Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Measuring the past

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“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”
Bill Viola,‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. Writings 1973-1994

“For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which—by means of a sort of snapshot—we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it.”
Marcel Proust, Time Regained

If the past is past and no longer exists and the future is yet to happen, then how do we, in the present, know about the past and experience the flow of time? In the here and now, there is no past and no future. So where are they? In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine of Hippo concludes that they are within us:

“It is within my mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective. When I measure time, I am measuring something in the present of my mind. Either this is time, or I have no idea what time is.”

In ‘The Order of Time,’ Carlo Rovelli writes; “…in the present, we see only the present; we can see things that we interpret as traces of the past, but there is a categorical difference between seeing traces of the past and perceiving the flow of time – and Augustine realises that the root of this difference, the awareness of the passing of time, is internal. It is integral to the mind. It is the traces left in the brain by the past.”

Things as events

In the same book, Rovelli writes:

“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events… even the things that are most ‘thing-like’ are nothing more than long events.”

Mediaeval jug

Like us, an object in a museum (for example, a mediaeval jug) is an event, and as an event, is just as much a part of the world today as it’s always been. Its use, function or value might have changed but as an event, the fact of its nowness now, is the same as it was 800 years ago when it was experienced in much the same way as it is today.

To borrow `Bill Viola’s quote above, this event (our mediaeval jug) has been ‘living’ this same moment ever since it was made, but it’s the lives of those who have ‘experienced’ the jug (their lives and deaths) over the centuries that gives the impression of a ‘life’ of discrete parts, periods or sections – the difference between now and then; a sense of history.

“There will no longer be any more reason to say that the past effaces itself as soon as it’s perceived, than there is to suppose that individual objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them.”
Henri Bergson (1859–1941)

Measuring the past

When we cease to look at an object, that object remains within us as a memory, a snapshot which straight away begins to bleed into vagueness, much like a drop of ink spreads on a piece of paper. Our perception of the time that’s passed is also vague. It’s hard to relive a past moment with any degree of clarity (although music, objects and, in particular, place, can certainly sharpen our remembering senses). It’s also difficult to measure the flow of time with any degree of accuracy. How often is it that on recalling when someone famous died, the time that’s passed appears much shorter than it’s actually been?

We know the length of a year, and can, with that knowledge, imagine the span of 100 years or more, but only as we might walk a mile and contemplate a journey to the moon. As a rule to measure our lived experience (the flow of time as opposed to the fact of our age) units of time (months, years, decades) are of little use. Even less so as a means of perceiving, with any degree of accuracy, a span of several centuries past.

“Time – that’s what makes death so terrifying. The very idea of not existing – forever. But when you consider the past without recourse to a clock, when the past becomes that cloth bag of moments, then the future too – there on the other side of this thing we call the present – is just another load of moments waiting to go in the bag, to be jumbled up with all that’s gone before.”
Brief Castles

To ‘measure’ the distance to a past event and contemplate that place on ‘arrival’, we need to use our own memories and relationships as a yardstick, all bound up in the presentness of our own existence. When we think of times in the distant past, we do not consider them precisely as we do when measuring distance. The years are not arrayed within us sequentially along a line, but like our memories are mixed up together. If we’re looking at something made in 1588, we know it’s 290 years older than something made in 1878. But when we consider those times in which they were made, and try to imagine what they were like, our imaginations can’t discriminate between them in terms of a quantifiable length of time.

As I’ve written above, we are all events and as events are continuously linked to hundreds of other events; a network which, like a cat’s cradle, changes with every passing second as relationships are broken and new ones created. When we imagine a moment in the distant past, we have to try and imagine its events and the links between them.

[The city consists of] “…relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past; the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window…”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“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.”
Christopher Tilley, ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology.’

Clearing in the mist by Yu Jian

“Entitled Mountain Village in Clearing Mist by Yu Jian, the painting [shown above] was made all the more extraordinary on account of its age, made, as it was, around 800 years ago in the mid 13th century. This seemingly rapid work transported me to a time long gone. It revealed – much as with the Japanese haiku of Basho – an ancient and vanished moment, not so much through what it showed but how it was depicted. It was almost as if I could see the landscape before the painter himself. I could see the work as a whole (the landscape as a whole), but then, whilst picking through the gestures of the artist, evident enough in the brushstrokes, I could see the landscape as it was revealed. Yu Jian’s painting was not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced. It was almost as if the painting had become a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It wasn’t the mountain that was made visible on the paper, but the artist himself – his presence at that moment. 800 years after his death, and Yu Jian was as good as sitting next to me. Or to put it another way, 800 years before I was born, I was as good as sitting next to him.”
Brief Castles

The age of a memory

How do we process the age of a memory? How do we ascribe an age to a time we’re imagining? Is it through a subconscious comparison between now and then, where the number of links between us and other remembered events are diminished (disorder) and where those memories or imaginings with the fewer extant links we recognise as the oldest?

Then

Now

To ‘visit’ the past in our imaginations is to compare the world now with what the world was then (just as with our own memories we compare the same). It’s the scale of that difference (not the rule of years) which gives us the age – the degree of ‘pastness’. It’s the number of lines which link us to that past. When we look at our mediaeval jug we are linked to that jug by dint of the fact we’re observing it. When we walk in an historic place, the links – the lines – are greater, such is why, in these places, we can often gain a better sense of the past.

This internal time travel requires that entropy is reversed. We travel away from disorder. Relationships (links) are ‘re-established’ within our imaginations through the lens of our own memories and experience. When I was a child (and still as an adult), that meant rewilding the natural world; seeing the country still covered with ancient forests before they were felled.

Somewhere along the paths of those ancient woods, the long events (our family line) of which we are each a part continued in its presentness, coiled within people long since forgotten. Those forgotten people had memories of those paths – of the trees and dappled light on a summer’s day – just like the memories we have today of roads down which we’ve travelled. And those who carried these memories of the trees and the paths through the woods also carried their children, who in turn were to carry their own memories of their childhoods further down the line.

Of course once we’re travelled back in time, we have to imagine the world as if, like today, it was moving towards disorder; as if things were not fixed by history and that all its details were still filled with potential. Having established the links we need to break them.

In my previous post (‘Disordered Time’), I wrote with reference to some old photographs:

“These open windows therefore help us see the past moment as it happens rather than as it was. They ascribe the picture a duration and give it flow.”

That duration delimits a span of time – a flow – in the blankness of our own non-existence where a symmetry is found between now and then; between a time (now) when I’m alive and someone else is dead, and (then) when they are living and I am not yet born.

That duration – that flow – is a bridge; a means of establishing empathy.

“Trying to remember is itself a shock, a kind of detonation in the shadows, like dropping a stone into the silt at the bottom of a pond: the water that had seemed clear is now turbid and enswirled.”
Patrick McGuiness, ‘Other People’s Countries’

Also in my previous post, I looked at a photograph taken 125 years ago. I looked at a detail in the background of the image, of a man oblivious to the picture being taken.

Detail of a photograph taken in Oxford in 1897

“One can imagine him working and the effort he is making and the fact he’s unaware that he is part of the picture allows me to reach beyond the edges of the photograph. It’s as if, through his being unaware of the photograph, the boundaries of the photograph are dissolved and the moment is given rein to move.”

Boundaries of the photograph. Boundaries between life and non-existence.

Those details, whether they are open windows in 19th century photographs, brushstrokes on an 800 year old painting or ancient handprints on a cave wall are, for me, what Patrick McGuiness describes above as detonations in the shadows. They are the dropped stones agitating the image and the object, disordering time and ‘increasing entropy’.

Hands on cave wall

If we imagine standing in the cave with these handprints before us, we can easily imagine the process of making them. If we were able to place our hands upon them, we could affect the same position as those who made them thousands of years ago. These links, lines or relationships help us back to the moment of their conception. But when we think of the world 35,000 years ago and what it looked like compared to ours, there are few links, lines or relationships left. The fewer the lines the older the time. The scale of disorder is vast. But that moment when a hand was painted is vivid and when set against the vast blankness of all the untold moments that make up the last 35,000 years, the sheer unlikeliness of our coming into being is dizzying. More so when we take that moment all those millennia ago and, like a ‘detonation in the shadows’, imagine its progress into the next moment and the next. And as we imagine the millions of lines, links and relationships which every second were, with the progress of those moments, made possible, we remember that 99.99999999% of them would have led to us never being born.

In a previous post (‘Entropy‘) I again referred to something Carlo Rovelli wrote in ‘The Order of Time’.

“The notion of particularity, is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way. Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between.”

It was this line which took me a while to grasp: “He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between.”

If we think back to the sandcastle and the pile of sand we can imagine the number of different configurations of each and can easily imagine that the number of configurations for the castle are far, far fewer than of the pile of sand. The castle therefore has few configurations that our ‘blurred vision does not distinguish between’ (low entropy) as opposed to the sand pile (high entropy).

When we think of a past moment whose future has been fixed in time we can borrow from the world of physics and say it has low entropy. But when we consider the details of a moment (the distant man oblivious to the photograph, Yu Jian’s painting in progress) and all the lines, links and relationships formed and broken with every passing second, we can say that, in our imaginations, the same fixed moment acquires greater entropy as we consider all the possible moments that could arise.

To climb the peaks of our imagination and see a time long before we were born is, at the same time, to descend into the depths of our own non-existence, wherein which dark expanse, our imagination lights the dark as it does the paths that lead away from our deaths. Imagination and memory come together to blur the boundaries of our beginnings and ends, as if, like a book, the unseen words that might have been written before and after are suddenly revealed in all their infinite number.

Disordered Time

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In my last post I talked about entropy, in particular with reference to a book I’ve recently re-read by Carlo Rovelli called ‘The Order of Time’. I ended with the question (one as much for myself as anyone else); what has this got to do with my work?

So, here goes with (the beginnings of) an answer.

As I’ve said, my work has often sought to imagine past moments as if they are ‘now’ in order to better empathise with those who lived at the time; in particular those who lived through traumatic events.

Borrowing from the world of physics and what I’ve gleaned about entropy, I can look at a past moment as something which has a very low entropy (and here, of course, I’m using these terms in a loose,  ‘poetic’ way rather than anything scientific). The past is like the sandcastle as opposed to the pile of sand (but with far fewer possible configurations of state than the castle).

This is because the past moment has happened and therefore its form is fixed; there are no different configurations by which it can enter the next moment as the next moment has also already happened. If we think of the moment we are living now, then we can think of it as having very high entropy as there are countless possible configurations by which we, as people living in this particular moment, can enter the next and so on. We are like the pile of sand as opposed to the castle.

Below is a photograph taken in Oxford in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubliee.

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Oxford 1897
© Oxfordshire County Council

I want to look at this photograph as being illustrative of a moment in time rather than as an object in its own right. So what do we see?

If we are going to try and recreate a past moment, we have to try and think of that moment as it happens, not as it was. So, when I look at an image like this, at a moment frozen in time 125 years ago, I try to imagine the scene just before the image was taken and for a short while after. To do that, I might zoom in on a detail – one of the people – and imagine them moving. I imagine the noise of the scene, the sounds they might have heard and think about what they might have been saying (if anything).

Detail from a scene in Oxford, 1897
Detail from a scene in Oxford, 1897
Detail from a scene in Oxford, 1897

It’s easy to animate the faces above, but to animate the moment, I have to zoom out a little, to catch more of the scene around them. If we look at the boy in the first image for example, we can see that he is standing with a girl and a small boy. The girl is clearly talking to him but his eyes are on the camera. The small boy beside her looks impatient as if he wants to be doing something else.

Detail from a photograph taken in Oxford in 1897

And we can continue to zoom out and allow more of the moment to reveal itself.

Detail from a scene in Oxford, taken in 1897

One thing I do find with photographs like this, is that it’s often those people who are in the background and who are completely oblivious to the picture being taken that allow me to animate the scene. For example, this man (below) up a ladder adjusting the bunting.

Detail of a photograph taken in Oxford in 1897

One can imagine him working and the effort he is making and the fact he’s unaware that he is part of the picture allows me to reach beyond the edges of the photograph. It’s as if, through his being unaware of the photograph, the boundaries of the photograph are dissolved and the moment is given rein to move (a piece I made as part of my MA several years ago – Creatures –  is concerned with this very idea).

But what has  this all got to do with entropy?

The present moment has ‘high entropy’ in that the number of possible configurations (the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between) which will take this moment into the next are vast. But for a past moment, such as the one above, the number is practically zero, in that the moment has come and gone. It’s ‘entropy’ is very low. So if we are to try and imagine this moment in 1897 as if it’s now, we have to ‘disorder time’ and imagine the scene as if its ‘entropy’ is as high as he moment in which we now exist.

In a post from several years ago (Windows, Bicycles and Catastrophe) I talked about these background details and how they can help bring a past moment to life.

In the picture above, the horses and carts locate the photograph in the early 1900s but it’s the windows – the open windows – which help me locate myself in the time. Why? Because the rooms behind the windows are spaces outside the photograph; spaces oblivious to the photograph being taken. It’s as if they have escaped the moment frozen by the camera. The open windows also speak of a time before the photograph was taken and therefore give the photograph a sense of duration which, like the rooms behind them, also extend the boundaries of the image. When the photographer took the photo, the windows had been open a while beforehand; people had (obviously) opened them and I can begin to imagine those moments. I can imagine being in one of those rooms, looking out through the open window and seeing the horses down on the street and hearing the sounds of the city. These open windows therefore can help us see the past moment as it happens rather than as it was. They ascribe the picture a duration and give it flow.

In his book, The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli writes: “The growth of entropy itself happens to open new doors through which entropy can increase further.” In the case of this image, Rovelli’s doors are our windows but the effect is the same. We begin to disorder time and locate among these details, pockets of potential. Instead of everything being fixed, there is room for manoeuvre, for change; entropy increases.

As I wrote in my previous post: …our blurred view of the world equates to our recognition of things as things; objects with form, and it’s because of this that we experience the flow of time; the sandcastle collapsing on the beach and the castle falling slowly to ruin. 

This blurring is the term used to describe how we perceive the world. We see things as particular (things as things; objects with form as opposed to how they are at the microscopic level). Rovelli writes: “The notion of particularity is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way. Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between.”

In the case of the past itself and our view of it, our ‘blurred view’ is that of the object, the photograph, the relic. It is the knowledge we derive from sources; diaries, letters etc.

Rovelli continues: “The difference between past and future is deeply linked to this blurring. So, if I could take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world, would the characteristic aspects of the flowing of time disappear? Yes. If I observe the microscopic state of things, then the difference between past and future vanishes.”

A quote from William Blake is pertinent to this point: “If the doors to perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.”

If then, we imagine the entirety of the past as being akin to the world at the microscopic level, then as we look beyond what our blurred vision allows us to see of the past (beyond the relics and artefacts) and see the details (for example, the rooms beyond the windows), then, just as at the microscopic level, where the difference between past and future collapses, so it does when we focus our attention on those seemingly insignificant details; details which we might well experience in our own, everyday lives.

One aspect I want to return to is the flow of time. As I wrote above: “These open windows therefore help us see the past moment as it happens rather than as it was. They ascribe the picture a duration and give it flow.” But this will have to wait for my next post.

Entropy

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My work has often involved an exploration of time, in particular, how we can best imagine a past moment as ‘now’. Recently I’ve been re-reading Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ and have been particularly interested in entropy and the part it plays in the fact time always flows from the past towards the future.

But what is entropy and what has it got to do with time? Well, the answer is complex and would require a book to answer it properly. However, as a layman, and as far as I understand it, entropy is, at a very basic level, the measurement of how much atoms in a given substance are free to spread out, move and arrange themselves in random ways.

As ever, Professor Brian Cox describes it perfectly here:

The difference between past and future lies in this “natural disordering that leads to gradually less particular, less special structures” [Rovelli, The Order of Time]; structures like the piles of sand as opposed to the sandcastle.

One aspect of Rovelli’s book I took a while to grasp was the idea of ‘blurring’. Rovelli asks the question, why do phenomena that we observe around us in the cosmos begin in a state of lower entropy in the first place. He describes a pack of cards:

“If the first twenty-six cards in a pack are all red and the next twenty-six are all black, we say that the configuration of the cards is particular; that it is ordered. This order is lost when the pack is shuffled. The initial ordered configuration is a configuration ‘of low entropy. But notice that it is particular if we look at the colour of the cards – red or black. It is particular because I am looking at the colour. Another configuration will be particular if the first twenty-six cards consist of only hearts and spades. Or if they are all odd numbers, or the twenty- six most creased cards in the pack, or exactly the same twenty-six of three days ago … Or if they share any other characteristic.

If we think about it carefully, every configuration is particular; every configuration is singular, if we look at all of its details, since every configuration always has something about it that characterises it in a unique way. Just as, for its mother, every child is particular and unique. It follows that the notion of certain configurations being more particular than others (twenty-six red cards followed by twenty-six black, for example) makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (in this case, the colours). If I distinguish between all the cards, the configurations are all equivalent: none of them is more or less particular than others. The notion of ‘particularity’ is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.

The notion of particularity, is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way. Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between.”

The difference between past and future is deeply linked to this blurring. So, if I could take into account all the details of the exact, microscopic state of the world, would the characteristic aspects of the flowing of time disappear? Yes. If I observe the microscopic state of things, then the difference between past and future vanishes.

The future of the world, for instance, is determined by its present state – though neither more nor less than is the past. We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ’cause’ and ‘effect’.”

It was this line which took me a while to grasp: “He has demonstrated that entropy is precisely the quantity that counts how many are the different configurations that our blurred vision does not distinguish between.”

If we think back to the sandcastle and the pile of sand we can imagine the number of different configurations of each and can easily imagine that the number of configurations for the castle are far, far fewer than of the pile of sand. The castle therefore has few configurations that our ‘blurred vision does not distinguish between’ (low entropy) as opposed to the sand pile (high entropy).

As far as I understand it then, our blurred view of the world equates to our recognition of things as things; objects with form, and it’s because of this that we experience the flow of time; the sandcastle collapsing on the beach and the castle falling slowly to ruin.

But what has this to do with my work?

See my next blog post to find out.

Wicked Magician, Fly

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For many years I’ve had a song in my head, the lyrics for which I’ve always remembered as being:

The wicked magician flies through the night
With long wings to take him far out of sight
When you are safe in bed, he’s flying overhead
Wicked magician, fly!

I was< I thought, about 7 or 8 when, as a class, we all sang along to the recording. I would have been at New Marston First School and can recall the classroom we were in, and, for some reason, the view outside the window.

Years later, with the song still in my head, I decided to try and find out what it was and it didn’t take long to discover that the song was part of a broadcast for schools on BBC Radio; a series called ‘Time and Tune’ with this particular cantata entitled ‘Alvida and the Magician’s Cape’.

On the Broadcast for Schools website, it states:

“This cantata [by composer Michael Plaskett] , based on a Swedish folk tale, was the winning work in a national competition held by Time and Tune in 1977, calling for composers and authors to write an original work for children. Two concerts based on Alvida and the Magician’s Cape were given at Fairfield Halls in Croydon on Friday 10th March 1978.”

Alvida and the Magician's Cape

The series leading up tho this performance was broadcast on the BBC between January and March 1978 which would have made me 6 years old when I heard it. The fact I was so young and have remembered this song so vividly, illustrates how much of an impact the tune and the words had on me. Considering it was about a flying magician who captured children, that might hardly be surprising.

Despite looking, I couldn’t find a recording of the song (it has, apparently, been deleted) but recently on eBay I managed to find a copy.

The programme itself comprises a narrator who leads the children listening through each of the songs (explaining how they might play along and so on) as well as a final performance at Fairfield Halls in Croydon. The extract below is a very poor recording of the song I remembered, taken from that performance.

Despite the quality of the recording, hearing it again after 45 years was incredible. Not only was the tune exactly as I’d remembered, but I could recall other parts around the song; the narrator’s intro for example, where he says menacingly:

“Whenever the magician needed another boy or girl, he would put on his finest clothes, dab his lips with honey to make sweet words come from his mouth and sprinkle magic dew in his eyes to make them sparkle with kindness. Then he would take out his special black cape, which he would change into gigantic wings and fly off to find another victim.“

The Quanta of History

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I have just finished reading Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ which, as well as being a fantastic read, has helped me think about my own thoughts on time and in particular, the idea of trying to see the past as if it were the present.

Rovelli takes the reader on a journey from what might be termed a ‘common perception of  time,’ to one that is much more strange. He describes how time moves at different rates depending on where you are. Time moves more quickly at the top of a mountain than it does on the ground – although you would need an extraordinarily accurate and precise timepiece to measure it. There is the question of what is ‘now’ – the present. The present is local (in terms of the universe) and that locality can be measured by taking the minimal length of perceived time (e.g. 1/10 of a second) and multiplying it by the speed of light. In our case, that is still a very big space, but in terms of the universe it of course very small. He then talks about entropy; that it is entropy which truly distinguishes the past from the future; the difference between order and disorder.  For example, if you have a box of 12 red and 12 green balls and the red balls are on one side and the green on the other, then the contents of the box can be termed ‘ordered’ – there is low entropy. If you stick your hand in the box and move the balls around then the balls become disordered and entropy is greater. Of course, what constitutes ‘order’ depends on the variable we use to describe the system – the contents of the box. If the red and green balls are also numbered  1-24, then it might be that the balls are disordered in terms of their colour but that their numbers are running in sequence and therefore ordered.

Anyway, what has all this got to do with me and my work?

The past is perceived as more ordered whereas in the present, entropy is greater – things are more disordered. One of the words I’ve often used to describe my thinking is ‘presentness’ or ‘nowness’ – that is, how can we see an event in the past as if it were the present and thereby establish empathy with those who are now anonymous and who lived through such an event? Having read Rovelli’s book and watched him on YouTube, I realised that our idea of the past – history – is an ordered view of time; a place of low entropy. We see the past as a succession of ordered events with beginning and ends. Henry VIII was born on 28th June 1491 and died 28th January 1547. We know about key events in his life which we can read about in countless books and the same is true for many others. For others the facts are less well known, but even with my own family history, I know, for example, that Samuel Borton, my 6th Great Grandfather was born in Oxford in 1706 and died in 1768. There is an order to his life but of course there was much more to his existence than his birth and his death; there were all the bits in between. I know that he ran the Dolphin Inn which stood in St. Giles from which he ran a coach service to London. I know he 9 children and that his parents were Richard and Mary. But that, along with a few other details are all I know. It is a very ordered (and, of course, limited) view of his life.

What I’m interested in are the people who came into his tavern; the faces he knew well along with the strangers. I like to think about the conversations he had, the weather outside the window. I like to imagine what the inn looked like, the smells and the sounds. In effect, what I’m doing is taking my ordered view of his life and shaking it up – disordering it; introducing a higher degree of entropy.

Thinking back to the fact that our view of a system depends on the variable we are using to describe it (the green and red balls, the numbered balls), does reimagining the past as if it were the present require a different variable?

Empathy Forward

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Much of my work over the past however many years has been about empathy and how we can empathise with those who suffered trauma in the past. In part, this line of work began with a visit I made to Auschwitz in 2006 and developed with visits to other sites of historical trauma including the battlefield sites of the First World War.

My work has taken many forms but has often sought to view historical events as if they were taking place now; to understand what it means to be present in the now and apply that back to the past. Now, with the trauma of Climate Change hanging over the world, it’s on the future that my attention is directed.

When I was studying for my MA between 2006-08, Climate Change was a theme explored by several students. But the one thing which struck me was that where the work often sought to educate about Climate Change, it didn’t engage with what I saw as the real issue; action.

Most people know about Climate Change. They know what it is and they know what causes it. Even those who still insist it isn’t a thing know what it is and why it’s happening. The fact they deny it and the fact many people aren’t dealing with it is down to action, or the lack thereof and it’s this that needs addressing. But this won’t be achieved by telling people more and more about Climate Change and what will happen if we don’t do anything.

Looking back at my work over the last 15 years or so, I have tried to engage people with the possibility of directing empathy towards those who no longer exist. I realise now that in order to engage with Climate Change, we need to reflect this view from the past (and those who no longer exist), to the future (to those who haven’t yet been born).

One of the quotes I’ve often used is one from Paul Fussell (see ‘Lamenting Trees‘):

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

Much of my work on historical trauma has dealt with the landscape of war and in many respects, the landscape of the future, if Climate Change isn’t dealt with, will be akin to that of a war. The opposite of war, as Fussell writes, is peace and the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral. If we consider the destruction of the natural world, then this quote becomes even more powerful.

In my novel ‘Brief Castles’, I wrote the following which was based on an experience I had with the painting described.

“And as I look, I’m reminded of a painting I once saw in London, during one of my a lunch hour tours of the British Museum. I’d never before considered myself a fan of Chinese art but on this occasion I was quite entranced. Entitled Mountain Village in Clearing Mist by Yu Jian, the painting was made all the more extraordinary on account of its age, made, as it was, around 800 years ago in the mid 13th century. This seemingly rapid work transported me to a time long gone. It revealed – much as with the Japanese haiku of Basho – an ancient and vanished moment, not so much through what it showed but how it was depicted. It was almost as if I could see the landscape before the painter himself. I could see the work as a whole (the landscape as a whole), but then, whilst picking through the gestures of the artist, evident enough in the brushstrokes, I could see the landscape as it was revealed. Yu Jian’s painting was not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced. It was almost as if the painting had become a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It wasn’t the mountain that was made visible on the paper, but the artist himself – his presence at that moment.

800 years after his death, and Yu Jian was as good as sitting next to me. Or to put it another way, 800 years before I was born, I was as good as sitting next to him.

Death had been defeated.”

There’s a quote I’ve often used from Christopher Tilley. In his book, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, he 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.”

One of the things which has interested me in my study of historic trauma is the fact that in order to see the past in what was its ‘presentness’ we have to consider our own non-existence. This can, I think, become a barrier to engagement and the same might be true when considering the future. But in the extract above, where the character, Tom, sees how he can mentally defeat his own impending death through a dialogue with an artist’s engagement with nature 800 years before (this ‘other’), we can see that this barrier is easily dissolved. This distinction between humans now and humans then or those to come is broken down; it doesn’t exist. It’s as if our empathy, dammed by these twin obstacles of distant past and distant future, is allowed to flow freely backwards and forwards in time.

With regards Yu Jian, this breaking down of 800 years of time occurs because of his brushwork – the gestures of the living artist, and these gestures are similar to those in paintings I made in Shotover Wood a few years back whilst tracing the shadows cast by the trees.

The idea behind these and also a video I made of the same patterns was that these paintings – gestures – were all that remained of the wood in that moment. Of course the wood still exists as an entity today, but the wood I experienced at that particular time has gone and in order to rediscover that moment we have to use the gestures of the artist (in this case, me) and the patterns in the paintings or the video to reimagine the woods and that lost moment in time (much as we might reimagine a world from a single object in a museum (for example a pair of mediaeval shoes)).

There is also the fact that these brushstrokes remind me of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy – something I’ve always admired. And just as I cannot read these beautiful texts, so these brushstrokes I made in the wood are like a lost language; one which we need to read in order to understand the world/time from which they came.

Again this links back to Paul Fussell’s quote, where we are asked to propose moments of pastoral in order to experience the opposite of war (while we cannot experience a war we haven’t lived through, we can through proposing moments of pastoral, understand what it would mean to lose those moments and thereby glimpse that war through the absence of that peace). And now, if we think of the future, where that landscape of Climate Change will be a warlike one (one which we cannot experience), we are again proposing moments of pastoral, not to reimagine a time that has past, but a warlike time yet to come, when in actuality, so much of the natural world, woods and forests included, will be lost.

The Natural World of 978

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I’ve written before about this postcard.

When I bought it n 1978 I was 7 years old and, in many ways, it marked the beginning of my interest in History – the idea that there was a time when the year could be written with just 3 numbers; 9, 7, and 8 – and at some point my interest in the past was conflated with that of my interest in nature; in particular forests. In part, this conjoining came about because of the Cold War. When I was a boy growing up in the 70s and 80s, the threat of nuclear conflict was seemingly ever-present and history became for me a means of escaping to a place where such weapons did not exist; the world of 978.

This world was one which humans hadn’t had the chance to destroy; forests were full and vast, rivers were unpolluted. History then was a means of reaching that world; its portal being the stories I could read in history books; stories such at the murder of Edward at Corfe Castle.

History then was a way through to this other world; a veil drawn between my time and that unspoiled, pristine landscape.

As I grew older, and as the Cold War threat diminished, I became increasingly interested in the people in those stories. It wasn’t only that they were a means to another place; I was interested in the means itself – in the veil so to speak. But in many ways, my desire to see these people, not as characters in a story, but as real people; to see them not with the weight of history upon them, but lightened with the nowness of the present, meant that the landscape of their lives – that unspoiled landscape (or at least much less spoiled than today) was easier to see.

This need to see the past unencumbered by history, to view it through the lens of ‘presentness’ became increasingly important as I began to visit landscapes associated with historical trauma; in particular the landscapes of the Holocaust and the First World War.

Today, we are facing the treat of Climate Change and again I find myself wanting to escape to the world of 978 – to the world before it was damaged; to walk in those full and vast forests; to sail on oceans untouched by plastic; to see unpolluted rivers and the all the wild meadows we have lost.

Related blogs on this theme:

Chinese Landscape Painting

Writing Shadows

A Detonation in the Shadows

The Gone Forest

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Two years ago I shot some video at Shotover Country Park (see ‘Writing Shadows’) and finally, this weekend, I had the chance to edit the clips together to make a piece entitled ‘The Gone Forest’. The piece is something viewers can dip in and out of rather than sit through from beginning to end, and while it is a finished piece, there are lots of other ways I want to explore using these clips.

For now, here is the video:

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).

Goethean Observation: Pilgrims of the Wild, 1935

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As with observations of this type, the text is written almost as a stream-of-consciousness, as a result of which there might be a fair amount of repetition, dropped sentences, and parts that won’t make an awful lot sense! But that is the nature of the thing; to find a hook – a few words that might be the foundation of something else.

Goethean observation of a book; Grey Owl’s ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’, published in 1935.

1

The object is a book with around 300 pages. It’s hardback, grey with a fair amount of wear and tear; mottled with patches of lighter grey. The spine has the title and the name of the author and publisher. The front and back covers are both blank with the same discolouration.

Most of the pages are taken up with text but several of the pages contain black and white photographs.

As I flick through the pages my eyes jump from word to word, picking out fragments of sentences.

Never
Barricade
Next day
I did
Discovered
Lady
We watched the two V’s

I read in my head – aware of the sound of the boiler, the clock on the wall and the odd car outside; not so many due to the current pandemic and the restrictions placed on movement.

I can, as I flick through the pages, smell the age of the book; the smell of fusty paper. The spine and covers crack as I turn them. The paper is yellowish with age.

On the first blank page is an inscription:

Pat,
Christmas 1935
From Grace M Jones

A Christmas present from 85 years ago.

I’m aware of the book’s weight.

2

Reading the inscription one imagines two things; the moment the inscription is written by the giver and when it’s read by the recipient.

Grace wrote the words with a fountain pen, blew on the words and then, having left it to dry, closed it again, smoothing the cover which I have just done. Is it wrapped? Is it unwrapped? Was it given in person? Was Grace there when Pat opened it?

Who was Grace? Who was Pat?
How did they know each other?

The book is a token of friendship.

There was a point when the first page was blank. Before the inscription was written. Then the book was just that – a book. When the inscription was made it became something else – a gift. The words of the inscription became as much a part of the book as the words of author had written and published.

What did Pat do on receiving it? He/she probably flicked through the pages as I just did – their eyes picking/snatching odd words from the pages.

Maybe he/she smiled?

Maybe he/she said thank you.

The book would be put down and Christmas 1935 would begin its drift into the distant past.

Was it was read over a period of time or in one go? As I read the the words on a random page I find myself in time with Pat. When I read a sentence further on, I find myself in a slightly different time – perhaps a different place.

My reading is like a sound wave, aligning with another, becoming in phase with another.

This phasing occurs within the mind; Pat reads the book in 1935/36 – his/her words sounding silently in their mind.

When I read, the words too are sounded silently in my mind. It is in our minds that the phasing occurs. I become aware again of the sounds around me as I read the words, as I sound them in my mind, and I wonder what sound Pat could hear when she read these words.

And what of others who have read the book throughout the intervening years?

I read the last two lines of the book: The cycle goes on. The pilgrimage is over.

I turn over and rest my eyes on the blank pages.

I’m aware in my time of the foxing on the paper; the stains where the tape is showing through. I become aware for a second of the book’s production; the binding of it – the binder.

I close the book and put it down. It’s as if the book has collected time, as if each reading builds a layer within its pages; becoming with each reading slightly – imperceptibly – heavier.

The pages when looked at from the top and the side are like layers – strata within which these readings are buried.

Each word becomes an object and its shadow, The words, read that first time create an image in the reader’s mind and simultaneously become a shadow of that image within the reader’s mind.

It’s as if the words are taken from the page and replaced. There is an exchange of sorts.

Everything takes place within the readers’ minds, but there is the physical link of the book itself; its weight in my hands.

Back on the shelf it becomes weightless.

3

When you polish something, you take a very thin layer off the thing being polished – imperceptible.

Reading a book is like that. One is removing but then replacing at the same time.

Reading a book is like listening to a record but your voice comes out – silently in your own mind.

The book not only imparts, it records; it collects as much as it gives, in silence.

At the end of the book, the words have become shadows of the pictures the reader has imagined, but no less diminished as a result.

The blank page at the end becomes a mirror within which you see these imperceptible traces of everyone who has read that book before.

The book held lends its weight.
The book is a mirror which does not reflect.
I ‘polish’ to see, but it is only in my mind that I see.
My reflection is not revealed. It is kept.

The book lends its weight; the weight borrowed from another time and given to this.
The book is a mirror which does not reflect. I polish to see, but see only that in my mind’s eye.
My reflection is not revealed, only kept by the book.

Each reading is also an inscribing – a wordless inscription.
The gesture of inscribing without writing (shadows).

The gesture of the book is an inscribing without words on the blank page at the end before the book is closed.

The weight is relinquished,

A polishing to see what’s in my mind’s eye; like my reflection revealed to the book.

Nazareth O

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As part of my family history research (as described in my previous post), I chanced upon a name which leapt from the pages of an old parish register: Nazareth.

Nazareth was the wife of my 8th great-uncle William Oakley (born in St. Thomas’ parish, Oxford in 1673), and as things stand, that is all I know. But the more I’ve thought about her and who she was, the more I’ve considered how long she’s been forgotten, completely lost among the brier of ancient words that make up entries in the register. It’s strange to think that that is all that remains of her life; a fragment – a name scratched in ink on the pages of a book.

Who was she? What did she look like? What did she do in her life?

I thought then of recent work I’ve made which, based on textile fragments, aims to articulate the idea of a lost and distant life, lived well beyond that which remains. Nazareth Oakley is an example of someone who has all but been forgotten, but who, in the fact of her name written and later read in a register, is, in some small way, remembered and snatched at the last from oblivion.

I’ve been working on new ideas for work and a new piece (following on from a painting called Raspberry, named after someone else long since forgotten) which I have decided to call Nazareth O. 

Although this is very much at the research stage, I think giving it a title will help with its development. I’m beginning to see these developing into small packets, where the map is folded and things placed within based upon the title.

Several Johns and St. Thomas

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I’ve recently returned to researching my family tree – something I’ve been doing on and off since 2007, and have been following a line on my maternal grandfather’s side in my hometown of Oxford. My mother, like her father and grandfather, was actually born in Reading and it was something of a surprise to find that her ancestors (on her own paternal grandfather’s side) originated (as far as extant records show) in Oxford – the town to which she moved as a child with her family in 1952.

It was my great-great grandfather, Jabez Stevens who was the first Stevens to be born in Reading in December 1847 – his father, John, the last to be born in Oxford, in the parish of St. Aldates, in 1811. His father, my 4th great-grandfather, was born nearby in the parish of St. Martin’s in 1776 and baptised in a church that no longer stands (see image below), save for its 14th century tower, now known as Carfax Tower.

His father was also called John and married Lydia Borton in 1764 (Lydia was the daughter of Samuel Borton, an Oxford innkeeper who, along with his father (Richard) before him ran The Dolphin Inn in St. Giles). That was about as far as I’d got, but with the online availability of parish registers, I’ve now taken the line all the way back to another John Stevens, who, although I don’t know when he was born, died in St. Thomas Parish, Oxford, in 1681. This means of course, that he would have grown up in what was a tumultuous time in the city’s and country’s history – that is, the English Civil War.

John and his wife Jane had a son, another John, who was also born in St. Thomas’ parish in 1667. In 1695, he married Mary Oakley, born in the same parish in 1668 and together they had another John (1701-1747) who married another Mary and who had themselves yet another John who married, as I’ve written above, Lydia Borton in 1764.

St. Thomas’ Parish occupies an area which with the clearance of St. Ebbes in the 1960s and 70s and the subsequent development of the Westgate Shopping Centre was almost cut away from the rest of the town. Today it includes the castle and the ice-rink as well as Oxford station and of course, St. Thomas’ church which still stands. I think of it still as a nowhere place, a kind of hinterland where people enter or leave the town. Growing up, it was little more (in my mind at least) than a large car park and in my teenage years, the place where we’d go clubbing at The Coven. Discovering that my ancestors lived in this area over so many years has made me want to reconnect with that part of the city – first and foremost by visiting the parish church.

Looking online at information about the church, I found this photograph; an image of the gable of the south porch. The coat of arms carries the date 1621 and is therefore something my ancestors would have seen with their very own eyes.

Raspberry

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Continuing with my research, I’ve gone back a few years to some work I did on World War I, specifically an ‘observation’ made of a trench map and graphite paintings using that map as a basis for the work.

I’ve always liked the idea of using the map format as it articulates both the idea of place and of someone in that place. Combining it therefore with the recent work I’ve been doing on fabric tokens works well; the token describes an absence (and also, in some respect, a presence in that it’s a fragment of a lived life), while the map onto which it’s pinned articulates the space beyond that fragment. As I’ve written before:

“Every object in a museum, every relic (whether an object or building, or part of a building) is surrounded by space; that time and space from which they are now estranged. The fabric tokens in the Foundling Museum are likewise surrounded by space, into which the patterns seem to seep.”

The token, the seeping pattern and the map all combine therefore to articulate the ideas I’ve been working with over the years.

Using some folded paper, I made a sketch…

There is something about this pattern and the seeping image which somehow refers to childhood. Therefore I’ve decided to work this up into a bigger piece called ‘Raspberry’, named after a girl, Raspberry Hovel, who lived at the start of the 19th century  and who I discovered in my family history research.

This image also reminds me of mediaeval manuscripts  (the token being the drop-cap) and in some respects, the blankness surrounding the text is like the space I’ve described above. I’m always fascinated by annotations and marginalia in such works as they serve to bring us face to face with those who read those books hundreds of years ago. The seeping pattern becomes in a way a kind of marginalia.

Taking this further, I’m reminded of an installation I made in 2008/09 called ‘The Woods, Breathing.‘ This was based on my reading a book which Adam Czerniakow had read during the dark years of the Holocaust. A text work I made called ‘Heavy Water Sleep‘, based on that book, also lends itself perfectly to this form.

Tokens and Shadows

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A while ago I made some sketches at Shotover Wood, tracing shadows with ink.

Thinking back to these and with regards the work I’m currently making, I looked again at these sketches and applied the idea of the quick, gestural painting to the patterns. The shadow paintings, like the related video work, were themselves about absence, of time passing, something being there (the woods at a specific time) and now being absent (revealed only through their shadows). This seemed to chime with the idea of the fabric tokens as also being about absence.

Patterns Seeping (II)

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Following on from a previous blog (‘Patterns Seeping‘) I’ve been working on a few preliminary sketches using some fabric I recently purchased. The idea of the work is to show how when one is looking at an object (or any relic of the past), the mind tries to take that object back into the spaces it once occupied many years – maybe centuries – ago, and thereby to make a connection with those who have long since died.

With these ‘tokens’ therefore, the idea is to extended the pattern into the space of the paper surrounding it whilst avoiding a simple recreation of the pattern within those spaces. These are, as I’ve said, very much the beginnings of a thought process, but I like the way they seem to be heading.

‘Missded’ 4 – Tokens

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Having completed stitching the ‘Missded’ 4 canvas, I have now cut it up into tokens.

Patterns seeping

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With my latest set of tokens (for ‘Missded’ 4) I wanted to work with a few of them and try something new. As I’ve stated before, the tokens – the originals on which they’re based at the Foundling Museum – represent an individual given up; an individual made absent. They were the means by which the mother could claim her child back if she were once again able to look after him or her. Now, more than two hundred years later, they are the only means by which we can ‘know’ those children. Like everything that comes down to us from the past, much is anonymous and fragmentary.

For the purposes of my ‘Missded’ project, they represent my having my children to stay for a time before they return to their mum. In particular, they represent their absence in the days when I don’t see them. The patterns from which they’re cut, were drawings made by me and my son which were traced, cut and stitched together, representing the idea of a memory cherished and replayed, over and over. The drawings were made in an instant, but the process of making the stitched versions (the memory) took weeks and months.

Every object in a museum, every relic (whether an object or building, or part of a building) is surrounded by space; that time and space from which they are now estranged. The fabric tokens in the Foundling Museum are likewise surrounded by space, into which the patterns seem to seep.

With one of the tokens I made for ‘Missded’ 4, I wanted to somehow show that space – that absence, the ‘missingness’ as it were and so I thought of placing them within another canvas. The result can be seen below.

The thing which struck me with this was how the stitched lines of the token seemed to want to encroach on the space above and to the sides, reminding me how, when looking at objects in museums, one tries to push the boundaries of the object on display into the space that can’t be seen; the space of the distant past. It is, as I’ve said above, like the patterns seeping out from the fabric tokens. This token resembles the stems of a plant, which I think helped in that idea of growing out and beyond the limits of its own space.

So, although I like this image, it demands something else. The question is, how is that to be realised?

Cut Paintings

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I have some old paintings which have for many years been stored in a shed. I have nowhere else to put them and the shed is needed for other things. So having removed the canvases from the frames (the canvases were little worse for wear as a result of their not-ideal storage) I looked at the ‘Missded’ work I’ve done and wondered if they – the paintings – could be re-worked by cutting them down into similar sized pieces.

These paintings were originally created in response to historic traumas – such as the Holocaust and World War I – and also themes of absence and therefore the idea of creating smaller works seemed to make sense; the original tokens are after all – for wont of a much better, more appropriate word – a ‘transaction’ where someone – a child – has been given up. They are, as I have written previously, tokens of absence.

So as a test, I cut some ‘tokens’ from the original canvases and pinned them as I have the tokens made for my ‘Missded’ project.

As an addendum to this post, I was reminded of some work I did in regards to a fragment of pottery many years ago. The pottery shard can be seen below.

‘Missded’ 4

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I’ve finally finished stitching the fourth in the ‘Missded’ series of stitched works which I began some time ago. The complete piece, prior to being cut into ‘tokens’ can be seen below.

Locks III

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Progressing the images from my previous post, I’ve started to arrive at something more akin to what I had in mind from the outset.

The first in these three images in particular has the subtlety I am after, and, combining the three ‘locks’ gave me even more – something not entirely obvious once compressed for the web.

There’s something too of early Victorian photography in this image, in particular, the early experiments of the Henry Fox-Talbot such as the fern reproduced below.

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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