Online Event: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

Join Elsewhere editors and contributors on 14 December for an online reading and discussion on wanderlust and memories of elsewhere, the places we’re longing for and those we are separated from, whether by time or distance. 

The starting point for the discussion are a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year (see links below) and we are really looking forward to bringing together Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton to talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year.

To register: For Zoom login details, please send an email to paul@elsewhere-journal.com and he’ll send you the info you need to join the event.

Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere
14 December 2020
6pm in Dublin & Cambridge / 7pm in Berlin 

For updates, please also follow the Facebook event page if you are on the platform, or follow us on Twitter. 

Read the essays by our panel from the Memories of Elsewhere series....

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

About the Panel...

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Marcel Krueger is the books editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books, including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the forthcoming novella In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021).

Paper Ghosts

By Anna Evans:

By the water’s edge, the monument to the immigrant, looking back at the city, looking out across the wide and muddy river. Situated at the point of arrival, the old port of New Orleans, marking the point of embarkation, the journey’s end and the start of crossings and travels, hopes and dreams. A two-sided statue, a decorated figure, like those carved on a ship’s prow looks out to the water; an immigrant family look towards the city. The crescent city lies at a bend in the Mississippi River. A city haunted by its migrants, by their comings and goings, the history of these streets and those who walked them.

I remember our arrival. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and losing sight of land, as if the train travels an endless bridge to nowhere. New Orleans is a surprise to me, a last-minute change to our plans, an unexpected part of our trip. And like the surrounding Louisiana swampland, it is like a new language, one I had never learned but feel I should know already. 

We have travelled 1300 miles across the land, thirty hours, half in sleep and half in daydream, and it is as if our souls lag behind. From our arrival at sunset, darkness quickly descends to shroud the streets in mystery. We are hushed and excited on arrival, caught in a tangle of new places and new impressions that makes this place feel curiously flat and enclosed, and we wonder what it will look like when daylight comes.

In the morning the sun is caught behind deep overcast skies, waiting to break through. We spend hours mesmerized in the pattern of the streets and the architecture of the old French Quarter. The city of music leads a dance in circles. The vibrant buildings with their elegant shutters, iron porticoes and ornamented balconies, the graceful sweep of the trees above. There are wooden verandahs and carved iron railings, with intricate patterns that take the solidity of iron and give it a careful fragility. 

In the square a group of musicians assemble, playing of impossible dreams, laying their heads beneath the stars of a thousand nights in a hundred different places, drawn to New Orleans from far and wide. Sleeping under the stars and dreaming of boxcars, of all the miles that went before. Something about this place grips and calls them back, the struggle and the sadness. City of roamers, the restless, or those who never had a home. The place to settle if you don’t wish to settle. 

Out on the street the rain comes again as we walk, at a distance from each other so that you are crossing the road while I am standing still staring fitfully, as if the answer could lie in these elegant streets of the French quarter. The rain descends, gallops down from the sky, and we watch from a corner of the street, sheltered by balconies and trees. The skies have darkened, and the rain still comes. For a moment we walk through and it soaks our clothes, water grows in puddles across the streets. The balconies and verandahs make a passageway through and we continue our walk entranced by the rain. Reflected in the pavements, in pools and rippled water forming, are the shadows of the pillars that are everywhere. A place of shadows, the rain brings out the shadows.

The rain in New Orleans. Hurricane season. Rainbow flags and cocktails, and dancing, sprawling tourists, visitors to New Orleans’ spirit of intoxication. Some with a hand on their money, others unguarded, out on the lookout for reckless times. And those elongated souls who look as if they had spent a day too many street wheeling, freewheeling, they forgot where they came from and where they were going.

The French Quarter is like a film set framed in black and white with the tension of a thriller. The restless fans and fire escapes, in all those old detective movies where the private investigator sits late at night in his office, nursing a whisky tumbler. 

We widen and lengthen our walks to the outlying districts, long streets of bright-coloured wooden houses, each one different from the next. It is slow progress as we stop to look at every house, on the way to Frenchmen Street, where the sun has broken through cloud, and shines powerfully through the heat and skies cast over. 

Next to the painted elegance of the dark turquoise green and white house, dark red doors, with its balcony under the sweeping shade of the tree; is a tiny pink house, with a small pointed roof and large windows and doors, green and purple shutters, its steps and iron railings besieged by trailing plants, ivy-covered like something from a story. 

There are pillars with overhanging roofs and lanterns, steps out onto the street. We walk the pavements through trees and plants, depth and shade, and flowers pink and red. Looking down the tree lined street, pillars next to the trees, and shutters purple and green, blue and white, yellow in the streets beyond the French quarter, in Marigny and Bywater. A play of light and shade, shade and light. 

The streets make a poem to the transient. Trees in flower everywhere and hanging baskets with ferns or lanterns decorate the houses, each one taking on new colours and depth, a beautiful façade of permanence claimed back at night by shadow, the deep shadow of darkness that covers the streets when night falls, changing them back. 

Here the pavement is brick and uneven, the roots of the tree below the surface, deep cracks in the road. I always knew the earth was moving but here is the proof spread large. Living on borrowed time, borrowed land, propelled by its legends – the new and the ancient exist side by side - as if this city reveals its faults and its truths like the deep cracks in the road. Life is uncertainty, the roving spirit says it best. The feeling that life is closer here, that it is right at hand, to be lived; the tenuous and unsettled feeling, the one that doesn’t put down roots, or none too deep. For the roots of trees lie just below the surface and erode the stone above as they spread outwards, upwards; as if they might uproot themselves and walk away.

I want to piece it together, to work out if I belong here. So, the saying goes, the legend tells, the city will let you know if you were meant to stay, meant to leave. And I want to be the one the city welcomes, but I know also that there is something here that unsettles, that displaces me deep down.

Under the bridges, the tent cities remain. New Orleans evokes this sense of wandering – for those who choose it, those who don’t. In the faces of those who pace back and forth, day and night, up and down, for a dime, a dollar, a nickel, in the patient, hunted faces of those who lost everything, those who never had it, those who go looking.  

They make paper monuments now to honour all those who were forgotten, unrecorded. You can find them at street corners, down by the water, if you’re looking. From where we cross by boat, to Algiers, on a deserted ferry, to deserted streets between the heavy showers of rain. Heat-steeped, sleepy Algiers, where we trail around, looking for something we never find. 

New Orleans wears its history in layers, like the paper ghosts standing on corners. The city haunted by the spectres of all those who passed through. I float through the map, tracing the streets as I go. I can only write the poem of a stranger to this city, another visitor entering its spell, city of illusion, of powerful emotion. New Orleans you keep on returning to me, keep calling me back. I walk along your streets in shadow. 

I walk along your streets in shadow, watching the changing light, remembering how darkness falls like a cloak, changing the streets, calling them back. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Marseille, port city: sails and sunlight

By Anna Evans:

I am waiting to take the bus from Cassis to Marseille. Leaving behind the little streets of the town of Cassis and the cafes with their terraces, where artists came to paint the colourful fishing boats and its perfect bay; to sit by the lighthouse surrounded by waves. The rocks on the beach where I sat and watched the sun set across the rooftops of the town, to the lights of the harbour and the illuminated castle in the darkness. In the little square by the church I read in the warm shade of trees, with cats sunbathing, and the singing cicadas rising, while patterns of sunlight form on the page.

As I wait, I am thinking about travel and new places, of my first visit to the south of France and how it captured my imagination. The flickering colours of the train journey along the coast, where we stood for the whole journey immersed in the scenery passing by. There is always the sense of what lies around the next corner, the changing view that comes from moving on. The excitement of the journey to new, unknown places needs the sense of apprehension to make it more real. I fell for Marseille and for the feeling that travel brings, even then; for the feeling of being away.

The ride is breathtaking. The winding road ascends to the rocky plateau, crossing the Massif des Calanques. Across the rocks, the city stretches out white towards a blue and sparkling sea. From here I glimpse panoramas of the city, the harbour, and the Frioul islands. The descent is exhilarating; spectacular at the bottom of the hill lies Marseille by the water, recognizable by the silhouette of the Notre-Dame church, and a series of high-rise white tower blocks.

Marseille is a city with a certain reputation, a city apart. Perhaps it is for the lure of ports, and stories of voyages and arrivals, that I am drawn to it. A point of departure I return to constantly as an anchor. It is not for a feeling of belonging, of being at home, that I like it. Not for a sense of recognition but for its displacing effects.

Arriving in Marseille and stepping out into the sunlight from the train station, the sensation of heat, of warmth on my skin, surrounding me. Undeniable the feeling of arrival and scattered impressions of the city. If I close my eyes there it is again. Stepping out and feeling the heat as my first and abiding impression. From St Charles station you can stand and look down a hundred steps to a long street pulling you onwards and into the city.

I am interested in this idea of a return, of exploring the memories contained in a place, even if they are not definitive. Later I developed a captivation with the city and for years I imagined moving to Marseille, but I never did it. Something always held me back; this never became my city. The apprehension stronger than the desire to leave. Held back by the idea that there would be time, always time stretching ahead. Not expecting, not realizing that growing older would bring a sense of narrowing horizons, of enclosure, and that I would need to keep wandering inwardly; that settling was for me a myth.  

Then here are two selves, the one that returns, who looks back, and the one who embarked from a train one day stepping out into a feeling of intense heat. I could call myself a writer then. It didn’t matter so much whether I was one. There was always time, time ahead. 

Imagining a small balcony looking out to the street below, to where the street opens out and people gather as the sun begins to set. They draw up chairs to sit and talk, or to sit and look at nothing but the street itself. The sun in the afternoon, the day ending. 

I am careless, the thrill of being away sinks into my bones, as if I were fleeing something, as if I were running away. Drinking small, strong black coffee each morning and wandering the picturesque streets. I abandon myself to swimming in the sea, to the all-encompassing waves, warm, azure and enfolding. There is something intoxicating about being somewhere hot; having lived in cold places all my life, I can understand how a lack of heat could feel like a loss. The heat is alluring to me as the city is; it pervades everything, is inescapable and all-surrounding. 

I remember looking out towards the castle on the rock and out to sea. Walking the streets of the panier, of old Marseille. The buildings, white with shutters and balconies, the sloping, rundown streets and the intense blue of the sky where boats depart for Algiers, signifying another direction. The shape of the buildings, solid and definite next to the perfect clarity of the sky.

There is something about the blue of the sky that cannot be argued with, that gives it a certainty. 

Now I follow the Rue de Rome towards the old port. Everywhere the buildings with shutters, white and pastel, as if the sun has drained and turned everything a faded white. The harbour lined with boats, their sails blue and white; in lines they point upwards, their forms definite and leaving shadow. The reflections in the water are gentle ripples which turn them back to trees, they are branches bending gently with the movement of water. There is a big wheel circling slowly and up into the blue. I take photographs into the sun to see how they are drenched by light, as though the sun has pulled all the colours out and left only reflected lights. 

Looking down over the port from its vantage point, the basilica of Notre-Dame, again pure white in the heat of the sun. White buildings and shutters, the terracotta of their roofs and balconies. I climb the sloping streets that fan outwards and upwards from the harbour.

In the café near the old port, a young man sits outside a pavement café, gently strumming a ukulele.  He is relaxed, apart from everything, living in the moment. I wonder what his story is. The waitress minding the tables with ease reminds me of the waitress we admired on that first trip, for the art and grace with which she moved around the tables. 

In the morning light, the harbour bears traces of the football match that has taken place the evening before in the stadium across the city. The bars and cafes have spilled into morning as the smell of stale beer across pavements. The early morning brings the setting up of the market, the arrival of fishing boats to sell their catch; and the fisher men and women collide with the departure of stragglers in the cafes, holding on to the last part of night. 

A bus out to the city beach and at the back music playing loudly, the kind that saturates the atmosphere like the sunlight covering everything, transcendent and dreamy music. While the sun beats down outside, around us, we are bathed in music for a few moments, cinematic and ethereal. Trying to work out what song it is, somehow joyous and uplifting, it saturates our eyes in a timeless sound, we smile at each other; this is what we wanted.

Now I take the boat out to an island, passing the Chateau d’If, the legendary prison fortress. On the island, I walk paths across the rocky coves and inlets, pirate beaches. Where craggy rocks create places to climb, secret coves looking down to where the water beckons, the sheltered and secluded azure green of the water.

The boat back towards the city frames another view, the harbour as the jeweled centerpiece of the city, white and blue; sails and strong sunlight. I take a photo and it looks like a painting in oils from a time of ships and sunsets. Turquoise blue and burned terracotta orange like an antique map. 

As the city beckons me back again, to winding streets and afternoon shadow. The wheel turning towards the sun. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

By Anna Evans:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
– Hart Crane

I have been dreaming I am in New York. Looking out across the harbour to where the bridge begins and ends. With a paperback of poems to carry as I walk, walk across thee. Waiting for the sun to set, I follow the steps upwards to the bridge where time spans like birds in flight. 

From the book an image draws fragile in my hands. Without looking down I know on the cover is the bridge, pastel coloured and simple. The suspension of wires dominates the view, dark lines crossing over. The lines that cross from the centre outwards, to the bricks of Brooklyn. Birds fly distant, the kinds that children draw, shaping the letter m for movement. Through the middle rising upwards a vertical blue like crayon marks, shading to where the sky and water meet ascending; to the blue of distance that throws outwards and upwards. Joining the impossible like a bridge from shore to shore. The city in the distance marked in pink, as it might look in the morning light. It contrasts with the black lines of iron girders, and the steps leading onwards to the bridge. 

I know that inside the book is an inscription that reads To A. neat and precise with just one x to mark the spot. In your room the books in stacks surround us. The books like bridges: we take turns to select one and read out the first line. I pick up the book of poems saying I want to read it. And so, you take the book, write just inside the cover and give it to me. I never read further than the first poem or skim a few lines here and there. Still the words reach out and form a trail I must follow, in endless rivers crossing the land and all the flow of words that clogs them. Books that don’t belong to anyone, that stay with us for a time. 

I sit down and read, imagining that I look to where your arches end and the point at which the shadow forms. I read: Under thy shadow by the pier I waited / Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

Hart Crane looked out from his window on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, compelled by a changing view of the bridge. A vision to chase in symbolic form, in language. I look to find the author in its solid lines, in all its transient footsteps. To see him address the other side and set these bridges in motion. And the bridge moves as we walk. Its solid lines make stillness and motion combine. Iridescent, it sets in motion each day past; as though night and the fall of morning were gone already.

Waiting for night to fall, the dark comes quickly, and in crossing the city changes from the red and pink of dying lights, across purple-blue; to see the bridge come alive and the city melt in its shadow. I walk across moving through the crowds of people posing for photographs; there is no solitary view of the bridge, no chance to stand and look across. 

In the centre, two domed arches from which a series of wires are suspended in grid-like lines drawn against the sky. They are not so much imprisoning as uplifting, reaching high across the city. I walk taking blurry impressionistic pictures, city lights of many colours. Buildings that reflect one another, incandescent and blurring away into hazy distance. Becoming ghostly, they question solidity. Walking the bridge, it lives in motion. The wires suspended in black lines to draw you upwards. The view of the bridge that comes from walking. 

With you he walked across, hand in hand, in rapture. From this moment: these bridges in motion. Always crossing, from what is past and present, to what is on the other side. 

⁎⁎⁎

Walking across as sunset came and went. The sudden descent of darkness and the changing colours of the lights; the endless streams of traffic passing. When everything that lies below becomes murkier and more uncertain. The bridge measures out the distance between each wire, and our eyes fix on a series of lines laid out as far as the eye can see across the unfathomable reaches of water.

As darkness falls the wires suspended are lit with fairy lights that twinkle, that dwindle into distance, even as the darkness seems more engulfing. It saturates the sky above and draws upwards from the dark constant of the river below. And above and below are where the bridge remains suspended. Its very tautness and the precision of its measurement are carefully weighted against the depths; yet still the depths remain and seem ever closer. It is there in the way it joins across a gulf, a chasm; by its very joining it projects our thoughts to what lies below. 

In the night you dance exhilarated holding hands. Dancing over the bridge, uplifted. Like the bridge you are indestructible. The bridge is more than just a bridge. The bridge is life. In rapture you seek to say what daunts, what sinks under river water. To look upwards, where wires close in, suspending thoughts from city to city, from river bank to sea shore. So that for a moment you are flying, though you may always believe in falling. 

The water dark and obscuring. The bridge brings a shape and form to what is unfathomable. You must believe that there is a way to say it, that the bridge is possible. That you can write a message in a bottle and throw it carelessly to the currents, in waves. The bridge that cuts you off, unreachable, lost at sea. Your meaning obscured when you wanted to make visible another world just beyond this one. The bridge transports in metaphor, to carry across, from one side to the other. You leave only your words. While somewhere there are those that fall between the gaps, who find the unknown in the measured reason of the bridge.

While I have been crossing the bridge, darkness has come and changed the world as we see it. Each day, the same adjustment. From the solid mass of stone, soar two great arches, the strength of steel wires, thick and twisted, to iron girders bordering the edges, and thinner wires reaching out grid-like, touching the blue true of the sky, the billowing clouds, the coming light. The light that is always coming. There is colour and a sense of the city all around. Impressions gather like scattered lights and solid lines of steel. 

I am always imagining endings. That I might look down to the river and see your message in a bottle, transcending time. The past is there and waits for us to cross. Now the book leads me to the bridge. Crossing over, crossing back to what came before. A bridge to my past self, wherever time has placed you.

Across the vast silences like the river flowing, ever-flowing. When things changed, and each moment was already lost, unreal. 

I sometimes think we were never present; we were already looking back. You once wrote of me as a silhouette receding against the sky. Was it always so? I find you here again as I pick up the book and read onwards. I am free to cross the bridge and look back across the city, that expanse of time that is past. Is there a chance then, that when you read this you may say, that is not how it was, that is not what I said, that is not how it was, at all?

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Dispatches from the train: on becoming lost and found somewhere near Jackson, Mississippi

By Anna Evans:

From the train, drifting through the land, America endless passes through windows. We are travelling from New York by train heading south. Long distance train travel foregrounds the journey itself – the hours stretch ahead of us and time passes differently. A whole litany of travel, of escape, of distance. This is travel for its own sake: departures and the unknown destination, the one yet to be arrived at. 

From New York we say goodbye swiftly, disappearing into a tunnel and emerging in New Jersey. Time passes easily: the names of the stations before us like a list unfolding. Counting the states as they roll by … New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, Virginia … 

The landscape filters through the windows. Watching the outskirts of cities becoming central, immersed in the view from the window. Each place is a destination for someone, and at each station we await departure, glad to remain on the train with everything ahead of us, still a plan, an idea of travel; the onward pull of the train tracks. 

Windows frame the scenery, flickering still life by. To be in motion, like so many images coming together as a moving picture. Sitting still on a train this movement is entrancing. It is when I try to catch a moment of stillness and enclose it, that I get some sense of the speed we are travelling. Trying to read a sign at a passing station or recall someone glimpsed from the window. The view from the train is partial; momentary and suggestive.

Stepping out of the train at Washington, feeling the heat, feeling a difference. Sensing the unfamiliar, of places I have imagined but never seen. The names of the places resound through the announcements of the train conductor, coming up and down the carriage . . . Culpepper, Manassas. Small town America, picture perfect, while below the surface history crackles with tales of power struggles and the defeated. The railway tells stories of crossing a continent, of a means of leaving and becoming fugitive. 

As we travel it is hard not to think of all the unknown souls who laid down the tracks, lost to time. Immense bridges and river crossings connecting those vast expanses of land. All the images of pioneers and immigrants, wagons and horses, galloping across the horizon and as far as the eye can see, fabled legends of exploration myths and map-making. The iron road laid out as if to tame the land and mark out its boundaries, to fix and make permanent the story of a new world.

Shortly before our stop in Virginia, just as darkness is falling, the train comes to a stop. The storm has blown trees on the line. We wait in the middle of another huge forest, darkness outside, for news, for updates. Imagining great trees laid across the line, small figures scurrying around them. The falling night brings with it change and uncertainty.

America feels too big to begin, and I know that it makes no sense to think like this when I can track the progress of the train as I go. When it is restlessness that brought me here. I feel far from home, and the two impulses battle within me; my travelling spirit stretched to its limit, to the end of its comprehension. 

As the train travels through the night I am aware that we have barely scratched the surface of what lies beyond the next tree, the next horizon. Now I just feel lost. Is it possible to be lost when the train track winds onwards through the land, laid out piece by piece, when everything has been explained and laid to rest?

Except that no one really knows what lies beyond the measured miles, the boundaries of loss. 

***

We continue the journey by night. Our route passes through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana … People get on and off at stations along the way which I fail to wake at, pulled under by sleep, lulled by the movement, the sound of the train. Dimly aware of change, but cold, too cold, sheltering under the thin blanket, looking for a pillow to rest on. 

The fingers of sleep crept in stealthily and covered your eyes, tousled your hair, pushed you ever downwards, downwards. Sometimes you resurfaced and were crossing cities above like darkened shadows.

Train dreams are the ones that vanish through your fingers like the names of the stations while moving at speed. The train guards walking up and down the train. Good morning! First call for breakfast. Shifting, waking, looking out at the dawn, drifting again …

Onwards through the landscape, small settlements scattered through the tall and unending trees. Cities strung out in-between like troubled dreams. Passing, half imagined, the land divided into counties and marked out by rivers. Gatherings of houses and lights, the city like a dreamscape.  

Train dreams are the falling stars, the sleep that comes suddenly and takes over, the drifting and the sudden call back. The long and convoluted dreams that can only last a moment but that lie in infinite parallels circling back.

From the window, glimpses, snapshots, fleeting: time passing like something remembered you can touch. Travel makes you a stranger everywhere continually seeking for and casting off the sense of home. From the window impossibly long trails of freight cars. I picture the track that runs behind us, spooling away endlessly, lost into distance. The forlorn sound of the train, the sound for which the word was made, stretching outwards for-lorn.

Somewhere in the night we cross over to a time and space that feels different. Where time expands, and space widens. Overnight, recognition becomes replaced by a feeling of disassociation. That sometimes time reels out like so much track laid across the distance, when you try and picture the end of the line.

Waking to the morning light in Georgia. The train conductor passes calling out the names of the stops. Atlanta …

The railroad, the train track, always travelling, always moving on.

***

Travelling across America by train is like every song you ever heard that was melancholy and floated through you … in the telling of travel, departures and long distances, the lack of control over your own destiny, the loss of identity. The railroad reaches on into the distance, like the track spooling away behind, just out of view around the next bend.

Train songs, the names of destinations far away, connected, ever-connected by the railroad. The same music that America has been running from and tracing its way back to ever since. In these songs, departure and longing, distance and loss. Leaving the south, like exile and captivity, the weight of the journey and all those who dreamed of escape.

The longing of train songs; even if after roaming all those thousands of miles brings you to another place where things might be different, might be the same. 

The forlorn sound of the train approaching, like something remembered, already known. 

For a while in Alabama, the train follows the course of the river, a wild and overgrown bridge. The track winds off in the distance to vanished routes. 

As the hours and miles go by, distance starts to overwhelm us and we look out of the window, speaking less and less. The train travels through Alabama and Mississippi, deep and far away. Sitting in the buffet car, listening to the train staff talking. Apprehension comes with the falling of the light, the lengthening of afternoon, and the building clouds across the sky. We lack the words to explain, they hang between us, like the storm beginning to build outside.

Train words are the ones that fall between the ones we say, the ones that float between our window reflections and out into the trees like dandelion seeds; tiny parachutes looking for a safe landing.

Lost railroad tracks leading off into the trees. The lonely cry of the train through one track towns, passing once each day going south and once in the other direction. Long straight roads, white chapels and the highway out of town, past boarded up buildings and lone walkers. Leaving, becoming ghost towns, out on the road beyond the view from the train. The road that runs alongside the rail tracks. Becoming lost in distance. Lonely road, broken down town, marooned. 

The perfect vista as viewed from a train. Flickering sunlight from above, clouds on the horizon. In the viewing carriage of the train you can sit immersed in the landscape, and skylights offer a view of passing skies. I sit with book in hand, unopened, listening to the talk of other passengers, where they are going to, and where they have been. The way the light falls on the trees making some a golden yellow.

Evening comes, and then night falls with a formidable darkness. Something overcomes us, a deep and unending weariness we are unable to explain. Words fail us and we look out to the fading light as if to a great wave. My suffocated soul begins to accept, to comprehend the unending distance, to frame the land as a recognizable space. 

I carry it with me so that I know it will always be there like a longing.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Passages / Transambulare

By Anna Evans:

The passage is a city, a world in miniature.
– Walter Benjamin

Our walk back through the city, in the fading light, when everything starts to look different. We take the Metro upwards, with the idea that we can descend back towards the centre via a series of steps marking our route. I am charged with navigating streets unknown to me: guesswork, anticipating the disorienting effects of the darkness. Already, it begins to fold over us, obscuring the paths we take, bending downwards through the lit city streets.

You expect the secrets of the streets to unveil themselves like a map, as if you could look at them from above; but they only come step by step, there is no panoramic view.

It is at this time of day that the city begins to reveal itself. When street lamps are lit, exposing walls and the narrow passageways between buildings. The lights illuminate brightly so that the wall seems cast in yellow stone, and the shadows of overlooked corners steal away to find new hiding places.

The shutters suggest a neglected abandon, broken and crumbling. For a moment I am mesmerised, drawn inwards to claustrophobic interiors, the living darkness; concealment of unspeakable shadow. Echoes of the uncountable possibilities of the concave life of the city.

Out on the streets daytime is retreating, furtively, while the night is lit up like a museum display. Steps leading upwards, and at their base the silent scream of graffiti on walls. Unabashedly colourful, it becomes a mural, taking its place within the narrative of the streets.

As we walk, you identify one of the symbols that mark the famous passageways, the lion’s head, and opening the heavy wooden door we enter, perhaps there is a passage through. At the entrance I take a photograph…

***

It has been a day of wandering streets, drawn into courtyards and entrances, seeking glimpses of interiors, arches and vaulted ceilings. The traboules, the network of passages between buildings, crossing through the streets of old Lyon.

When the city was occupied in the Second World War, Resistance fighters used this system of passageways to evade the Gestapo and as meeting or drop-off points. Perhaps this is why they feel underground in some way, like stumbling upon the unseen and hidden side of the city. An in-between space, they suggest undercover operations, secrets and trespass, a code you have to know about; off the map.

They are a passage through where it looks like there is none.

***

The photograph shows a series of staircases lit up, rising to the top of the building. Railings ascending, the stairwells connect the floors, crossing sides and linking them together. The stairway exposed, ironwork and stone pillars; it is as though one partition, one side of the edifice has been removed, like a doll’s house.

In the photograph, the yellow light is eerie; it accentuates murkiness and incandescence. The ascent of the stairs a gradual slant upwards, shadowy and bending towards the reflected cast of iron railings. Lit up, haunted space. Through the closed door the city continues, spilling its inside into the outside. It is like seeing what usually takes place under cover, behind the walls of the building. Like an undercover car park, subterranean and suggestive. The illusion of mystery; what it looks like when no one is around.

Looking at the photograph, I notice the figure again; remembering how entering the passage had seemed like an intrusion, into a space we thought was empty. In the way that cities have always that possibility of an encounter, in passing by or meeting another, in crossing over. Footsteps following onwards.

In the contrast between bright and dark, the figure both blends in and is exposed. Like a shadow emerging from the walls of the building, ghostlike, and appearing only as the photograph is taken. An apparition. An echo of the light and the shadow. As if the figure is both there and not there.

It is the stillness of the figure that strikes me now. It is as though they have been sitting a long time, on the stairs, outside of laws and history. The lit cigarette, like a pause. The brightness of the light making a silhouette. The smallness of a human figure positioned in space and timeless, against the city streets. A witness to all the hidden and secret encounters, and to everything that might take place in a passageway.

***

Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction.

On visiting the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne

By Anna Evans:

Approaching along the peninsula, the town seems to lie at the end of the road, like reaching a final destination. A castle stands guard over the quiet estuary, dramatic and imposing, its battlements slowly reclaimed by the landscape. It is a trip I embark on as much to look for traces of the past, a memory of a prior visit fifteen years ago. Arriving at the hour of dusk in early spring, the town quiet and deserted, the Boathouse already closed for the day. We walked along the street to the pub where Dylan and Caitlin Thomas used to drink together in the evenings. Then we continued our journey into Pembrokeshire, driven on by the time.

I am thinking of a photograph on a beach somewhere on that trip to Wales. Dark clouds and grey sea. There is synchronicity in the image; our faces are together, touching in the half light. When photographs were still like slips of chance on the paper. Thinking about being outside as night fell in the mountains, sharing a bottle of wine; jubilant in the almost total darkness, with no lights to guide us home.

Today I am on time to make the pilgrimage and see inside the house, but I had imagined my return differently, that I would have more time to look around and to absorb the atmosphere of the place. I am distracted, harassed; my mind caught in the argument we had this morning, still unresolved. Family life spinning around us, its currents of confusion. I am looking for clues of something. Thinking back to a simpler time and recalling pictures of my past self, shrouded in the rain-soaked hills and twilight of the Welsh skies. Dylan Thomas is important to me. His poetry resonated with me, the colour of language. He gave me a way to think about death and the passing of time, and about change.

Thomas lived in the town with his family, and for the last few years of his life acquired the Boathouse and the writing hut. It is a place in which he wrote some of his most important poems, and a place that witnessed arguments, the disintegration of his marriage, of his body. A life lived outside convention. The house is understated, leaving scope for imagining life here. I look around, my camera stuck on sepia mode, nostalgia in the recreated drawing room space. A notice explains that this is not the actual furniture, much of which Caitlin sold in response to the ever-advancing demands for money, the unpaid bills.

Family photos on the wall. Dylan and Caitlin in a rowing boat, his deep brown eyes stare into the camera. The exhibition tells me that Dylan would retreat to his writing shed, away from the noise of the children, from the travails of family life. The closed door. I look out from the window at the far-reaching view out into the bay, across the estuary, outwards to sea. Thinking about the precarious balance of art and life, between real life and life on the page, and about trying to carve out a space for one from the other. Thomas is seen in a pure sense as an artist, one who created his art and placed it above all things, the artist as genius, demon angel, doomed to destruction.

I continue back along the path to the writing shed. It is beautifully restored and has inspired many aspiring artists, as the photographs and paintings of it attest. It is overlooking the water, the sweep of the bay and the harbour where boats lie, picturesque, as if cast adrift from the sea. A place to think about moorings and being unmoored.

I am always compelled by images of writing spaces and desks, by descriptions of how and when writing takes place. I think of my own chaotic balance of writing and life, the hasty tidying away of books and paper to make a space for living, my writing is always on the move, from one place to another. A dedicated writing space where things could remain untouched is every writer’s dream. Where, as Caitlin explains, from two until seven each day – often she would lock the door - Dylan would disappear, returning hours later with a perfectly crafted line or two of poetry. In his writing space, the many lists of words he compiled. The possibilities of language, and the meticulous hours spent in constructing a single sentence. Looking out to sea, a retreat away from the domestic confines of home, exposed to the waves and sealed off.

Leaving the writing shed, I begin to walk, thinking to head back into the town. There is a path leading to the churchyard where Thomas is buried, and a sign says that ‘the path to Dylan’s grave can be muddy.’ It occurs to me that I am the same age now, as Dylan when he died. I would like to keep following the path but I am uncertain where it goes and how long it will take. Instead I read your messages, you are wondering where I am, how long I am planning to be away.

Looking back as we drive onwards, the remains of the castle unexplored, the map open displaying the route along the coastline, the town falling away behind us.

Now I see that the road continues.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction and has recently launched a blog playing literary detective around Paris and London in seach or Jean Rhys and other wanderings, titled And The Street Walks In.