During the 1968-9 Golden Globe single handed round-the-world sailing race, Donald Crowhurt, with his trimaran shipping water into one of its hulls, pulled back from what would have been a fatal journey into the Indian Sea and wandered the Atlantic posting false positions, while reading Einstein on general and special relativity. Before turning back towards England, Crowhurst, in imagined conversations with the physicist, with a number of gods, and with the devil, came to the conclusion that life is a game, its rules – regarding time and space – set by otherworldly beings, the purpose of which was to transcend the game and achieve non-material ‘cosmic’ being. In Will Vigar’s ‘Haunted When The Minutes Drag’ the reader is on a similar adventure, with agoraphobia playing the part of the ocean: “to be agoraphobic is to be imprisoned in space, time, and mind”. Time and space are messed with by the condition; days tumble over each other, night and day collapse into each other, while at particular times space becomes extremely constrained, a universe crushed into a flat from which the author struggles to leave; “the word outside came to feel like another planet”.

Vigar’s genius is not to overly or under-medicalise his condition, but to explore it both as a deeply troubling (at times torturous) condition and as an often single-handed journey through disrupted time and space in search of a “rediscover[ed] ‘self’” via the mires of nostalgia and hauntology. While the author never downplays the subjectivity or the seriousness of his challenges, he finds remarkable sublimations in psychogeographical adventures and critical thinking. He opens worlds. He interrogates relationships between past and future that maybe get taken for granted. He returns to the spaces of his past to find that “almost all of the places I frequented as an adolescent have either been demolished, are derelict or have changed beyond recognition. I doubt I am alone in this.”  That final short sentence is key to Vigar’s ability to take the intensity of his experiences and spread them into descriptive and critical appreciations of fields of cultural experience that illuminate. He has much of value to say about hauntology, makes a provocative assessment of contemporary psychogeography and, perhaps mostly valuably, begins a long overdue discussion of melancholy that “exists in a state of solidity and ephemerality, being both desirable and detrimental, it interrupts Time’s Arrow by creating a collision of pasts and presents in an overwhelming moment”.

A latecomer to the first ‘Star Wars’ movie, Vigar navigates the literature in the margins of this blockbuster project, exploring the productions of anticipation and their interweaving with ‘big world’ movements; turning up with a ticket to watch ‘The Phantom Menace’ he finds that the cinema has a few days before (“a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”) been permanently closed.

‘Haunted When The Minutes Drag’ is wonderful in its evocations of marginal landscapes, and of atoms of abjection within familiar attractions. There is quite a psychogeography here, of Whitby, Robin Hood’s Bay and Ravenscar. Whether it is the “crabs crushed by beaks of their gull predators”, snake-head ammonites, scary tales of Old Linger, spectral hitchhikers, Heinz bottles versus plastic tomatoes, the cassettes (“I hope to God these tapes are never found”) recorded by his nan, Norman Vaughan, whale bones, his retold selkie tale from the Faroes, or the ‘mirror me’ that inhabits a wall world in a house in which he never feels comfortable, Will Vigar is repeatedly able to extrapolate out from pinpricks of intensity to broads sweeps of thinking. Adjacent to a consideration of the personae of David Bowie (that “would allow me into the wider world… a sense of belonging, from his presence… it had never occurred to me that David Bowie could die”) is a long dialogue between Hilda, Abbess at Whitby and Vlad the Impaler about their mutually unstable presence in ontology and fiction.

Bowie is woven into the coastline, along Ravenscar’s spectral “once-to-be-splendid” Marine Esplanade. A future fails and hauntology becomes everyday, unexceptional. Having worked “to free myself from agoraphobia”, Covid Lockdown forces Vigar back indoors. Somehow, he finds pleasure in the irony. He recounts the ‘internet game’ of ‘The Game’ for which the fourth and penultimate rule is “As soon as one thinks about The Game, one loses”. He changes the “sensual reds, velvets, blacks and golds” of his front room into blues and whites; cosmic yet protective, a “gateway to otherness”, and despite the risks of his personal Chapel Perilous, he continue to think about ‘the game’ of being, and about possible escapes – to the top of the sky or to the bottom of the ocean – from the “Existentialism made dull” of car park and care home.

Phil Smith