where are the banks of time?

8/9/2019 Where Are the Banks of Time?

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Where are the banks of time?

And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by

time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which

disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in

eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-

changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction?1

I was going through some photos I took a few years back on a trip to Prague and Icame upon this image (Fig 1) of a public sculpture, which, if I recall correctly, lay at

the foot of Petrin hill. Who knows what the creator of this sculpture had in mind? I

myself can discern a kind of movement-image, perhaps a bit like those captured in the

very early days of cinema. But something is grimly amiss in this image. The further

away the gaunt, emaciated human figures are from our viewpoint the more they

become fragmented until we reach the figure nearest the very top of the staircase, of

whom there is nothing present except a solitary human leg. As man lurches forward in

this movement image then, it seems as though his past breaks up, disintegrates and

disassembles behind him. Compare this with the early zoopraxiscope images taken by

Eadweard Muybridge (Fig 2) which expressed the confidence of an emerging

modernity exultant at having last conquered lifes movement through time which until

then had probably seemed impossible to represent.

Our relationship to time has not always been as it is now of course. Whereas we once

may have imagined time as cyclical, we now have, certainly since the early capitalist

period but probably earlier than this, an idea of it as a straight line that we are moving

through. Near the very beginning of W.G Sebalds magnificent workAusterlitz (a text

I will be referring to throughout this paper) when the author has only recently met the

peculiar but captivating character that is Austerlitz himself, the two characters stand

underneath a giant clock in the station at Antwerp. The clock is placed in a central

position so that it can survey all the commuters who dash to and forth and,

conversely, as Austerlitz notes, all travellers had to look up at the clock and were

On time, place, memory and our relationship to historys victims


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Fig 1 Public sculpture in Prague

Fig 2 Early motion capture by Eadweard Muybridge


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obliged to adjust their activities to its demands.2

To Austerlitz all time seems

illusionary. For him, the past is everywhere present, and this is what, more often than

not, gives him a bad case of vertigo.

For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet

courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the

current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to

me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future

events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at

last3

I want to delve a bit deeper into our relationship with time and space. It is clear that

humans have, over the centuries, negotiated with the landscape, made it matter, by

charting it, graphing it, naming it, and dividing it, be it a parish boundary, a kingdom

or a nation-state. Underneath, all that has changed is the scale involved, at once

becoming increasingly magnified (we seek to join up the world though instantaneous

communications) and simultaneously dwindling to ever more microscopic areas (we

seek to name, discipline and patent even the fundamental building blocks of life). Via

this networking of the human and the non-human, the macroscopic and themicroscopic, space fluxes between the smooth and the striated, as some of our

technologies encode and territorialize space whilst others disrupt and deterritorialize

space once again. Generally speaking, man has had the continuing impulse to encode,

order and discipline what he has viewed as an unruly space.

With time, things are perhaps a little more difficult for us to get our heads around.

Continuing with our Deleuzian detour, I would suggest that we have long had a quite

erroneous conception of our relationship with time. Austerlitz is right to believe time

illusionary. At least since enlightenment times we have had the tendency to think of

time as being a sort of medium which the present, our lived present, moves through. A

medium divided up into discrete units. With a past we are moving away from and a

fixed future that we are running towards as an athlete lunges towards his finish line.

But of course this conception of a linear time is something superimposed onto life by

human consciousness. What we see as a medium stretching between past and future is

rather a continuous emergent unfolding, a becoming, an emerging from the virtual


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plane of things that could be. That is, a creation of difference. The best way we can

think of time from this perspective is the intensive force that pushes movement and

life along, that makes difference happen, that makes life happen. We tend to think of

being first then have it move through time, but in this reworking we think of time first

as an active force and have being becoming through and via time.

The universe knows no chronology, and thus has no need for remembrance, for, like

Austerlitz, all of its pasts and futures are together at once. We can see this in the way

that a particle on one side of the universe can be perceived by a particle at the other

side in no time at all. However, the slowness between perception and response that

occurs in humans (slower then that of particles, and of plants and of animals, who

must experience time quite differently) means that we posit a medium called time that

we then assume all of life must flow through. While standing in the observation room

at Greenwich (what a stroke of genius, to have this thought expressed here, in the

nucleus of humanitys drive to order all of space and time), Austerlitz puts it like this:

if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its

source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have

banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time?4

Do our relationships to space and time have ethical and political import? I would

claim that they quite intrinsically do. The impulse to graph, order and divide space

and time and to dismiss space and time as mediums through which we simply move

can lead, I fear, to the voices of those who are not assumed to be part of the present to

be unheard. These voices are, namely, the dead, and those others in more unruly areas

of the world who exist in a present that has not quite caught up with ours but may well

do once apologies for our past actions are paid and structural adjustment plans are

laid. Our relationship to time and space has a lot to say about how we remember

historys victims. If we think ourselves to be in a present rushing headlong into a

future then it will surely lead to us become willingly forgetful. We might believe that

once reparation is made with our victims then we can forget about the past, contain it

in a memorial, and move on in our present that I imagine, with a slight smile, to be a

bit like a big bubble, through time. Yet who is to say that this forgetfulness might not

result in the past being repeated? Surely the past should be our constant watchguard?

Might not a nonlinear notion of space and time like the one hinted at above punctuate


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our present(s) with our past(s) and cause us to become more responsive to the

warnings of historys victims?

Returning to Austerlitz, joining him as he reflects on the hospital for the insane which

was named Bedlam and stood on the site of the present Liverpool Street Station

concourse:

I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over

the centuries had ever really ebbed away, or weather they might not still, as I

sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead, be sensed as

we pass through them on our way through the station halls and up and down the

flights of steps.5

If hospitals are places where accumulated pain and suffering continue to haunt the

present, then what about cemeteries? In the cemetery, the inhabitants of the city are

given enduring memorial. There is a sense in which cemeteries are one of the few

places excluded from the headlong rush into the present. We find television screens in

Times Square, but it would seem inappropriate and be deemed tasteless to place

televisions in a graveyard. Henceforth, cemeteries remain still and tranquil places-variously described as creepy, peaceful or moving. In the Unbearable Lightness of

Being, Sabina reflects that no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in

the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitlers time, in Stalins time, through all

occupations they were as beautiful as a lullaby.6

So cemeteries remain outside of

the historical moments of wars and occupations. Isnt this odd, that the dead remain

out of time and out of mind at the times when we might just need them most?

Historys victims are made to rest in the earth in beautiful gardens as the victims of

the present and the future are condemned to the same fates, the same wars with

different names, in repetition.

In the west of my home city of Sheffield lies a Victorian cemetery on the banks of the

river Porter. The river itself is barely visible as the city has encroached upon the

valley, but when the cemetery was built the area was still very much a rural one and

the idea was that, when coupled with the Botanical Gardens on the opposite bank, a

kind of classical landscape would begin to emerge in the valley. The General


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Cemetery Directors report of 1837 states that the cemetery is, situated beyond the

precinct of the town; in its scenery, picturesque and enchanting, exhibiting amidst the

stillness which befits the repose of the dead, so many forms of life to remind the

spectator rather of the future resurrection than of the temporary dissolution of the

body.7

The dead of the city of Sheffield, at least those who could afford a monument

(one grave plot is recorded as containing 96 pauper burials8) are given a resting place

that sets them apart from the present. The cemetery was designed with the afterlife in

mind. The bereaved or the casual viewer alike is to be struck by the magnificence of

the monuments and understand that this represents the continuing of life, onwards and

after death. But the very fact that the cemetery is situated in what its early occupants

probably hoped would remain a remote and undisturbed setting suggests that this

movement onwards is very much set apart from our living present, where we fear

death and wish to be not reminded of it as we go about our day to day lives.

As revealed by my photographs (Figs 3 and 4), the Sheffield General Cemetery is

today a dishevelled and unkempt site, dense with weeds that in places obscure entire

gravestones and disrupt the designers original desire to fastidiously contain and order

space in the classical style. Even if you merited a monument at the cemetery, there

was no guarantee that it would remain in place to see the 21 st century, as Figs 4 and 5

show. The monument of James Montgomery, poet, writer, philanthropist,

campaigner, hymn writer, editor of the Sheffield Iris9

that commands the marvellous

vista in the grainy black and white photograph has left no trace but its circular iron

railings. Trees have grown huge, blocking the view of the Porter valley and grass

envelops the ground on which Montgomerys plinth once stood. A monument then, is

not permanent and ever lasting, despite what the makers of history might wish. A

monument is designed to withstand time, and yet time is what causes the

transformation and dissembling of monuments. As we have seen, time is the active

force that articulates life, and as death is but a part of life, it articulates death also.

Montgomerys statue is now actually relocated in the city centre, amongst the hustle

and bustle of everyday life. But many other monuments suffer more violent ends.

What of monuments in a city such as Prague? A city that has, as the writer Ivan Klima

reminds us, a history full of uprisings and reversals, occupations, liberations,


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Fig 3 The General Cemetery in Sheffield

Fig 4 Where the monument to James Montgomery once stood

Fig 5 As the monument once was


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betrayals and new occupations.10

In a city such as this the density of historys

remaining traces are great. Every street, every square, every bridge holds a thousand

memories, layers of history and memory that lie in fragments. Here history enters the

life of people and cities as a burden, as a constant reminder of lifes uncertainties.11

History here is like a surface blemish that constantly makes us attentive to our present

behaviour. The acts of history can be all too easily absorbed and neutralized by the

landscape, the ever assembling and dissembling landscape of the modern city. In

Klimas Prague, monuments to people who represent the nauseating past are torn

down, street names are changed- the names of those who happen to be in control are

made immortal in one era and then unceremoniously erased in the next. In this ever

changing landscape, what do we have to hold on to? Is history really a burden?

Perhaps, but in a radical temporal structure, where we no longer keep the past at a

distance, then this is one burden that it befits us to retain. We are tempted to cry,

forget the past, it is over!, but how can we forget the past, when it is all around us?

Why do the people of Prague bear this burden of history so admirably, so modestly, in

Klimas eyes? Through restraint and patience: If Prague is still standing, and has not

yet lost its allure or its beauty, it is because its very stones, like its people, have

expressed their patient perseverance.12

Austerlitz, with the ephemeral memories of his past that he had once blanked out

being spurred by a series of chance events, returns with trepidation to the city in

which he spent his very early childhood: Prague. His wanderings through the streets

and gardens of this city unravel one shimmering memory after another- the bad

tempered little dogs walked by old ladies in the Seminar Garden, the sight of the

hunchbacked tailor, Moravec, who, from the balcony, could be seen in his time,

swinging his heavy iron filled with red-hot coals through the air 13 Later, he

reminisces upon his wanderings through the lonely and deserted streets of Terezin,

the site of the forced labour camp to which his mother was once taken. The emptiness

of the place is what strikes us first. The desolateness of the buildings with their blank

windows and closed doors leads us to question if there is anybody living there at all,

despite this place being supposedly once more an ordinary town. This is a town that

still seems haunted by the practices that went on here. These are memories that lie not

in monuments or in the cemetery but in the very fabric of the town itself, in its

squares, its streets and its buildings.


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Here, as in other writings by Sebald, we have a sense of the haunted, spectral nature

of place. Place as an event, as a taking-place. Place and present being suffused with

the past and also the future. The multiplicity of imageries and signs that exist in a city

such as Prague are brought, through Sebalds writing, into an unsettling and displaced

present. Here, linear and striated notions of spatio-temporality are reworked into a

space that consists of the apparitions of place and a time that no longer moves in a

straight line but instead in fluxes and eddies. Following Austerlitz as he wanders

through these deserted streets, we read again of one of his intense cases of temporal

vertigo from which he so often suffers, as he recalls the tens of thousands of people

who were forced to live together in this tiny space. The becoming past of the present:

it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that they had never been

taken away after all, but were still living crammed into those buildings and

basements and attics, as if they were incessantly going up and down stairs,

looking out of the windows, moving in vast numbers through the streets and

alleys, and even, a silent assembly, filling the entire space occupied by the air,

hatched with grey as it was by the fine rain.14

The public sculpture in Prague (Fig 1) with which I began this paper pleads us to

rethink our relationship to the past. The human figures in the sculpture fragment and

shatter. The memories of past brutalities, of invasions, of purges and removals of vast

portions of the population are covered over as we attempt a Freudian style cathartic

process of remembrance. Remembrance that is safely restricted to museums and

monuments. Monuments like those that I saw in the Sheffield General Cemetery but

which stand, of course, in the burial grounds, town squares and grand boulevards of

all cities around the world. Huge symbols to the afterlife in which the past can lie

remote and undisturbed. The disappearing statue of James Montgomery and the

similar unwillingness of monuments in the Prague to remain in place for more than a

decade, tell us that time does not conform to our attempts to define it as a linear,

orderly medium from which we can clearly disentangle past, present and future. If

like Newton, we conceive of time as a river, then we must concede that it is not

always a smooth free-flowing river- at times the river bends back on itself, is subject


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to the interruptions of rocks and fallen trees that block it course, sends it off into

spirals and eddies

And what of the rivers source, what of its end, and its banks? Time, as the active

force that moves life along in unknowable, unpredictable directions, has neither a

source nor an end in sight and its banks are in constant flux. Geographies must in

some way attend to such a conception of time and re-imagine our closeness to those

who have been separated from us by time as well as by distance. Perhaps we can

learn a lot from the haunted writings of W.G. Sebald in this respect. John Wylie

writes that spectral geographies should work within a hauntology that unsettles

narrative and subject, that reveals the shaping of place through haunting rather than

dwelling, that dislocates past and present, memory and visibility, through forms of

documentary experimentation.15

I agree with this proposition, and thereby implore

geographers to be particularly attentive to the past of place, a past that cannot be

disassociated from the present, that past which is always coming back to haunt the

present and ensuring that the banks of time continue to be transient, unfathomable,

inaccessible.

References1

Sebald, W.G. (2001)Austerlitz. Penguin : London. Pg. 1432 Ibid. Pg. 133 Ibid. Pg. 3594

Ibid. Pg. 1425

Ibid. Pg. 1836 Kundera, M (1984) The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Faber & Faber : London. Pg. 1007 Horton, J (2001)Remote and Undisturbed: A brief history of the Sheffield General Cemetery. Friends

of the General Cemetery : Sheffield. Pg. 188 Ibid. Pg. 189 Ibid. Pg. 5910

Klima, I (1994) The Spirit of Prague. London : Granta. Pg. 4311 Ibid. Pg. 4312 Ibid. Pg. 4413

Aus. Pg. 22114

Ibid. Pg. 28115 Wylie, J (2007) The spectral geographies of W.G. Sebald. Cultural Geographies, 14. Pg. 185

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