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 Published in this First Edition in 2018 by:

TRIARCHY PRESS
Axminster, England

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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,
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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 celebra-
tion 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 Work-
shop 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 mythogeog-
raphy 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 docu-
mentation 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 Depart-
ment of Cinema & Media Studies for supporting the festival and Phil Smith’s residency.

/5
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 con-
crete 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.

/7
Starting

Some fifteen or so participants gathered at Bridge Square in North-

field, 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 associa-
tions 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 some-
thing like an erudite and caring octopus with a fan of pray-
ing 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 mythogeographi-
cally, 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 mytho-
geographical 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 unbal-
anced 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

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
Jesse James Museum & Bank Raid
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 theatri-
cal: 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 dis-
covered 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 pro-
posing 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 rela-
tion 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 weird-
ness 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 North-
field 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 pre-
cisely 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 Prog-
ress 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 pil-
grimage 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 dark-
ness 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-tsu-
nami 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 mul-
The 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 quan- Before the amplituhedron was deduced by theoretical
tum mechanics. The amplituhedron is a simple geometrical physicists at Harvard and Princeton, I had somehow intu-
shape (‘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 … mineralogi-
order 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 math-
in 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 mean-
ignoring 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 sug-
The 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 Google-
vision 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, simi-
lar to those I found in Northfield. In the case of ‘A la Ronde’
these included a chapel, teaching rooms and iconic monu-
ments that marked the demise of ancient civilisations; instru-
ments 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 recla-
mation 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 Dar-
tington 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 col-
lege 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 philanthro-
pists 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 south-
west 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 geo-
logical 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 mil-
lion 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 mis-
siles 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 telecom-
munications 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 blurt-
ing 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 mythogeographi-
cal 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 manifesta-
tion 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; fidel-
ity 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 perfor-
mance, 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 imme-
diately 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 iden-
tity 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 negotiat-
ing 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 sig-
nificance 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 con-
trasted 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 every-
day 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 mytho-
geography; 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 Divi-
sion Street – with Cinema and Media Studies students from
Carleton College, I set the class, in groups, the task of explor-
ing 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 idea-
individuals under my own name; and though in the past I
have suggested that the proliferation of individualised terms
for various psychogeographies (Tina Richardson’s Schizocar-
tography, 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 mytho-

geography 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 experi-
ences enjoyed on foot and unpredictable associations, which some-
times 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’, exem-
do 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 (Der-
disembodied 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, leader-
public 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 miss-
6/ 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 Spec-
thrown 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 Malt-
farming 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 Blaz-
ing 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 meet-
ings 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 presen-
tations 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 irresponsi-
bilities 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 Plym-
outh 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 con-
ceptual 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 mis-
guided 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 docu-
ment; 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 give-
aways 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 experi-
ence 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 (some-
times), 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-o-
Meal ‘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 imagi-
naries 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 gen-
erative 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 eventu-
ally to touring a 70-minute duet with dancer-choreographer
Jane Mason, getting detailed feedback notes from Wayne
McGregor (possibly the UK’s leading contemporary chore-
ographer; 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 blis-
tered 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 conse-
quential as I was repeatedly tested for life-ending conditions.
. minded of those moments in sport when a player suspends
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 eighteenth-
century 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
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, keep-
ing open the ‘edge of chaos’ for as long as is feasible without
missing the opportunity. A performer who can position them-
selves 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 medio-
cre 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 origi-
nally 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’, practis-
ing 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 frighten-
ing or interesting presence. The prepared walker’s transpar-
ency 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’ begin-
ning 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 experi-
ence 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 ware-
house 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’, pro-
vided 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 obe-
lisks, 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 cur-
rent 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 breeze-
blocks crying out in amazement, angry electricity, a memo-
rial text about a beam of light that had appeared at a me-
morial 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 orna-
ments, 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 Hus-
tvedt’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 dis-
of 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 physi-
in 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 prin-
ciples, architectural and philosophical, of the Temple’s construc-
tion. 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 (empty-
and 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 tun-
without 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 Cem-
etery 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, tempta-
tions, 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 Art-
ists 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 danc-
ing 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 narra-
tives, 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 free-
masonry, 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 combina-
tion 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 indecipher-
able multiplicity opened up. So, what freemasonry perpetu-
ates 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 con-
catenation 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 archi-
tecture 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, acci-
dent, 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 Wash-
ington 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 connectiv-
ity. 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
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machine. Fortunately I had presence of mind enough to keep my
watch going, as well as the captain’s chronometer, for otherwise I
would have had no knowledge of the passage of time. Once or twice
the scarlet women visited the ship, but seemed nervous and wary,
and made no effort to approach or molest me, merely gazed about
as if searching for something—perhaps for me—and then retiring.
Several times, too, I ventured on deck, and peered over the ship’s
side, but saw none of the giantesses, although with the glasses I
could see crowds of the beings about the city in the distance.
“Also, I noticed among them, several individuals who were much
smaller than the rest, and who appeared to be men, although I could
not be sure. I also discovered, and almost lost my life in the
discovery, that the atmosphere of this place is unfit for human beings
to breathe, and is thick with sulphurous fumes. Close to the ground
these fumes are so dense that a person would succumb in a few
moments, but at the height of the Chiriqui’s decks, nearly seventy
feet above the rocky bed on which she rests, the air is breathable,
although it causes one to choke and cough after a few minutes. And
I am sure that the houses of these giant beings have been built on
the summits of the basalt columns in order to avoid the suffocating
fumes of the lower levels. Later, too, I learned that the membrane-
like frills upon these creatures are a sort of gills, or as I might say,
natural gas-masks, which by some means enable the beings to
breathe the sulphur-laden air. But even with these, they avoid the
lower areas where the fumes are the worst, and only visit them when
necessity arises, which accounts for my being left in peace, with
none of the horrible women near the ship, for days at a time. I
discovered the presence of the sulphur gas on the first day when,
attempting to eat, I removed my gas-mask. Suffocating as I found
the fumes, I was compelled to endure them, and gradually I became
slightly accustomed to them, so that now I have little trouble in
breathing during the short time it takes me to eat my meals. At all
other times I must wear the apparatus, and I thank God that this is
so, for I know now that it is the gas-mask which so far has preserved
my life.
“On the tenth day after my arrival I noticed a number of the
giantesses gathering about the huge, spherical airship which still
rested on its cradle near the Chiriqui, but which, I have forgotten to
state, ceased to emit its green or red lights after it had landed. Lying
there it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic can-buoy or a
floating mine, if one can imagine a buoy two hundred yards in
diameter.
“On the day I mentioned, all interests seemed to be centered on
the thing, and cautiously peering from the shelter of the deck-house,
I watched the proceedings. Presently several of the women entered
the sphere through an opening in its middle band; the aperture
closed behind them, and immediately there was a low, humming
sound as of machinery. As the sounds issued from the sphere, the
cables to which were attached the smaller spheres (which glowed
red when carrying the Chiriqui through the air) were drawn in until
the two smaller spheres were resting in recesses at the axes of the
large sphere, and where they appeared merely as hemi-spherical
projections. Then, slowly at first, but with ever increasing speed, the
slender rods about the large sphere began to move back and forth,
or rather in an oscillating manner, until they were vibrating with such
rapidity that they appeared merely rays of light. Slowly, majestically,
the immense globe rose from its cradle, and gathering headway,
leaped upward to an immense height. Then, tilting at an angle, it
passed over the city and headed for an immense pinnacle of rock,
which, fully seven miles from where I stood, reminded me of a
gigantic chimney or funnel.
“Although it was barely visible to the naked eye, I could see it
distinctly through the glasses, and I watched it with the most intense
and concentrated interest. For a few moments it remained, poised a
hundred feet or so above the pinnacle. Then, from the towering,
tapering rock, a terrific jet of steam roared forth, and striking the
great spherical machine above it, hurled it upward and beyond my
vision. Give close heed to these words, whoever may, by God’s
grace, be listening to what I say, for upon them may hinge the fate of
the human race. Only by this means, by being shot upward by this
titanic jet of steam, can the airship leave this subterranean land and
emerge through the crater by which it entered bearing the Chiriqui.
Within this place it can sail at will; once above the crater opening it
can travel anywhere, although it cannot land; but by some unknown
force or magnetic attraction or freak of gravitation the machine
cannot ascend through the crater, although, when over it, it will drop
like a plummet through the opening. And herein—for the sake of
humanity, listen to this and remember my words—lies a means of
destroying the machine, for by surrounding the crater with powerful
guns the sphere can be shelled as it emerges and utterly destroyed.
To attempt to do so as it returns to the crater would be suicidal, for
once in the outer air, it emanates vast quantities of most poisonous
gas, and all living things within a radius of several miles would be
struck down unconscious, as were my companions on the Chiriqui.
Even if gas-masks were worn, it would be most difficult to destroy
the machine as it descended, for it travels with incredible speed in its
descent and, moreover, the terrible creatures who man the thing
would see that enemies lurked near and would find some means of
destroying them, or by the mysterious magnet force they control,
would draw even the heaviest cannon to the machine as an ordinary
magnet draws needles or iron filings. So if the thing is to be
destroyed, it must be done as the machine emerges from the crater.
Would to God that I could tell where the crater is, but beyond feeling
sure it is at the summit of an Andean peak, I have no means of
locating it.
“But I was telling of what occurred on that tenth day when the
spherical airship was projected from my sight by the blast of steam.
As the machine vanished, the women who had watched its
departure, returned to their city, and I swept the landscape with my
glasses, wondering at the bleak, terrible scenery and bizarre colors.

“As I focussed the binoculars upon a level plateau, perhaps a mile

from where the Chiriqui rested, I gasped in surprise. Clearly defined,
lay the remnants of what had once been a steamship! Had I given
the matter thought, I might have known that the Chiriqui was not the
first vessel to have fallen a victim to these awful beings; but the sight
of another ship’s skeleton came to me as a terrific shock. As nearly
as I could judge, the vessel had been dismantled, for only the great
steel frame remained, with the mighty boilers and other portions of
the ship scattered about, and gruesomely like some mammoth
creature lying disemboweled upon the earth.
 “I was consumed with a mad desire to visit that pathetic wreck, but
I knew not to what dangers I would be exposed, once I left the
security of my ship. Not a being was in sight, however, and carefully I
studied the land, visually measuring the relative distances between
myself and the wreck, and between the city and the route I must
traverse. Having already observed that the giantesses moved slowly
and cumbrously on foot, I at last decided that even if they attempted
to intercept me I could regain the Chiriqui before I was overtaken, so
I threw caution to the winds and prepared to undertake my
hazardous journey. Slinging the loaded rifle on my back, with the
revolver at my belt, and still further arming myself with a keen-edged
fireaxe, I hunted up the pilot’s ladder, lowered it over the lowest side
of the ship,—which was also the side farthest from the city,—and
clambering down the Chiriqui’s lofty sides, leaped down upon the
ground. To my amazement, I landed in a dense jungle of dry, tough
vegetation which rose to my shoulders. From the deck, looking
directly downwards, I had thought this dull-green growth a short, wiry
grass, and, of course, in its relative proportion to the gigantic women,
it was no higher than ordinary grass to a normal human being. It was
a wonderful example of the theory of relativity, but my mind was not
interested in scientific matters at the time, and I merely gave thanks
that the miniature jungle,—which I saw was composed of giant
lichens—would afford me cover through which I might sneak in
safety, and with little chance of detection.
“Without much difficulty I made my way to the other vessel, and
found her even more dissected than I had supposed. Why the
denizens of the place had torn her to bits I did not then know, but
certain portions of her machinery and fittings had been left intact,
and, as I examined these, I made another and most astounding
discovery. Deeply engraved upon a brass plate was the ship’s name
‘U. S. S. Cyclops!’ For a space I stood staring, scarcely able to
believe my eyes. Here then was the solution to that mystery of the
sea, the disappearance of the collier, as laden with manganese, she
vanished without word or trace when off the Barbados during the
World War. No doubt, I thought, many a mystery of the sea had been
caused by the damnable work of these beings with their infernal
machine. But why, for what reason, did they capture ships? Why did
they carry off the unconscious persons upon the vessels? And why
did they tear the vessels apart? It was all a mystery which, in all its
horrible, gruesome, ghoulish details I was soon to solve.
“There was nothing more to be learned from the remains of the
Cyclops, and in safety I returned to the Chiriqui to find, to my
surprise and terror, that a gang of the monstrous females had
boarded the ship in my absence and were stripping her of
everything. But as they caught sight of me, all threw down whatever
they had and fled precipitately, leaving me once more in undisputed
possession of the ship. I was relieved at this, for it was obvious that I
had no need to fear the creatures. By now, too, I had formulated a
theory to account for this strange dread of a being who was a puny,
miserable thing compared to them. Unquestionably my gas-mask
rendered me a most grotesque and unknown creature in their eyes.
My remaining alive and active while all others upon the ship had
succumbed to the noxious gas had probably caused them to think
that I was a supernatural being. The fact that I could go about and
breathe the sulphur-laden air would cause them to regard me with
even greater wonder and superstition, and, as I found later, the fact
that I was never seen to eat, confirmed their belief that I was some
mysterious being against whom their gases and their deviltries were
of no avail.
“I had not much time to devote to such matters, however. Soon
after regaining the Chiriqui I heard excited cries from the land, and
looking over the ship’s rails, I found an immense crowd had gathered
near the empty cradle of the airship, and that all were gazing
upward. Following their example, I stared into the greenish void and
instantly understood. Descending rapidly towards the plain, came the
great sphere, and, suspended below it, was the hull of another
captive ship. And as I focussed my glasses upon this, I rubbed my
eyes and gaped. The dull gray color, the lines, the raking funnels, the
barbettes and gun muzzles left no room for doubt. Incredible as it
seemed, the captive vessel was a warship! What hope then had my
fellow men upon earth? What chance was there if these giant
creatures could send forth their flaming machine, and by it, capture
the fastest, most powerful war-vessels—all within the space of a few
hours?
 “Rapidly the machine and its burden approached, and presently
descended gently dropping the war vessel close to the Chiriqui. My
worst fears were confirmed. The vessel was an American destroyer,
the McCracken, and I knew that scores of my countrymen must lie
unconscious upon her, and in a few moments would be carried off to
some unknown horrible fate. What that fate was I had already
surmised. That first demonstration of the ferocious cannibalism of
the giantesses upon the Chiriqui’s deck had been enough to make
my blood run cold.
“But I had not yet guessed even a fraction of the true horror of it.
Scarcely had the McCracken been dropped upon the earth, when
the women swarmed upon her, and once more I saw the creatures
gathering the inert forms of men and carrying them to the city. And
rapidly, too, they commenced dismantling and tearing the destroyer
into bits. How they had accomplished this with the Cyclops had
puzzled me, but now I witnessed the process close at hand. From
the vicinity of the waterfall, lines or pipes were led to the vessel’s
side; presently there was the roaring sound of steam; dense clouds
of vapor arose from the cataract; the water ceased to flow, and from
the extremities of the lines or tubes twenty-foot jets of blinding flame
shot out. As easily as though made of wax, the steel sides, the
massive beams, the armored barbettes of the warship melted and
were cut by these jets, and as the pieces fell apart, the spherical
airship took a position above the vessel, and by its magnetic power,
lifted tons of the fragments, then sailing off, deposited them in some
spot beyond the city. It was then, as I saw the ship rapidly dissolving
before my eyes, that the inspiration came to me which may make it
possible for me to communicate with the outside world and may, if
God wills, serve to warn my fellow men of the fate which will
overtake them if these terrible creatures are allowed to follow out
their plans. As the jets of flame cut through the McCracken’s
superstructure, and the radio antennae fell in a tangled mass across
the deck, I forgot all else and rushed to the wireless room of the
Chiriqui. Here was my chance. If the ship’s radio transmitter was still
in working order; if the auxiliary battery was still charged, I might
send out messages which, small as the chances were, might reach
the ears of some of the countless thousands of persons who listened
each night at their receiving sets. I trembled with fear that I would
find the transmitter injured or dismantled. I shook with dread that the
battery might be dead. I felt faint with apprehension that the
message, if sent, might never penetrate the sulphur-laden
atmosphere or might never reach the outer world. And I realized,
with a sickening sinking of my heart, that even if heard my
communication might be regarded as a hoax, and no attention would
be given it. But I would do my best. The radio set had not been
molested. Everything was in working order, and I set myself the task
of transmitting my story each night at the same hour, repeating it
over and over again, until the storage batteries are exhausted, for to
get up steam and start the dynamos is beyond my powers. Had I
knowledge of Morse I would send my story by that code, but I have
not, and so—I must cease. For the love of your race and of your
dear ones listen, I beseech you, until I can resume.”

Here the message broke off abruptly, and Frank and I sat staring at
each other, fearing to speak lest we might interrupt or miss the words
which might come, and listening with straining ears at the head-sets.
For an hour we sat there and then, once more the voice spoke.
“The doom that I feared is approaching. I have been here for three
months and this will, I know, be my final message. Oh that I could
only be sure that someone has heard my words, that my fate has not
been in vain but has served to warn my fellow beings. But I must
hurry on. I have learned everything of importance. I have watched,
studied and have even learned to understand much of the language
of these beings. I found that there were men. They are puny beings
compared to the women, though ten-foot giants compared to normal
men, and they are cowed, abject, mere slaves of the females. Only
enough male children are permitted to survive to propagate the race.
All others are killed.
“As they reach manhood only those males of super-intelligence,
strength and virility are permitted to live. The others are destroyed
and—yes, horrible as it sounds, their bodies, like those of the
murdered infants and of the aged, sick or infirm, are devoured. And
as fast as the males attain middle age their lives are forfeited. Long
ago these beings subsisted upon the few wild creatures which
roamed their land; but long ago all these were exhausted and human
flesh became the only meat. There is no vegetable food, and for a
time the sacrificed surplus males, and the aged, provided food for
the race. But gradually the male births decreased, female children
preponderated, and with the increased population resulting, the
males were too few to nourish the others. Then, through what
damnable accident or design I do not know, the creatures went forth
in their airship and discovered the teeming millions of human beings
on earth.
“But the bulk of humanity was and still is safe from them, at least
until new means of attacking mankind are devised, for the globular
airship cannot approach the land. The very power it uses to lift the
greatest steamships and carry them off, draws the machine to the
earth and holds it fast. But above water, which acts as an insulator
apparently, the apparatus can operate at will. And they have a two-
fold purpose in capturing ships. All the available metal in this land
was exhausted in constructing two of the spherical machines. One of
these never returned from its first trip, and only the one remains. To
construct more, these giant women plan to use the metal salvaged
from captured ships, until a vast fleet of the infernal things is ready to
go forth and wipe the seas clean of ships and human beings. And
the bodies of the men and women, struck down by the gas, are to
serve as food for these demons in human form.
“This is the most horrible, blood-curdling thing of all. Rendered
unconscious by the gas, the victims remain in a state of suspended
animation indefinitely, exactly as do grubs, spiders and insects when
stung by certain species of wasps and placed in their nests to
provide food for their young. Stacked in great storage vaults these
breathing, living, but paralyzed human beings are kept, and as
needed, are taken out.
“Already they have a supply on hand sufficient to last them for
over a year. Some of the Cyclops company are still preserved; there
are over three hundred from the Chiriqui, hundreds from other ships,
and the entire crew of the McCracken.
“All these things I learned little by little, and mainly through a
friend, for marvelous as it may seem, I have a friend—if friend he
can be called, a miserable, trembling, terrified male, who, doomed to
death, sought to escape his fate and sought refuge with me,
dreading my presence less than his doom, and hoping that such a
feared and almost reverenced being as myself might protect him. For
two months he has been my companion, but he cannot eat anything
but meat and the supply of meat upon the ship is getting low, and
sooner or later he must succumb. And the women, maddened at his
escape from their clutches, though not yet daring to approach too
closely to me, are getting bolder. Some time, at some unguarded
moment, they will find the poor fellow alone and will fall upon him.
And in his terror, in an effort to buy his life, he will, I know, reveal to
them that I am but an ordinary mortal, a man who eats and drinks
and who survived the gas by mechanical and not supernatural
means. But I will not be taken alive by these fearful female
cannibals. When the time comes, as I know it will, I will blow my
brains out, and though they may devour my body they will not rend
me alive. No more ships have been brought in here since the
McCracken was captured. But this I know is due to the fact that all
the energies of these creatures are being devoted to building
additional air machines. This work goes on in a vast cavern beyond
the city where tremendous forces, furnaces with heat beyond human
conception and machines of which we know nothing, are controlled
by the internal steam, the radiant energy and the magnetic powers of
the earth’s core.
“And now, again let me implore any and all who may hear my
words to give close attention to what I say, for here again is a means
by which humanity may combat and destroy these ghastly, gigantic
cannibals. The spherical air-machines are helpless from above.
Their magnetic or electrical forces extend only downwards. The
gasses they throw out are heavier than air and descend but cannot
ascend, and by means of swift planes, huge bombs and machine
guns, the things can be easily destroyed. And they cannot travel
without throwing off the dazzling green light. Only when motionless
are they dark. And so they will offer easy marks and can be readily
detected. So, I beseech you who may hear, that the governments
are notified and warned and that a fleet or many fleets of airplanes
properly equipped patrol the seas, and at first sight of one of the
green meteors rise above it and utterly destroy it without mercy.
 “Wait! I hear a terrified scream.... I am back again at the
transmitter. It was the fellow who has been with me. Poor devil! He
has met his fate, but after all it was the custom of his people, and,
moreover, he would have starved to death in a few days. For that
matter I, too, face starvation. The ship’s stock is running low; all the
food upon the McCracken was destroyed in cutting up that vessel,
and unless another ship is captured I will have no food after two
weeks more. What a strange thought! How terrible an idea! That the
awful fate of hundreds of my fellows would be my salvation! But I will
never live to die from hunger. I can hear the terrible screams of my
late companion on the deck outside. God! It is the end! The fellow
must have told the enraged females. His body has been torn to
shreds. With bloody hands and reeking lips they are rushing towards
the upper deck where I sit. They are here! This is my last word! God
grant that I have been heard! I am about to⸺”
Crashing in our ears came the report of a pistol.
The End

1 The message as it came in, was halting, and interrupted, with many unintelligible
words and repetitions, as if the sender were laboring under an intense strain or was an
amateur. For the sake of clarity and continuity, the communication has been edited and
filled in, but not altered in any detail.
2 The metropolitan papers reported the meteor on the eighteenth and stated it was
observed by those on the Chiriqui on the evening of the seventeenth, but it must be
remembered that the Chiriqui was in the western Pacific and hence had gained a day
in time.

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 1927 issue of

Amazing Stories Magazine.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A VOICE FROM
THE INNER WORLD ***

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