Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Pastoral Annotations

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I’ve been taking a lot of photographs of shadows, particularly that of foliage on pavements. I’m especially keen on the different degrees of ‘focus’ with some parts being sharp whereas others are much more blurred.

pastoral_1

The shadows imply the presence of something, but something which cannot be seen – an absent presence. That they are shadows of plants ties in with the idea of ‘moments of pastoral’, and of times before the war – the memory of past summers.
moments-3
This postcards shows the writing of a soldier.
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In some respects, these words also imply the presence of something – of someone; an absent presence – a man working out the cost of train, ale and fags.

Proposing Moments of Pastoral

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Through my research on World War I, I’ve accumulated a large amount of data – postcards, quotes, maps, texts, photographs, personal thoughts and experiences – which I want to start distilling into a new body of work. To do that, I’ve been looking for a ‘lens’ through which I might look again at this archive and thus begin shaping my research into something I can use in a work.

Quotes

A lens could be anything; an image, an experience, a thought, or in this case a quote – or quotes. I’ve discussed them before, but here they are again, the first from Neil Hanson, the second, Paul Fussell:

“As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.”

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

The smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – and the idea of moments of pastoral come together to make a lens through which I can re-examine my research. I’ve used Neil Hanson’s quote before, as the title of a piece in 2007 (pictured below), but combined with Paul Fussell’s quote it becomes even more interesting.

The Smell of an English Summer 1916 (Fresh Cut Grass)

The smell of fresh cut grass is a smell I often associate with the past, in particular, my childhood, and as a child, my notion of the past was a pastoral one. To me, the past was an unspoilt place, where squirrels could run the length of the country without touching the ground (a ‘fact’ I always loved). I loved the idea – and I still do – of untouched swathes of forest.

The past was always pastoral.

Maps

To pursue my pastoral fantasy, I would create maps of imagined landscapes (something I’ve also discussed numerous times before) and this too has become a lens through which to look at my research. When we think of those who fought in World War I, we often consider only their deaths. We don’t imagine their lives beforehand, especially the fact that not so long before the war, many were still children.

My maps were well-wooded.

As are the trench maps I have in my collection.

Postcards and gardens

There is a link therefore between a pastoral past, my childhood and the consideration of those who died in World War I as children years before – as real people who existed beyond the theatre of war.

This leads me to postcards, such as the one below:

World War 1 Serviceman

This postcard shows a soldier posing with his mother(?) standing in what might have been his garden, in the place where, perhaps, he grew up as a child. I might not be able to empathise with him as a soldier directly, but I can well imagine his garden. Part of the landscape of my childhood comprises the gardens of my home and those of my grandparents, as well as parks and playing fields at school. They are pastoral landscapes in miniature, where the grass was cut on a summer’s day.

Proposing moments of pastoral

The question which I haven’t asked is: how do you propose moments of pastoral? The answer to this, I think, is crucial to the development of any work.

To propose is to suggest, invite. It is something given to another.

Maps are objects which propose. But what are they proposing? On the one hand, they propose journeys. More often than not, we use them to plan a journey in the future, for example a day trip or holiday. They require us to use our imaginations; to imagine the future, the landscape and our position within in. They can however propose journeys into the past. In a previous blog about Ivor Gurney, 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.”

The map they laid on the bed was one that showed the familiar trails and paths of the countryside. But it was also one which, like that I made in my childhood, gave Gurney access to his imagination – to his own past. Together, the patient and his visitor read it with their fingers, following the trails as one follows words on a page. A narrative of sorts was revealed, memories stitched together by the threads of roads, paths and trails.

Maps can also be used of course to orient ourselves in the present. We might consult them to find out where we are or where we ought to go. In fact, they can be used to orient ourselves in the past, present and future.

As an artist wishing to propose moments of pastoral, I want to use the form of the map as a starting point. The map might show a pastoral scene, using, for example, the ‘vocabulary’ of the trench map to show the trees.

The Past in Pastoral

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July 1st 2016 will mark the 100th anniversary of the infamous Somme offensive. Having already made a lot of work about World War I, I want to mark this anniversary with some new pieces, working around the theme of ‘shared moments of pastoral’.

There have been numerous starting points which, in no particular order, I will outline below.

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

“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful – the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth. Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel…” Paul Nash

‘The next day, the regiment began the long march to the Front. In the heat of early summer, nature had made attempts to reclaim the violated ground and a deceptive air of somnolence lay on the landscape. “The fields over which the scythe has not passed for years are a mass of wild flowers. They bathe the trenches in a hot stream of scent,” “smelling to heaven like incense in the sun.” “Brimstone butterflies and chalk-blues flutter above the dugouts and settle on the green ooze of the shell holes.” “Then a bare field strewn with barbed wire, rusted to a sort of Titian red – out of which a hare came just now and sat up with fear in his eyes and the sun shining red through his ears. Then the trench… piled earth with groundsel and great flaming dandelions and chickweed and pimpernels running riot over it. Decayed sandbags, new sandbags, boards, dropped ammunition, empty tins, corrugated iron, a smell of boots and stagnant water and burnt powder and oil and men, the occasional bang of a rifle and the click of a bolt, the occasional crack of a bullet coming over, or the wailing diminuendo of a ricochet. And over everything, the larks… and on the other side, nothing but a mud wall, with a few dandelions against the sky, until you look over the top or through a periscope and then you see the barbed wire and more barbed wire, and then fields with larks in them, and then barbed wire again.”

As the torrents of machine-gun bullets ripped through the grassy slopes up which the British troops were advancing, the smell of an English summer – fresh cut grass – filled the air. For thousands it would be the last scent they would ever smell.’ Neil Hanson 

“There was utter silence, broken only by the twitterings of the swallows darting back and forth.” Filip Muller on the murder of a friend in Auschwitz

World War 1 Serviceman
WW1 Backdrops

Trench Map 1916
My Invented World - Ehvfandar

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.”

P is for Pastoral

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In her book H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald writes [my paragraphing]:

“Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. 

The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to prehistoric England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. 

The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years…”

This quote interested me in that it tied in with another by Paul Fussell who wrote:

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

Putting these together, I’m reminded as I’ve often written about before of my childhood, when I would create maps of imagined countries (which were in effect imagined pasts) in which I would mentally walk whilst out walking.

Proxies

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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)

Gardens

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In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes the concept of punctum thus:

“…it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument… punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”

Looking again at the photo of Jonah Rogers, I became aware of something which, as Barthes might have put it, ‘pricked me’.

This is the photo…

…and here is the ‘punctum‘.

In actual fact there are two things about this detail which interest me.

First, the left foot.

The fact it’s blurred implies that it was moving when the picture was taken. Otherwise Jonah appears stock still, unnaturally rigid, his hands curled into fists on his lap. One detects through this foot a sense of anxiety – not so much because of what he’d have to face on the battlefield, but rather because he was having his picture taken; he doesn’t seem comfortable in front of the camera – his foot is constantly moving. The pipe in his mouth also seems a little incongruous – especially when one considers those clenched fists; his hands look as if they’ve never held a pipe before. It’s almost as if someone has placed the pipe in his mouth.

The second thing is the ‘missing’ brick in the flower bed.

That there must have been a brick implies a passage of time between when the brick was laid and when it became dislodged – kicked perhaps out of place. That brick hasn’t been replaced, the flower bed and path have tumbled into one another and time has fallen from the photograph like the mud and mulching leaves. Or perhaps there was never a brick at all and the gap is some sort of conduit for water – the gutter running across the photograph implies this might be the case. This would still suggest a sense of time bound up in the thinking of whosoever laid the bricks in the garden, and indeed the flow of water itself. Whatever the gap is – drain or accident – both possibilities point to a time before the picture was taken; they give the photograph – to use an apt metaphor – temporal roots.

Jonah was killed in 1915 in the second battle of Ypres and I can’t help drawing a parallel between the soil of the garden and the infamous mud of the trenches such as those pictured below in which some of the 2nd Monmouthsires (Jonah’s battalion) can be seen.

This then brings me to the Paul Fussell quote I often return to:

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

I have for a time been thinking of the phrase ‘moments of pastoral’ and have come to regard it on a domestic level, i.e. moments of pastoral as experienced in a garden. I have always considered it vital, when establishing an empathetic link with those who died in the war, to consider their lives before the war. As I’ve written in a previous blog:

Neil Hanson, writing in ‘The Unknown Soldier’ talks of how, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, the smell in the air was that of an English summer – of fresh cut grass; the smell – one could say – of memories; of childhood.

The garden then is a link to a time before the war and again this is reflected in some of the postcard portraits I have in my collection, where soldiers were photographed – prior to leaving – in their gardens.

I have always found these images especially poignant and have written about them before but there is something here I want to explore further; that is the empathetic link between ourselves and soldiers who fought and died in the war and the idea of the garden as a shared space of memory and experience, a conduit through which an empathetic link might be established.

Lamenting Trees

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‘Ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme’. Such was how soldiers described High Wood, one of the many that peppered the battlefields of Flanders and France. Woods in name only, these once dense places were quickly reduced to matchwood. One officer, writing of Sanctuary Wood near Ypres, declared that: ‘Dante in his wildest imaginings never conceived the like.’

We, in our wildest imaginations can not conceive the like. So how can we remember and empathise with those who for whom it was real? Historian Paul Fussell provides a starting point:

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

I aim therefore to create a series of pastoral landscapes and accompanying maps which use, as their starting point, portrait postcards of Great War soldiers (in particular, elements found on the studio backdrops against which they were photographed) and Trench maps. Although the pastoral scenes will be empty – devoid of human life – I aim nonetheless to create a sense that people have been there; that the landscape is remembering them – an absence rather than a lack. This will serve to articulate the journeys of those soldiers, from photographic studio to the Front, and for many, death.

Two quotes are useful here; the first from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

“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.”

The other from Wordsworth’s Guide to the District of the Lakes:

“…we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.'”

In Rilke’s poem, the idea of trees (among other things) remembering through their silence those who’ve passed amongst them is particularly appealing and finds a kind of reversed echo in Wordworth’s imaginings of the primeval woods: where it isn’t the human heart regretting or welcoming the change, rather the trees, regretting (or welcoming) our absence.

Words from war poet Edward Thomas serve to further this idea of ‘remembering trees’. In the Rose Acre Papers, a collection of essays published in 1904 he writes:

“…a bleak day in February, when the trees moan as if they cover a tomb, the tomb of the voices, the thrones and dominations, of summer past.”

His widow, Helen, writing after the war in ‘World Without End,’  described how the “snow still lay deep under the forest trees, which tortured by the merciless wind moaned and swayed as if in exhausted agony.’

It’s almost the same lamenting her husband had described before the war.

Richard Hayman, writing in ‘Trees – Woodlands and Western Civilization’ states that “woods are poised between reality and imagination…” As a child woods were, for me, a means of accessing both my imagination and the distant past; a place “for chance encounters” with historical figures, monsters and knights. Woods, as Hayman puts it, are places which can “take protagonists from their everyday lives” while, as I would add, keeping them grounded in the reality of the present.

As a child I would often create maps of imagined landscapes covered – like my imagined mediaeval world – by vast swathes of forest. And as an adult, the act of drawing them returns me to a place where my childhood and the distant past coexist; “a mixture of personal memory and cultivated myth” grounded in the nowness of the present. As such, the ‘pastoral’ landscapes I’m going to paint, based on those strange and incongruous studio backdrops, become too, landscapes of childish sylvan fancies.

When considering the war, much of our attention is, naturally, focused through the lens of its duration: the years 1914-1918. But every one of those men who fought in the trenches was once a child, and since becoming a father this has become an important aspect of my ability to empathise. To empathise, we must see these men unencumbered by the hindsight which history affords us; as men who lived lives before 1914 and beyond the theatre of war. I return to Paul Fussell’s quote (“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) and add that we must also see the soldiers who fought not as men, but as children. Again, the words of Edward Thomas serve to articulate this idea; the “summer past” including perhaps those lost years of childhood. Neil Hanson, writing in ‘The Unknown Soldier’  talks of how, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, the smell in the air was that of an English summer – of fresh cut grass; the smell – one could say – of memories; of childhood.

Returning to Rilke’s Duino Elegies we find another dimension to these landscapes.

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).

These pastoral landscapes become therefore, not only the landscapes of childhood imaginings, of “personal memory and cultivated myth”, but the landscape of mourning. The words of Edward and Helen Thomas are especially poignant in this regard; Edward’s trees mourn for a long-lost past; Helen’s for an empty future.

War and The Pastoral Landscape

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I’ve been thinking these last few weeks about a new body of work based on the First World War. For a long time – as will be evident from my blog – I’ve been looking at ways of using the backdrops of numerous World War I postcards.

A quote from Paul Fussell has been especially helpful in this regard.

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

The images on the backdrops are these proposed moments.

As a contemporary artist living so long after the war, it is of course impossible for me to create works about the war itself. What I can do however is comment on my relationship to the war (and those affected by it) by creating scenes – pastoral scenes – which use as their starting point the backdrops of World War I postcards.

The pastoral will, therefore, be articulated through the language of war.

These pastoral images will, predominantly, be woodscapes based on places I have visited over the last few years including Hafodyrynys (where my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers (1892-1915) grew up), Verdun and the Somme. They might contain  – to quote Rilke – ‘…temple columns, ruins of castles’ as per the slightly less pastoral backdrops. They will be devoid of people; the soldiers absent as if they had melted into the backdrops – as if these pastoral scenes represent the Keening landscape of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

As I’ve written before: it is this absence which the trees express so silently, so eloquently. As Rilke so perfectly puts it:

‘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.’

The woods I paint will be based, as I’ve said, on those places I have visited as well as those idealised scenes in front of which the soldiers stand in the postcards. They will be – as Richard Hayman puts it – woods “poised between reality and imagination…” – shame and unspeakable hope.

Again as I’ve written before: After the war, the sense of emptiness must have been everywhere. Every insignificant moment – barely acknowledged before the war – now pregnant with a sense of incomprehensible loss. The world, outwardly the same, had shifted just a little, but it had taken the lives of millions to push it there.

There is in this text a sense of absence but also of movement, of continuation – however slight or small (something I want to record in my work). And there’s a link between this and a quote from William Wordsworth who wrote in his Guide to the District of the Lakes: we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.’ I somehow want to turn this quote on its head and borrow from Rilke, who in his Duino Elegies describes the towering trees of tears. I want to paint scenes where there are no people, but in which their absence is recorded, primarily by the trees silently remembering.

“The painter sees the trees, the trees see the painter.”

Absence

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In the Tenth Elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies we read:

‘…Our ancestors
worked the mines, up there in the mountain range.
Among men, sometimes you still find polished lumps
of original grief or – erupted from an ancient volcano –
a petrified clinker of rage. Yes. That came
from up there. Once we were rich in such things…’

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 double and unfolded page,
it sketches for him the indescribable outline.

I’ve read this poem numerous times but on a recent reading, the first and last two lines reminded me of some sketches I made during a visit to Hafodyrynys, a town in Wales where my grandmother was born. My great-grandfather, Elias, used to walk from their house, up ‘the mountain’ as my grandmother called it, to Llanhilleth where he worked in the mine. Following in his footsteps, and walking the path he walked almost every day over 100 years ago, I thought of how the shape of the view had barely changed. I sketched it: an indescribable outline on a double and unfolded page.

Something indescribable is – of course – a thing which defies (or at least seems to defy) description. In my work that ‘thing’ is the ‘nowness’ of a past event. Indeed, if I was to describe what I attempt to do in my work, I would say ‘to walk in the landscape of the past as it is now’.
As a means towards this, I attempt to capture the nowness of the present through single gestures (like the sketches) or a few written words, creating lists of short observations as I walk:

A young boy in a flat cap pulled over his face
A bell tolls
A girl on her computer sits at the window looking out
Blue, yellow and white balloons
Two distant blasts of a train horn made bigger by the stillness of the air
The cackle of a bird

With regards gesture: Rilke said that the “depth of time” was revealed more in human gestures than in archaeological remains or fossilised organisms. The gesture is a “fossil of movement”; it is, at the same time, the very mark of the fleeting present and of desire in which our future is formed.

The concept of a ‘depth of time’ leads me to consider the phrase ‘a distant past’. How can the past be distant (or otherwise) if the past no longer exists? How can we measure that which we cannot empirically observe? My getting up this morning is as much a part of the past as, for example, the death of Richard III, yet of course there is a difference; a scale of pastness. But how can we measure pastness? We can of course use degrees of time, seconds through to years and millennia, but somehow it seems inadequate. For me, pastness can also be expressed through absence (in particular that of people) and it is this absence which the trees express so silently, so eloquently. “William Wordsworth, writing in his Guide to the District of the Lakes, wrote that we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.'”

‘Look,’ says Rilke, ‘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.’

In his book The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes: “The painter sees the trees 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 be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a 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 for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.” 
When the painter leaves, it’s as if the trees remember him.

When speaking of distance in relation to the past (the distant past), I think of distance as it’s perceived in the landscape; a measurement defining the space between me and something else. Putting the two together, the ‘distant past’ becomes something internal, carried in relation to the external world; the sum of those absences I carry through the landscape.

Rilke’s description of the Keening landscape reminded me too of the landscapes which I created as a child (see also Maps). These were ‘places’ based on how I perceived the landscape of the past; in particular, its swathes of ancient and unspoiled forests. As Richard Hayman puts it: “woods are poised between reality and imagination…” Whenever I was in a wood – however small – I always experienced it with my imagination.

Which brings me round to recent work I’ve been doing on World War I backdrops.

Seeing the young soldier standing before a bucolic backdrop, one is reminded of the youth in Rilke’s poem being led through the Keening landscape.

For some time, I’ve been wanting to create landscapes based on these postcards, landscapes about the Great War which do not seek to illustrate its horrors but articulate our present day relationship to it. A quote by Paul Fussell is important in this respect:

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

The landscape behind the soldier becomes the Keening landscape described by Rilke, a moment of pastoral as described by Fussell. In the right hand image, the soldier has gone; the landscape is one filled with ‘the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy.’ It is an image of the past: as Ruskin wrote: a tree “is always telling us about the past, never about the future.” It is an image of absence, a kind of which only the trees can speak.

The Keening Landscape

by

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.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024