Shed Summit

8/14/2019 Shed Summit

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Shed Summit

On a blistering hot day 14th July - we went to explore the area

around Welcombe Barton recycling shed on our way in, then along walk down to the Welcombe Mouth beach geology! The

earth crushed together and rising process the hut to the beach like

Spanish penitents each of us wearing hut hats - failed to get

to either Ronald Duncans or Rev. Stephen Hawkers sheds

between two ignorances, the rocks of the combe shimmered in the

heat. At his church in Welcombe, opium-soaked Hawker not only

invented Harvest Festival he also introduced the practice of

opening the North Door during baptisms in order to let out the

Devil (brought in by the un-baptised child) and then locking the

door and keeping it locked until the next baptism. Along the way to

the beach and back again by a different route we found many

locked sheds and huts, ready for weekend owners. During the Shed

Summit the people were there, weekending, and in one case they

invited us all into their garden to process about their shed, to

present our shed to theirs, and to photograph them and us togetherwith the sheds.

I was overwhelmed

with associations The

Last Battle by C. S.

Lewis where, in a shed,

the ape presents adonkey in a lions skin

as Aslan I hired a

joke lion skin from

Fantasy World on Fore

Street (I couldnt quite


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remember the name and I just looked it up in Raimi Gbadamosis

The Dreamers Perambulator, couldnt resist running over more

pages, walking through names, most but not all commercial, no

longer a directory, already out of date when it was never in, buta route in itself). I brought along various clothes for Simon, to

dress as the ape but there was never a right moment to perform

this. We saw an advertisement for a performance by the amazing

suicidal birdman and I remembered I had written The Village

Project while living in a shed; a play based on the life of

Blaedudd, King Lears father, who tried to fly and died in the

attempt. I remembered the dystopian shed in Ambitions, written

for the same company Gog Theatre, full of smoke from explodedpcs, written twenty years ago, after visiting some early-days-of-

pc-games designers.

The difficulty of performance and the ease of ritual; parade,

pseudo-pilgrimage stripped of belief. I was to lead the parade

with a staff made from pieces of the cut

up shed. The best part was being able tohand the staff over to various

pilgrims.

Stephen made a Schwitters-esque

speaking scarecrow, Cathy made poetry

with potting plants, Simon made a mini-

shed-gallery of shed imagery. I made

mini-performances. I wrote with a piece

of Cynheidre coal into soil, listening to a

tape my friend the poet and former miner

Mogg Williams sent me, recorded in his

shed not so long before he died. On the


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tape he says something like: maybe then its all been worth it, this

time in the shed, the loneliness in the shed, if the poetry has been

recognised It was odd at the Summit. I lay dozing with a

candle, Blaedud the Birdman book by the sheet I was under.There was a strange post-theory air about the talks I attended, a

return to empirical nuts and bolts. Death of the theorist. Next to our

shed within a shed a large shed was being constructed from pallets

over two days. Rubbing hands Simon and me squashed raspberries

(loganberry substitutes) into our hands, the robbers, beheaders of

St Nectan. Inflatable buildings, smooth skins off which slid

causality, all marks of manufacture disappear by expansion,

empiricism stretched thin becoming flat and smooth andunquestionable, an a-skin. We were swamped in our shed early on

by national and agency photographers sent by editors with a

skewed impression of the event. Should we always refuse to pose?

Discovered the North Cornwall mythos of St Nectan: how on his

decapitation, at which he picked up his head and walked back to

his shed, he lay his head on a stone, whichremains stained. The church at Welcombe

is dedicated to St Nectan. At the start of our

walk I handed out pieces of modelling clay

for the walkers to make little models of

their own heads, to carry in their hand or

pocket, to be aware of seeing things from

more than one view point, to offset the self

as the only walking consciousness.

Susan Blackmore concludes her

Consciousness: An Introduction

(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003) with waking up she


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describes the poisoning of Douglas Harding by robbers. Waking he

realised he had begun to see differently: Past and future dropped

away, and he just looked. To look was enough. And what I found

was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brownshoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands,

and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in absolutely nothing

whatever! We can all do what he did next. We can look where the

head should be and find a whole world. Far from being nothing, the

space where the head should be is filled with everything we can

see For Harding, this great world of mountains and trees was

completely without me, and it felt like suddenly waking up from

the sleep of ordinary sleep. It was a revelation of the perfectlyobvious. (p.408, Consciousness: An Introduction) Another saint

beheaded productively - by robbers.

I felt that the possibility of producing a culture which both

articulates difference and lives with it could only be established on

the basis of a non-sovereign notion of self The fragmentation of

identity is a recognition of the importance of the alienation ofthe self in the construction of forms of solidarity. (p.213, Homi

Bhabha, The Third Space)

Only the visually self-disassembled body can explores the states

of resistance to the digital city. (p.158, Stephen Barber, projected

cities) The a-violent version of this works through a mathematical

and geometrical visuality rather than the surgeons knife and its

nostalgic ripperology, instead a self-disassembly of granular

visuality into grids, meshes, curves, probable or potential surfaces

and deconstructed, conscious flowfields with their landmarks,

simple variables and dynamic-triggers, all wedded to a

mythogeographical history/geography/rumour.


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The man I recognised from

Bristol wrapping and

bandaging the damaged shed onthe beach at Welcombe Mouth,

so we could carry it, now salty

from the Atlantic, back through

the lanes, past the S&M holiday

home with its thick curtains,

someone limping now, everyone sweating under the sun cream,

pleasurable weariness.

The walker becomes an extended organism, a materiality of

consciousness and everything else in dynamic process: eddying,

consuming, digesting, two acids eating each other, two pans of

seething oil melding and interacting. Two metaphors accumulating.

A translucent, mobile, pocket scrapbook. Something that might

explain the feeling of well being that a number of people have

expressed the day after drifting

thanks for monday's drift, Phil: had a fine old time of it, and felt

very

>> grounded and relaxed and happy on Monday evening

and though I hesitate to begin down the way of medical

explanations, I might very tentatively suggest that this resting of

the overburdened meme-complex of discrete self has a

psychological as well as a philosophical effect. Im hesitant, not

because I dont think drifting can be a real, easing pleasure for

people, but because I fear that theres a petit-bourgeois junction not

far down that route that leads to small-business and the closing


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down of the drifting memes uncontrollable wandering far and

wide.

I went to talk with Rev. Anthony Freeman at his house in NewtonSt Cyres. He is the editor ofThe Journal of Consciousness. He

talked about how he took up painting when a village parson and

how for six months he saw brighter colours and more distinct and

striking shapes. The next day I go to speak with Dr. Chris

Williams, a consultant at the Department of Clinical Psychology at

the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. We suddenly get into a

discussion about the Debenhams building in the High Street after

he has raised the question of educating the mind, programmed toappreciate and enjoy certain harmonic intervals and organisations

of shape, to appreciate atonality and asymmetry. And I suddenly

think, and this is a banal and obvious thought, that most people are

out there suffering minor levels of trauma because no one has ever

bothered to let them even know about the predominant

atonal/asymmetry of the modernist environment. And that such a

courtesy might help people who suffer more extreme traumas tocreate for themselves safe and enjoyable places along familiar

routes. Chris explains that that is exactly what they do with

patients, giving them the skills to create imaginary safe places if

they are subject to a panic attack in public. Developing a mytho-

geographic appreciation of places - I explained to Chris how I had

learnt to enjoy the generally disliked Debenhams building for its

simple proportions and its sense of mass and because I know its

basement was to be a nuclear war hospital could give to people

with problems about going outside, or into public or crowded

places, an alternative map of safe and pleasurable space.


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As we approached the church of St Nectan I shouted ahead, the

possibility arose for us to carry the shed through the North door,

but I couldnt grasp the idea of carrying it through or around the

church (the audience walked three times round the deconsecratedchurch in Church), I couldnt relate what we had been doing with

a religious practice, even to its subversion.


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I felt by then we had floated free from the angel/devil binary.

Laughter and hurting feet on the beach stones and the sweat of the

hot day and the shocked hospitality of the shed people welcoming

in thirty-plus visitors, the pseudo-ritual with nothing in the sedan-shed-coffin to bury, nothing to put in the ocean but the shed itself:

we thought youd

brought a dead pet to

bury. We had floated

into a cloud of

associations larger than

good and bad angels. Is

that the place thelayer that meshes the

angels and their

shadows. Not the naughty boy/girl embrace of the devils and

vampires, but the space that is neither haunted by pseudo-

revolt/pleasure in violence over others (the state in miniature) nor

scared into submission to the big states ideologies. Able to fly in

and among floated-free ideologies making a precarious play ofthemselves.

When Stephen Barber proposes the memories of film as a means to

pierce the citys surface, evoking the situationist image of a

bottle thrown through a cinema screen in Howard Brentons

Magnificence, he quantifies the effect as to unsettle and

revolutionize the city (p.156, projected cities), underestimating

the citys capacity to repair points of disruption. Far harder for it to

repair or expel are those disruptions which slide in, self-

disciplinedly two-dimensional. A flatland dissidence. A phantomic,

diaphanous practice; self-organised, emergent. An a-violence

offering itself as a grid to mesh with. A quantum entanglement,


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androgynous, neither penetrative nor enfolding. A

mathematicalisation of disruption. In Exeter and Exmouth there are

still city centre, communal, comforting screens in the brief years

of this anomaly the digitalisation of action offers a bathing of spacecompatible with that of film so cinema/space disappears, a

disappearance and consequent bathing of the city for the driviste

dependent on the archaic presence of the Odeon and the Savoy.

The discrete self is eroded, by the geological/intellectual process

of a neo-Symbolist floating-free and the synthesising of unlikes,

setting in motion the explicit machinery of persuasion and

deception and power, but dislocated from its material base, so thatit becomes (if we avoid falling off either side of morality) our thing

to play with, to aestheticise, the recovery of art from the

repetitive survivalism of everyday life for the purposes of

dtournement.

Walking: into the city, into the rural landscape, into these already

pre-conceived naturalities and artificialities, is released from thesetwo eyes, offset by the consciousness of nothing in the head, of

nothing behind the eyes, of eyes offset to one side a seeing that

already contains previous perceptions of the world, meme-soaked:

for it seems that we are never able to see the world fresh our

seeing is biologically enabled by electrical memories, and before

that by hard-wired expectations of shapes and meanings,

inheritances from our very meaningless luck of being here that we,

legitimately and meaninglessly, grant all sorts of significance.

The appearance of phosphenes, colloquially called seeing stars,

is well known to everyone. On entering a completely darkened

room, colour spots start to appear in the eye, once the eyes have


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become accustomed to the

darkness colour patterns and

shapes appear which do not

enter the eye in the normalway, but are produced within

the eye and the brain

phosphenes originate all along

the visual pathway and it is

possible to stimulate visual areas in the brain to produce such

phosphenes. Stimulations of this kind produce visual experiences

of the past patients who had been blind for a long time began to

see phosphenes after similar treatment. It was not possible,however, to achieve such results with persons who had been blind

since birth. (p. 26-7, Art and Science Dolf Reiser, London:

Studio Vista, 1972)

RODS the DVD Jose Escamillas ground-breaking discovery of

critters in our atmosphere! Includes how-to-film RODS

around you. DVD $19.90 (ad in Paranoia magazine, Fall 2003)

There were things I realised that I didnt do in the Lost Tours

fortnight: Skimmerton Riding, a hoax drift as wandering bishops, a

pylons walk, a movie walk bathing the city in film sequences

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Shed Summit