Roving Places: Beach Cafe to Rocky Valley

Dear Morgan – a healer who knows the uses of every plant shares the sitting with a sister who counterfeits Excalibur’s scabbard by enchantment, with a hostess who slips a dirk into a page as lightly as harpooning a rat, with a bastard daughter sent to a nunnery where she masters astronomy and physic. Nine centuries of testimony, and the disciplines trained on such piles have a method ready: date the witnesses and rank their authority, then discard whatever will not reconcile. The reading does something else. It lines the versions up with their contradictions intact and hands the whole file to a body that now has to carry it down a cliff.

Elen raises the stakes of the same problem. Her contradictions are ethical rather than literary: an amalgamation codified from dreams and reindeer figures, indicted as appropriation from one side, held by the other in the conviction that a lack of evidence is no verdict.²Helen Cornish, “The life of the death of ‘the fighting fairy woman of Bodmin’: Storytelling around the museum of witchcraft”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2013), 94. (Cornish 2013, 94) Both cases rest on origins, and origins cannot be examined from this coast. What can be examined is the standing. Location, as the heading proposes, is an accountable relation: a claim made by particular flesh from a particular nook, answerable for where it stands.³Adrienne Rich, “Notes Towards a Politics of Location”, in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Poetry 1979-1985 (1987).

What the stretch offers is a procedure to walk through this. Hands go along the rocks; objects are gathered by different means, the last with eyes closed; a bearing chosen on the cliffs is felt for inside the cave, where nothing confirms it. Then the staircase drills: nine steps, rotate, one sense per rotation. Looking on the first turn, listening on the next, scent after that, then temperature mapped across the skin from face to feet. Each drill isolates a single channel and lets it testify on its own, and the drills never promise the channels will agree. What halts the walker on a ninth step, the pull of one direction over the others, is evidence nobody else can audit. The procedure that produced it is exact: counted and ordered, repeatable by anybody on these stairs. The exercises are inscriptive in Grosz’s sense, attention working the corporeal surface until the working reads as depth.⁴Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference) (1994). Run them while carrying the Morgan file and the Elen indictment, and the argument is metabolised rather than adjudicated; competing responses stop being two opinions and become two corporealities, produced by different practices of attention.

Lining up multiple points of view at once, the same evidence from different angles is what this stretch does. The zine and walk delivers no ruling on Morgan and neither acquits nor convicts Elen. It trains a way of holding testimony in a way that does not seek resolution, a fixed pace of approaching the subject that leads to a logical conclusion. Every witness is kept, every fragment felts, while the feet keep moving.