Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Somewhere Between Writing and Trees

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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.

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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…

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and then a series of text works…

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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.

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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.

Pastoral Annotations

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

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

Two Worlds

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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.

Proposing Moments of Pastoral

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

Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past was always pastoral.

Maps

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

My maps were well-wooded.

As are the trench maps I have in my collection.

Postcards and gardens

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

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

World War 1 Serviceman

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

Proposing moments of pastoral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Past in Pastoral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World War 1 Serviceman
WW1 Backdrops

Trench Map 1916
My Invented World - Ehvfandar

Centenary

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100 years ago, on 8th May 1915, my great-great-uncle was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres.


I’ve written before about this photograph and in particular its location; the idea of the garden as a shared space of memory and experience. Recently, in our own garden we had to have an apple tree taken down due to the fact it had been hollowed out by heart-rot and was in danger of toppling over. I asked for the trunk of the tree to be save in one piece, and when I saw it on the ground, I was reminded again of the idea of gardens as described above.

The trunk of the tree resembled a torso missing its head and limbs.


There was something interesting in the way the bark had grown over a length of wire which had been wrapped around the trunk years ago. It called to mind the cascading lengths of barbed wire rolled out in front of the trenches. It also seemed to turn the trunk into a corpse.

At the same time the tree Is symbolic of a lost idyll; that of the garden of childhood memories.

P is for Pastoral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Present Standing in Silence

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“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.”

It’s strange to think these words have lain silent for 100 years – hidden like fossil-shells pressed between the pages of a cliff face. Recounting, as the fossil recalls a vanished sea, a contemplative scene of remembrance, the scene now remembers as much itself as it does the fallen soldier.

A few years ago, I happened upon a quote of Rilke’s, paraphrased as part of an exhibition. The ‘depth of time’ it said, was revealed more in human gestures than in archaeological remains or fossilised organisms. The gesture is a ‘fossil of movement’; it is, at the same time, the very mark of the fleeting present and of desire in which our future is formed’

Reading the passage with which I began, I am struck in particular by the last few words: ‘all present standing in silence.’ As I read the words, the quiet gestures of my ancestors 100 years ago are made visible, felt. Like the lines on a fossil-shell – such as that pictured below – recalling in their pattern the vanished seas in which their signified others once lived, so in the words of Jonah Rogers’ obituary, one can hear the faintest echoes of World War I, not the sound of the battlefield, but the speeches and reciprocal silence of those inside the chapel.

But it’s not only their gestures – those inside the chapel – which, as I read the text, I can see and feel. It’s also those of a time before the war; times which like the gestures released by the text, were no doubt remembered by the mourners, recalled by limbs, nerves and twitching muscles as well as the very fabric of the place in which they were standing. Perhaps those who made “references to the death of Private Rogers” were talking about such times.

 


The lines of the shell’s imprint, in the photograph above, were made 195 million years ago, when mankind was beyond even the furthest reaches of improbability. When I read the closing words of my great-great uncle’s obituary, I imagine those gathered inside the church, struggling within the limits of their imaginations, to comprehend that other place which, although certain, exists – within the human mind – beyond the reaches of improbability; death.

This obituary concerns the death of Jonah Rogers (pictured above) and yet all those inside the chapel are now dead; it is now as much about their deaths as his. And reading this text I am aware too of my own fragile existence. When that meeting took place, sometime in the summer of 1915 I did not exist. I too was also well beyond the reaches of improbability. And yet, it is in my imagination that this scene is taking place.

Children’s Names

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Today is Armistice Day. A day on which the lists of names arrayed in marble and stone, on plaques and in books are at the forefront of many people’s thoughts. Names left behind, as Rilke so beautifully puts it, ‘as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy’.


It was whilst standing with my children on Remembrance Sunday, holding my son as we watched the laying of the wreathes on the town’s memorial that I thought of those names and how, once, they had indeed belonged to children.

Jonah Rogers was just 22 years old when he was killed near Ypres in 1915. At the end of his obituary there is a moving passage which reads:

“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.”

There is something about that silence which, almost 100 years on, speaks to me about Jonah. It’s as if one can hear the thoughts of his parents and siblings, remembering their son and brother in years passed; not the man dressed in his uniform, sitting on a chair as he poses in a garden for a photograph, but the boy who played in the garden of Tunnel Bank Cottage, Hafodyrynys.

So whilst we remember the names on lists, like Jonah’s on the Menin Gate above, I want to think of two lists that are altogether different, not least because they contain the names of children – of Jonah aged 7 in 1901 and 17 in 1911.

The census from 1901.

The census from 1911.

Silence

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In a previous blog, looking at a photograph of Jonah Rogers, I mentioned Roland Barthes’ concept of Punctum; “…that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)…” In that photograph (reproduced below) I found it (that poignancy) in the left foot and the missing brick of the flower bed.

In my last blog, in the newspaper clipping reporting Jonah’s death, there is also an especially poignant moment – the clipping’s punctum as it were. And it’s this:

“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.”

It’s there in the last line: The meeting passed a vote of condolence with the relatives, all present standing in silence. 

The past is silent (as the tomb which it becomes) and that silence of the relatives, beating inside the church, is one hewn from that immense quietude; a grave cut into another grave. And yet it’s all the louder for it. Imagining the scene, one can hear the silence, punctuated by coughs, scrapes and fidgeting bodies (it’s amazing to think that my grandmother, then three years old, might have been there). There is something too in the silence which serves to throw into relief the image of my ancestors. The writing sets them apart from the rest of those gathered inside. They are silent and just as one imagines those everyday sounds from which silence is made, one can imagine those relatives, standing and recalling everyday things about Jonah… And it’s there that we can get a better picture of Jonah than we can from any photograph.

It’s almost as if the words in that penultimate paragraph, describe something entirely different. One can almost imagine the vote of condolence, the kind words spoken, coming only as murmurs to the relatives; all made shapeless by their mournful introspection.

Jonah Rogers – Newspaper Cutting

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I am grateful to Keith Morgan for the following newspaper cutting recording the death of my great-great-uncle, Private Jonah Rogers in 1915. I have transcribed the story below.

PRIVATE JONAH ROGERS 
(HAFODYRYNYS)

Private Jonah Rogers (1565), 2nd Monmouthshires, whose parents, Mr. and Mrs. George Rogers reside at Fernleigh Vila, Hafodyrynys, was killed in action on May 8th. From the Records Office, Shrewsbury, the official notification of the sad news of Private Rogers’s death has been received by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers. Several of the gallant sons of Hafodyrynys have now given their lives for their King and country. Private Rogers was one of that noble army of young men who prepared for danger; he had been in the 2nd Monmouthshires for three years prior to the war and on the 5th August last, when the mobilisation was ordered, Private Rogers was one of the most ready of the Hafodyrynys lads to answer the call. He was made of the stuff that real soldiers are proud to behold. With him there was no flinching in danger’s hour. His experiences can never be adequately recorded, but it shows his true grit to be able to say that three times he was in hospital in France suffering from sickness and frostbite, and yet did not take the “leave of absence” he might have had. He felt it his duty to be at the post of danger; he was a rare good solider. In the words of a lifelong friend “He was a good lad – one of the best.” When writing home of his life in the trenches – the strain of which sometimes he found very trying – he was always so buoyant in spirit, never complaining, and spoke so cheerfully of coming home again after the war was over. To his parents the sympathy of all goes out.

Private Rogers was born at Hafodyrynys nearly twenty-one years ago. From his childhood days he had attended the Hafodyrynys Congregational Sunday school, and to-day, as for many months past, his name is inscribed upon the “Roll of Honour” – the list of young men who from the little chapel at Hafodyrynys have gone to do what they can in the cause of right and justice. The little chapels and Sunday schools have given some of their brightest young men to the Army and Navy in this crisis, and it is a real pleasure to find young fellows who are used to the luxury of good homes, and who are now enduring hardships as good soldiers, writing to friends and saying, “You know I went for conscience sake.”

Of the “pals” who left Hafodyrynys with Private Rogers, three have written to the gallant lad’s parents offering their deepest sympathy. The parents are truly grateful for their thoughtfulness.

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.

Private Rogers was a finely-built young fellow. He was intelligent, and in the estimation of the Hafodyrynys people he was placed very high. His death is very sincerely lamented.

Photography: The Colour of Shadows

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As shown in a previous blog, this is a picture of my grandparents’ garden in Headington, Oxford, taken sometime in the mid 1970s.

This was, growing up, a very special place for me…

…I remember well my grandad’s vegetable patch, the plastic greenhouse and the Victoria plum tree (all shown above);  the brick outhouses with their giant spiders (in which the red tricycle was kept); the large apple tree and the wooden lattice-work gate. I remember too the giant Christmas tree (pictured below behind the fir tree), planted – when the tree was considerably smaller – when my mum was a girl.

The following two photographs were also taken in Headington, some 60 years earlier at the time of the First World War (or a few years before – the second photograph is possibly 1908). They are by one of the pioneers of autochrome photography, Ethelreda Laing and show her two daughters, Janet and Iris.

What’s interesting about these photographs is that they were taken in what is now Bury Knowle Park at a time when the house was a private residence. What makes them even more interesting is the fact they are in colour. But what is it about a colour photograph that enables me to better connect with the referent? (This is a subject I started to discuss before: see ‘Empathy and the First World War (Part 2)‘.)

The photograph below shows me and my brother in the garden of the house where we grew up, also in Headington.

This photograph which, like the photograph from Bury Knowle, shows two children enjoying the garden, was taken c.1974. Looking at it now, I’m drawn to the patterns of light and shadow on the fence behind.
The fences were always well creosoted and when the sun shone they exuded a wonderful smell. I can smell it now, just by looking at this image, but what is more, I can feel the pattern of sun and shadow, the sensation of the cool dry earth below – the smell of the firs. It’s a synaesthetic image in that I can almost taste the pattern.
If the image above was in black and white, I doubt I’d have the same response. When we look at an image in black and white, it seems to me that our memory is stimulated less than if the image is in colour. When looking at photographs taken long before we were born this hardly seems to matter, but when looking at a colour image – such as that of the girls above – taken long ago, something strange seems to happen.
It seems to me, that a colour photograph is more likely to trigger a physical response than one which is black and white.
First of all, I’ll look at a selection of black and white images.
The image below is of my mum and dad. It was taken c.1960 in my grandparents’ garden (as can be gleaned from the windows – seen in the second image above).
This image, of course, elicits a response in that I recognise my parents and the location. But that is all.
The next image was taken at Carfax, Oxford in 1893 and shows St. Aldates looking south towards Christ Church.
The image also elicits a response in that although most of the buildings shown have all disappeared, Tom Tower – in the distance – is still standing. I recognise the location as one I have experienced countless times before – although of course I could not have experienced what is shown in the photograph. 
Looking at the photo more closely, one does begin to establish an empathetic response based on more than just recognition.
Again this is something I have talked about before but here, empathy is established through the movement of the man and woman. They have no idea that they are being photographed, an obliviousness which is vital for an empathetic response. It is an image of now, of the everyday. We can easily imagine the man and woman, unfrozen by time and the camera’s shutter, continuing up past the old Town Hall towards Carfax, deep in conversation.
But how do old photographs differ when they are in colour?
This photograph was taken 13 years after the one above and what strikes me about it, is the fact that like the one above, taken in my garden, I can feel it. And what I feel is the temperature difference between the shadows and the lawn where the sun is shining. I can imagine the texture of the grass and the tree, I can hear the wind and feel the air; and yet this photograph was taken 108 years ago. The shadows are living – they are not dead as they can often be in black and white photographs; they have a colour.
The same can be said of the next image, taken during the First World War.
One can feel the light, the heat of the sun; the cool of the shadows. Again the shadows live. The image too is abundant with texture which I know would be absent if the image was in black and white.
It seems to me that I’m responding to these images kinaesthetically; my mind, memories and experience read them, which is why perhaps I find often these old colour photographs – while amazing – so unsettling. My mind reads them, my body feels them and yet when the image was taken, I did not exist. There is a conflict between existence and non-existence; the age old tussle between life and death.
There is no time in the past; all those things shown in the images above are as much a part of the past as each other. All there is to separate them is a rule against which, the increasing improbability of my coming into being is measured.

Proxies

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Following on from my last entry I’ve been wondering whether an empathetic link between ourselves and those who fought and died in the First World War can – based on Paul Fussel’s quote regarding “moments of pastoral” (“if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) – be found in the idea of the garden.

Can the garden – that domestic, pastoral space – become a space of memory and, therefore, experience shared with those who died in the violent landscape of the Western Front?

My grandparents’ garden in Oxford in the late 1970s
One of the main difficulties faced in trying to empathise with individuals who lived and died before we were born is that to think them alive we must think too of our own non-existence (and if we’re imagining our own non-existence we cannot truly empathise). Furthermore, experiences of people such as victims of the Holocaust or World War 1 soldiers are so far beyond our own, it’s impossible, even with a keen imagination, to bridge that divide.

We therefore need a proxy, and that proxy is place. Being in a place where an historic event has taken place can help us empathise, in that we can do so through a shared experience of that particular place or landscape.

This was certainly the case for me at Auschwitz where it was through observing the trees that I could best empathise with the people who were there, even though their experiences were so unimaginably different.

Trees at Birkenau

(One might imagine that a consideration of non-existence might lead to empathy through a shared consideration of death, but as Jean Amery wrote:”Dying was omnipresent, death vanished from sight.”

Non-existence bears only a passing resemblance to death and non whatsoever to dying.)

With soldiers of the First World War it’s also impossible for us to empathise with what they experienced. We can empathise through being in the landscape of Ypres or The Somme – i.e. we can empathise through a shared experience of presentness, of, in effect, being alive – but the fact the landscape looks so different today makes this especially hard.

Mouse Trap Farm c1915 – a place near where Jonah Rogers fell

Paul Fussel’s quote however helps us begin to bridge that divide: the concept of the garden, that pastoral space on a domestic scale, becomes the proxy – a space which we in the present could be said to have shared with many of those who fought in the war.

My Grandparent’s garden is as much a part of the past as the garden in which Jonah (above) is sitting. It’s almost as if the past becomes a single remembered landscape – a garden in which we can find those who lived and died long before we were born.

Me as a small boy with my mum, nan, aunt and great-grandmother (born in 1878)

Jonah Rogers – New Photograph

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It’s been six years since I discovered my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers, killed in action on May 8th 1915. In that time I have also been collecting World War I postcards, portraits of soldiers taken before they left for the Front. Now, thanks to a descendent of Jonah’s sister Ruth (my grandmother was the daughter of another sister, Mary Jane) I have, in this centenary year, been sent a postcard of Jonah Rogers. The quality of the reproduction isn’t high but I’m hoping to see the original soon.

4th August 2014

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“I never saw them again; they were hurried once more, fast as corks on a millstream, without complaint into the bond service of destruction.” Edmund Blunden

Thinking of my post from 28th June 2014, I wonder if ‘A’ was one like them.

Her Privates We

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Whilst reading Frederic Manning’s wonderful novel ‘Her Privates We’, a couple of quotes leapt off the page, particularly as regards my work and the ongoing theme of empathising with past individuals.

“Then for a moment the general sense of loss would become focused on one individual name, while some meagre details would be given by witnesses of the man’s fate; and after that he, too, faded into the past.”

“And they were gone again, the unknown shadows, gone almost as quickly and as inconspicuously as bats into the dusk; and they would all go like that ultimately, as they were gathering to go now, migrants with no abiding place, whirled up on the wind of some irresistible impulse. What would be left of them soon would be no more than a little flitting memory in some twilit mind.”

With love from ‘A’ – 100 Years on

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With the centenary of the start of World War I (August 4th) almost upon us, today’s date is no less significant. 28th June 1914 was the day on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, thus precipitating a chain of events which was to lead to the chaos and carnage of World War I.

The postcard shown below (both front and reverse) was written on that day, exactly 100 years ago.

Irony

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“The irony which memory associates with the events, little as well as great, of the First World War has become as inseparable element of the general vision of war in our time.”

Paul Fussell
The Great War and Modern Memory

Lamenting Trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).

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

© Nicholas Hedges 2024