Phil Smith (Crabman/Mythogeography) and Tony Whitehead join forces
with master photographer John Schott to lead readers on a
`virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way
to an unknown destination. “What is most real is what you have
still to discover.” “Relax in your seat. Allow the train to
take you along the water’s edge to the beginning point of your
walking pilgrimage… When the train pulls into the platform, step
off. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised
fortune teller – the `voice of truth’ – discarded from the
nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a
building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any
truths you find today will be your own.” Pilgrimages – real and
imagined - are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya,
Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, Puri: a few of the sites that beckon.
The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an
interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the
two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns
wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to
their religious houses. For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage,
the authors followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over
many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one
– then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair
pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into
caves and down to the coast. “We arrived again and again at what
we assumed would be a final `shrine’, only to be drawn onwards
and inwards towards another kind of finality… rather than
reaching a destination, the pilgrimage was repeatedly reborn inside
us, until its most recent rebirth in this book.” Over the course
of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite us to experience the
world around us just as they did as they walked. So, over the first
three days, they suggest that we contemplate, among other things:
• Our habit of generalising – acquired 40-50,000 years ago,
when our `chapel’ mind of specialisms became a `cathedral’ mind
• Our tendency to let one thing remind us of another thing •
What it might be like to be an ocean where fish swim through us •
How the world experiences us just as we experience it: `gently feel
for the feelers feeling for you’ • A world where we tend to
`add’ meaning and intensity • A world where we let go (without
the aid of dementia) of memory, imagination, desire and wild fancy.
And, as the pilgrimage concludes: “Returning is never going back
to the same place.” “A brilliant idea, inviting us to `be
present’ to a reality that is imagined and recorded, mediated by
words and images. The feelings and emotions are no less `real’
than if we were actually standing in and experiencing that reality.
I love the genius of words and images displayed here -- no less
than the reality itself.” Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and
Media Studies, Carleton College, Minnesota
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