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DRIFT with students from an Englishlanguage school 7.2.03
Arriving in ones, twos and threes at “The Statue” (in BedfordCircus): Ryan, Haejin, Keiko, Bong rok, Etsuko, Mahmut,Matthew, Cathy and me. To walk the word DRIFT in Koreanalphabet onto the surface of the city of Exeter (I first typed “thecity if Exeter”); tracing it down back streets, cul-de-sacs,demolition sites and alleys, criss-crossing the ancient flint route of the Icknield Way (Sidwell Street and High Street). Finding a tiny Zworld in a hole in the city wall. Discussing the graffitied bluestencils of a young woman’s face that have been decorating thesurfaces of city buildings for a month or so – “is she a 40s filmstar?” – and then meeting her at the very moment that she sees her own deep blue image for the first time – she says an artist took her  photograph at a party.Mahmut pointing out theAladdin pantomime poster, discovering thedirection of Mecca froma man in the NewHorizon café. All of us inthe café chatting under the gaze of ‘Clifford’sTurret’:
 
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Matthew and I were on the last lap now. Wandering down LongbrookStreet, past Park House. Matthew would like to think of the child WilliamClifford sitting in its turret, looking, thinking. But the turret was added after Clifford lived there. But maybe we should think of him, suspended inspace. A mythogeometric moment. Clifford the Big Red Mathematical Dogin orbit.
(from
Z Worlds
)
Dewey number 510 is where we find William KingdonClifford’s ‘The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences’.Number 82 is where we might have found Clifford as a childat home in Longbrook Street, a three minute walk from here -from the turret of which we might imagine him watching theexecutions on the prison ramparts, aware, like the man withthe rope around his neck, of the way space curves abouttime… anticipating Einstein by forty years … but the turretwasn’t built until Harry Hems bought the house and Cliffordhad grown up and gone.
(from
tEXtcavation
– a Wrights & Sites performance/installationin the underground stacks of Exeter Central Library for the 2003tEXt Festival.)A building turned into a hill of bricks. Moss growing into words ona gravestone.
 
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Cathy later said that this wasthe first time she’d understoodthe drift because it moved soslowly, it became possible for unexpected things to emergefrom familiar places. Aghostly lamppost.Cathy, Matthew and me, and then finally, just Matthew and mewalking into the darkness to complete
DRIFT
. At the end of adark alley blundering into a private garden, taking a portrait photofor German visitors, gazing on the hermetic spire of St Michael’s& All Angels from the Egyptian Catacombes. And finallydiscovering that on tracing our route onto a map, that we havewalked/waked the shape of a flying girl, which turns on its side to become an old man leaning on a stick and upside down a tank or artillery gun.The velocity of the movement of thegeometries of self/s and place/s througheach other affects the probable amounts of contact, the amounts of binding, theamounts of place that detach themselves andattach themselves, the amounts of self thatdetach themselves and attach themselves. Asthe walk slowed, the idea of destinationdisappeared, and then – at the very end of the day, in the darkness, the choice arisesagain – a ghost on a bouncy castle: to
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