield, listening in Northfield, being questioned in Northfield, and reflecting on Northfield illuminated the

It wouldn’t be your way if there was anything under this heading, would it?

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