Weird and Eerie (1) – Last Train To London Dark – Part Two.

xiii. Rik Rack Recumbent

On a bench outside the main gate of King’s Cross Station, I see a familiar face. Rik Rack has poured himself into a solid wooden bench that is pooling water. He is blissfully unaware of the encroaching wetness and sleeps peacefully. Tuckered out, no doubt from a nighttime railing against the electric dogs in Anglesey. I looked at him for a moment a reached into my wallet. Meagre though the contents were, I begin to put them on the bench.

‘Save your money,’ comes a voice, a police officer, ‘he’s lost his gloves.’

The officer grinned at my confusion and repeated, ‘He’s lost his gloves. He won’t touch money without his gloves on… says it’s poison.’

He may be right.

‘Your money. It’ll just blow away. It’ll be wasted.’

I nodded and put my money back in my wallet. I mulled over whether I could buy some new gloves for him, but at 6:00 am, the chances were slim. I thought about leaving food instead. A hot drink, maybe? Even the night cafe was closed now. Perhaps his terror of money and the lack of gloves was why he looked so thin, so sallow. Without gloves, he couldn’t buy food.

There was nothing I could do except pity.

Oblivious to my dilemma, Rik Rack slept, untroubled.

The officer winked at me and walked on.

xiii. A Conversation With My Therapist

‘This seems to have been a powerful experience for you,’ she said. 

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘Quite scary.’

‘In a way,’ I said, ‘but probably not the way you are thinking.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. You’re thinking that the alienness of the space is what I found scary.’

‘And it wasn’t that?’

‘Partially, I suppose.’

‘And the rest?’

I told her that when the encounter with London Dark occurred, I was in a transitionary place. I wasn’t in a manic phase and wasn’t in a depressed phase. It could go either way. It felt like I was blindfolded on a roller coaster, uncertain of which way the journey would go. The euphoria of climbing mania; the gut flipping fall into depression.

‘You hadn’t been diagnosed at that point,’ she said.

I smiled, ‘No, but I had been aware of the cycle for a long time. I’d been begging the Doctor for a diagnosis but all I got was ‘you’re young, you’ll grow out of it’ and endless bottles of Valium.’

‘Ouch.’

‘It took another thirty years and a breakdown to finally get the diagnosis I’d known since I was fourteen.’

‘Again…’ she winced.

‘Anyway, the point I was making was that I wasn’t certain of which way I was heading, towards mania or depression. It was always a peculiar time, and I felt oddly out of place. London Dark had the same vibe. It was there; it was both solid and ephemeral. It was out of place. I was out of place in an out-of-place place, and it looked and felt oddly enticing.’

‘Enticing?’

‘Yes. It would have been so easy to let everything go and just… fall into London Dark… to become part of it.’

‘What stopped you?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Suitcase Woman, I suppose.’

‘How so?’

‘I felt I had a duty to make sure she got home,’ I shrugged.

‘A duty?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘misplaced chivalry, I think.’

‘I wouldn’t say misplaced,’ she snorted.

‘No, but politeness and caring are not as fashionable as they once were.’

She said nothing, made as if to speak, then stopped herself. A moment later, she asked, ‘Was that the only reason?

‘No,’ I said, ‘seeing Rik Rack on the bench had a bearing, too.’

‘What did that do?’

‘There was a recognition, in some respects. I’d had a short period of homelessness and, to an extent, understood that aspect of it. I survived, and I’m sure I’d survive again, but there was, I suppose a class issue.’

‘Class?’

‘Look, I’m trying really hard not to be judgemental, but I wasn’t that lost. I still had a shred of dignity and, for the most part, functioned well. I had this horrible, horrible thought that if I went into London Dark, that…’

‘That what?’

I let out a pained sigh, ‘I would still be different. My feelings of alienation, of difference, would be the same, but …’

There was a brief silence before she said, ‘I don’t know why, but I’m thinking about Jane Goodall and the chimps.’

I winced. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say! I would never think of those people as chimps!’

‘No, no, that’s not what I meant but I think you’d probably get lost in the analysis. You’d alienate yourself by separating yourself from the very thing you’d almost decided to join.

‘Yeah. It was inevitable that I’d end up going home, so I saved myself potentially years of pain.

Rationalising it, there was, I suppose, an element of identification. A lot of these people had mental health issues. I could see myself in that situation if the worst came to the worst. I think seeing Rik Rack asleep on the bench, totally incongruous, snapped me back to reality. Or as close as I get, anyway.’

‘It’s interesting that you keep calling them ‘these people,’ though.’

‘I know, and I feel conflicted about that. I don’t know what to call them. ‘People’ is enough, but …they deserve more. Finding something non-judgemental is tough, though. Whatever I’ve come up with makes it seems like they are an underclass, less than human, and that simply isn’t the case.’

‘No. Perhaps you feel so protective because you came so close?’

‘Maybe.’

‘It seems to be that you were caught in a catastrophic thought spiral.’ 

‘During the London Dark thing? I think so, yes. I could see myself in that situation, so my psyche was trying to manufacture a way to make it so.’ 

‘And being in that space between mania and depression…’

I felt my lip tremble and gulped hard to stave off unexpected tears.

‘Nothing was really… clear. The scariest thing was thinking I could be like that. The loss of control it would take.’

‘Control again,’ she mumbled.

‘Okay… so you may have a point,’ I finally conceded, ‘but it didn’t feel like I was controlling the situation. It felt like I was escaping fate.’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ she said.

If looks could kill…

xiv. Another Light

Fisher tells us that ‘It is a diminishing or diminished presence that typifies the eerie.’ (Fisher, K-Punk: the Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher, 2018) If it is, as defined earlier, something absent, or in the process of becoming absent, that should be present, it inevitably becomes associated with a sense of loss. If the loss is human, it resolves into [Melancholy] by virtue of processing grief and taking on the [Janus Hue].

True eeriness, though, is about a space devoid of humans, more often than not a place that once contained humans and London Dark’s eerie aspect is just that: a space of often overwhelming hullabaloo, suddenly stripped of its human presence, but for the remnant.

Mistrust of the night dweller, the remnant of London Light lost to the Dark, is ingrained from the earliest of times. Even the Bible says that ‘If someone should walk in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of the world. But if someone should walk in the night, he stumbles because the light is not in him.’ (John 10:9-10) 

‘The light is not in him’ would suggest that by living nocturnally, those night creatures are denied the light of the world, the light of God. Nightwalkers and night dwellers are deemed to be godless. Those things unchristian occur at night by those shielded from the light of God. The unease we feel at those inhabiting the night, or the boundaries between night and day, is a basic fear and perhaps an evolutionary survival technique – we do not associate with those things we cannot see clearly. 

xv. Cheat

In being there, in London Dark, in that strange time between sunset and sunrise, Suitcase Woman and I became acutely aware that we were the weird presence in an eerie world, the Outlanders. Dreamlike, we walked through a once familiar world, with those things once accessible and joyous, rejecting our advances, denying us their diurnal pleasures – outside looking in at a spectre of our sunlit lives. Our world is physically present but frustratingly unavailable, and we were forced to accept that, for now at least, our world is lost. 

The buildings we wished to access, if only for the sake of familiarity, shelter and sanity, were now obsolete. It felt as if we were walking through a video game where the only buildings that ‘worked’ were those that furthered your story. Being here, felt as though my story had been arrested. I was the blank part of the page between the chapters of a novel, waiting for the next chapter to begin.

The buildings, although looking perfectly real (in an artificially created way) had no use to us in London Dark. Not only do the ghosts of the past and the shadows of people haunt us, but the ghosts of architecture, too.

I tried to imagine living in a world where this was the norm – with the knowledge that this other world of wonders exists behind brick and render and was forever out of reach. 

For the Outlander, London Dark manifests as a state of frustration and fugue.

In being there, in that strange time between sunset and sunrise, Suitcase Woman and I became acutely aware that we were the weird presence in an eerie world, the Outlanders. Dreamlike, we walked through a once familiar world, with those things once accessible and joyous, rejecting our advances, denying us their diurnal pleasures – outside looking in at a spectre of our sunlit lives. Our world is physically present but frustratingly unavailable, and we were forced to accept that, for now at least, our world is lost. 

The buildings we wished to access, if only for the sake of familiarity, shelter and sanity, were now obsolete. It felt as if we were walking through a video game where the only buildings that ‘worked’ were those that furthered your story. Here, none of the buildings we saw served any practical purpose. Being here felt as though my story, my personal time-line had been arrested. I was the blank part of the page between the chapters of a novel.

The buildings, although looking perfectly real (in an artificially created way)had no use to us in London Dark. London Light had shunned London Dark.

Not only do the ghosts of the past and the shadows of people haunt us, but the ghosts of architecture haunt us, too.

I tried to imagine living in a world where this inaccessibility was the norm, with the knowledge that the other world of wonders that exists behind brick and render that was forever out of reach. 

There is a sense of wrongness, a sense that something does not belong. On later reflexion, I realised that it was Suitcase Woman and I that did not belong and that probably accounted for the feelings of trespass we felt.

For the outlander, London Dark manifests as a state of frustration and fugue.

xvi. Tickets Please

I showed my ticket and walked through the barrier. The train was already waiting at the platform. There was still another half hour until it was due to set off. The driver arrived early, presumably for the pre-journey checks and says, ‘Bitter out.’ 

‘Aye,’ I said, wishing I could be a little jollier, but the effort of the evening was beginning to catch up with me. The driver smiled, pulled out a key and let me on board.

‘You look perished,’ he said.

I just nodded.

‘Get on, love,’ he said and opened the doors. I appreciated the gesture and appreciated the northern-ness of being called ‘love’ by a burly bloke. It smacked of home.

It wasn’t until the warmth of the carriage hit me that I realised how cold I had been. I steamed slightly in the heat and worried about how Rik Rack, Turd Guy and the other denizens of that sombre, skewed reconstruction of Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ managed life. I felt that I had intruded on a private world, that I had no business being there, that the thought of this being an adventure came from a very privileged viewpoint, and that no matter how long I spent in London Dark, I would never understand the loneliness and loss etched into those faces, nor their dislocation from my increasingly fragile world. 

I felt like an idiot tourist, a Brit abroad, but instead of repeating myself slowly and loudly to be understood, the urge was to hide, to say nothing; the urge was to embrace the cold and to be consumed by the fear that London Dark freely supplied; to eschew being understood and become a part of this sunless, spectral half-life. Another time, with no Suitcase Woman, no Roche 5 and a yen for pomegranate seeds, I may have succumbed.

xvii. Domestic

Fisher notes that ‘a sense of the eerie seldom clings to inhabited domestic spaces,’ typifying that sensuality as ‘that which does not belong’ and brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it and cannot be reconciled with the homely.’ (Fisher, What is Hauntology, 2012)

However, domesticity for the homeless is a very different thing. Attempts to establish a stable space often end with external violence –  i.e., being ‘moved on’ by the authorities or – and the bones of the city become one giant but unsafe semi-domestic amphitheatre. Personal space becomes a gladiatorial endeavour, fighting for the right to sleep in the warmest places. Ephemeral as the term ‘home’ is in this context, we were walking through someone else’s home without invitation.

xviii. Warm

In the warmth of the carriage, I muse about London Dark and the disparity between the two aspects of the city troubled me. It isn’t just the absence of sunlight that disturbs. The lack of people widens the roads, the footfalls echo, sounding slightly out of time with your steps, leading to the uncomfortable feeling that something is in the shadows, following, waiting for your panicked turn into a blind alley. The buildings are too tall and, paradoxically, too close together for such artificially wide roads.

It felt as though London Dark was a second city, superimposed over London Light, populated by the lost, the rejected, the remnant. Years later, on recalling the tale of being lost in London Dark, I would think of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere’ (Gaiman, 1996): a story of London Below, where the Black Friars guard a secret, Old Bailey lives on the rooves, overseeing the delineation between Above and Below while feasting on roasted crow, and where an Angel called Islington has an infernal plan. I would make parallels with China Mieville’s ‘The City and The City’ (Mieville, 2009) where two distinct and separate cities share the same physical space; their peoples and cultures never meet or even acknowledge another, except in times of ‘breach.’ 

I wished I could attribute such stories to Rik Rack, Turd Guy and the shadows in the alleys to give life beyond the desolation they projected but…

London Dark, the London of night and shadow, is another city and I, and suitcase woman, were the unwitting cause of a breach. We were the unwelcome incursion, disturbing the alien routine of the night café. 

‘It is the irruption into this world of something from outside which is the marker of the weird,’ says Fisher, and for the Londoners Dark, we were that irruption; we were that weird encounter brought about by those experiencing an eerie aspect of London Light.

xix. Perspective

Perspective is the key to understanding the concepts of the weird and the eerie. Both elicit a sense of the wrong, of wrongness, of something that cannot be reconciled with those things one would ordinarily be comfortable with. In this respect, the weird and the eerie can be seen as the offspring of the unheimlich. 

Where the eerie achieves this sense of wrongness with calm and things missing – an eerie calm often indicates a space emptied of its usual inhabitants – the weird achieves the same with noise and additions. Weird is often the harbinger of the new, aligning itself with Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ (Toffler, 1970) while the eerie is, among other things, the wake left by something moving into the future without you, a sense of loss.  

The eerie requires disengagement from one’s norm and this is the framework in which London Dark works. The once familiar, restructured, re-lit, re-inhabited, but personal perspective remains the same. The reconciliation of the norm and the readjustment to the new paradigm causes the feeling of the unheimlich. There are enough reminders of London Light within London Dark to cause a conceptual disconnect within the self, and one becomes as new. A newborn in a new land, unaware of the rules of the new habitat and frightened by the prospect of learning them.

xx. Jiggedy Jig

I slept until Nottingham. On waking, I wondered if Suitcase Woman had got home safely. It occurred to me that, in the unfamiliar essence of London Dark, we hadn’t exchanged names. 

The upside-down world I had just left, where day is night and the shadows are breathing, made us forget our diurnal rituals and perhaps it was that friendly anonymity ensured our survival. Shamans, witches and sorcerers will tell you that power is in the naming, so names were dangerous in London Dark. If someone calls your name, they know too much, and it can’t end well. 

But more than that, the nature of existing in London Dark offers an insight into how regulated London Light is, how divided it is, and how reliant it is on class and strata. In London Dark, these strata are stripped away. No one is better or worse; they all exist in the same state, the same timeless, classless place. Blake saw a truth in this by this telling sentence: ‘in the midnight streets of the city, nightwalkers bring to the light the hidden contradictions both of the class society and their own divided psyche.’ 

A divided city, a divided psyche. 

Morlocks and Eloi.

xxi. Gemini

It is difficult to illustrate and explain the concepts of the weird and the eerie from a purely academic standpoint as, unlike the other pillars, weird and eerie are more ephemeral and ‘felt’ or intuited than observed and as with most aspects of hauntology, the individual’s viewpoint is paramount.

With montage being the de facto context and structure of the weird and the subtractive version, the eerie, it seems peculiar to present a traditionally structured essay. I have chosen to present the following hybrid chapter that juxtaposes academic texts, poetry, and personal experiences that better illustrate the weird and the eerie than a traditional academic work. A similar process of montage appears in the majority of the spectres. 

I have come to view ‘weird’ and  ‘eerie’ as ‘the twins,’ the Castor and Pollux of the hauntological family. In Greek myth, Castor and Pollux are both mortal and divine and thus loaded with contradictions. The weird and the eerie share that contradictory nature, being opposites of one another but intrinsically conjoined. The also have a tremendous emotional overlap. 

I found myself lost in ‘London Dark,’ the nighttime manifestation of daytime ‘London Light.’ London Dark, despite occupying the same physical space as London Light has its own rules, its own geography and foibles, overlaid on the more familiar London Light. Each aspect as real as its counterpart and largely ignored by their opposite numbers. 

It is  an idea that numerous authors have exploited: the aforementioned China Mieville and Neil Gaiman novels, along with Katherine Rundell’s ‘Rooftoppers’ (Rundell, 2020) and Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘The Rivers of London,’ (Aaronovitch, 2011) to name a few.

Fisher describes the difference between the weird and eerie by telling us that the ‘weird’ is something that is present that shouldn’t be, and the eerie is something that is not there but should be. An empty building, for example, would be viewed as ‘eerie,’ [Drama!] and extra limb would be ‘weird.’ Both aspects require us to reconsider our relationship with the world.

He also notes that the weird offers a feeling of ‘that which does not belong,’ and brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it and cannot be reconciled with the homely.’ The heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (unhomely, uncanny) are important forces within the concept of hauntology, which is discussed elsewhere.

Regarding ‘that which does not belong,’ within London’s Light and Dark aspects, the allocation of what does and does not belong, as with all aspects of hauntology, is entirely subjective.

xxii. Goodbye, London Dark…

With all aspects of London firmly in the past and in making my decision to return home, I hoped that I would not return to its dark aspect. Even though, however alien it seemed, it had its own balance and ‘norm,’ it wasn’t a norm with which I was comfortable. If it has to exist, and it must if only to give context to London Light, those who seek London Dark out invariably aim to change it. They irrupt into it, altering the fine balance between Londons Light and Dark, and then vanish with the dawn once their evangelical damage is done. 

Perhaps finding normality in London Dark brought you one step closer to not leaving – even those nightclubbers revelling in McDonalds knew that their visit to London Dark was a special occasion: not the normal nighttime occupation. One foot in London Dark, where night is another planet and normal rules don’t apply, was enough. 

I mused on the allocation of ‘normal.’

There but for the grace of electric dogs…