Proxies - Nicholas Hedges

Following on from my last entry I’ve been wondering whether an empathetic link between ourselves and those who fought and died in the First World War can – based on Paul Fussel’s quote regarding “moments of pastoral” (“if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) – be found in the idea of the garden.

Can the garden – that domestic, pastoral space – become a space of memory and, therefore, experience shared with those who died in the violent landscape of the Western Front?

My grandparents’ garden in Oxford in the late 1970s

One of the main difficulties faced in trying to empathise with individuals who lived and died before we were born is that to think them alive we must think too of our own non-existence (and if we’re imagining our own non-existence we cannot truly empathise). Furthermore, experiences of people such as victims of the Holocaust or World War 1 soldiers are so far beyond our own, it’s impossible, even with a keen imagination, to bridge that divide.

We therefore need a proxy, and that proxy is place. Being in a place where an historic event has taken place can help us empathise, in that we can do so through a shared experience of that particular place or landscape.

This was certainly the case for me at Auschwitz where it was through observing the trees that I could best empathise with the people who were there, even though their experiences were so unimaginably different.

Trees at Birkenau

(One might imagine that a consideration of non-existence might lead to empathy through a shared consideration of death, but as Jean Amery wrote:”Dying was omnipresent, death vanished from sight.”

Non-existence bears only a passing resemblance to death and non whatsoever to dying.)

With soldiers of the First World War it’s also impossible for us to empathise with what they experienced. We can empathise through being in the landscape of Ypres or The Somme – i.e. we can empathise through a shared experience of presentness, of, in effect, being alive – but the fact the landscape looks so different today makes this especially hard.

Mouse Trap Farm c1915 – a place near where Jonah Rogers fell

Paul Fussel’s quote however helps us begin to bridge that divide: the concept of the garden, that pastoral space on a domestic scale, becomes the proxy – a space which we in the present could be said to have shared with many of those who fought in the war.

My Grandparent’s garden is as much a part of the past as the garden in which Jonah (above) is sitting. It’s almost as if the past becomes a single remembered landscape – a garden in which we can find those who lived and died long before we were born.

Me as a small boy with my mum, nan, aunt and great-grandmother (born in 1878)