vandalise dormant energies by the act of ambulant sign-making."
"... we're on the point of letting the day go...
"It's over, the V has closed its legs"
It was in 1994 that Iain Sinclair and his photographer tramped in and out of London on a mission to uncover its secrets through the ancient art of walking and the practice of 'psychogeography'.
Psychogeography is the cultish tradition in literature and theory that seeks to interrogate place according to its psychologoical secretions - the ambiences and sentiments that ooze from its scarred surfaces. The psychogeographer 'reads' the urban landscape, pressing it into giving up its secret histories.
Sinclair is the self-proclaimed psychogeographer and acclaimed modern myth-creator of London, often lauded as a visionary London prophet in the line of William Blake and Thomas De Qunicey. He is the author of Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge and of Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital and Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out Of Essex'. These last three form concentric circles that attempt to tighten the belt over the sprawling belly of the metropolis and give it definition. On its publication over ten years ago Lights Out for the Territory nearly drowned in praise, critics of all colours scrambling over each other to lick Sinclair's boots, still thick with the muddied dust of the capital.
Employing a little pseudo-psycho-patho-mythology of my own, I read Lights Out only to page 69. Literary lore has it that this is the page on which to sample the wares before buying - the page indelibly marked by generations of book fanciers as the spot to glimpse of the book's most curious energies. 69: a number possessed of its own peculiar symmetries. It is the gravitational centre of any book.
I wanted to love Lights Out, I truly did. But any insights it possesses are obscured by a sulphrous smog of spite that would choke even the most hardened of city-dwellers. The misogyny of the book is rank. It's very difficult to talk about these things without sounding like a humourless blue-stocking, but still: images of rape and sexual conquest abound. This seems to be a deliberate choice, but it's a disappointingly predictable one. The tales Sinclair tells of London in the good-ol' days of yore are of middle-class, mildly eccentric, educated, white men, most of whom ran bookshops.
The natives fare little better. Most Londoners are repellent to Sinclair, unless they number among his bookish mates, drafted into the narrative to prop up the canvas on which Sinclair scrawls long sentences. This supporting cast stands in for the human sensibilities our poet so patently lacks. On the street, where the working classes and other 'ordinary folk' of London are real men and women, and not some brawny intellectual-plaything in shirt-sleeves, they are dismissed by being rendered and interpreted in pathological terms: their humanity is removed; they are mere symptoms of a sick society.
You'd get more warmth from the smouldering butt of a Silk-Cut Ultra under a kicked-in Hackney bus shelter.
Here, for what it's worth, is my 'vision' of Lights Out:
A man in a rain-coat is furiously jacking-off into a time-crusted Houses of Paliament souvenir teatowel, fantasies of raping Margaret Thatcher flashing across the inner membrane of his eyelids.
I always had a hunch that Margaret Thatcher is to trendy lefties what Myra Hindley was to so-called Middle England: the hate figure of threatening female 'other' – the vessel into which male psycho-sexual insecurities are decanted. That Sinclair elsewhere describes Thatcher as a 'wicked witch' is telling. The witch, that haggard symbol of persecuted femininity: the woman hounded to death by society, because, unmarried or influential, she poses a threat to the patriarchal order.
Whatever we may think of Thatcher as a politician, the tenor of polemics against her is disturbing. Sinclair is not alone. Critics of Thatcher have always focused on her femaleness and perceived lack of conventional feminine attributes. The accepted way of describing Cabinet members who had been fired or rebuked by Thatcher was, for example, ‘handbagged’.
With a depressingly Freudian predictability, it is the ‘liberal’ male thinkers who are most vituperatively sexist when it comes to Thatcher. Sinclair describes her as '[t]his wicked witch who focuses all the ill will in society. This is how it comes out of his mouth. I'd suggest that the author is misdiagnosing his own impressions. The symbolism he detects in Thatcher is more suitably characterized by her status as a legitimate hate-figure. For those who have absorbed a soft, politically-correct feminism into their psychological make-up, there is a lack of conceptual vocabulary to deal with their own sexist impulses. It is pure repression. Thatcher’s politics made her an acceptable safety valve for a repressed hatred of womanhood.
******
So, what are the psychological impressions this textual space gives up? The undercurrent of Lights Out is threatening indeed; but it is not the threat of urban decay in the denuded city: it is the threat of a hardening reactionary that misaligns societal ills with the paltry gains of gender politics, and of an intellectual elite that feels itself so defeated by contemporary society that it has turned snarling on its people.
Sinclair's 'born-again flaneur' is not a radical seer, but a stalker: as the stalker is to his victim, the born-again flaneur erases the city that is, not by pursuing and demystifying it but, flexing his own mystical powers, he evacuates the victim’s identity, transforming her into a vessel for his fantasy. He doesn't want to explain London: He wants to ravish it. The body of the city, identified from the outset as female, is to be reclaimed as the great canvas on which maleness will be expressed, tattooed and measured out in size-nine strides.
The geography of Sinclair's own psychology seems to invite further study. Steeped as it is in the Ripper mythos, the unwitting psychological portrait of Lights Out is not of London so much as of a cadaverous masculinity, bloating itself on a fabricated account of the past.
On second thoughts, perhaps it's not such an inaccurate portrait of London after all...
