Author: orbific

Last night, at a book launch in London, I was talking to a magician. He told me how his interest in magic was sparked by strange experiences in childhood; magic provided a means of understanding these events. My experience of the world is very different. As I explained to the magician, nothing strange has ever happened to me.

That’s not to say my life isn’t interesting (not least because it involves meeting up with magicians at book launches in nightclub basements). And I’ve been to lots of strange places and events, such as the Mari Lwyd or the Karni Mata temple. It’s just that, in all these adventures, I’ve never seen any direct evidence of particularly odd or inexplicable.

I’ve always been interested in the weird and supernatural. As I child, I loved my copy of the Usbourne Books’ Supernatural Omnibus. As I’ve grown older, I retained that fascination, for example being obsessed by Grant Morrison’s Invisibles comic. Recently, I gave a talk on Slenderman and Creepypasta. But my interests are only as an observer. I’m probably the only Robert Anton Wilson fan without any personal synchronicity stories.

But that doesn’t make me a sceptic. Another thing I’ve always loved are stories. I can appreciate other people’s narratives, even if they don’t work for me. Maybe it comes from attending chapel three times a week at school, the whole establishment following a religion it didn’t believe in.

If pushed, I could explain away any particular incident of weirdness – whether through marsh gas, drunkenness, credulity or a desperate desire for attention. The problem comes with explaining away all of them. Too many times, on a summer afternoon, I’ve seen conversation slip into the unexplained. It amazes me how many people have a story to tell. It’s more than good manners that stops me from claiming they must be making it up. A single story can be explained away, but there are too many such stories.

We live in a strange beautiful world, and one of the things I love most about it are those gaps, the things that can’t be quickly explained away: accounts of magic, interventions by spirits, strange coincidences. I know a lot of people who’ve had odd experiences, but these things all happen to other people. Nothing strange has ever happened to me.

In his book Our Pet Queen, writer John Higgs claims that Britain has two monarchs. One is Elizabeth Windsor; the other is King Arthur Uther Pendragon. In comparison with Elizabeth, King Arthur is “more likely to sleep in a ditch, drink cider until he pukes and set fire to people for a laugh”,  but is “recognized as a King because his followers don’t know anyone who would make a better king”.

King Arthur was born John Timothy Rothwell in 1954 and spent time as a soldier and a biker. After reading a book on the mythical King Arthur, he spotted certain similarities and decided that he was Arthur reincarnated. He changed his name and was proclaimed King by several Druidic orders.

According to Higgs, King Arthur knows how mad this is, but he is also determined to live up to the ideal of King Arthur. He does not work or take benefits: “[King Arthur] can only eat and drink if people value him enough to feed him. His stout frame is, therefore, a source of some pride. Together with his long white hair and beard, it is hard to deny that this ex-soldier and biker has come to look an awful lot like a king.”

(Higgs also tells an excellent story about how King Arthur Pendragon found Excalibur, but I’m not going to regurgitate the book. My friend Michael Parker has also found Excalibur. I texted him while I was writing this piece to ask if he’d met King Arthur. Mike texted back to say that he had: “I told him that I had ‘an’ Excalibur, and he said then that I am ‘an’ Arthur”)

As a King, Arthur Pendragon took his first stand against the long-running exclusion zone against Stonehenge. He continues to participate in direct action with his followers, the Loyal Arthurian Warband and has accumulated a series of honorary titles.

King Arthur Pendragon is reminiscent of another figure, the Discordian Saint, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Norton declared himself Emperor in San Francisco in 1859, on nothing but his own authority. Despite that, his 21-year reign is generally seen as a good thing. Norton I is said to have dispersed anti-Chinese riots, released his own currency and was fed by the city’s restaurants. When arrested for a mental disorder there was uproar, with the town’s citizens demanding his release. The police chief apologised when the Emperor was released: “he had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line.”

When Norton died in 1880, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle declared “Le Roi est Mort”. At first, a pauper’s funeral was planned but his citizens demanded something greater. On January 10th 1880, the body of Emperor Norton I was paraded past 10,000 people with a funeral cortège 2 miles long.

King Arthur Pendragon and Emperor Norton draw attention to something important about power and legitimacy. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland has existed only since 1801; governments have come and gone. While they may not also be what we would choose, we can choose our ideals and leaders to an extent – but this does come with a responsibility. As King Arthur Pendragon says on his website: “Arthur is what Arthur does and I will be judged solely by my accomplishments.”

Mark Fisher’s book, Ghosts of My Life, includes an interview where Burial discusses the influence of MR James on his work, and how many of his mates have seen ghosts. MR James is also the starting point for an essay by Robert Macfarlane about The Eeriness of the English Countryside. For Macfarlane, James has an “understanding of landscape – and especially the English landscape – as constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships“. This is emblematic of a wider movement which Macfarlane describes as English Eerie, relating it to the current political scene and ongoing environmental crises.

This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.

Like hauntology, this English Eerie is a grouping for various ideas, as varied as PJ Harvey’s stunning White Chalk album, the movie A Field in England, Julian Cope, The Wicker Man, Ley Lines, Paul Kingsnorth and MJ Harrison’s ‘Empty Space:A Haunting’. He also points to On Vanishing Land, an audio essay by Mark Fisher. If nothing else, MacFarlane’s work provides an exciting list of things to investigate. It’s easy to think of other elements to add, such as Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic work Riddley Walker, or the strange and unsettling chapters of the Wind in the Willows.

Like all definitions of movements, the English Eerie acts backwards, collecting these different strands that might have been seen as unrelated (an effect discussed in the Borges essay, Kafka’s Precursors). The movement also creates something for other artists to align with and respond to.

MacFarlane sees this movement as inherently political: “What is under way, across a broad spectrum of culture, is an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism. The supernatural and paranormal have always been means of figuring powers that cannot otherwise find visible expression.” It also relates to concerns about surveillance – in Jeremy Keith’s response, he points towards recent work by James Bridle, The Nor.

Another thing that Keith links to is Warren Ellis’s dConstruct talk A Cunning Plan. Much of my interest in folklore has been kindled by Warren Ellis’s work over the past few years, particularly a couple of essays in his collection Shivering Sands – and Ellis’s upcoming work promises more exploration into these issues.

In an increasingly wired and urban world, the English countryside is still relevant. It is not the wild, natural environment some people like to think, but a place that has long been warped by economics and politics – the Downlands as we know are a result of farming, not of wildness. There are debates and struggles that have been going on for centuries: and modern concerns like online privacy and ownership are merely a continuation of these.

I missed the original hype around Hauntology. It looked interesting, a sinister mix of electronic music, test-cards, folk and government information films. In a Guardian article, Andrew Gallix noted a feeling that it had become old hat. James Bridle predicted it was “about six months away from becoming the title of a column in a Sunday supplement magazine“. This was a fate that occurred to Psychogeography but was avoided by Bridle’s New Aesthetic when its parents strangled it to death.

The word hauntology was coined by Jacques Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx. The concept plays with the way communism was announced as a ghost, with the Communist Manifesto beginning “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism“. Derrida’s term was related to haunting, the dislocations of time and futures that had never happened.

Hauntology has come to note a sort of claustrophobic nostalgia. To quote Mark Fisher: “it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We remain trapped in the 20th century… in 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today… cultural time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultaneity”. The ghost here, is a “spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.”

As one commentator, Christopher Pankhurst has said, “It would be wrong to say that Derrida’s book has spawned a hauntological artistic movement but what it has done is allowed otherwise disparate cultural artefacts to be read in terms of their engagement with past forms“. And it’s easy to point to those cultural artefacts, as Fisher has: “[hauntology is]  a confluence of artists. The word confluence is crucial here. For these artists – William Bansinski, The Ghost Box label, The Caretaker, Burial, Mordant Music, Philip Jeck, amongst others – had converged on a certain terrain without actually influencing one another. What they shared was not a sound so much as a sensibility, an existential orientation”.

Fisher talks a lot about how exhausted music seems, with no sense of anything new coming through. There is a strong sense of melancholy, as can be seen in the title of Leyland Kirby’s album Sadly, the future is no longer what it was, or V/vm’s The Death of Rave, a project “using all of the dance floor hits from the time and stripping theme of energy and spirit, turning them into shadows and ghosts“. Then there is the Caretaker’s Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (which has been discussed at length by Fisher). For me, the confluence of influences, of folk, children’s TV and technology are to me, form a sort of soundtrack to things like the Scarfolk Council website. 

Hauntology briefly flickered into life around 2006 and has continued to echo and influence. It has influenced culture and continues to do so. The sense of failed futures grows stronger, as does a feeling that the city is haunted by the country.