SPECTRAL INSUBSTANTIALITY,SPECTRAL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, SEBALD, WALSER AND MELANCHOLY. LINKS.BY STEVEN BENSON

The phrase “spectral insubstantiality” emanates- and I use that word,advisedly, in its meaning of a ghostly essence- from Sebald himself. He is writing re the “precariousness of Robert Walser’s hold on life and hold on, even,his posthumous{sic} reputation”(In “A Place in the Country”, 2013, trans and ed Caitling, in the chapter ”Le Promeneur Solitaire: A Rememberance of Robert Walser”, partly first published in 1998). “Le Promeneur Solitaire”: how that resonates in reference to Sebald himself, his narrators and the protagonists(all blurred together as they usually are, spectrally gazing back on each other from the self-intertextual mirror that is his/their writing/fleeting essence). See my posting on Sebald and Michael Hamburgerhttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/thanks-to-eric-l-santneron-the-sebaldian-narators-repressed-homoeroticism-homosexual-panic-and-natural-catastrophecatastrophization/; and also this reflection(and it is conjecture, I must add) on the possibility of Sebald himself being ill with an (un?)diagnosed illness in his later years:http://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/what-happened-to-sebald-in-marienbad-conjecture-and-poemby-steven-benson/

So, this eerie,on the boundary of life and death essence, of many of the sebaldian narrators and protagonists(Austerlitz, Selwyn, and their narrators, and many more), manifested in physical “malaise”, illhealth obscurely defined as inhabiting those somatised realms between and across the physical and the emotional/psychological and spiritual. The same malaise, Sebald, always his elusive self, writes about in regard to Walser.

I want now to revert to semi stream-of-consciousness prose in attempt to make some links and ellisions:

………………….

Sublimation of (parts of ) the self in: writing(as Walser does); reading(not that these are judgements on this process, heaven forfend!)…. Sebald, Walser, myself{arrogant sod!}.Joyful sublimation(or who is to CALL it “sublimation”?), nay JOUISSANCE(I did my homework if a certain person, perchance, happens upon this posting!)… bugger the “sublimation”; jouissance(extreme joy, admixed, sometimes, though opinions differ, with pleasurable pain, depending on whether you set your definitional weather- cock by Lacan, Zizek or Edelman(hello again!)..of writing( and reading, which CAN be and SHOULD be such a collaborative act)so that the writer “sometimes succeed{s} in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity{sic!} as life itself is scarcely able to provide”(Sebald, in his introduction to some of the essays collected in “A Place In the Country”, p.3). But then, this is the other side of the coin of writing(perhaps the pain principle of the jouissance!):”which causes every emotion to be transformed into letters on the page which bypasses life with such extraordinary precision”(p.2, Foreward, op.cit). Note the aporia, however, around transformation as sublimation and as the afore-mentioned “intensity”/intensification(or perhaps the gentle holding in the hand of a contrapuntal, putative{only} binary.)

The latter is what we are more used to hearing from Sebald and his narrators(easily conflatable): whilst the first quotation argues for the intensification of life via art, this is the exception in Sebald because writing(or , for example, Max{sic} Ferber’s ART, in “The Emmigrants”) is usually seen as a solitary, often unproductively compulsive occupation. Hence again, “ There seems to be no remedy for the vice{sic!} of literature;those afflicted{sic again} persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it…”(p.2 , Foreward, op. cit)

………………….

So, Sebald…. writing about a virtual disease (writing), which WRITES about diseases/senses of malaise, both psychological and physiological (and all in between), self-reflectively/self-intertextually/self-reflexively.. he could be writing re himself, writing re the narrator of “the Emmigrants” , writing about  Cosmo, Ambros Adelwarth’s lover and partner; its like a Russian doll. By the way, Cosmo meets much the same fate as Walser: disappearing into nothingness in an asylum(another example of Sebald’s productive useage of knowing intertextuality and self-intertextuality-again, probably knowing)…

hence.. onto melancholy:

To me, the primary definition of melancholy(as much as a FEELING CAN be pinned down and defined)is the soul/self’s inability to actualise/occupy its dreams of self-fulfilment/satisfaction/(self)Utopia; its the aching gap-the hiraeth-between desire and realisation, be it unfulfilled/unreciprocated love or ability to actualise one’s dreams in whatever respect. Or even you realised these dreams once and you can never re-claim them; the  moment is lost/gone. Thus, Henry Selwyn’s melancholy and solatiriness: set apart from his whole(ostensible/putative) life /”life”, in mourning for the loss/death of Naegeli his (same-sex)true love(see the second part of this posthttp://towardsutopia.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/wg-sebaldcritics-responsenon-response-to-the-large-amount-of-homosocialityclose-male-friendshipsand-of-homosexualbisexual-characters-in-his-work-with-particular-reference-to-the-character-of-h/); mourning manifested as melancholy and distance from the remaining shards of his life.

Melancholy is often mis-represented as self-indulgent,or as some kind of garb one can put on wilfully when one chooses; there is perhaps a little bit of truth in this.. but it is, to me, the GAP between dreams, one’s OWN, envisaged Utopia, and the reality of what one can actually attain/will oneself to attain, or even DOES attain(and , for whatever complex reasons, lets go of). This interstition may also be manifested as anxiety, even as somatisation of mental/emotional distress(as often in Sebald’s states of “malaise”).

Sebald, of course, encapsulates all this exquisitely and all-encompassingly: his “prose fictions”(HIS self-description),and essays: all imbued with loss , mourning manifested as melancholy and this vague( though well-delineated) malaise(the emblematic Dunwich Heath scene in “Rings of Saturn”, as I have often written, epitomises this, even going as far as ascribing at least part of the melancholy and  malaise to the loss of the love-object of the sebaldian narrator,Michael Hamburger, as the narrator surrenders his WHOLE sense of self to his beloved in obect identification and homoerotic desire; that is, he feels he has BECOME Hamburger!

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Now, this may seem self-grandiose/self-grandiloquent(NEVER!)… well, if it is, most of this blog is.. but I now become self-reflective and, presumptuously,inter-textualize myself with Sebald( and Sebald writing on Walser) by writing:

On

Liverpool

Light

Night,

I sit

Alone,

Not

Unhappily

So;

Melancholy yet

Not Despairing

In a

Conducive

Bar,

Watching a

Light

display-

Flashing

With the
Quickness of

Thought-:

I sit

Unable to

Actualize my

Desire-

Psycho

Biblio

Geography-

Of

Visiting

The new

Library

(But I

WILL do!)

……..

And I am

reading

Sebald.

{With all this spectral psychogeographical malaise in Sebald, I am going on the hunt soon: to see if there REALLY ARE any queer moments of epiphany, jouissance(in the sense of pleasure ONLY, sans the pain, or PACE the pain)in his books: I have just read an abstract of a paper on ‘the Queer Aesthetics of national space in “Austerlitz”‘, where the writer argues that, in the nooks and crannies, physically and psychologically, with, presumably, a psychogeographical mirroring of each,there does Austerlitz find some sort of redemption or even just a bulwark against the terrors to which he and his family were subjected(I presume a physical geographical nook would be the Liverpool Street Station Ladies waiting Room where Auserlitz has his epiphany, but it is a NEGATIVE/reverse epiphany from which he cannot recover so I do not see the redemption there); but this analysis of mine is cursory;I want to explore this new field of Sebald study and see whether I am won over(to any degree or , even, fully). And, of course, I do not mean Austerlitz is gay in orientation, but queer in its broadest sense of becoming, selfhood, self-actualisation, quirkiness; or Lee Edelman might muddy the waters, (as may Jouissance!)

SEBALDIANA:THE GREAT EASTERN HOTEL, LIVERPOOL STREET, LONDON.BY STEVEN BENSON

It seemed, in that summer of 1983,I vaguely recall, that I had found both refuge and psychological disintegration in that hotel,where I sojourned for a day or two,in a desperate escape from the horrors of working in the Swansea Night-Shelter.Uncannily, Sebald writes re it (it is where the sebaldian narrator and Austerlitz meet regularly, in “Austerlitz”{2001});and Sinclair, in “Tracking Sebald:Austerlitz and After”(2013), describes it as a “feeling of stillness, submersion,a time-frozen tank of anchored Titanic furniture in creeping darkness”(p.16).I only have a memory of an occluded breakfoost room, in the dying days of British Transport Hotels,; mirrored, in myself,by a feeling of sebaldian malaise and anxiety, as, eating too much breakfast, in a vain attempt at self-comfort,and then forcing myself to venture further into the City, I attended a lunchtime concert in a secluded church; whence I sunk into a depression so deep that I visited the Samaritans office and received counselling.

The only other things I remember about the Great Eastern Hotel was the closed off sections, acessible only to staff, and the general air of desuetude and forlorn heaviness.

Eerily again-a form of prefigurative deja vu(because I only read “Austerlitz” about 23 years later)-I saw the adjacent, decrepit, castellated, Gothic carapace that was (just) still Broad Street Station, which, whilst Sebald does not write of the spectrally deserted station, (nearly wholly closed down), himself, but, instead, of the graveyards and skulls discovered beneath it  when the station was demolished in about 1985  to make way for the Broadgate Centre:-there were more  (pre)shadowed commonalities of experience with the great writer.

Why, like Iain Sinclair and Stephen Watts(Sebald’s friend), and many others who read(and re-interpret and re-envision for themselves) Sebald’s great oevre, do we feel a sense of ghostly connection with the man?Co-incidences or…. what?. A heimliche(literally, homely, a sense of having been to the location before, a sense therefore of familiarity) heimat(literally homeland); but with an uncanny (unheimliche, unhomely)undertow

THE END OF BIRMINGHAM SNOW HILL STATION.LAST PART OF A SERIES OF SHORT PIECES OF SPECTRAL GEOGRAPHY.BY STEVEN BENSON.

He returned.

Demolition.

Nothing left.

Inner chaos and

Nothingness

the w

or

d

s dis

int

e gra te

d

{the end}

TOTAL CLOSURE.THE SPECTRAL STATION. PART 4. BY STEVEN BENSON

About another year passed. The visitor returned to the station on the hill, as usual. From the outside, all looked the same; he entered past the car park attendee’s booth and walked towards what he thought would be the gloomy underpass to the Wolverhampton(one remaining) platform.

Again, the station was still full of cars; but.. again.. the man could not process mentally or emotionally what had happened: because the trackbed to platform 4, the Wolverhampton bay, was filled in and also now covered in cars. There was a lonely notice :”The Secretary of State for Transport has determined that from{a date of recent provenance} the service from Birmingham Snow Hill to Wolverhampton Low level will cease; and that all train services from this station will end”.

He felt like another piece of him had departed him; lost, derelict, like the station….

{To be concluded}

PART 3. THE SPECTRAL STATION. THE VISITOR RETURNS. BY STEVEN BENSON

Roughly a year went by. The man felt compelled to go back there, even though he lived in a different city; the station had come to represent some compartmentalized off or sublimated part of his personality and identity. He HAD to know how it was doing.

He approached the same side entrance. Taken aback,he saw a large sign advertising “National Car parks”; he looked to his right and above this car park entrance: the whole hotel that had been built above the station had been demolished; all that remained were the roofless booths of the former booking hall, at the back of the car park entrance. A rudimentary shack housed the attendant. There was one old maroon sign stating “Trains to Wolverhampton”, but you had to walk through the incongruous carpark to get to through into the tiny, still functionning part of the station; there was the Wolverhapmton little dmu waiting like last year.

Again, memories of how Liverpool Central High level, Manchester Central and Liverpool Exchange stations had metamorphosed  into carparks, some of them whilst still operating a skeletal local train service, were present, in some form, in his mind. The disorientating and unsettling fact was that the this particular hulk of the once-thriving station he was visiting again,was both a carpark AND a vestigial station;it seemed to cross boundaries of function and time; looking through the boards into the section of the station that had been wholy disused a year ago, he saw it full of cars: disconcertingly, they covered platforms and even the earthed over tracks between the platforms. It was as if some massive mistake or dissociation between two realities had occurred; a car park in a (just) working railway station.

Existential panic gripped the man; he had to leave the station; he knew, however, that he would have to return next year.. he would have to see what its next stage in dereliction would be

(To be continued)

UNHEIMLICHE HEIMAT:THE RETURN TO THE SPECTRAL STATION. PART 2 OF A SERIES.BY STEVEN BENSON

Eerily fascinated, the man returned to the semi-derelict station a few months later; it was the start of a compulsion. He entered it by the only entrance, at the side of the building. From the outside he hallucinated that the station was slightly but perceptibly sliding down the hill. He had no intention to board the one remaining train service.

In just that few months the station side entrance had taken on a cavernous, gloomy, neglected feel; no ticket office, just a passageway. He emerged on bay platform 4: the Wolverhampton dmu had just arrived, and waited forlornly in the vast carapace. A half-hearted attempt to board off the two platforms in use from the remaining ten (ex mainline) platforms had been made; but it was easy to slide through a gap in the boards; and, once again, a sense of dislocation, de-realization and time-slippage occupied him as he realised the station was in even more of a desuetudinous state than last time.He walked around; again the buffet, with broken crockery on the floor; and then a parcels office, with tickets scattered around, randomly. No-one had bothered to clean up. It was some time, yet no time.

Seperating out the fact, in his mind, that he HAD often been here( literally) before, he also felt he had been here in some sort of semi-conscious, inexplicable way;as he became aware, as the sun streamed falteringly through the grimy overall roof, that he was somehow a child again: he was at the station where he had gone trainspotting with his grandma a few years ago, when there was still (just about) steam trains; he also remembered Liverpool Central High level in its last distressing days, reduced to that single line; so it was homely but uncannily so. He then remembered that the railway from London Paddington via this station went to Birkenhead Woodside , closed at the same time as this selfsame one. Time boundaries collapsed upon each other. Feeling a vague sense of psychological and physical malaise, he carried on walking to try and free himself from this uncomfortable feeling.

The man nearly jumped out of his skin…a railway worker appeared out of one of the doorways on an abandoned platform. Both of them were relieved to see each other amongst this ghostly wasteland; they chatted. The railwayman said that, since the closure of the main lines, the signal box had shut too; and the signalling was operated by one person from a “panel”, a simplified form of signalling, for the one remaining one-coach dmu to Wolverhampton Low Level. This quotidian piece of information somehow grounded the man; he felt calmed; there was someone else in this  vast empty,dying  building which was the spectre of itself.

(to be continued)

{Acknowledgements to Sebald; and to  various Flicker pictues of Birmingham Snow Hill station in its dying days}

“6TH MARCH 1967: THE JOLT”.A STORY OF SPECTRAL GEOGRAPHY AND UNCANNY ARCHITECTURE. BY STEVEN BENSON

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkingbill/2159495656/On the friday previously, 3rd March, I had been to the station,on the hill, as usual,and boarded the diesel-hauled express to London, gleaming in electric blue.I had not noticed anything remiss; the station was busy, as usual, with ,London and local commuters, the few remaining steam engines, many and various diesels and the usual, more local diesel multiple units, snaking in and out.I came back friday night; everything the same…..

Monday morning, 6th march 1967, I went to the station on the hill, the beautiful grand, if soot-begrimed, edifice, joy of the former Great western railway; and discovered..a vortex in time, a chasm opened up in time.. a sense of existential panic seized me.

Firstly, on the main entrance, a notice that this entrance and the other major one were closed from that day, and a side, minor entrance should be used hitherto; I followed the directions. Secondly, wholesale desertion, emptiness; no ticket office. I went for my morning coffee: the beautiful buffet was strewn with broken crockery, as if both disused for all time but also as if having been interrupted mid-flow. There were no station staff. But nor were there any notices saying the station was wholly closed.

I wandered around, purposelessly, with a growing sense of foreboding and depersonalisation.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffsimages/5898509627/On platform 4, I suddenly came upon a train, a one coach diesel multiple unit, stranded like a dying fish in this once grand behemoth of a station. It was the only surviving, living vestige of life; a few, lonely commuters gathered round it, waiting to board.

Only then did the driver, the only member of staff on the station,but for the train’s conductor, tell me what had happened……

{This is based on fact. On 6th march 1967, the vast 12/13 platform Birmingham Snow Hill station endured a demotion from being Birmingham’s equally busy, long distance station to being the world’s largest unstaffed halt, with one small bay platform in use, for the local service to Wolverhampton(low level). Overnight, literally, the heart of this thriving cathedral to the railways was ripped out, leaving people to be able to roam about a vast deserted former main line station, uncanny in its vast redundant splendour. I cannot mentally process how this happened in 12 hours, but it really did. If you want to see pictures of this beautiful and then spectral station, they can be googled as “Birmingham snow hill station  the last days”; there are many on Flicker, including one particular set, which show the sharp poignant, ghostly contrast in the before and after, with the shadowy “dmu” waiting in platform 4, and the huge station an echoing vast emptiness around it. To me, some of the most poignant, and disturbing, pictures on the whole internet. Interestingly, like Holbeck hall hotel hotel, in Scarborough(of which I have also written a short storyhttp://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/the-hotel-and-the-guest-a-story-of-sebaldian-malaise-and-an-essay-in-psychogeography/  this station, much more gradually, was slipping down the hill, and it was finally demolished a few years later, after surviving with this one, hourly service to Wolverhampton from 1967 until 1972}