all things thrown and wonderful, all memories great and small

All Things Thrown and Wonderful, AllMemories Great and Small1*

ALEX WILKINSON†

Abstract And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school and like lots ofother kids (though far from all) came to an age at which I simply stopped going.Nothing conscious about it, I don’t think, it’s just those sets of spaces stoppedbecoming; stopped like nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall andinstead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I (re)member, in my naiveteens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps the time of the Iraq war, but maybe thiswas a different car journey) I once came out with the statement (which was notparticularly naive especially) “I think God exists, how did we all get here otherwise”.Me, my sister that is two years older than me, my mum and dad, were on the roadfrom Auchmuir Bridge towards Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scot-land, on which Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of amemory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I (re)member the initiationinto a different vision of the universe and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleatedbewilderingly. As an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a “rhizome,a burrow”, with “flights of escape” which have no beginnings or ends, mereinitialities and finalities.‡ This is strange. It is not a polemic, nor does it have anexplicit argument, except perhaps to ask the question that always dances on apinhead – as Bohumil Hrabal once put it, “Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp”§ – is thereany escape? I think I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at my Gran’s funeral,but it might have been something else. We stopped in the house of the priest andwatched England lose the Cricket World Cup in 1999; they played in blue. That’show I (re)member the year of my Gran’s funeral. The church I used to go to burneddown. Arson, I think.

*****

* I must thank Kathleen Stewart, Allen Shelton and Haruki Murakami,who while each in this text through fleeting quotations, provided my routeinto the rhizome and the burrow like no others, and revealed to me somewings to go on flight with. And, of course, Derek Sayer, without whom theremay have been no possibility of routes at all. If I have become-Icarus, it ismy fault.† Alex Wilkinson is a Teaching Fellow in the History Department, LancasterUniversity.‡ They talk of this in many places. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London and New York: Con-tinuum, 2004); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a MinorLiterature, Dana Polan trans., (Minneapolis and London: University ofMinnesota Press, 1986). For Deleuze alone also see Gilles Deleuze, TheFold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley trans. (London: The AthlonePress, 1993).§ Bohumil Hrabal, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp.

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2013DOI: 10.1111/johs.12040

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched outendlessly – and yet was defined and limited.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart2*

Belonging

I have a bench that belongs to me in the South-West corner of theCimetière du Montparnasse. Strictly, it appears, like a ghost fromsome far off imaginary geometry, as the North-East, but I guessthat’s just how these things go around some compasses.3 Thebench probably doesn’t belong to me, though I have never once(re)membered someone else sitting there. Anyway belonging is onlyrarely official, so it’s mine now.

I sit there about once a week, sometimes more. It is often rainingin Paris at this time of year, and it seems, when I sit there, that itrains. So be it. I like to sit in the rain as it rolls down my glasses,obscuring my vision. Seems to me that this makes things clearer. Iguess because it is the Cimetière du Montparnasse and that youare supposed to see things here that it becomes clearer whenblinded. Lipstick kisses were being rolled off the sheen of Jean-PaulSartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s grave today. They’ll be replaced. Inthe summer you get that special smell of rain evaporating off thepavement, one of those few smells that is a metaphor for itself.4 Thebench is next to the perimeter wall, which stands at about 7ft.Between the bench and it are probably about three rows of graves.None of them contain any of the ever-present dead celebrities thatare listed on the board at the entrances (that does not includeSusan Sontag for those looking, though. I advise you to get lostlooking for Brassaï, he knows the way). No, it is something outsidethe graveyard that caught me and that I cannot catch. It is the backof a shed perhaps ten metres long, which runs along the top of thewall. It is what you would expect from an old shed: wooden frameseaten by woodworm, wind and rain (maybe it is because it is alwaysraining?), windows taped over or simply hanging broken, slack oneof those weathered faces in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Europeanseries of photographs.5† Speaking of which, I have tried to photo-graph it, but it’s no use. Either I’m not a good enough photographer– perfectly plausible – or it is unphotographable, for me.

I will continue this habit, I guess, until I leave.6 What else is thereto do?

* Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (London: Vintage).† Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans.

2 Alex Wilkinson

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2013

Method

First, I would start with the head. (Of late, I have been listening toMiles Davis while doing this, the disturbing muted trumpet solo thatopens “ ‘Round About Midnight”; the lisping fuzziness of fog com-bined with a sharpness of rebounding reverberating within thatmute. His constant dialogic shortenings of notes before melody: I findit works well.) Now, it is important to be careful with the brains – theycan go everywhere, particularly if you like them in bed. (And I findsomething about the trickiness of this operation under a cover). Tryand do it quickly, with a pinch and pull. Unlike pushing a thumbthrough polystyrene, strings will stay attached like a genealogy. (AskNietzsche.) Your fingers will be sticky by now, but that is part of thefun. Next the tail. You want to crack the back, exactly like you mighta human’s, but you do not want to do it quickly.7 Put it on a rack withapplied pressure, legs in the air until you hear it start to go. It shouldbe like the stored potential of a ball rolling off the edge. When it doesdrag your fingers along to the tail and pull with your thumb-nailunderneath its last vertebrae. For me, this is the most enjoyablepart, because it is hear here where the method might fail. All that isleft is to remove the legs and the remaining vertebrae: an easy job ofskinning. A small tub should take about a record, just less.

That is how I eat my prawns anyway, maybe you do somethingdifferent. It is also here, listening to the gasps of Miles Davis, thatI find most closely the desire the Surrealists had for walkingthrough Paris at night.8

Le Mans

One summer I committed a murder, perhaps several. It was a violentone, come to think of it, that involved a constant slashing in thescorching heat of two days at my friend’s parents’ house to the northof Le Mans. It wasn’t a particularly happy time for me, looking backon it, though it was formative – like everything coagulating in asomething that forms the knitting needles carelessly protrudingupwards in the space we call the present of the everyday. Not that Iam making excuses, or finding reasons: I was perfectly capable ofsuch a violent assault at that time regardless of other things goingon. Anyhow, something drove my body to spending two days in thesun, with it beating on my back, pulling ten hour days, drinking beer,and hacking at the French shutters with a paint brush and a tub of“ten year” varnish, with such relish that I ignored, for sustainedperiods, the doings of those around me. I became somehow voided,as if I had the desire to melt into the act, that time and me wouldrevolve around each other removing my skin, consuming my bones,

All Things Thrown and Wonderful 3


and leaving only the stench of a rotten corpse to linger in the brickswithout odour.9 This is how it seems now, anyway.

I was once described when someone was talking about my work asa Francophone. The person probably intended to say a Francophile,but I am not sure the usual definition of this would suffice either;that is, someone interested in the placeness of France, its society andculture, more than their “own”. Yet, phonic, could be taken to be readas drawn to something that is indefinite and obscure. This is how Iwould describe my relationship with France. I am drawn – mydesiring-machine is thrown (like stray words battered around abuilding) into drive – by two things usually ascribed as French: therhizome of Paris where I feel like Alice tumbling into wonderland; andFrench shutters. Thus it is a murder I will always regret. In this senseI share some feelings with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: “Wherea chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe,which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole whathas been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has gotcaught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer closethem.”* I have killed what I have killed (and this was far from my firstmurder): what time that used to live soaked into the curls of varnishpeeling off the shutters as they used to have been I have suffocatedlike a face stretched on the inside of a plastic bag. I was so muchinside the experience that I can only now hear the screams.†

The Even Side of the Street and Balzac’s Eyes

Boring is a process of tunnelling through a material; that itsphoneme is a philosophy of presence is somewhat interesting. Thisphonemic trope became available to me because I live on a certainside of the street (left or right depending on how you look at it –probably more often right for me, seeing as I “come” from north ofit. Not that this matters, I suppose).10 Perhaps it is better describedas the even side of the street, the side whose order of things isassigned by having even numbers. As good as anything I suppose,though after the first encounter, perfectly irrelevant for habitude: adifferent cartography becomes enacted.

The closest we get to the physical experience of boring, as inthrough material happening to us, is at the dentist. Some peopleare good at going to the dentist, I guess, and some people are bad.

* Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, Michael W. Jennings, HowardEiland, Gary Smith eds., Selected Writings: Volume 4, part 2, 1938–1940,(Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press, 2005), 392.† See ref. 7.

4 Alex Wilkinson


I am one of the bad ones mostly, when I get there at all. However,the smell of a dentist bores into me by reminding me of theeventness of the place – though no specific event is recalled. Thereis a dentist at the bottom of my rented room in Paris. I feel repelledby the desire to press the call button when I walk past. Anyway, thisis all a prelude to a suggestion of why my teeth hurt when I seeRodin’s statue of Balzac, which faces south on the BoulevardRaspail where it meets the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was origi-nally bronze but it has entirely melted into an ionised green.Moreover, the eye sockets have recessed into what is now darknessregardless of the time of day, and bore into me, or so it seems. Atnight, the statue is lit up from below by a powerful floor light.

“Fuck off, Balzac.” That is what my teeth say every day. Althoughmaybe it is just because I have written this that I (re)member it likethis. I forgot to add that he looks right. Chance geographies can beperilous, splicing the cumulative boredom of a dialogic landscape.

Timescapes of Paving and Benches

A very clear philosophy of time is available in Paris for anyone withthe tenacity (and, indeed, the time) to create an inventory of it. Atone point, somewhere, a decision was reached to stamp new pavingwith the date of its foundation. Thus I can tell you that the firststretch of the Boulevard Saint Jacques (in the direction of the Placed’Italie from Denfert Rochereau) was laid in October of ’96, whilefurther down where St. Jacques becomes Boulevard AugusteBlanqui, the pavement was laid first in August of ’93, then inAugust of 2000. The stairs down to the four line at Châtelet wereinset in 1984, at least I think (each step is inscribed with “84” –perhaps another code?). Such dates constitute a poetry. Man Rayonce sent a postcard to Roland Penrose informing him that hisrecent work had taken him into a playful erotics involving math-ematical equations. “Exquisite!” he exclaimed.11* Times arere-membered in by a vertiginous morass of floating debris that pinthem down. Thus a walker from Denfert Rochereau, in thisinstance (this is available throughout Paris), could, with this simplestamp, could have his feet and forced into something. Or not,perhaps it cuts short, or maybe they are not seen at all. Not somuch of a decision though.

On one bench is carved, with fleeting abandon and great atten-tion, a love heart with two sets of initials inside connected by a plussign (a mathematics again? Certainly an art). A perfectly ordinary

* Man Ray, Roland Penrose Archive – buried in my boxes somewhere in theoffice.



thing, which might strike as cute, tacky, Parisian, vandalism,trashy, true love, weird, depending on where you stand and whoyour feet belong to. Above and below, however, the messagechanges. Above is something indecipherable, below is somethingonly slightly more legible, though very clear to the eye, “A LA MORT,23/4/09”. Perhaps nothing changes, perhaps everything. Official,though personal, plaques dedicating benches to people who walkedin certain places have become somewhat of a fashion in the UK.They have a certain grammar which this scrawled something doesnot. And then there is the date: is it to the death of their love? ofthem and written by a third person? are the messages connected?why the precision? I can’t help comparing the exactitude of the dateon the bench to those on the pavement. An endless, poignantpotentiality, that in the end you lower your arse to. The bench wasput there in 1984, by the way.

Hashish O’Clock

It’s “3.30 P.M.” That is what struck me most about Benjamin’srecording of his second experience with hashish. It is an event thatcrops up in the convolute on the flâneur in The Arcades Project,where he takes the last few lines of this recording and transcribesthem into a fragment on the flâneur. Thus hashish, convalescenceand time become one long past dream. Yet, it is the perilousprecision of the world ordered for the kickoff, and its subsequent(re)membering, that are startling.

The memories are less rich, even though the immersion was less profound than itwas the previous time. To put this more precisely, I was less immersed, but moreprofoundly inside it.

‘Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish’, ‘Written January 15, 1928, at3.30 P.M.’

The “experiment” was taken relatively seriously, with two of Ben-jamin’s friends watching over in case of assistance. In the end, itwas aestheticised: “I uttered the name of Delacroix.”*

Granddad

I think I remember him keeling over in ’92, or perhaps it was ’93. Iwas only five or six, about the same time I got run over and

* Benjamin, “Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish”, MichaelW. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith eds, Selected Writings: Volume 2,part 1, 1927–1930, 85–90.

6 Alex Wilkinson


strangely enough that my first “best friend” told me of his crush forthe most popular girl in the class. I can still remember her name,though if I have an image of her she is trapped in a certain bubble,perfectly visible but opaque at the same time. I am not sure you cancall it a crush at that age – he was in the year below me. Whetherit was or not, these events suddenly charge forward and backward,roll over each other, swing backwards and around and collapse onmy waking dream state.12 Aside from this I remember only an imageof a memory of my granddad. I must have been much younger(much younger than 5!? Yes, it is possible, this has nothing to dowith years), and he was bathing me. He had a peculiar method –and this may or not may not be factually accurate – but what doesthat matter? – of pinching my nose and plunging me backwardsunderwater. I can’t remember whether I had full confidence in himpulling me back upwards or not. It may not even have been him, butthat is how I see it.13

My next memory is probably socialised.14 It is of the smell of apacket of freshly opened Golden Virginia tobacco. I think I haveprobably stolen this memory off my sister. She is eight years olderthan me and would have been around 13 or 14 when he died andthus probably has more “legitimate” memories than I do. This is herreason, and occasionally mine, for secretly (from our parents atleast) smoking occasional cigarettes, which she rolls (I am hope-less).* Granddad smoked a pipe. It is probably the landscape offloating stories which rests on me most, like the way the curlingsmoke from cigarettes eats your skin. Every now and then a timewill distil this surface smoke giving rise to its odour and taste, andcolour all that lies around, like a child with crayons constantlyoutside the lines of a sketch book. These things are physical too: Iinherit things via such stories. Thus it is that I have my granddad’smemory. He once moved house, so the story goes, to the place thenext door which his neighbours were vacating; the same day in factthat someone would move into their newly vacated house. Ofcourse, he forgot, came home from work straight into what was (youcould say) his home, took of his shoes, unfurled his paper, lit hispipe, and fell asleep. A sight for the new owners and an accompa-niment to festivity at endless reunions since. I tell the story too.

I could mention other stories of going in search of my granddad;how for instance, one night when I was supposed to be playingbridge in Edinburgh, but ended up instead, glass of wine in hand,with my foot through my former grandparents attic in Glenrothes,Fife. My dad nailed the bottom of the broken kitchen drawer to theceiling, to “mend” it. I found some objects which I keep and pretend

* I apologise to my sister for the revelatory nature of this admission.



were given to me. Like my granddad’s application to a post a St.Andrew’s University in 1954 (I think – he was not successful). Hetaught history as well: another thing I “inherited” in narrative. Icould drink like he could too. He brewed at home, wine that had areputation for being on the strong side. I found some of this in theattic as well. In big glass jars (perhaps holding a couple of litres). Hegot them from a friend of his in the chemistry department of hisschool in Kirkcaldy (on the wall at the train station is written thelines from a song I cannot remember the name of, just the lines: “Idon’t want to go to Idaho / I’d rather stay home in Kirkcaldy”.15 It ispronounced Kirk-oddy: you can tell an “outsider” from this), oneach of which is plastered a label “Sulphuric Acid”, over which mygranddad put a now faded sticky label with simply, “Sloe ’70”. Thisnow melts holes in me and my walls occasionally in Lancaster.*

I tried a history quiz, a hundred copies – or thereabouts – ofwhich I found in the loft he had written for his high school pupils.I knew none of the answers. I prefer to say this says somethingabout the ephemerality of history.

Oh and his name: that is in the middle of me.16

Graft and Wearing

Allen Shelton, in Dreamworlds of Alabama, speaks of the “Mark onthe Spade” that his granddad may or may not have made. Thoughthis is hardly the issue.

My grandmother gave me the spade. She was the gardener; he kept bees and playedcroquet. The thumb mark could be hers or Henry’s, the black hired hand whoworked for her occasionally. I fantasize it is my grandfather’s. I like to ease mythumb into the space as if I were resetting a molar deep in someone’s mouth, placingmy thumb in the gap like a new tooth filling in the absence with a reverence ofabsence. The mark is an opening to my dead grandfather’s hand. On the other sideis the callous of my thumb. At the time I could pick up hot coals that had spilled outfrom the wood stove with my bare hands.17†

I recently had to get a new bag after a long time, another casualtyof my flâneurie in Paris. It was a cloth bag that I fantasise had beengiven to me in India by a Tibetan I had been teaching English. Iwasn’t much of a teacher, which may or may not explain his eithergood or bad ability as a pupil. I can’t remember now, it is pleatedwith other things. I was in the stage of life Haruki Murakami oftenfocuses on in his novels, 19–20. That, he insists, is the big shift inlife. That is how I see it now, sometime after reading his books,

* Though, I hasten to add, I do no drink it.† Allen Shelton, Dreamworlds of Alabama.

8 Alex Wilkinson


sometime before as well. The contemporary has a funny musicalityin that way. At some point between buying the bag, which had “FreeTibet” written on it, and wearing it in the dislocation of Otherspaces than the largely Tibetan dominated town of Dharamsala, inHimachal Pradesh, it came to be that he had given me the bag.Folded into this narrative was that this made it, in some ways, anon-political gesture. For some reason, such a gesture made thebag abhorrent to me, as if it were generalising my memory. At least,somehow, this is how I reconstructed it afterwards. I still feel thepull of this narrative shift, although it may or may not have beenhow I felt at the time. That shift between 19–20 is often a politicalone, and I came back feeling grumpy about what I felt were the clearhypocrisies of the world around me and encountering Marx.

Either way the bag became a gift that I used constantly for fouryears. My body and it must have become pleated – it grafted on tome, plastically, like a talisman.* I always wear it on my rightshoulder and until recently, while the inlay once tore and had to bemended, the cloth outside was fine. In the past month, duringendless walking around Paris, the bag collapsed, fraying every-where. It was simply the bag’s experience of old age and a familiarbattering. Nowhere was this more evident than on the left side ofthe reverse, the side which must have brushed my leg thousands oftimes. My leg had opened up a hole, which consumed me andswished me round, like mouthwash, before spitting me out. It costme €18. The left hand side of my new bag has those first bobbles ofwear, like tears of fatigue rolling down the face of a marathonrunner.18

Nearness and Farness

Deleuze and Guattari, in a reading from a short story of Kafka’s,suggest that “the contiguous village is at the same time so far awaythat it would be impossible to reach it”.19 When I was young, thatis when I was younger than I am now – which many people wouldstill consider to be young (look at the portrait of the young Rimbaudat 17, both eyes boring through the lens of the camera, as if to tellyou he is writing his unpretentiously titled “First Attempt”, “A shaftof light, the colour / Of wax, played truant / On her smiling mouth (Iwatched) / And then on her breast – a midge on rose”, and will soonbe sleeping with Paul Verlaine. Young, though, clipped hair inblown-by-the-wind fashion, bow tie off-centre: exhilarating! Hisyouth was over at 21 after Verlaine shot him in the wrist in London

* See Yoko Tawada, “The Talisman”, in Where Europe Begins, SusanBernofsky trans. (New York, New Directions Publishing, 2002), 91–96.



and he went in to trading in North Africa.* By one of those petrifyingcoincidences I saw Verlaine watching over a children’s playgroundsouth in the 13th arrondisement, shortly after I wrote this fragment.Cigarette in mouth, I exploded him with my camera20), or at leastyoung in the making-his-way in the world young, 23 that is, thoughabove the metamorphosis stage of early university, and definitivelyabove the common conception of the “puberty stage” – however, Imean really young, perhaps drastically really, maybe 8 to 10, likedescribing a past in terms of shoe sizes, where at one point youstopped being one size and became another, though the gapin-between was hardly clear, though perhaps often painful at thetime. However, around this time, there was a park.

This is being somewhat charitable – but now it is even less ofa park than it was back then, and well, what the hell it was givena sought of park aura through “our” usage of it. It stretched a fullfootball field in length between two houses about 20 metres away.“A full football field!” you ask.† Well, perhaps an exaggeration, butit was a full football field to us and even had a clear concretepath running through the middle for the half way line – a sort ofgauntlet for the OAPs who wandered past before or after dinner.Either way it was a full football field with more than its share ofa full football team on it. Needless to say, goals were scored bythose who could shove each other out of the way, I imagine. Iimagine, because that is it. Glints of sunlight on a yellow BoltonWanderers shirt I used to wear pressurise the minutes of tomor-rows present futured into the past, like a graft gone wrong, butapart from that there just remains a fuzzy purity any time I drive(hardly ever a walk) past the park.21 This was in a village thatperhaps never existed, or at least can no longer be relayed. I waswalking back from meeting a few old friends about a year ago inthe pub in this village as it is marked on a map, probably farfrom sober, but certainly not drunk. All of a sudden I became aworlding in the atmospherics of the eventness of the place. Therewas no specific event, just an overall attunement, as KathleenStewart has recently put it.‡ Take all the photos you want, thisplace will still not exist, just a bare affect.22

* Arthur Rimbaud, “First Attempt”, in Selected Poems and Letters, JeremyHardy and John Sturrock trans., (London: Penguin, 2004), 9–11. Seeintroduction by the same translators in this edition for a brief précis ofRimbaud and Verlaine’s intertwined life.† Robert Walser, Microscripts, trans. Susan Bernofsky, (New Directions /Christine Burgin, New York, 2010). This style I borrowed from Walser.‡ Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric attunements”, Environment and Plan-ning D: Society and Space, 29, 2011, 444–454.

10 Alex Wilkinson


Graffiti

Paris is one amorphous canvas whose skin is everywhere tickledwith tattooed graffiti. I was walking the fifteenth district arounda month ago and captured, in perfect profile, the followingphotograph.

Rue des Thermopyles, Paris. Taken, my computer tells me, at 12:35 on05/07/2011. I guess that was me then.

Climbing plant and climbing graffiti hand in hand. It was on theRue des Thermopyles, a place overcrowded with nothing thatemerges at the Place Alberto Giacometti, named after the Frenchsculptor associated with the Surrealist movement. For this I canthink of no poetry better than the photograph.

My Bedroom and The Great Gatsby

My room that I rent in Paris is 9 m2 (thus 3 × 3) and is organised inthe following manner. Opposite the entrance door is a fold-outsofa-bed. It is a little temperamental: it needs to be folded out twicebefore it doesn’t just rock like a seesaw on a pair of legs two thirdsof the way down. The technique for doing this pleated itself on to meafter a week or so, but still differently repeats itself every time. It



has a cover that doesn’t fit especially well, and got me thinkingmight not be utilised in future if every morning I had to put thedamn thing on. However, this pleated itself to me too, and everydayit sits there, cover on, saying hello to me. In front of it is a tablestacked of books, and like the bed it has its foibles pleated on to myskin too (these I will save for another time). To the right of this isclothes storing place just taller than me (about 6ft), and about ametre or so wide. It contains an iron, which I never use (there is noironing board, though this would probably not be the reason). Imove the table in front of it at night (it folds down). The table,weighed with books too, is heavy. On the table I can see the pink,flowery alarm clock I bought for a pound in a moment of despera-tion about a year ago. It is the only time-telling device (aside frommy camera and my laptop) that I own – I have no wristwatch ormobile. Somewhere between unconscious and conscious choices, Iam not sure. To the right of this is a kitchenette, with a two-rungelectronic hob (no oven), a small draining board, and a sink.Underneath, a cupboard and a fridge, each smallish. On the wall ofthe entrance door, the other side of a reasonably large window witha flowerbox containing roses in which I sometimes place an incensestick to light, is a toilet and a shower cubicle. The floor is hexagonaland terracotta red. Next to the shower is a small hall table on whichmy laptop sleeps. In front of the door is something made out ofwood that I have no idea what it is.23

Clearly small, impossibly small perhaps, but regulated in a kindof Frankfurt kitchen kind of a way. Right down to waste production.It all goes through the toilet, which flushes, if you leave the taprunning in the kitchen sink, every thirty seconds: about. Likesomeone being sucked through the airplane toilet in a joke by BillyConnolly, the rambling “Jobbie Weecher”. I bought The GreatGatsby, in English, in Paris, and for the first time read it. I alsobought Cousin Bette, by Balzac.* The Great Gatsby makes my roombigger; Cousin Bette, smaller. Shape changing is an affect of theordinary too.

Conclusion: “My Special Snow Effects”

TO RROSE SELAVY“André Breton has given up writing.”(Journal du Peuple – April 1923)

* F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (London: Penguin, 1994); Honoréde Balzac, Cousin Bette, Sylvia Raphael trans., (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992). The Great Gatsby has continued to draw me, while CousinBette, I confess, has little appeal.

12 Alex Wilkinson


I’ve left my effects behind,my special snow effects!24*

This article took me one day and a lifetime to read and write.† I wassuffering from a genuine case of fatigue at the time. In attempt toget fit and lose some weight (2 years of a PhD had taken a toll), aswell doing some flâneuric “research” in Paris involving typicallydaily 10–15 mile walks in some direction or other, I had assaultedmy body. After a few weeks it politely told me to “fuck off”. And soI did, at least I thought at the time, when I crawled to bed. I had hadthis idea for such an article, so it was slightly frustrating not to beable to write it. Paracetamol was hardly going to do me much good,so I went to sleep. I woke up feeling not an awful lot better, butdetermined to write. I started with prawns and Miles Davis. It turnsout the nutrition I was lacking was memory. I hadn’t eaten enoughof it. While photographing Paris as a flâneur, which is no longerpossible, a dream action, I had been photographing myself,abstracting and tearing at my skin. This is not to say that this is anattempt to bolster the “selfness” of the self in any fashion. Perhapsthe opposite. Memory is delirium food, perhaps, but oh sodelicious.25 I am still not sure what all this is about, but appears tome that to go in search of facts when writing and critiquing suchhistorical writing (which it is), is to miss the wood for the trees.26

This is how I see it, I add, and sign here, like Derrida, at the end of“Signature, Event, Context”:

(Remark: the – written – text of this oral – communication was to be delivered to theAssociation des sociétés de philosophie de langue française before the meeting. Thatdispatch should thus have been signed. Which I do, and counterfeit, here. Where?There. J.D.)27‡

P.S. You have to be of a certain bent for the ordinary event of thissignature to mean Jacques Derrida. The initials, even for a “theoryhead” such as I have been occasionally termed, first recalls the TVshow Scrubs. Another bit of American trash my dad would say.Probably right. But it infects and floats, nevertheless.

* André Breton, Earthlight, Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogrow trans.(Copehagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 95.† Aside from minor revisions, and part of the section (re)membering thepark in my “home” village of Little Lever under “Nearness and Farness”written prior, this holds to be: I started at about 5:30 P.M. and finished justafter 1 A.M. Oddly enough, people were walking on the roof of my seven-storey apartment block, speaking to each other. AW, 05/08/2011.‡ Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context”, in Limited Inc, SamuelWeber trans., (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 1–21.



Rue des Vertus, 3rd arrondissement, 30/7/11, 15:16.

Notes

1 Despite its transversal potential, time has had a tendency to take on atautological totality in historical discourse. I found myself standing on thedisplay shelf of a shop, seemingly selling a bewildering, but limited, array ofstock, some time after I took the photograph. It was as if I had emerged asa ghost in my own haunting of a place. Even in this relatively banal image,a magic interplay of the total and partial takes place, between the varioussurfaces of the glass, the corrugated iron shutters and, say, the orange toymotorbike seat that is strangling me. I guess – and is this, this this of theguess, not already a gamble? as in the etymology of guess inthe Low Country gessen, to appraise or take aim at, to shoot for, a quality –a guess at, or of, the embarrassment that I would wish to declare, to open asa kind of reprieve; in that I am simply embarrassed, I wish and fear,and then hope for my embarrassment, for a force of its own, to give over astutter to the world for the emulsion in the negative, of the image retainedhere, for you and all, a kind of nudity so very bare, that it bears not seeingat all, to judge. “There is yet another reason why my reading mightbe incomplete: although I have no intention to illustrate a new method,I have attempted to produce, often embarrassing myself in the process,the problems of critical reading.” (My emphasis: “souvent en nous yembarrassant”.) So said Jacques Derrida, at the commencement of hispeculiar history (for he says this too, of its first part: “certain significant

14 Alex Wilkinson


historical moments”) of technique and writing, Of Grammatology. It was aplay on the root of embarrasser, to block, from the Latin embarrass, for“obstacle”. There are numerous conceptions of the becoming of writing inDerrida, but his insistence on the uneasy friction (and the often heatedconcepts, such as cindres, for this friction) of its in-between in the spatio-temporal consistency of (re)beginnings and initiations, is a permanentfeature of what he means by différance. Embarrassment here is not anysimple admittance of fault and fault lines that have settled in a supposedlyperfect surface of academic becoming (of the numerous, “evident”, errors;grammatical or portentous without rigour). Rather, it (re)presents a mode ofbeing with the world and for it, to give forth through a necessary stumblingand tripping; a falling toward the tomb as Derrida once said. Embarrass-ment can then come to stand not simply for a felt inadequacy, but a forcefulconception of what is both hindered and let through in the inscription of apast always in passing across the distributed surface of a time. To empha-sise that I wrote this piece in eight hours is not at all an attempt to indicateany virtuosity, but an attempt to move toward the wall, the blockage, and letthrough, in the back alley of a thoroughly modern situé, a meaning thatcannot be hunkered down and caught in a web of signs responding to apolitical ontology of a desire to historicise according to any stable notion ofthe gathered. For our concepts to have any force at all, then, we mustabsolutely insist on their impossibility, at all moments, to transport any-thing at all. I thus, in the fragile and temporary album above, try to situatemyself in-between everything and nothing to consider the somethings thatthe passing of the past seem to call forth. I would like to thank Yoke-SumWong and the external reviewer for their urging to offer this, I hope, slightlymore open leaf for which the reader can make an entrance into the rabbithole. These mausolea (endnotes) are zones of magnetism, force fields, wherehistory contracts itself. Like the rhizome, they offer routes with trickpassageways into a perilously fragile sculptural monument to a chancearchive, geologically worn from a catastrophic genesis of a potential bothvisible and invisible at its moment of emergence. I thus could not signifi-cantly change the original text (see endnote v) and rather endeavoured uponthis more conventional building project, which, as opposed to the incom-plete ruin of the topos above, provides a kind of graffiti-commentary spraypainting signatures on to some tattered foundational stones. They serve, ifnothing else, to preserve the fragility of all writings’ becoming, its opennessto chance, accident and experiment, and as a reminder, if it were stillneeded, to the problem facing historical study: that is, not the reality of thepast or present as a dialectical becoming, but the passing of the past and thepast of passing, a sort of form to something – as Benjamin might say –between redemption, becoming, destruction and the sublime. I provide inthese notes, then, some of my influences which, without, I hope, reducingthe float of the text itself, provide (partial) access to my desiring subcon-scious. Where the “original” footnotes offer a full and complete reference Ihave not repeated it here. See Michel Foucault, “The Thought of theOutside”, in James D. Faubion eds, Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984,volume 2: Aesthetics, (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 147–169; Death and theLabyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, Charles Ruas trans., (London:Athlone, 1987). For further on the insertion of the “I” see Roland Barthes, ALover’s Discourse, Richard Howard (trans.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).For a comparative to the forgetting of the present, see the forgetting of death:Françoise Dastur, Death: an essay on finitude, John Llewelyn (trans.),



(London: Athlone, 1996). See also two books encountered subsequent to thisarticle’s becoming: Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: drawings infieldwork notebooks, namely my own (Chicago and London: Chicago Uni-versity Press, 2011); Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands,(London: Jonathon Cape, 2011). Together with Gail Scott (see endnotesvi/ix) they are two works that have encouraged me of the import of thisenterprise. For the above see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, GayatriChakravorty Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997); Glas,John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (trans.), (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1987). I would like to express my utmost thanks to the postgraduatecommunity in the Department of History at Lancaster University wholistened, sympathetically, to a version of the paper, and to Derek Sayer,Yoke-Sum Wong, Dariusz Gafijczuk and John Strachan for their constantsupport in the preparation of my work over the past four years.

2 Murakami, Sputnik, p. 186.3 For ghostly geometries and other hauntings see: Avery Gordon,

Ghostly Matters: Haunting the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis andLondon: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan Lepselter, “WhyRachael Isn’t Buried in Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs and a Place in the West”,in Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding eds., Histories of the Future(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Memories contain within themechoes of the future: they are in league with dreams.

4 For smell and history see Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). It is a museum where thecontaining white walls of modernity are opened to a flooding of penetratingmoss, whose mouth organ of pure gestation speaks in an echoing voice ofan alternate space where the senses are stored. Neither quite interior, norexterior, it registers a whole other form of being.

5 This is the first of many errors which (to emphasise) I ask the readerto sympathetically attune to, like scratches on a record. They are essentialdivagations to the life-span of the article. However, this was not intendedto be entirely an exercise in automatic writing. A considerable part of theexperiment was to reinitiate the import of form in academic critique. Byderationalising academic form I hoped to find new ways to liberate itscritique, particularly its historical and sociological dimension. I thereforeleft in some of the formal defamations, such as footnote errors, to give asense of this scatological becoming of chance and experiment. While simpleformal or grammatical errors help then in a sensory way, at times theywould hinder the very flow that was supposed to be released. I decided toalter some of these where I felt they did not add to the performativity of thehistory being evoked. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans, (London:Hayward Gallery, 1998), p. 17.

6 This sense of the circulation of habitude by repetitivity and theaccumulation of scattered meanings in weightless distant silences, is apersistent theme in the characterisations of Murakami, and perhaps also ahallmark of postmodern literature in the Western sense. For a slightlydifferent version of this sense see Jane Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London:Penguin, 2010), a book written as a prequel to the life of Jane Eyre. Focusingaround the first Mrs Rochester, the “mad” Antoinette whom he married byarrangement in the Caribbean, the work deconstructs and reverses themadness onto Rochester, elevating the knowledge system of the creoleAntoinette in favour of the White Western Male. The madness of void in JaneEyre, is subtly undermined, the logic of reincarnation through burning

16 Alex Wilkinson


destruction (of the house/self) an alternative resolution. In a further lightemphasising language, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, Richard Howard(trans.), (London: One World Classics, 2009).

7 This is a reference to the blackly humorous opening to Michel Fou-cault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sherdian (trans.),(London: Vintage, 1995).

8 For examples of this drifting see: André Breton, Nadja, Mark Polizotti(trans.), (London: Penguin, 1999); Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris,William Carlos Williams trans., (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1992); GailScott, My Paris (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1999).

9 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia II, Brian Massumi trans., (London and New York: Con-tinuum, 2004), 164–184.

10 For the availability of the city as archive, or document in its fleshiestsense (that is, internally tattooed with spewing eruptions), see: Steve Pile,Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (Sage:London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, 2005); Kimberly Mair, “AsAutumn Turns to Winter – in Search of the Archive Without an Address”,Journal of Historical Sociology, 24.2, June 2011, 133–154. See also WalterBenjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlintrans., (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press, 2002).

11 Man Ray to Roland Penrose, dated 23/8/1948, The Scottish NationalGallery of Modern Art Archive, Edinburgh, [RPA 707/8]. My memory, mymemory – his words: “I’ve been working all year since my trip to Paris andproduced a whole series of paintings based on mathematical equationsfrom an erotic standpoint – very discreet!” This is perhaps a pun by ManRay on the “Discrete Mathematics”, which deals with discontinuousnumbers and logic.

12 See the numerous references to the dream café in Place Edgar-Quinetin Scott’s Paris. There is a petrifying similitude to the manner in whichboth Scott and “I” recorded the dissonance of the Parisian ordering from asimilar location. “I” lived on the Boulevard Raspail just on the corner withthe boulevard Edgar-Quinet for three months, having not encounteredScott’s book, yet recounted in a similar style a considerable number ofsimilar ghosts Scott attempts to evoke. Similarly W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz,Anthea Bell (trans.), (London: Penguin, 2001).

13 For a rather different philosophical configuration of the fact seeRichard Evans, In Defence of History, (London: Granta Books, 2002). Likethe fact, Evans sees History – that is, as a discipline – as a ground with aninterior core stability (soul), which admits other analytics after a carefulscreening for use-value. Yet, the simple (de)centering of the title wouldseem to suggest otherwise. For a radically different conceptualisation seeGeorges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth”, in The Absence of Myth: Writingson Surrealism, Michael Richardson (trans.), (New York and London: Verso,2006), 48. Bataille offers a suitably anti-Enlightenment stance to theapproach of Evans.

14 My uncertainty, at the time expressed by an obsession with “prob-ability”, is endearingly weak. Of course, all memories are socialised even ifthey are unique: if we are to believe this article, at least.

15 Another slight error, it reads “here”, rather than “home”. The song is anold Fife folk song, with no clear author. It tells the story of the lament ofGeordie Munroe’s “wee lassie” who does not want to move to the West for thenew life.



16 For the act of entifying and naming as such has much to do withhistory. See Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York and London:Routledge, 1997). Perhaps one of the best examples of a debate circlingaround this issue is the one drawn out of readings of the Marquis de Sadeand Isadore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont). See Gaston Bachelard,Lautréamont, Robert S. Dupree (trans.), (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Pub-lications, 1986); Pierre Klossowski, Sade, My Neighbour, Alphonso Lingis(trans.), (Quartet Books, London, 1992); Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamontand Sade, Michelle and Stuart Kendall (trans.), (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2004).

17 Shelton, Dreamworlds, p. 15.18 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (London and New York:

Continuum, 2004).19 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,

Dana Polan (trans.), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),77. This is different from a sense of incommensurability, in that a knowingprocess is going on, haphazardly and across a tempographic dialectic. Thistheme of the contiguity of representation and re-presentation, that is of thetopography of obscurity and the romance of clarity, clearly cuts throughthis entire paper (see the ability to photograph on pp. 2, 9).

20 See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, in Selected Writ-ings: Volume 4, part 2, 1938–1940, (Massachusetts and London: BelknapPress, 2005), 389–400. Here he says the following: “What characterisesrevolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that theyare about to make the continuum of history explode.” Stéphane Mosès, incommenting on this essay more widely, astutely warns us to note “only theepistemological function of images in Benjamin’s later, particularly in hisphilosophy of history.” It is unclear whether Benjamin chose not to – orperhaps could not – make the move taken by Deleuze and Guattari, inwhich epistemological images are already aesthetic in desiring production.Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, BarbaraHarshaw (trans.), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 69. See alsoAndré Breton, Mad Love, Mary Ann Caws (trans.), (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1987), for his fullest exposition of the concepts of “con-vulsive beauty” and the “fixed-explosive”.

21 When I wrote this essay I was (and still am) grappling with the indicesof teletechnology and desire as drivers for a “new” history. For referencehere of what should probably have featured more prominently in thearticle, see Patricia Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Ageof Teletechnology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

22 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, (Durham and London: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2007). The work is a gesture “not toward a clarity of answersbut toward the texture of knowing.” It is an assertion for an “attunement”to the immanence of a literally taken affect, of body on body, and theintensity of molecular agitation rendered too abstractly in wide scalecritiques of the contemporary capitalist condition. Similarly to AveryGordon (see endnote ii), there is a commitment to the complexity ofexperience, and the hasty overcoming of quotidian existence. In this senseI see a strong coalition between the ordinary and ghostly.

23 See Allen Shelton, Dreamworlds of Alabama (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2007). This book beautifully renders materials betweenboth their use-value and their various narrative contexts.

24 Rrose Selavy was the female pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp.

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25 I was drawn to this image of counter-memory by the illustration ofFather Time by Dan Beard in Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at KingArthur’s Court (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). The hero finds himselftransferred to the seeming dystopia of Arthurian England in the sixthcentury, until he discovers that the technological prowess of modernAmerica provides him with the tools to give the impression of a dominatingmagician. Of course, the apocalypse is just around the corner. Imagereproduced in Timothy A. Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days:Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870–1920(Amherst: University of Amherst Press, 2007), p. 6.

26 For experimentation and indeterminacy see Paul Feyerabend, AgainstMethod (London and New York: Verso, 1993).

27 Derrida’s, “Signature, Event, Context”, develops themes that he willelaborate upon in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric Prenowitztrans., (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Perhapsthe most important impression (in this word’s doubling), is the sense ofDerrida’s becoming-archive, a feeling he feels, as projected by his eventfulsignature on to the surface domiciliation of Freud’s museum. See also, byDerrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, in Writing and Difference, AlanBass (trans.), (London: Routledge, 2002), 246–291. Rather differently,Robert Walser, Microscripts, Susan Bernofsky (trans.), (New York: NewDirections/Christine Burgin, 2010), a collection of stories Walser wrote ontiny scraps of paper, from stamps to letters, with an archaic script no morethan a few millimetres in height.

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all things thrown and wonderful, all memories great and small

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