Journal articles on the topic 'Candle magic'

Meningkatkan Kreativitas dalam Melukis pada Anak Melalui Kegiatan Candle Magic Painting. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui mengetahui gambaran mengenai bagaimana peningkatan kreativitas dalam melukis anak melalui kegiatan candle magic painting, mengetahui kondisi objektif sebelum dan sesudah diadakan penelitianMetode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode Penelitian Tindakan Kelas dan melakukan kolaborasi dengan guru kelas. Penelitian ini dilakukan pada anak kelompok B di TK Muslimat Baiturrohmah Kecamatan Astanaanyar Bandung, dengan jumlah subjek penelitian sebanyak 15 orang anak yang berusia 5-6 tahun. Data penelitian diperoleh dengan menggunakan instrumen penelitian berupa pedoman observasi kreativitas anak. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan empat tahap yaitu tahap perencanaan, tahap pelaksanaan, tahap observasi, dan refleksi. Penelitian ini menggunakan dua siklus yaitu Siklus I dan Siklus II pada setiap siklusnya terdiri dari 2 tindakan. Kondisi awal kemampuan kreativitas anak dalam melukis di kelompok B TK Muslimat Baiturrohmah masih belum berkembang secara optimal, dengan persentase kategori kurang (K) 45.83%, kategori cukup (C) 47.5%, dan kategori baik (B) 6.67%. namu setelah diberikan kegiatan melukis melalui kegiatan candle magic painting kemampuan kreativitas dalam melukis anak mengalami peningkatan yang signifikan. Presentase kemampuan kreativitas dalam melukis anak dengan kategori kurang (K) menjadi 2.5%, kategori cukup (C) 25%, dan kategori baik (B) 72.5%.

The publication focuses on the unique local traditions of the folk spiritual culture of the Russian-Belarusian Bryansk-Gomel borderland. They include the features associated with the calendar (Christmas, Annunciation, Easter, Ascension), rituals of the life cycle, beliefs, folk medicine and magic. The idea of the modern linguocultural situation in the south-western regions of the Bryansk region bordering on Belarus is enriched by considering the units of the language of spiritual culture, many of which also denote ritual artifacts. The linguoculturological material of the paper is compared with other studies of the traditional culture of the Bryansk-Gomel borderlands, regional dictionaries, the Dictionary of Russian Folk Dialects, and the compendium Slavic Antiquities. The characteristic-local traditions considered (distinguishing schedrovkas by gender — for the owner and hostess, the image of the “goat”, inviting frost, cooking three types of kutia, the rituals of “driving an arrow”, “candle”, “parting of the mermaid”, bylichki about well-wishers, the widespread use of healers and others) are also represented in the Belarusian traditional culture of the Gomel Polissya and the Dnieper region, which confirms the common cultural past and present of the Bryansk and Gomel regions.

In the traditional culture of Polessie special part belongs to the candles consecrated on the day of Candlemas held on 2/15 of February. These candles are used in the family-life cycles, calendric, agricultural and occasional rites, in multiple magic acts aiming at producing safety and health. The article is based on the data from the Polessian archive and field materials of the author.

An 8.4 million channel narrowband spectrum analyzer is nearing completion, and will be used to expand the frequency coverage of the ongoing search at Oak Ridge by a factor of 200. The new system – project META – will cover 420kHz at 0.05Hz resolution, utilizing a swept receiver to cancel the effect of the earth's rotation. The increased bandwidth will permit observation of CW beacons transmitted at magic frequencies in any of three preferred frames: the local standard of rest, the galactic barycenter, and the cosmic blackbody rest frame.

Abstract The development of a simple and compact permanent magnet (PM) phase shifter is presented in this paper. The design is based on four PM blocks per girder (8 PM blocks in total), and uses only one type PM block with horizontal magnetization and 15mm length. The magnetic field provides a net zero and second field integral and a phase integral of 2 · 10–6 T 2 m 3 for 60mm overall magnet length. The study of the numerical model with Radia shows that this design is mainly sensitive to angular magnetization errors. The correction strategy is based on pairing the PM blocks in order to cancel the sum of magnetization angle error, and the remaining magnetic field error is corrected with a stack of magic fingers located around the magnet. Finally, a prototype was built, and the magnetic measurements results are presented here.

Los canales de YouTube, Alanna y WITCHYSOFFIE, enseñan al espectador sobre hechicería y tradiciones paganas. Estas se oponen a la estigmatización, el tótem patriarcal y los tabúes religiosos generados por la Inquisición los cuales aún son mantenidos por una parte de la sociedad actual. La magia de varios grupos wiccanos se encamina hacia la espiritualidad y alabanza de un Dios creador, algo semejante con la filosofía católica. De igual forma, su estudio por la naturaleza y su aplicación en rituales se enfocan en el autoconocimiento y la conexión con el universo. Los factores como la globalización y modernización actúan de manera crucial en las impresiones colectivas que se tiene sobre la brujería.

L'articolo prende in esame la presenza di schiavi musulmani all'interno del Bagno di Livorno nel XVII secolo, soffermandosi sulla loro esistenza quotidiana ed in particolare sulle relazioni da essi intrattenute con gli abitanti della cittÀ. L'analisi di alcuni processi inquisitoriali conservati presso l'Archivio arcivescovile di Pisa ha portato ad evidenziare l'esistenza di casi in cui clienti cristiani ricorrevano alle arti magiche dei "turchi", dettagliatamente descritte e perciň confrontabili con la tradizione islamica nordafricana. Questo fenomeno si dimostra allo stesso tempo frutto di un'ideologia che associava gli infedeli al mondo demoniaco ma anche uno dei canali attraverso cui si esercitava il confronto culturale tra le due sponde del Mediterraneo.

In 1936, the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP, 1935–43) appointed New York City artist Charles Alston (1907–77) to be the first African American to supervise a New Deal mural project. Alston, five other artists, and their assistants designed narrative, celebratory images of Harlem, African-American life, children's fairy tales, and stories for New York's Harlem Hospital. In paired panels exploring the theme of healing, Alston depicted an African past beyond exotic and barbaric stereotypes in Magic in Medicine for the foyer of Harlem Hospital Women's Pavilion, and a racially egalitarian American present in its companion panel Modern Medicine (each 17 × 9 feet) (Figure 1). Initially, white hospital authorities rejected the works on the basis that they “contain too much Negro subject matter,” which would make them unappealing to residents of Harlem. This judgment angered Alston, since his designs were consistent with project guidelines. Because the building was a hospital in Harlem, Alston selected the theme of medicine and depicted black figures in his two panels. Yet the seeming suitability of images that looked like the people who used Harlem Hospital and referred to their collective history met with loud objections from Harlem Hospital's white administration. While it was common for muralists to base their subject matter on the local community and its history, and in fact the WPA/FAP encouraged artists to do so, officials tried to cancel Alston's commission on these very grounds. Their attempt to prevent artistic self-representation in the 1930s followed on the heels of prolonged racist hiring policies at Harlem Hospital. Alston ultimately painted his mural designs as planned; final approval of the murals did not come until 1940.

Abstract The upper limit on (time reversal symmetry T-violating) permanent hadron electric dipole moments (EDMs) is the PSI neutron EDM value; dn = (0.0 ± 1.1stat ± 0.2sys × 10-26) e cm. This paper describes an experiment to be performed at a BNL-proposed CLIP project which is to be capable of producing intense polarized beams of protons, p, helions (He3 nuclei), h, and other isotopes. The EDM prototype ring PTR (proposed at COSY Lab, Juelich) is expected to measure individual particle EDMs (for example EDM_p for the proton) using simultaneous counter-rotating polarized proton beams, with statistical error ±10-30e.cm after one year running time, four orders of magnitude less than the PSI neutron EDM upper limit, and with comparable systematic error. A composite particle, the helion faces T-symmetry constraints more challenging than the proton. Any measurably large value of Δ= EDM h - EDM p , the difference of helion and proton EDMs, would represent BSM physics. The plan is to replicate PTR at BNL. The dominant systematic error would be canceled two ways, both made possible by phase-locking “doubly-magic” 38.6 MeV proton and 39.2 MeV helion spin tunes. This stabilizes their MDM-induced in-plane precessions, without affecting their EDM-induced out-of-plane precessions. The dominant systematic error would therefore cancel in the meaurement of Δ in a fixed field configuration. Another systematic error cancellation will come from averaging runs for which both magnetic field and beam circulation directions are reversed. Precise magnetic field reversal is made possible by the reproducible absolute frequency phase-locking over long runs to eliminate the need for (impractically precise) magnetic field measurement. Risk of EDM measurement failure is discussed in a final appendix.

Abstract Introduction and geodynamic setting. – Syn-rift exhumation of mantle rocks in a continental breakup zone was highlighted along the present-day west Iberian passive margin [e.g. Boillot et al., 1988, 1995; Whitmarsh et al., 1995, 2001; Beslier et al., 1996; Brun and Beslier, 1996; Boillot and Coulon, 1998; Krawczyk et al., 1996; Girardeau et al., 1998] and along the fossil Tethyan margins [e.g. Froitzheim and Manatschal, 1996; Manatschal and Bernoulli, 1996; Marroni et al., 1998; Müntener et al., 2000; Desmurs et al., 2001]. Along the west Iberian margin, serpentinized peridotite and scarce gabbro and basalt lay directly under the sediments, over a 30 to 130 km-wide transition between the thinned continental crust and the first oceanic crust [Girardeau et al., 1988, 1998; Kornprobst and Tabit, 1988; Boillot et al., 1989; Beslier et al., 1990, 1996; Cornen et al., 1999]. The formation of a wide ocean-continent transition (OCT), mostly controlled by tectonics and associated with an exhumation of deep lithospheric levels, would be an essential stage of continental breakup and a characteristic of magma-poor passive margins. The southwest Australian margin provides an opportunity to test and to generalize the models proposed for the west Iberian margin, as both margins present many analogies. The south Australian margin formed during the Gondwana breakup in the Mesozoic, along a NW-SE oblique extension direction [Willcox and Stagg, 1990]. From north to south, the continental slope is bounded by (1) a magnetic quiet zone (MQZ) where the nature of the basement is ambiguous [Talwani et al., 1979; Tikku and Cande, 1999; Sayers et al., 2001], (2) a zone where the basement shows a rough topography associated with poorly expressed magnetic anomalies [Cande and Mutter, 1982; Veevers et al., 1990; Tikku and Cande, 1999; Sayers et al., 2001], and which is the eastward prolongation of the Diamantina Zone, and (3) an Eocene oceanic domain. The continental breakup zone is believed to be located near or at the southern edge of the MQZ [Cande and Mutter, 1982; Veevers et al., 1990; Sayers et al., 2001]. Breakup is dated at 125 Ma [Stagg and Willcox, 1992], 95 ± 5 Ma [Veevers, 1986] or at 83 Ma [Sayers et al., 2001], and followed by ultra-slow seafloor spreading until the Eocene (43 Ma), and fast spreading afterwards [Weissel and Hayes, 1972; Cande and Mutter, 1982; Veevers et al., 1990; Tikku and Cande, 1999]. The western end of the margin (fig. 1) is starved and bounded in the OCT by basement ridges where peridotite, gabbro and basalt were previously dredged [Nicholls et al., 1981]. Altimetry data [Sandwell and Smith, 1997] show that some of these ridges are continuous over 1500 km along the OCT of the south Australian margin and of the conjugate Antarctic margin. The objectives of the MARGAU/MD110 cruise (May-June 1998; [Royer et al., 1998]; fig. 2) were to define the morpho-structure and the nature and evolution of the basement in the SW Australian OCT. An area of 180 000 km2 was explored with swath bathymetry. Gravimetric data (11382 km) were simultaneously recorded whereas few single channel seismic (1353 km) and magnetic (5387 km) data were obtained due to technical difficulties. Crystalline basement rocks, made of varied and locally well-preserved lithologies, were dredged at 11 sites located on structural highs. Main results. – The bathymetric map unveils three E-W domains (fig. 2). From north to south, they are the continental slope of Australia, prolonged westward by that of the Naturaliste Plateau, a 160 km-wide intermediate flat sedimented area corresponding to the MQZ, and a 100 km-wide zone of rough E-W oriented topography which continues the Diamantina Zone (fig. 3). The first two domains are cut through in three segments by two major fracture zones (FZ), the Leeuwin FZ along the eastern side of the Naturaliste Plateau, and the Naturaliste FZ along its western flank. These NW-SE trending FZ terminate north of the E-W trending fabric of the Diamantina Zone. Accordingly, extension occurred along the NW-SE direction during the formation of the slope and of the MQZ, and then turned to N-S during the formation of the Diamantina Zone. In the Diamantina Zone, the mantle rocks dredged at Site MG-DR02 are mainly lherzolites, rich in pyroxenitic micro-layers, and pyroxenites. They contain spinel rimmed by plagioclase and locally coronas of olivine + plagioclase between opx and spinel, which suggest that they underwent some subsolidus reequilibration in the plagioclase field (fig. 4C). Westward (Site DR09), the mantle rocks are harzburgitic, with lesser pyroxenitic bandings and no plagioclase. The rocks have coarse-grained porphyroclastic textures that are locally overprinted by narrow mylonitic shear bands, and then by a cataclastic deformation, which indicate decreasing temperatures and increasing stresses during their evolution. Basalts were sampled at Sites MG-DR01, −04, −05, and together with gabbros at Sites MG-DR02, -03, -09. They have a transitional composition as shown by their REE patterns, except one sample from site MG-DR-05 which is an alkaline basalt (fig. 5). The gabbros are clearly intrusive in the peridotite at Sites DR02 and -09. They contain olivine and clinopyroxene (cpx) at Site DR02, cpx, plagioclase and hornblende at Site DR03, and cpx and amphibole or orthopyroxene or olivine at Site DR09 (fig. 4D). At that site, a tonalite containing K-feldspar and biotite and alkaline in composition (fig. 5), has also been sampled. All these plutonic rocks display either their primary magmatic textures or secondary porphyroclastic ones that are locally overprinted by mylonitic shear zones (fig. 4E). Retrograde minerals of amphibolite to greenschist facies developed during the deformation. The basalts are clearly intrusive in the gabbros at Site DR03. They are altered and exhibit porphyric textures with abundant plagioclase and plagioclase + olivine phenocrysts at Sites DR03, -04, -08, -10, and have a transitional composition (fig. 5). The nature and evolution of the peridotites and associated gabbros are compatible with an exhumation under a rift zone, on both sides of the Leeuwin FZ. It includes a mylonitic deformation which attests that these rocks underwent a shearing deformation under lithospheric conditions, in probable relation with their exhumation during the early stages of the oceanic opening. The crustal rocks are represented only by intrusive gabbros and by transitional basalts. In the MQZ, the peridotites recovered at Site MG-DR06 are mainly spinel and plagioclase lherzolites (fig. 4B) and a few pyroxenites (fig. 4A) with high temperature porphyroclastic textures. Their discovery indicates that the basement in the MQZ is not exclusively formed of thinned continental crust. Lavas sampled westward of the Leeuwin FZ at Site DR10 have also transitional compositions (fig. 5). On the Australian slope, samples dredged at Site MG-DR07 are continental quartz-bearing rocks (mostly gneisses and rare granites), some showing a high grade paragenesis (upper amphibolite to granulite facies) marked by the presence of K-feldspar, biotite, sillimanite and/or kyanite and garnet, and without primary muscovite (fig. 4G). Some of these rocks underwent an intense mylonitic shear deformation followed by post-tectonic recrystallisation or migmatization. Depending on the age of the high grade evolution (metamorphism and shearing), these rocks document either the syn-rift exhumation of lower continental crust, or the formation of the older Australian craton. On the slope of the Naturaliste Plateau, at Site DR11, rocks of oceanic origin (gabbro-diorites/dolerite/basalt; fig. 4F) were dredged together with acid rocks (gneiss and granites) of probable continental origin, some having a quartz, K-feldspar, biotite and garnet metamorphic paragenesis (fig. 4H). At that site, the transitional basalts intrude the gabbros and associated dolerites. The presence of metamorphic acid rocks indicate that the Naturaliste Plateau is likely a continental fragment that was later intruded by mafic rocks, whose origin and ages of intrusion have to be determined. Discussion and conclusions. – The retrograde tectono-metamorphic evolution of the peridotites recovered in the MQZ, which includes a reequilibration in the plagioclase field (marked by the development of olivine and plagioclase after spinel and pyroxene), is compatible with an exhumation under a rift zone [Girardeau et al., 1988; Kornprobst and Tabit, 1988; Cornen et al., 1999]. By analogy with the Iberia Abyssal Plain, the MQZ could represent a wide OCT where the mantle was exhumed and stretched mostly by amagmatic extension before the initiation of oceanic accretion [Beslier et al., 1996; Boillot and Coulon, 1998] (fig. 6). This hypothesis is supported by the tectonic structures (horsts and grabens) imaged in the seismic data over the MQZ [Boeuf and Doust, 1975]. Accordingly, the limit of the continental crust would be located at the foot of the slope, i.e. 160 km (or 250 km in the NW-SE extension direction) northward of the assumed location of the OCT at the southern edge of the MQZ. The age of the Australia-Antarctic breakup would thus be (1) older than that inferred from the magnetic anomalies (circa 95 Ma [Cande and Mutter, 1982; Veevers, 1986]), which would rather date the onset of oceanic accretion, and (2) older than the age of the breakup unconformity estimated as Santonian (83 Ma), further east, in the Great Australian Bight [Sayers et al., 2001]. The origin of the Naturaliste Plateau, continental or oceanic, is still disputed. The discovery of metamorphic rocks of probable continental origin on the southern flank of the Plateau (Site DR11) shows that it consists at least partially of rocks of the Gondwana continent. All the samples from the Diamantina Zone confirm that its basement is made of a peridotite-gabbro-basalt assemblage. The nature and age of the peridotites and of the associated magmas will help understanding the origin of this domain, which can result either from Neocomian seafloor spreading with further remobilization during the Australia-Antarctic separation, or from post-Neocomian ultra-slow seafloor spreading. Because of the omnipresence of extensive tectonic structures (fig. 3) and of the relatively small proportion of crustal rocks relative to the mantle rocks, we argue that the formation of the Diamantina Zone was mainly controlled by tectonics rather than by magmatic processes. In conclusion, the data collected along the southwest Australian margin during the MARGAU/MD110 survey evidence two major tectonic phases with formation of a wide OCT where abundant mantle rocks, in association with few mafic rocks, outcrop or lay directly beneath the sediments. The evolution of the crystalline rocks is compatible with an exhumation under a rift zone during a phase of magma-poor extension primarily controlled by tectonic processes. The domains where basement highs were sampled seem to be continuous over more than 1500 km eastward along the south Australian margin. Additional evidence on such large-scale structural continuity and on the nature of the associated basement highs may help generalizing the models for continental breakup and formation of non-volcanic passive margins, where oceanic accretion does not immediately follow continental breakup.

En diciembre de 2021, la Revista Brasileña de Ciencias de la Comunicación (INTERCOM) publicó un artículo titulado “Pílula do câncer na TV brasileira: a cobertura de programas televisivos sobre uma controvérsia científica” (Píldora contra el cáncer en la TV brasileña: cobertura de programas de televisión sobre una controversia científica), escrito por Marina Ramalho, Marcela Álvaro y Vanessa Brasil de Carvalho, investigadoras de la Fundación Oswaldo Cruz y el Instituto Nacional de Comunicación Pública de Ciencia y Tecnología (Río de Janeiro, Brasil). El estudio analizó la publicación mediática realizada por los canales de televisión a partir de 54 videos de 14 programas, sumando hasta 5 horas y 12 minutos de material. Las autoras identificaron el predominio en el enfoque narrativo político/legal y científico, y un mayor uso de entrevistas con pacientes (75) en relación con científicos (22). A pesar del uso de aspectos emocionales que motivó la discusión popular sobre el caso, las investigadoras de divulgación científica señalan que hubo racionalización del debate, centrándose en la evidencia científica y las alertas médicas. La revista Epicentro entrevista a la investigadora Marina Ramalho e Silva a fin de discutir los principales puntos de la publicación y reflexionar sobre cómo el conocimiento del caso puede servir como una estrategia para la práctica de la divulgación científica sobre temas controvertidos en la actualidad, a ejemplo de la discusión acerca de las vacunas, de uso de sustancias off-label para el tratamiento del Covid-19 y la ascensión del negacionismo de la ciencia. Keywords:scientific dissemination, synthetic phosphoethanolamine, narrative focus, Covid-19. Abstract In December 2021, the Brazilian Journal of Communication Sciences (INTERCOM) published an article entitled "Pílula do câncer na TV brasileira: a cobertura de programas televisivos sobre uma controvérsia científica" (Pill against cancer on Brazilian TV: coverage of television programs on a scientific controversy), written by Marina Ramalho, Marcela Álvaro and Vanessa Brasil de Carvalho, researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and the National Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The study analyzed the media publication made by television channels from 54 videos of 14 programs, adding up to 5 hours and 12 minutes of material. The authors identified the predominance in the political/legal and scientific narrative approach, and a greater use of interviews with patients (75) in relation to scientists (22). Despite the strong use of emotional aspects that motivated the popular discussion about the case, the researchers of scientific dissemination point out that there was rationalization of the debate, focusing on scientific evidence and medical alerts. The magazine Epicentro interviews the researcher Marina Ramalho e Silva to discuss the main points of the publication and reflect on how the knowledge of the case can serve as a strategy for the practice of scientific dissemination on controversial issues today, such as the discussion about vaccines, of the use of off-label substances for the treatment of Covid-19 and the rise of science denialism. Introducción En 2015, los medios de comunicación en Brasil cubrieron ampliamente la discusión sobre la fosfoetanolamina sintética (FS), anunciada en los titulares como la "píldora contra el cáncer". La sustancia había sido sintetizada por el científico Gilberto Chierice en el Instituto de Química de la Universidad de São Paulo y distribuida durante unos 20 años hasta la suspensión de la actividad por parte de la universidad. Ante esta situación, las personas afectadas recurrieron a los estrados judiciales para adquirir el derecho de recuperar su uso, considerando que existían varios factores que indicaban que su consumo sería eficaz contra varios tipos de cáncer. El mayor problema era que, hasta ese momento, no se habían realizado estudios clínicos controlados en seres humanos que verificara su efectividad y, por lo tanto, no había autorización de la agencia reguladora brasileña para la producción y uso de la sustancia como medicamento. Lo único que había eran resultados de pruebas aplicadas en modelos animales. El movimiento popular y la disputa legal llevaron al Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación del Brasil a realizar inversiones en el valor de R$ 10 millones para la investigación sobre el uso de la sustancia y, el Senado de la República aprobó una ley que autorizó su "producción, fabricación, importación, distribución, prescripción, dispensación, posesión o uso de la fosfoetanolamina sintética, conforme a los usos determinados en esta ley, “independientemente si poseía o no el registro sanitario de los órganos pertinentes, de forma excepcional", incluso sin los resultados de los ensayos clínicos. La Corte Suprema de Justicia, en respuesta a un reclamo planteado por la Asociación Médica Brasileña, decidió por mayoría de votos a favor de la inconstitucionalidad de la mencionada ley. En 2016 se publicaron los primeros estudios de ensayos in vitro de la sustancia, concluyendo que, además de la concentración en cápsula ser inferior a la esperada, la composición era incorrecta y la sustancia no presentaba actividad citotóxica o anti proliferativa. Solo la monoetanolamina, a partir de una concentración cercana a tres mil (3000) veces mayor que la utilizada en la quimioterapia, sustancia presente en la cápsula, pero no anunciada, demostró cierta actividad contra las células cancerosas. En marzo de 2017, varios investigadores señalaron la ineficacia de la fosfoetanolamina sintética para tratar el cáncer y los estudios se suspendieron oficialmente. Actualmente, la sustancia se comercializa como un suplemento dietético y permanece no registrada por la Agencia Reguladora Brasileña. Gilberto Chierice murió en 2019 en São Carlos. En 2021, Marina Ramalho e Silva presenta con su grupo de investigación en un artículo publicado en la Revista Brasileira de Ciencias de la Comunicación[1], datos y comparativos sobre la cobertura del caso y como el mismo se propone emblemático para los estudiosos de divulgación científica a respecto de temas controvertidos de la ciencia. ____________________________________________ ENTREVISTA LAIRTES: ¿Cómo surgió el problema de la investigación: desde la publicación por la prensa o a partir del tema en sí? RAMALHO E SILVA: En realidad, a partir de las dos cosas. Las historias de cáncer son muy recurrentes, despiertan el interés y un sentimiento de esperanza muy fuerte en la población. ¿Quién nunca ha pasado por la situación de conocer a alguien o tener un pariente cercano con cáncer? En ese momento, tenía un pariente cercano con cáncer y siempre estuve muy interesada en temas controvertidos de la ciencia. Tenía, por lo tanto, estas dos situaciones: un pariente muy cercano al que se le dio la posibilidad de recurrir a la fosfoetanolamina y, por otro lado, había estado acompañando este caso desde el 2015, cuando de hecho entró como pauta en los medios de comunicación brasileño. He propuesto un proyecto para el CNPq[2] y obtuve los fondos para realizar esta investigación. Paralelamente, una estudiante de Química ingresó a la maestría, con un proyecto para estudiar fosfoetanolamina. Adaptamos el proyecto y así, Marcela Vitor Álvaro, comenzó a trabajar conmigo como mi alumna de maestría. Es importante mencionarla porque es coautora de la obra publicada, sin su ayuda y la de Vanessa Brasil de Carvalho[3] el artículo no se hubiera publicado. La ciencia no es un trabajo individual, sino de grupo. El caso de la fosfoetanolamina era peculiar porque se trataba de una controversia científica que conquistó al público porque salió de los muros de la comunidad científica y generó un movimiento social muy fuerte en el Brasil por involucrar a pacientes, incluyendo la judicialización para acceder a la sustancia que, potencialmente, podría tratar un cáncer, a la comunidad científica y al poder público. Las personas que tenían acceso a esta sustancia por medio de la USP[4] de repente se encontraron con el acceso suspendido; por tanto, recurrieron a la justicia para obtenerla, una de estas personas, un enfermo terminal, logró en el Supremo Tribunal el resultado favorable, situación que llamó la atención de la prensa y a partir de entonces, este tema se convirtió en el centro de interés de una audiencia pública, ganando aún más publicidad y logrando la movilización de diputados y senadores, hasta convertirse en ley. Es muy interesante, pues muestra el caso de un tema científico que llega a la opinión pública y comienza a debatirse fuera del ámbito científico, representando una oportunidad para abordar un problema científico y mostrar cómo funciona la ciencia. Trasladar en el presente, en la pandemia de Covid-19, es una oportunidad para hablar sobre cómo se fabrican las vacunas, cómo se prueban y usan los medicamentos. Es un espacio para hablar de ciencia. LAIRTES: Cuando hablamos de abordar la ciencia en el periodismo, lo que solemos ver es que las líneas editoriales buscan simplificar el tema para el lector, pero al hacer eso en lugar de informar y educar a la población para el conocimiento, puede crear más mitos. En el caso de la fosfoetanolamina sintética (FS), el propio título de "píldora contra el cáncer" generó, en cierto modo, la interpretación de una píldora mágica. Es decir, sale de la discusión científica y termina creando aún más fantasía en la concepción de las personas que no conocían el protocolo que se estaba discutiendo en la investigación. Es posible recordar que, en ese momento, debido a esta interpretación, varias 'píldoras mágicas' comenzaron a aparecer desde varios lugares, producidas en Brasil y China. RAMALHO E SILVA: De vez en cuando aparece un "tratamiento mágico" para alguna enfermedad, especialmente para el cáncer o el SIDA. Así también, de momentos aparece en los medios de comunicación una "respuesta mágica ". Es una oportunidad para el periodismo científico cuando aparecen estas respuestas mágicas, para discutir cómo funciona la ciencia de manera responsable, es decir, para hablar de la ciencia misma mostrando limitaciones, lo que ya existe en la evidencia científica y lo que es 'magia'. En nuestra investigación, trabajamos con un enfoque cuantitativo, al realizar un estudio, es importante ser conscientes de las limitaciones que puede tener. Esta investigación mostró las tendencias de las publicaciones de los diferentes medios televisivos. En el tema de FS, emisoras como Rede Globo utilizaron recortes basados más en la evidencia y la ciencia como fuente. En otros, como Record y SBT[5], principalmente, la publicación ya está basada en las manifestaciones del paciente, cargadas de emoción, aclarando que, no significa no considerar la parte científica, sino enfatizan más las ideas emitidas por el paciente. Este trabajo está basado en el debate y discusión sobre las publicaciones de "tratamientos mágicos", pero para profundizar en este tema, sería necesario utilizar un enfoque cualitativo, incluso con análisis del discurso. La metodología aplicada permite la realización de comparativos. LAIRTES: En el trabajo emplearon diferentes enfoques para analizar cómo se abordó el tema de la "píldora contra el cáncer". El primer enfoque sería el científico, el segundo, basado en el drama del paciente, luego el económico, y finalmente el jurídico, ya que hubo una importante batalla judicial. Es interesante observar todos estos enfoques y ver como varía en cada uno. Se puede interpretar que todos los medios abordaron el mismo tema, pero con una diversidad de enfoques ¿Existe realmente esta diversidad? RAMALHO E SILVA: Sí, existe una diversidad de enfoques narrativos. Es interesante que la publicación de un tema científico sea abordada en diferentes enfoques, incluso para llamar la atención del espectador. Tal vez un asunto con enfoque científico sirva de anzuelo para un cierto tipo de audiencia, un enfoque más posicionado en la situación del paciente puede llamar la atención a otro tipo de público, que no está tan interesado en la ciencia. No estoy afirmando que siempre deba enfocarse en el paciente necesitado en tomar fosfoetanolamina, eso no es todo, pero puede traer mayor cobertura mostrando fuentes, voces y otros temas relacionados con la ciencia. Los enfoques existentes permiten tratar los problemas científicos desde diferentes ángulos. Un tema científico puede mostrar cómo una persona con cáncer sufre para tener acceso a diferentes tratamientos, mostrar lo que funcionó y lo que no resultó para la experiencia de las personas. Esto no es convencer a la población de tomar fosfoetanolamina u otra sustancia, sino dar voz a un importante actor social. Los temas científicos están atravesados por varios aspectos sociales, especialmente el de la salud, que es transversal. Por supuesto, el periodista debe asumir la responsabilidad de esta publicación para no producir una historia sensacionalista. Es posible a partir de la personalización, es decir, desde la experiencia de una persona, desarrollar una materia verdadera, basada en la evidencia científica, que informe y colabore para el debate. LAIRTES: Con la oportunidad que tuvieron de identificar los tipos de fuentes, de personas entrevistadas, utilizadas por diferentes emisoras. Mirando los resultados, les parece que es posible referir, a partir de la investigación, que la elección de la fuente implica y tiene un efecto directo en el tipo de enfoque que recibe la materia, es decir, hay un predominio del enfoque científico, como acabamos de abordar, porque hay más uso de las voces científicas. ¿Es verdad? RAMALHO E SILVA: Particularmente creo que sí. Un relato periodístico tiene el poder de dar voz o inviabilizar intereses y demandas de diferentes actores sociales. Entonces, en una historia que buscas escuchar más a científicos, necesariamente estás dando visibilidad a los intereses y demandas de la comunidad científica. Si le das voz a los pacientes, estás dando visibilidad a los intereses de este actor social. Se cuenta con una diversidad de fuentes. Cuando una controversia científica gana espacio en los medios de comunicación, es interesante mirar las fuentes y, en el caso de la televisión, principalmente por las voces. Las fuentes serían todo lo que se cita, pero la voz es lo que consideramos cuando tenemos allí, en la pantalla, a una persona, mostrando su rostro y hablando de un determinado tema. Si entrevistas a un paciente, a un científico, a un legislador, estás dando visibilidad a diferentes contextos sociales y resulta muy interesante porque los periodistas involucrados demuestran la opinión de todos los sectores. En este trabajo se hace un análisis cuantitativo, o sea la cantidad de pacientes, científicos u órganos públicos, pero no se analiza el aspecto cualitativo de ver exactamente de qué están hablando estas personas, o incluso comparar el tiempo de habla. Tratamos de enfatizar este tema de la visibilidad de diferentes maneras, mostrando la cantidad de sujetos que abordan diferentes enfoques, y la comparación de la cantidad de veces que aparece una imagen de un científico versus la cantidad de veces que aparece la imagen de un paciente. Así que hemos visto, por ejemplo, que hay más imágenes de científicos que de pacientes. Por otro lado, los pacientes son mucho más entrevistados. Las imágenes de los científicos no eran necesariamente de investigadores hablando y opinando, sino imágenes que los reporteros usaban para ilustrar off (Off es un término periodístico. En off, el periodista no aparece, sino su voz, solamente. La parte visual se construye mediante secuencias de imágenes que se relacionan con lo que el periodista está narrando) explicando cómo se realizaban los estudios clínicos o la sustancia en sí. Mientras el periodista hablaba, estas imágenes de científicos estaban llenando este espacio. LAIRTES: Dar voces, pensar estrategias, va más allá de hablar de periodismo o ciencia, como elementos separados. Está hablando de cómo la ciencia es y hace parte de la vida de las personas. No es posible hablar de ciencia y de la opinión pública por separado. En este sentido, en varias partes del texto se dejó en destaque sobre cómo los medios de comunicación, que también se puede considerar como una inclusión en la discusión sobre la opinión pública, dieron espacio a las Sociedades de Especialidades Médicas. Por lo que se suele observar, las sociedades científicas suelen tener muy poco espacio en los medios de comunicación y en los gobiernos, por tanto, muy pocas logran involucrarse en las discusiones. En el artículo, se ha señalado que las emisoras estaban preocupadas por escuchar a la Sociedad Brasileña de Cancerología (SBC), una sociedad científica y no solo opiniones de profesionales médicos. En mi opinión, este aspecto en particular es interesante porque permite dos enfoques: el primero, la necesidad de escuchar a los estudiosos sobre un tema, lo que va en contra de la comprensión popular de que todo médico es un científico, y para nosotros, en la educación superior, es algo que siempre llama la atención. Se sabe que el doctor estudió ciencias médicas, pero no todos los médicos producen ciencia o forman parte de este circuito. Y a menudo, cuando el periodista o el propio gobierno, selecciona como portavoz a alguien que estudió de forma superficial un determinado tema, pero que no participó en el proceso de generación de su conocimiento. Una vez más, entraríamos en el aspecto más cualitativo, que son estos riesgos que asume el periodista a la hora de seleccionar la fuente y que el propio profesional sanitario debe tener en cuenta a la hora de brindar una entrevista: si está capacitado para compartir esta información, si solo busca promoción personal o si generará más desinformación que conocimiento. Entraríamos así en la cuestión del primer problema de cómo esta ciencia necesita llegar a las personas. RAMALHO E SILVA: Me atrevo a decir que es muy común, cuando hay un problema médico involucrado en un asunto se debe buscar al profesional que trabaje clínicamente con esa enfermedad para dar una opinión. Y este tema de la fosfoetanolamina, SBC se ha manifestado como una organización de médicos que trabajan clínicamente cuando produce investigación y esto fue muy interesante. No era la experiencia de un médico, sino de una sociedad, de un colectivo de profesionales médicos, que estaba tratando de entender cómo sus colegas estaban lidiando con este tema. Por otro lado, Marcela observó algo diferente. Prestó atención al hecho de que la Sociedad Brasileña de Química (SBQ) no se manifestó en ningún momento. La SBC realizó una encuesta con sus miembros para abogar contra el uso de fosfoetanolamina y, SBQ no emitió ningún parecer, sabiendo que el actor principal de esta controversia, Gilberto Chierice, era un químico, jubilado de la USP, quien pasó más de 20 años produciendo y distribuyendo FS dentro de la universidad. Es interesante ver cómo los actores sociales se organizan para actuar, tanto para servir de fuente como para actuar sobre un tema específico. Es curioso compararlo con otras publicaciones de salud en Brasil. Por ejemplo, el desempeño de las sociedades médicas, en el caso de Brasil, sobre el uso de hidroxicloroquina y cloroquina en el tratamiento del Covid-19 fue totalmente diferente. No voy a arriesgarme a hablar específicamente de esto porque no profundicé mi estudio del tema. Pero lo que vemos es que el posicionamiento de la Sociedad de Medicina en Brasil, en este caso, fue ambiguo, con información basada en las opiniones de médicos, y no necesariamente en estudios con evidencia científica. En el caso de la fosfoetanolamina, las empresas se organizaron para dar su opinión y actuar con propiedad sobre el tema. LAIRTES: La investigación publicada habla de un tema específico que ha sucedido tiempo atrás, pero al mismo tiempo trata de algo que está muy presente hoy en día. ¿Qué enseñanzas crees que, analizando casos como éste: la divulgación científica sobre fosfoetanolamina sintética, puede ayudar a difundir la ciencia haciendo llegar el conocimiento a la población, considerando, por ejemplo, ¿las situaciones que se vive hoy por las discusiones sobre la vacunación y el uso de tratamientos off label para Covid-19? RAMALHO E SILVA: En el caso específico de FS, la publicación fue bastante explícita a la sociedad en general, quienes no poseen conocimientos sobre la forma de actuación de la ciencia. No me refiero específicamente a la televisión, estoy hablando de la discusión en general. Este proyecto generó el artículo sobre las publicaciones televisivas, otro sobre las publicaciones de periódicos, como también un análisis sobre grupos de pacientes con cáncer que hablaron sobre FS. Se pudo observar que varios segmentos de la población no poseen mucho conocimiento sobre cómo actúa la ciencia, por lo que cuando una controversia científica sale de los muros de la comunidad científica y es conocida por los medios de comunicación, es una oportunidad para que los divulgadores científicos lo aborden. Muchos grupos creen que la ciencia produce respuestas rápidas con verdades absolutas. Estos sectores se confunden mucho cuando aparece en los medios de comunicación una polémica de la ciencia. En lugar de enfrentar estos debates con naturalidad, ya que la ciencia se basa en discusiones, intercambio de ideas y, a menudo, conflictos, estas personas tienen en cuenta la credibilidad de la ciencia en su conjunto, que es cada vez más complicada, teniendo en cuenta que vivimos en un contexto global en el que los negacionistas de la ciencia ganan cada vez más espacio en los propios medios de comunicación. Así que creo que sí, como investigadora de divulgación científica, que los casos controvertidos de la ciencia deben ser publicados mostrando las controversias científicas y sociales que existen al respecto. Es importante escuchar a las personas, a los pacientes, pero con la responsabilidad de no generar historias sensacionalistas. ¿Es importante mostrar la visión del paciente? Eso creo. Sin embargo, también es importante decir que esta visión del paciente se basa en su experiencia, del día a día, y que, lo que la comunidad científica tiene que aportar no es una experiencia aislada, sino datos probados y reproducidos. Estos dos enfoques deben mostrarse. Asimismo, es importante mostrar cómo circula la política de esta ciencia en la administración pública, organismos reguladores y en el Senado. La ciencia no está restringida (a menudo lo está, pero no debería) a la comunidad científica, ya que los temas científicos atraviesan la sociedad en su conjunto, de manera transversal. La divulgación científica debe ser un espacio de debate, de discusión, que muestre a la ciencia con todo lo que tiene de bueno y con los riesgos que puede generar, y sobre todo cómo se pueden informar y discutir los temas sociales. Estas portadas deben ser cada vez más recurrentes, pero con los debidos recaudos de mostrar cómo se hace la ciencia. Así, cuando surja otra polémica, el resultado de esta no será que "entonces la ciencia no sirve de nada", sino que sí. Eso y la ciencia es la más confiable para tratar sobre estos temas y, sin embargo, no está hecha de verdades absolutas. Debemos dar nuestra opinión, pero con responsabilidad. LAIRTES: ¿Y en qué está trabajando su grupo de investigación ahora? ¿Sigues estudiando divulgación científica en salud? RAMALHO E SILVA: Siempre estamos, de una manera u otra, tratando un tema de salud. Hablando de proyectos estudiantiles, tengo un estudiante que defenderá en febrero, por ejemplo, una disertación sobre cómo el planteamiento del periódico Folha de São Paulo ha trascendido de una estricta información policial para el uso potencial de la marihuana en la medicina. También mi grupo del Centro de Estudios de Divulgación Científica obtuvo un importante apoyo de Fiocruz para realizar un estudio sobre las Consecuencias de la Desinformación en la Salud para la Población. Esta vez, con investigaciones que tratan de entender desde el punto de vista del receptor, tanto de los medios tradicionales como de las redes sociales, influyen en la forma en que los diferentes tipos de audiencia ven la desinformación en salud. Se trata de un gran proyecto, que se desarrollará en un plazo de tres a cuatro años, a partir de varios experimentos para entender aspectos de esta cobertura que afectan a la forma en que las personas ven, para luego tratar de aplicar estos productos de difusión dentro del Museo de la Vida. [1] Ramalho M, Alvaro M, Carvalho VB. Pílula do câncer na TV brasileira: a cobertura de programas televisivos sobre uma controvérsia científica. Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação [online]. 2021, v. 44, n. 3, pp. 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-58442021302. [2] Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, Brasil. [3] Investigadora y coautora del trabajo. Pílula do câncer na TV brasileira: a cobertura de programas televisivos sobre uma controvérsia científica. Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação [online]. 2021, v. 44, n. 3, pp. 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-58442021302 [4] Universidad de São Paulo [5] Rede Globo, Record y SBT, son emisoras de televisión populares en Brasil. Perfil de la entrevistada: Marina Ramalho e Silva es coordinadora del Centro de Estudios de Divulgación Científica, Museo de la Vida (Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/ Fundación Oswaldo Cruz, Brasil), donde realiza actividades académicas y prácticas en DC. Licenciada en Periodismo por la Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro (2003), Doctora (2013) en Educación, Gestión y Difusión en Biociencias por el Instituto de Bioquímica Médica de la UFRJ, Maestría (2008) en Periodismo de Agencia, realizada en la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (España) en colaboración con la Agencia EFE (España). Trabajó en la Agencia EFE de España, fue corresponsal del portal de noticias Science and Development Network (www.scidev.net), formó parte del Centro de Divulgación Científica y Tecnológica de FAPERJ (Fundación Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a la Investigación del Estado de Río de Janeiro), trabajó en el Jornal da Ciência (de la Sociedad Brasileña para el Progreso de la Ciencia), en el Jornal do Brasil y prestó servicios en Canal Futura. Actualmente, es editora de la sección de Divulgación Científica de la revista História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, Vicecoordinadora y profesora de la Maestría en Ciencia, Tecnología y Difusión de la Salud (Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz) y profesora de Especialización en Divulgación y Popularización de la Ciencia (COC/Fiocruz). Demuestra interés sobre estudios relacionados a Ciencia, Medios y Estudios de Sociedad, Ciencia y Género y Estudios de Recepción y Audiencia. Madre de Alice, Antonio y Martin.

AbstractCreativity in early childhood is very important for growth and development, through this creativity children can be free to imagine and work according to their wishes without any coercion from any party so that they can produce valuable works for the future. This study aims to determine the effect of candle magic painting on the creativity of free-painting children aged 5-6 years in Pembina State Kindergarten, Sungai Raya District, Kubu Raya Regency. The research method used is quantitative in the form of one group pretest and posttest design. The research sample is B2 grade children in Pembina State Kindergarten, Sungai Raya District, Kubu Raya Regency, totaling 11 children. The research instrument is using an observation sheet and a checklist list. The data collection tool uses observation and documentation techniques. Based on the results of the analysis showed differences regarding before and after the experimental activities. Calculations in this study using the Wilcoxon match pair test with the use of the SPSS for Windows version 23 application showing a Z value of -2.816 and Asymp. Sig. (2 tailed) of 0.005 with the condition that the calculation of Tcount Ttable then Ho is accepted. Because Tcount Ttable is 0.005 0.05, Ho is rejected and Ha is accepted. So it can be concluded that there is an effect of candle magic painting on the creativity of free painting for children aged 5-6 years in Pembina State Kindergarten, Sungai Raya District, Kubu Raya Regency.Keywords: Candle Magic Painting, Free Painting Creativity

This study aims to investigate the impact of computer-generated imagery (CG) on the aesthetic context and innovation of oriental gods and creatures in Chinese magical film footage. This study focuses on the analysis and research of CG technology in Chinese magical film lens images, as well as the aesthetic habits and aesthetic psychology of contemporary audiences towards oriental gods and creatures. This research employs a qualitative research approach because it is appropriate for examining the cultural background and aesthetic habits of Chinese magical film lens images created using CG technology, as well as the aesthetic emotions that the film evokes in its audience. This study specifically examines the aesthetic expression and breakthrough innovation of oriental gods and monsters in the CG screen effects of the film series Candle In The Tomb, as well as the operation process of Chinese magical film CG technology and its expression based on and the generative context and breakthrough innovation of oriental gods' aesthetic style. This study will provide a theory of the CG technology used to guide the visual aesthetics of Chinese fantasy films. It will benefit creators of Chinese magic films, researchers, academicians, students, and those interested in the subject's study and preservation.

Abstract Based upon the new designed helical resonator, the RF resonant frequency for trapping ions can be consecutively adjusted in a large range (about 12 MHz to 29 MHz) with high Q-factors (above 300). We analyze the helical resonator with a lumped element circuit model and find that the theoretical results fit well with experiment data. With our resonator system, the resonant frequency near magic RF frequency (where the scalar Stark shift and the second-order Doppler shift due to excess micromotion cancel each other) can be continuously changed at kHz level. For 88Sr+ ion, compared to earlier results, the measurement accuracy of magic RF frequency can be improved by an order of magnitude upon rough calculation, and therefore the net micromotion frequency shifts can be further reduced. Also, the differential static scalar polarizability △α 0 of clock transition can be experimentally measured more accurately.

In this study we made a quite large presentation of some important religious themes of Vinča culture, one the most important civilization of Neolithic period. Based on di!erent discoveries, on literature, as well as on our own experience we have noticed that many of the main religious themes are intercorrelated.So, we have discussed the problem of sanctuaries and cultic inventory, focus on Zorlenţu Mare, Balta Sărată, as well as on Liubcova discoveries.It was discussed and the fragmentation of idols, ritual breaking of sacred e"gies, how it is right to be named, idols or gurines. We referred to the types of masks (human or animal) illustrated by Vinča plastic art. In connection with masks we have approached other problems, such as sacred liquid, symbols of power and social distinctions (cross band, belt, diagonal band etc.).Another important theme is related with birth and sexual organs (phallus, vulva), some artifacts giving us opportunity to present analogies or similar depicting manner.Vinča plastic art also re#ect the theme man-bird, bird, #ight (idol or amulets of Zorlenţ type, with anthropomorphic and ornithomorphic attributes). Dance and music are part of sacred, expressed through alto relief manner of rendering feminine characters on Zorlenţu Mare pots; ocarina discovered at Liubcova can be considered as one of the earliest musical instruments in the area.We did not avoided elements related with magic, but we have underlined that is quite di"cult to make di!erence between the white and the black magic practices, based on artifacts from Zorlenţu Mare, Gornea, or Balta Sărată.Another topic was related to the symbols and signs discovered on several objects related with sacred: idols, pots, altars, table/altars, candles, sacred house, tablets, plates, discs, buttons, and breads. Analogies and similarly discoveries have been presented with reference to our database, Scrierea (Word), as well as the Danube script. Analyzes of di!erent artifacts has underline other important themes, such as sacred marriage, oranta (worship position), throne etc.Most of the religious themes of Vinča culture as in other civilizations are related with events of humans and cycles of nature, sacred and profane being in an inextricably dependence.

Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestiality, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to pornographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, homophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.

1. Make a list of things to do2. Copy list of things left undone from previous list3. Add items to list of new things needing to be done4. Add some of the things already done from previous list and immediately cross off so as to put off the feeling of an interminable list of never accomplishable tasks5. Finish writing list and sit back feeling an overwhelming sense of listlessnessIt started so well. Get up: make list: get on. But lists can breed listlessness. It can’t always be helped. The word “list” referring to a sequence of items comes from the Italian and French words for “strip”—as in a strip of material. The word “list” that you find in the compound “listlessness” comes from the old English word for pleasing (to list is to please and to desire). To be listless is to be without desire, without the desire to please. The etymologies of list and listless don’t correspond but they might seem to conspire in other ways. Oh, and by the way, ships can list when their balance is off.I list, like a ship, itemising my obligations to job, to work, to colleagues, to parenting, to family: write a reference for such and such; buy birthday present for eighty-year-old dad; finish article about lists – and so on. I forget to add to the list my necessary requirements for achieving any of this: keep breathing; eat and drink regularly; visit toilet when required. Lists make visible. Lists hide. I forget to add to my list all my worries that underscore my sense that these lists (or any list) might require an optimism that is always something of a leap of faith: I hope that electricity continues to exist; I hope my computer will still work; I hope that my sore toe isn’t the first sign of bodily paralysis; I hope that this heart will still keep beating.I was brought up on lists: the hit parade (the top one hundred “hit” singles); football leagues (not that I ever really got the hang of them); lists of kings and queens; lists of dates; lists of states; lists of elements (the periodic table). There are lists and there are lists. Some lists are really rankings. These are clearly the important lists. Where do you stand on the list? How near the bottom are you? Where is your university in the list of top universities? Have you gone down or up? To list, then, for some at least is to rank, to prioritise, to value. Is it this that produces listlessness? The sense that while you might want to rank your ten favourite films in a list, listing is something that is constantly happening to you, happening around you; you are always in amongst lists, never on top of them. To hang around the middle of lists might be all that you can hope for: no possibility of sudden lurching from the top spot; no urgent worries that you might be heading for demotion too quickly.But ranking is only one aspect of listing. Sometimes listing has a more flattening effect. I once worked as a cash-in-hand auditor (in this case a posh name for someone who counts things). A group of us (many of whom were seriously stoned) were bussed to factories and warehouses where we had to count the stock. We had to make lists of items and simply count what there was: for large items this was relatively easy, but for the myriad of miniscule parts this seemed a task for Sisyphus. In a power-tool factory in some unprepossessing town on the outskirts of London (was it Slough or Croydon or somewhere else?) we had to count bolts, nuts, washers, flex, rivets, and so on. Of course after a while we just made it up—guesstimates—as they say. A box of thousands of 6mm metal washers is a homogenous set in a list of heterogeneous parts that itself starts looking homogenous as it takes its part in the list. Listing dedifferentiates in the act of differentiating.The task of making lists, of filling-in lists, of having a list of tasks to complete encourages listlessness because to list lists towards exhaustiveness and exhaustion. Archives are lists and lists are often archives and archived. Those that work on lists and on archives constantly battle the fatigue of too many lists, of too much exhaustiveness. But could exhaustion be embraced as a necessary mood with which to deal with lists and archives? Might listlessness be something of a methodological orientation that has its own productivity in the face of so many lists?At my university there resides an archive that can appear to be a list of lists. It is the Mass-Observation archive, begun at the end of 1936 and, with a sizeable hiatus in the 1960s and 1970s, is still going today. (For a full account of Mass-Observation, see Highmore, Everyday Life chapter 6, and Hubble; for examples of Mass-Observation material, see Calder and Sheridan, and Highmore, Ordinary chapter 4; for analysis of Mass-Observation from the point of view of the observer, see Sheridan, Street, and Bloome. The flavour of the project as it emerges in the late 1930s is best conveyed by consulting Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, and Britain.) It was begun by three men: the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, and the ornithologist and anthropologist-of-the-near Tom Harrisson. Both Jennings and Madge were heavily involved in promoting a form of social surrealism that might see buried forces in the coincidences of daily life as well as in the machinations and contingency of large political and social events (the abdication crisis, the burning of the Crystal Palace—both in late 1936). Harrisson brought a form of amateur anthropology with him that would scour football crowds, pub clientele, and cinema queues for ritualistic and symbolic forms. Mass-Observation quickly recruited a large group of voluntary observers (about a thousand) who would be “the meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feeling can be compiled” (Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation 30). Mass-Observation combined the social survey with a relentless interest in the irrational and in what the world felt like to those who lived in it. As a consequence the file reports often seem banal and bizarre in equal measure (accounts of nightmares, housework routines, betting activities). When Mass-Observation restarted in the 1980s the surrealistic impetus became less pronounced, but it was still there, implicit in the methodology. Today, both as an on-going project and as an archive of previous observational reports, Mass-Observation lives in archival boxes. You can find a list of what topics are addressed in each box; you can also find lists of the contributors, the voluntary Mass-Observers whose observations are recorded in the boxes. What better way to give you a flavour of these boxes than to offer you a sample of their listing activities. Here are observers, observing in 1983 the objects that reside on their mantelpieces. Here’s one:champagne cork, rubber band, drawing pin, two hearing aid batteries, appointment card for chiropodist, piece of dog biscuit.Does this conjure up a world? Do we have a set of clues, of material evidence, a small cosmology of relics, a reduced Wunderkammer, out of which we can construct not the exotic but something else, something more ordinary? Do you smell camphor and imagine antimacassars? Do you hear conversations with lots of mishearing? Are the hearing aid batteries shared? Is this a single person living with a dog, or do we imagine an assembly of chiropodist-goers, dog-owners, hearing aid-users, rubber band-pingers, champagne-drinkers?But don’t get caught imagining a life out of these fragments. Don’t get stuck on this list: there are hundreds to get through. After all, what sort of an archive would it be if it included a single list? We need more lists.Here’s another mantelpiece: three penknives, a tube of cement [which I assume is the sort of rubber cement that you get in bicycle puncture repair kits], a pocket microscope, a clinical thermometer.Who is this? A hypochondriacal explorer? Or a grown-up boy-scout, botanising on the asphalt? Why so many penknives? But on, on... And another:1 letter awaiting postage stamp1 diet book1 pair of spare spectacles1 recipe for daughter’s home economics1 notepad1 pen1 bottle of indigestion tablets1 envelope containing 13 pence which is owed a friend1 pair of stick-on heels for home shoe repairing session3 letters in day’s post1 envelope containing money for week’s milk bill1 recipe cut from magazine2 out of date letters from schoolWhat is the connection between the daughter’s home economics recipe and the indigestion tablets? Is the homework gastronomy not quite going to plan? Or is the diet book causing side-effects? And what sort of financial stickler remembers that they owe 13p; even in 1983 this was hardly much money? Or is it the friend who is the stickler? Perhaps this is just prying...?But you need more. Here’s yet another:an ashtray, a pipe, pipe tamper and tobacco pouch, one decorated stone and one plain stone, a painted clay model of an alien, an enamelled metal egg from Hong Kong, a copper bracelet, a polished shell, a snowstorm of Father Christmas in his sleigh...Ah, a pipe smoker, this much is clear. But apart from this the display sounds ritualistic – one stone decorated the other not. What sort of religion is this? What sort of magic? An alien and Santa. An egg, a shell, a bracelet. A riddle.And another:Two 12 gauge shotgun cartridges live 0 spread Rubber plantBrass carriage clockInternational press clock1950s cigarette dispenser Model of Panzer MKIV tankWWI shell fuseWWI shell case ash tray containing an acorn, twelve .22 rounds of ammunition, a .455 Eley round and a drawing pinPhoto of Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire)Souvenir of Algerian ash tray containing marbles and beach stonesThree 1930s plastic duck clothes brushesLetter holder containing postcards and invitations. Holder in shape of a cow1970s Whizzwheels toy carWooden box of jeweller’s rottenstone (Victorian)Incense holderWorld war one German fuse (used)Jim Beam bottle with candle thereinSol beer bottle with candle therein I’m getting worried now. Who are these people who write for Mass-Observation? Why so much military paraphernalia? Why such detail as to the calibrations? Should I concern myself that small militias are holding out behind the net curtains and aspidistra plants of suburban England?And another:1930s AA BadgeAvocado PlantWooden cat from MexicoKahlua bottle with candle there in1950s matchbook with “merry widow” cocktail printed thereonTwo Britain’s model cannonOne brass “Carronade” from the Carron Iron Works factory shopPhotography pass from Parkhead 12/11/88Grouse foot kilt pinBrass incense holderPheasant featherNovitake cupBlack ash tray with beach pebbles there inFull packet of Mary Long cigarettes from HollandPewter cocktail shaker made in ShanghaiI’m feeling distance. Who says “there in” and “there on?” What is a Novitake cup? Perhaps I wrote it down incorrectly? An avocado plant stirs memories of trying to grow one from an avocado stone skewered in a cup with one “point” dunked in a bit of water. Did it ever grow, or just rot? I’m getting distracted now, drifting off, feeling sleepy...Some more then – let’s feed the listlessness of the list:Wood sculpture (Tenerife)A Rubber bandBirdJunior aspirinToy dinosaur Small photo of daughterSmall paint brushAh yes the banal bizarreness of ordinary life: dinosaurs and aspirins, paint brushes and rubber bands.But then a list comes along and pierces you:Six inch piece of grey eyeliner1 pair of nail clippers1 large box of matches1 Rubber band2 large hair gripsHalf a piece of cough candy1 screwed up tissue1 small bottle with tranquillizers in1 dead (but still in good condition) butterfly (which I intended to draw but placed it now to rest in the garden) it was already dead when I found it.The dead butterfly, the tranquillizers, the insistence that the mantelpiece user didn’t actually kill the butterfly, the half piece of cough candy, the screwed up tissue. In amongst the rubber bands and matches, signs of something desperate. Or maybe not: a holding on (the truly desperate haven’t found their way to the giant tranquillizer cupboard), a keeping a lid on it, a desire (to draw, to place a dead butterfly at rest in the garden)...And here is the methodology emerging: the lists works on the reader, listing them, and making them listless. After a while the lists (and there are hundreds of these lists of mantle-shelf items) begin to merge. One giant mantle shelf filled with small stacks of foreign coins, rubber bands and dead insects. They invite you to be both magical ethnographer and deadpan sociologist at one and the same time (for example, see Hurdley). The “Martian” ethnographer imagines the mantelpiece as a shrine where this culture worships the lone rubber band and itinerant button. Clearly a place of reliquary—on this planet the residents set up altars where they place their sacred objects: clocks and clippers; ammunition and amulets; coins and pills; candles and cosmetics. Or else something more sober, more sombre: late twentieth century petite-bourgeois taste required the mantelpiece to hold the signs of aspirant propriety in the form of emblems of tradition (forget the coins and the dead insects and weaponry: focus on the carriage clocks). And yet, either way, it is the final shelf that gets me every time. But it only got me, I think, because the archive had worked its magic: ransacked my will, my need to please, my desire. It had, for a while at least, made me listless, and listless enough to be touched by something that was really a minor catalogue of remainders. This sense of listlessness is the way that the archive productively defeats the “desire for the archive.” It is hard to visit an archive without an expectation, without an “image repertoire,” already in mind. This could be thought of as the apperception-schema of archival searching: the desire to see patterns already imagined; the desire to find the evidence for the thought whose shape has already formed. Such apperception is hard to avoid (probably impossible), but the boredom of the archive, its ceaselessness, has a way of undoing it, of emptying it. It corresponds to two aesthetic positions and propositions. One is well-known: it is Barthes’s distinction between “studium” and “punctum.” For Barthes, studium refers to a sort of social interest that is always, to some degree, satisfied by a document (his concern, of course, is with photographs). The punctum, on the other hand, spills out from the photograph as a sort of metonymical excess, quite distinct from social interest (but for all that, not asocial). While Barthes is clearly offering a phenomenology of viewing photographs, he isn’t overly interested (here at any rate) with the sort of perceptional-state the viewer might need to be in to be pierced by the puntum of an image. My sense, though, is that boredom, listlessness, tiredness, a sort of aching indifference, a mood of inattentiveness, a sense of satiated interest (but not the sort of disinterest of Kantian aesthetics), could all be beneficial to a punctum-like experience. The second aesthetic position is not so well-known. The Austrian dye-technician, lawyer and art-educationalist Anton Ehrenzweig wrote, during the 1950s and 1960s, about a form of inattentive-attention, and a form of afocal-rendering (eye-repelling rather than eye-catching), that encouraged eye-wandering, scanning, and the “‘full’ emptiness of attention” (Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order 39). His was an aesthetics attuned to the kind of art produced by Paul Klee, but it was also an aesthetic propensity useful for making wallpaper and for productively connecting to unconscious processes. Like Barthes, Ehrenzweig doesn’t pursue the sort of affective state of being that might enhance such inattentive-attention, but it is not hard to imagine that the sort of library-tiredness of the archive would be a fitting preparation for “full emptiness.” Ehrenzweig and Barthes can be useful for exploring this archival mood, this orientation and attunement, which is also a disorientation and mis-attunement. Trawling through lists encourages scanning: your sensibilities are prepared; your attention is being trained. After a while, though, the lists blur, concentration starts to loosen its grip. The lists are not innocent recipients here. Shrapnel shards pull at you. You start to notice the patterns but also the spaces in-between that don’t seem to fit sociological categorisations. The strangeness of the patterns hypnotises you and while the effect can generate a sense of sociological-anthropological homogeneity-with-difference, sometimes the singularity of an item leaps out catching you unawares. An archive is an orchestration of order and disorder: however contained and constrained it appears it is always spilling out beyond its organisational structures (amongst the many accounts of archives in terms of their orderings, see Sekula, and Stoler, Race and Along). Like “Probate Inventories,” the mantelpiece archive presents material objects that connect us (however indirectly) to embodied practices and living spaces (Evans). The Mass-Observation archive, especially in its mantelpiece collection, is an accretion of temporalities and spaces. More crucially, it is an accumulation of temporalities materialised in a mass of spaces. A thousand mantelpieces in a thousand rooms scattered across the United Kingdom. Each shelf is syncopated to the rhythms of diverse durations, while being synchronised to the perpetual now of the shelf: a carriage clock, for instance, inherited from a deceased parent, its brass detailing relating to a different age, its mechanism perpetually telling you that the time of this space is now. The archive carries you away to a thousand living rooms filled with the momentary (dead insects) and the eternal (pebbles) and everything in-between. Its centrifugal force propels you out to a vast accrual of things: ashtrays, rubber bands, military paraphernalia, toy dinosaurs; a thousand living museums of the incidental and the memorial. This vertiginous archive threatens to undo you; each shelf a montage of times held materially together in space. It is too much. It pushes me towards the mantelshelves I know, the ones I’ve had a hand in. Each one an archive in itself: my grandfather’s green glass paperweight holding a fragile silver foil flower in its eternal grasp; the potions and lotions that feed my hypochondria; used train tickets. Each item pushes outwards to other times, other spaces, other people, other things. It is hard to focus, hard to cling onto anything. Was it the dead butterfly, or the tranquillizers, or both, that finally nailed me? Or was it the half a cough-candy? I know what she means by leaving the remnants of this sweet. You remember the taste, you think you loved them as a child, they have such a distinctive candy twist and colour, but actually their taste is harsh, challenging, bitter. There is nothing as ephemeral and as “useless” as a sweet; and yet few things are similarly evocative of times past, of times lost. Yes, I think I’d leave half a cough-candy on a shelf, gathering dust.[All these lists of mantelpiece items are taken from the Mass-Observation archive at the University of Sussex. Mass-Observation is a registered charity. For more information about Mass-Observation go to http://www.massobs.org.uk/]ReferencesBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Fontana, 1984.Calder, Angus, and Dorothy Sheridan, eds. Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception. Third edition. London: Sheldon Press, 1965. [Originally published in 1953.]---. The Hidden Order of Art. London: Paladin, 1970.Evans, Adrian. “Enlivening the Archive: Glimpsing Embodied Consumption Practices in Probate Inventories of Household Possessions.” Historical Geography 36 (2008): 40-72.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 2002.---. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Hubble, Nick. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2006.Hurdley, Rachel. “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home.” Sociology 40, 4 (2006): 717-733Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation. London: Fredrick Muller, 1937.---. First Year’s Work 1937-38. London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938.---. Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986): 3-64.Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literary Practices. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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James Lull. London: Sage, 1992. 134-151. Mayes, Rob. “Songs in the Key-Space and Place.” Failsafe Records. Mar. 2013. <http://www.failsaferecords.com/>.McAlister, Elizabeth. “Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism.” Small Axe 16.3 (2012): 22-38. Mitchell, Tony. “Flat City Sounds Redux: A Musical ‘Countercartography’ of Christchurch.” Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Glenda Keam and Tony Mitchell. Auckland: Pearson, 2011. 176-194.“Rebuild and Restore.” Arts Centre, ca. 2016. <http://www.artscentre.org.nz/rebuild---restore.html>.“Scientists Find Rare Mix of Factors Exacerbated the Christchurch Quake.” GNS [Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited] Science 16 Mar. 2011. <http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/Multiple-factors>. Sullivan, Jack. “In New Orleans, Did the Music Die?” Chronicle of Higher Education 53.3 (2006): 14-15. Sweetman, Simon. “New Zealand’s Best Songwriter.” Stuff 18 Feb. 2011. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/4672532/New-Zealands-best-songwriter>.———. On Song. Auckland: Penguin, 2012.Webb, Gary. “The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research.” Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. New York: Springer, 2006. 430-440. MusicAll Fall Down. “Black Gratten.” Wallpaper Coat [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987.Bats. “Block of Wood” [single]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987. ———. “Claudine.” And Here’s Music for the Fireside [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1985. Beyonce. “Halo.” I Am Sacha Fierce. USA: Columbia, 2008.Charlie Miller. “Prayer for New Orleans.” Our New Orleans. USA: Nonesuch, 2005. (Dance) Exponents. “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait).” Expectations. New Zealand: Mushroom Records, 1985.———. “Victoria.” Prayers Be Answered. 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This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. 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