Art, Writing and Research
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:
On Tuesday I made my way to Shotover to work on a piece I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. The piece, about absent-presence, will, eventually, comprise videos of shadows in a wood, a few stills from which can be seen below.
But why woods?
Since I was a child, the image of the forest or wood has been an important one. From when I was 7 or 8, the past seemed like another place – a ‘foreign county’ – rather than another ‘dimension’ of the place in which I lived, and that place, when imagined, was always thickly forested. I’m not sure why exactly, but I can remember being enthralled by the oft quoted ‘fact’ that in the past, a squirrel could travel the length of England without touching the ground. (See: Postcard from Corfe Castle 1978)
As an older child in the 1980s, when the tension of the cold war was still a part of everyday life, the thickly wooded past became a place of retreat, a world to which I could escape the threat of nuclear war. It was also around this time I started reading role-playing books (like Fighting Fantasy) whilst developing an interest in magic and adventure (if not quite Dungeons and Dragons). I began to create maps of imagined lands which, again, were often thickly wooded. These too were places to which I could escape and were in many ways a conflation of the past and my imagination. (See: Maps for Escaping)
Of course, as I became an adult, my imagined landscape changed. The past was no longer a place, in parts indistinguishable from worlds of monsters and magic, but indeed a different dimension of the place in which I lived. And yet, despite this difference, the symbol of the forest/wood remained a backdrop to my work (See: A Backdrop to Eternity). To imagine the past was, for me, to imagine a wood, vast and untouched, and in some respects, it would be true to say that my interest in the Environment developed as much as a means of preserving and accessing the past as safeguarding the future. The fact that many of these forests have vanished or been so depleted means their absence in the present – a stark difference between now and then – has become a metaphor for absence itself.
Even when I have sought to connect with those in the past, who lived through the most horrific events, the image of the wood returns as a means of reaching out to them.
A quote to which I’ve often referred from Paul Fussell:
…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.
(See: Proposing Moments of Patsoral
I discovered this quote whilst making work about World War I and it tied in with what I had been thinking, how it was impossible (and indeed unethical) to make work about these events directly (i.e. as though one were there), but possible to make work about the difference between now and then – about the attempt to empathise with people in the past, especially those who have lived through such traumatic events.
(See: Somewhere Between Writing and Trees)
This brings me onto Adam Czerniakow, another figure I have discussed extensively in relation to my work. (See: The Woods, Breathing)
As I wrote in that blog: 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.
For Czerniakow, the woods were a place in which he could escape the horrors of life under Nazi occupation. He would also seek escape in books, and one night, on January 19th 1940, he wrote in his dairy:
…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.
Paul Fussell’s quote is worth repeating here:
…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.
This brings me back to what I wrote earlier, how it’s impossible for me to make work about the experience of war.
What I can do however is allude to war through its opposite – to borrow from Fussell – in “proposing of moments of pastoral”. This opposition between war and pastoral is there in the line about Otwock. It’s there too in Czerniakow’s reading of Grey Owl’s book set in the wilds of Canada. The question is, how can proposing moments of pastoral, enable us to bridge the divide between now and then, between those who suffered the horrors of Wold War I and the Holocaust and those of us who read about them?
In many respects, we can empathise with them not as victims but as people who lived lives before the war or whatever trauma they were faced with.
Before I get onto the ‘shadow paintings’ I made at Shotover, I want to remind myself about a blog I wrote on Chinese painting (See: Chinese Landscape Painting)
It contains a quote I have come back to time and time again from Christopher Tilley:
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.
And my final paragraph discussing the work of Yu Jian:
Like the trees, the mountains [Yu Jian painted] share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.
I wanted these paintings to be images, not of shadows per se, but of a moment in time. They are as much about the rapidly painted strokes delineating that moment as the shadows they are tracing. I also like the way they resemble Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and could almost be a language whose meaning is lost; the language of a moment that has been lost.
I’ve been working on a series of drawings for a while now, the development of which can be seen in the pictures below.
More work using the iPad Pro and pencil.
Having recently bought and iPad Pro and pencil, I decided to start drawing in a style inspired to some extent by my son’s drawings and by my recent visit to Shotover wood, and, I have to say, I was pleased with the results.
The process of drawing without too much consideration of what one’s aiming to represent is similar to the process of automatic writing, where the subconscious drives the pen. I did something like this 10 years ago after a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, a trip which inspired much of the work I made over the next 2 years as I completed my MA in Contemporary Arts at Oxford Brookes University. Two of the pieces that came about after various ‘automatic’ strategies are those below. First a series of drawings…
and then a series of text works…
The title of this post – ‘Somewhere Between Writing and Trees’ – is to some extent a reflection of an ‘automatic’, ‘subconscious’ process and the conscious drive to a representation of trees. Trees have played an important part in my research over the past ten years and after a gap in my work of late, they are I’m sure, a means of finding my way back in, particularly when coupled with thoughts of my son. Separated from my wife, I am also separated from both my children for much of the week, a pain which, anyone in my position would empathise with. Empathy itself has been an important part of my research – in particular regarding the victims of the Holocaust and the millions who died in World War I – and trees have played a part in bridging the gap between the past and present – a necessary step towards empathy. With regards to the Holocaust, it was the way the trees moved at Birkenau which closed a gap of almost 70 years; with World War I it was a quote from Paul Fussell: “…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”
We are familiar with the image of blasted trees from the battlefields of The Somme, Ypres and Verdun, but nothing in our imaginations can take us there. We can never experience what those men had to endure, day after day, night after night. So the idea of looking for the pastoral as a means of empathising with victims of war is an important one, helping to bridge the gap by reminding us how these soldiers were ordinary men before they enlisted; men who were once boys, some of whom no doubt played in woods and climbed trees.
When I was a boy I was obsessed with woods and forests. Trees were a means of escaping the present, where in the early 1980s, the threat of nuclear conflict was ever present. They were a means of escaping to the past. I loved the idea of the mediaeval landscape, covered with vast swathes of trees, because, quite simply, it was a place where nuclear weapons did not exist. Of course it was an idealised past; an overly pastoral one, and to some extent the backdrops of portraits made of soldiers before they went to war remind me of this place. The following is a piece I made based on those backdrops.
Every one of these men was someone’s son which brings me back to my own, to his drawings and my drawings of trees.
Drawing and drawing with my son, helps close the gap which separates us for much of the week. It helps me feel close to him when he isn’t there. Drawing trees is a process which takes me back to my work, and whilst thinking of my son, becomes another means of empathising with those in the past.
This weekend, I was drawing with my children. Eliot was drawing in his usual style…
…and as I watched, I took up my felt-tip pen and began to draw. Having drawn my lines, I began to do what I used to do as a child – I began to colour in the gaps, and as I did, my daughter Iris came to help.
As we coloured in the segments, she said the drawing reminded her of an artist they’d been looking at at school, who, as she spoke, I realised was Piet Mondrian. I explained to her the process of abstraction and how when you look at paintings he made of trees, you can see how that process developed. What I forgot was just how beautiful his paintings of trees were:
And given that I’ve been working a lot on the subject of trees and how I’ve been inspired by watching my son draw, it seemed somehow fitting to look at these works and to see how they might influence my work in the future.
Another triptych comprising photographs taken on Sunday at Shotover.
A triptych comprising photographs taken at Shotover on Sunday.
On what was a beautiful Autumn day, I took a walk to Shotover wood to take some photos of trees. I’ve always loved Shotover, both for its place in my past and that of my family, and its own history, being as it once was the main road to London (the mounting steps at the top and bottom of the hill are particularly interesting). The following images are a few of the photographs I took.
I have been photographing the same trees – shown above – for almost 18 months now, and what started as a simple photographic record of a particular set of trees has since morphed into a project which shares certain aspects with other lines of research. I was drawn to them initially by their shape and proportions; by the fact that they reminded me of an Isaac Levitan painting, such as that below.
Since then, as my personal circumstances have changed through separation, the trees have come to signify something else. Being separated from my children for much of the week, there’s a connection between this anxiety and that which is present in the postcards of World War I servicemen, photographed in studios before they left for the Front, often against a painted backdrop of trees.
I worked on this theme previously, working with postcards such as that above and creating montages that used photographs I’d taken of trees at one-time battlefields such as the Somme and Verdun.
I was thinking about the post World War I landscape and how the years after 1918 saw a surge in spiritualism with grieving parents, wives and children seeking solace in the idea of their loved ones’ continued existence on ‘the other side’. There is, I think, a link with the Pastoral landscapes I’ve been thinking about of late, a place which seems best expressed by the poet Rilke:
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).
In tandem with this boom was the beginning of battlefield tours; tourists would visit the western front when the guns had hardly stopped firing. And I thought how interesting it was that there were these two different ways of looking for those who had gone: one, in a landscape of the imagination, the other, in the physical world; a pastoral plane and a place torn apart by war. And in many respects this reflects my work; the real world which we inhabit today and the plane of the past – a place in which we search for the dead in order that we might empathise with them.
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 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:
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.
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
I remember as a small boy how my Nana would on occasion take me and my older brother to where she worked as a Housekeeper. The house was – at far as I recall – a big, white, Modernist building with a large well-kept lawn at the rear. But what I remember most was the wood which stood at the edge of the garden. I can see it now – that contrast between the manicured lawn and the wild dark of the trees, and with the work that I’ve been doing on gardens, trees and contrasts, this particular memory has suddenly sprung to life.
You can see the house and the lawn (which wasn’t perhaps quite as well-kept as I’d remembered) and the encroaching woods surrounding it.
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.”
The past is silent. To know the past, one must know silence.
The theme of silence has come up a lot in my work, something I’ve written about before (see Augmenting Silence), and it was whilst re-reading a blog on Chinese painting that I began to consider – within the context of what I’d written – silence as other.
In that blog I wrote:
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.
Like the trees, the mountains share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.
I would add now, that, like the trees and the mountain described, silence works in the same way. To empathise with the past, as I’ve written many times before, we must understand what it means to be present, and silent meditation is a great way to do that. Sitting in the garden and listening in silence, one realises how silence comprises many ‘layers’ of sound (and other sensations); how the nowness of now comprises many ‘parts’.
The past too comprises many layers or parts, most of which have been stripped away by the very fact of their pastness. Now the past is silent, but by understanding that silence, we can find a way back.
Another blog entry (An Archaeology of the Moment) backs this up. In it I wrote how in his book Figuring it Out’ Professor Colin Renfrew writes:
The past reality too was made up of a complex of experiences and feelings, and it also was experienced by human beings similar in some ways to ourselves.
The way we experience the present then, tells us a great deal about how people experienced the past when it too was the present.
In a blog about a distant ancestor Thomas Noon (The Gesture of Mourning), I wrote about standing at the grave of him and his children who pre-deceased him; how he would have stood there:
“I can imagine him there, listening as I can to the wind in the trees. He sees the same late-winter sun and feels its warmth on his face. I can, as I have done, read about his children and their untimely deaths. I can read about him. But standing at their grave, my imagined versions of them are augmented by the gesture of my body.”
Back to the blog entry Augmenting Silence. In it I gave three extracts from old newspapers:
“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)
What interested me about these quotes were the silences. When I became aware of them, I realised I was empathising with the story much more readily. I could almost sense myself in the amongst words and the scenes they described. To repeat what I wrote earlier:
“Like the trees, the mountains share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.”
If silence is ‘other’, how can it be shown in a work? The answer is revealed in the following from Augmenting Silence. As I wrote:
In all three quotes, the ‘revelation of silence’ comes after the ‘facts’:
“The meeting passed a vote of condolence with the relatives, all present standing in silence.”
“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.”
“…the lightning appeared in the south and western horizon… but unaccompanied by thunder.” Silence is not the subject of the texts, but a part which serves to illuminate the whole (which in the second extract is especially pertinent).
It’s like the opening of a camera’s shutter; everything that came before it is condensed into a moment.
Also, as I looked into my work, I realised that ‘silence’ appeared in ‘Heavy Water Sleep‘:
Outside a window stands silent, the surrounding
covered with heavy water sleep.
There is no sound and no movement
dropping through the
closed rude
earth.
a man advancing with resolute step
But for the heavy steps,
there is silence.
time Meanwhile
emerges
from a hole in the day before
and
pulls impatiently
at the window stops Outside
the so-lately deserted
Silence
the Extraordinary story
that lies behind this scene
Graveyards and cemeteries have always fascinated me. The feeling I have when entering them, is much the same as when I enter a museum, a sense of calm mixed with expectation as I wonder whose story or stories I’ll encounter.
Graveyards are archives; the headstones, documents on which we find the names and dates of those who’ve gone before us. But they are much more than that.
My family tree is an archive, one currently comprising almost 1,000 individuals. Poring through documents (albeit ones which are digitised), I discover names, locations and dates, much as you do when walking through a graveyard.
Thomas Noon was my great-great-great-great-uncle. He was born in Burton Dassett, Warwickshire in 1795. He was baptised there on 20th September.
At some point between 1824 (the birth of his daughter Betsy) and 1830 (the birth of his son Thomas) he moved with his family to Oxford.
In 1841 Thomas spent census night away from Oxford, but we find him in 1851, along with his second wife Ann.
By this time Thomas had already buried his first wife Mary (1832 or 1840) and their three daughters – Emilia (1837), Eliza (1846) and Betsy (1850). In September of this census year, Thomas would also bury his son, killed in a train crash at Bicester. In 1852, tragedy would strike again when his brother Elijah killed his own wife with a sword at their house in Jericho.
Thomas died in 1863 at his home in Little Clarendon Street.
Through archive sources we can piece together his life, in censuses, baptism records, probate records and newspapers.
As we consider his terrible losses, we can sympathise with him but standing at his grave, the one he shares with his son Thomas and his daughter Betsy, that sympathy turns to empathy.
I can trace his name with my finger, and as I stand there, looking down at the grave, everything changes. I might be thinking, but my body is mourning.
First Betsy and then Thomas Jr were buried in that very grave over a decade before their father. How many times in those intervening years did Thomas stand where I was standing, looking down at that same patch of ground, thinking of his children? It’s as if, standing there over 150 years later, with the bearing of a mourner, I not only find Thomas within my imagination; I find myself within him too.
I can imagine him there, listening as I can to the wind in the trees. He sees the same late-winter sun and feels its warmth on his face. I can, as I have done, read about his children and their untimely deaths. I can read about him. But standing at their grave, my imagined versions of them are augmented by the gesture of my body.
They move in that space where the boundary between imagination and memory is blurred.
Reading Clive James’ Poetry Notebook, I find myself a little better prepared to tackle the task of writing a poem; something I’ve wanted to do since the start of the New Year. I’ve made attempts in the past which I might publish in due course, but reading the Poetry Notebook I see where those attempts were lacking, as well as where, in small parts, they might be deemed to have worked.
What I have tended to do in those past efforts was to allow language to take over, to become a thing in itself; words for the sake of words. Now however, I want those words to work – to convey a specific meaning. In my art, I try and articulate that which is often beyond prose, things which should be well expressed in verse form.
But what will my subject be?
With the centenary of my great great uncle’s death near Ypres (8th May 1915) fast approaching, I thought I would look there for my subject, and remembering his obituary, I read it again and found my first line (the last line of the obituary):
All present standing in silence.
It’s a moving line which, having been isolated from its initial context creates a question. Who – or what – is present and standing in silence? I thought of soldiers standing for roll-call on a Parade ground. I thought of trees… but the language doesn’t allow for their lack of movement; yes they sway in the wind, but they do not leave and return as being present would suggest the ‘all’ have done. The words speak of people who have come together as a specific group. Of course, in its original context, the ‘all’ were the relatives mourning the death of one of their own:
The meeting passed a vote of condolence with the relatives, all present standing in silence.
The all is a family which, in the small church, isn’t all present. Instead there is a raw space which the silence seeks to fill; a physical silence eclipsing the wake of the church as it mines the depths of the family’s grief. Even from a distance of 100 years one can tune-in to that moment; catch as on shortwave radio their internal dialogues. And just as one can hear the “references to the death of Private Rogers” made by several members of the Church, those speeches are made formless as if heard underwater. For us it’s the distance of a century that does it. For the family it’s the distraction of cherished memories whose shapes are knife-sharp and remembered by their bodies.
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?
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| My grandparents’ garden in Oxford in the late 1970s |
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| 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.”
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.
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| Mouse Trap Farm c1915 – a place near where Jonah Rogers fell |
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.
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| Me as a small boy with my mum, nan, aunt and great-grandmother (born in 1878) |
I’ve never before considered myself a fan of Chinese art but there have been times (most recently in the British Museum) when I’ve been overawed by a particular work. I refer in particular to early (11th-14th century) landscapes which move the viewer in a way one doesn’t find in the Western landscape tradition until much later on. (Why did it take so long for landscape painting to develop in the West? And why was it such a key part of painting in the Far-East so early on?) Paintings such as that below (Mountain Village in Clearing Mist by Yu Jian – made all the more extraordinary when one considers it was painted around 800 years ago in the mid 13th century), transport the viewer to a time long gone; they reveal – much as with the 17th century Japanese haiku of Basho – a moment long since past; not so much through what they depict but how it is depicted.
If I’ve never been a fan of Chinese painting per se, I have always admired Chinese calligraphy, which is of course, in itself, a form of painting. One can see in the full view of Yu Jian’s painting below, the text on the left hand side.
One can see here how the landscape itself becomes a kind of text, arranged not in straight lines, but in accordance with the serpentine lines of mountain paths, the drifting patterns of mist and the directions of distant sounds carried on the wind.
With works like these, it’s almost as if you see the landscape before the painter himself. We first 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, we see the landscape as it is – or was – revealed. Yu Jian’s painting is not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced.
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.”
Like the trees, the mountains share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.