I’ve always been interested in the weight of history. Not just in a political sense, but the physical and emotional ways in which the past interacts with the present. How do we exist in a present which is informed by the past? How do our physical landscapes and geographies shift and adapt to accommodate that past? Are we ever truly aware of its presence? How do we, as conscious individuals, as members of diverse human communities, and as inhabitants of a changing planet, come to terms with the everyday legacies of history?
When I visited DC in 2018, we took a tour of the city’s landmarks. The Senate and House of Representatives, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, a whole row of museums white and imposing as mausoleums. I don’t remember much of the trip (I was going through a particularly volatile emotional experience which inflected most if it with an impending sense of dread) but I do recall our American stereotype of a tour guide informing us enthusiastically that the building in which we were standing was over 125 years old! 125 years! As if this was a grand achievement, a monumental expression of human ingenuity and achievement, a victory over time. We weren’t impressed. The British school I was travelling with was almost as old.
When I’ve told this story before I’ve framed it contemptuously, as a sign of cultural ignorance and naivety, a testament to the hollow nature of American exceptionalism. Yet recently I have begun to see it in a different light. In America, history is not history. It isn’t buried yet. It is still fresh, a smouldering wound as pink and raw as the late paintings of Philip Guston, whose cartoonish colours mark the surface of a seething violence. In the UK, history feels like history. Whether we choose to weaponise it for politics or harness it for art, we have to dig up its grave first, reanimate its corpse. We drag it along behind us as a reminder of its presence. It’s a heavy burden.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, says Joan Didion. God. Constellations. The nuclear family. Psychiatric diagnosis. Pareidolia: the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognisable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines. What is history but the first and longest story, the story without beginning or end? A way of making patterns in the dust that other people left us?
Walking around St James’s Park recently, dodging between tourists on my lunch break, I found myself struck by the physical weight of the past as it hangs over London. Not the hackneyed costumes and cockney accents of the re-performers at the London Dungeons or Tower, or the unobtrusive presence of a blue plaque on a Victorian wall, but a deep sense of human continuity and emotional depth imbued into the physical geography of the city. A somatic connection to those who came before me and the traces they have left. Sometimes this sensation overcomes me to the point of nausea.
Clarissa Dalloway crosses this park, at the start of Virginia Woolf’s novel which bears her name. On my lunch breaks, I trace her walk in reverse. I turn past Hatchard’s bookshop and enter at the gates of St James’s, where Clarissa pauses, overwhelmed by ‘a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.’ In Woolf’s fiction the presence is violence and the past is ever-present, whether in the ‘visions which ceaselessly float up’ from the depths of the unconscious, or in the skeletal figures of the Great War veterans crowding London’s supposedly unchanged landscape.
Weaving and darting through the city, drawn both to the delights of a flower shop or a fishmonger and the unspeakable modern horrors of taxi cabs, airplanes, and omnibuses, Clarissa Dalloway could be engaged in her own kind of dérive. Part of the discipline of psychogeography, developed in the 1950s by the Situationist movement, the dérive is ‘a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences’, an unplanned, experimental journey through an urban landscape. Defined by its pioneer, French Marxist philosopher Guy-Ernest Debord, as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’, psychogeography concerned itself with the urban environment, its influence on the individual, and how that influence could be manipulated for radical ends.
Through the dérive and other critical praxis, psychogeography sought to navigate the tedious, impersonal purposefulness of the modern city and enable a new spirit of exploration and experimentation, one opposed to a world distorted by capitalism and consumerism. Though it’s hard to engage in on your lunch break, bound by the one hour lunch break and the iPhone map which tells you how far is too far and the fifteen minute queue for a lukewarm flat white. Psychogeography illuminates the joys of walking as well as the banal constraints of the urban world it seeks to defy, reminding us constantly that we are bound in time and space. Which parts of the city stimulate you, make you feel alive? Which are stultifying? Where do you want to go? How do you get there? How do you feel when you get lost? Does the city even let you get lost?
I’m sceptical about the ubiquity of cellphone photography and broadly judgemental of those who view the world through a six inch screen. Yet as I walked through the park I found myself smiling at the pointless banality of it all; the man chasing squirrels and green parakeets with his camera, the families posing by the Tube sign or in the early daffodils. Those just walking along and filming. It's easy to criticise, and I could, but perhaps this is the most human desire of all, to capture the moment and one’s space within it. Whether it’s a selfie or a handprint on a cave wall, we imprint ourselves onto our surroundings, and our surroundings make their mark on us in return.
And if the most human desire of all is to mark one’s space in the moment, perhaps the most universal of all states is the one opposed to it, the ceaseless, seamless passage of nature. Nature, not time, which implies a human presence to conceive it, to record it, to strive against it. Nature is bodily as well as planetary, is aging towards death as well as the cyclical passage of the seasons or one’s hormones. In St James’s Park spring has come early. People are taking off their coats. The crocuses and a few ambitious patches of daffodils are out. Birds are singing over the tour guides. It’s the day after Valentine’s Day: everything is thinking about sex. Year after year, decade after decade, animal, vegetable, mineral, human comes alive with the spring. Our ancestors — generation upon generation of them — welcomed the spring, and our descendants will too. Though in the face of climate collapse, even that certainty seems uncertain. Does this explain my — our — sense of dislocation in time and space? We live in a world where human meaning crumbles. The facade of the present falls away to reveal the skeletons of the past and the black void of the future. We are losing natural time and live by the ever-ticking doomsday clock.
Or as Henri Bergson conceived it, the linear regularity of ‘clock-time’ cannot capture the complexities of the psyche which shape our true experiences of time. It is this psychological time or ‘duration’ which seems to speed up or slow down certain experiences, to foreground memories or allow them to fade. It is the time of the mind.
Writing about flea markets but also about writing, Ellena Savage speaks of the
Delight that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It reminds me of my duty, everyone’s duty, to the future. My friends’ kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people’s future dreams and not feel totally alone.
In the age of the internet, our ‘beautiful things’ rarely have a physical presence. Journals become Notes app musings, correspondence takes the form of a WhatsApp chat, even postcards have become obsolete. All our precious junk contained in a tablet of silicon and glass the size of a palm. We’re in an era of information overload, with more space to store and capacity to discover than ever before, but our stuff now lacks the physical presence which tethers us to the material world. And the consumer goods which proliferate are plagued by planned obsolescence, single use plastic, and the empty aesthetics of mass production, aggressively filling our personal spaces with impersonal objects. We have distorted the Earth’s psychological rhythms as much as we have our own. And we live in urban landscapes where the only sign of spring is a few ragged daffodils and the gradual lightening of the sky about the street-lamps. Our bodies want to play out the patterns of the past, but the stage is changing.
Wandering through a flea market, rifling through forgotten treasures, is an act of psychogeography across time as well as space. Who has not felt a strange pang of nostalgia when picking up a second hand book and seeing someone else’s name transcribed, or a deep sense of connection at an old photo of a stranger in a junk shops. the physical world and the objects which fill it are imbued with meaning and memory.
Perhaps this is why I struggle when visiting North America. It asserts its newness so aggressively, so stridently, positions itself in an ever-ongoing present which insists on situating itself in the future though it has not yet emerged from its past. I find it disorienting but not in a good way, a disconcerting sense of rootlessness, an everywhere-and-nowhere type of feeling as we drive past another Starbucks or Walmart or Bass Pro superstore. I felt this feeling reading
‘s recent LA travelogue, her realisation that ‘the Neo-Gothic crypts were constructed only one hundred years ago. There is something unsettling about modernity imitating the ancient. It’s as if the whole city is a film set.’ Of course there is a deep, rich Indigenous history to North America, but the sense of time and space that prevails in the cities is one of newness, a violent newness akin to the triumph of linear over psychological time, of the industrial world over nature. Of course this too is a constructed narrative of history, and a polemical one, but there is something strange about America. The artifice of a sharp break with time does not quite succeed.Who are my ghosts? In the late nineteenth-century, a craze for ‘spirit photography’ swept through Victorian Britain and the US, with professional and amateur photographers gaining fame and notoriety by photographing sitters with their dead relatives. The debate over spirit photography raged for over twenty years, with leading proponents exposed as frauds who had created their images through long exposure, the reuse of exposure plates, and practical effects. Yet the allure persisted — and it’s easy to see why. Like today, the late nineteenth century was a world undergoing change, a world under threat. During this period of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation ‘the modern’ hurtled into being like the plane which shoots across London in Mrs Dalloway, its ‘sound…bor[ing] ominously into the ears of the crowd’. It must have been terrifying and alienating to experience this strange new world, which seemed to be trapped in a steady forward march in the name of capital-P Progress, marching to the beat of the clock — or perhaps the machine gun, first invented in 1884. It’s no wonder, really, that everyday people could be taken in by technologically-savvy charlatans, who promised them a true connection with those now gone where Progress could not follow. Spirit photos weren’t just the work of the talented — if fraudulent — craftsmen who made them, but the work of the human imagination, pareidoila at play. We see what we want to see, believe what we want to believe.
What must it have felt like, I wonder, to sit for a photo with the unshakable knowledge that your ancestors stood by your side?
In St James’s Park I followed the stream of tourists around the pond and felt myself almost as one of them, experiencing the city as a grand museum of sights and sounds, a monument to a lived past easily condensed into a bus tour or audio guide. This wasn’t a dérive, a word which derives from the French for ‘drift’, but a purposeful walk implicitly mapped out by the architecture of the city itself (the Mall to St James’s to Picadilly and up Bond Street or maybe, for a different type of tourist, Soho) and designed to hit as many famous landmarks as possible. I thought about the surface-level nature of ‘sightseeing’, the double emphasis on the visual contained within the word, the heightened attention paid to the visual in our age of photography and image-driven social media (‘top ten most aesthetic spots in London’, etc). I thought about the teenagers and tourists taking selfies on the steps outside the art gallery where I work, posing by the eighteenth-century facade or the murals on the walls without venturing into the gallery spaces within. I thought about all the bodies these buildings have known, the bodies which built them and sustained them and have been thrived within or been excluded from them and demolished and rebuilt them. I thought also about how we can experience the city differently, peeling back its layers and gazing into its depths. I thought about all the ghosts. And the places where time falls apart, where the boundaries are thin and you can peer into the eyes of your ancestors. The banks of the Thames. The parks. The Bakerloo line. The little churches that peer out from under skyscrapers.
This is how I believe in ghosts, which are the barely perceptible traces of the gone, an essence held in some strange and sometimes eerie form in the places they most impressed their emotions. In places of worship most frequently, a sense of congregation even when empty. Also in abandoned spaces, preserved in the past tense. A sense that faith and ecstasy and grief live on in the walls. Not sentience or consciousness, not quite, but connection. An ongoing conversation down the generations. Perhaps sometimes strong enough to take physical form, a haunting.
This is how I believe in ghosts.
Even a pierced heart scratched into a tree-trunk or a bathroom door is a ghost.
Where are the bones buried?
In London we live atop them.
In this context, what is the role of the tourist, the interlocutor with the fresh, optimistic eyes and the camera which extends them? The observer, the flaneur? She for whom the bones are curiosities in glass cases. You are reading this essay as my boyfriend and I fly to Vienna, primarily so I can drag him round art museums and cafes and ask him in awed-but-stressed-out tones if he’s enjoying himself. ‘Beautiful, but—’, people have warned us. Beautiful but not quite de-Nazified. Beautiful but aggressively bourgeois. I have an itinerary for the weekend, a route march from the Schönbrunn Palace to the State Library, which firmly positions my boyfriend and I as tourists, sightseers, consumers of culture on the most basic level, engaging only with the past in its most historicised form, its acceptable front — or its acceptable unacceptable (de-Nazification). Yet this is what, in my own city, I find eye-rollingly lazy and reductive. The problem of time and money makes more meaningful engagement with a new city difficult, whilst the very act of travel sharpens the boundaries of self and other, by positioning the tourist as observer and relegating local people to background roles or to serve (often quite literally within the tourism industry) as the providers of a cliched ‘authentic’ experience. Tourism involves the construction of a facade by a locale and the acceptance of that facade as fact by the traveller. But for those who dwell in the cities, these urban palimpsests of time, is there no other way to move through time and space? Must we always go forwards? Can we pierce the facade?
What if we followed emotions rather than maps? Debord again:
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
All urban walking is a ghost tour, conducted in the space where one consciousness meets another, and conducted without fear.
I’ve written before about memory, and the strange tricks it plays on us. How ‘a life rocks and jolts forwards, carelessly swinging through time. It sheds the pretence of linearity imposed to make it make sense, the clarity of purpose implied by New Year’s resolutions and graduation dates and summer vacations. Not a neatly laid out timeline but a stack of notecards, occasionally scattered, reshuffled, or mislaid’.1 A city has its own set of notecards, its own memories, and sometimes these too are shuffled carelessly. Those ghosts again, time travel of a sort, that the imbuing of places with meaning can resonate across the centuries and manifest emotional echoes in the future.
‘History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past’, writes E. H. Carr. A conversation with two participants, but each speaks only his own language. History is thus also the translation that breaches the divide. That reads the body language and the signs. That excavates the ruins the past has left — the psychological artefacts as much as the physical. History is also a ghost tour.
Indeed, there is a strange frisson to knowing you stand where someone long ago once stood. Were time to bend and collapse, would Woolf and I sit side-by-side in St James’s, scoffing at the tourists and counting the days until Spring? And is this what drives us to sightseeing in the first place, to press saccharine kisses to the tomb of Oscar Wilde or to pose at the gates of Graceland? That irrational but so-very-human sense that perhaps this time, we’ll feel the presence of the past passing before us. It’s the urge that drove us to spirit photography, the comfort in the strange. The desire for location, to know that the past has made a mark. That the past can be present sounds antithetical, borders on the grammatically incorrect. But this is the work of psychological time, drawing our conscious out of our day to day routines and back to our childhoods, or to moments of intense emotional experience (of course the two often overlap). Can this tangled web of time extend beyond the individual? Mrs Dalloway again: ‘the part of us which appears’, that is the body, is ‘momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death.’
We move through time as well as space.
this is a truly incredible piece!
i'm so honored to be mentioned... i love this. it reminds me of mark fisher's work "the weird and the eerie" or even some of brian eno's writings about landscapes/liminality.