Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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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,
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Catholics
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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.
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swamp, to cut down the tree rather than raise up the
building. It was dedicated to St Thomas until 1955…
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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death’.” (p. 173-4, The Air Loom Gang, Mike Jay,
London: Bantam Press, 2003)
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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)
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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.”
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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.
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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)
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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.
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.
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