buller walk

8/14/2019 Buller Walk

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Buller Walk

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

Michael Line which supposedly passes directly under theNorman tower of The Church of the Holy Cross, Crediton

was part of an ancient flight path for the Nefilims 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. Wed 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. Itstood in the garden of the farmhouse, the tracks of the

farms 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 theleaves so greeno! Sally Brown shes 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 theside of a King again. The lyric was written by the Reverend

Stephen Hawker of St Nectans, 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 ONSunday the First of October 1939and

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 andreads 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 aprayer 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 childrens 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 withtheir 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 andovergrown. Vicky

reckoned there was ten

years of growth. It

looked like a centurys.

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 alongwinding lanes passing on the way the village of

Whitestone, in the Deanery of Kenn, finally andalmost unexpectedly, we reach this little chapel,hidden amongst orchards with a farmhouse closeby. The ancient font having been longdesecrated, was restored to its former use, after anold example Its existence goes far to conform thestatement that there had been a chapel here fromtime 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 hadever been discovered.

This liquid identity - St Gregorys in Dawlish that became

St Michaels 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 Medleythe Vicars mother gave the new seats in theChancel

The FORM OF SERVICE forInstitution 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 ChurchWardens and the newly instituted Clerk to the church

door (the people turning so as to face the churchdoor), and laying the hand of the Clerk upon the key

or handle of the door, the Archdeacon shall say tohim 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, theVicar 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 eachwaddle downhill hurt the horses. And going downWhitestone Hill one horse began to kick and bothbolted. After keeping the carriage straight down thehill, it broke in two at the Nadderbrook at the bottom.Mrs Medley was thrown out and killed, and the Vicarand Mrs Shore were also thought to be. Preb. Cornishwas thrown out but turned a somersault and pitched

on his feet unhurt. Mrs Shore and Preb. Medley bothrecovered after a long illness. During this illness Preb.Medley was offered the Bishopric of Frederickton inCanada and under medical advice on his recoveryaccepted it This is the account as recorded by anobserver. 11.7.1960

Wonderful connections and dis-mis-connections - I'm justsearching 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 cant 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

Penczaks City Magick, but in a way that slides planes of

time to mesh with the respectability/non-respectability atthe edge of the academy.

I didnt 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, notequivalent 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 didnt follow the sheltered way,

Matthew talking of the Ridgeway in Wiltshire where he felthe 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 topwas 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 thewhole day has been bringing us and even though Im

hungry and thirsty now and wished wed found a village

with a pub, Im 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 historys 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, officiatedat 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 crashsite 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 ofalgorithmic 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 hadnt

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, didnt 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 abuilders 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 theresan 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 Peoples Park Road a woman pointed out

Mister Langhornes house. He wasnt 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 Haslams 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 bygangs 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 whichcontrives 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 workout 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 machines operations and

sometimes makes a merriment of the business, making

wisecracks like Im here to see fair play. Third is SirArchy, 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 Fours 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 Foucaults version of the panopticon,

this machine is become organically ideological, but,

unlike it, the air loom is reversible.) All the time the gangsare 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 fluidlocking 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 toldby 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. Dont 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 endof 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. Im 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.

JFKscreenplay.) 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 worlds TV. Its like they believe

Baudrillard, but didnt 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 onthe 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 asthe 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. Mythogeographyshould 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. Marxisms 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 abruptmonocular 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 thats 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: Serpents 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 gangschalk 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 thatneed 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 Pilgrims 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 tosneak 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 Salmons Leap, there was a

house, behind big gates, called Herons Fall and across a

bench that stood against the wall of the house lay, supine,

an ornamental heron, fallen from the roof.

Phil Smith

buller walk

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