Good Vibrations

Extract from BBC Radio 4 the ‘Today’ programme, 19th October 2011

The almost throwaway opening to this discussion on Radio 4 is worth rewinding and hearing again. Yes, buildings hold feelings. In fact anything dense may hold feelings.

A neighbouring church for instance, is generally considered a feng shui no-no. This is essentially because, like hospitals, jails and police stations, they are places where a great deal of stress has been experienced. Some churches are so well positioned and cared for that to enter them is to feel blessed. In some, weddings and christenings have outnumbered funerals and the desperate cries for help but in many they haven’t.

In 1971 Nigel Kneale, author of scifi classic “Quatermass & the Pit”, wrote a tv play called “The Stone Tapes.” The central idea, that masonry and other dense materials absorb impressions, was inspired by the work of the dowser TC Lethbridge who claimed to be able to identify with a pendulum, stones that had been present at certain types of event. Some had been used in battle, others had been underfoot at great gatherings and so on and his pendulum would indicate which. Lethbridge actually developed a”calculus” from which he believed he could identify the emotions stones had absorbed; his pendulum would swing a precise arc dependent upon the signal they gave out. He could tell a stressed church from a chilled one.

Like a Rolling Stone

Kneale set his story in a haunted castle. Psychic investigators discover that when they play certain sounds, ghosts appear and when they stop, the apparitions are gone. After a while they are able to get manifestation at the press of a button.

Even today, in the age of the Quantum Field and the Hadron Collider, such notions may appear absurd. But when we consider what happens when we record onto magnetic tape, maybe less so. What an old style analogue tape recorder did was to agitate small crystals with the vibrations of a sound such as a voice. When the vibrations were duplicated, the voice could be heard again. There is perhaps only a difference in quality between that and “instructing” a rose quartz. And between that and the stone tapes of castle and church walls. And indeed, furniture.

Not Fade Away

Outside Guildford, for a while there used to be a shop called “Pew Corner”. They sold furniture from old churches. Once Sheila and I went in there on a whim. I was felled. It was like a thousand funerals all at once. I’ve observed this many times since. Hardwood appears to hold vibrations almost as well as stone. And houses certainly hold feelings.