I.

Dear Laura Oldfield Ford,

I have been thinking a lot about ghosts lately.

The haunting nature of place in your book Savage Messiah can be taken as literal or
metaphorical. A flicker of deja vu, a vivid memory summoned out of nowhere, a nightmare of
days gone past. These are the kinds of ghosts that concern you. Your work deals with the
psychogeography of old and new London, but really it is about the interplay of those two, the
eerie in-between state where one time meets another.

The In-Between 1

In the narrative of urban developers, the past and present comprise two neat boxes that cannot be
transcended. The developers might include a quaint past as a selling point, but generally they are
more concerned with the modern incarnation of a building/neighborhood. If they cannot erase a
dark past, they can at least obscure it, and the bright condominiums are, to the newcomer, all that
ever existed in that space. It suits the developer and those in power to refuse memory and limit
their narrative solely to the present/future. Your work posits that the past is never truly over; that

Georgetown Aqueduct, D.C.

vestiges of old decades remain even if we cannot see any physical evidence, and that our
environments alter us as much as we seek to alter them.

II.

Every act of community destruction creates waves of resistance in its wake. It's always there, if
you know where to look. It comes in the form of oral tradition, graffiti, sabotage of new
businesses, and the formation of underground cultures and repurposing of spaces.

The Reclaimed Script2

This creates a kind of social cognitive dissonance, the noise, as I imagine it, of two opposing
narratives screaming at each other, the space where your work lives. And also the space you
inhabit, wandering around London like a ghost, remembering.
It surrounded her, no past no future, just suspension in the fog.

You float through this spirit world and bring the reader back haunting images from the ether.
Girls with sad eyes, sneering young punks and skinheads, drug addicts, transient people, and
other undesirables are juxtaposed with photos of Ballardian high-rises and council estates.
There's an iconography to this world, esoteric symbols and coded messages. The drawings glare
2

Metro tracks, D.C.

out at us from the page with fierce eyes, daring anyone to erase them from history.

The New Hieroglyphics 3

Hegemonic culture loves to romanticize its discontents, and it seems like every week there is a
new spread in Vice magazine about train hoppers or homeless youth. More trendy mainstream
coverage of graffiti and abandoned buildings with no discussion of the race/class oppression that
creates them. I love your writing because it is nothing like this insincere bullshit. You are living
and breathing this upheaval. These places you write about are your homes. And you resist the
temptation to romanticize the past.
All there // equal parts beauty // grim desperation.

Metro tracks, D.C.

The Past4

You understand that nothing is ever in a fixed, uncomplicated state.

She was here now, flesh and blood, but he was struggling with the images replicating furiously in
his head, the corridors opening, the vistas shifting and reconfiguring.

Your characters exist in constant flux. Unformed. This brings into question the definition of real.
What is real, only tangible things one can touch? Only the present, because we can see it? Or can

Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia

real also include memories, dreams, apparitions?

The Lost Soul5

In answer to this, I am reminded of what the writer/punk poet Richard Hell wrote about memory:

It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity jewels are pressed
into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories... But like the best poems, they're also never
really finished because they gain new meanings as time reveals them in different lights. Maybe
every memory is inside you from the beginning; they erupt and branch and merge in fantastic
patterns, but if you really tried you could trace any one of them back to the same original.

You drag things out of the dark chaotic factory Hell describes and force them into the light.
Every memory is edited, thus every memory is a type of storytelling. For the purposes of
understanding this London that runs counter to the neoliberal narrative, every element is
necessary and imagined interactions can be given the same weight as real ones. The book is
living collage, an ongoing palimpsest. Like the best poems, unfinished.

Holy Rood Cemetery, D.C.

The Palimpsest6

III.

In my hometown we're in the midst of the same battle you're fighting in Savage Messiah. Locals
struggle to stay in their homes as rents soar and corporate efforts to drive them out escalate. Its
turning into a city of stark, ironic contrasts: homeless people sleeping in the shadow of the White
House and drunks passed out in the doorway of Alcoholics Anonymous. The D.C. area I grew up
in has vanished. The anarchist bookstore next to the liquor store is gone, the huge abandoned
building we used to have shows in is now a Capitol Food Mart, and perhaps the biggest
difference is the disappearance of the group houses with colorful names: The Party Pit, the
Vermont Hurler, The Girl Cave, The Fireswamp. My memories are wrapped up in these places
drinking jungle juice, smoking cigarettes, baking cakes, scrawling graffiti, watching friends play
music, kissing boys who were too old for me, throwing up, drinking tea on someone's bed.
Moments embedded in these walls, my sweat and dirt. Traces of violence, psychic damage to the
atmosphere of a place. Stories lost and looking for their homes.

Metro tracks, D.C.

The Bureau of Misdirected Destiny 7

Instead we now have: a restaurant named Eat the Rich, a bland furniture store called And Beige,
that looks to a restrained color palette, yoga studios, luxury cupcake shops. If the developers
have their way, the world will soon be unbearably innocuous.

THE FUTURE IS BEIGE. THE FUTURE IS OFF-WHITE. THE FUTURE IS PASTEL. THE
FUTURE IS VERY POLITE AND WOULD LIKE FOR YOU TO CALM DOWN AND STOP
YELLING.

Like you, Laura, I wander the city ruminating, remembering, and hunting for traces of the past. I
am the haunter and the haunted. My memories consume me. The only way to exorcise them is to
obsessively put it on paper.
Dredge up the past // create debris.

14th and S, D.C. http://www.juxtaexposed.com/2010/04/06/the-bureau-of-misdirected-destiny/

Philly, Baltimore, D.C. I drift through train tracks, graveyards, old mental asylums, abandoned
buildings. I don't really like the terms flaneur or urban explorer, so I'll just say that I'm searching
for context.
IV.

My bike route to work goes through the city dump. Sunflowers. Brick towers, kudzu jungles.
Moralizing murals, wild raspberry bushes. Summer grass fragile // dried out and bleached by the
sun. I crawl into holes. Get scraped by thorns from overgrown vines. Looking at my arms and
legs you'd think I'd fucked a ghost. Hungover in the sunlight. Streams of rainbow filtering past
my eyelashes

we live in // have always lived in

// secret passageways we create.

Yours,
Arielle

West Baltimore