Weird and Eerie (1) – Last Train From London Dark – Part One.

i

‘The form that is most appropriate to the weird,’ says Fisher, ‘is the montage; hence the preference within surrealism for the weird combinations.’ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) The montage, though, has become something of a cliché. Its usage is now openly mocked and satirised. In ‘Team America: World Police,’ the montage sequence, complete with an original song, explains what a montage sequence is, what it does and how it works. It parodys the use of montage as a shortcut to understanding and plot furtherance. In ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ the usual format of the filmic montage (inspirational music, slow motion, fast edits on the beat) are applied to academics thinking in various poses; the stillness and inactivity are at odds with the expectation of activity, sweat and power. 

However, there is a greater truth to the idea of the montage that directly relates to the hauntological; the experience of agoraphobia and the weird. If the weird, one of the components of hauntology, by extrapolation, montage becomes the major driver of hauntological experience.

Like the ghost containment grid in Ghostbusters and music sampling, the juxtaposition of art in galleries, and, most importantly, one’s personal archive, the juxtaposition of random elements creates a sense of the surreal, a sense of otherness, of difference. This may be why sampling still seems ‘weird’ with pieces of the past juxtaposed against pieces of a different past or temporal position. If, as with my own agoraphobic experience, parts of memory that are deemed ‘lesser’ are erased, these juxtapositions become more frequent, and ‘reality’ becomes montage. Where self is attached to the experience of agoraphobia and the diminishing of memory, the ‘new’ is simply two old memories rubbing together in a state of unbound temporality. Where context is contracted or erased, these new ideas leave one with a bewildering sense that one’s life is not one’s own; that you are looking in on someone else’s experience; that somehow, you are ‘once removed’ from your own life.

When Fisher says, ‘Modernist works of art/culture can often seem weird because we are in the presence of the new; so, the shock of the new signals that concepts and frameworks that we’ve previously used are now obsolete,’ the meaning can be applied to the psyche.

Life as montage, life without context, is as peculiar, frightening and surreal as one might suspect. One is forever bombarded with the shock of the new as memories diminish and the temporal space between them shrinks; the bombardment of the unfamiliar exacerbates the need to stay at home. Those constructs that have been instrumental in maintaining stability are suddenly at war, and the ‘weird juxtapositions’ that were once understood and divided by time and context, offer no comfort. 

ii. Last Train From London Dark

It mocked with a hot sigh, rising to a hysterical wail;
slipped into sparking darkness; leaving me stranded
and exposed in the harsh rage of bludgeoning

fluorescence. In the sudden silence, the tiles
reflected everything – the floor rippled with sound
and the recycled air hummed with light and I’m

alone but for the careless footfalls of weary
travellers, unseen, and the abandoned scents
of sweat and rubber; ozone and stale perfumery.

iii. The Night Café

The stench of dead cigarettes is ground into the aged Formica tables. Each piece of brittle plastic furniture yellowed by decades of nicotine. This place is populated with crude charcoal sketches, the outline of people once swaddled in glorious technicolour; ghosts lost in The Smoke. 

In the night café, I’m just waiting. I fiddle with my polystyrene cup, squeezing the sides, wondering how much pressure it would take for the cheap instant coffee, laced with rancid UHT and saccharine, to fall from the teased cracks.

A young woman enters in need of shelter, fear paints her face. Her eyes spill adjuration, for succour, for someone to talk to; feel safe with. An enamel pink triangle on my seen-better-days leather jacket convinced her there was a softness among the ragged edges. I nodded and gestured for her to sit. She smiled, grateful and dragged a mauve suitcase behind her. The squeak from the broken wheel causes murmurs among the sketches – but it’s clear… she is another victim of the last train blues.

iv. Agency

Fisher suggests that the eerie is ‘fundamentally tied up with questions of agency.’ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016)While his example of an owl unexpectedly hooting creating an eerie atmosphere, is sound, his comment regarding the weird as being ‘an irruption into this world of something from the outside’ indicates the paradoxical, ephemeral qualities and inchoate definitions the concepts of the weird, the eerie and the liminal engenders. However, we cannot ignore the Newtonian notion of ‘equal and opposite reactions.’ (Newton, 2016)

Where the weird is an irruption, the eerie is its Newtonian counterpart. One cannot exist without the other and whether weird or eerie largely depends on from where you view the event in question.

Fisher’s description of an owl hooting in an abandoned space, causing an eerie feeling, is graphic enough to show it is inferred meaning, but the owl is just going about its business. Nothing about its actions is weird or eerie, merely the outsider’s perception of events. It may perhaps be startled that his territory suddenly has an unexpected human agent in it; perhaps its hoot is a warning to others of owl-kind that something unsavoury, something weird, lurks in their dark lands. 

In matters of the uncanny, the weird, the eerie, context and agency in the eye of the beholder.

v. Rik Rack

We talked easily, lowering our voices when the shadows shuffled past, until a man that looked like Rik Mayall (had he been subjected to starvation and the rack) filled the room with wild profanity and body odour so thick you could knit with it. Shoulders around the room sank, and heads bowed. They had all heard his lunatic spiel before. He recognised us as outsiders and decided that we needed to share his wisdom. Perhaps we would be the ones to believe and relieve the pressure.

His theory expounded with evangelical fire, was that electric dogs ruled the world from a secret base on Anglesey. His fervour drifts as the tv springs to life. He fixes on the untuned box, finding relief in the snow. 

His brow furrows as he answers unasked questions, lost in his master’s voice. The café owner walks past and wipes our table with a filthy rag. He gestures towards Rik Rack and rolls his eyes. ‘It’s the only way to shut him up’ he mutters in a dark, death rattle voice.

Suitcase Woman plays with the condensation on the window, before turning back to the table. She gives a wan smile and sprinkles salt on the table from the cracked plastic cruet, duck egg blue. Not wanting to write in the window condensation or speak in case it pulls Rik Rack back to Earth, she writes ‘WALK?’ in the scattered condiment, and I nod. 

Slowly, we make as to leave but the door is blocked by a Hallowe’en scarecrow.

It swims through its clothes; too big, tied with a string; caked with grease and mud; no shoes; a sock that is more hole than material – he holds the door frame, barring our way. He stiffens, and intense, worn eyes glare at a space that appears not to exist in this dimension. We expect confrontation, but the glaring stops, and peace spreads across his face. A large, cricket ball sized turd falls from his trouser leg and rolls towards my shoe. 

Mission accomplished, he shuffles silently, slowly. 

The horrified paralysis passes violently as Rik Rack races past us, pushing Turd Guy from the door, screaming something wild about the Royal family. We hear the words ‘queen,’ ‘robot,’ and ‘purgatory’ as he chases after a black cab but cannot glean context from his now muffled, reverberating shrill. He blunders down Montague Street, limbs flailing in ragged circles, his shouts and indignation merge into the fabric of the city. 

He is the heart of London Dark.

vi. Night Walking

In Charles Dickens’ essay on night walking, (Dickens, Night Walks, 2010) he says that it is ‘a matter of going astray,’ a phrase pregnant with potential meanings – becoming lost either deliberately or accidentally, emotionally lost, having ‘slipped through the cracks’ of health or social support, having gone ‘morally astray’ and engaging in criminal activity, best served under darkness, and more. 

Although Dickens’s experiments with night walking were a result of insomnia, he is able to speak eloquently of the uncanniness of what I call ‘London Dark.’ In this passage, he viscerally illustrates the difference between Londons Light and Dark and the queer aspect the city takes on with the absence of daylight; of how London becomes a repository of haunted souls: ‘But the river had an awful look, the building on the bankside were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.’ (Dickens, Night Walks, 2010)

Similarly, night people display, or at least are more likely to display, darker or less wholesome traits. Bolano suggests two types of nightwalkers. Those who are running out of time and those with time to burn. Although in a delicious irony, it is uncertain which of these types represents London Dark’s flipside.

Those with ‘time to burn’ may indicate its nocturnal denizens, as seen in the ‘Last Train to London Dark’ sequence, or those who temporarily and knowingly inhabit the night-time as a respite from London Light. Those whose ‘time is running out’ could refer to the dispossessed or those afflicted with mental health issues, such as Rik Rack and the inhabitants of the night cafe or those revellers that, like vampires, vanish at the cock’s crow. 

Beaumont describes the difference between the two types of night walking as those who engage in ‘Noctivigation,’ being the act of the homeless and the indigent, of those who seek a social, spiritual refuge in the streets of the city at night – and those who practice ‘noctambulations’ that ‘by contrast, is the activity of the relatively privileged as it implies a more leisurely, and at the same time more purposeful sort of movement.’ (Beaumont M. , 2016)

Nothing in London Dark is ordinary to the London Light dweller, despite being the exact same spacio-temporal location. Nothing is safe, static or dependable. London Dark is populated by what Ryan Palmer describes as ‘the sad, the mad, the bad, the lost, the lonely, the hyper maniac, the catatonic, the sleepless, the homeless, all the cities internal exiles. The night has always been the time for the daytime’s dispossessed.’ (Palmer, 2000)

Life within London Dark is perceived to be lesser, more ephemeral, more ‘over there.’

Beaumont also tells us that ‘in the darkness above all, perhaps in familiar or routine places, everything acquires a subtly different form or volume.’ Whether a physical volume, where buildings take on a cyclopean aspect, or lakes of light or being up lit by faltering streetlights, or the aural volume where each sound appears to be amplified and elongated with the absence of the people that would absorb the sounds of London Light.

vii. Ralph McTell

We walked through Covent Garden un-accosted – no jugglers or living statues – and then past the British Museum, a place filled with unlikely ghosts. According to school legend, at the top of the building is a small room; residing in this cell is the ghost of Henry XIII, languishing in an electric chair. I shuddered, partly at the absurdity and anachronism, but saw nothing through the portico. So, instead we looked for nightingales in Berkeley Square – where else – just for something to do.

Doubling back, we hit Charing Cross Road, empty and shimmering in the fine bore drizzle, dancing beneath the flickering of worn, tangerine lamplight. We pass number 84 and I think of Helene Hanff (Hanff, 1982): ‘a guy I knew’ she said, ‘told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: ‘It’s there.’’ I looked at the deep littered streets, and the remnants of people – discarded, huddled in dark corners and in alleys. I wondered what they had been looking for that led them here.

Deep within the hippocampus, the ghost of Ralph McTell² is smirking.

viii. Silver Lining

Listen. The directionless 

monoxide retch 

of engines – quarrelling 

in sick arteries

has quieted. 

Listen as animals call

from traffic islands,

twitchels and premium

wasteland – unsure 

of the silence but testing –

brush tails quivering

at the opportunity

to reclaim their stolen

nightlands. 

Listen as the air thins 

and echoes sound in

the urban uncertain –

leaves rattling, 

soundtracking the street 

with the louche cadence 

of a diffident guiro.

Listen. You can hear 

the buildings breathing. 

ix. Soho Sound

Sensing my discomfort, she smiled and said that we should head back towards the station. I didn’t think it mattered where we were once the tube awoke from its harsh lit slumber. She agreed, excited by the idea of continuing a ripping adventure in the realm of the dead. I winced at the thought that this was just a jolly escapade. At 4:00am, even Soho was oh so quiet, but for the gigantic rumble of suitcase wheels that echoed through the architecture that gained a fleeting blanket of sonic graffito, miniscule proof that we were there among the diminishing sleaze. 

‘Do you read poetry?’ she asked.

‘No, not really,’ I said, ‘I never really got past Spike Milligan, Lewis Carrol and all the nonsense poetry. Stuff like Ogden Nash. Gelett Burgess. School stuff.’

‘Oh, I love Gelett Burgess! The one about purple cows.’

‘There are two,’ I said, smiling, and recited them both to peals of laughter.

‘But no, really…’ she said, ‘There’s a poem by Shelley…’

I smirked, ‘I’m not sure I can take anyone seriously whose middle name is Bysshe…’

‘Oh, shush. Listen. He wrote a poem called ‘Alastor; Or the Spirit of Loneliness.’ There’s a line in it:  ‘In lone and silent hours, when night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, like an inspired and desperate alchymist, staking his very life on some dark hope. ‘ It’s the first thing I thought of when I got to the café.’

‘And here we are, in the weird sound.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it’s more than that, it’s the loneliness that struck me. The café was full of people. All lost to themselves. No one talking.’

I saw the point she was making, that even though in a crowded place, the loneliness is palpable, but didn’t really see a difference between the daytime and the night-time for that. Perhaps that’s what London, or any city is: a repository for the lonely. A purgatory for the lost.

I didn’t really want to express that, being too bleak for the situation, so said, ‘I just thought of ‘Nighthawks.’

‘Nighthawks?’

‘Edward Hopper painting. People in a late-night diner, light streaming from the windows. No one talking.’

‘I think I know the one,’ she said, as she frowned.

‘Always made me feel incredibly sad.’

‘Same with Alastor,’  she said, ‘Of course, the difference is that we are not alone,’ she stared at me intently and I stared back and smiled. We continued to walk, silently, but for the suitcase. After a moment, she slipped her hand into mine.

‘The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest,’ she said, ‘and Providence their guide: They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way.’

‘That’s Milton,’ I said.

‘Yes, from Paradise Lost. I thought you didn’t read poetry?’

I smiled and said nothing. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had read it on the back cover of a pulp sci-fi novella.

PART 2

x. Fate

Time’s Arrow, surprisingly, indicates the existence of fate, an idea backed up by Fisher’s comment that ‘(fate) implies twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception.’ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) Once again, Eddington’s comments regarding the nature of reality become pertinent. While ‘fate’ may appear to be a counterintuitive argument for what is essentially a case for a kind of proto-existentialism, Eddington’s thought experiment intimately and intrinsically demands that we, regardless of our attempts to change it, will ultimately succumb to the same end. That end being entropy; the breaking down and irretrievable dissolution of time, matter and dimension. 

For those of London Light, London Dark provides an illustration of the ‘breakdown’ of their norm. What was normal has become uncanny; familiar, but other, having lost the majority of its diurnal lifeblood. It has become moonlight and sodium edge shadow of their city. 

xi. Underworld

After a brief stop in Soho square, where there was just enough dark sky away from the light pollution to see Orion and Gemini, our night walk continued We tried to make light of this unfamiliar landscape. We recognised few places but greeted each recognisable location as an old friend. We saluted the Admiral Duncan; waved at Ronnie Scott, landed on a Forbidden Planet… The weather changed. Previously cold and dry, although not cold enough to see out breath, the air filled with a fine mizzle that further dampened the already muted colours of London Dark and yet added a soft sheen to the streets. We were walking through a cloud, treading on a pavement that now reflected the buildings. For a moment, madness set in, and we didn’t know which of us, the sad reflexion in the pavements or the weather beaten original, was the real entity. Which was real, which was a dream? Londons Light and Dark wrestled for our attention.

In a space and time alien to my quotidian life, where dreams, nightmares, reality, surreality and otherness collide, I became uncertain of everything. Even a fleeting encounter with London Dark affects the psyche and I felt myself being drawn to the twisted romance of London Dark. I needed a marker, a beacon that would lead me out of this underworld and back to the world of light.

This salvation arrived in a most unexpected form: a 24-hour McDonalds. Usually, somewhere I would avoid, it’s light drew us to the door.

‘Any port in a storm,’ she grinned.

The door to our salvation opened, and we were met with the raucous laughter of the post-club crowd. Gangs of revellers, chatting, being, alive; a bubble of London Light awaiting the threshold of dawn; the return of the sun, the dissolving of shadows.

We ordered coffee; its bitter heat was welcome and warming. The cardboard cups didn’t squeak the way the polystyrene cups of the night café did, nor did it taste of the white pepper, shrapnel, and cheese mix that it offered. 

We sat quietly, exhausted and I thought of a line drawing I had once seen in a book whose name still eludes me. It showed two people sheltering under a piece of corrugated iron (not very sensibly, given the caption that accompanied it: ‘While thunder lasted, two bad men were friends.’ 

Suitcase woman opened her bag and pulled out some fruit, hiding it from the McDonald’s staff. I ate the sliced apples, but I said no to the pomegranate seeds, just in case.

xii. Other

Fisher makes a great deal of the writer H.P. Lovecraft³ in his meditations on the Weird and the Eerie. Indeed, Lovecraft makes a fleeting appearance in [Dream Tyne] to describe a weird and eerie scene. The scene itself revolves around an absence of the sea and being able to walk in a place that should be engulfed by water; the absence of such causes the feelings of otherness. This illustrates an important point about the weird and the eerie in that they are rarely ‘horrific’ in themselves or in a traditionally ‘horror movie’ visceral, gore-filled way. More likely, they elicit a sense of fascination, dread or awe.

Lovecraft’s lurid stories are filled with the threat of creatures rather than the creatures themselves, and it is, more often than not, a human agency that causes feelings of fear, unrest, dread and uncanniness, leaving the eerie to suggestion. The absence of the ‘Old Ones’ and ‘Elder Gods’ fascinates as much as the threat of their return.

What made London Dark such a peculiar, weird experience for me was later made solid by Fisher’s comment: ‘The weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention.’ (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016) Being caught between ‘repelled’ and ‘compelled’ put me in the threshold state that defines London Dark. It was an extended moment of liminality, of choosing to belong or choosing not to belong. Awash on the seas of liminality, would I choose to follow the path of [Time and Tide], reach for the shore or drown in the depths?

‘The weird de-naturalises all worlds by exposing their instability,’ says Fisher and London Light, and my relationship with it had been destabilised. I could never see it in the same way again.

xiii. London’s Filthy Heart

The coffee kept us going until the rain eased and trains ran again. We walked to St. Pancras and said our goodbyes. She gave a sad smile and a small wave that said more for being lesser than a more exuberant, expressive one, with shrieks and hugs, could have managed. 

Alone for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, I paused in the short walk to King’s Cross to take a last look at the ethereal city of London Dark. It seemed odd that in minutes, this aspect would be gone. 

The traffic was already beginning to infect the roads and I took a moment to listen. To breathe in the last of the cool air. ‘In the dead of night,’ said Ford Maddox  Ford, ‘the solitary pedestrian’s feet begin to recall the real earth,’ and for the briefest of moments, I felt the hidden rivers and watercourses still bubbling and chirruping beneath my feet. I felt the marshland beneath the asphalt and tar. 

The ghosts of the landscape of London True, now adorned with brick and concrete, garlands of light and coarse architectural bling, crying out to be freed. 

I began to sing Shriekback’s love song to London to myself:

‘They try to dress you up

like someone younger and more free

Ridiculous, they try to make you see.

When what you are is perfect

and I need no more than this.

Come open up your filthy heart to me…’

(Allen, Andrews, & Barker, 1992)

Perhaps hearing, being privy to, the lost music of the London Past brings you closer to an understanding of the city. Perhaps this music of marsh and river, the hidden history and the covert space, is London True; Londons Light and Dark in harmony. And maybe, just maybe, the disenfranchised, those described by Palmer, are the true denizens, their otherness a result of living in a city that no longer exists at street level but is as real and present as London light is to the day dwellers. 

A memory, a ghost story, emerged and I remembered a tale I had been told of a legion of spectral Roman soldiers marching along a hilltop, their legs submerged into the ground but walking freely as if still at ground level. The road they had walked along in life remained but was now lost beneath new layers of earth. They knew the old road and walked along it, disregarding the passage of time. The ghostly presences of Rik Rack and the shadow people knew the paths of London Past and walked those away from the prying eyes of London Light. Both (sur)real; both misplaced.