Repeated walks, circuits, attempts to navigate—to get to the heart of the labyrinth—proved frustrating. There was no centre.
—Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory
Iain Sinclair has just discovered that he owns an original photo by William S. Burroughs. We are in the kitchen of his house on Albion Road, in the heart of Hackney, a district he knows like the back of his hand and the soles of his feet; an observatory on the margins from which he has mapped and interpreted both the magical, ritualistic London of visionary poets and the Plague Years as well as the frenetic, multi-cultural London of motorways, tube-lines, and take-outs. Sitting behind his whitewood table he looks the picture of a retired Englishman, with his garden and grey squirrel out back (which right then jumps, climbs, and disappears). Yet whenever he gets up to look for a book, Sinclair’s tall, sinewy body has the vitality of someone who walks seriously every day of the year, regardless the threat of rain, thunder, snow, or even terrorist attacks in this post-Olympic city in which thousands of cranes aim tensely at the sky as if, Ballard-like, they were crying out for an airplane to crash. He’s just come back for the nth time holding a book. He opens it. And there it is.
“The photo was in this book,” he says, showing it to me, “Brion Gysin dedicated it to me—we shared a publisher—and I found it because this year was his centenary, and they asked me for a cut-up based on the Times of the day of his birth and 19 January this year.” When he saw the image, Sinclair remembered selling a suitcase full of original photos by Burroughs when he was working as a bookseller. One of them, having gotten trapped between the book’s pages, has just resurfaced. In it, Burroughs appears with Gysin, a musician who was one of the many who helped create the orientalist image of Tangier as a city of extremes. Gysin was the inventor of the Dreamachine, a pioneer of computer-generated poetry, and the owner of a restaurant that was above all a psychedelic, social space. The composition of the black-and-white image recalls Velázquez’s Las Meninas: the interplay of windows and mirrors creating repetitions of photographer and photographed. Maybe the photograph—with its ambiguous split image—is actually speaking to the origins of the “cut-up,” a literary technique Gysin adapted, unawares, from previous avant-garde practice, and to which Burroughs gave form in some of the twentieth century’s wildest, most emblematic novels.
“I started by selling some books I had sitting on pavements in Camden, and I’d soon inspired a market, two days a week. The headquarters, we might say, was here at home,” he tells me. “I sold to bibliophiles from all over the world. I sold Burroughs’s suitcase, which contained a huge collage, with lots of linked images, to an American.” He bought his house forty years ago, for next to nothing. It is now worth two million pounds. He continues, “When it was being built, we found some strange relics. Apparently there used to be an old brickworks here.” It was the base for his bookshop and publishing house: he still keeps remnants from that era in a room stuffed with boxes and junk, which I see as we leave the house. It is an archive waiting to be revealed. A psychogeography that was a network of walks. One day it will map not only London, but also various repercussions of international counter-culture.
In the doorway to his house he tells me that every walk he takes is a story, and that he cannot stroll without going off on a tangent. So we immediately abandon Albion Road and slip along unglamorous side streets with blocks of council flats where carpets and scarves, printed with images of Indian gods, elephants in lotus position, and faded friezes, hang. He is constantly reading walls, place names, and advertisements. “They drove out the legitimate inhabitants of this area, demolished their proletarian houses, and built those blocks that are blind to their murderous origins, and have no roots in this area,” he says. He urges me to look at the posters advertising house sales: photos of the nearby train station; private, interior gardens; everything that radically separates them out from the district, from the territory. “They are commercially attractive because they are quite out of the way yet well connected, because they allow you to make a quick exit from here.”
He can’t take a step without reading the surface and the depths. He once walked with a diviner through Hackney looking for the course of a lost river, waters William Blake described in “Jerusalem.” He found them. The branch shook. The energy is still flowing, despite the weight of their exile. One can feel it: it radiates from Iain Sinclair’s feet, rises up his legs, infects you like hysterical laughter, as if the swaying movements of a single individual could counter the official discourse of an entire megalomaniac city.
In the 1995 film Smoke, a character takes a photo every day at the same time on the same Brooklyn street corner, recording the lives, times, and deaths of its inhabitants and quotidian passers-by. Sinclair, similarly, goes for a walk every morning around his neighbourhood, around London Fields, repeating millimetre by millimetre the same route, before starting work: “It keeps me in good shape, now I’m past seventy, and lets me savour the day’s weather, and observe the small changes in that part of the city.” For years he saw the same man with the same dog on the same bench in the same park. One day, he wasn’t there. Nor the next. Soon after, someone put a plaque there to commemorate him. Sinclair’s afternoon walk, however, is always different. Sometimes it finishes far away, and he returns by train. Other times, he gets lost: “It’s impossible really to get to know London, I know some of its parts quite well, but the whole is… impossible.”
The canal is beautiful in the evening light: dense, heavy clouds are reflected in its lapping waters. A couple of boats are moored there. We walk a few metres along the towpath, but after crossing the canal by New Road, we take a side street: “For decades I walked along the towpath, but it’s out of the question now because you have to fight the cyclists and skaters.” Like most cities in the Old World, London has idealized wheels without engines, with lanes for bicycles and campaigns to promote non-polluting transport, but has forgotten pedestrians. Determined to walk, Sinclair has challenged the logic of vehicular transport: in Lights Out for the Territory he invented nine routes for walkers to search out the city’s hidden patterns; in London Orbital he walked along the edge of the M25, an urban highway going nowhere, a crazy loop, trawling for the remains of vanished villages and lives severed by speed and asphalt Scalextric, and in London Overground he walked fifty-six kilometres in one day, going to each of the different stops on the overland train’s orange line.
“I made three excursions to prepare the hike for London Overground, that takes a single day, when I was accompanied by John Rogers the filmmaker,” he tells me as we go down the stairs of Old Street Station, “but then we did it in reverse, because he had an accident, a horrific motorbike accident, and wanted to exorcize the pain with a nighttime stroll.” And walking by night seemed a completely different phenomenon to daytime: “By day you stop at a café, you go into a bookshop, you buy a book, you sit on a bench, there are always people more or less around; by night, on the contrary, everything is quiet, sometimes dead, it’s like sailing across a dreaming city.”
After passing a florist’s and a crêperie in the station’s underground passageways, we come to Camden Lock Books, whose owner was one of the booksellers on Camden Passage from the good old days. While Sinclair buys the recent English edition of The Unknown University by Roberto Bolaño, I leaf through a short monograph on Crash, the David Cronenberg film based on a book by J. G. Ballard. Sinclair, Ballard, and Michael Moorcock are the contemporary metropolis’ great narrators. While Martin Amis and his cronies narrate London from a literary realist perspective with modernist touches, counter-cultural writers like Ballard, Moorcock, Alan Moore, and Sinclair himself do so with an insane mix of all manner of styles and languages. Sinclair’s projects almost always create a dialogue between visionary psychogeographic literature and documentary film. Ballard, likewise, has recourse to science fiction and forensic science. Moorcock is renowned for his magic demon sword sagas, but London is also a constant presence in his narratives, as in Mother London (where the city is recounted by psychologically disturbed patients) or the Cornelius series (which is set in a multiverse, but frequently visits districts like Notting Hill Gate or Ladbroke Grove). Moore revolutionized superhero comics and created some of the first serialized graphic novels, a form he took to extreme narrative ends in his masterpiece, From Hell (illustrated by Eddie Campbell), an exploration of the city in Jack the Ripper’s time based on one of Sinclair’s seminal essays, “Nicholas Hawksmoor, his churches,” from Lud Heat, A Book of the Dead Hamlets. Moore also produced exhibitions and installations that broke down the boundaries between literature, film, video art, comics, and performance.
We leave the shop, weighed down by books, and reach our destination via City Road: Bunhill Fields. Sinclair tells me that the cemetery has ceased to be a secret place since the neighbourhood’s recent gentrification. There are mothers taking their children for a walk, executives with their cell phones, girls with their dogs, and skateboarding adolescents… But no tourists. It’s not on any circuit. It’s as if tourism were punishing Daniel Defoe and William Blake in the same way their contemporaries did: banishing them for not belonging to established religion. “Nobody notices Defoe’s monolith, though there are always pilgrims who leave their offerings by Blake’s gravestone, that is and isn’t his grave, because we now know he was buried over there, under those trees, with eleven other people.”
The afternoon’s magnetic light filters through the trees’ criss-crossing branches. A man is asleep on a bench, and five boys are larking around, their skateboards leaning on the wall and ground. Beyond them rises the belfry of a Hawksmoor church. Shakespeare had a theatre close to these graves. We are outside the city’s ancient walls, in an area filled with brothels, hospitals, entertainment, and the non-conformist dead. Seven fat pigeons are resting on the tomb of John Bunyan, the pilgrim preacher. There is a medallion on the tomb’s side. It shows him leaning on a stick, struggling to walk, literally crushed by the weight of his knapsack.
“I can identify with that image,” says Sinclair, gripping his paper bag from Camden Lock Books. “I’m always walking weighed down by books.” By literature. “Is this the city’s magical centre?” I ask. “Not anymore. It has ceased to be that; now it’s too public, too visible.” “So what will the new centre be?” I ask. “I’m still looking… Perhaps I’ll tell that in a future book.”
“In my next book I will say goodbye to London: it will be called London Final,” reveals Iain Sinclair on my last night in that canniballistic metropolis, as our taxi leaves the wealthy centre and penetrates the surrounding suburbs: “Then I will go to Peru and follow in the footsteps of my great-great grandfather, who went there to seek his fortune and wrote in a style similar to mine.”
I didn’t take notes on this conversation. We’d drunk a good deal of wine. Perhaps it wasn’t his great-great grandfather, but his great-great-great grandfather. Perhaps I dreamed it. I’m not going to send him an email to check: he would never do that. But if it ever happens, that journey to South America will be a logical continuation of American Smoke (2013), the story of his road trip to the United States following in the footsteps of the Beat Generation. The book abandons Sinclair’s usual territory, his infinite London, to visit the spaces where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso continued the visionary tradition of William Blake and the nomadism of John Bunyan. The New World routes where the Old World still had meaning.
I can’t imagine him on a transatlantic flight. In Lima. In a rented car or a nighttime bus. The cordillera in the distance, like a curtain or a threat. I can imagine him wandering through Andean villages. He doesn’t switch on his cell phone, he doesn’t use GPS, he is never geolocated. I imagine him getting lost: travelling to the end of his own light. Osip Mandelstam says that Dante imagined a completely urban Inferno with alleys and stairs because it was his recreation of the city of Florence that sent him into exile. I imagine Sinclair wandering through indigenous markets and Inca ruins as if he were strolling through London, always going off on a tangent, always reading.