Nicholas Hedges

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The Gesture of Mourning

February 19, 2015 by Nicholas Hedges

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.


Like the name Thomas Noon, found in the documents described above, we find the name on his gravestone (below), weathered and worn to almost nothing (NB the name Thomas Noon and Betsy have been enhanced).

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.

Filed Under: Family History, Trees Tagged With: Cemetery, Family Hedges, Family History, Gesture

The Somme

May 7, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

“Frontiers are lines. Millions of men are dead because of these lines.”
Georges Perec

The name Somme is, in the minds of many, synonymous with death, a byword for futile and indiscriminate slaughter. Think of the Somme and the image of men walking towards their deaths comes to mind. Think of the Somme and one date stands out above all others; 1st July 1916, the day the battle began. The battle itself lasted over four months, up until November 18th, but the 1st July is as infamous a date as any, being as it is the blackest day in British Military History. By the end of the first day’s fighting, British and Commonwealth forces had lost almost 60,000 men, with 20,000 of those killed or missing in action – a number which is almost impossible to comprehend. The exact number of casualties over the entire course of the battle (1st July – 18th November 1916) is unknown, but Allied forces lost some 620,000 men with over 145,000 killed or missing in action. Germany suffered around 465,000 casualties with almost 165,000 of those killed or missing.

These numbers are of course horrendous, but there’s always a danger that statistics such as these will only ever be numbers, rather than a single death multiplied several thousand times. Every one of those over 300,000 killed or missing in action was a son, husband or brother; an individual whose life was cut short for a small patch of ground. And we mustn’t forget the wounded whose injuries were often appalling – the result of a new type of warfare, where bodies were mauled and mangled by artillery shells, machine gun fire and shrapnel. Disfigurements and mental illness meant that even if they were lucky enough to return, many would never again lead a normal life.

Before visiting the battlefields, I recorded my thoughts on how I imagined the Somme. Drawing on old photographs, books I’ve read and contemporaneous records, I’d built up a picture – a collage of sorts – of devastated fields, cut through with trenches; craters and mud, machine gun fire and shells. I’d imagined woods reduced to spent matchsticks occupying a space on the horizon and the terrain as I saw it in my mind’s eye was almost always flat. The images themselves were silent, equivocal and without any weight or real sense of place. There was colour but like any specific detail the colours were always vague. Any imagined scene was removed from my senses. I could try to imagine the war, but of course any idea as to what it was like would – to say the very least – be well wide of the mark. I could imagine the rain, the blue sky, the smell of the grass, but still it was all divorced from my senses; an indeterminate collection of images wherein there was little sense of direction. I could try and imagine movement, but any progression derived only from a series of stills as if I was looking down a length of film found on a cutting-room floor.

Having arrived in the Somme, we drove towards our B&B, down the narrow roads which cut across the fields. The sun was setting, casting long shadows which lay down across the landscape like discarded coats and clothes. I couldn’t help but think of those who’d stood in the trenches on the morning of 1st July 1916, knowing they might never see another sunset again. For a moment, this sunset became the one they wouldn’t to see. The sunset of that terrible day.

On arriving at the B&B we found our first cemetery.

We had just over a day to explore the Somme battlefields and therefore took the ‘Circuit of Remembrance’ a route signposted with poppies which takes in the major sites of the battle. Starting at Beaumont Hamel, we travelled to Thiepval, Pozières, Longueval, Rancourt, Peronne and La Boiselle. The following morning, we travelled to Serre to see the place where, among others, the Accrington Pals suffered horrific losses on that first terrible day.

Travelling through the countryside and seeing signposts pointing the way to villages and towns such as Arras, Pozières and Thiepval, I felt a strange sensation, in that prior to visiting the Somme, these legendary names were almost fictions – places connected with a distant past found only in the pages of history. Temporal distance in some way then correlates with geographic distance, where places one has never been are like those times to which one can never go. It’s as if they are names of moments in time rather than places in another country; the past is indeed a foreign country, and yet one it seems can go there.

Of all the places we visited along the ‘Circuit of Remembrance,’ two stand out in particular; the site of the attack on Serre at what is now The Sheffield Memorial Park, and the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont-Hamel. Of course all other sites were extremely poignant, not least the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval and the many cemeteries, all immaculately kept, which are found throughout the Somme countryside.

The first place we visited was the Newfoundland Memorial Park at Beaumont Hamel.

 It’s one of the few sites in the Somme region where the ground has remained largely untouched since the end of the First World War. The trenches are still visible, for example, St. John’s Road and Uxbridge Road which once led to Hyde Park Corner and Constitution Hill; trenches now filled in beneath a field of Rape (the line of the Uxbridge Road trench has been marked in white in the car park).

 The naming of the trenches has always interested me. It’s almost as if in the midst of the ruined landscape, whose pre-war character had all but been effaced, a new place was brought into being; not simply a ruin of that pre-existing world, but a new world entirely; a labyrinth of lines cut into the ground, named after streets or towns back home. It’s as if these ‘streets’, ‘lanes’ and ‘alleys’ were each a piece of the collective memory of those who fought and died there; fragments of a place called ‘home’ to which many would never return. Now of course the trenches have all but disappeared along with the men who made them, along with their individual memories. And yet they remain on maps and in books, and although the ruined towns and villages have been rebuilt, their own much older names seem to belong more to this other lost world than that before or after.

 

It was at Beaumont Hamel that the Newfoundland Regiment attacked on 1st July 1916, suffering as they did appalling losses. The following description is taken from the ‘Newfoundland and the Great War’ website:

“Thus it was that the Newfoundlanders moved off on their own at 9:15 a.m., their objective the first and second line of enemy trenches, some 650 to 900 metres away. In magnificent order, practiced many times before, they moved down the exposed slope towards No Man’s Land, the rear sections waiting until those forward reached the required 40-metre distance ahead…

 …No friendly artillery fire covered the advance. A murderous cross-fire cut across the advancing columns and men began to drop, at first not many but then in large numbers as they approached the first gaps in their own wire. Private Anthony Stacey, who watched the carnage from a forward trench with Lieutenant-Colonel Hadow, stated that “men were mown down in waves,” and the gaps cut the night before were “a proper trap for our boys as the enemy just set the sights of the machine guns on the gaps in the barbed wire and fired”. Doggedly, the survivors continued on towards The Danger Tree.”

The ‘Danger Tree’ still stands, and standing there today, looking at the sheep laying around its base, it’s hard to imagine the scene at that same place 96 years ago.

Like many who’ve read about the Somme, I was aware how close the opposing armies were to one another – at least in terms of stats – separated as they were by the void of No Man’s Land, but it was only in this place that the distance was made startlingly apparent; it was hardly any distance at all. Entering the memorial, one can see the British front lines. A leaflet guides you around and suddenly, you find yourself looking back from the German front line towards where you entered, a distance which is all but a few minutes’ walk away. And in between is a patch of ground, much like any other you might have seen before but upon which thousands lost their lives.

The following images show the Caribou Monument to the Newfoundland Regiment (shown on the map above) which stood at the British Front Line. The Danger Tree is that shown above which marked the furthest many men managed to get. The Y-Ravine is behind the German Front Line, the trenches of which are also shown below.

Of course it goes without saying that in 1916, the ground would have looked very different. Pockmarked by shells, cut through with trenches running on for miles and covered with swathes of barbed wire it would have presented advancing troops with considerable difficulties even without the horrors of enfilading machine gun fire and pounding artillery. 

As far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance that day. Of these, all the officers and around 650 other ranks became casualties.  Of the 780 men who went forward about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only 68 were available for roll call the following day. To all intents and purposes the Newfoundland Regiment had been wiped out, the unit as a whole having suffered a casualty rate of approximately 90%.

It goes without saying that as tourists today we can never imagine what it was like to be a part of this battle, not that we should be deterred from trying. Even so, one can appreciate things which sharpen the focus of any prior knowledge of the war and in particular any images which one might have imagined beforehand. I’d read about the attack on Beaumont Hamel in a book by Peter Hart and had imagined a vague collection of ‘ambiguous stills’ with which I did my best to appreciate the experiences of those who suffered the appalling violence of that first day. But standing in the middle of what had been No Man’s Land, with the British Front Line to my left, beside the Newfoundland Caribou Memorial, and the German Front Line to my right – just behind the memorial to the 51st Highland Division – I was struck by how small the battlefield, at that position,  was. As I’ve said, if this was any place in the countryside, it would constitute nothing more than a small part of a short walk, but in 1916 it was a great advance, in the pursuit of which, many thousands lost their lives.

There is a tendency at sites such as this, or rather in associated museums (for example that in Ypres) to create recreations of battles with sounds effects, waxworks, lighting effects and so on. For me, such recreations do nothing other than turn history into fantasy. They push history – which already borders on fiction (in that it can only be imagined)  – deeper into the world of make-believe. Recreations serve no other purpose than to ‘entertain’ and certainly do little by way of justice to memory of the men who fought there. It’s much better to be in a place, to hear the birds and see the trees… they might not be shells or machine guns, but they are real all the same.

I must admit I could have stood there in ‘No Man’s Land’ for hours, collecting together what I knew of the war and what I could glean from the guide and anchoring it to the reality of the world by which I was surrounded. What I could really appreciate here was the terrain, not only the pock-marked surface, but the level of the ground which,  superficially at least, appeared quite ‘flat’. Certainly, if one was out walking, one wouldn’t think it was particularly steep or hilly. However, from the point of view of those who left the British Front Line to attack the Germans, one could see what they were up against. The ground rose just enough to leave them exposed, while at the same time affording the German army at least a degree of shelter. Indeed, something which I found myself coming to understand in the Somme, were the subtle shifts of the terrain and how such changes, visible to the individual eye, shaped the war as a whole and determined the fates of so many hundreds of thousands of men.

The image below is taken in what was No Man’s Land. The Y Ravine Cemetery is on the right. Over the ridge in the distance is the German Front Line.

Over the course of the last few years, ever since my visit to Auschwitz, I’ve tried to understand what it is about being in a particular place that makes knowledge of a past associated with that place so much more compelling. It seems obvious that it should be the case, but why? I can watch countless DVDs about the Somme for example, view masses of photographs, read the testimonies of those who fought and look at the lists of the names of the dead. But only by standing there, in the middle of a field (upon which sheep were grazing) did the full horror make itself known.

I felt exactly the same thing at the Sheffield Memorial Park, situated on what was once the British Front Line between ‘Matthew Copse’ and ‘Mark Copse’ near the village of Serre. It was from here that an attack was made on what was then a fortified village by, amongst others, the Accrington Pals and Sheffield City Battalions, again on that infamous day, 1st July, 1916.

Again, staring ahead towards the Queens Cemetery, behind which the German Front Line would have run, one could see just how close the two sides were to one another. One could also read the terrain and see the advantage the Germans had when facing the approaching army. As a result therefore, one could also see just what the soldiers of the Pals Battalions were up against, even without the horrors of machine guns and artillery.

Again I have to stress, that we can never fully appreciate what the men who climbed from their trenches faced that fateful day. But as with my experience at the Newfoundland Memorial, I found that in looking towards where the German lines would have run, across the field over which the soldiers would have walked, the horrors of which I’d read became much clearer. I couldn’t see the guns of course, or the artillery and barbed-wire. I wasn’t walking into a hail of bullets with shrapnel flying from shells bursting all around me. But there in the tranquility of the present day, where one could hear the birds, I’d brought with me to that place, the whole of my existence – my past – and that was something at least I had in common with the brave men who fought there.

In La Boiselle, one can find the Lochnagar Crater, caused by a huge mine detonated at 7.28am on 1st July 1916. Containing 24 tons of explosives, it was at the time the largest ever man-made explosion.

 At 300 feet in diameter and 70 feet deep, the crater is still the largest caused by man in anger. Again, like the various battlefield sites, it’s a tranquil place, in stark contrast to the violence from which it was created. And yet, although one can’t hear the noise, one can see it in the vast space left in the ground. The sound has left a footprint; it’s become physical, just as sounds remain in the pock-marked battlefields found across the Somme.

In some respects, this idea of a ‘sonic footprint’ is akin to that of people leaving a trace on paths, roads, tracks and other lines found in the landscape. The trenches for example – those which one can see today – are not as they were in 1916 (i.e. they’re not as deep and are grown over with grass) but they are lines created by people many years ago. They might not call to mind a sound in quite the same way as the Lochnagar crater, but they’re nonetheless records of actions and movements.

In his book, ‘Lines, A Brief History’, anthropologist Tim Ingold writes that human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route’. He considers this in light of the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan – meaning to incise runic letters in stone) and surmises that human beings somehow ‘write’ themselves in the landscape. Henri Bergson wrote that our whole psychical existence was something just like a single sentence. I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists.’ The whole past could be said to exist, upon and within these trenches, as ‘sentences’, ‘written’ in the landscape by men almost 100 years ago.

These lines can also – metaphorically speaking – be thought of as magnetic tapes, where as we walk, we record our presence; where what we see, hear, touch etc. at any given moment, is analogous to the recording head of a tape-player arranging the magnetic particles so as to record the sound or video image. Equally, when we walk down a particular street, path or track, we simultaneously play-back previous recordings, those laid down by people long since lost to the past and the battlefields of the Somme are a perfect place to illustrate this point.

At the battle for Serre on that fateful day – 1st July 1916, hundreds of men lost their lives on the ground between the village and the memorial where we were standing. The weather on the day of our visit was mixed, but mostly dry (the battle took place on a beautiful summer’s day). There were patches of blue sky and the odd cloud. Looking ahead, I could see the lie of the land. I could see the distance, the village of Serre and behind me the trees of the copse. I could hear the birds and feel the ground beneath my feet. Imagine then, that as I walked, the things I saw were somehow recorded in the ground upon which I was walking: the position of the sun, the colour of the sky, the sound of the birds and the distance. As a record-head receives information and translates it onto tape, so metaphorically, my body was doing the same.

Of course, recording-heads don’t just record, but play-back all that’s previously been recorded. Again we can think of the ground as being crossed by many lines and that along every one of those lines are hundreds of ‘recordings’ left by those who went before us. We can imagine that what they saw, what they heard and what they thought were all translated into the ground upon which they walked.

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘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’. If we think of the lines the soldiers left behind, lines which stopped abruptly in No Man’s Land, we can imagine them leading all the way back to the time they were born.

These long, individual lines are of course impossible for us to imagine in their entirety, but on sites such as the battlefields at Serre and Beaumont Hamel, where the lines of trenches can still be seen and where No Man’s Land stretches out ahead, we can be sure at least of seeing a small part. By following these fragmentary lines, our bodies in a very small way mirror that of the soldiers. Again I have to stress the words very small way and again make it clear that we can never know what it was like to experience what they did.

When we walk down the line of a trench, the gestures of our bodies are bound in some very small way to mirror those of people caught in the midst of war. When we look at the sky, down at our feet, turn our heads left or right, we can assume that an aspect of the way our bodies move is almost a mirror-image of those who went before us. We can imagine then, that when we plant a footstep, the way our body moves, what we see around us is akin to the idea of our bodies playing back that which has been recorded in the ground; the ground determines how we move – determines the shape of our body; thus we empathise kinaesthetically with those lost to the past.

These lines, as I’ve said, are only fractions of the total line carried by men into battle, i.e. the total span comprising the entire geography of their lives. But history is full of holes, and the gaps have holes of their own.
History tells us only a little about the past. It gives us the outline whereas the rest is all but missing. The history of an event, as told in a book, has a beginning, a middle and an end, but of course in reality the past is never like that. Historic events are about the people involved, many of whom are missed out altogether. For George Lukács, ‘the “world-historical individual” must never be the protagonist of the historical novel, but only viewed from afar, by the average or mediocre witness.’ In other words, those historic events written about in books, are best discovered through the eyes of those who are missing from the text, people who at best are either given the epithet ‘mob’ or ‘masses’ or are bundled into numbers and tables of statistics. It’s through the eyes of these people that I want to see the past.

 
To consider this a little further; in the film Jurassic Park, the visitors to the Park are shown an animated film, which explains how the Park’s scientists created the dinosaurs. DNA, they explain, is extracted from mosquitoes trapped in amber and where there are gaps in the code sequence, so the gaps are filled with the DNA of frogs; the past is in effect brought back to life with fragments of the past and parts of the modern, living world. This ‘filling in the gaps’ is exactly what I have done throughout my life when trying to imagine the past and it’s just what we do in terms of the fragments of lines upon which we can kinaesthetically engage with people lost to the past. Where there are gaps we use our own lives to fill the holes and thereby understand that those who died in places like the Somme, were people just the same as ourselves.

Something else which plays a key role in interpreting landscapes such as those at the Somme is something which we might describe as ‘Embodied Imagination.’ We all at some point in our lives try to imagine the past whether through photographs, paintings or literature, but what we imagine always comprises snapshots, static images animated to some degree by our imaginations. It’s exactly how I described my thoughts on the Somme before my visit.

“Before visiting the battlefields, I wanted to record how I imagined the Somme. Old photographs, books and contemporaneous records all made a picture – a collage of sorts, comprising devastated fields, cut through with networks of trenches. Craters and mud; machine gun fire and shells. Woods reduced to spent matchsticks occupying a space on the horizon. The terrain as I’d imagined it was always flat and the images themselves silent, equivocal, without any weight or sense of place. There was colour but like any specific detail it was always vague. Any imagined scene was removed from my senses.  I could try to imagine the war, but of course any idea as to what it was like would be well wide of the mark to say the very least. I could imagine the rain, the blue sky, the smell of the grass, but still it was all divorced from my senses; an indeterminate collection of images wherein there was little sense of direction. I could try and imagine movement, but any progression derived from a series of stills as if I was looking down a length of film found on a cutting-room floor.”

 
In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology,’ Christopher Tilley writes:
“At the basis of all, even the most abstract knowledge is the sensuous, sensing and sensed body in which all experience is embodied: subjectivity is physical… The body carries time into the experience of place and landscape. Any moment of lived experience is thus orientated by and toward the past, a fusion of the two. Past and present fold in upon each other. The past influences the present and the present rearticulates the past.”

In a ‘Phenomenology of Landscape,’ he writes: “Knowledge of place stems from human experiences, feeling and thought.”

We could say therefore that knowledge of the Serre battlefield, for example, stems from ‘human experiences’ (the experiences of those who fought in 1916), ‘feeling’ (my own kinaesthetic experience of the battlefield in the present day) and ‘thought’ (my embodied imagination where my knowledge of past human experience is animated by my own kinaesthetic experience). Knowledge of a place is both geography and biography, of both the place and the individual.
 
Again, Christopher Tilley’s work is useful here. In his book, ‘Body and Image,’ he writes:

“What the body does in relation to imagery [landscape], its motions, its postures, how that imagery [landscape] is sensed through the fingers or the ear or the nose, as much as through the organ of the eye, actively constitutes the mute significance of imagery [landscape] which to have its kinaesthetic impact does not automatically require translation into either thoughts or meanings. The kinaesthetic significance of imagery [landscape] is thus visceral. It works through the muscles and ligaments, through physical actions and postures which provide affordances for the perceptual apparatus of the body in relation to which meaning may be grafted on, or attached. Meaning is derived from and through the flesh, not a cognitive precipitate of the mind without a body, or a body without organs.”

 
The ‘perceptual apparatus of the body’ as described by Tilley is akin to what I’ve described as my kinaesthetic experience of the battlefield. ‘Meaning’ can then be ‘grafted on’ or ‘attached’, where that meaning is my knowledge of past human experience. The whole is what I’ve described as ‘embodied imagination.’ But we must be careful not to reduce experience down to a mind/body dualism. The mind is not divorced from the body, neither is the body separate from the mind. ‘Consciousness is corporeal.’

I mentioned earlier the names of the trenches; the fact that for four years, a strange, new and violent place was imposed upon a peaceful agricultural landscape; how it’s almost as if the names of the trenches were fragments of the collective memory of those who dug and occupied them. Today, when we walk along what remains, we engage kinaesthetically with those who knew them during the war and we carry with us the entire geography of our existence, stretching back in a line to the day we were born. In effect, we impose – just as we’ve done throughout our lives – our own world upon that which already exists. “In a fundamental way,” writes Christopher Tilley, “names create landscapes”  and in a sense, the names of those we have known, whether throughout our lives or for a few minutes are mixed with the names of streets, cities and buildings, to make a landscape unique to us as individuals. The landscape of the Somme, in the physical present or in books and maps has been created not only by the names which existed prior to the war, but by the names of the trenches, fortifications and not least the names of everyone who fell here.

 Inevitably in a place such as the battlefield at Serre where so may men fell on that small patch of ground, one’s thoughts will turn to death – the literal end of the line. In an interview in 1979 with Frank Venaille, writer Georges Perec was asked: “…don’t you think that… the determination to work from memories or from the memory, is the will above all to stand out against death, against silence?”

If we can empathise kinaesthetically with the lives of the men who fought, it’s almost inevitable that we will somehow engage with their deaths which inevitably means a contemplation of our own, and in that sense, the fact that we can then walk away means that to some extent we do indeed stand out against death and silence.

Death is at its most visible in the cemeteries and monuments of the Somme. The landscape is covered with hundreds. Immaculate and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, they are strangely beautiful places wherein one’s breath is always taken away by the row upon row of white headstones. It’s only here the scale of the slaughter becomes apparent. Some headstones have names, many – where names are unknown – have just the words A Solider of the Great War. Often the date is familiar, coinciding with the start of a phase in the battle, July 1st 1916 for example. But many men too vanished altogether and over 72,000 of these men are commemorated on the Thiepval memorial to the missing.

In some respects, by being in the places where they fell, by walking the lines of the trenches and through ‘reading’ or ‘playing-back’ ‘recordings’ in the lines which cover the Somme as I’ve described above, we are, kinaesthetically, remembering the missing and all who never returned home. People are places and places are people. Remembrance is not an act solely of the mind, but of an embodied imagination.

Filed Under: Trees, World War I Tagged With: Bill Viola, Cemetery, Moments, Silence, The Somme, Tim Ingold, World War I, WWI

Music and Names

May 11, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

Over a year ago I wrote about the beginnings of a project concerned with Music and Text. I must admit that I’ve not followed up this project what with my MA Show and other things taking over, however, recently, in working on another project (see: Wolvercote Cemetery) I have come around to picking up where I left off. It was whilst considering the cemetery in Wolvercote, but whilst visiting another cemetery in Highgate that I was struck whilst looking at the hundreds of names carved into the stone how once these names would have had a sound.

As I wrote after my visit: “…when we read a name, we hear within our minds, albeit silently, the sound of a name that was spoken countless times. We hear it muffled, like bells were muffled at times of death.”

I then began to think back to another line of research which I’d started sometime earlier. This was in regards to Old Musical Instruments which I studied in the Ashmolean Museum. The reason for the research was to try out a method of observation the results of which led me to assert (a point which may appear rather obvious) that the design of the instruments, sitting silently behind their glass; the materials used and so forth, were as such so that the instrument would make the perfect sound.

The silent instrument sitting in its display case was made to make a sound, just as a name, carved on a tombstone was there to be spoken.

A Lira da Braccio in the Ashmolean Museum.

Highgate Cemetery

Graves in Highgate Cemetery.

Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Cemetery, Goethean Observation, Highgate Cemetery, Instruments, Music

Highgate Cemetery

May 6, 2009 by Nicholas Hedges

I’d known about Highgate cemetery, principally as the last resting place of Karl Marx, but this was the first time I had visited it. Having left Archways Tube station, I walked up Highgate Hill, through the pleasant surroundings of Waterlow Park and found my outside a large iron gate, standing amongst a small group of people waiting to go in. The cemetery itself is divided into two sections; the older West and the newer East. The East side can be visited at any time, but the West can only be accessed as part of a guided tour. It was for this tour that we along with a dozen others waited our turn.

I had the feeling that we were queuing to be let inside a prison. Not that I’ve ever queued for such a reason. It was simply the fact that we were locked outside waiting for our appointed time to visit, when those kept behind the walls would be allowed to receive us (there is something similar too in the architecture of the gatehouse and that which one sees in some Victorian prisons). Also, I couldn’t help but think of King Kong – the wall and the gates behind which the giant beast was kept. There was certainly a sense of anticipation, which had, it seems, been in part been created by the cemetery’s architect Stephen Geary.

Highgate Cemetery

The way into the cemetery itself, from the courtyard, is via a flight of steps. When standing in the courtyard, the cemetery cannot be seen; it’s only when walking through the archway leading to the steps, at the top of which one can see the greenery and the first of the monuments, that this vast cemetery is slowly revealed.

There is certainly more than a hint of theatre in how one enters, and the fact one ascends the stairs into the world of the dead serves to reflect a belief in the continuity of life after death; by ascending the steps we follow in the footsteps of those long since passed away, as if they were not borne here by pallbearers, horses and hearse, but had walked here themselves. Their lives continue and of course life continues through our present-day visiting.

It is this which makes the place feel strangely alive. That is not to suggest of course that those interred within are indeed still living in the physical sense of the word, but that the memory of their lives is almost tangible. Many of those buried here would have enjoyed the finer things that Victorian life could offer, things which we modern-day visitors can only know through books, films and television. These people lived the lives that we can only imagine.

Highgate Cemetery

I do not wish however to over-romanticise their lives, by suggesting that they were all happy and spent their time at balls, dressed in splendid costumes; that their lives were indeed little more than costume dramas; that would be naive to say the least. But nonetheless, as I walked around the cemetery, I was aware as I read the names on the tumbledown, but nonetheless impressive monuments, that the names inscribed upon them – or at least some of them, particularly in the Circle of Lebanon (which reminded me, in some respects, of the Great Crescent in Bath which we’d visited the day before) – would have been known in society. They would have called to mind faces, voices, attitudes and characters where today they are labels for empty spaces.

The Victorian attitude to death – the strong belief in the afterlife which I’ve already mentioned – is clearly apparent in this cemetery; religion was of course very important to them. Strange then that they should choose to design their funerary monuments in the style of Ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. Perhaps this was as much down to the fashion of the time as anything else, but could it also be that the Ancient Egyptians’ attitude to death and remembrance was somehow a confirmation of a continued existence? That’s not to say – and this goes without saying – that Victorians shared in the Polytheistic beliefs of the Pharaohs, but that the very age and ancient duration of their (the Pharaohs’) memory, which had and has spanned several millennia, promised an afterlife of a different kind; one that would be shared with living. Alongside the immortality of the soul, the endurance of the name was also important.

Highgate Cemetery

Such large and elaborate monuments are rebuttals of death itself. They are large and elaborate parts of the living world and, it could be argued, belie the uncertainty of a continued heavenly existence. They occupy a space in the land of the living, just as did the deceased, and when we read a name, we hear within our minds, albeit silently, the sound of a name that was spoken countless times. We hear it muffled, like bells were muffled at times of death.

I was reminded when reflecting on this of some work I did on Old Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It might sound obvious, but having studied materials used in the making of a Lira di Braccio as well as its shape, I became aware that it was so designed and made so as to make a sound. Names too are like this. They are given so as to be said.

Considering the perpetuity of names and memory amidst the slow convulsions of the ground , I coudn’t help but think of the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, who in Urne Burial, published in 1658, wrote some of the most beautiful lines ever put down on the subject of mortality and remembrance:

“And therefore restlesse inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems vanity almost out of date, and superanuated peece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons, one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ‘Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes. To extend our memories by Monuments, whose death we dayly pray for, and whose durations we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.
[…]There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks. To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for Eternity by Ænigmaticall Epithetes, or first letters of our names, to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were, and have new Names given us like many of the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting Languages.
[…]Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.”

Walking in the Circle of Lebanon (reached by a gateway which itself could be a cast off from a production of Aida) one couldn’t help but think of the families entombed within the sepulchres and, as I’ve already written, the lives which they led in Victorian society. The dead names carved in the stone were now as hollow and as empty as whatever lay behind the closed doors. And up beyond the Circle of Lebanon, the once wealthy inhabitants of the cemetery, far from the whirligig of their colourful lives were now just bones turned over in the soil. The trees, growing all around, seemed to be reaching with their roots deep into the ground like a man searching for change in his pockets, elbowing their way between the tombstones, staggering amongst the ivy trusses, as if driven mad by the idea of nothing.

Highgate Cemetery

In a recent study of another cemetery, this time in Wolvercote, Oxford, I came to the conclusion through a particular process of observation, that there were no such things as cemeteries. Well, of course there are cemeteries, but in a wider, more holistic view there is just the cycle of birth, life and death, whether those cycles are applied to the existences of human beings, animals or leaves. Where those leaves fall and where bodies are laid to rest is in the end quite irrelevant.

Highgate Cemetery itself was saved because of the threat of development. For many years it was left to decay, grown over with ivy, brambles and trees and suffering from vandalism. Unchecked, this cemetery could have disappeared along with all the names and their monuments. Thankfully, through the dedication of a relatively small number of people, the cemetery remains a place that we can visit today. But why is it we do so?

Highgate Cemetery

There are of course many reasons why a place like Highgate is of interest, not least from a purely historical perspective. The Victorian attitude towards death is a subject in itself, as are the styles and designs of the various funerary monuments. But for many of us who visit I think the reasons run much deeper.

The monuments we see were put there for us. As we walk, we try to imagine the lives of those who lived a century before we were even born, when we did not exist. And now, when the those who lived back then, exist only in the hollow shell of their names, so we cast our eyes to the future when our names will also no longer be spoken.
Back in 2007, Monika and I visited Pere Lachaise and Montmartre cemeteries in Paris, and reflecting on our visits I wrote:

“Cemeteries have something in common with old photographs, particularly when we consider the the writing of Roland Barthes who writes that photographs have within them the ‘catastrophe of death,’ and that, ‘in the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…’. In cemeteries too, Time is somehow engorged and contains in abundance that catastophe. One has the impression of time standing still, stopped by the dates of death carved into the many gravestones and tombs, yet we know, all too well, that time continues.”

Perhaps it’s Time, engorged within the bounds of the cemetery that skews the gravestones and monuments.

As I wrote earlier, the people buried in this cemetery lived lives that we can only imagine. Similarly, their existence now is one that we can only conceive at the very limits of our imaginations. My aunt once said to me, “you have to believe in something,” ergo, you can’t believe in nothing. And this is certainly true, I can’t imagine nothing, whether that nothing is all the time before I was born or all the time that will come after my death. Cemeteries, like any historical record, building or object tell us there was something and that there always will be something.

Cemeteries point to both our past and future non-existence at a moment when we feel the present most acutely.

As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his conclusion to Urne Burial:

“‘Tis all one to lye in St Innocents* Church-yard, as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrainus**.
*in Paris where bodies soon consume.
**A stately Mausoleum or sepulchral pyle built by Adrianus in Rome, where now standeth the Castle of St. Angelo.

Filed Under: Goethean Observations, Trees Tagged With: Barthes, Catastrophe, Cemetery, Death, Goethean Observation, Highgate Cemetery, Instruments, Montmartre, Music, Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

Connections

August 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

This evening I began working on an idea I’ve had for a while which incorporates the World War 1 postcards I was given by Tom Phillips. The idea was to show these postcards on a wall but with only a few the right way round i.e. showing the portrait (they are all portrait postcards of soldiers, most individual, some with other people). The rest would be displayed reversed showing either writing or, as is mostly the case, nothing – they would just be blank. I wasn’t sure how this would look and so I began putting the postcards up on my bedroom wall and fairly quickly I could see that the postcards, displayed in this way had an impact.

Very Lights

There was something about the blank postcards which was particularly resonant and the more I looked, the more I could see what it was that leant them this quality. On most of the blank postcards there is a motif running down the centre of the card (dividing the address from the text). These lines are of various designs, some very simple, others more elaborate. I decided to scan a few which can be found below.

Reverse Motif

Reverse Motif

Reverse Motif

For me these motifs have something of the grave about them, perhaps because they are each shaped a little like a crucifix, and they reminded me of some of the memorials I had seen in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Paris

And as I started making connections, I thought of the X paintings and those I discussed in a previous entry – Black Mirrors and thought about how these marks could be incorporated into a work just like the symbol of the ‘X’.
X (Mine)

I also thought how these various motifs/symbols resembled the botanic labels I’ve had made, each engraved with the name of one of my ancestors such as that of Henry Jones (below).

Deadman's Walk (Henry Jones)

And finally, one last connection between the motifs and a work I made in November 2006, soon after a visit made to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Reverse Motif

7

Reverse Motif

Filed Under: Holocaust Tagged With: Cemetery, Connections, Holocaust, World War I, WWI, WWI Postcards, WWI Postcards, WWII, X

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

November 8, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

On the first day of this month, I travelled to Paris on Eurostar and met my girlfriend Monika at the Gare de Nord station, she having travelled in from Luxembourg by TGV to Gare de l’Est. I was last in Paris in 1992/93 (the exact date eludes me) on a visit made as part of my degree in Art History, and although my memories of the city were rather vague and (before re-visiting) few, my impression of it was nonetheless intact and fairly lucid. From the pretend statue at Sacre Coeur (a woman, painted white, standing still), to being lost somewhere near Les Halles, from the pastels of Odilon Redon in the Musee D’Orsay, to Rodin’s ‘Balzac’, from the Musee Moreau to a few trips made on the Metro, I could adduce that Paris was beautiful, and, as Walter Benjamin described it in his Arcades Project, the ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century.’

This sense of it being a nineteenth century city might owe as much to the fact that much of it was indeed built (or rebuilt) in that period (with the extensive renovations by Haussmann in the 1860s) and that its ‘symbol’ the Eiffel Tower, was constructed between 1887-89 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle (the novelist Guy de Maupassant, who claimed to hate the tower, supposedly ate lunch at the tower’s restaurant every day. When asked why, he answered that it was the one place in Paris where you couldn’t see it).

The city’s character is formed as much by an abundance of 19th century literature (Zola, Baudelaire, Balzac, Huysmans…) and art (Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism…) than simply ‘bricks and mortar’, yet, despite this sense, it’s by no means a city stuck in the past at all, rather it’s very much of the present, as if the intervening time had not intervened, as if there was nothing to intervene between.

November the 1st is All Saints Day, and by tradition, people in many European countries, including France, take flowers to the graves of dead relatives. Our hotel room, overlooked the cemetery at Montmartre which, having unpacked, we visited.

Paris

For Monika, being Polish, the day was very much part of her own tradition, and one of the first things we saw as we walked around, was a group of Poles reciting a prayer for a fellow countryman laid to rest in the cemetery. The cemetery itself was interesting inasmuch as it was very much a part of the city, rather than a place divorced from life – a sense augmented by the bridge which ran above it, beneath which the tombs of the dead resembled makeshift dwellings erected by the homeless; constructions for the purpose of temporary habitation, rather than eternal rest. Indeed, given the occasional broken pane of glass we wondered whether or not they were in fact used as shelters; where the living tap the dead for respite from life.

These little dwellings were beautiful, especially where time, which ought to have let the dead alone, had scratched away at the doors, much like the vagrants seeking shelter from the rain.

Paris

The first grave we saw took my interest, since a cat was laying on top of it, dead centre, looking towards the headstone. I took a photograph (which I have since, accidentally deleted) and immediately, a lady, standing with a man (I presume was her husband) asked me in French, ‘why did you take a picture?’ I must confess here that I do not speak French and relied on Monika who does. I explained that I was interested in the cat and was amazed then to discover that the grave was that of her mother. Suddenly, from an anonymous grave with an anonymous name, the memorial had come to mean much more. There was a physical, living connection. She explained in polite conversation, that the cat had been there most of the day and hadn’t moved even when she busied herself about the grave arranging flowers and so on. Cats, we were to discover, were a common feature of the cemetery.

One sculpted tomb was especially beautiful. It showed what I presume to be the deceased, not as he was whilst living, but as he was dead. His sunken features, his closed eyes, and the exposed shoulder all pointed to something deeper than sleep. The eyes in particular were striking, in that one could see they were the eyes of a man who would never open them again. The shroud had been pulled back, to allow one last look at his face, a look which had lasted over a century. I say, as he was dead, but of course he still is dead, and this sculpture serves in a way to remind us, that even in death we are not free from ‘time’s relentless melt’.

Montmartre Cemetery, Paris

On our second day in Paris, we visited the Louvre which, I remembered, I hadn’t visited during my first stay in the city. The building is indeed impressive, as are the queues which inevitably form outside. Nevertheless, having joined the queue outside we soon found our way to the queue inside which as well as being much longer was even slower to move. In fact, it took almost an hour to get a ticket which wasn’t surprising considering that one of the two tills serving our queue was closed and when that which was closed finally opened, the open one, for the purposes of consistency, closed, and this fat caterpillar of people continued chewing on its incredulity.

Once in, I found the Louvre to be almost worth the wait, although the queue had sapped our strength somewhat, and what one needs when walking around the palace is all the strength one can muster; mental as well as physical. What did strike me was the bizarre behaviour of most of the other visitors, something which I remembered as having struck me when I visited what I think was the Grand Palais during my first visit. Back then, a number of people walked around the galleries videoing continuously, looking at everything through the eyepiece of a video-camera, and now, in this increasingly digital age, the same is true but on a much larger scale. Maybe it is something to do with our contemporary culture which means we cannot see something unless it’s reproduced, we cannot know it except through facsimile, that things are not received as being experienced unless captured by a camera. Imagine, you’re approaching a painting, a genuine da Vinci (not the Mona Lisa in this instance). You are about to see something which you know the great man saw himself, something with a provenance dating back over five centuries, an image which countless numbers have looked at since its creation. What do you do? Well, the woman in front of us framed it in her camera, took its picture and walked off looking at the image on her camera’s display. The difference between something original and a copy (and by copy I mean a skewed, 5 megapixel digital photograph) has, it seems, been attenuated to such an extent that there’s no longer any perceived difference at all.

Near to where this ‘incident’ took place is the room which houses the Mona Lisa, a painting whose popularity is, in part, due to the viral-like profusion of its myriad reproductions. On posters, postcards, badges, T-shirts, calendars, mugs and so on, the image is better known than any other in the world, and so, as if she were a celebrity, people crowd about her – as she gazes out from behind her bullet-proof screen – all wanting a copy of their own. Phones are raised amidst the clamorous throng like numerous periscopes; cameras snap at her heels. It really beggars belief.

There were no throngs of people slobbering around Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, or Vermeer’s Astronomer, and there was no-one standing in front of Ingres sublime portrait of Louis Francois Bertin, a painting which at 116 x 95cm, is, if not in scale, truly epic. Bertin looks out from across almost two hundred years, as alive as he was then. He looks at you as you dare to return his dismissive gaze. One can almost hear him scoff. You are mortal. You can almost hear him say it. He is immortal and you know that he is thinking it. He looks right through you at the centuries to come when you will be long gone from his gaze. “I will still be here,” he says. It really is one of the great portraits.

An artist well known for his monumental works, Anselm Kiefer, was at the time of our visit exhibiting three new works commissioned by the Louvre. It took us a while to find them, and when we did I must say I was rather disappointed. Whereas Ingres more modest-sized portrait was made vast in the palace, Kiefer’s painting ‘Athanor’ despite its scale was rendered rather small. The two sculptures either side were somewhat peripheral and reminded me of Christmas trees which after New Year start to outstay their welcome. This is not to say that any of these works are bad, they’re not – far from it. But somehow in this setting they just didn’t seem to work.

After the Louvre, we were given a guided tour by one of Monika’s friends of the Marais district, which was a real treat. The Marais district (meaning marsh or swamp), spreads across the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Rive Droit, or Right Bank of the Seine. According to one of the many websites on The Marais, it was:

“… in fact a swamp until the 13th century; when it was converted for agricultural use. In the early 1600s, Henry IV built the Place des Vosges, turning the area into the Paris’s most fashionable residential district and attracting wealthy aristocrats who erected luxurious but discreet hotels particuliers (private mansions). When the aristocracy moved to Versailles and Faubourg Saint Germain during the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Marais and its mansions passed into the hands of ordinary Parisians. Today, the Marais is one of the few neighborhoods of Paris that still has almost all of its pre-Revolutionary architecture. In recent years the area has become trendy, but it’s still home to a long-established Jewish community.”

Evidence of the Jewish community, and, in particular, the traumas suffered at the hands of the Nazis and the Vichy government can be found in the Holocaust Memorial, as well as the memorial in the Alle des Justes, dedicated to all those who helped the Jews in such dangerous and terrible times; thousands of anonymous names (unknown at least to visitors) who nevertheless did so much, to do good in a very bleak world.

On numerous walls of various buildings were plaques dedicated to the hundreds of children deported from the district’s schools. Having visited some of the terrible places where some of these children ended up, it’s somehow even more distressing to see the place from where they were taken.

Paris

Evidence of the area’s mediaeval past can be seen in its surviving ancient wall, the only section left of the Philippe Auguste fortifications which date back to the 11th and 12th centuries. It’s just one of the many features which distinguishes this part of Paris from the rest of Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.

Paris

But it’s more than just the old buildings, the place has a character which is quite unique; it’s quite understated (although not entirely); most unlike the sweeping brovado of Haussmann’s boulevards. In one part of Marais, there is a group of antique shops, called Village St. Paul, where we came across a photographic shop selling old photographs. This shop, called ‘Des Photographies’ was a place in which I could have spent several hours sifting through snapshots of times long gone, and although we were pushed for time, we did purchase two photographs, or rather one and a half, for one of the photos had been cut from a bigger picture.

The first shows a young woman, standing in the rain. I cannot tell exactly when it was taken, but I would imagine it’s some time in the 1920s or 30s.

A Lady

I liked this for the fact it had been cut from a bigger photograph. But why was it cut? Was it malicious? Was it through heartbreak? Was someone cutting this woman, this memory, from their life? Of course it could have been anything but malicious.

The second photograph, which Monika bought for me, is a group portrait, perhaps a family, taken around the end of the nineteenth century.

Group Portrait

This photograph is interesting for many reasons, one being that no-one is looking in the same direction. Only one person, the woman standing behind the old lady (seated) is looking at the camera. The photograph itself, judging from the back, had at one point been part of an album, and one can’t help wonder when looking at it what other pictures accompanied it within that collection. Individual portraits of those within the picture perhaps? Images of where they came from? Who were these people, these men and women who have since lost their names? It’s strange, but sometimes names outlive the body (on plaques and tombstones) or bodies (or at least their alchemical equivalents) outlive the names (such as with these photographs), but rarely do the two continue to coexist.

The following morning we made our way to the largest and most famous cemetery in the city, Pere Lachaise. The cemetery takes its name from Pere François de la Chaise (1624-1709), confessor to Louis XIV, and is reputed to be the world’s most visited cemetery, not that it seemed particularly busy as we walked around. Armed with a map upon which we’d marked the graves we wanted to see, we spent a few hours wandering through the streets and avenues of this vast necropolis.

Pere Lachaise Map

Among the graves we visisted were those of, Apollinaire, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Bizet, Gustave Caillebote, Chopin, Corot, Daumier, David, Delacroix, Paul Eluard, Gericault, Ingres, Moliere, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Seurat, Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde.

Paris
Theodore Gericault (1791-1824)

Paris
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875)

Pere Lachaise, Paris
Paul Eluard (1895-1952)

Paris
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

Paris
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

And there was something quite strange about seeing the graves of painters whose works we had seen in the Louvre the previous day, artists such as Ingres, who’d given Louis Francois Bertin immortality through his portrait. It was hard to reconcile the fact the he – Ingres – had been dead and buried in this place for 140 years, over a hundred years before I was even born, whilst fresh in my memory was an image which would have once occupied a space in his own: the intervening time had not, as I said earlier, intervened at all.

As with the cemetery at Montmartre, what I found myself drawn to were the graves of those who’ve not left behind a tangible heritage (paintings, discoveries, books etc.). Those names without bodies; scratched like grafitti, by a vagrant time who wanders amongst the stacked sepulchres. Names which do not ring bells when you read them, into whose shapes the moss has grown; names around which death has become less eternal; fragile like glass, broken in the bent and buckled leading of once replete windows.

Pere Lachaise, Paris

In broken windows such as these, we see the passing, not just of a life, but of memories; the passing of those who came after the deceased with whom the increasingly vague memories of a distant relative melt into further graves. In every cemetery, you will find hundreds, maybe thousands of anonymous names; names and numbers from which we are separated by generations, decades or even centuries, and of course the ultimate experience: death. And in a cemetery, perhaps somewhere in France, are the names of those people in the photographs I bought in Le Marais; the single woman cut from the bigger picture (in more ways than one), the old lady seated on a chair in the sunlit garden, the two women beside her, and the three men all looking in different directions.

Having said goodbye to Monika at Gare de l’Est, I listened to ‘In Our Time’, a podcast from the BBC. The episode I was listening to was on the 17th century philosopher Spinoza, whose work George Eliot had translated in the 19th century, and whilst discussing Eliot’s epic novel Middlemarch, one of the speakers paraphrased an extract from its conclusion, an extract which I have since discovered, just as she had written it:

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

What we leave behind (our legacy) is not justified solely by its apparent value or greatness; whether or not it’s great art or literature, or a discovery which will prove a catalyst for even greater advances. It is not dependent on whether or not we have made some kind of sacrifice or acted with courage in times of great affliction. It is also those unhistoric acts of which Eliot speaks, by people who in many cases are not even names anymore. It’s often the decidely average which plays the greater part. Everything, even the mundane has an influence on the world.

In the translator’s forward to Walter Benjamin’s even more epic Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin write of Bejmain’s intentions as being:

“to grasp such diverse material under the general category of Urgeschichte, signifying the ‘primal history’ of the nineteenth century. This was something that could be realized only indirectly, through ‘cunning’: it was not the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography but rather the ‘refuse’ and ‘detritus’ of history, the half concealed, variegated traces of the daily life of ‘the collective,’ that was to be the object of study, and with the aid of methods more akin – above all, in their dependence of chance – to the methods of the nineteenth-century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or indeed to the methods of the nineteenth-century ragpicker, than to those of the modern historian.”

Paris is indeed the capital of the nineteenth century, but what of the nineteenth century itself? As the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, who is himself commemorated in the Pantheon:

“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.”

Somewhere, the century still exists and Paris is still its capital.

Filed Under: Photography, Trees Tagged With: Arcades Project, Cemetery, George Eliot, Junkshop Photographs, Paris, Pere la Chaise, Spinoza, Vintage Photographs, Walter Benjamin

Parisian Cemeteries and Old Photographs

November 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst writing about Parisian Cemeteries, I came to realise that there was a similarity between the cemetery and old photographs. Roland Barthes, in relation to photographs talks of the catastrophe of death inherent in every one, and how, in photographs time is engorged.

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

“In the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…”

The same could be said of cemeteries, except in their case, the death in question (the inherent catastrophe) is not those of the already dead, but our own, and Time’s engorgement, is the passage of time within the cemetery’s boundaries, where with all the dates of death, where it has been ‘tripped up’ and where it has stumbled, the passage has been disrupted, much like a cart pulled over rough ground. In a cemetery, time lags behind itself, behind where it should be, and for a moment we are more free of its grasp than at any other time; more alive amongst the dead than ever amongst the living.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Barthes, Catastrophe, Cemetery, Paris, Time

Parisian Cemeteries

November 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst on a trip to Paris with Monika, we paid a visit to two cemeteries; one, the cemetery at Montmartre, near our hotel, and the other, the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in the east of the city. The cemetery at Montmartre was interesting in the way it was very much a part of the city, rather than a place divorced from life. This feeling was enhanced by the bridge which ran above it, beneath which the tombs of the dead reminded me of the makeshift dwellings put up by the homeless.

Paris

The first grave we saw took my interest, since a cat was laying on to of it, dead centre, looking towards the headstone. I took a photograph (which I have since, accidentally deleted) and immediately, a lady, standing with a man (I presume was her husband) asked me in French, ‘why did you take a picture?’ I must confess here that I do not speak French and relied on Monika who does. I explained that I was interested in the cat and was amazed to discover that the grave was that of her mother. Suddenly, from an anonymous grave with an anonymous name, the memorial had come to mean much more. There was a physical, living connection. She explained in polite conversation, that the cat had been there most of the day and hadn’t moved even when she busied herself about the grave arranging flowers and so on. Cats, we were to discover, were a common feature of the cemetery.

Paris

The day we visited was November 1st, a public holiday and the Day of the Dead, a time in some European countries when people visit the graves of loved ones. I knew, through Monika, that it was an important time in Poland, and, sure enough, where there were Polish graves in the cemetery, there were Poles, laying flowers, saying prayers, and remembering those of their country who had long since died; a tradition which is both poignant and to be admired. Later, when we visited Pere Lachaise, we found the grave of Chopin bedecked with flowers and a sashes of the Polish colours.

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Some of the graves in the Montmartre Cemetery were particularly beautiful. Many were like tiny dwellings replete with doors and windows (usually stained glass), and although many had decayed through the ravages of time, their wearied state accentuated the romantacism inherent in many such cemeteries.

Montmartre Cemetery, Paris

One sculpted tomb was particularly beautiful. It showed what I presume to be the deceased, not as he was whilst living, but as he was dead. His sunken features, his closed eyes, and the exposed shoulder all pointed to something deeper than sleep. The eyes in particular were striking, in that one could see they were the eyes of a man who would never open them again. The shroud had been pulled back, to allow one last look at his face, a look which had lasted over a century. I say, as he was dead, but of course he still is dead, and this sculpture serves in a way to remind us, that even in death we are not free from ‘time’s relentless melt’.

Montmartre Cemetery, Paris

At Pere Lachaise, I was keen to visit the graves of artists, writers and composers such as Ingres, Moliere, Pissarro, Proust, Chopin, Gericault, Delacroix and Wilde amongst many others and having bought a map of the cemetery (which is vast) Monika and I planned our visit and began to seek them out.

Pere Lachaise Map

It was strange – in the case of the various painters buried there – that having seen their work in the Louvre, we were now standing above their remains. One painting, for example, which we had seen in the Louvre, stuck in my mind as I stood next to the grave of Ingres (1780-1867). It was his portrait, painted in 1832, of Louis Francois Bertin, one of the most famous works by the artist, and one which is so full of life, it hardly seemed possible that the man in the painting and the man who painted it were long since dead. How was it, that I had seen something I know Ingres had also (obviously) seen, yet here I was, standing above his grave where he had lay for over a century before I was even born. That is the power of painting; they are objects into which the artist paints him or herself, in brushstrokes (particularly in the case of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works we saw) which made in moment can exist for all time.

On the way home from Paris, as I passed beneath the sea in the channel tunnel, I began to write about the visit to Pere Lachaise. What I had been aware of as we walked around, was the content of the photographs I was taking, some of which follow:

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They were all images of decay, the gradual fall into disrepair of the numerous memorials in this vast necropolis, and, given the work I have lately been doing on the ‘gestures’ of things, I began to consider the ‘gesture’ of this particular cemetery. What follows is what I wrote on the way home:

(The gesture is) like mould, lichen, which grows slowly in small patches over a long period of time. But these spores are invisible, we cannot see them except in the broken panes of glass, the flaked paint, the verdigris patinas on the doors to individual tombs, the chipped stones; every trace of time’s slow, considered vandalism. It’s always present in the cemetery and every now and then, one detects a trace of its fleeting presence – the scent of vinegar which lingers around a tomb where the glass is missing, where the door is open, or where the iron gates have corroded and been worn through by time’s relentless scratching; time’s relentlessness.

Even when all trace of the bones has gone, long after the burial clothes and the casket, time will continue its malevolence, picking at the fabric of memory, wearing down the words, smoothing over names, dismantling the dead and our memories of them, withering through slow alchemy these parts into atoms. Candles lit and placed beside the graves will soon be extinguished, flowers will be wilted, trees will be naked, picked of their leaves and left like confetti, to remind the living of this withering certainty.

Cemeteries are not just places where the dead are dismantled, where the names by which these parts were held together are also broken apart. They are as much for the living, who fight with death to keep the parts together, to deny death, to deny its certainty; to deny their own futures. The living wander the graves to maintain the present. Inside cemeteries the present is stretched.

We walk through cemeteries, and with our minds like nets try and catch this butterfly called Time, but we are assailed by its beauty, we stand open-mouthed and wait for the crysalis to be spun with invisible thread around us.”

Cemeteries have something in common with old photographs, particularly when we consider the the writing of Roland Barthes who writes that photographs have within them the ‘catastrophe of death,’ and that, ‘in the photograph, Time’s immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…’. In cemeteries too, Time is somehow engorged and obviously contains – in abundance – that catastophe. One has the impression of time standing still, stopped by the dates of death carved into the many gravestones and tombs, yet we know, all too well, that time continues…

Filed Under: Photography, Trees Tagged With: Barthes, Catastrophe, Cemetery, Gesture, Montmartre, Paris, Pere la Chaise, Vintage Photographs

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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