A Man About The House

script for a walk performance at A la Ronde (National Trust) 2008

Simon Persighetti & Phil Smith

1/ empty plinth (behind car park)

Shell

(Phil to collect the audience from the

reception area and lead them into the
car park. Phil is dressed as a fusty
1950s local historian. He carries an
old notebook titled “Mein Buch”)

Phil: (mimes putting up umbrella)

It was raining very lightly, and I kept opening my umbrella and
then closing it, opening and closing, opening and closing. (Mime
this action, then as if leaving it up, so that the hand is held almost
like a papal blessing.) I was waiting for Trevor and I was just
about here (point to spot) – and I was wondering what it was that
Trevor was so keen to tell me.
His car pulled up just there and he got out and walked towards me
here. We shook hands.

(Phil shakes hands with a member of the audience, and then

another.)

Peace be with you. Peace be with you.

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(Taking the hands of the final audience member Phil does not
release their hands.

In the third century there were two opposing Popes: Cornelius and
Novatus. When Novatus gave communion he would seize the
hands of the communicant and refuse to release them until they had
sworn never to turn to Cornelius.

(Phil release the audience member’s hand and mimes takes down
his umbrella.)

Trevor said: “Have you been told anything about what I’ve found
out?” I told him I hadn’t. “Then, you might have to re-think your
walk.”

He led me to the volunteers’ room inside the house, and began to

make me a cup of coffee, no milk, no sugar. It seemed to take
forever, while I waited to hear what this story was. At last Trevor
began:

“It was 1885 and a Mr and Mrs Rice booked in to a guest house in
Bristol… “

I’m going to keep you waiting as well, but rather than a cup of
coffee I need to prepare you, in the same way that I was prepared
to hear what I heard – I’m going to take you to eight places, each
one symbolic of the life and passions of the Reverend Oswald
Reichel, the only man to live here in two centuries of occupation.
The first one is just over here.

(Phil lead the audience to the empty plinth. He places a mussel

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shell on the plinth. Then he stands on the plinth and takes a
statuesque position for a moment.)

(Phil reads passage:)

“The (Holy Roman) Emperor Leo the 3rd was a native of Isauria, of
obscure birth, a valorous and able soldier… but rude and unrefined
in mind, unable to appreciate art and loving a plain and unadorned
worship… Images... seemed (to him) positively sinful…
Christendom was astonished by the appearance of Leo’s edict
interdicting all worship of images … proscribing as idolatrous all
statues and pictures which represented the Saviour, the Virgin, and
the Saints… ordering the whitewashing of the walls of the
churches. Scenes of rebellion and bloodshed were the
result…terrible prodigies were witnessed in heaven, and
phenomena no less strange appeared on earth. … ‘Go into a school
where children are learning their letters, and proclaim yourself a
destroyer of images. You will receive their tablets thrown at your
head.’”

(Phil smashes the mussel shell and then replaces it with a new
unbroken mussel shell.)

That’s a quotation from ‘The See (S -E - E) of Rome in The

Middle Ages’ – in other words the government of the church
between a thousand and five hundred years ago. It was written by a
young Anglican vicar called Oswald Reichel, 19 years before he
came live here at A la Ronde. Reichel was just 30 when ‘The See
of Rome’ was published – it’s a huge book about Europe’s politics
and religion, and it reads well today. Reichel was born in 1840, the
son of a Moravian Priest, possibly from a long line of Moravian
bishops, his mother was Matilda Hurlock, a cousin of Jane and
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Mary Parminter, the first occupants and possible designers of A la
Ronde.

(Show audience the official guidebook to A la Ronde with Reichel

and his wife Julia in the family tree at the back.)

You’ll see Oswald there and there’s his wife Julia, born 1842. Julia
lived out the final years of her life over there, in a 1920s built
house called Three Acres.

In his youth, Oswald switched to the Church of England – very

close in beliefs to the Moravian Church – and was ordained an
Anglican priest in 1865 after studying in Oxford with great
distinction, and was made vice principal of Cuddesdon College in
Oxford, training young men for the Anglican priesthood, as well as
curate at North Hinksey and later vicar at Sparsholt, both villages
in Oxfordshire.

Reichel’s publishing was extraordinary – not only is ‘The See of

Rome’ a brilliant, book, but around the same time Reichel
published translations from the German of major works on Socratic
philosophy and on the Stoics and Epicureans. The man was a
genius, and yet when he arrives at A la Ronde in 1889, he has
published nothing of significance for 19 years and is no longer
officiating as a priest.

As perhaps you could guess from the quotation about Leo the
Third, Reichel believed strongly in the importance of the material
quality of symbols: "no religious man” he quoted “goes on a
pilgrimage without an image".

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The shell of a thing was not simply an outer distraction, it was like
the shell of a crab or a shellfish, part of the living organism and
being of all things.

So, what is the significance of his move here, taking A la Ronde as

his shell, and why, suddenly, after 19 years does he begin to
publish on a national stage again, this time not on the church
government of the past, but on the church government of the
present and the future, at the same time, dedicating much of his
time to the minutiae of local history:

(Reads.)

“… and (the) generations of those who have gone to make it up,

now mingl(ing) their dust with that of others in the quiet
churchyard of St John in the Wilderness, on the neighbouring hill.”

In a footnote to one his essays he writes of being told

“by Mr Joel Crabb that the last case of a corpse being carried…
along the old Churchway occurred some sixty years ago… a son of
his Uncle Henry’s … killed by a prong falling from a hayrick and
transfixing him.”

Here’s the map from the essay…

(Phil shows the map from the essay)

and you can see the churchway or corpse path there and possibly
extended along the route right next us to here – see how Park Lane
stops so abruptly suggesting that when the A la Ronde grounds
were made up from fields, the path here was blocked, and now is
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open again.

So let’s walk in parallel with what might once have been a

churchway – a corpse path - and carry these shells as the shells of
men and women would once have been carried in their coffins.
(Phil hands out mussels and walks on along the perimeter path, at
one path beginning to sing.)

“… da fing das Öl zu brennen an,

Von Aserbeidschan bis Tibet.
Es stecke die Welt in Brand,
Petroleum heisst unser Vaterland.
Dafür zerlöchern wir uns das Fell:
Shell! Shell! Shell!

(reads)

“The oil began to burn from Azerbijan to Tibet, It set the world on
fire. The name of our Fatherland is Petroleum, And for the sake of
it we’ll drill, Each others’ hides full of holes: Shell! Shell! Shell!

That’s from Muschellied or ‘The Mussel-Song’ from the play Öl-

Konjunktur (Oil-Economy) by Leo Lania and Felix Gasbarra,
words by Gasbarra and music by Kurt Weill, though sadly the
music you just heard was me just making it up.
Not many people know that the first logo of the Shell Oil Company
was the mussel shell, first used in 1901 and then replaced in 1904
by the famous scallop shell or pecten, appropriating the scallop
badge worn by medieval pilgrims.

Let’s continue our pilgrimage to the next station.

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2/ obelisk (frozen sun beam) ~ Ice
(apollonian male intellectualism/female dionysian sun worship
spiritualism)

Phil: Can you put your mussel shells around the obelisk for a
moment and place your hands on the stone. I’m wondering how
warm or cold it feels to you?

You see, an obelisk is the representation of a sunbeam.

(Sings) “Es stecke die Welt in Brand!”

It sets the world on fire.

This frozen sunbeam is a good place to consider the contradictions

of Oswald Reichel’s life here at A la Ronde, as the only male
occupant in an otherwise uninterrupted female occupation.

Look down to the Estuary of the River Exe, for a moment. During
the Pleistocene ice ages, the glaciers north of here sucked the water
out of the seas, and this area was dry, allowing the River Exe to dig
deeper and deeper into the earth. When temperatures rose again,
the glaciers melted, the waters flooded back in and drowned the
valley. Ice and fire.

That’s what the Beefeater chain are calling their Father’s Day meal
this year – it’s a fry up washed down with Heineken? – Ice and
fire.

If you’ve travelled along the edge of the Exe you’ve probably

noticed the pieces of wood stuck in the mud and occasionally
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people lifting them up and taking something – they’re “crab tiling”
- collecting little Pea Crabs, to sell as bait.

These Pea Crabs lives in symbiosis with the Mussel. The females
live inside the shells of the Mussels, feeding on the Mussels’
mucous membrane, so they are parasitic. The males, great
swimmers, swarm over the Mussel beds and sneak inside the
Mussels’ shells to mate. The female Pea Crab, while in the Mussel,
has no outer shell - her host provides her with all the necessary
protection.

So perhaps there is a contradiction here – in nature – between the

outer appearance and the nature of what is within?

What protection was A la Ronde, this female shell, affording

Oswald Reichel?

And how did he feed upon it?

He certainly made some changes here to Jane and Mary’s original

house – putting in big pipes for central heating, letting in the light
through dormer windows in the tiled roof that he put up in place of
a thatched one.

The passages I’m reading today are all written by Oswald Reichel,
if it’s by someone else I’ll usually tell you – and this is someone
else, this is a passage from ‘A House of Leaves’ by Mark Z.
Danielewski, a novel about a house transformed by the spirit of a
former male occupant:

“At first everything seemes to be proceeding smoothly. Slowly but

surely, Navidson draws more and more slack rope down onto the
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floor, steadily lifting Reston up through the bore of th(e) stairs.
Then about halfway up, something strange happens: the excess
rope at Navidson’s feet starts to vanish, while the rope he holds
begins to slip across his fingers and palms with enough speed to
leave a burnuing gash. Navidson finally has to let go. Reston,
however, does not fall. In fact, Reston’s ascent only accelerates,
marked by the… green light he…holds…
But if Navidson is no longer holding onto the rope, what could
possibly be pulling Reston to the top?

Then as the stairway starts getting darker and darker as that faintly
illuminated circle above – the proverbial light at the end of the
tunnel – starts getting smaller and smaller, the answer becomes
clear.

… the stairway is stretching, expanding, dropping,

And as it slips, (it is) dragging Reston up with it.”

And this is Mark Danielewski’s sister, Poe, singing about the same
changing house:

On cassette player, play Poe singing “Five and A Half Minute

Hallway” from ‘Haunted’.
As this plays, Simon appears – coming along the path/’hallway’ -
wearing white, he carries a piece of ice that is melting.
As he approaches, Phil reads from the book:

Phil: “Finally, in the temple crypts, Tamino… passes through the

trials of Fire and Water, and proves he is worthy to win his
beloved. The powers of Night are vanquished. Reminiscent of the
biblical reference to baptism by water and by fire, this passing of
trials stands for the full awakening of Mind.
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What does it all mean? What is the main theme of the opera?
Surely, it refers to the transmutation of character from raw material
to enlightenment, the process of our maturation into full
humanhood.”

Does Oswald Reichel pass these trials?

Simon arrives. Phil takes the ice from him and hands it, with a cup,
to a member of the audience – to hold the ice and catch the melting
water.

Simon leads the audience towards the Secret Garden.

3/ the 'secret' garden

Secrets ~ the invisible

Simon enters the garden, either Salli or Phil opening the gate with
a key. Simon goes to the apples in a bowl, the symbolic tree behind
him, and begins cutting one into slices.

Phil: Before we enter the secret garden – this is the third station,
so we’re moving on from the first part of the solemn mass as it was
in the Ninth Century, to the second part – we began with the
“public readings” and now, for the next two stations, we’ll have the
People’s Prayers… or rather we should be, but by the ninth
century, the informal, improvised prayers of the people of the early
church had been replaced, to Oswald Reichel ‘s distaste, by
silence.
Reichel did not like silence, he did not like invisibility, ghosts, or
churches based on opinions rather than physical congregations with
all their differences, and he did not like secrets… he liked outward
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material symbols that expressed, explicitly the truth of what was
within.

The audience are led into the secret garden. Simon is cutting up an
apple.

Phil: For more than 20 years Oswald Ray-shell - for that,

apparently, was how he preferred people to pronounce his name –
Ray-shell was a member of the Board of Guardians for St Thomas
in Exeter – often taking fruit for distribution to the poor, picked in
his gardens here.

Simon hands out the pieces of apple for the audience to eat.

Phil: (reads) “Certain persons… in Holy Orders are disqualified

from exercising their office on the ground that the exercise of the
ministry by them would tend to cause scandal… the disqualifying
circumstance, which may not be a sin at all, is called an
Irregularity. … To constitute an irregularity… a crime must... be
publicly known and not secret … Irregularities may cease… by the
lapse of time, or study, or absence…”

Even before I’d heard Trevor’s story I’d written in my notes: “was
Oswald hiding a secret world?”

“… never forget that we have this treasure in earthen vessels; and

that although the soul soars upwards to higher things, the body has
not lost its human instincts… make allowances for the strength of
human passions surprising the unwary and carrying them to excess
at times, remembering that the simple gratification of the primary
instincts of human nature such as eating, drinking, sexual
intercourse, and the like, is not wrong per se, but only become so
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when indulged in excessively, unlawfully, or unnaturally. Far from
confounding religion with morality… (the Canon Law) owns that
the Church itself exists through grace and hence rejoices in every
triumph of grace over human weakness…”

Simon raises the symbolical tree – sharp at the bottom and curled
in some way at the top. The tree is handed to a member of the
audience.

Phil: Can we now process the tree, please, left along the narrow
path, until we reach the gate with one stone post standing?

(We all process down the narrow path until we reach station
number four.

4/ broken stone gate

Keys ~ St Peter (keys to heaven) - dumb materialism

(Phil hands his book over to Simon,

taking the symbolic tree and holding
it like a bishop’s crozier in one hand,
standing before the gate, while
producing keys in his other hand.
Simon kneels before Phil, holding up
the book so Phil can read from it.

Phil: We have shared carrying both

the tree and the water as a symbol of
those egalitarian and communal
elements in the early Christian church
that Oswald Ray-shell admired so
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much, and believed could still (just about) be detected in the shared
responsibilities and communality of the solemn mass of the Ninth
century. But here, now at the gate of heaven, we re-enact the reality
of what, in the eyes of Oswald Ray-shell, had become of that great
project of united spiritual organization:

(Reads)

“The Church had become an aristocratic, not a democratic

institution… The free elections of primitive times had gone into
disuse… the independence of priests was gone. A few great men
governed the state, a few great prelates governed the church. Once
it had been a note of Christianity that to the poor the Gospel was
preached. Now it was otherwise, the gospel was for Princes… the
Church was leaving her children to go after her lovers…”

(reads) “The crosier is an ecclesiastical ornament which is

conferred on bishops at their consecration.

( Phil jabbing at and then gesturing towards the audience with the
‘tree’. )

“…the end is sharp and pointed wherewith to prick and goad the
slothful, the middle is straight to signify righteous rule, while the
head is bent or crooked in order to draw in and attract souls to the
ways of God.

In a moment I will ask you to come forward and look through the
gate.

(reads) “said Oswy, then king of Northumbria: ‘… the keys to

heaven were given to Peter by our Lord. And… I say unto you that
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he is the doorkeeper, whom I will not contradict… lest when I
come to the gate of heaven there should be none to open them…”

If the barbarians of Europe imagined Heaven as a geographical

location, with a gate, and its keys held by the Pope, what did Ray-
shell imagine as heaven?

In all his writings I don’t recall him ever mentioning it. Heaven
seems to fall within his antipathy towards the secret, the invisible,
the ghostly.

Come forward and look beyond the gate and try to imagine a
material heaven.

Audience to come to gate and look through.

(reads:)

“Everything that exists consists of body and empty space, and there
is no third thing.”

Phil pockets the keys and returns the symbolical tree to the
audience.

Phil: Can you, please, lead us to the left and stop on the path near
the large oak tree there?

5/ the mature oak

Body ~ church's body corrupted by secular power, yet early
idea hangs on

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Phil: Now, it would be wonderful to be able to go right up to this
lovely oak. But we have to restrain ourselves today – in the
interests of the fabulous flying red beetles and grey, blue and
brown butterflies – and of the pleasure we get in seeing them.

So I will read what I would have said to you if we could have gone
to the tree, and maybe you could hold out your hand – and try to
imagine how it might feel to touch the bark.

This is what I would have said:

“In a moment, can we all spread

out – like the scientists in ‘The
Thing From Outer Space’ when
they make a circle around the
outline of the flying saucer buried
under the ice… except that instead
of looking down can you look up
and stop when you are beneath the
very farthest edge of the oak’s canopy? Pause there for a moment,
then once we’ve all found our place, come and gather together
around the trunk.”

Oswald Ray-shell often used trees as metaphors – for the church,

for himself, for empires, for ideas. But there were problems in
doing this. The tree is a pagan symbol. In Christian symbolism, it
is often a negative one: the cross of crucifixion, the tree of
knowledge that tempts Adam and Eve. And it is in the German
forests that the love of individualistic freedom “as rugged as…
native woods” – is learned, that will split the oak into fragments.

15
We now begin the third part of the solemn mass. This is the long
prayer of the president:

(reads) “The Holy Roman Empire of the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries… was the grandest attempt ever made to realize a great
and elevating idea… Europe was united politically and
ecclesiastically; all differences of race and origin were merged in
membership of one common society…. Making no distinction
between barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, German and Spanish,
Italian and Pole…”

“The gigantic oak of the Holy Roman Empire had spread forth its
branches and overshadowed all lands… Glorious in its own
luxuriance, it could only await the slow decline of time…”

“… (its) ruins… were… stepping stones in one direction, imperfect

attempts to assert the personal responsibility of each individual to
God.”
Let’s walk those ruinous stepping stones.

Simon leads the way, taking from his pocket either beach pebbles
and begins to drop them along the route up to the ha ha.

6/ ha ha
Sand ~ foundations, people =
'earthen vessels',

On the ha ha is a small table, a

teapot with water, a bowl with
mixing spoon. Simon takes the
cup of melted ice held by an
audience member and puts that
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in the teapot, then pours water from the teapot into the bowl of
sand and mixes into a mud with the spoon.

Phil: After Oswald Ray-shell died in this house in 1923, his

widow, Julia, attempted to sell the grounds of the house for a
housing development. If she had been successful this whole area
we see here would have been dug up, foundations put in, roads
laid, a small suburban enclave… built on sand.

For under the grass here are the remains of a 250 million year old
Permian desert, mile after mile of sand dunes formed in
tremendous heat, stained red by ferric oxide, dried under a fiery
sun, the sandstone below us occasionally peppered with Breccia –
layers of small pebbles, the result of flash floods sweeping across
the sands – the world tested in trials of Fire and Water.

(Reads) “Never forget(s) that we have this treasure in earthen

vessels…”

And now we’d like you to walk – singly and in silence – like
pilgrims in the desert - can you walk down this path, to the
perimeter path, then turn left along the perimeter path this way, and
then left again up the path that we’ve just come up. Thank you.

17
7/ the grass Ghosts

Simon and Phil have hung a black strip of material in one small
oak tree for Julia. Phil and Simon are waiting for the audience –
who have processed down to the perimeter path, along and back up
towards the house - between the two small oak trees. Simon is
removing his shoes and socks before entering the hay meadow to
hang a white strip for Caroline on the other young oak.

Phil: (reading) “Matrimony is not merely a civil contract… The

bride and bridegroom are ministers of a Sacramental Act. … When
two persons mutually consent to live together… even if irregularly,
before God only, Marriage is initiated. When that mutual consent is
followed by sexual union, it is consummated… The religious
ceremony is not an essential, and even concubinage, so that it be
sole and perpetual, is allowed by the Church as valid though
irregular…”

(During the next passages Simon takes a water sprayer and sprays
small clouds of water into the air. )

At last, Trevor had finished making the coffee and this is his story:

In 1885, a Mr and Mrs Rice registered at a hotel in Bristol and took

a room. Trevor was telling me this in the room up there, you see
the two windows facing us, the one on the right, put in by
Oswald… On the second day of Mr and Mrs Rice’s stay…

(Phil caresses the long grass.)

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… the landlady, Miss Niblett, challenged the couple, identifying
Mr Rice as an unmarried clergyman and accusing him and ‘Mrs
Rice’ of committing an immoral act under her roof. The couple left
abruptly…

Mr Rice was of course, Oswald Reichel or Ray-shell.

Mrs Rice was Caroline King, a servant for 13 years at the vicarage
at Sparsholt, Reichel’s home. Miss Niblet wrote twice to Reichel,
and then came personally to the village of Sparsholt, where locals
got to hear of her visit, a scandal ensued and the unsympathetic
Bishop of Oxford, forced Reichel to take Miss Niblett to court on
charges of blackmail. He lost. He resigned as vicar at Sparsholt.
And a string of subsequent unsuccessful court cases left him, by
1889, virtually bankrupt. He was saved by his sister, who had
inherited A la Ronde from their mother, and passed the house,
against the wishes of its originators who had stipulated only female
occupation, to Oswald.

So, were Mr and Mrs Rice a Sacrament, an

irregular, but valid outward sign of the Grace
of God in a new church?

(Phil caresses the long grass. Simon takes the

white material from the oak tree and attaches
it to the symbolic tree.)

(reads) “…bodily pleasure is the earlier form,

and likewise the ultimate source, of all pleasure... everything good
has reference to the belly… we have no cause for rejecting gross
and carnal pleasures if they can liberate (us) from the fear of the
highest powers, of death, and of suffering.”
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When Caroline said that Oswald had seduced her in Stratford-
Upon-Avon, Oswald said that he had only taken her there to show
her Shakespeare’s Tomb.

(Simon throws a small cloud of ashes in the air for the ghost of
Julia.)

In 1887, in the middle of all his disastrous court cases, Oswald

married Julia Ashenden. On the wedding certificate, Julia’s father
is described as a “gentleman” and “of Brighton”; he was an
itinerant shawl salesman from Willesden. A cover story is being
constructed. Even Julia’s date of birth in the official handbook I
showed you earlier is incorrect… Trevor was suspicious of that
1842 birth date – he knew she died at Three Acres in 1951. Had
she really been 109 years old? No, she was born in 1864; someone
had put an inaccurate birth date into the family tree, perhaps to
hide the 24 year age gap between Oswald Ray-shell and the
dressmaker Julia Ashenden.

(Simon takes the black material from the tree and attaches it to the
symbolical tree, then returns to the path and puts on his socks and
shoes.)

Can a sacrament operate in camouflage?

When Oswald died he was buried in St John in the Wilderness

churchyard, without a headstone. Today, long grass – like the grass
here - grows over his unmarked grave.

(Phil caresses the grass.)

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When Julia died she was not buried with Oswald. Her body was
taken to Plymouth where it was cremated.

But is there another ghost here? At the final station, perhaps.

Phil and Simon head off up the path, up the haha steps, and to the
gate by the side of the barn. Phil stands with his back to the gate.)

8/ glass passage (now gone) Oil the sacraments

(transubstantiation - material really changes)

(Phil hands out one piece of popcorn to each member of the

audience, supplying women members with a napkin.)

Phil: (reads) “Taste... the dominant sense – can be frequently

overpowering so that at times, in the act of eating (or drinking) our
other senses virtually cease to exist… So why on earth would we
want to eat at the movies?”

“Is it not possible that in the obsolete usages of solemn mass may
be found the ritual expression of the true Christian socialism which
it should be the object of us all to promote?”

“ …a higher… form of Catholicity… which can look beyond its

own narrow horizons and sink national particularities, and which
can cultivate more deeply that one grace without which the tongue
of men and angels will profit nothing.”

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(Simon begins to anoint the tree with oil. )

Phil: (reads) “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was
dead already, they break not his legs; but one of the soldiers with a
spear pierced his side, and forthwith came forth there out blood and
water.”

So, what is the story here?

Is it a fruity bit of scandal? Is it the tragedy of a young man with a

generous vision of the future, of grace, of a different kind of
Europe?

(Simon take the symbolic tree and carries it to the side of the barn
facing the entrance to the A la Ronde house.)

O, the reason the women have been given napkins is in line with
Ray-shell’s prohibitions of women touching the sacrament,
entering the priesthood, singing in church, baptizing … and yet, as
with his qualification of irregularities, there often seems to be
exceptional circumstances where prohibitions can be ignored.

But we wanted to get you in some sort of movie-watching mood –

because you need the kind of sense of time that you get in movies
to understand Ray-shell’s radicalism – because he uses a better past
as a model for a better future…

(Simon begins his walks slowly into the house.)

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OK, we have almost completed the fourth part of the solemn mass,
almost completed a figure of eight, and we are approaching the
eighth station – after plinth, obelisk, garden, gate, tree, ha ha, field
- now we come to glass –
For this is where Oswald Ray-shell built a glass passage to join the
barn here, where I’ve read somewhere that, at times of storm and
snow, the sheep and lambs were kept, with the house. And we will
end our performance by enacting the passage of an outward symbol
of the Reverend Oswald Ray-shell into this House of Europe, full
of objects collected by the Parminter cousins on their European
Grand Tour.

(All watch as Simon slowly moves across the gravel and enters the
house.)

Phil: Thank you for coming – if there are any questions you have
then I’ll be happy to answer them, but you may be more interested
by the questions that the house will ask…

Thank you.

Actually that isn’t the real end… this is… (Phil fetches a glass and
wine bottle (red wine) from the bushes and pours himself a glass of
wine) … you see, when I was trying to write the script for this
walk, I got to this part and gave up. It was late at night and I came
downstairs and poured myself a glass of red wine and put on a dvd
– something I thought was is in tune with the subject… ‘Inland
Empire’ directed by David Lynch – it’s about a wealthy actress
who gets a part in a Hollywood movie about a wealthy woman who
loses everything due to an affair – see the connection - and ends
up on Skid Row being stabbed in the side – here. (Phil points to
his side.)
23
I was once stabbed, but it was in the other side. (Points to the other
side.)

But as the film develops it begins to seem that the story of the
movie within the movie – of the woman who ends up stabbed on
Skid Row – is more real than the world of the wealthy actress –
though I have to explain that by this time I was fading in and out of
sleep so some of this may be my dreams - anyway, eventually it
turns out that the whole thing is the dream of a woman on Skid
Row, who as she lies, stabbed, in the gutter, dreams of being
played in a movie by a wealthy actress, and then the shot pulls
back and Skid Row is, itself, a film set… and that was the moment
I woke up and I found I’d poured red wine all down my side.

(Phil pours the red wine down the side of his shirt.)

And that is the end.

24