This was no stroll. Or mere record of snatched days, outings from the bookshop. Ivan, Renchi’s fit and chunky son, accompanied him on the final stages, through Somerset and Cornwall. When they took a break on Dartmoor, Ivan filled his dad’s rucksack with rocks.
Chorography, not topography. Paul Devereux, in his book Re-Visioning the Earth, makes that distinction. The ancient Greeks, he tells us, ‘had two senses of place, chora and topos’. Quoting Eugene Victor Walter, Devereux sees spiritual tourism as ‘a complex but organic mode of active observation’. This was Renchi’s methodology, arrived at after many years of trial and error, false starts. The chorographer was hungry for place: ‘place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’.
The feel of this Selborne event, the friendliness of the crowd, was resolutely non-metropolitan. Paintings that had been executed over a seven-year period, a journey of around 350 miles (as the crow flies), with backtracking, exhibited for one night only. In a specialist gallery in a Hampshire village. The opening was the event. The following morning the paintings would vanish (they would subsequently be shown at The Miracles Room, Isle of Avon Foundation, Glastonbury). You wait twenty-four years for a solo show from Renchi and then it’s gone in the blink of an eye.
Leaving, as a prompt, a small blue book with tipped-in colour reductions, bright stamp-sized panels accompanied by a textual gloss. Picture and legend facing each other, so that the journey can be re-experienced. It’s a nice form.
Leafing through the blue book, moving with the crowd, I make connections. Circuits, haloes, spirals, starbelts: Blake’s Dante orbits or the overlapping spheres of ‘Milton’s track’. Zones that cluster around the ‘Mundane Egg’ (or ‘Shell’). The world through which the spiritual Milton journeys. Wheels. Rings.
‘The sphere of the north heavens aligned to the Pole star touches into spheres of Earth and Sky,’ Renchi writes. Clumps and mounds and ridges and globes. ‘Vortex energy centred… serpentine lanes.’ Here is the road as a hot and angry tongue, cars like sunset coals. ‘The pilgrim following Faustus and Faustus confronting Mephistopheles.’
So I am drawn in, at last, to greet the painter. My response to his work, chat. Renchi as Paradise Pilgrim. The poet Aaron Williamson, who met him for the first time at the ‘Shamanism of Intent’ weekend in Uppingham, was walking through Hampshire. Coming into Selborne in the twilight, he chances on this show. A special night. Dublin faces, who haven’t seen each other in years, reconvene; pick up conversations, left mid-sentence in 1965.
I tell Renchi about my notion of a walk around the M25. He is, instantly, up for it. As the next project. A scheme brokered at the perfect moment. It’s mad enough. It’s inevitable.
On his return from Glastonbury, the second showing of the paintings, Renchi writes:
Being in Glastonbury for a week was brilliant and gave time to explore the old ‘Paradise Line’ which was followed by pilgrims… and has been obscured by housing and factories… At this time of year it was a great joy to walk round the small fields with apple trees in blossom and cows and calves and sheep and lambs grazing beneath. I am still very excited about the M25 post modernist mosaic and I enlisted some interesting leads… about a vibrational device that is being distributed to people in circle around London and a special music played to them at timed intervals! (More on this when we meet.) Also another site of interest near Cockfosters/New Trent — Camelot fields??
We’ll return to Waltham Abbey and wing it from there.
5
Here it begins, the walk proper. No detours. No digressions. We decided to take Waltham Abbey as our starting point, the grave of King Harold, and to shadow the motorway (within audible range whenever possible) in an anticlockwise direction. We wanted, quite simply, to get around: always carrying on from where we left off at the finish of the previous excursion. From now on the road would be our focus, our guide. We’d snatch days whenever we could (when Renchi’s shifts permitted) and get it done before the millennial eve.
On 30 September 1998, we stalked into town. Renchi had been working until 10.40 on the previous night — but he arrived in Hackney by eight a.m. He read the weather as: rain trousers, heavy blue sweater, furry cap with ear-flaps. He spoke of sweat lodge ceremonies based on the number four: sixteen poles, four dances a day for four days.
He is fifty-two years old, grizzled, with a tidy silver beard, a naked scalp. He walks with his wife, every morning. The same circuit. Spurning novelty, giving the mind time to settle; noticing the unnoticeable, tiny shifts in season and climate. The work he does, as a house-parent at Mayor Treloar’s College, is physically demanding; manhandling wheelchairs, sharing the enthusiasms, sulks and piss-takes of a group of teenagers. ‘An enabling education,’ it says in the brochure. Renchi, I imagine, would be good at this.
New Age gypsies, who have been tracking me, town to town through Hertfordshire and Essex, on a counterpilgrimage, have arrived in Waltham Abbey, PSYCHIC FARE (Town Hall, Highbridge Street, Waltham Abbey). A signboard attached to the fence outside a property that doesn’t register on my Nicholson’s map. An absence. There’s nothing there, but you can’t come in: ‘Government Research Establishment’.
A day of locked gates. The abbey was off-limits, a funeral. So we wandered through the orchard, the monastic reservation, circumnavigating drained fish ponds. Nobody knows quite what to do with these green spaces: they’re not enclosed, but access isn’t free. They don’t belong to the town and locals don’t make much use of them as places for contemplation or dog walking. They’re suspended. Visitors can’t crack the behaviour code: are you a temporary believer or a confirmed sceptic? A residue of retreat, monasticism, is still present in whatever remains of the original layout; measured avenues, monuments to the godly or powerful, warm red bricks. But, play the empathy game as much as you will, you can’t escape the song of the road, the mantra of transit. A perpetual cycle of auto-prayer.
From the gardens we see traffic stall as the funeral procession arrives, led by a gleaming black stretch-limo.
Behind the abbey, we hit the meridian line. The local authorities are keen on this abstraction. They want to give it a physical form. The abbey church with its astrological ceiling is working a number with Time and Movement, the Clockwork of the Heavens, the colonisation of zero longitude.
We’ve fallen for it before and we fall for it again. The meridian walk through Cornmill Meadow. I’ve noticed granite pillars lying on the ground, aligned with church, with Greenwich, with zero. I’ve imagined cultists taking zero for their symbol. But now stones, which might have been ignored as glacial detritus, have been erected as markers for a permitted zero longitude pathway. The copywriters of the Lee Valley Park are keen ‘to develop a strategy through which Vision can be made a reality’.
It’s a typically English conceit, the millennial mile. Begin with a grey omphalos on a base of stones and shells, a suncrowned archetypal figure with a letterbox navel (into which requests, questions for the oracle, can be posted). This south-facing man/pillar is like something Renchi might have drawn, in the days when he was supposed to be studying anthropology or comparative religion. (We subsequently discover that the granite blocks once formed part of London Bridge.)
A line runs down the pillar, an apparent crack, marking zero longitude, its long flight across the Southern Ocean. We can see where we are and see what our journey should be, through Suffolk and Norfolk, to the edge of the Wash.