Just back from a stay on the Suffolk coast exploring Hauntology (in Felixstowe – more of that to come). Open Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius in the pub and this is the first passage I read.
“All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings — castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.”
Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism 1953
“Why is walking so full of woe?”
Of Walking in Ice (1978)
In February 1957 (On the Road was published in September 1957) Jack Kerouac boarded a ship from Brooklyn to Tangier in Morocco. He traveled back to the U.S via France and England. An account of this trip was published in Lonesome Traveler. Below is his record of his few days in London waiting to catch the boat train to Southampton.
“Outskirts of the city in late afternoon like the old dream of sun rays through afternoon trees. – Out at Victoria Station, where some of the students were met by limousines. – Pack on back, excited, I started walking in the gathering dusk down Buck-ingham Palace Road seeing for the first time long deserted streets. (Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.) – Past the Palace, down the Mall through St James’s Park, to the Strand, traffic and fumes and shabby English crowds going out to movies, Trafalgar Square, on to Fleet Street where there was less traffic and dimmer pubs and sad side alleys, almost clear to St Paul’s Cathedral where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.
I called my London agent on the phone, telling him my plight.
‘My dear fellow it’s awfully unfortunate I wasnt in this afternoon.
We were visiting mother in Yorkshire. Would a fiver help you?*
‘Yes!’ So I took a bus to his smart flat at Buckingham Gate (I had walked right past it after getting off the train) and went up to meet the dignified old couple. – He with goatee and fireplace and Scotch to offer me, telling me about his one-hundred-year-old mother reading all of Trevelyan’s English Social History. – Homburg, gloves, umbrella, all on the table, attesting to his way of living, and myself feeling like an American hero in an old movie. — Far cry from the little kid under a river bridge dreaming of England. – They fed me sandwiches, gave me money, and then I walked around London savoring the fog in Chelsea, the bobbies wandering in the milky mist, thinking, Who will strangle the bobby in the fog?’ The dim lights, the English soldier strolling with one arm around his girl and with the other hand eating fish and chips, the honk of cabs and buses, Piccadilly at midnight and a bunch of Teddy Boys asking me if I knew Gerry Mulligan.
Finally I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.
And on Good Friday afternoon a heavenly performance of the St Matthew Passion by the St Paul’s choir, with full orchestra and a special service choir. – I cried most of the time and saw a vision of an angel in my mother’s kitchen and longed to go home to sweet America again. – And realized that it didnt matter that we sin, that my father died only of impatience, that all my own petty gripes didnt matter either. – Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble basrelief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages. Outside as I walked in the dusk around Christopher Wren’s great masterpiece and saw the gloomy overgrown ruins of Hitler’s blitz around the cathedral, I saw my own mission.
In the British Museum I looked up my family in Rivista Araldica, IV, Page 240, Lebris de Keroack. Canada, originally from Brittany.
Blue on a stripe of gold with three silver nails. Motto: Love, work and suffer.’
I could have known.
At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvelously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music, Enobarbus noble and strong, Lepidus wry and funny at the druken rout on Pompey’s boat, Pompey warlike and harsh, Antony virile, Caesar sinister, and though the cultured voices criticized the Cleopatra in the lobby at intermission, I knew that I had seen Shakespeare as it should be played.
On the train en route to Southampton, brain trees growing out of Shakespeare’s fields, and the dreaming meadows full of lamb dots.”
“All I know is that place dictates the story. The petty interventions of humans are of no account. We raid the past to make the present bearable. But there is no present. Just images, scratches, blood colours. Chalk, oil, aerosol: legacy. And outliers to record it.”
P.61
“Before Haussmann wide pavements were rare, and the narrow ones afforded little protection from vehicles. Strolling could hardly have assumed the importance it did without the arcades.
“The arcades, a rather recent invention of industrial luxury,’ so says an illustrated guide to Paris of 1852, ‘are glass-covered, marble-panelled passageways through entire complexes of houses whose proprietors have combined for such speculations. Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature.’ It is in this world that the flâneur is at home; he provides ‘the favourite sojourn of the strollers and the smokers, the stamping ground of all sorts of little métiers’,’ with its chronicler and its philosopher. As for him-self, he obtains there the unfailing remedy for the kind of boredom that easily arises under the baleful eyes of a satiated reactionary regime. In the words of Guys as quoted by Baudelaire, ‘Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat: a blockhead, and a contemptible one.’ The arcades were a cross between a street and an intérieur. If one can speak of an artistic device of the physiologies, it is the proven device of the feuilleron, namely, to turn a boulevard into an intérieur. The street 4a becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. That life in all its variety and inexhaustible wealth of variations can thrive only among the grey cobblestones and against the grey background of despotism was the political secret on which the physiologies were based.”
From Charles Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin published by Verso which comprises of extracts from The Arcades Project
There are so many striking poignant lines in Chris Marker’s masterful essay film, San Soleil, that I’ve resorted to reading a transcript found online. But this particular riff stuck out:
“I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”
then..
“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”