Open Up the Northwest Passage
In 1566, Humfrey Gilbert initiated the campaign to open up the
NorthwestPassage. 400 years later the call was taken up by the
Situationist International.
George Gascoigne tells the reader in his introduction to Gilbert's
Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia how his
hero is akin toa bee in Queen Elizabeth's beehive who has waspishly
gone astray, but yetat last returns to his former abiding.
Gascoigne himself was a kinsman toMartin Frobisher, the Yorkshire
man who first attempted the Northwest Passage.
It was during a visit to Humfrey Gilbert's home in Limehouse that
he cameupon Gilbert's text and arranged to have it published. He
assures the readerthat John Dee, founder of the British Empire,
liked the text very much,commending the author in his preface to
the English translation of Euclid.
Gilbert cites both Plato and Ficino in support of his plan,
mentions romancoins found by the Spanish in American gold mines,
and refers to the discoveryof Europe by some Indians in 1160, when
a storm forced them onto the coastof Germany. Gilbert was driven by
the search for commodities, not Utopia.
Nearly 400 years later, the S.I. assembled in Limehouse searching
for newpassageways. This was a contentious conference, the last
that Asger Jornattended. It was only after Prem and the Nashists
had left, that the S.I.declared its resolve to follow a new
direction:
"At this moment of history when the task is posed, in the most
unfavourableconditions, of reinventing culture and the
revolutionary movement on anentirely new basis the Situationist
International can only be a Conspiracyof Equals, a general staff
that does not want troops. It is a matter offinding, of opening up,
the 'Northwest Passage' towards a new revolutionthat cannot
tolerate masses of performers, a revolution that must surgeover
that central terrain which has until now been sheltered from
revolutionaryupheavals: the conquest of everyday life. We will only
organise the detonation:the free explosion must escape us and any
other control forever."
('The Counter-Situationist Operation in Various Countries',
S.I.No.8, January 1963)
The LPA is holding a rally near the site of the Alchemical
laboratory ofthe Society of the New Art, an organisation set up by
Gilbert, Lord Burghleyand the Earl of Leicester (its exact location
has yet to be determined).It was also in Limehouse that Gilbert
wrote his proposal for an Elizabethan"Achademy", a proposal that
was eventually realised by his fellowMerchant Adventurer, Sir
Thomas Gresham. Gilbert claimed to have constructedremarkable
navigational machines, an area of work that the Gresham Collegewas
quick to concern itself.
Outside the nearby library, there is the baleful influence of the
statueof Clement Attlee, the mass murderer who signed the
authorisation for droppingthe bomb on Hiroshima. The town hall
across the road used to be a socialistreliquary, where Prince
Kropotkin's table was kept. Alongside this wereother relics of the
communist saint, Sylvia Pankhurst. (She was beatifiedby the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and given the title Debre). These
wereremoved before work began on Canary Wharf.
The rally will celebrate a whole year since
the re-emergence of the LPA at the Cave at Roisia's Cross.
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