How did I manage to lose Vertigo as soon as I read it? It continued on the train North without me; I’ve rung Edinburgh station to ask them to notify me if the carriage cleaners bring it in. Vertigo: I read The Emigrants, too, over the last few days. Of course, the loss of a book doesn’t bother me at all; it was a secondhand paperback, nothing more. But the annotations! My underlinings! The descriptive phrases and sentences I was going to copy into my notebook!
Back in the North, I arrived with a new resolve to sort out my life. When I get back, I’ve thought to myself repeatedly over the last ten days, I’ll arrange for a water meter to lessen by bills. And I’ll get the damp proofing done. And I’ll patch up the long scar that runs up the wall where the old pipe was pulled away. And now I’m back? I took a broom to the yard. I moved the plants away from the overflowing drain. It was cold, but clear. Thudding music from upstairs. I thought: I had wanted to copy those phrases from Sebald. I thought: I’m going to sort everything out, one task at a time. I’ll call the damp proofers! a financial adivser! the water company!
Intimacy: how is it that I’ve as though these last few days sheltered not a memory but a place where memory might be kept? How is it that Sebald hollowed out a space in me that was somehow open to the air, like the Roman temples to the sun and the moon? Open, but to movement of time no memory could keep. Open – not to this or that memory, but to the intimacy of memory itself, all at once.
Remember – keep a place for memory. But keep a place, too, for the memory of memory – for what might be kept. Reading Sebald, I come to know of what a memory might consist that would be truly that of home. There is no nostalgia in Sebald, I’m not saying that. Not even a nostalgia for nostalgia – that desire at one remove to make of one part of the world that place to which one might return. It is rather there is an awareness of what homes people have made across the centuries, across the continents. And of the loss of those homes, those dwelling places, which are also dwelling places in memory.
Of what losses does he speak? Of war, of disaster, of that want which drives people to move from one land to another. Loss: but Sebald never seeks simply to put mourning to work. It is never a question of return, of the movement upstream to what cannot be changed. Everything has changed: the town, W., to which he returns has been completely rebuilt, from the foundations up. It’s changed – Sebald’s narrator (is it Sebald himself? Doesn’t Sebald erase his full name in the documents whose photographs he places in his pages?) recounts these changes; he seeks to find out about the course of those lives around him, of those he knew and did not know.
And what of the course of his, the narrator’s, life? That is given in the recounting itself; it is its possbility. The narrator as rememberer, not mourner – or at least, his mourning is not joined to work. It is as I read that history is passing over me, memories I will retain and those I will forget. So many incidents! So many place names (some of which, as in The Emigrants, I know intimately)!
Events, the streaming of events. Until I am left with a sense that I must remember, although I’m not sure what content memory should have. I must remember. To keep memory, to allow memory to be kept, yes, but also to keep a place for memory, to redouble memory and the effort of memory. This is not a call for scrupulousness, for careful documentation. I can barely find the words: to keep place for memorising, for its turning point, its hinge. For that point of articulation the rememberer occupies, even before he remembers anything at all. Just that point, that non-point of suspense, that retreat from the streaming of the world.
Vigilance: not what is remembered, but the act of remembrance. Not me, the rememberer, but the other, the recording surface upon which memory leaves its impression. But not even that: the place of articulation, like the cartilage around the elbow joint, where memory becomes possible. Only this interstice is opened by memory itself: the impress creates not just the impression but the medium of impression, until it is difficult to talk of mediation at all, and perhaps necessary to invoke a kind of immediacy, an ‘all at once’ that affects me not in the present but one step behind the present.
Who are you, double, recording surface? Who are you, flayed surface? Not the point of continuity, but discontinuity; not the intimacy of memory, but its extimacy: the great inversion which my insides are spread open, in which the inside becomes outside, the pure, exposed surface. Memory place, memory unplace. Not the dwelling place, but the nomadism that is a characteristic of Sebald’s own movements. Venice to Verona to anywhere-at-all.
Movement: I do not remember, but remembering happens. Movement: the other, my double, is watches over the non-place. Who am I, that lags behind himself? Rememberer, I know you are just behind me. Uncondition, I know you have unjoined time from itself, even as you bring it together. Where is Sebald’s Manchester? In my exposed heart. And where is it, my Manchester, which I passed through at exactly the same time as Sebald’s last visit?
Cities undone in flight. Cities undone by movement. What reaches me as memory has happened for the first time. The first? Or does it overlay what happened, your real Manchester, your real Midland hotel, with that of Sebald’s book, Sebald’s words and photographs? Does it let one city, one hotel overlie the other? Venice to Verona to anywhere at all: is it that flight undoes the city from within, flayed into a single exposed surface? Or is it I who lie exposed thus?
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