Foggy Flâneur

Lilian McCarthy

I love walking, particularly around cities. Once upon a time, I loved to run, too. I would run anywhere, always with an objective in mind; training to become a better soccer player. Better, in this context, means faster, stronger, more agile, more reactive, more in-tune with my body. However, five years ago, I had to give up running as a result of an extended and growing health crisis. I am no longer able to run essentially any distance, and I haven’t played any sort of sport since that time. Now, there are days I cannot leave my apartment. Every inch of my body hurts, particularly my head and back. My brain is a cloud of static, sparkling, pulsing pain; I can’t stand up or bend over, never mind put my feet in shoes and explore with any sort of levity or purpose, even if it is just to witness my surroundings.

W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn walks with a purpose, just as I used to run. In some ways, it is physical, but not in the sense of getting from A to B. His purpose is to simply walk and by doing so, work through the trauma of being born in Germany as World War II ended and the consequences unfolded in his personal life and surroundings. He frequently gets lost, walking in circles upon the heath of East Anglia. His physically random walking is reminiscent of the flâneur, the man who saunters around observing urban society with little to no physical or directional goal, as popularized by Baudelaire. In Sebald’s case, however, he is in the country, a somewhat sparse and unpopulated area, despite its singular natural beauty. I believe that his version of “observing urban society” is rather observing the machinations of his own mind and their connection to his cultural and societal origins. By doing so, and by spending chapters on extensively detailed accounts of various topics such as Thomas Browne, the herring trade, a friendly Irish family, the Taiping Rebellion, and the silkworm moth, he follows his mental paths where they take him. Rather than shutting down his thoughts, feelings, and memories, he allows himself to wander through, explore, and observe them, just as his feet wander through, explore, and observe the heath.

Unexpectedly, The Rings of Saturn begins with the story of Sebald’s sudden illness and confinement to a hospital which begins a year to the day after he begins his East Anglian walking tour. He is “in a state of almost total immobility” and during this time, he begins “in [his] thoughts to write these pages. [He] can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, [he] became overwhelmed by the feeling that Suffolk expanses [he] had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from [his] bed was the colorless patch of sky framed in the window.” Perhaps unwittingly, Sebald here shares an anecdote all to familiar to own experiences and to those of my peers crippled by chronic illness and disability. In many cases, our ability to access the physical world outside of out prison-like home is deeply affected. Sebald finds it necessary, as I literally have done myself, to “assure [himself] of a reality [he] feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window…and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on [his] belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours [he] dragged [himself], despite the pain, up to the window sill.” He goes on to describe his physical appearance in this moment, writing “in the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass.” How often have I done the same, absorbing the brief taste of the glass’ coolness on my aching forehead before my feverish flesh warms the spot of contact. I glimpse clouds passing, perhaps a bird, maybe even a car drive by, and it serves to reassure me, to some extent, that I did not imagine my life beyond the dark room where I find myself contained. I see life other than my own, life whose thoughts I do not know, whose dreams I do not dream, whose sensory experiences are beyond my comprehension (in the case of animals).

In such a situation, one I experience nearly weekly, sometimes for days on end, and that Sebald writes about in this one instance, one is forced to give up beloved rhizomatic wandering; we must, rather, “robinsonner,” a term created by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his 1884 novel À Rebours. Just as Robinson Crusoe is stuck on an island, the once-flâneur becomes stuck in their mind. The main character in the Huysmans’ novel does so by choice. But I, Sebald, and countless others have no agency in the matter. We are forced to travel, explore the world, from the confines of our body. We are forced to exist only within ourselves, letting our minds create the world beyond our skin in a dance between imagination, memory, and knowledge. In a painful and unique way, as Huysmans wrote in the 1903 preface for the novel, we must take “swift flight to the land of dreams, [seek] refuge in the illusion of extravagant fancies.”;

The special complexity of this reality comes when one considers how to robinsonner without a fully functioning brain. I began to experience this as a child when I started experiencing migraine, which was exacerbated by two concussions at age 12, the second of which was severe. My subsequent infection with Lyme disease that went undiagnosed and untreated for over a decade contributed significantly to my neurological decline. Neurological effects are a hallmark of many chronic infections, post-viral illnesses, and other disabilities; it is currently a soaring cause of disability that people experience with “Long Covid,” essentially Myalgic encephalomyelitis resulting from Covid-19 infection. As MEAction writes on their website, “Like many other neurological diseases, up to 80% of cases of ME/CFS are initiated by infection. Several preliminary studies are now showing that nearly half of people with Long COVID have ME/CFS.” Thanks to the failure of my doctors, after experiencing increasingly problematic neurological issues for over a decade, I only recently learned the term “brain fog.” It was like a bubble burst. I finally had a phrase to describe my brain’s frequent inability to create coherent thoughts, read, communicate with my loved ones, and feel like a real, material, functioning, fleshy creature.

Brain fog, as well as my other least-favorite vestibular migraine symptom known as [depersonalization/derealization] (LINK), is exacerbated with my migraine spikes. These spikes in symptoms (I technically have had a migraine for eight years straight, which is called intractable migraine, so when I feel extra bad, they’re called spikes rather than the usual attack) can be caused by many factors, or for no discernible reason at all. Unfortunately, the times when I need to robinsonner the most - when I am trapped in my room, crushed with pain, nausea, photosensitivity, etc. - are when I am the least able to. When I make my occasional pilgrimages to my windows to check in with reality, just as Sebald did, I often can’t even tell if I am, in fact, seeing reality. I could be watching TV, or looking at a painting, or, worst of all, it’s all a dream.

I wonder if Sebald experienced this too. Did he experience brain fog? Or just physical pain? Or my delightful combination of both? Did he, as I do, when feeling better and returning to outdoor space, ever wonder whether, in fact, what he actually experienced while ill was a dream, rather than the dream being the life outside of the hospital? In the hospital, did he wonder if he would ever escape again? And in his future walks, was part of the trauma he walked through the trauma of experiencing such isolation, wherein he was “cocooned in an almost complete and, as it were, artificial silence. All [he] could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in [his] own ears.”

I will never know just what he felt and how similar it truly was to my own experiences. But the next time I am trapped in my room, somewhere between being too-in-my-body with pain and completely unable to comprehend my surroundings or to robinsonner, I hope I at least am able to remember that a man I will never know, so many years ago, was similarly trapped. And he, too, was eventually able to escape, to become his own type of flâneur once again, to once again wander, as well as robinsonner, freely.

PDFs of The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald used in quotes can be found HERE

Lilian McCarthy (she/they) is a disabled, queer, nonbinary woman who lives in Boston, MA and Dublin, Ireland. She is a Masters candidate in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She enjoys fabric arts, painting, playing with animals, writing, and translating French and Italian work.