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Peripheral Vision
I wanted to do this drift because of a feeling I got when wewere drifting in woods during the
Taxi To Westwood andFeatureless
dérive:
----- Original Message -----
From:
 Phil Smith
To:
 sandra reeve
Sent:
Monday, June 17, 2002 8:42 AM
Subject:
yesterday and in the woodsDear Sandra,
 
Yesterday we went on the 'drift', taxi-catapulted. Theexperiences of the resulting journey have broughtback to me questions that we corresponded on just ashort while ago.
 
The taxi left us in what the driver described as a"featureless" place. Which was a strange remark asthe landscape there was distinctively featured withhuge electric pylons humming and buzzing overhead,a theatrical driveway to one side and a large strangestructure (never did find out) maybe two miles away.After some adventures - confronted by 24 hour videosecurity, a public footpath blocked by a new barrier of chickenwire, the burnt and transported remains of a
 
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house which we remade, and finding a church "for sale" - we arrived at and entered a wood. Simon sawdeer in the trees but our arrival scared them off andwe followed deer tracks deeper and deeper into anincreasingly closely-grown wood of slim trunks. Thedeer paths bent us over sometimes. For forty minutesor so we were searching through the woods. For what? For me, it was searching for the edge of strangeness, lightly felt at the entrance to the thicker part of the wood, that is the beginning of Pan-ic, for the sense of 'everything' in a non-human place towhich one's presence adds the final ingredient, thekey that turns the lock to 'everything'. But, except for one moment, when the large tree trunks on theopposite side of a bridle path appeared in an illusionthrough the narrow trunks as the classical pillars of some folly or old house, the realisation of strangeness never came. And I began to ask myself "how should I be moving here?" "How should the four of us be moving?" And I thought of moving on the daywith you in the woods.
 
I was very aware of always leading with my eyes.Tending towards the linear. Not working enough withperipheral vision. Not feeling enough. Not letting theshape of the wood's floor lead us. Not letting our body weights be drawn by the shapes in time/space.Too Newtonian and not enough General Relativity!Using peripheral vision only to stay in contact with theother members of the human group and notextending it beyond. I see that I made a note on the
 
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print-off of your email: "like to move with othersthrough site... looking ahead - peripherally mycolleagues… (a seeking outwards) not into mirror of others, but in moving (bonding?) thru' site". I'm notquite sure what this note means - me struggling for understanding - but what I do understand of itseemed inadequate in the wood yesterday.
 
This engages, for me, with comments you made inyour last email. "Presence" being the "there iscontext/I am context" - presence being what one ispresent in - perhaps a perfect description of 'site-specificity'. The place as "imaginary partner", theeverything (else) as "imaginary partner". In thepresence of others (and properly present withthem.......... so how should I have been properlypresent with my companions?
 Working with fallen branches felt no different to me fromworking with the discarded rubbish from a house fire – theforestry on this estate is a factory for making trees. There isnothing ‘natural’ here. Nowhere that I have been is.Everywhere one is playing on a patina, and sometimesalong great shafts or planes of human intervention andorganisation. And I can love that. In the shadow of thetrees, the apparent aridity of the forest floor under theclosely planted trees… this is the dark overgrowth of mythical pre-city, pre-village Europe, the thick green brown roof of trees. That may be just a nostalgia, autopianising of the deep past – for the deep past may in facthave been more like a swathe of New Forest, more like a
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