Continues…
GANTOB tells me that Bill Drummond has been known to write about ley lines. Here is his off-the-cuff response to a journalist in a 1981 quote: “It is the interstellar ley line. It comes careering in from outer space, hits the world in Iceland, bounces back up, writhing about like a conger eel, then down Mathew Street in Liverpool where the Cavern Club – and latterly Eric’s – is”. Later in the piece (written in 2013) he identifies a specific manhole as a “gateway between the known, out-there physical world and the unknown, internal, imagined world”.
I am not sure if Calton Road has a manhole cover at the point where I first encountered GANTOB’s paper plane.
I am intrigued by Bill Drummond’s telescoping of ideas from interstellar ley lines to the internal workings of the mind. It reminds me of a book by Carlo Rovelli called Helgoland (2021). Rovelli covers a wide range of topics, from wave-particle duality to the relationships between quantum entities and the scientists studying them (the observer changing the behaviour of what they are observing), and ultimately between objects themselves. It is a disorientating read.
I think that I prefer Philip Pullman’s take on the topic in His Dark Materials, a trilogy of books that I noticed that GANTOB mentioned in her book (but in the context of the pain of being separated from one’s KLF collection). In these books Pullman writes about a material called Dust at a number of levels, but in each iteration it appears to be a sentient entity, guiding decisions, answering questions.
And that takes me to the scientific mysticism attempted by Jimmy Cauty with his standing stone project Local Psycho and The Hurdy Gurdy Orchestra. In an extraordinary claim that can only, I suppose, have come about via quantum physics, they state that “In a ceremony on Mayday the Hurdy Gurdy Song was embedded into the stone, playing it directly into the rock using powerful transducers”.
I think about this as I peer into the nooks and crannies around Calton Road, under Regent Bridge. With such outlandish assertions by Drummond about ley lines, and Cauty about encoding a standing stone with sound, is it so fanciful to read significance into the spot where I encountered GANTOB for the first time? And if so, who is who, which is which? GANTOB the particle? The Benefaktor the wave? And who is observing?
THE BENEFAKTOR
2 October 2023
GANTOB blog 