Barefoot in Bollingen and Dreaming

A Story of Pilgrimage

Daisy Campbell at Bollingen. Photo by Jonathan Greet.

Over Easter week 2019, sixty-nine people undertook a pan-European ‘pilgrimage’ which ended at Carl Jung’s Tower, Bollingen, Switzerland. I was one of the 69 and I also helped organise it. I want to understand what the experience meant to me personally and I’m hoping that putting it into words will help. I’d also like to know what it was we actually did; ‘pilgrimage’ is in inverted commas because it’s an approximation. As John Higgs said in his newsletter; there isn’t — yet — a name for what it was. So while you, me, John Higgs and everyone else figures that out — pilgrimage — will have to suffice.

One of the tasks we were given prior to it was to recommend a ‘life-changing’ book. There are a few on my shelves that fit the bill. But of those, the vast majority are arcane books about the nature of money and economy. I couldn’t really recommend The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille as essential Bus reading. I wanted to recommend a book I thought my fellow pilgrims would like. So in the end I went for Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There’s a famous Author’s Note at the beginning where Pirsig warns the reader that while his book ‘must be regarded in its essence as fact’, it’s not actually very factual about motorcycles. This essay could do with a similar note.

For facts about the pilgrimage — such as they exist — you might be better off reading this Daily Grail piece by my fellow pilgrim Ben Graham. Whatever it was that we did, this essay is my own personal and partial assimilation of it.

“Have a word with Daisy, will you Jon?” Michelle asked me.

Daisy had first announced her intentions during the tour of her one-woman show Pigspurt’s Daughter. Paying homage to her late father Ken Campbell, it had considered both the joys and dangers of living your life as if it were a story. Now, she was in the process of raising £28,000 from 69 people in order to undertake a non-denominational, pan-European pilgrimage based — in part and roughly speaking — on a mythologising of her own life.

Michelle added, “I’m worried this time she’s bitten off more than she can chew.”

Daisy had identified CERN in Geneva, Switzerland as the place where the 69 pilgrims would ‘immanentize the Eschaton’ — create Heaven on Earth. To usher in this new age, a magical action would be performed marking the completion of a chapter of Daisy’s life-story. This action would also work to reset time and shift the world onto a new temporal path, and — if that wasn’t enough — it would bring about the end of story as we know it.

When Daisy had performed her show in Liverpool, like audiences elsewhere, those attending were impressed by the scale of her magical ambition. Some of them also had to assimilate an extra-large dollop of synchronicity. It just so happened that the Liverpool Arts Lab (LAL) were planning a pilgrimage to Switzerland, too. Their destination was Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower, Zurich. Their start date was Bicycle Day (the anniversary of Albert Hoffman’s first intentional exposure to LSD) which this year — 2019 — happened to fall on Good Friday, the proposed start date of Daisy’s pilgrimage.

The happenstance was revealed and two simultaneous Swiss pilgrimages became one.

I saw the very first show of Daisy’s tour. Back then I’d taken the idea of a pilgrimage with a pinch of salt. It wasn’t that I doubted Daisy. Or, that I didn’t like the idea. It’s just that — having been a Tour Manager (mainly in the music industry) — I know what it takes to transport a group of people across Europe on a tight budget. I’ve also done a pilgrimage of my own each year, for the past four years, so I know how tough these particular sorts of journeys can be. The Holy Days of a pilgrimage are not a holiday.

“The likely outcome of Daisy’s plan?” I’d asked myself back at that first show. “A dozen of us in a single minibus and a few strained friendships.”

But the project had gained real momentum from the LAL synchronicity onward and Michelle picked up on this. She was worried. Normally in Daisy’s projects the worst thing that can happen is an actor falling off the stage. For this, it’d be a bus full of people falling off a mountain.

Michelle was still reticent about speaking to me, though. She knew of my tour management work but she also was aware I’d hated the job and it had been a contributory factor in my marriage break-up. However, once it became clear that the pilgrimage would be oversubscribed she felt compelled to ask.

So I made the call to Daisy just to point her in the right direction and get the thing on a firm logistical footing.

I found myself working on it for the next six months.

Daisy Campbell performing Pigspurt’s Daughter. Photo by Dan Dares. T-Shirt by Church of the Burn.

I first met Michelle, Daisy and Kate — I’ll tell you more about Kate, shortly — on 23rd Oct 2013 at the Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London.

I’d gone there to ritually burn £20 in front of an audience.

[ If you’re new to this — I’m Jonathan Harris a.k.a. Money Burning Guy and burning money in ritual is my thing. I like to create nothing from something. ]

I tell the backstory to that evening and the uncanny coincidences that led me to be there in the 2016 piece Money Burning Man at Festival 23. What I don’t talk about in that piece is my personal circumstances at the time. The Horse Hospital was my first proper night out since Sally had left me six months earlier. We’d been together 30 years.

The pain of separation had been quite overwhelming in those early months. Every waking moment was filled with it. And there was no respite at night; Dream-Sally was a bitch.

Then something happened. The beginning began.

View over New Quay Harbour by Emlyn Sayce circa 1945–1952