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Buller Walk

“It can now be exclusively revealed that the so-called ‘St


Michael Line’ – which supposedly passes directly under the
Norman tower of The Church of the Holy Cross, Crediton –
was part of an ancient flight path for the Nefilim’s UK
mining operation. Now follow me carefully…” (p.47, The
Golden Means, John Peake in Fortean Times, no 138.)

Vicky went to ask at the farmhouse. We’d all tried the


door. Matthew noticed that there was no lock, so how was
it secured? I tried again. I put my shoulder to it and it gave
way. I have never seen a church without any kind of sign or
marking outside before. Just the stone and the shape. It
stood in the garden of the farmhouse, the tracks of the
farm’s flatback vehicles curling around it, it stood in a large
‘lawn’ of dark green, with three large, glowering, druidic
trees leaning over the visitor as they walk up to the stone

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chunk of building – tree resisters to the axe of Boniface. A
loop runs in my mind: Boniface, tree, Tom Bombadil,
Warwickshire the leafy county, Jackie boy? Master? Sing
ye well? Very well! Hey down! Ho down! Among the
leaves so – greeno! Sally Brown she’s a bright mullato,
Whey hey she ups and go! She drinks rum and chews
tobaccy – spend my money on Sally Brown! Which is an
interesting colonial lyric for Miss Sidley the church
organist to be teaching primary schoolchildren in Coventry.
But what stirred me most was the song of the rebels led by
Trelawney who were going to show King James what
Cornishmen could do. After that tune I was never on the
side of a King again. The lyric was written by the Reverend
Stephen Hawker of St Nectan’s, Welcombe Barton. By the
only door to this church there was a strange assemblage of
material, perhaps part of the roof, the remains of some
repair or a bicumen sigil? There is no door for letting the
devil out. The damp inside ripples a folded 1920s Jesus
attended by four ‘representative’ children of the world,
tucked away in a wooden chest behind a screen. The plaster
bubbles. And various orders of service: A FORM OF
PRAYER TO ALMIGHTY GOD AT THIS TIME OF
WAR TO BE USED IN ALL CHURCHES AND
CHAPELS IN THE PROVINCES OF CANTURBURY
AND YORK ON Sunday the First of October 1939 and
then THANKSGIVING FOR VICTORY ORDER OF
SERVICE 1945. Something has eaten a route with
tributaries through the latter.

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Matthew finds the passage about
“ten rivers of oil” read at the Iraq
War Remembrance Service and
reads it from the lectern.

Hi Phil,

Vicky and I just wanted to say


how much we enjoyed that drift.
Must do more.

I've since remembered that the


Templars had an initiatory chamber carved into
the chalk under Royston High Street, which is also, it
seems on a cross-point
of the Michael and Mary lines. We visited it the summer
before last.
Everyone agrees the Templars used it for ritual purposes,
and even the
incredibly straight local historian admitted to successfully
dowsing the lines
right through the middle of the chamber. So it would make
sense that they'd
have been interested in the Collegiate Church of the Holy
Cross and the Mother
of Him who Hung Thereupon.

Also, we carried on with Flora Thompson's "Lark Rise" and


yesterday got to the
bit where she's describing the local kids teasing the local

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Catholics

"...Yet, strange to say, some of those very children still said


by way of a
prayer when they went to bed:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John


Bless the bed where I lie on.
Four corners have I to my bed;
At them four angels nightly spread.
One to watch and one to pray
And one to take my soul away."

So what happened to the 4th angel? Did some secret


knowledge get coded into a
a children’s prayer-rhyme? Vicky remembers that from her
childhood. By the
mid-70's it had degenerated to "Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John, went to bed with
their trousers on".

If I get a chance I'll do some websearching re:


Oriel/Asrael. I'll be seeing
an old friend in S.W. Ireland next week who switched me
on to this character.

all the best


m
--------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Matthew R. Watkins
School of Mathematical Sciences

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We found an extensive
set of farm buildings
utterly derelict and
overgrown. Vicky
reckoned there was ten
years of growth. It
looked like a century’s.
That under all this
manicured land and wood, waiting, is ten years of brambles
and rust before the animals start to eat and trample down a
clearing – a miniature generation-long era from Vico.

On the wall of the un-marked church near Tomhead Cross


were two mounted notes in an italic hand:

Fully six miles from Exeter, up steep hills and along


winding lanes passing on the way the village of
Whitestone, in the Deanery of Kenn, finally and
almost unexpectedly, we reach this little chapel,
hidden amongst orchards with a farmhouse close
by…. The ancient font… having been long
desecrated, was restored to its former use, after an
old example… Its existence goes far to conform the
statement that there had been a chapel here from
time immemorial.

Like Lidwell Chapel the church is far from any settlement,


suggesting it might be an appropriation of a far older, pre-
Christian site, consecrated in order to destroy, to cover and

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swamp, to cut down the tree rather than raise up the
building. It was dedicated to St Thomas until 1955…

…since no evidence of any previous dedication had


ever been discovered.

This liquid identity - St Gregory’s in Dawlish that became


St Michael’s by custom until someone discovered old
papers.

Mr Medley started the Exeter Diocesan Architectural


Society in 1841… Mr Medley built the new Chancel &
Mr Buller of Downes gave the new roof for the Nave.
The old font was put on a new base and Mrs Medley
the Vicar’s mother gave the new seats in the
Chancel…

“The FORM OF SERVICE for Institution and Induction


TO A BENEFICE in the Diocese of Exeter.

¶ Then the Archdeacon, taking the Mandate of


Induction in his hand, shall proceed with the Church
Wardens and the newly instituted Clerk to the church
door (the people turning so as to face the church
door), and laying the hand of the Clerk upon the key
or handle of the door, the Archdeacon shall say to
him after the prescribed manner:

BY virtue of this mandate, I do induct you into the real,


actual, and corporeal possession of the parish church…”

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After the re-opening on 14th September 1844, the
Vicar drove his mother, the Hon. Mrs Shore & Preb.
Cornish, back in his carriage with a hired pair of
horses, but the pole-strap was too loose and each
waddle downhill hurt the horses. And going down
Whitestone Hill one horse began to kick and both
bolted. After keeping the carriage straight down the
hill, it broke in two at the Nadderbrook at the bottom.
Mrs Medley was thrown out and killed, and the Vicar
and Mrs Shore were also thought to be. Preb. Cornish
was thrown out but turned a somersault and pitched
on his feet unhurt. Mrs Shore and Preb. Medley both
recovered after a long illness. During this illness Preb.
Medley was offered the Bishopric of Frederickton in
Canada and under medical advice on his recovery
accepted it… This is the account as recorded by an
observer.” 11.7.1960

Wonderful connections and dis-mis-connections - I'm just


searching for my
stuff on St Michael's, Mount D., to see if the Bishop at the
consecration was
the same guy at St Thomas In The Wild! let you know!
Yes, I had a great time
too! All the best, Phil

We came to an open level crossing and walked across the


rails. Matthew mentioned that some people think these
networks of steel have upset longstanding electro-magnetic
fields. Or may they have established something just as
good, but we can’t be bothered to apply anachronism to

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modernism? Surely postmodernism sets us free to do just
this? Not in the milk and water manner of Christopher
Penczak’s City Magick, but in a way that slides planes of
time to mesh with the respectability/non-respectability at
the edge of the academy.

I didn’t want to look at the map. I wanted us to slip down


the curves. To feel the suck from and the slide toward the
dips and basins. To grid in mind the mass of hills, not
equivalent to the graphs of attraction, but meshing across
them – walking a multi-dimensional route, depending on a
feeling for the invisible graph as well as navigating by
physical landmarks. We talked about the paths that run
along the tops of hills rather than through valleys, Vicky
wondering why the paths didn’t follow the sheltered way,
Matthew talking of the Ridgeway in Wiltshire where he felt
he was eased along by the previous walkings as if on one of
those moving walkways you get in airports. This, as we cut
from the road along a public footpath that seemed old and
snaked languorously round the hill top, smashed to
smithereens as we hit managed forestry, the senses

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fragmented, suddenly we were dropping down deer paths,
scrambling over barbed wire, sinking through the pine
needles in the hush of the hunched forest to reach a vehicle
track – the cool march, curving and swinging along the top
was now a stumble across an unstable floor of poking
twigs, barbs and ankle-turning holes. We eventually found
some yellow footpath arrows and took a route over a
stream. Once again it curved and snaked with the contours
of the lower hill, a drop to one side of us, a tunnel of
coniferous trees and then a descent into a mist that hung
onto just one short passage of forest. The mud was yellow
underfoot, great wounds waterlogged. This is where the
whole day has been bringing us and even though I’m
hungry and thirsty now and wished we’d found a village
with a pub, I’m happy again. Buller is about something that
is alive and rotting, composed by decomposition, stone
turning green, the road oozing underfoot, the air hung with
droplets, damp history’s clammy hand on our shoulders.

Matthew! Vicky!

It's him! it's him!! The same John Medley who flew angel-
like from the coach
crash on the way back from the (transgressive,
unwelcome?) consecration
(de-consecration?) of St Thomas in the Wild, perhaps as
much a cutting down
of those trees in that place as a Boniface axe might perform
("and I think
the little house knew something about it too"), it was he,
the priest who

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flew through the air and landed on his feet who then
became - "John Medley,
the Bishop of Fredericton, Canada, formerly Vicar of St
Thomas, officiated
at the consecration (of St Michael and All Angels, Mount
Dinham), on behalf
of Bishop of Exeter, Henry Philpotts, who was old and
infirm." (The Church of
St Michael's & All Angels, A Short History and Guide.)
What a
mythogeographical connection!! We should be able to
discover where the crash
site is (of course it could all be a 'theatre' for a ufo crash
with this one
surviving 'angel' who backengineers Tractarianism?) -
maybe we could begin
our next drift at the crash site (or set off from that pub at
Newton St
Cyres and head for the crash site with some sort of
algorithmic tic to stop
us proceeding too cartographically?) and work our way
back to St Michael &
All Angels?

Yours, over-excited,

Phil

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But of course I was wrong, it was Prebendary Cornish who
was the guardian angel that flew safely over Medley from
out of the coach and saved him.

We had begun at The Collegiate Church Of The Holy Cross


and the Mother Of Him Who Hung Thereon at Crediton.
Being ushered in to see the Buller Memorial we became
entangled with the Communion procession. I hadn’t
expected something that dominated the whole nave. “Some
love it and some hate it” one of the churchwardens told us.
She said: “Of course, Queen Victoria called him Reverse

Buller.” She does not respond when Matthew says: “He


invented the concentration camp, didn’t he?” A huge pack
of honking geese overhead formed a B. She was annoyed
that the royal coat of arms had been removed (and then
mislaid) when the memorial was installed. We passed a
builder’s merchants with a Tardis and a sideless shed made
of cast iron pillars, we passed Curfew Cottage looking for
Robin D Langhorne.

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We found a wall like a wave and a monument to St
Boniface – scarred with the shell and innards of a recently
thrown egg – an inset of him cutting down trees sacred to
an older religion in Germany. In the church porch there’s
an unpolished brass plaque: “H R H The Princess Margaret
Countess of Snowden received this Quercus Rubra
presented to Crediton by the Burgomaster of Dokkum, 6th
June, 1971.” In People’s Park Road a woman pointed out
Mister Langhorne’s house. He wasn’t back from church,
but his wife answered the door and encouraged us to call
again – gave us their telephone number – he would love to
talk to us.

That dank and misty morning the houses in Crediton were


covered in creeping green mosses, a damp kind of life
moved slowly, everything breaking down into the future, a
progressive decay. Lamorna, Camelot, Shalom, Malvinas,
Buddha in a rockery.

Any mythogeographical map must be mechanical as well as


physical. A good model would be James Tilly Matthews’
Air Loom, drawn and described while incarcerated in the
Bethlam Hospital in London for his doctor and persecutor
John Haslam’s Illustrations Of Madness. Matthews, an
emissary to leading members of the French Revolutionary
governments (whether a representative of the English
radical movement, a spy for the British government, or of
his own delusions only) first gained access to, then was
refused access to, resorted to barracking and was
imprisoned, by ministers first in Paris and finally in
London. He remained imprisoned in Bedlam at political

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request. While there he systematised his conviction that the
players in the political game were not operating according
their own free wills. Instead there were, in basements
placed close to the centres of events, air looms operated by
gangs who radiated the
loom with energy and
then transmitted their
manipulations through
the medium of air;
weaving a pneumatic
and transmissible
motion.

“The range of ‘event-


workings’ is a
‘formidable catalogue of human miseries’, with every
operation vividly christened. ‘Fluid locking’, for example,
is the name for ‘constricting the fibres at the root of the
tongue’, which impedes speech; ‘kiteing’ is a force which
‘contrives to lift into the brain some peculiar idea, which
floats and undulates in the intellect for hours’; ‘lengthening
the brain’ is an effect analogous to a distorting mirror at a
funfair, which twists any serious and important notion until
it becomes irresistibly hilarious – significantly, it can cause
good sense to appear as ‘insanity’… ‘dream-workings’
force the subject to endure whatever dreams are transmitted
to him in sleep… And there are also fatal operations such
as ‘lobster-cracking’, which increases the magnetic
pressure around the subject ‘so as to stagnate his
circulation, impede his vital motions, and produce instant

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death’.” (p. 173-4, The Air Loom Gang, Mike Jay,
London: Bantam Press, 2003)

Here is ideology operating in mechanical terms,


independently though guided and harnessed, members of
the gang irradiating the loom with their own thoughts, but
then releasing them in ideological packets, presumably as a
wave function, into the atmosphere. Matthews describes the
gang that run the loom that was used to control him, their
intentions varying, like Matthews’ own, between
conspiring for the French republicans and for the British
reaction. It is a classic British ideological ‘gang’: they work
out of a cellar near London Wall. Just round the corner, as
it happens, from Bedlam itself. The gang are seven. Their
leader is Bill the King, who ‘…has never been observed to
smile’. His second-in-command is Jack the Schoolmaster,
who takes notes on the machine’s operations and
sometimes ‘makes a merriment of the business’, making
wisecracks like ‘I’m here to see fair play’. Third is Sir
Archy, foul-mouthed and low-minded, who wears old
fashioned breeches… some of the gang talk of him as a
woman in drag… The fourth and last man is known only as
The Middle Man, who is said to be a manufacturer of air
looms… The first of the women is Augusta, who seems to
be the public face of the gang. She rarely works the
machine, and is usually to be found liasing with other spies
and ‘corresponding with other gangs in the west end of
town’. Charming when she gets her way, when thwarted
she ‘becomes exceeding spiteful and malignant’. The
second, Charlotte, seems to be French and, unlike Augusta,
rarely leaves the cellar. She is half-naked, poorly fed and

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apparently often chained… The final member, known only
as The Glove Woman, is virtually part of the machine. She
operates it with incredible skill and despite regular teasing
from the others, ‘she has never been known to speak’. (p.
174-5, The Air Loom Gang) This is a gang out of an
Ealing Comedy, this is Channel Four’s Time Team –
forged in ideology and performers/makers of it. Each
‘event’ is a mystery play, a creaking mock-medieval
symbolism, dressing brutality in eccentricity, subordination
in heritage. (As with Foucault’s version of the panopticon,
this machine is become ‘organically’ ideological, but,
unlike it, the air loom is reversible.) All the time the gangs
are operating their air looms so conveniently close to the
necessary areas of our brains, the very brains that we must
use to assess their significance and intentions, the little
numbskulls using their telescopes to see through our eyes,
pulling their levers and clanking bellows in the damp
basement of the hippocampus. We have only them to
combat them. And their effects: as physical as the ‘fluid
locking’ on Erskine, the chief opponent in the House of
Commons of war with France suddenly choked, or as the
adapted neurology of intellectuals suddenly turned
nationalist zombie: “Most shocking of all were the people I
had known for many years from left and liberal circles in
the United Kingdom who had fallen under the spell of
Croatian nationalism. These people demonstrated their
consistent solidarity with a small-minded, right-wing
autocrat as a consequence of losing the ability to argue
rationally. In extreme situations nationalism seemed to
neutralise that part of the mind which is able to fathom

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complex equations.” (p.86, The Fall Of Yugoslavia, Misha
Glenny, London, Penguin, 1992)

A similar machine is described in a joke that was often told


by the Trostkyist Tony Cliff – of how a Sheik once visited
a Trafford factory to shop for a cooling system for his
harem, when the hooter for lunchbreak sounded and the
workers left the production line. “The slaves are escaping!”
shouted the Sheik, in alarm. “Don’t worry”, the manager
assured him “in half an hour they will all return.” And
when the hooter sounded again half an hour later the Sheik
was amazed to see the workers return to the line. At the end
of the tour of the factory the manager asked the Sheik:
“Well, would you like to purchase our cooling system?”
“Forget the cooling system, “ said the Sheik, “how much is
that hooter?” Cliff would then conclude the story by
exhorting revolutionaries to smash the hooter in their own
heads.

There are of course “even more real” machines. I’m sitting


in a pub in a university town while a respectable (they
always are) fellow (background in the City, then the Arts)
tells me of his Republican Congressman friend, former
ONI (“You know what they say: ‘once ONI, always ONI’.”
JFK screenplay.) This man tells me of the war rooms
conducting the war in Iraq. Of one large war room in the
centre, with numerous satellite rooms with their corridors
running to and from the mother room. On the walls of these
rooms are hundreds of TV screens (his description begins
to take on a mongrel tone - of an alien abduction testimony
with a scene from The Man Who Fell To Earth)

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monitoring all the world’s TV. It’s like they believe
Baudrillard, but didn’t get past the title. One can imagine
the sheer fun of this. The man describes the horror in the
rooms when the idiot-soldier unfurls the stars and stripes on
the statue of Saddam Hussein, the frantic calls to Iraq and
its replacement by an Iraqi flag and the feeling – like Albert
Brooks in Broadcast News, at home, on the phone passing
on background research straight to the studio floor for
parroting by the telegenic William Hurt – “I say it in here
and it comes out there.”

The wheel of war rooms is as ideologically ineffective as


the air loom is metaphorically efficient. The war rooms
create vicious cycles of imagery, shedding meaning as they
spin. The air loom is incomplete, a hybrid of different
sciences, the diagram of it trailing over the edge of the
page, fuelled by zoological odours, its upper parts fading
into vagueness, corporeal, both machine-like and ethereal,
all carefully labelled, even the absences. Mythogeography
should work like the delusion of an air loom, not the self-
perpetuating, accelerating wheel of the war rooms or the
Euclidean geometry of the panopticon. Mythogeographical
diagrams of the mechanics of ideological production and
exchange could accompany, on acetate overlays perhaps,
any mapping of the concentrations and hydraulics of space
– Z Worlds, dread places, ambient hubs, plaques tournants,
etc.

This uncomfortable pseudo-science is essential to play


along. Paradise must be placed in the map of
mythogeography. Marxism’s ambiguous use of utopia, as a

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legitimate but ‘necessarily’ undefined aspiration, meant it
could be lopped from emancipatory politics and re-attached
to any obscenity. And its reticence to explain beyond its
inner circles the limitations of revolution, (with any post-
capitalist society dependent on the market mechanism until
it has devised alternative ones) allowing it to describe
revolution as a trigger for paradise rather than what it is: a
catalyst for changes of state (political, and by analogy,
physical) guaranteeing nothing and more likely to create
new (and better) social patterns by a BZ process of diverse
reversals (triggering the virtues of nostalgia) and renewals
(the resurrection of the modern) rather than an abrupt
monocular break. Deadly serious in detail, utopia, like
nostalgia, entertained explicitly as fantasy, can map what is
not (is no longer) there – a map of longing, a map of desire.

Mythogeography should be as socially catalytic as it is


personally therapeutic.

Refusing the blandishments of the civil arm of the wheel of


war rooms, mythogeography if it gets anywhere will have
to deploy its own air looms against the Air Loom; its
walkers and mappers will create their own gangs with their
own ideological personae at war with that ideology…

“ ‘Collaborations – that’s the key.’ an archaeology of


figures who have warped consensus reality. Curating,
retrieving, connecting fragile links between a graphic here,
a text there, a sound, a lost soul, a smothered history, or a
recorded moment which disabuses the notion that we are all

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on the same path. Creating what Burroughs and Gysin
called The Third Mind.”
(p.177, Exotica: fabricated soundscapes in a real world,
David Toop, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999)

…dragging the centre of gravity of


its operations away from the
commercial and retail outlets and
into the house churches, the
basements, the hippocampi.
Without incorporation, the ‘gangs’
chalk architectural plans on the
sites of proposed civic
developments. They submit their
own plans and bids, if only to map
what will not be there: pleasure in
space. They organise half-real, half-
imaginary festivals, festivals that
need only their announcement to
occur: for example a city-wide
exhibition of front gardens or
private window ‘displays’. (The
announcement would be enough,
making the city like An Exeter Mis-Guide is for Simon
the actor and carpenter – nothing needs to be done, but
everything appears differently.) Later declare a Festival of
the Eye – in which anyone can participate – the
announcement explaining that each displayed eye will be
regarded as a pictorial frame (from within and without) for
the duration of the festival. In mapping and site-specific

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actions and the creation of ‘situations’ this is no more nor
less than the making of a new Pilgrim’s Progress,
collaborative and in fragments, textual, illustrated,
disrupted, serialised and pedestrian.

“Which of us has not soiled his garments in the Slough of


Despond? Which of us has not, as Christian did, taken
hands to help his feet up the steep sides of Hill
Difficulty? Which
of us has not turned
from the little
wicket in hopes to
sneak round by a
flowery and level
way?” (p.204, My
Favourite Books,
Robert Blatchford,
London: The Clarion Press, undated)

But enough for now. This year has been a year of pre-
mythogeographical wondering and wandering and the
beginnings of making contact with other air loom gangs
and their members. Maybe next year or the year after will
be architectural.

Coming out of Crediton, at Salmon’s Leap, there was a


house, behind big gates, called Heron’s Fall and across a
bench that stood against the wall of the house lay, supine,
an ornamental heron, fallen from the roof.
Phil Smith

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