Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

The First Line?

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Reading Clive James’ Poetry Notebook, I find myself a little better prepared to tackle the task of writing a poem; something I’ve wanted to do since the start of the New Year. I’ve made attempts in the past which I might publish in due course, but reading the Poetry Notebook I see where those attempts were lacking, as well as where, in small parts, they might be deemed to have worked.

What I have tended to do in those past efforts was to allow language to take over, to become a thing in itself; words for the sake of words. Now however, I want those words to work – to convey a specific meaning. In my art, I try and articulate that which is often beyond prose, things which should be well expressed in verse form.

But what will my subject be?

With the centenary of my great great uncle’s death near Ypres (8th May 1915) fast approaching, I thought I would look there for my subject, and remembering his obituary, I read it again and found my first line (the last line of the obituary):

All present standing in silence.

It’s a moving line which, having been isolated from its initial context creates a question. Who – or what – is present and standing in silence? I thought of soldiers standing for roll-call on a Parade ground. I thought of trees… but the language doesn’t allow for their lack of movement; yes they sway in the wind, but they do not leave and return as being present would suggest the ‘all’ have done. The words speak of people who have come together as a specific group. Of course, in its original context, the ‘all’ were the relatives mourning the death of one of their own:

The meeting passed a vote of condolence with the relatives, all present standing in silence.

The all is a family which, in the small church, isn’t all present. Instead there is a raw space which the silence seeks to fill; a physical silence eclipsing the wake of the church as it mines the depths of the family’s grief. Even from a distance of 100 years one can tune-in to that moment; catch as on shortwave radio their internal dialogues. And just as one can hear the “references to the death of Private Rogers” made by several members of the Church, those speeches are made formless as if heard underwater. For us it’s the distance of a century that does it. For the family it’s the distraction of cherished memories whose shapes are knife-sharp and remembered by their bodies.

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

Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.

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I read this poem by my favourite poet, Rilke, and like so much of his work it is absolutely beautiful. This translation is by Stephen Mitchell.

Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said.to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars —:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around —,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away, dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

T.S. Eliot (2)

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Burnt Norton

And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

T.S. Eliot

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East Coker

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

The Keening Landscape

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World War 1 Serviceman
I sometimes think of these images as pieces of theatre. There’s the stage on which a man stands wearing his costume. He leans on a prop – a chair, the scenery hanging behind him; a pastoral scene with trees and flowers; a path and a bridge crossing a river. And as in any piece of theatre, the costume, scenery and props combine to tell a story. But what is the story?

The First World War: this young soldier would have played his part; perhaps one of the nearly 900,000 British men killed in action. Or one of the over 1.6 million wounded. But there is nothing in the backdrop or prop that points us towards that tale. Just the costume.

So what story does the scenery tell us? A soldier stands in a landscape; an idyllic world seemingly untouched yet threatened by a war in which the soldier has yet to play his part. (Or rather, the war has yet to play a part in the soldier’s life: an important distinction, for if the story or ‘play’ is History, then this soldier’s part would be a minor one. Imagine a vast stage, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of actors. Most of them would say nothing, remaining part of the anonymous ‘chorus’ (exiting and entering the stage) leaving the lead actors, playing the parts of named politicians and Generals, to speak any lines. Yet of course, in his own life story, this soldier would play the lead. It would be as if towards the end of the ‘play’, one of those hundreds or thousands of extras making up the chorus, would step forward and begin to speak.)

There is another story. The war is over. The threatened landscape is secure, or perhaps the traumatic landscape is healed. The trees have returned, as have the flowers. But what of the story? The soldier still wears his uniform. The actor is still in his costume, seemingly unscathed.
It was as I considered this, that I recalled reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In the Tenth elegy we read:
And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).
And she shows him grazing herds of mourning
and sometimes a startled bird draws far off
and scrawls flatly across their upturned gaze
and flies an image of its solitary cry….
Dizzied still by his early death, the youth’s eyes
can hardly grasp it. But her gaze frightens
an owl from the crown’s brim so it brushes
slow strokes downwards on the cheek – the one
with the fullest curve – and faintly,
in death’s newly sharpened sense of hearing,
as on a doubled and unfolded page,
it sketches for him the indescribable outline.
For me, the story told by these postcards is not one of war, or indeed the imminence of war, but rather the war’s end. The soldier has played his part.

Glimmerings: The War Poets, Paths and Folds

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One of the nicest compliments I received during Friday’s private view was ‘…these remind me of Siegfried Sassoon…’. The works in question were those images of imagined World War I landscapes painted onto folded paper, one of which I have shown below:

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In fact, the war poets were brought up a number of times in relation to these works which – for obvious reasons – pleased me enormously. But, I wondered what it was about these pieces which called to mind the poets?

One of the poets I’ve become increasingly interested in, is Edward Thomas – killed at the battle of Arras in 1917. I first became aware of his work whilst reading a book of World War I poetry, in which I found his poem ‘Roads’ (a poem I’ve already discussed in relation to my work). It was then in Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Wild Places’ that I encountered Thomas again, this time in relation to another poet, Ivor Gurney. In a previous blog I wrote:

After returning from the war, Ivor Gurney, like so many others suffered a breakdown (he’d suffered his first in 1913) and a passage in Macfarlane’s book, which describes the visits to Gurney – within the Dartford asylum – by Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas is particularly moving. Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance survey maps of Gloucestershire:

‘She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.’

 Macfarlane discusses Thomas in another book, ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot,’ in which he writes how for Thomas, paths “connected real places but… also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses – between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal – occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms. Corners, junctions, stiles, fingerposts, forks, crossroads, trivia, beckoning over-the-hill paths, tracks that led to danger, death or bliss: he internalized the features of path-filled landscapes such that they gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

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Ever since I walked a path in Wales on which I knew my great-great grandfather walked every day to the mine in which he worked, I’ve been interested in the idea of people as place (and vice-versa) – see Landscape DNA – the simultaneity of stories so far. The path from the small town of Hafodyrynys to Llanhilleth where he worked, not only connected those two places, it also connected me with my ancestor. It did just what Thomas suggested; connected real places but also went backwards to the past and inwards to my own self. As Macfarlane puts it: “paths run through people as surely as they run through places.”

 It was important for me that the images shown above did not appear so much as pictures – objects stuck on a wall – as objects of use. I wanted them to appear as if they’d been unfolded rather than simply painted, that like maps, they could be read rather than simply looked at. I wanted them to retain the potential for being folded (which, if they were framed, wouldn’t have been possible) for this inherent potential of folding and unfolding refers back to an observation I made whilst studying an old trench map.

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During that observation I wrote, “…the past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.”

The folds in the map are like ancient paths in a landscape. We can walk (within reason) wherever we like through a place, but more often than not, we will follow the way of countless others before us. Paths are themselves like folds within the landscape, and we, like the map, resist being folded any other way.

Trench Map 1916

Macfarlane again writes how for Thomas “…map-reading approached mysticism: he described it as an ‘old power’, of which only a few people had the ‘glimmerings’.”

These glimmerings reminded me of a passage I read in Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography, in which he writes: “Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary…”

These ‘glimmerings’or ‘shifting angles’ are best seen or accessed through the everyday; observations of which I record in other map works.

Map Work

This is something which Macfarlane again seems to allude to in ‘The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot’, when he writes: “The journeys told here take their bearings from the distant past, but also from the debris and phenomena of the present, for this is often a double insistence of old landscapes: that they be read in the then but felt in the now. The waymarkers of my walks were not only dolmens, tumuli and long barrows, but also last year’s ash-leaf frails (brittle in the hand), last night’s fox scat (rank in the nose), this minute’s bird call (sharp in the ear), the pylon’s lyric crackle and the crop-sprayer’s hiss.”

As I have recorded in my text-maps:

A man talks holding his hat
A flag flies, fluttering in the growing wind
The next bus is due
A car beeps
Amber, red, the signal beeps
The brakes hiss on a bus

Maps are objects which we fold and unfold. We unfold them to find our place within the landscape. We fold them and carry them with us. The process or unfolding and (en)folding: the idea that the past can be seen as being enfolded within the smallest objects and everyday observations in vital to my work; as is the way in which we are enfolded (written) into the landscape as we walk; the way in which the landscape is unfolded as we travel across it. Knowledge, likewise, is also unfolded in this way. As Tim Ingold writes in ‘Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description’:

“…knowledge is perpetually ‘under construction… the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding [my italics] field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur. Where things meet, occurrences intertwine, as each becomes bound up in the other’s story. Every such binding is a place or topic. It is in this binding that knowledge is generated.”

Empathy is another important aspect of my work and I’ve stated before that empathy is an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. I like to think that with these works I’ve discovered a means of expressing that.

Finally, the works I’ve made are fragile pieces, and in another passage on Thomas, I found in Macfarlane’s prose a sentence which describes why they should be so: “His poems are thronged with ghosts, dark doubles, and deep forests in which paths peter out; his landscapes are often brittle surfaces, prone to sudden collapse.”

Perhaps this, in part, answers my question above.

The Expiration

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SO, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away;
Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day;
We ask none leave to love; nor will we owe
Any, so cheap a death as saying, Go.

Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Oh, if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, go.

Wordsworth and The Other

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On my journey back from Nottingham yesterday, I listened to a podcast of In Our Time about William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Whilst listening to one of the panel talking (Stephen Gill) I was struck by his reading of a particular passage and what he said about it thereafter. The passage was from Book II of the poem and is as follows:

The garden lay
Upon a slope surmounted by the plain
Of a small Bowling-green; beneath us stood
A grove; with gleams of water through the trees
And over the tree-tops; nor did we want
Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream.
And there, through half an afternoon, we play’d
On the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent
Made all the mountains ring. But ere the fall
Of night, when in our pinnace we return’d
Over the dusky Lake, and to the beach
Of some small Island steer’d our course with one,
The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there,
And row’d off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.

Stephen Gill said of this passage: “look at the language of this, it’s all about your body being taken over by the outside world, the dead still water lays upon thy mind, the sky sinks down into my heart and the pleasure of it all is a weight.”

I was struck by this passage and commentary as it seems to parallel the notion of the embodied mind; a corporeal consciousness engaging with the world through the physical body.

I bought a copy of The Prelude and read the first few lines which served to illustrate this point further:

Oh there is a blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek
And seems half conscious of the joy it gives.

The following passage is a lovely description of the act of wayfaring:

Whither shall I turn
By road or pathway or through an open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon a river, point me out my course.

In a piece I wrote on my website about history, I wrote the following:

In his book The Materiality of Stone,  Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes: ‘The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would he impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. Dillon comments: “The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”’

I am interested in how the landscape remembers the people it ‘sees’ and I find this ‘Other’ everywhere in Wordsworth’s poetry. Again in Book I of The Prelude.

How Wallace fought for Scotland, left the name
Of Wallace to be found like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country, left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of Ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river banks

In Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy with the following words:

Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance,
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together

I like to think of this poem and this passage as addressing nature herself, that great ‘Other’ which remembers those whom she has seen.

No Man is an Island

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I have written a great deal about how I perceive the past and how I use objects and the landscape to find  ways back to times before I was born. In my text ‘What is History‘ I conclude with the following paragraph.

“History, as we have seen, [might be described as] an individual’s progression through life, an interaction between the present and the past. It follows, having seen how the material or psychical existence of things extends much further back than their creation that history spanning a period of time greater than an individual’s lifetime is like a knotted string comprising individual fragments; fragments within which – in the words of Henri Bortoft – the whole is immanent.  The whole history of all that’s gone before is imminent in every one of its parts; those parts being the individual.”

I was reminded as I read this paragraph – and in particular the last line – of the poet John Donne and the following words taken from his XVII Meditation:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Having read this, I thought about some of the work I’ve been making for my forthcoming exhibition in Nottingham, Mine the Mountain. Two pieces are maps of invented landscapes, one of which (the first shown below) is based directly on a map I created as a child, the other based on the outline of Belzec Death Camp as seen in an aerial view of 1944.

If I Was A Place
If I was a Place, 2010

The Past is a Foreign Country
The Past is a Foreign Country, 2010

The first map, as I have said, is a contemporary reproduction of one I made as a child. It’s therefore essentially a map of an individual – of me, as I was at the time. It is a place that, although imagined, was real nonetheless, one based on fragments of my memory and my perception of the distant past.

Having been to Wales (in 2008) and imagined all my distant forebears walking the various tracks and roads around the village where my grandmother grew up, I realised how I was very much a part of those places and they in turn were part of who I was. I had existed – at least potentially – in those places long before I was born. All those roads, paths and trackways led in the ‘end’ to me. Of course that sounds a rather egocentric way of perceiving the world and its history, but then I’m not suggesting that I am the only intended outcome. Just as my invented world – my map of me – was made of all those bits of the past I loved to imagine as a child (the untouched forests, the unpolluted rivers and streams) so I can see how this foreshadowed my current thoughts on history; how I am indeed (as we all are) a place, one made of all those places in which my ancestors walked, lived and died. 

A quote from a source which is of huge importance to me and my work (Christopher Tilley’s ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’.)

“Lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them so much so that the person can become the place (Gaffin 1996). The body is the medium through which we know place. Places constitute bodies, and vice versa, and bodies and places constitute landscapes. Places gather together persons, memories, structures, histories, myths and symbols.”

Alongside the second map I will be showing a piece of text taken from the diary of Rutka Laskier describing what appears to be an imaginary landscape, though one perhaps based on memories of family holidays to Zakopane, Poland. She was a child when she died in the Holocaust and by putting the two maps together, I want to reflect on the numbers of children who perished, as well as illustrating how within each child – within everyone – the whole of humanity is immanent.

John Donne’s words serve to illustrate this sentiment further still. No man, woman or child is an island. So whilst I have created two maps of individuals, through Donne’s words we can see how these islands comprise pieces of everybody else.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.

Poem – The Crematorium

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And so to the crematorium
We’ll make our way again. This empty place
Full of names, shards like glass from broken
Window panes, and rain like thorns on roses.
To the waiting room where no-one sits
Where all the clocks have stopped to rub their hands
Where mourners recount the hour of the toll
And one by one swallow nothing whole.

Through the gates the headlights come, bearing down
On everyone who waits. Black slick night,
Shadows in no hurry for today or
Days that have passed. A nervous laugh
Hovers above the breathless chimney stack
A graceful scar upon the tumbling sky
The bird floats high by dint of searching eyes
And dives. Gone as if it never was at all.

We greet old friends and those still unknown
With half-suppressed expressions. Like uncertain
Lovers in love’s first encounter; a chain-gang shackled
By the things we should remember, we walk
Towards the chapel. We follow the pipes
That bellow death in gentle slumbered tones
And take our seats with strangers; our only
Child in common has seen the flame and blown.

We hide in the order of service
Words of hymns that nobody knows, rising from
The page like cat-pawed moths, flitting round a
Hopeful bulb. Then at last the curtains close
To hide the cheap illusion. Some close their eyes.
Some stand with hands clutching their tears
Like summer drinking rain. Then all go home
Beyond the flowers, until it’s time again.

Silence

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It was after reading a poem by Edmund Blunden that I started to think much more about silence as a space in which to remember. In ‘1916 seen from 1921,’ we get a glimpse of what it was like for Blunden, for a survivor of the Great War, as he looks back at the horrors of the conflict and ahead towards the future.

“…Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree…”

In my previous entry, ‘Night and Day’ I touched on emptiness as a means by which we (or a place) might best remember an event or events:

“It is better to form one’s memory loci in a deserted and solitary place, for crowds of passing people tend to weaken the impression…”

Emptiness equates of course with silence, and, particularly in the case of the war, and all proceeding wars, silence is the means by which we collectively remember those who lost their lives. It is only now, having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ieper, that I see the two minutes silence as a metaphor for the holes left by those who died; holes made by the absence of sound, the absence of voices. It is not only our voices which are stopped as we remember, but rather those of the dead.

Edmund Blunden

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Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) saw action at both Ypres and the Somme and was awarded the Military Cross. A friend of Siegfried Sassoon, he became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1931 where he remained until 1944, returning to the city in 1968 as Professor of Poetry.

I found the following poem in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.

1916 seen from 1921

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there – and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none’s at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary’s shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

This is a beautiful poem, three lines of which struck me in particular:

Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

As part of my research for my OVADA residency I have been looking at the area of Oxford in which the OVADA gallery is situated (Gloucester Green) a place which following the Black Death was known as ‘Broken Hayes’. At this time (c.1348/49) many parts of the town – decimated by the plague – were empty, and Blunden’s lines seem to describe perfectly this sense of emptiness, reflection and loss.

The Moon

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“The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water.”
Dogen Zenji (1200 – 1253)

“Headlights illuminated a large area with a deep oval-shaped pit in the middle. At its bottom a pool of water had formed in which the moon was mirrored.”
Filip Muller – Eyewitness Auschwitz

“The Moon shines with so blue a light
Over the City,
Where a decaying generation
Lives cold and evil –
A dark future prepared
For the pale grandchild.”
Georg Trakl

© Nicholas Hedges 2024