East Street: resacralising our environment
Timpo toys.
Some years ago, in the fading wake of my father's death, I took a walk back to the streets where I grew up. It was a quixotic sort of expedition through my own past, I suppose; made all the sharper by my first suspicions that my mother, then entering her eighties, was beginning to lose her own recollections into the void of dementia and awareness that I, too, am beginning to grow older with the weight of memory.
There was a sense of urgency to it, an insistent need to experience physically the places that still felt familiar yet at the same time removed by the years between. And it didn't require a long or arduous trip. Without going too deeply into the details of local geography, my home area is actually five towns that have effectively merged into one sprawling conurbation. My childhood was spent in one, and I've lived virtually my whole adult life in its neighbour. So my little pilgrimage required a journey of no more than an hour's walk.
The terraced house where I grew up was, and was not, as I remembered it. At the time of my revisiting, I hadn't lived there for over thirty years. Perhaps oddly, it still had the same front door as it had when our family moved out, and apparently the outer walls had not been repainted either in all that time. I could almost see the faint ghost of my ten-year-old self, still sitting on the front step. But the house looked worn out and battered. Cables that must, at some point, have connected to something dangled, loose and aimless, from the roof. Grubby curtains hung inside the windows, hiding the interior from my view.
Back in my childhood, there was a tight little community that was centred on that one rather narrow street. In the house immediately opposite ours, my maternal great-grandparents lived until they passed away while I was still very young. I do recall them, though. I can remember myself sitting at the edge of my great-grandmother's bed, feeding her grapes one by one while she laughed heartily at something I must have said but that is forgotten now. My great-grandfather, too, snoozing in an armchair close by the fire, white walrus moustache bristling as he lightly snored.
Further down the road, my mother's Uncle Bill and Aunt Edie lived with a caged budgerigar and Bill's traumatic memories of surviving a Japanese PoW camp. They draped a tea towel over the cage bars at night so the bird would sleep. I imagine that I can still hear the sound of its twittering. It seemed strange to me that a man who had been a prisoner would want to keep another living creature in a cage. When, in my late teens, I began training in kendo and iaido, Bill showed me the sword he had taken from a Japanese soldier on being released from his own cage at the end of the war. It was the shin guntō type that was mass produced in wartime and issued wholesale to NCOs, not traditionally forged let alone an antique. Even so, I was appalled to find the blade had been smeared with a thick layer of vaseline “to protect it”. I still wonder, sometimes, what became of that sword.
Across the road from them, my mother's childhood friend lived. When I was seven years old, she gave me a portable mono record player in a red case, and a collection of 45rpm “singles” that she wanted to discard. I didn't think much of the Shadows, but there were copies of Layla and of Lindisfarne's Lady Eleanor that I spun again and again even though I didn't really understand at the time what the songs were about.
Mum's cousin Erica had her house in Kingswood Road, the street next to ours, but her back garden gate opened onto East Street. I played with her son, my second cousin, on a regular basis. I envied the toys he owned. A complete Timpo wild west town, an electric train set with train wagons that could “blow up” (in other words, they fell apart) when hit by a spring-fired missile, an Airfix kit of a Lancaster bomber...
It seemed, in fact, as if most women in the street were friends of my mother, if not family members at some remove or other. My own friendship network mirrored hers, to some extent. The kids I played with most regularly were those in the same street, including the children of the Pakistani and Indian families that had started to move in, and a few schoolmates who lived in the neighbouring and intersecting streets. Not, however, the kids at “the top of the road”.
“The top of the road” is how my mother always referred, in dark tones, to the row of older, smaller terraced houses at the southern end of East Street, standing opposite the Admiral Elliot pub. The men who were our more immediate neighbours were mostly workers at the Royal Dockyard, which was still a thriving local employer at that time. But the men at “the top of the road” were a different sort of crowd; refuse workers, street cleaners, unskilled factory labourers.
Overhearing the conversations between my mother and her friends, I learned that those sorts of men were not to be mixed with. They were apparently dirty, drunk, untrustworthy; not like us. The children were regarded as a reflection of the parents. The Admiral Elliot was alleged to be a den of iniquity that they frequented, not the sort of place where respectable folk would pass through the doors; which, given my family's past associations with that pub, was a rather ironic attitude to take.[1]
Another irony...a few years ago, some time after my personal pilgrimage back to my childhood street, my partner and I decided to sell our home of two decades and move to another part of town. One house we briefly considered – before covid struck and everything was locked down, and our plan faltered – was in East Street, at “the top of the road”. It had been modernised, and given proximity to the local rail station on the mainline to London, no doubt the residents nowadays are all commuters.
There was no revisiting on that second occasion, as we went no further than viewing the house on a website. But the fleeting, slight contact with the locale was enough to remind me of my earlier visit, and to make me wonder how many ghosts are layered one upon another by the passage of time and our personal histories.
During a recent pathworking, one of my Inner contacts suggested that it isn't only the future that can follow many potential pathways. “There are many pasts”, they said, “and it is possible for those pasts to exist in parallel with one another”. I'm still trying to unravel the threads from that. But one thing that's occurred to me already is that maybe, just maybe, it's possible to reach back and heal aspects of the past, thus triggering changes in the present. There's that rather worn out trope in science fiction, where the time traveller to the past is responsible for some small action that has (usually catastrophic) consequences for their own time. Must the outcome always, inevitably, be negative?
Current theories of intergenerational trauma suggest that experiences can cause changes in the function of genes that are subsequently passed down, affecting future generations. That's on an identifiable, traceable, even physical level. We can extrapolate, from that, effects on the more subtle esoteric levels too. Possibly not just from the more traumatic experiences.
I'm thinking back into the known past of my own family. It's a history riddled with war and imprisonment, with illness and loss, with poverty, with oppression and abuse, and with at least one suicide. That reflects the past of my hometown, my community, and my class background. Any attempt to deal with all that using magical arts would entail a massive project, and is quite a daunting prospect.
Yet even that is only a small part of the weight we all inevitably carry of our personal, ancestral histories. At best, the histories we know are (to use a cliché) merely the tip of a very large iceberg. Using my own ancestry as an example: there are Border Reivers with a record of theft and murder; the certainty, as with any white British family, of implication at least in the crimes of imperialism and the slave trade; even a Cherokee woman in the 18th century who ended up married into the family and living in a small Suffolk village, and one can only guess at the degree of coercion involved in that situation.
Working seriously with ancestors necessarily includes confrontation with deeply negative aspects of a collective history. This doesn't mean wallowing in guilt, or engaging in self-flagellation. But it does mean that we need to confront honestly the harsh realities of our inheritances, as well as seeking contact with those more distant ancestors who are shrouded with the glamour of the very ancient past.
Having said that, my pilgrimage back to East Street reminded me that there are positives we can gain from such personal hinterlands. The adults around me at that time were all, in one way or another, scarred by the trauma of living through World War – and in the case of my grandparents and great-grandparents, two of those. Yet they also carried a sense of social solidarity that was more or less ingrained through generations of working-class experience. Membership of a trade union, for those in work, was taken for granted even by the more conservative. Within the neighbourhood, in spite of perceived divisions on the basis of localised snobbery, race, and so on, people generally tended to chat over the garden fence or in the street; they patronised the same local shops; they socialised with one another in the local pubs and at community events. Without wishing to gloss over the conformism and the prejudices that were commonplace, that basic communal spirit was fundamental to the capacity of working-class people for resistance and their capacity to fight for change.
It seems to me that the – admittedly difficult – task of rebuilding that kind of grassroots community solidarity is necessary to a process of growing not only our present and future resistance to capitalism, but also to the potential for a genuine transformation of society.
Dérive
Author archives: family wedding in 1929.
There's another aspect of my return to East Street that I want to briefly explore, and that's the concept of pilgrimage itself. That pilgrimage remains a living concept, and not merely a kind of mediaeval hangover, is surely beyond reasonable doubt. Every year, for instance, thousands take the ancient route to Santiago de Compostela, neo-Pagans and atheists among them as well as devout Catholics.
With pilgrimage, the journey is far more important than the destination. However it's absolutely the case that the destination should hold some sacred significance, but again how that term sacred is defined is mutable. My childhood home held (and continues to hold) a place in my personal consciousness that might be considered in a sense sacred, as an example.
Not that an actual destination is entirely necessary. The art of the dérive, as developed by the early Surrealists and later popularised by the Situationists, has always been precisely to walk without any preconceived destination. Though the method was developed as a means of exploring and subverting the urban environment of capitalism, with its increasingly rigid channelling of human communications into the interests of business and profit-making by “encouraging” people into certain routes and certain ways of seeing, it's possible to perceive a link between practice of the dérive and preceding concepts of pilgrimage.
In a sense, the dérive can be part of a process that resacralises our environment. The method depends to some extent on the capacity to bring about a shift in consciousness that allows us to perceive beyond the mundane appearances around us as we walk.
I think this resacralisation is something implied – if not stated explicitly in terms of the sacred – more broadly within the art and science of psychogeography. But what is also implied is a necessary reconsideration of what is meant by that loaded term, sacred. Some years ago, in 2005, I participated in a Surrealist exhibition at Fundación Eugenio Granell, in Santiago de Compostela, that was titled Profane Revelation. And that title, to me, sums up a practice of radical reimagining that can lie at the heart of both the sacral and of pilgrimage as modern esoteric practice.
In the exhibition catalogue, members of the Leeds Surrealist Group wrote,
“This profane revelation signifies a particular relationship between subjective consciousness and objective reality, the reconciliation of imagination and perception, of the mental and the physical. It entails the opening up of oneself to the possibility of chance encounters between the material and the imaginary – and all of the delirium, disorientation or disruption that this might bring. Whether arising spontaneously or provoked by intervention, our experiences of what we describe as profane revelation challenge an understanding of the world based on intellectual, experiential and emotional polarisation, with a demand that imposed arbitrary opposites turn to face each other and speak the language of dreams”.[2]
This raises the spectre of the sacred as being (or becoming) a pivot of relationship rather than a pivot of worship, and a revolutionary re-envisioning of the world. The act of pilgrimage, in such a context, thus becomes a form of revolutionary action. Such journeying can bring the “radical pilgrim” into relationship with place, with ancestors, with community, and with the self in ways that reframe and revitalise those relationships, and help prepare the ground for their rebirth in consciousness, or for their revival in fresh forms.
I come back to my own ancestors, at least to those more immediate ones who I knew as family and community while I was growing up. My connection to them became strained, and in some cases altogether broken, during my middle to late teens. In the process of my finding the path that led me to political activism and, by a somewhat more circuitous route, to Pagan traditions and occult studies, I pushed them away as they pushed me away. That was probably a necessary stage in the journey. My pilgrimage back to East Street allowed me a kind of reconciliation with them – if only from my perspective – and a more nuanced understanding of their world, which was of course the world that I also came from in my turn.
More than that, it has opened up a space in which I can commune with, and work with, them effectively as ancestral spirits; integrating them and myself into a chain of lives that reaches back far beyond the limitations of my own memory. It seems the simple act of walking is not so simple, after all.
Endnotes
[1] I've written, elsewhere, about my family's associations with the Admiral Elliot. That essay can be found on one of my blogs.
[2] – Quoted from the introductory essay by the Leeds Surrealist Group in the exhibition catalogue for Profane Revelation (Revelación Profana), Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela, June 2005.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).