I plan to write a 2 part travelogue about my 2 week stay in Wiltshire, one for each week. The first week I stayed in Devizes on the west side of the heart of crop circle country. The second week I joined B. and K. (wife and best friend) on the east side, occupying a rental unit near Marlborough. The summary of the story is that Devizes is most likely *not* an option to stay for longer periods of time after I’m/we’re retired, unlike what I thought before the vacation. But the good news is that Marlborough still seems like a very decent option, with a number of advantages over Devizes and any other nearby locations such as Pewsey or Calne. A drawback, however, might be the additional cost of a rental in Marlborough.
But back to the beginning of the trip to start the text for these batch of photos, and some sad news. My camera *died in England*. Yes, the one I affectionately named Liquor (have to ask B. again about the name origin), and with which I took not some but *all* pictures for both this blog and its 4 1/2 year predecessor, the Baker Blinker Blog, has finally given up the ghost. The final photo of the Final Liquor Shots, 02 entry that pairs with this particular post is the last I took with the camera, period, seeming to add to its significance.
We start in Devizes and the cemetery that played a quite prominent role in the beginning collages of the Lis series from Feb/March of this year, a series which *greatly* aided my decision making in Devizes especially, and might have even saved this leg of the trip, period. This is the cemetery of St. John’s church, very near where I stayed with [TV] above the Hound and Hares bar near the center of town. This particular tombstone, as described in Brian Robert Marshall photo of the same here, is called the Millenium momument. From his caption:
The monument is eleven years old and is starting to weather nicely so blend with the rather older tombstones and graves. Visible are symbols and scenarios mostly but not necessarily associated with the town. These include a hot air balloon, a helicopter, a tractor, a lollipop lady, a train leaving a tunnel, a canal boat and a Nativity scene.
I like the way both Marshall’s photo linked to above and my own photo have people in the background with their backs to the camera. Marshall’s photo was used in Lis 01, along with another shot of the Millenium momument from a different angle, a couple of his photos of St. John’s church, and a pyramid shaped sculpture more in the middle of Devizes. In the Lis 01 collage, all these shots and various angles are smushed together a bit like a cubist painting to create a certain Essence of Devizes as a whole, or at least that was the seeming objective.
It’s possible that this particular photo of mine, and others here, might be used in new collages, as some kind of extension of the Gilatona Lis series. If so, what will they be called??
My second photo from this post is another reinterpretation of a Brian R. Marshall photo used in a Lis collage, this time Lis 04, which is paired with Lis 03 to make one of the two diptychs of the series. My interpretation of this diptych appears here. I’ll just let interested readers peruse that interpetation post if they will, but one thing I want to point out here upon studying my own photo and Brian’s similar one of the blocked up train tunnel: there is *absolutely nothing* in my photo that resembles in any way the 2 connected figures I identified in the center of Marshall’s photo — nothing. Given what happened to me at almost *this very spot* during my stay in Devizes (more on that later), I can’t help but come to the conclusion that these images, this Green Man effect, is actually represents some kind of psychic wormhole into another dimension. Again from the interpretion oriented post linked to above, I directly associate this effect with the Cygnus X-1 black hole.
For some reason now, I’m picking up on a connection between the woman with her back to us in Lis 01 — and who is doubled with the man appearing in Lis 02 and Lis 03/04 (they appear together in Lis 02) — and the Manchester Museum statuette that mysteriously circled around in its cabinet (or coffer) to turn its *back* on the person writing this museum blog entry. This mystery is described some in the Diamond Too post just above. Note especially the similarity of the stacked set of symbols on the back of the Manchester statuette (http://egyptmanchester.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/feb-2013-007.jpg) with the similarly stacked symbols of the Millenium monumet the woman with her back to us in Lis 01 is obviously associated. Also note in this collage I combined *two B. R. Marshall shots* of this Devizes cemetery monument from different angles — mimicking Marshall’s “spinning” around the monument to create his particular set of photos concerning it. The more I look at the two things, statuette and cemetery monument, the more I think they must be linked in this way. But how???
Let’s move on for now, and leave that new mystery for a future post (!) We come to a shot into the interior of the Wiltshire crop circle country “Hole” I’ve described in a recent series of post; best to start with The Hole, Part 03 on this subject. Unfortunately I really didn’t get to explore the interior of The Hole at any length due to time constraints and also the relative remoteness of the thing. The shot comes from just south of the Cherhill white horse, which I hiked up to on my second day in Wiltshire/Devizes.
Moving to Avebury now — this would be the third day of my stay — we have several pics of a particular rock that I identified with on this particular day. Peculiarly, although I returned to Avebury perhaps 8 or 9 times during my trip, I did not study this rock again. Maybe I was sad because I identified the stone with my now dead camera. But anyway, I took a shining to it, as they say, and particularly noted a figure 8 on its top, along with what appears to be a “c” just above it. Compare with this map I prepared of what I call Sharieland in Herman Park. Again, we have a close conjunction of an “8” and a “C” (which stand for 8 ball and cue ball respectively). I’m tempted, then, to call this Avebury rock “Herman’s Rock”, and it even may be related to the rocks depicted in this early Frank and Herman Einstein! blog post from October of last year.
A shot of the Avebury Cove Rocks featured in a number of Gilatona-Lis collages, including the final 4-part Falmouth series. Interesting article on mysteries surrounding the Avebury rocks:
http://www.britainexplorer.com/avebury-stone-circle-mysteries.html
Yet another Gilatona-Lis related photo, this time of Ironmonger Lane in Marlborough, the setting for both Gila 06 and Gila 10.
As it turned out, this alley ran all the way from High Street, the very wide main street of the town, to a parallel road plainly named Back Lane. The length of Ironmonger Lane is perhaps 100 yards…
… and you can quickly circle back to High Street from Back Lane by using another connecting alley called Chandler’s Yard just to the west. High Street is glimpsed through the whitewashed exit to Chandler’s Yard in the center of the below photos.
(continued in Final Liquor Shots, 02)
Sunklands 
