There were twenty-nine entries for Laurence Arne-Sayles. Some of these were only a line or two; others ran to several pages. I skim-read about half of them, but was no wiser. The information they contained varied wildly: lists of publications, biography, quotations, descriptions of people Arne-Sayles had met in prison. I came across one entitled: Laurence Arne-Sayles: pros and cons of writing a book, and, since the idea of writing a book appeals to me strongly, I read this with interest.
Possible project: a book about Arne-Sayles, exploring the idea of transgressive thinkers – people whose ideas go beyond what is thought acceptable within a discipline (or even possible). Heretics.
Not sure whether this is a good use of my time or not. Pros and cons.
• Angharad Scott did a passable job with her book, A Long Spoon: Laurence Arne-Sayles and His Circle. (Con)
• That said, Scott’s strength is biography, not analysis. She would be the first to admit this. (Pro? Neutral?)
• Scott herself is gracious, encouraging, willing to help. She would like to see another book written. Gave me quite a lot of background information and has indicated that there’s more to come. See notes of phone call with Angharad Scott, page 153. (Pro)
• Arne-Sayles is quite a sexy subject? Major scandal, trial, prison sentence etc. (Pro)
• Arne-Sayles is the perfect example of a transgressive thinker – transgressive in more ways than one – morally, intellectually, sexually, criminally. (Pro)
• The extraordinary effect he had on his followers, getting them to believe that they had seen other worlds etc. (Pro)
• Arne-Sayles refuses to speak to academics/writers/journalists. (Con)
• His close associates – the people who knew him at the time he claimed to be passing to and fro between this world and others – are few. Of that number several have disappeared and most of the others won’t talk to journalists. (Con)
• Tali Hughes was the only student of Arne-Sayles’s who was willing to talk to Angharad Scott. According to Scott, Hughes is emotionally unstable and possibly delusional. James Ritter spoke to a journalist (Lysander Weeks) in 2010. Might be worth a conversation? According to Weeks, Ritter works as a caretaker in Manchester Town Hall. Worth checking if Weeks himself is working on a book? (Neither pro nor con – neutral)
• Mystery of the people connected to Arne-Sayles who disappeared: Maurizio Giussani, Stanley Ovenden, Sylvia D’Agostino. (This is a strong pull for readers and therefore a definite pro. Unless I disappear myself, in which case, con.)
• Spending a long time writing about a deeply unpleasant man could be emotionally taxing. It’s universally agreed that Arne-Sayles is malicious, vindictive, manipulative, spiteful, arrogant, a complete and utter prick. (Con)
Not sure where this comes out. Very slightly con?
This told me very little about Laurence Arne-Sayles himself. It was the last entry of all that was the most informative. It was called:
Notes for a talk to be given at Torn and Blinded: a Festival of Alternative Ideas, Glastonbury, 24–27 May 2013
Laurence Arne-Sayles began with the idea that the Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back. If, for example, they travelled in a boat on a river, then the river was in some way aware of carrying them on its back and had in fact agreed to it. When they looked up to the stars, the constellations were not simply patterns enabling them to organise what they saw, they were vehicles of meaning, a never-ending flow of information. The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man.
All of this was more or less within the bounds of conventional philosophical history, but where Arne-Sayles diverged from his peers was in his insistence that this dialogue between the Ancients and the world was not simply something that happened in their heads; it was something that happened in the actual world. The way the Ancients perceived the world was the way the world truly was. This gave them extraordinary influence and power. Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue – intelligible and articulate – it was also persuadable. Nature was willing to bend to men’s desires, to lend them its attributes. Seas could be parted, men could turn into birds and fly away, or into foxes and hide in dark woods, castles could be made out of clouds.
Eventually the Ancients ceased to speak and listen to the World. When this happened the World did not simply fall silent, it changed. Those aspects of the world that had been in constant communication with Men – whether you call them energies, powers, spirits, angels or demons – no longer had a place or a reason to stay and so they departed. There was, in Arne-Sayles’s view, an actual, real disenchantment.
In his first published work on the subject (The Curlew’s Cry, Allen & Unwin, 1969) Arne-Sayles said that these powers of the Ancients were irretrievably lost, but by the time he wrote his second book (What the Wind Has Taken, Allen & Unwin, 1976) he was not so sure. He had experimented with ritual magic and now thought it might be possible to get some of the powers back, providing you had a physical link with a person who had once possessed them. The best sort of link would be actual remains – the body or part of the body of the person in question.
In 1976 Manchester Museum had in its collection four preserved bog bodies, dated between 10 BCE and 200 CE, and named after the peat bog in which they had been found: Marepool in Cheshire. They were:
• Marepool I (a headless body)
• Marepool II (a complete body)
• Marepool III (a head, but not one that belonged to Marepool I)
• and Marepool IV (a second complete body).
Arne-Sayles was most interested in Marepool III, the head. Arne-Sayles said that he had performed a divination that had identified the head as belonging to a king and a seer. The knowledge the seer had possessed was exactly what Arne-Sayles needed to further his own researches. Combined with his own theories, it would result in a water-shed moment for human understanding. In May 1976 Arne-Sayles wrote a letter to the director of the museum, asking to borrow the head so that he could perform a magical rite of his own invention, transfer the seer’s knowledge to himself and so usher in a New Age for Mankind. To Arne-Sayles’s astonishment, the director refused. In June Arne-Sayles persuaded fifty or so students to demonstrate outside the museum against this blinkered and outdated thinking. The students carried placards that said ‘Free the Head’. Ten days later there was a second demonstration, during which a window was broken and there was a scuffle with the police. After this, Arne-Sayles seemed to lose interest in the bog bodies.
At the end of December the museum closed for Christmas. When it re-opened in the New Year, the staff discovered there had been a break-in. There was evidence of people having camped inside the museum. Food crumbs, biscuit packets and other litter were scattered about. There was a smell of cannabis. ‘Free the Head’ appeared again painted on a wall, and burnt stubs of candles were stuck to the floor. The candles formed a circle. Nothing appeared to have been taken but the cabinet in which Marepool III was displayed had been broken and the head had been handled. Some candle wax and fragments of mistletoe adhered to it.
The police and the museum staff naturally suspected Arne-Sayles. Arne-Sayles however had an alibi; he had spent the Midwinter festival with some wealthy neo-pagans at a farmhouse in Exmoor. The neo-pagans (people called Brooker) confirmed this. The Brookers revered Arne-Sayles as an extraordinary genius and a sort of pagan saint. The police did not think their testimony was reliable but had no means of refuting it.
No one was charged with the break-in at the museum, but in his next book (The Half-Seen Door, Allen & Unwin, 1979) Arne-Sayles talked about a Romano-British seer called Addedomarus who had been able to walk a path between worlds.
In 2001, while Laurence Arne-Sayles was in prison, a man called Tony Myers walked into a police station in London and asked to make a statement. He said that while a student at Manchester University he had bro
ken into the museum on Christmas Day 1976. He had smashed a window, climbed in and then opened the doors to let other people in. He had witnessed Arne-Sayles performing a ritual with two other men. He thought that the two men were Valentine Ketterley and Robin Bannerman, but it was a long time ago and he could not be sure.
Myers said that at one point he had seen the lips of Marepool III move but he had not heard any words.
Myers was not prosecuted.
Arne-Sayles himself never wrote about the ritual he used with Marepool III. In the late seventies he was in any case changing his ideas. He was less concerned with the content of lost beliefs and powers and more interested in where they had gone. Based on his earlier idea that the lost beliefs and powers constituted a sort of energy, he said this energy could not have simply winked out of existence; it must have gone somewhere. This was the beginning of his most famous idea, the Theory of Other Worlds. Simply put, it said that when knowledge or power went out of this world it did two things: first, it created another place; and second, it left a hole, a door between this world where it had once existed and the new place it had made.
Picture it, said Arne-Sayles, like rainwater lying on a field. The next day the field is dry. Where has the rainwater gone? Some has evaporated into the air. Some has been drunk by plants and animals. But some has seeped down into the earth. This happens over and over again. For decades, centuries, millennia, the water, seeping down, makes a crack in the rock under the earth; then it wears the crack into a hole; then it wears the hole into a cave entrance – a kind of door in fact. Beyond the door the water keeps flowing and it hollows out caverns and carves out pillars. Somewhere, said Arne-Sayles, there must be a passage, a door between us and wherever magic had gone. It might be very small. It might not be entirely stable. Like the entrance to an underground cave it might be in danger of collapse. But it would be there. And if it was there, it was possible to find it.
In 1979 he published his third, most famous book, The Half-Seen Door, in which he discussed these ideas of other worlds and described how, after a certain amount of struggle, he entered one of them.
Extract from The Half-Seen Door by Laurence Arne-Sayles
Once you have found the door, it is always with you. You simply look for it and there it is. Finding it the first time is where the difficulty lies. Following the insights that Addedomarus had given me, what I eventually concluded was that it was necessary to cleanse one’s vision in order to see the door. To do this one must return to the place, the geographical location where one last believed the world to be fluid, responsive to oneself. In short one must return to the last place in which one had stood before the iron hand of modern rationality gripped one’s mind.
For me this was the garden of the house where I grew up in Lyme Regis. Unfortunately by 1979 the house had gone through several hands. The then-owners (dull exemplars of the prevailing mediocrity) were unsympathetic to my request to be allowed to stand in the garden for several hours performing an Ancient Celtic ritual. No matter. I discovered from a friendly milkman when they would be taking their holiday, returned at that time and ‘broke in’.
The day I entered the garden was cold, rainy, grey. I stood on the lawn in the pouring rain, surrounded by the roses my mother had planted (though now forced to share their beds with flowers of insufferable vulgarity). Behind the rain were masses of colour – white, apricot, pink, gold and red.
I focussed on my memory of being a child in that garden, of the last time when both the world and my mind had been unfettered. I had stood before the roses in my blue wool romper suit. I gripped a metal soldier in my hand, his paint somewhat peeling.
To my surprise I discovered that the act of remembering was extremely potent. My mind was immediately freed, my vision cleansed. The long, complicated ritual that I had prepared became completely unnecessary. I no longer saw or felt the rain. I was standing in the clear, strong sunlight of early childhood. The colours of the roses were supernaturally bright.
All around me doors into other worlds began appearing but I knew the one I wanted, the one into which everything forgotten flows. The edges of that door were frayed and worn by the passage of old ideas leaving this world.
The door was perfectly visible now. It was in a gap between the Antoine Rivoire and the Coquette des Blanches. I stepped through.
I was standing in a vast chamber with stone floor and walls of marble. I was surrounded by eight massive statues, each one different, each depicting a minotaur. A great marble staircase rose up to a great height and descended to an equally disorientating depth. A strange thundering – as of a sea – filled my ears …
I remain calm
third entry for the nineteenth day of the ninth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls
The description of Laurence Arne-Sayles’s theories contained in my Journals corresponds closely to what the Prophet himself said. (More evidence that they are one and the same person!) I was pleased to rediscover the name Addedomarus, and to have its correct spelling. This was the name that the Other called on in his ritual three months ago! I feel certain that the Other learnt of Addedomarus from Laurence Arne-Sayles. (‘All his ideas are mine,’ the Prophet said.)
One sentence puzzles me: The world was constantly speaking to Ancient Man. I do not understand why this sentence is in the past tense. The World still speaks to me every day.
I believe I am better at reading these Journal entries than I was at first. I remain calm even when faced with the most obscure language. Words and phrases that pulsate with mysterious energy – words such as ‘Manchester’ and ‘police station’ – no longer discompose me. I seem, almost unconsciously, to have fallen into a habit of treating these entries as if they were the writings of an oracle or seer, someone in a frenzied or inspired state who imparts knowledge, albeit in a strange and not easily processed form.
Perhaps I was indeed in an altered state of consciousness when I wrote them? I find this theory persuasive, but it leaves several questions unanswered. What did I do to achieve this altered state? And why, when I have always thought of Myself as a scientist, did I begin this practice in the first place?
There will be a Great Flood
entry for the twenty-first day of the ninth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls
One of my regular tasks is to maintain a Table of Tides. In order to do this I rely on my observations and on a set of equations that I have invented. Every few months I perform my calculations and make sure that there are no Extraordinary Occurrences in the coming weeks. I have been so occupied recently that I have rather neglected this work. This morning I sat down to apply Myself to it and immediately discovered something Highly Alarming – a Conjunction of Four Tides in less than a week’s time!
I was shocked to think how close I had come to missing this event altogether! My last set of calculations were for a period that ended more than two weeks ago. I had neglected my duties and put Myself and the Other in mortal danger!
In my agitation I leapt up and walked rapidly up and down the Hall. Oh, fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I muttered to Myself. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! After a minute or two of walking uselessly to and fro, I spoke to Myself sternly, telling Myself that it was no good bewailing the Past; what was needed now was to plan for the Future.
I sat down again and set Myself to doing further calculations in order to understand more accurately what was likely to happen. Depending on the Force and Volume of the Waters – which are difficult to predict with exactness – between forty and a hundred Halls will be flooded.
Fortunately today was a Friday, one of the days when I have my regular meetings with the Other. I arrived in the Second South-Western Hall almost half an hour early, so anxious was I to speak with him.
The moment he appeared I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’
He frowned and opened his mouth to protest; he does not like me to take charge of the meeting but on this occasion I overrode him
. ‘There will be a Great Flood!’ I declared. ‘If we do not prepare ourselves properly, there is a very real danger that we will be swept away and drowned.’
Immediately he was all attention. ‘Drowned? When?’
‘In six days’ time. On Thursday. The Flood will begin to rise approximately half an hour before midday. A High Tide from the Eastern Halls will be followed by …’
‘Thursday?’ He relaxed again. ‘Oh, that’s OK. I won’t be here on Thursday.’
‘Where will you be?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Somewhere else,’ he said. ‘It’s not important. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Well, that is good. The Flood will be centred around a point 0.8 kilometres to the North-West of the First Vestibule. It is vital that you are out of the Path of the Waters.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said the Other. ‘Will you be OK?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks for asking. I shall walk to the Southern Halls.’
‘That’s good.’
‘That only leaves 16,’ I said without thinking. ‘I need to …’ I stopped. ‘That is …’ I began and stopped again.
There was a pause.
‘What?’ said the Other, sharply. ‘What are you talking about? What’s any of this got to do with 16?’
‘I only mean that 16 is not a native of these Halls,’ I said. ‘She will not know that a Great Flood is coming.’
‘No, I suppose not. So what?’
‘I do not want her to drown,’ I said.
‘Trust me, Piranesi. That would solve all sorts of problems. But, in any case, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. You’ve no way of getting in contact with 16 and so you couldn’t warn her even if you wanted to.’
There was a silence.
‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ said the Other. ‘You haven’t spoken to her?’ He gave me a sharp, appraising look.
‘I have not,’ I said.
‘Not now? Not in the past?’
Piranesi Page 12
