DRIFT with students from an English

language school 7.2.03

Arriving in ones, twos and threes at “The Statue” (in Bedford

Circus): Ryan, Haejin, Keiko, Bong rok, Etsuko, Mahmut,
Matthew, Cathy and me. To walk the word DRIFT in Korean
alphabet onto the surface of the city of Exeter (I first typed “the
city if Exeter”); tracing it down back streets, cul-de-sacs,
demolition sites and alleys, criss-crossing the ancient flint route of
the Icknield Way (Sidwell Street and High Street). Finding a tiny Z
world in a hole in the city wall. Discussing the graffitied blue
stencils of a young woman’s face that have been decorating the
surfaces of city buildings for a month or so – “is she a 40s film
star?” – and then meeting her at the very moment that she sees her
own deep blue image for the first time – she says an artist took her
photograph at a party.

Mahmut pointing out the

Aladdin pantomime
poster, discovering the
direction of Mecca from
a man in the New
Horizon café. All of us in
the café chatting under
the gaze of ‘Clifford’s
Turret’:

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Matthew and I were on the last lap now. Wandering down Longbrook
Street, past Park House. Matthew would like to think of the child William
Clifford sitting in its turret, looking, thinking. But the turret was added after
Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of him, suspended in
space. A mythogeometric moment. Clifford the Big Red Mathematical Dog
in orbit.

(from Z Worlds)

Dewey number 510 is where we find William Kingdon

Clifford’s ‘The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences’.
Number 82 is where we might have found Clifford as a child
at home in Longbrook Street, a three minute walk from here -
from the turret of which we might imagine him watching the
executions on the prison ramparts, aware, like the man with
the rope around his neck, of the way space curves about
time… anticipating Einstein by forty years … but the turret
wasn’t built until Harry Hems bought the house and Clifford
had grown up and gone.

(from tEXtcavation – a Wrights & Sites performance/installation

in the underground stacks of Exeter Central Library for the 2003
tEXt Festival.)

A building turned into a hill of bricks. Moss growing into words on

a gravestone.

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Cathy later said that this was
the first time she’d understood
the drift because it moved so
slowly, it became possible for
unexpected things to emerge
from familiar places. A
ghostly lamppost.

Cathy, Matthew and me, and then finally, just Matthew and me
walking into the darkness to complete DRIFT. At the end of a
dark alley blundering into a private garden, taking a portrait photo
for German visitors, gazing on the hermetic spire of St Michael’s
& All Angels from the Egyptian Catacombes. And finally
discovering that on tracing our route onto a map, that we have
walked/waked the shape of a flying girl, which turns on its side to
become an old man leaning on a stick and upside down a tank or
artillery gun.

The velocity of the movement of the

geometries of self/s and place/s through
each other affects the probable amounts of
contact, the amounts of binding, the
amounts of place that detach themselves and
attach themselves, the amounts of self that
detach themselves and attach themselves. As
the walk slowed, the idea of destination
disappeared, and then – at the very end of
the day, in the darkness, the choice arises
again – a ghost on a bouncy castle: to

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complete the word on the city’s ‘map’.

(Halloween, 2003: Last night I walked with about 15 others

on a ramble up and down New Bridge Street/Fore
Street/High Street/Sidwell Street) led by Raimi Gbadamosi –
the maker of The Dreamers’ Perambulator - and as we
walked I was very aware of seeing again some of the details
of the slow DRIFT 7.2.03 – of the basement of the
Debenhams store ready to be a hospital in the event of
nuclear war, of the young woman’s blue face still there on
Somerfields, a survivor of the conflict between the taggers
and the stencillers – and I felt the impulse to spread those
memes. Raimi stopped at the meeting point of Fore Street
and Mary Arches Road and pointed out the economic
fracture here, between the high rent national chains and the
low rent local shops, a fracture that ran along the dogleg
that the Icknield Way originally took past St Mary Arches
Church/Roman Temple. Then we trod across the former
ethnic fracture running between the old British/Celtic and
Saxon areas. We walked in a ‘straight line and back’ and yet
the space was always reaching out sideways like a billowing
web – as Raimi pointed out the arcades left and right from
Fore Street and New Bridge Street (in and not in the street)
and the ‘run through’ I’d never noticed before from the rise-
top law courts site that Mrs E. O. Gordon mentions as a likely
gorsedd site in Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and
Circles, down past McGahey the Tobacconist, through a
tunnel in the block of shops, across Princesshay and through
another tunnel into Southernhay. “What does “hay” mean?”

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“I know, but I can’t remember… yes… ‘hedge’!” And how
much further can that line be traced? And how long has it
been a path? And of any significance? A few moments ago I
took out the aerial photographic map of Exeter and, using
the edge of Vera Chapman’s Blaedudd The Birdman,
attempted to detect some significance in this route by
drawing an extension of it across the map – it seems to be
heading for the old yew tree at Heavitree – the meeting
place of the Dumnoni – but what I also noticed was that the
law courts, from above, are shaped like a trident, three-
pronged like the /|\ that Mrs Gordon calls God’s NAME: “God,
in vouchsafing His NAME said /|\ and, with the Word, all worlds
and animations sprang co-instantaneously to being, and from their
non-existence, shouting in ecstasy of joy /|\, and thus repeating the
Name of the Deity.”

One of the accidental themes of this

year of walking has been the tracing
of webs of symbolism draped across
the space of the city, hovering in the
layers between historical and
imaginary. Waiting for someone to
read them by walking, waiting to
reveal themselves in the most
familiar (and sometimes unexpected)
sites – the most recent /|\ I found was
on a brick (part mortared over) in a wall at the Velwell Road
end of the Hoopern Valley Path, a place I had walked past
hundreds of times, created a cd walk there with Tom Davies,

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graffitied on… it was only this time as I chalked on the wall
that I noticed the /|\ - it had fallen between “mis” and
“guide”.)

Want to log and map those webs of symbols, the secret

conspiracies of meaning not even known to themselves, harmless
plots that come to nothing and are now ready for use, mathematics
that don’t add up to much, discarded signs that are beginning to
drag themselves back towards the simple memes from which they
came, rusting, breaking down – this is the crucial moment to
capture them, while the narrative is looking the other way, to set
them free, float them away from the meaning from which they are
almost completely detached. To write a dictionary or a phrase
book, for the mythogeographical pocket-book; a critical version of
what Michael Evamy has done for signs in World Without
Words.

The city of Exeter now faces a hollowing out – the law courts
moving from the gorsedd mound, the Westcountry Studies Library
from its inflammatory/phoenix site, the arrangement of artificial
“Quarters” on commercial criteria, tripping up ‘presence’
accountably, rendering vacuums with titles. With the theatrical
hollowing of the Telecom building opposite the central library the
blunders of the city council may accidentally increase the
mythogeographical potential of the lanes off the High Street.

In DRIFT the imbalance of experience, and it happened again on

Halloween, is an inhibitor. There is a dynamic irony here – the
more one explores both the ideas and the streets, the greater the
need for inventing one’s own invisibility the more widely to

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explain the processes,
algorithms and ideas of
‘sploring. The more one needs
to become A. J. Salmon, a
non-existent authority. The
greater the relief to be drifting
in München in January 2004,
accidentally, unknowingly
wandering down a high cold stone corridor to view – as if through
TV control room windows - the waiting ones on their trestles; the
dread space of the window with its grey curtain drawn.

Route of DRIFT 7.2.03: Bedford Square, Post Office Street,

Eastgate, Sidwell Street, Cheeke Street, left, left, York Road, thru’
recently cleared public gardens, Longbrook Street, Northernhay
Gardens, Exeter Central Station Platform 2, New North Road,
Richmond Road, Lower North Street, Northernhay Street, Queen
Street, Paul Street to the Catacombes and back, Gandy Street, New
Buildings, New Musgrave Row to passageway, High Street,
Bedford Square.

Phil Smith