Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Empathy/Exchange: 668 grams

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This follows on from my last post – Goethean Observation: Pilgrims of the Wild, 1935.

I made this observation after struggling with an idea I’ve had for a long time. The idea came from work I made several years ago on the theme of the Holocaust which led to an installation at Shotover Country park in Oxford (2009) entitled ‘The Woods, Breathing’, pictures from which can be seen here. What I’ve since become interested in is the book that inspired the piece – that which Adam Czerniakow had read on January 19th 1940, remarking in his diary: “…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.”

I knew there must be a way of using this book, this text, as a means of establishing some kind of empathetic link with Czerniakow. It would be as if by reading the words, I was following Czerniakow through that forest, following the words as if following a trail. The idea of the forest as a means of augmenting empathy was something I’d used in ‘The Woods, Breathing,’ but what of the text itself?

I began by creating ‘blackout poems’ which, although I liked the derived text, didn’t do what I wanted the work to do, that being, to establish some kind of link with the past – with Czerniakow.

I tried incorporating these texts into other works…

…and although I liked the work, they didn’t serve the purpose.

I realised I was, to some degree, putting the cart before the horse. I was falling into bad habits – thinking about the form of the piece much too soon. What I needed was go back to what I had learned during my MA and research the idea properly; that meant starting with looking at the book which I did through a Goethean Observation of Grey Owl’s ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’.

I’d always thought of the text when thinking about this piece, but in doing the observation, that completely changed. As is often the case with these observations, a few words from the thousand or so written stood out:

I’m aware of the book’s weight.

There is an exchange of sorts.

When the inscription was made it became something else – a gift.

The book lends its weight; the weight borrowed from another time and given to this.

From these few words I get: Weight. Exchange. Gift.

Empathy is a kind of exchange where you swap with another to understand the predicament they are in. What you can swap or exchange is of course limited, especially when dealing with events which are both unimaginable in their horror and/or set in the distant past.

Art itself is an exchange and that is where I want to focus my attention.

That is the starting point of this piece: not the text, but the weight of the book, the exchange. So I weighed the book: 668 grams.

Exchanging the weight of the book for the weight of something else and interpreting that weight in the form of something new is also a means of illustrating the idea of taking someone else’s life/predicament and in some small way reinterpreting it within your own.

It’s also interesting that the title of the project, derived from the blackout poem, is Heavy Water Sleep (something which I saw a alluding to snow).

Silence in the Woods

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I’ve discussed previously, three extracts from newspapers in which a moment of silence serves to amplify all that happened before and after. To recap, those three extracts were [my italics in all]:

“On Sunday last, at the close of the evening service, the Society Meeting was held, and references to the death of Private Rogers were made by several members of the Church. Private Rogers’s mother is one of the oldest members of the Church. The meeting passed a vote of condolence with the relatives, all present standing in silence.” (1915) 

“Shortly after dusk, the lightning appeared in the south and western horizon, and soon became most vivid, blue sheets of lightning following each other in rapid succession, but unaccompanied by thunder.” (1842)  

“Her mother got up and tried the door but it was locked by [the] witness when her father and mother came in. Her father took the sword out of the sheath which he threw to the floor and then struck her mother on the back with the flat side of sword; neither her father nor mother spoke.” (1852)

In each of these three passages, the moment of silence is set in opposition to the text preceding it, and, as a result, it serves, as I’ve said, to amplify that text. As I was thinking about this, I became aware that the pieces of work, Heavy Water Sleep and The Woods, Breathing also reflected this opposition.

Both projects use a moment in the life of Adam Czerniakow. As I’ve written before:

“For almost three years, Adam Czerniakow was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the inspirations for this work is a line taken from his diary, which he kept whilst living in Warsaw in occupied Poland from 1939 to his death in 1942. On September 14th 1941 he wrote:

‘ In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing.’

On occasion, Czerniakow was allowed to leave the ghetto to visit the Jewish Sanatorium at Otwock just outside Warsaw. It was one place he could find some respite from the horror and torment he endured in the ghetto.”

In reading his diary, this effort and the toll which it took on both his physical and mental health is evident and in these few words – the air, the woods, breathing – words with which we can easily identify, we can glimpse his relief at being able, just for a short time, to stand in the woods and breathe. In that simple, everyday, action we see the other side of his life; the world far beyond our own comprehension.

Czerniakow would also seek solace in reading. One night, on January 19th 1940, he wrote:

“…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.”

Given what we know about the Holocaust and what Adam Czerniakow went through, these silent moments – in the woods at Otwock and reading at home – are set in stark contrast to what was going on around him. As a result, these two moments serve to amplify the horrors of the war; everything that had happened and everything that had yet to occur.

In my previous blog, I quoted Jorge Luis Borges who wrote:

“A single moment suffices to unlock the secrets of life, and the key to all secrets is History and only History, that eternal repetition and the beautiful name of horror.”

The word moment crops up a lot in my work, as it has in this entry. I’ve long thought that one can only empathise with people in the past through an awareness of present day moments – moments of the everyday. Borges’ quote seems to bear this out. In the case of Adam Czerniakow I have given two such moments. Then there are the three moments of silence in the passages above.

History is a cycle, an eternal repetition of single moments. When I read the same book that Czerniakow read (Pilgrims of the Wild) I am repeating that same single moment. Likewise, when I stand in a wood I am repeating another of those single moments.

So the silence amplifies History and the nature of that silence serves as a moment of connection with the past. The nature of silence and its opposition to violence is interesting too. I return to a favourite quote of mine:

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

Peace equates with pastoral, and, perhaps, with silence. I shall end with a quote from Rilke which also seems to fit with what I’ve been saying:

“Look, trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.”

Heavy Water Sleep (Poem)

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I wouldn’t really call this a poem, but poem is the best word I can think of to describe what this is at present. Based on previous work, this text is derived from the first 19 pages of the book ‘Pilgrims of the Wild.’

[3]Outside a window stands silent, the surrounding
covered with heavy water sleep.
There is no sound and no movement
dropping through the
closed rude
earth.

[4]a man
advancing with resolute step
But for the heavy steps,
there is silence

[5]time Meanwhile
emerges
from a hole in the day before
and
pulls impatiently

[6-7]at the window stops Outside
the so-lately deserted
Silence
the Extraordinary story
that lies behind this scene

[8-9]The town dipped and scattered
White to a maze
Reduced though it might be,
this year was feeling choked
The farewell celebrations
were coming my way;
singing a low
whispering dirge

[10]It was an arduous
empty return journey
A disastrous ground
barren, burnt out
tortured East so rumour had it
Much of my route lay through
unrecognisable miles
existing I passed on
wondering what lay ahead
sorrowfully living

[11]still worrying
I met some old faces, who made
history in these parts;
a landmark in the
town

[12-13]to get the feel of it again:
What did it all mean;
earlier days, undisturbed
kept alive by many old originals, waiting
days had passed into legend
respected by men
Time was rolling back
like a receding tide
adventurers, seeking the satisfaction
found in untouched territory
a strange, new, trail.
This place held memories
They had to stay

[14]a journey was made
that covered miles
occupied years
there had been a girl, cultured,
talented

[15]Most of my time
had been spent in solitude
I resented any infringement on my freedom
one of those unusual people

[16]looking behind
These things were very dear to me
they were real people
who walked beside me;
features brought to my attention
one by one

[17]I remember the hair
But far, far more
I discovered time
as it is now,
one with our own

[18-19]born only too often
yards heavy in view
I began to feel with a pencil in hand
the body, marking the outline
where the wind shaped against her form
proceeding to cut
I stood in apprehensive silence
and viewed the slaughter
out of which was constructed
the word best fitting
the impression which I gained

we had considered sending them back,
though we never did;
lonely at times vaguely uncomfortable
in those days the weather singing winter
through the window
sunsets were often good to look at
we arose before daylight and travelled all night
they had waited patiently, wishing
She was, she said becoming jealous
blind hatred could not see
and dreamed lines of traps

Heavy Water Sleep (Textwork) I

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This afternoon I’ve been working on a new approach to my Heavy Water Sleep series. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of the notebook – the crossings out, the marginalia, the sense of time – not only its accumulation through the pages, but its nowness in the moments of writing.

In particular, I love the pages of Walter Benjamin’s notebooks, one of which can be seen below.

There is something too, about the way the words on the reverse of the page show through that I find particularly pleasing on the eye.
The images below show my first efforts using the first two pages of the source book ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’.
I was also interested when I looked at one of the blank pages and saw the impressions left by the writing.
I was reminded of a photograph I took recently of the holes left by railings removed during World War II…
…which in turn reminded me of a photograph I took in a Jewish cemetery in Prague.
Returning to the Heavy Water Sleep series…
These text pieces called to mind the text maps I made last year.
So what could these pieces mean?
The idea behind them is that the book is a kind of map – the words like a trail leading through a vast landscape. Previously, I have used photocopies of the page, cutting the words out so as to make a new narrative whilst maintaining the integrity of the original. This ‘new’ narrative is in turn inspired by my reading of Adam Czerniakow’s diary.
There is another reader – or traveller; ‘Pat’, to whom the book was given at Christmas 1935.
Looking at Walter Benjamin’s notebook, I’ve listed its different aesthetic attributes:
crossings out
marginalia / annotations
reverse page words showing through
damage / wear of the pages
different text styles / colours
the archive stamp
This work will, in a sense, become an archive, one which reflects the archival nature of memory and the landscape, articulated through the metaphor of a book / map.
Is there any way of this book / map reflecting the text map structure as inspired by trench maps?
The Jewish cemetery image (above) is interesting as regards the placing of paper etc in the carved words of memorials. I’m not sure of the exact reason for this, but perhaps it has similar meaning to the placing of stones on graves? Why this custom exists isn’t entirely clear, but it could be to show that people have visited the grave or to keep the soul within. I like both these ideas in relation to my thinking on paths and the landscape, the idea that memories are held in specific places and that people have travelled the same route before us.
How would this be shown in an artwork? With pieces of rolled paper? Perhaps these pieces could contain ‘glimpses’ of those worlds to which previous travellers belonged?

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings) III

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I worked again tonight on the studies for Heavy Water Sleep, working in landscape elements such as trees and sky. The original text from which the words are taken, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ by Grey Owl, is set chiefly in the forests of Canada. And in the ‘secondary text’ which inspired the work in the first place, ‘The Diaries of Adam Czerniakow’  there is a moving passage in which, following a visit outside the Warsaw Ghetto to the woods of Otwock, he writes simply, ‘… the air, the woods, breathing.’ Trees then seem integral to the work and have indeed been a recurring them in much of my work, particularly work to do with the Holocaust and World War I.

I wanted then to use trees in these works and found myself using a stylised form which I’d scribbled one day in my notebook based on lines you find in Family Tree diagrams.

This symbolic tree was in part inspired by some work I did on the First World War in which I used the dividing lines on the backs of original wartime postcards to symbolise the bond between the anonymous individuals who died in the war and their families back at home. These ‘T’ shaped divides reminded me of photographs in which hastily dug graves were marked on battlefields with crude crucifixes. I therefore created landscapes (based on my visits to battlefield sites on what had been the Front) and used these T-shapes to represent graves.

Battle 2

From these T-shapes I derived the forms for the trees below.

Heavy Water Sleep

Heavy Water Sleep

The link between them and the Ts above is an obvious one – even more so when one considers the original inspiration for this work.

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings) II

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I worked again last night on the ‘Heavy Water Sleep’ paintings, continuing to concentrate on the texture. For the first board below I used a white acrylic paint mixed with an acrylic modelling paste.

DSC07384

The words are too chaotic in this one and the paint has dried very matt. I could add some gloss medium but it would make much more sense to use oil paint which I will for the final versions. I will add another layer to the painting above later.

Having completed this painting I worked again on the one I did yesterday.

DSC07382

I like how the words are slightly more obscured now and much prefer their more ordered placement. The next thing I want to try is keeping the lines of the pages together rather than placing them in a random fashion.

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings)

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I’ve started work on a new series of paintings based on the Heavy Water Sleep work I’ve been doing over the past few years. The idea is to create a series of paintings based on the idea of the words being a trail in a landscape (in turn derived from the idea that the book is a kind of map, leading me through the landscape of the past). The words from each page will be cut out with most painted over either wholly or in part. The words which make up the ‘poem’ of each page will be left, as per the image below.

DSC07376

The above sketch shows how the words might be placed.

What I realised after completing this sketch is how important it is to create a sense of depth in the work. At the moment the words are raised upon the surface, whereas they need to appear ‘sunk’ into the paint layer like footprints in the snow. Furthermore, the picture plane needs to be much bigger to give a greater sense of space – of wilderness; after all, this work represents the idea of the past as a place.

I shall continue – fo the time being – working on this scale in order to get the textures right, then progress to a larger canvas.

I suppose the ‘feeling’ I want to achieve with these paintings is that of the lone traveller, following in the footsteps of someone long since gone, and the one landscape painter who comes to mind is Caspar David Friedrich, two of whose pictures are reproduced below:

Of course I’m not aspiring to create something that looks like these paintings, but something which instills within the viewer the same sense of space, solitude and wilderness – not forgetting a sense of time’s inevitable passing.

Heavy Water Sleep

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Continuing from what I was discussing yesterday (see Humument), I decided to make a start on my own ‘Humument’ by reading the first page of Pilgrms of the Wild by Grey Owl, using the text to describe something about the moment in which I was reading it. Given the snow and the freezing conditions outside, I was surprised at what I came up with, and very pleased with the result. The image below shows the original pages with my amended version below:

It goes to show how this technique can lead to unexpected, and in this case, rather beautiful results. I would never have thought before of describing snow as ‘water sleep’, but as my eyes scanned the page, the combination of words lept out at me.

My plan is to rework a page a day – not necessarily every day – and to rework the same pages with the Diary of Adam Czerniakow in mind.

A Humument

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In January this year, I used words from two seemingly unrelated books to create an installation in Shotover Country Park as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece was called The Woods, Breathing, the title coming from an entry in the diary of Adam Czerniakow, who was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto up until his death in 1942.

In his diary, on January 19th 1940, Czerniakow describes a book he’d read, of which, he wrote: ‘The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.’ The book was Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, and his comment is especially poignant given the horrors of the time in which he was living. It’s as if in the book, he found the freedom he craved, freedom which vanished as soon as the book was closed. The previous year, a few months after the start of the Nazi Occupation, he wrote how he was ‘constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times.’ There is a sense then, when he describes Pilgrims of the Wild that he is also envying the author, Grey Owl.

I’ve always seen Grey Owl’s book as a map, as in many respects all books are, maps through fictional landscapes, half conjured up in the minds of the author and his or her readers. Having read Czerniakow’s diary, reading Pilgrims of the Wild bought me closer, not only to him but to the time in which he was living, as if reading the book was a shared experience; as if we were walking through the same landscape, emerging at the end in very different places. That is not to say of course that reading the book enabled me to understand what it was like to live in those terrible times – nothing can ever do that. But by reading the words he would have read, it was as if I was following in his footsteps.

Looking up from the page, gazing out the window at the sky made me consider the present, the moment in time in which I was living. The sky was that of the book’s landscape, and that which Czerniakow would have seen outside his own window. We must remember, although it seems quite obvious, that the past too was once the present. By understanding this, we can begin to find indviduals lost to the pages of history. We don’t know what it’s like to experience the horrors of Nazi persecution, but reading the book beomes a shared experience, both mentally and kinaesthetically. It is an everyday activity, which opens up a crack through which we can glimpse the past.

Tom Phillips’ ‘treated Victorian novel’ – A Humument – (a page from which is pictured above) has always interested me; the technique of taking a text and changing it to make something entirely new is appealing for a number of different reasons. Every conversation we have, letter we write or note we take borrows from conversations, letters and notes spoken and written over the course of centuries (depending of course on how long the language has been used). Similarly the way we move, whether walking, sitting, standing or reading, borrows from the ways people have moved, again over the course of many hundreds, if not thousands of years. For me, Tom Phillip’s technique as used in The Humument articulates this. It’s as if we’re in the same landscape created by the original work (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, first published in 1892) and yet are making our way through it in an entirely different way, as if the words are breadcrumbs on a trail, most of which have long since vanished.

As we walk down streets today, across parks, or through woods, we find ourselves within the same place as those who walked there a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred years before. We use the same words, we move the same way, but find ourselves interpretating the place quite differently. But it is the same place.

I want to useTom Phillips’ technique and create a new work from Pilgrims of the Wild, a page from which can be seen below; a work that articulates both my time of reading the book and that of Czerniakow’s.

Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl

© Nicholas Hedges 2024