Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith (writing as Crab and Bee), The Pattern: A Fictioning

I’ve been meaning to read this book since it appeared two years ago. One sign of that desire is the fact that I’ve ended up with two copies (e-mail me your address if you’d like the spare). Nevertheless, what with school and work I haven’t found the opportunity—until now, when I find myself in a strange lull between drafting and revising, waiting for feedback. So here I go. My reading will focus on the accounts of the walks Billinghurst and Smith made, along with the manifestoes and theoretical ruminations the text contains, and I’m going to skip over the games they propose for humans in the landscape; others might do the reverse, playing those games and ignoring the walks. I’m also going to skim through the poems and definitions of mythological figures, which some readers might wish to make their focus. To each their own. There’s a lot going on in this book, and different readers will want to take different things from it.

The Pattern begins with a page entitled “Ways To Read This Book,” where the text is described as “a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape” (v). It is, Billinghurst and Smith continue, an “invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind” (v). Readers are invited to use the book the way they want to, by solving its mystery, borrowing tactics from it, or drilling it for ideas. See? I can, on this reading, make the walks the centre of my attention if I want to do that. And, while The Pattern “describes a model for art making,” that was not its authors’ intention: “Instead, the model emerged from our ‘hyper-sensitized’ walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of ‘web walking’” (v). The model it proposes developed through poetry readings and performances, by inviting people to take the authors on walks, in workshops and ann art exhibition. “The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider,” they write (v). They also note that the book is “a fictioning” in which they “adopted narratives and characters to find things out” (v). The introduction ends with an invitation for readers to join their threads to the book’s web.

The Pattern is a collection of fragments, written by Billinghurst and Smith under multiple pseudonyms: Smoke and Mirrors, Cloak and Daggers, Crab and Bee. Using pseudonyms is one of the consistent elements of Smith’s mythogeography practice. Part One, “The Edges,” begins with an epigraph: “It is when we do not ‘know our place’ that we best discover who we are not and who we are to become” (1). The text begins with a walk in a labyrinth in the Scilly Isles; the idea of the labyrinth quickly becomes a motif, as the authors consider the “labyrinthine geography” of their city, Plymouth, in the context of Greek myths involving labyrinths (1). “Winding and unwinding became part of our methodology of enchantment,” they write, describing how that process became part of their art practice (1). 

After announcing this theme, the text turns to another walk, made with Tony Whitehead (with whom Smith and John Schott wrote the 2019 book Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage), in Southway, a suburb in northwest Plymouth. “We wanted to test for a labyrinth in the least mythical of circumstances,” Billinghurst and Smith write (2). In the rain, they discover a ruined Tudor farmhouse among trees, a quarry, a wasteland “where acres of woodland had been felled and roots dug up and piled high like bodies on a battlefield” and where “old cars rotted into ferns” (3). On the other side of a stream, the trio goes “on a deeper quest, begun not by imitating ancient or esoteric rituals, but turning off an anonymous residential street to follow a concrete path” (3). That night, Billinghurst wrote a poem about the walk that surprised and frightened her, as if it had written itself. “[T]his was the first time, for us together, that the atmospheres or forces or whatever they are showed us that they had as much agency as we did and that, whatever we thought about the matter, they might have their own ideas about what needed to happen” (4).

The next section of the text thinks about a game the authors play, in which they imagine themselves to be wolves. That game seems to be central to their practice because of its sensuality and “raw commonality” (5). “Hence our willingness to abandon principles, to never say never, in order to undo closures and open up ways of cornering and sidestepping,” they write. “At a cost we blazed trails, tying red threads to the imagined hunting tracks of missing wolves. Whatever the cost, the wolves must return” (5). That description shifts to British political and intellectual history, particularly “the new royal materialism of Isaac Newton and his successors,” which “could not cope with things that can only be known by their consequences” (5). Red, the colour of the monarchy, persists in mail boxes, telephone booths, buses. For Billinghurst and Smith, those objects, especially mail boxes, “are red magical objects; wayside shrines to connectivity” that are not unlike holy wells, since “they are the visible springheads of invisible currents of penned paper, postcards, packages and parcels” (7). Around the fringes of Plymouth, they took over a variety of holes and boxes “as an alternative postal network; as a way of flagging up the magic of the postal system we already have” (7). 

That anecdote leads to a story about a mail coach near Plymouth being attacked by a lion in 1816. Where the lion would have come from is not clear. That story leads to an account of a walk about imagined or remembered predators—wolves again, this time—in which a company named Wolf Minerals is mining wolfram for light bulbs. The walk begins in a junkyard, continues through a wooded valley filled with abandoned houses, where they hang red threads (their motif, the labyrinth) around objects as a performance. Then they arrive at the huge open-pit mine, where they perform rites for the missing (extirpated) wolves. They come to consider those rites a pact with the absent wolves. They make the same walk the next day, this time with a Brazilian theatre performer and PhD student, performing similar rites, mending the woodland, which has been “defiled by yellow and black signs,” with red thread (12).

“The terrible irony of the destruction by tungsten mining of so much terrain at Plymouth’s Drakelands and Merdon by Wolf Minerals,” the authors explain, “is that this wounded land is part of the moor where some of the last wild wolves in England were killed. This irony is revealing; for humans can only subdue the wolf by destroying their shared world” (13). Destroying such essential predators “is catastrophic for the planet” (13). However, by “re-loving the wolves, by respecting and re-sharing our roles as top predator with them, in a landscape managed by predators rather than gamekeepers and the managers of ‘shoots,’ more general reparations and re-wilding can begin” (13).

Another walk on a different moor, this one marked by apparently abandoned clay pits, follows. They discover various colourful objects and a sheep’s skeleton, which they collect, running red and white thread through the vertebrae and swinging the bones beetween them. “We leave the sheep bones and the threads strung on the barbed wire fence; a warning to the mining corporation about the consequences of their depredations,” they write (16). They walk until they can see the tungsten mine in the distance: “The landscape has been royally trashed here” (16). They discover a hole, covered by a board, in which a green frog is sitting. “We have opened the book of the hill,” they write (17). They call their game with the thread and the bones “Crow” and describe it as a “‘horizontal maypole’” (21). During their walks on the Scillies, they looked for the village of Maypole but almost missed it—but for their game with the bones and thread, which (they realized) had taken place on the village green in “a kind of bone-dowsing” (21). That game leads to another: writing poems that curse the powerful.

Next, Billinghurst and Smith describe the book’s cast of characters, its “bestiary,” taken from various sources, which represent earth gods, “Chthonics,” “the gods-we-need, the snakes and worms that are our guides to the forest-beneath-the-forest, the dark place of rhizomes and fungi and white strings where chemical messages are shared from bushes to trees and from trees to bushes; the cat’s cradle of the underground” (25). Another labyrinth, then, defined by gravity, “the attraction of all things for all things” (25). 

The next page presents a description of a barrier that is actually a doorway, installed by locals to protect meadows from being quarried. That gate-like barrier becomes a symbol: “Opening the gate one way, things can come through the other way” (27). Those things are unpredictable, their process open-ended. No one knows in what form they might return. More walks follow: this stime to forts that ring Plymouth, where “‘bomb proof’ earth coverings were now mutating into novel ecologies,” including mature trees and shrubs in which birds nest (30). “Vaulted stone military structures were starting to look like the temples of oracles,” they write, providing a tangible example of unpredictable, open-ended processes (30). During another walk at Efford Fort, a doorway, “a chance arrangement of three slim tree trunks that framed the sun,” led to a strange experience, a shift in vision, for Billinghurst (31). They wondered if it was a sign that something terrible had taken place there, or whether they were imposing that interpretation on the place: “Was there the residue of something bad at Efford, or some residue in us?” (32). During a performance at another fort—this one “a melancholy heritage site” (33)—they meet a local worthy they dub the “Woodland Dame,” who is impervious to the sadness they sense in that place. “Strange things happen, strange feelings take over” (34), they continue, including more poems, illness, surprises happening on walks through Plymouth’s suburbs. They walk through a forest joined by a long thread. They become attuned to the world under the ground—trees, fungi, microbes—“as much as the surfaces of places” (37). 

Next, the book tells the story of Alfred Watkins, who came up with the idea of ley lines, “traces of ancient trackways most of which had now disappeared,” always straight (38). Smith and Billingshurst believe in the truth of this theory, because of the number of “‘privileged points” those lines connect (39). Ley lines are linked to Ufology, the failure of which as an explanatory paradigm, they write, “is a mark of the inadequacy of a wider culture, both in its mainstream and alternative forms, that is still trying to measure its quantum social sstructures and phenomena with a Newtonian clockwork model” (40). I’m not sure about that. Ley lines are similar to the idea of “Thin Places,” where the veil between this world and another frays (40). “In a world of spectacle, in which everything is available through its appearance, the enigma of these ancient sites is a disruption of our smooth consumption of apparent meaning,” the authors contend. “Instead, the abject things of pseudo-research and pseudo-science suggest ways of unpicking the spectacle of self-evident significance” (40). I can’t follow Billinghurst and Smith in this argument, but as their introduction suggests, that doesn’t matter; I’ve been encouraged to take what I like from this book, and that’s what I’ll do. Indeed, the references to “scrying” in this book confused me until I gave in and looked up that word; I’m not likely to engage in oracular predictions using bodies of water any time soon, but if Billinghurst and Smith want to engage in such serious play (or playful seriousness), that’s fine.

One of those games (or performances) involves probe heads, bolts with ribbons tied to them. “By throwing a probe head onto the path ahead of you, you cause yourself to stop and let the ripples wash back, upsetting what you thought was your purpose for going on, your reason for being there in the first place, even what you thought you were doing when you threw the probe head in the first place,” they write (43). “Probe heads hurl sideways the image an artist has of their work and of the plans they have for it; instead, the work itself steps forward, quite different from what the artist thought it was,” they continue (43). The probe head “disrupts assumptions about what we really want, it can reveal desires that have no ‘what,’ it may cut up lines-of-desire and shuffle the expected order of events” (43). The authors contend that when a probe head lands, “time stops moving in just one direction towards one target”; instead, “all parts become probabilities,” and “a field unfolds for re-making wholly new understandings of what place, desire and art can be” (44).

Their walks became silent, so that they could attend to the voices of places that had started to talk back; they stopped in friendly pubs; they thought of themselves as walking fascia; they considered the tangle of birdsong around them. All of this, it seems, is part of their web walking practice: “We stretch a thread between different places and ideas. Soon it is not a single line, but a mesh or tangle of threads that wind themselves around” (46). Those tangled threads vibrate “as unseen things in unseen places give them a tug” (46). I think the webs are both literal (note the games they play with thread) but, more importantly, metaphorical. For instance, they think about hollow places underground: tunnels, chambers, caverns, nests of ants, holes in the limestone beneath their feet—phenomena that are both real and symbolic. “All the time we felt intimations of an underground all around, of the rush of subterranean rivers, of a hiddle fluid-matrix and an airy affordance in solid rock, which left its rhythms in the surfaces on which we trod,” they state (47).

But the authors are also interested in what’s above ground, too. One odd site, a stone proscenium in the garden of a “National Trust stately home,” a place they had never liked, is discovered to be the centre of “the geometry of strangulation” driven by that house, which is “an alibi, a distraction, a decoy, an excuse to destroy everything about it” (49). The lesson: “Trust your feelings about places” (49).

Next comes an account of a walk with two scientists who study microplastics; their presence sensitizes the authors to the amount of plastic litter everywhere, most of which bears the logos of transnational corporations. They walk from one water-treatment plant to another, learning about the way that sewage sludge (including microplastics) is spread on agricultural land as fertilizer. Hulks of ships line the sea front. Billinghurst recites a poem about plastic. “Has our pollution triggered the wild’s own re-wilding of itself?” they ask (52). 

Another walk, another suburb on the edge of Plymouth. A creek, a barbed-wire fence, a power pylon. They lie on the edge of the water, sinking into the “beach” beside it (53). “We are falling through roots, loam, pebbles, cold soils, spores, damp fungal layers, a mesh of plant-pedicles, hidden rivulets, latent vapours, compost, the waste of centuries, worms, rhizomes, tubers, plastic bags, beds of grit and soot,” they write (54). They are, in their imaginations, becoming one with the land, in all of its damaged splendour. 

The pair set out “to find a remote example of an ark on Tamerton Creek,” but discover that it is just another “rusting hulk” (55). “There will be no biblical floating away from climate emergency and species extinction,” they tell us. “The fuels don’t work, the invasion of plastic is at the cellular level. No ark can escape either problem. Instead of floating off, our eco-sensual sinking-in is the better, only, way to go. Not up or away, but down and within” (56). The apocalyptic vision here doesn’t surprise me; in the face of runaway ecological catastrophe, hope becomes irrational. By imagining their bodies “stepping forward to fall apart,” by imaging their own “eco-sensual composting,” they are imagining their deaths (56). And perhaps the deaths of all of us.

The next walk the book relates took place in one of Cardiff’s eastern suburbs, where they tied red thread onto twigs and discovered plastic garbage floating in what a sign described as “a ‘nature pond’” (61). An example of “short-termism”: “Little gestures, concessions to wildlife, abandoned and forgotten as soon as installed” (61). Such “short-termism” includes abandoned public art next to the remains of a fire, and “the rotting wooden posts of an other processional route over a subterranean sewage swamp linking two housing estates” (62). The human inhabitants of these estates are confused and confusing, odd. The following day, on another walk, they realize that Cardiff Bay has become “a captive lake, a fake sea,” and they use clay “to fashion models for new sensory organs that we might use to re-access the treasure and the treasured in this reconstructed space” (63). What is present is interesting to Billinghurst and Smith, but I think their hearts are in these wild, utopian gestures, these artistic investigations of impossibility. The mud of Cardiff Bay becomes “a metaphor for the way of working that we adopted during the Labyrinth project; a spinning out and holding up of actions between artists and artforms” (65).

The authors ask why they would risk “being dismissed out of hand” by “talking about myths and legends all the time” (81). I’m not surprised by that interest; after all, Smith’s version of psychogeography is called “mythogeography.” In any case, they see evidence of mythical stories everywhere: in advertising and corporate logos, for instance. “In other words, myths and their symbols are so much of a part of the hypermodern world that we seem largely desensitized to them,” they suggest (81). Only Greek myths, though; the foundational stories of other cultures get little attention. In any case, “we chose our own myths and characters and symbols,” they continue, “in order to re-sensitize ourselves to what is going on around us” (81). 

Threads, they suggest, are “‘lines of flight’” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but they allow for travel in both directions, enabling an increase or decrease in intensity (82). “The thread is the first step to web-walking; walking connected to multitudes of others,” they continue (82). The web is one pattern that emerged in their walking project. Another was “the green ‘poison ponds,’ glowing with algae and pond weed,” the mud of Cardiff Bay and into which the hulks of Plymouth were rotting—the apparently abandoned, polluted water (83). “These are all variations of a green lake of desirousness without the thread of desire,” they write. “An id machine generator of desires without objects, a green, green id machine; pure subject and presocialised” (84). Desire, they continue, “does not always want or need an object,” and the “most viable human id machines are fecund places of desire without obsession or jealousy” (84).

As a performance, they told the story of the mythical Albina, founder of Albion, on Teats Hill to anyone who passed by. Some listened; others told their own mythic tales; children made a sculpture of Albina from rock and seaweed. “A kind of model had been at work in us; to find the myth of a place, and begin from there . . . letting the story do most of the work, make most of the decisions, draw most of the attention,” they write. “So: find your place, uncover its story, gather the materials and invite everyone else to make the body” (88). For them, the Teats Hill project was a success, a way to put a story into a community. They used found materials—rocks, seaweed, rusted rivets and smoothed glass fragments—to tell that story. “All around the site we planted evidence of red lines of desire, of blood flow, red hunting lines and then white lines suggesting other bonier, milkier and more skeletal connections,” they recall (91). “Without forcing anything on anybody, we were able to place a diverse story of the origins of Albion (England) into a community that is always being told that nothing important or good ever happens there, and who often felt as if that were the truth,” they continue (91). The five days on that beach changed the myth and the performers, pushing them to rethink their understanding of shape-shifting, from something liquid to something more geological and “unharmonic” (91).

Next is another walk along “an abject way out of the city, under the Expressway” (91). They saw a broken toby jug, a man who resembled the figure of John Barleycorn, and twenty deer. Then they discover the corpse of a deer somehow fastened to a metal fence surrounding an industrial estate: “A deer/fence hybrid” (92).

The authors find themselves working at night, “almost physically allergic to solar things,” which they interpret through alchemy as part of a processof transformation (93). “In our case it was the precipitation out of our ‘work’ of what was hidden, even to us as we were making it,” they write (94). They are also working together, rather than separately, counter to the contemporary “ideology of separation . . . that renders communities and societies incapable of responding to those things that challenge or invite them collectively” (94). “The practice of webbing subjectivities tells a different story,” they argue. “Working intensely and closely with others, with openness and willingness to explore and talk in detail (often accompanied by coincidences and happy accidents) can work and talk new subjectivities into being” (94-95). The “Plymouth Labyrinth” project is an example of this: even though it was “driven by invitations to be subjective, intuitive, dream-based, eccentric,” “its processes were always convivial, and at times the art making was collective and ensemble” (95). “Such processes do not reduce a subjectivity, but connect its eccentricities to those of others, webbing and weaving feelings and shared associations and ideas that reach a critical mass—ecologies of subjectivity—as a haecceity” (95). I’ve never had that experience, partly because I’ve never encountered a working partner with whom I could undertake such a project, and my most recent work was of necessity solo (the pandemic, the difficulty of the walking). In any case, Billinghurst and Smith contend that working together in this way causes the relationships between people to “slip into the magical mode,” to bring in mythical creatures and the natural world (95). “What a sociologist might see as a problem—the idea that amoral forces can produce haecceities indifferent to social factors—is the idea here,” and the practitioners are freed from the restrictions “of individuality and individualism” (95).

Next is a description of the Plymouth Labyrinth art exhibition: drawings connected with red thread, paintings that “are the closest we come to alchemy” (97). The poems included in the show are like the paintings, containing “gaps across which their sense must leap” (98). That description ends the book’s first part.

Part Two, “The Pilgrimages,” begins with the authors’ attraction “to a certain kind of shaping in the ground,” not unlike amphitheatres, although not connected to human performance (103). Those landforms—I think they are natural, rather than the work of humans—may have functioned as “ritual landscapes,” as places to see the sky (103). They found such a place near the Icknield Way, and they lay down in it. This event, it seems happened on one of their pilgrimages, during which they tried to avoid “heritage paths, with official signs,” and to follow other routes instead (103). Their walk on the Scilly Isles was another such pilgrimage, during which they found another natural amphitheatre, the kind of site that makes “a space for Erewhon”: “A time out of time, a place out of space” (104). While they didn’t make that space, they did activate it by “walking first with a red thread for life and desire,” asking their fellow walkers “to feel the circulation of the blood in their bodies,” and then adding “a white thread for bone and death, asking the walkers to feel their skeletons holding them together” (104). “Opening the gate to the Erewhon on St. Mary’s was the first time we had worked to open these things up for others; first heating things up for them, then cooling them down” (104). On another group walk, they asked their walking companions “to concentrate on their own beating hearts and circulatory systems as they carry a red wollen thread for vitality; and then to focus on their skeletons as they carry a white woolen thread for change” (107). “The participants walk in single file between the two lengths of thread, between the two colours, between the two ideas,” they state (107). 

Next, the authors describe “body dowsing,” trying to find a lost holy well by feeling the pull of the water with their bodies (108). They were, they say, successful. “Imaginations, intimations and intuitions are powerful things,” they writes, “but sometimes the sensory organ of the whole body trumps them all” (109). I’m not sure if that well is/was on the Scilly Isles, but they continue with a story about walking on the beach at the Old Town there and thinking about Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who is buried nearby, and recent British history, which suggests, to them, the looming threat of authoritarianism. 

Next is a text by an alias, Cloak & Daggers, that explains “why web walkers skulk” (115). It is a how-to-skulk manual, a how-to-web-walk treatise: not just how to do it, but also why. It presents a combination of theory and practice. There is a shift here from a concern with the spectacle to one with “the assemblage,” which can (perhaps) be resisted by skulking, by a “dissidence-of-one that can preserve and nourish an inner self; an inner working that the dissident-of-one refrains from sharing either publicly or intimately, avoiding even the most sensitive and sympathetic arms of the assemblage, without apparently doing anything to protect themselves” (116). Such skulking ought to take place “in ‘unimportant’ places,” where it’s typically assumed that nothing important ever happens (116). Skulking isn’t a game, but rather it is “a down-to-earth way to live as human beings, resisting a twisted human society in which some humans exploit other humans and exterminate the unhuman. It is a way to commit tiny treasons while keeping ourselves safe” (116). It is not a withdrawal from the world, but a plunging into its ignored edges, and despite the need for working collectively which they previously argued for, skulking involves a refusal to share, a necessary being apart from others, even if a small group of friends skulks together. 

Billinghurst and Smith advise their readers to put together their own “pantheons, lexicons and bestiaries: stories, experiences, local legends, feelings, intuitions, superstitions, mental maps, insider knowledge,” and cherished nursery rhymes (119). That is world building, practiced by the “pseudo-science and wishful archaeology” of (for instance) the author of the ley lines theory, who was one of the “artists and poets of world-building arts” (119). Anyone motivated by such “non-systems” can “break the bad spell of capitalism” (119). How that happens, though, isn’t quite clear. I suppose the book itself is presenting a belief in “non-systems” as a form of resistance. Art and intuition are linked forms of resistance. “These are sensitive signals passed up and down the threads; it is how the spider, sitting on one thread, knows where you are on the web,” they continue (121).

“Walking for ‘Plymouth Labyrinth,’ it was plain for us to see that despite all the city’s concrete culverts and river-diversions, drained marshes, dried river beds in parks in the centre of the city, water-management and the profusion of manhole covers and balancing ponds on the estates, the streams were still powers in the city,” Billinghurst and Smith write (126). They came to think of the city as an archipelago rather than a continuous landmass, imagining it as a collection of islands, some quite isolated. “When we found sadness in the city, it was often associated with isolation,” they continue (127). Water became, for them, a symbol of connection and communication, often hidden or buried, but which could return. 

Now the setting shifts to Dorset, where the authors are “struggling to find a way in”: “even turning back to re-visit a portal to hell got us nowhere” (129). They get lost in the neglected landscape. Finally they find a stream and a path which appear “prehistoric” (129). The stream drops into a green ravine, while the path continues along the edge and into a village. “For a day and a half we had been walking this part of Dorset,” they write, “and in a moment we had ducked in and were deep in its underland” (130). 

That experience somehow, mysteriously, healed their tired, injured bodies. “One of the more intimate lessons learned from exploring the labyrinth by the deployments of playfulness and myth together, is that privileged points of pleasure can be redistributed across different parts of a hyper-sensitized walker,” they write. “Walking in the city in refrains rather than repetitions is not simply to put your body in the city, but to put the city (and other terrains) in your body, to flatten the points of your obsessions and roll yourself out as a sensitive diagram overlaying you-terrain and terrain-you” (131). The figures in their mythological bestiary played a part in this phenomenon, they argue, by “tripping strong emotional responses that jumble wariness, attraction, awe, longing and so on, into unsettling mixtures that enter the blood stream” (131-32). All of this is contrary to the ideology of husbandry, in which humans attempt to control the movement of nature.

Here Billinghurst and Smith return to Ufology, which “exemplifies the contemporary cultural failure to explain phenomena in their multiplicity” (133). The mistake that ufologists make is their attempt to make things into a system, to follow the example of “enlightenment science” (134). The study of “the sited uncanny” is another example; it fails because its practitioners sought “academic, empirical respectability for their speculative practices” by subjecting their work to the rules of positivism, by trying to become a conventional discipline (134): “However, a reader can web walk these literatures as something quite different: works of poem-analysis, phenomenological archaeology, adept intuition, pattern recognition, thoughtful wishing, and the imaginary narrating of forces that have never yet existed, or been proved to, but surely ought to. . .” (135). I’m not sure what the point of investigating such consciously confabulated forces might be—why bother with what “ought to” exist, when what actually does exist is more interesting, to my mind?

When they are out walking, Billinghurst and Smith witness the evidence of a war on the ecology, an ongoing destruction of flora and fauna. That leads to the idea of “Sexy Theory,” the “opposite of transcendent thought” which sits in the intellect: a way of thinking that is “thinking-through-the-body,” that happens through embodied acts (136). “Sexy Theory is not about valuing one idea over another,” they write. “It is a way of experiencing theories as erotic and interested in our bodies. For, just as the forest benefits from people attending to it, so theories gain by our attracting to them and we by their attraction to us” (136).

Next is a discussion of “useful randomness,” of data that refuses to be “sensibly, empirically or academically organized that gives us access to an earlier plasma, to a something prior to its self-organsation,” which “usefully rearranges . . . our more rational vocabularies and lexicons” (137). They see something similar in the oracles of the ancient world: a randomness that reveals something.

Back in Dorset, after a day of rain and writing, they climb Eggardon Hill. They find a small, grass-covered mound, and Smith lies down there. When he gets up, “the field was coloured like a lunar landscape,” which reminds him of an apocalyptic dream (139). That leads to a discussion of species coming together, of “[o]rgans without a stable organism” (140), which is followed by another manifesto on “Field Thinking”: “We are against the intellectual property borders and the sedentary thinking of the lecture hall” (141). “While our walking is geographical, we walk through physical space, there is a psychic aspect, a sub-set of the physical: we have all our diagrams of this aspect, but we suspect that they are all parts of a single seething diagram,” they write (141). Field thinking, they continue, is partly about “scaling up and down. Shifting ideas across different fields, volumes, genres and phases” (141). to Plymouth, and then take the train to Bristol, where Smith grew up. They follow the path of a buried river, which is marked by the “charred remains of fires” (145). They get lost again, disoriented, unsure if they will find their overnight accommodations. They notice almost no insects in some fields, “as if the chemical damage has been so severe, and perhaps ongoing, that the recovery of species, despite the return of habitat, has not been possible” (148). Finally they see moths and butterflies in abundance. They climb to the highest point in the Mendip Hills and eat bilberries. “We are moved by what is below and what is all around,” they write (150). “[W]e have a first inkling of how our web walking is changing from the hypersensitisation to detail and textures and fragments of narrative and lore, deepening and burrowing down in awareness of the vivacity of a dar forest below and the welling up from ‘privileged points,’” they write. “We had felt all along the threads of connectivities and lines of flight and desire, and then were buoyed up when those threads knotted and tangled and formed cat’s cradles and spider’s webs; and this is the same, but different” (151).

In Cheddar, they visit a museum dedicated to “Cheddar George,” a 9,000-year-old man, the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain, and he becomes the patron saint of their pilgrimages. They also visit a healing pool at White Spring, a place without liturgy or dogma in which “the least ‘fixed’ thing of all” is the water (156). Later they drink from the Red Spring across the road, where “[t]he water tastes of iron and blood” (156). The twin springs are “a geological wonder,” so different and so close together (157). 

Next, they describe a pilgrimage to Cambridge. Their first stop is a nearby village, where Billinghurst grew up, near a place where nineteenth-century archaeologists discovered the bodies of nine giant men in a quarry. They walk a path Robert Macfarlane took on a journey he relates at the beginning of his book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Beneath a field where people are playing rounders, they think, lie multiple chalk figures—based on the work of “archaeologist and psychic researcher T.C. Lethbridge,” one of the purveyors of disreputable knowledge they had discussed earlier (163). They walk back to Cambridge and drive on to Ashwell Springhead, another location “where holy space is public space, where holy space is common ground” (166). Weeks later, they discover that the spring was once a site of pilgrimage for the Romans, “who came to take the waters, to petition and make offerings to the water goddess Senuna” (170). 

They continue on to Arbury Banks, to the earthworks there, which they describe as “another unconvincing ‘hill fort’” (171). The site is behind a fence and there is no information about it. They stay in Dunstable, a depressed place, where they walk into town to find dinner. They recall searching for an artist’s grave in a cemetery in Cambridge, where they experience something they describe as time looping, a kind of glitch or slip that subverts time itself. That leads to a discussion of tantra, a “plateauing of that dying” in which life and death are in tension (177). They wonder if the lines they’ve been thinking about are actually the product of the stones, circles, and tombs. In Cambridge, they walk with no purpose to a forest called Nine Wells. “Our tattooed land, marked by architecture, accidental landscape and woozy stories is like a wonky gameboard,” they write. “Its grids yanked out of ‘true’ by the gravitational pulls of attractive characters and the tugs of amoral forces on its line and rungs” (179). They propose “a pilgrimage of the Pattern which eschews the trappings of aspirant-religions or ambitious systems of any kind, and assumes a more nomadic approach, going place by place, feeling by feeling, making things up as you go along,” letting the spaces guide the pilgrims “rather than what we believe of them” (179). In a motel filled with truckers, they spend the evening writing and drawing.

“Removing humans from the green environment creates a flood, accelerates an uninhibited rush to destruction”—destruction caused by corporations and other abstract entities, I’m assuming. “Human boulders in the flow create the possibilities for rapids, for the soaking up and variegation of the rush, turning energy into meanings and meaningful variations of velocity and volume,” they continue (183). They recall a climb in Ebbor Gorge, in Somerset, where they wondered if they would have the same fate as the schoolgirls in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Now, they discuss the tentacular as a force that cannot be managed, “Tentacularity is never wholly explicit; there are always blind streams which emerge without expressing by quite what hollows they have arrived,” they write. Then they return to their pilgrimage with a visit to a cave near Royston, where they bought a guide to “the alchemical agencies at work in the Red and White Springs at Glastonbury (187). They consider the importance of those colours in their work. During their walks, “our red and white threads became like two serpentine routes, weaving around each other, each a slippery scaffolding for the other, while together raising the ghost of a third and invisible thread” (188). 

Another pilgrimage, this one to the Wandlebury Ring, the site of Lethbridge’s excavation and “his problematic proposal for a jumble of supposedly ancient chalk images” (189). They acknowledge that it’s easy to laugh at Lethbridge’s method, but they “prefer to think of him as an intuitive myth-scientist, an artist, a skillful seer able to crochet-hook a vanished past into modernity, rendering it visible—and useful—for others” (189-90). They visit (on foot or by car? I can’t tell) the White Horse of Uffington, and have a picnic while watching volunteers refurbishing the chalk drawing. On their descent down the hill, they “slip through time,” seeing a white horse, a “bright flash, glint of metal,” and “red blood” soaking into the white chalk: “A strange, beautiful spectacle” (192). A “Red Kite” hovering overhead becomes a military helicopter (192). The following day, they visit Avebury Circle (they are clearly travelling by car now), where charms and trinkets hang from the branches of beech trees.

“There is, it seems, a web of surface patterns,” they write, which bring together “ancient chalk figures and esoteric grafitti with chance hill contours, motorway networks, zodiacal chartings and the Jungian imaginings of the likes of T. C. Lethbridge” (193). That web “tattoos the entire country” in a tangible pattern (193). “These are the veins and arteries to which our wanders on the outskirts of Plymouth have brought us, driven by the things we found there, the agents of connection,” they continue. “We did not set out to trace a pattern; instead it has come to us by our following an unfolding; first with threads, then knots and tangles and webs, and then the under-forest of rhizomes and mycelium, and myths and privileged points, and, fainally, brought us to The Pattern” (193). The tattoo on the surface is dense and meaningful, and “The Pattern is a hybrid; partly of affordant shapings in the landscape—mounds, inclines and bowls—and partly of subjective marings and tellings; a legend of the hill, a tower built on its summit” (193). They see parallels between The Pattern and Billinghurst’s drawings, and the line of their walks “is the line of implicit and explicit memory, mirrored in the survivals and disappearances of the palimpsests of old ritual layouts heaped one on top of another, a tattooing not only extensive, but in places deep and thick” (196). Other writers and artists have discovered “the same nodes and threads” (196). They constitute “the great land art,” which is “always walkable, processional, democratic; complementary to a train of thought that connects immediate personal associations to complex, buried, promiscuous shared memories and boxes of bones” (196-97).

Now they turn to their final walk for the book, on the edge of Plymouth. They climb to the top of a medieval motte and a hill near a quarry where the body of a sheep rots. “There is something very wrong here,” they write. “The privileged point is poisoned” (198). After a stop in a nearby pub, they carry on towards home. “We are travelling in different dimensions,” they continue. “part of us is following the ghost of the old creek, slipping spectrally by as the heart of the town becomes a port again; as unplanned cargoes arrive; as a ghostly schooner kisses the quayside, unmanned. Another part is still in those crimson armchairs, upholstered mechanisms for travelling in time and space” (199). “We started these journeys with an idea about space and set out to find a labyrinth; and now we are beginning something new with an idea about time and its loops, threading us back and forward, from future inundation to former idealism and back to the present where the past is curled snug in front of the glowing grate in the London Inn, resolutely provincial and promiscuously connected,” they conclude (199). But it’s not a conclusion, as the last words unequivocally state: “There is no conclusion . . .” (199).

So, what do I make of this book? I’m not sure. The walking practice it describes is very different from my own, but I already knew that would be the case, before I opened it. I find myself unable to fictionalize or mythologize, especially here, where the indigenous myths—the myths of Indigenous peoples—are not stories I feel qualified to tell, or borrow from, or play with. There is little playful here, in Saskatchewan—indeed, from the account Billinghurst and Smith provide here, there is little playful in England, too. The tattoo on the surface of this land is made of grid roads and road allowances, which overlay older trails, rivers, creeks, anything that meanders or deviates from the strict north-south or east-west lines on the map. I think that the practice outlined in The Pattern might fit the United Kingdom, but I’m not sure it would work here, in this very different place. In any case, Smith’s writing and his walking practices are always interesting, always worth thinking about and trying to learn from.

Works Cited

Billinghurst, Helen, and Phil Smith. The Pattern: A Fictioning, Triarchy Press, 2020.

Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Penguin, 2012.

Schott, John, Phil Smith, and Tony Whitehead. Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, Triarchy Press, 2019.