Field Study's Man in E11 asked, am I here or am I there?

Monday 7th July 2014 found me tasked with finding various locations in Covent Garden and Bloomsbury relating to Virginia Woolf. It was not long after entering the area via Waterloo Bridge and the grand arc of Aldwych that I was immersed in the 'thwarting currents of being' and 'splendours and miseries' of those streets. I was also on the trail of Field Study's Man in E11, on the trail of (a ghost of) (one of the minds of) a well read Bloomsbury Setter, on the trail of a pencil. This was looking like another lost and found pet situation until I started to imagine some elements of the trail that further disturbed the otherwise ordinariness or banality of my working day.

I found a window and climbed in through one side of it and out the other. From the other side of the window I could see students hurriedly making their way between the university buildings. All of them seemed terrified. The area had been blighted by a series of pencil thefts and muggings - particularly those of students but also those of tourists unwitting and foolish enough to buy souvenir pencils. Numerous signs were posted around the area warning people of the hazards of conspicuous display of pencils. Rumours abounded of who or what was responsible for the attacks. The most chilling of these was of a howling invisibility that lurked in the reflections of shop windows waiting to pounce on any field student foolish enough to take his/her pencil out to make notes and sketches.

I imagine Field Study's Man in E11 dared to take such a risk however I lacked his courage and so compromised with the use of a mobile phone camera to record reflective encounters with here and/or 'there-ness'. I want to believe that my photographs are proof of a howling invisibility but I can only imagine there is something in the images that points to a disappointed supernatural character in pursuit of a pencil.

There is a critical threshold involving the albedo of a 'flaneuristic' immersion - of the self being here or there becoming irreconcilable unless there is some sort of submission or surrender. Is this what Virginia Woolf implied in her 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' (1930)?

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'Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?'

So the true self was given rein and took us (the truth and the falsity) to Bedford Way and the entrance to the UCL departments of Psychology, Languages and Geography. As we approached we thought we saw smoke billowing from beneath the steps to the building. Closer inspection on arrival revealed the smoke as the comic cerebral emanations of a pencil obsessed invisible entity trapped in the sub-liminal cage. Was this a psycho-linguistic-geographic experiment? Had the fictional spate of local pencil thefts been the result of an academic experiment gone awry?

It occurred to me that I might have caught up with Field Study's Man in E11 in his pursuit of the haunting presence of a Virginia Woolf in search of a pencil. The spirit was not entirely incarcerated, for the desire for a pencil emanated beyond the steely confines of that experimental apparatus. I delved into my bag, feeling for a pencil but as I approached the cage to feed the imaginary with a lead pencil I was terrified by an awful shaking of the cage. I retreated hastily and concluded I did not have the nerve to take the study further.