Namaste, or: What Keeps Coming Back (in a Slightly Worse Mood)  (Part Two)

Someone nearby pointed something out; a holy thorn, maybe, or a story attached to a stone. Delivered with the bright certainty of a fact that has never been forced to withstand follow-up questions. I thought of Joseph of Arimathea turning up like an afterthought, drafted into local legend because the land needed a backstory and Christianity had one spare. It’s not that anyone is lying exactly. It’s that the story wants to be told more than it wants to be true. 

This is the hauntological condition: the past not as authority but as residue. It doesn’t govern the present; it decorates it. We don’t consult it. We accessorise with it. 

And then, because the Tor has a flair for timing, there was the didgeridoo. Lifted from a landscape it once belonged to and set loose across Somerset as if geography were a suggestion rather than a constraint. The drone rolled out over the grass and the tower and the tourists with the confidence of something that had never been asked to justify its presence. Which, to be fair, is increasingly how things work. 

What struck me wasn’t the sound itself, but how easily it arrived. How little resistance there was. No friction, no pause for explanation. The instrument had travelled well. That, it turned out, was the point. 

Portability is one of those words that sounds helpful until you notice what it leaves behind. It usually means convenience: the ability to carry something with you, to pack it up neatly, to make it fit into the available space. Laptops. Water bottles. Beliefs.  

In spiritual terms, portability is sold as openness. Accessibility. The promise that nothing need be rooted, or difficult, or heavy with obligation. You can take what you need and leave the rest behind, which is presented as freedom rather than loss. 

Here, on the Tor, portability had become the governing aesthetic. Symbols moved the way branding does: frictionless, context‑light, optimised for recognition rather than responsibility. A greeting, a headdress, a sound, each stripped of the inconvenient parts that once made them legible. Origins had been filed down to something decorative. Place had been replaced by vibe. 

The irony, of course, is that this all happens in the name of universality. “All paths lead to the same truth,” the scene seemed to suggest. Geography as a minor detail. History as an optional extra. The problem is that the land does not agree. The Tor does not become Australia because an instrument sounds. Glastonbury does not turn into a chakra because a word is spoken. However portable the symbols may be, the hill remains stubbornly where it is. 

The borrowing wasn’t aggressive. That would have been easier to deal with. It was cheerful, well‑intentioned, almost polite. Which is why it felt faintly violent in a quieter way. Cultural appropriation here wasn’t theft so much as sanding down: the conversion of grounded practices into free‑floating signs, available to anyone who wants the effect without the weight. Violence, but with excellent branding. 

The man beneath the tower seemed less a believer than a relay station. Symbols passed through him without stopping. None of them contradicted the others, because contradiction requires commitment, and commitment had been replaced by display. Portability solves many problems, but it also removes the possibility of refusal. Nothing stayed long enough to object. 

And yet the Tor itself refused to play along. It remained obstinately specific: a lump of land with a weather system, a geology, a long memory of feet on paths. It has been walked by pilgrims and poets, druids and school trips, seekers, and cynics. It has learned, over time, that being used is not the same as being understood. 

If anything here objected, it was the ground. Quietly. Continuously. Insisting, in its unportable way, that things come from somewhere, and that somewhere matters. 

Place is not a vibe. It’s a constraint. 

If you want a less poetic version: the Tor is not a blank screen. It has its own content. It has its own backlog. And it is, frankly, tired of being used as a spiritual projector. 

The man (because that’s what he was, in the end, whatever else he had gathered) seemed less a believer than a relay station. Symbols passed through him without stopping. None of them asked anything of him. None of them contradicted the others, because contradiction requires commitment, and commitment had been replaced by display. 

This is not, importantly, a moral verdict on one stranger with an instrument and an enthusiastic wardrobe. Nothing here is exceptional; it’s just unusually visible. It’s just the scene doing what scenes do: revealing the mechanism in plain sight. The Tor attracts a certain kind of collage spirituality because the Tor is already a collage, Christian tower on older myth on tourist path on national poem on Instagram. It’s not surprising that it becomes a magnet for spiritual magpie-ism. It’s practically an invitation. 

But invitations still have terms. 

I wondered, not unkindly, what would happen if one of those borrowed elements refused to behave. If the didgeridoo demanded its own land back, not symbolically, but materially, like a debt collector. If ‘Namaste’ insisted on context rather than warmth. If the headdress stopped being “a look” and started being a claim. If the crucifix insisted on suffering rather than sparkle. If Blake’s Jerusalem demanded to be built rather than quoted. 

If the Tor itself objected to being treated as interchangeable with everywhere else. 

But nothing did. Because nothing does, usually. The point of free-floating signs is that they don’t bite. They are designed, culturally, psychologically, economically, to be handleable. They are spirituality with the risk removed. Ritual without liability. Belief without belief. 

The sound resumed. Circular breathing. Infinite present. 

We stood, watched, listened, and then, as people do, moved on. The Tor absorbed us and released us with the same indifference it has learned over centuries of being looked at. It has been seen by pilgrims and poets, druids and school trips, seekers and cynics. It has learned that being watched is not the same as being heard.