Goethean Observation: Pilgrims of the Wild, 1935
April 7, 2020 by Nicholas Hedges
As with observations of this type, the text is written almost as a stream-of-consciousness, as a result of which there might be a fair amount of repetition, dropped sentences, and parts that won't make an awful lot sense! But that is the nature of the thing; to find a hook – a few words that might be the foundation of something else.
Goethean observation of a book; Grey Owl's 'Pilgrims of the Wild', published in 1935.
The object is a book with around 300 pages. It's hardback, grey with a fair amount of wear and tear; mottled with patches of lighter grey. The spine has the title and the name of the author and publisher. The front and back covers are both blank with the same discolouration.
Most of the pages are taken up with text but several of the pages contain black and white photographs.
As I flick through the pages my eyes jump from word to word, picking out fragments of sentences.
We watched the two V's
I read in my head – aware of the sound of the boiler, the clock on the wall and the odd car outside; not so many due to the current pandemic and the restrictions placed on movement.
I can, as I flick through the pages, smell the age of the book; the smell of fusty paper. The spine and covers crack as I turn them. The paper is yellowish with age.
On the first blank page is an inscription:
From Grace M Jones
A Christmas present from 85 years ago.
I'm aware of the book's weight.
Reading the inscription one imagines two things; the moment the inscription is written by the giver and when it's read by the recipient.
Grace wrote the words with a fountain pen, blew on the words and then, having left it to dry, closed it again, smoothing the cover which I have just done. Is it wrapped? Is it unwrapped? Was it given in person? Was Grace there when Pat opened it?
Who was Grace? Who was Pat?
How did they know each other?
The book is a token of friendship.
There was a point when the first page was blank. Before the inscription was written. Then the book was just that – a book. When the inscription was made it became something else – a gift. The words of the inscription became as much a part of the book as the words of author had written and published.
What did Pat do on receiving it? He/she probably flicked through the pages as I just did – their eyes picking/snatching odd words from the pages.
Maybe he/she smiled?
Maybe he/she said thank you.
The book would be put down and Christmas 1935 would begin its drift into the distant past.
Was it was read over a period of time or in one go? As I read the the words on a random page I find myself in time with Pat. When I read a sentence further on, I find myself in a slightly different time – perhaps a different place.
My reading is like a sound wave, aligning with another, becoming in phase with another.
This phasing occurs within the mind; Pat reads the book in 1935/36 – his/her words sounding silently in their mind.
When I read, the words too are sounded silently in my mind. It is in our minds that the phasing occurs. I become aware again of the sounds around me as I read the words, as I sound them in my mind, and I wonder what sound Pat could hear when she read these words.
And what of others who have read the book throughout the intervening years?
I read the last two lines of the book: The cycle goes on. The pilgrimage is over.
I turn over and rest my eyes on the blank pages.
I'm aware in my time of the foxing on the paper; the stains where the tape is showing through. I become aware for a second of the book's production; the binding of it – the binder.
I close the book and put it down. It's as if the book has collected time, as if each reading builds a layer within its pages; becoming with each reading slightly – imperceptibly – heavier.
The pages when looked at from the top and the side are like layers – strata within which these readings are buried.
Each word becomes an object and its shadow, The words, read that first time create an image in the reader's mind and simultaneously become a shadow of that image within the reader's mind.
It's as if the words are taken from the page and replaced. There is an exchange of sorts.
Everything takes place within the readers' minds, but there is the physical link of the book itself; its weight in my hands.
Back on the shelf it becomes weightless.
When you polish something, you take a very thin layer off the thing being polished – imperceptible.
Reading a book is like that. One is removing but then replacing at the same time.
Reading a book is like listening to a record but your voice comes out – silently in your own mind.
The book not only imparts, it records; it collects as much as it gives, in silence.
At the end of the book, the words have become shadows of the pictures the reader has imagined, but no less diminished as a result.
The blank page at the end becomes a mirror within which you see these imperceptible traces of everyone who has read that book before.
The book held lends its weight.
The book is a mirror which does not reflect.
I 'polish' to see, but it is only in my mind that I see.
My reflection is not revealed. It is kept.
The book lends its weight; the weight borrowed from another time and given to this.
The book is a mirror which does not reflect. I polish to see, but see only that in my mind's eye.
My reflection is not revealed, only kept by the book.
Each reading is also an inscribing – a wordless inscription.
The gesture of inscribing without writing (shadows).
The gesture of the book is an inscribing without words on the blank page at the end before the book is closed.
The weight is relinquished,
A polishing to see what's in my mind's eye; like my reflection revealed to the book.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations
Goethean Observation: Compost Heap
January 19, 2014 by Nicholas Hedges
The compost heap is some eight feet in circumference and about three feet high at its highest point. It comprises many different types of vegetative matter, at a glance; apples, the branches of the Christmas tree, twigs, cut-down shrubs, leaves and soil. There are numerous stones too, snail shells and new plants.
[a crow calls behind me]
The apples are in various states of decay, from ripe (and seemingly edible) down through papery brown to black. The black apples, split open, remind me of old leather shoes such as those you might find in a museum.
The sun catches the left-hand side of the heap [a blackbird is calling above the traffic]. There is also a piece of plastic – white and dirty. As I look more closely, I see a number of roots, rusty-brown in colour, stretching across the pile. The wind agitates some of the lighter twigs and the leaves which still cling to their branches. The colour of the leaves is pretty much uniform; brown to darker brown, and with all the dampness of the outer part of the pile – almost black., like the most decayed apples.
The crown of the compost heap is covered with lighter branches no more than a centimetre in diameter.
They stick out to the left of the heap like the spines / quills of a porcupine. Tangled within them are clumps of earth intermingled with dried grass – now the same shadow of brown as the branches. The colour of the heap, taken as a whole is the dark brown of those darkest leaves. (*From a distance of ten feet or so, the compost heap is a single entity onto which some things have fallen. It is predominantly a dark brown colour, but as one approaches, it forms fragments, as those things of which it's comprised throw out their shapes towards my incoming eyes.)
A few yellowish-green apples prick it and from these the eye gravitates towards the browner types, wrinkled and spotted/flecked. One apple looks like it is made of paper, its skin depressed as if a thumb and forefinger has marked it so.
There is a definite boundary between where the compost heap begins/ends and the rest of the garden, but looking more closely that boundary isn't as stark as grass and dandelion and other small plants start to encroach. Parts of the heap too have tumbled beyond this boundary.
Near my foot, a black apple has burst its skin and inside, its brown flesh looks like tapenade.
[The crow, sitting on a rooftop behind to my left is persistent in his calling. I can hear too the whistle of a wood pigeon's wings.]
The compost heap although an entity in its own right comprises thousands of different things. A bright apple catches the sun and is made brighter sill.
Walking around I take up position to the left of where I've been. I can see a plastic straw – so at odds with the rest of the heap. A piece of flower pot seems however quite at home next to the apples – large and bruised, brown and putrid. There is a beautiful apple – a pale rust colour ridged and wrinkled, spotted with tiny white fungi. Above that, another rotting apple has abandoned its shape altogether and is now a dollop of brown, gooey flesh.
The core of the compost heap is more exposed here, and upon it, tiny green weeds have planted themselves.
[I have in my head the image of a star – perhaps because of the apples; their spherical shapes and the stages of their decay which go hand in hand – towards their implosion – with their different colours, ending at black, like black holes.]
Around the compost heap is the rest of the garden – the shed, the apple tree, the lawn and the cracked path, on which I am currently sitting.
I cannot smell the compost heap – at least not from where I'm sitting. I move closer and breathe in and see two decaying rose-hips each of which comprises a myriad number of colours and shades. I step around it. The branches crack beneath my feet like branches in a fire. I notice too the thorns snagging the air which agitates the hair-like splinters of some of the branches.
The compost heap makes no sound – at least not that I can hear. Without the breeze it would seem entirely still, a fact belied by its very appearance, vis a vis its changing parts.
Pine needles from the Christmas tree are caked in the mud, a small pool of water has collected inside a hollow eaten out of an apple. The apple behind it appears almost turquoise. Holes in others are perfectly round. The wrinkled skin of some of the apples appear almost like human skin – that of the old.
The perfect shape of the empty snail shell – the random shape of decay.
Looking at the papery brown apple, one imagines its flesh returning to fill the depressions in its skin. One imagines its skin colour changing as the apple itself grows bigger, becoming once again green like some of those around it. Freed of the mud gathered around it, it returns to the tree and begins to grow smaller in size until it becomes a blossom, then a bud on a branch in the summer. If it was left now (in its present state), it would over time reduce further still becoming just a collection of pips from which in time other trees would grow.
The branches of the Christmas tree once hung with decorations, bought from a shop, cut down in a forest or a managed plantation. How old was it? You can see the rings in the branches like ripples on a pond. They decrease to nothing, the tree folds itself away, takes refuge in the soil.
The empty snail shells would have their snails, the cut down branches would await the spring when they could surge with sap and grow.
But this compost heap isn't dead. Nothing is dying here. When it was 'fresh' after I had finished gardening last year, it was four times the size. Some of it has been packed up and recycled, but much of it has reduced. There is still colour, even in the blackest apples. There is still shape, fragile like the snail shells.
Left to its own devices the heap would disappear entirely, but what would have disappeared exactly? In the end nothing truly disappears. Familiar shapes change.
The compost heap is never still and never silent, it changes by degrees which we cannot perceive, as with our own faces ageing in the mirror every day.
The leaves too would drift and change their colour, their shape, joining the tree again. Rewinding time they disappear. Fast-forwarding time they disappear but something remains.
Only the plastic straw will stay the same, not knowing what to do. The plastic straw is the one thing that's truly dead.
Feeding on itself.
It is what it consumes, its roots are the flows of energy released into the soil.
Colours are consumed.
It is blind. Deaf.
It feels. Drawing in to its core.
A star imploding.
All that will remain is the memory of its having been there.
It is for the most part invisible.
Just as it cannot see, we cannot truly see it, for it isn't the shape of its composite parts – the apples, the branches, the clods of earth and pine needles. It is a flow – a slow progress of energy, released by colours, shapes to its heart, to the soil.
The compost heap is a pulse. It is the most un-dead thing in the garden.
It is a conduit.
It is slow, but far from dead.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations, Trees Tagged With: Goethean Observation
Goethean Observation of a Fosslised Shell
August 3, 2013 by Nicholas Hedges
Fossilised shell (right)
The object is a lump of soft grey rock. It is irregular in its appearance except for a small part about 1cm square, which is extremely regular in its form. The piece of rock is heavy and feels quite dense and sits comfortably in the palm of my hand. If I scratch the surface with my finger nail a mark is left behind. The texture of the piece of rock is rough but at the same time its softness makes it feel quite smooth to the touch. Part of its surface is smoother than that on the other side and it is on this side I can see the regular pattern of lines and a couple of other circular imprints. This smooth part of the rock feels softer than that on the outside – indeed there seems to be a distinction between an outside and an inside. The inside is defined in some respects by what looks like a cut. The ridge is about a centimetre deep and is irregular in shape, although it seems, compared with the other side, more regular.
The very distinguishable pattern is a shell. I can see the ridges running from its outer edge at the top to the bottom. There also seems to be a dark patch running from one side to the other about a third of the way down from the top. There is a distinguishable bulge at the bottom of the shell where all the lines meet.
The rock feels cool but not cold (as I write my observations outside in the garden, a breeze is blowing, turning the pages and agitating the protective wrappings in which I keep the rock). Looking carefully at the surface of the rock, on what I have called its outside, I can see small patches of grey which unlike the rather dull complexion of the rock are quite shiny, reflecting the light of the evening. The rock seems encrusted with crumbs of rock which it seems I could easily rub off with my thumb.
The rock has about nine surfaces or faces including the ridge mentioned earlier and the face on which you can find the form of the shell. Whereas the crumbs of rock and the lines, imprints and grey shining patches seem an integral part of the rock; the shell-like form seems (although it is made of the same thing) separate somehow. It is both the rock and something entirely different.
As the wind blows a little, everything moves it seems, save for the rock (and the table on which it is resting). It feels in my hand extremely fragile, as if should I drop it, it would break apart. Certainly I feel as if I could break pieces off with my bare hands.
Although to the eye there are faces of the rock which seem rough and those which seem much smoother, it feels nonetheless as I hold it in my hand the same texture all over. It has in some respects the look of a piece of bone (like a hip joint) or a worked piece of stone – an ancient tool for example.
As I write I can hear the odd shout in the street.
The piece of rock is a fossil found in a large piece of rock next to cliffs at Charmouth. The rock is dated to around 195 million years old. The whole of this piece of rock has therefore been part of an inside for a period of time that is unimaginable in my human brain. It was once part of the cliff and therefore one can imagine that it would have been under a great weight. Of course the piece of rock only became a piece of rock because the cliff face eroded. Then part of the face collapsed, a smaller piece was broken open and inside the shell was revealed. For much of its incredible life span then, it wouldn't have been a piece but rather a whole. And, therefore, this piece wouldn't have born the whole weight of the cliff upon its shoulders; this weight would have been distributed throughout the layer of which it was a part.
The shell would, like the rest of the rock, have been covered (surrounded by 'other rocks'). It is the breaking open of it which gives it a sense of being 'inside'. Imagining it surrounded by rock, a seamless expanse of rock, one does have a sense of darkness and a sense of weight – immense dark and immense weight. When I found it and broke it open, there was, suddenly the sense of lightness and indeed light, whereupon the pattern of the shell's form was revealed for the first time in over 195 million years.
The light from the sun in the present day allows me to see the lines – the same sun that would have shined above the sea 195 million years ago.
This sense of an outside and an inside: the inside is hidden from view – invisible, and yet it exists. Looking at a cliff one sees colossal weight, density and reaching my eyes inside, I can picture only darkness. And yet, looking at this rock, one sees a form which is fragile, delicate, regular, light. The cliffs must be full of such tiny shapes – full of fragility; a delicate, lightness of touch. This mirrors the time before the rock was formed, when the shell was a living creature in the seas. One can imagine the light of the sun on the sea, the lightness of the creature – its fragility as it lived. There is a sense of the sea being light (in terms of sunlight and a lack of weight) and yet the sea is also impenetrably dark and heavier than the cliffs which we see today.
(The cliffs are little different then to the sea. They are not static, but are moving, slowly – too slow for our eyes until the second they slide.)
The shell would have been compressed on the sea floor over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years. Its outline, its shape, its ridges and perhaps its surface pattern were fixed as lines of incredible delicacy. The sea levels fell, the rocks shifted: huge, unimaginable forces, acting over vast, incomprehensible spaces of time – and yet this shape and these lines have remained. And all the while these lines have existed – this tiny shape has existed, whole epochs have come and gone – creatures have evolved ; whole species, including the dinosaurs have come and gone; the great mammals and so on. And finally man has evolved too. There is the sense that I'm looking only at the shell rather than the rock of which it is a part.
This lump of 'unremarkable' rock, shapeless, rough, grey, ugly, is just as ancient and incredible as the beautiful, perfect shell which is a small part of it.
Movement. Frozen.
The individual object which is not a part but a whole.
Air, light, water, colour condensed to make this soft, grey mass.
Delicacy of life translated into the delicacy of the small pattern on the rock's surface.
(The light fades outside where I write and the shape of the shell begins to dissolve into the rock).
Movement of the shell. Movement of continents.
Movements of creatures, of time on an evolutionary scale. The weight of time which this patten of lines has withstood for 195 million years.
(What can humans withstand as individuals and as a species?)
(Colours begin to face into darkness).
Movement returned to the rock from the moment it was found and carried in my hand – carried into the garden this evening.
Movement of that creature, of everything that sank to the seabed, of the water above, whose weight pressed upon it – now becomes/joins with my own movement through time/this world.
The light that allows me to see the lines of the shell – its shape, eyes which would have evolved since that shell was in the sea.
The delicacy of light, of eyes.
Lightness. Weight. Pressure.
Light. Vision.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Fossils, Goethean Observation, Shells
Goethean Observation: World War I Trench Map
February 2, 2012 by Nicholas Hedges
Less a Goethean observation and a more general observation with reference to the Goethean method (click here to read more about Goethean Observation).
Note: The aim of this observation is not to write a beautiful prose account of the map, but rather to look, observe and find a hook upon which to hang the next piece of research into this subject.
The map has been printed on a large sheet of paper creased vertically and horizontally with lines where the map has been folded and opened. The paper itself is a brownish-white, darker along the lines of the folds and around the edges in places. The corners on the left hand side are a little dog-eared.
The map on one side shows the area concerned – a part of France as the map tells me at the top. This side of the paper is smooth to the touch, but on the reverse I can feel a tooth. Folding over the first fold, I can see the tooth on the 'reverse' very clearly. The [fabric of the] paper is made up of very straight vertical lines, with wonkier lines running horizontally. There are four 'squares' (actually rectangles) to each folded column and eight folded columns (7 creases) in all. There are four folded rows (3 creases).
The 'square' at the top of the first vertical fold on the reverse side of the map tells me this is a 'Trench Map'. Like the bottom square, the colour of the paper is much darker than the rest. The two squares in between are like the colour of the map on the reverse side – possibly even lighter. This shows how the map, when folded, has a front and a reverse side. Having turned over the map so that this first fold appears on the right I can see all 32 'squares' that make up the map. The folds are particularly prominent, some darker than others. Some of the squares show no sign – or at least – very little sign of wear. There are some splits in some of the folds – caused of course by the repeated action of opening and closing the map.
Six 'squares' along the top two are covered with words – French words and their English translations. The words are the names of landscape features such as tree (arbre), gate/stile (barrière), oak tree (chêne) and pond (etang). The rest of the squares, including one on this top row are blank. All one can see is the pattern of the paper's fabric.
Turning the map over, one is aware of the holes and the sound the paper makes. It reminds me of a soft version of the crackle of a fire.
The drawing of the landscape takes up much of this side of the paper with explanatory texts and a key beneath as well as to the right of the map.
Looking at the details of the map, one can see the various features of the landscape – the woods, roads, hills (through contour lines), rivers, ponds or lakes and of course various towns and villages. All these features, along with the names and the grid are printed in a 'black' ink which actually appears as a light 'browny' grey.
What one's eye is drawn to straight away however are the patches of colour on the right hand side of the map; blue and red. The colours have been used to colour a multitude of lines which run from the top of the page to the bottom. The majority of these are red. There is one dashed blue line which snakes from top to bottom to the left of the furthest-most red line and to the left of that, the same colour has been used to mark out the landscape features showing rivers, lakes and what appears to be marshy land.
The red lines themselves have been drawn in a sort of 'stepped' way and cover a quarter of the map up to the right hand side. Looking closely at these lines, one is made aware of the other lines of the map – black curved lines, straight vertical and horizontal lines; straight vertical and horizontal dotted lines – these lines divide each square (delineated by the other straight lines) into four quarters.
In each of the large squares there are numbers, the greatest of which appears to be 36. Among some of these numbers, there are also letters – P, Q, R, V, W, X.
As I look at the map I begin to notice the mix of French and English words/names. The place names are clearly French; La Boiselle, Thiepval, Authuille, Contelmaison, Beaumont-Hamel. In amongst these however are names like Tara Hill, The Crucifix, Railway Copse, Brickworks, Pond Bridge and Cemetery. There also appear to be instructions: '35 to 40 ft deep: Impractical for Cavalry.' There is also a largish hole above Pozières.
Folding the paper up, it fits entirely in my hand. It is like a concertina, about an inch thick without too much pressure applied.
Looking more closely at the front of the folded map, I can see the words:
Trench Map
Sheet 57D S.E.
Edition 2.D.
There is then a diagram – an 'index to adjoining sheets' beneath which are the words and numerals:
Scale: 1/20,000
On the left hand side of this 'face' are what appear to be two initials, DM. The map smells of its age, a musty smell of something that for a long time was forgotten.
On the diagram I can see a small square which has been shaded in to distinguish it from all the others. One can see that this piece of paper is part of a much larger map measuring 'eight maps' wide and 'eight maps' high.
The map is clearly old. The date 1916 has been printed on the 'map' side, but even without this, the style of the printing and the condition tells me it's of some age. Through its age it has expanded in its folded form. The folds aren't as crisp as they were. It has no doubt lain forgotten in an attic or some such place, acquiring its patina and its smell. As the dust has grown, the text has faded, although the edges of each letter are crisp. And still I can see the 'DM' in pencil on the left hand side.
It doesn't resist being folded again. First vertically and then horizontally.
I unfold it and instinctively flatten it down. The folds in places rise up. The fold which runs vertically through the red lines does especially. This part of the map won't remain flat unless I press it down with my hand. As I do, my head instinctively lifts a little and my eyes move along the lines of red to rest around the village of Thiepval.
These actions would no doubt have been repeated in the past when the map was perhaps more pristine – when the folds were sharper and the map lay flat.
The map, when I lift it up, seems to want to fold into a particular shape. It doesn't want to be put away, but rather be folded so that two columns remain in view. The folds which delineate this part are a darker brown than all the others. In this section of the map is a concentration of red lines and blue lines.
The way it folds suggests that this was what was most important. When I pick up the map to fold it completely, it folds so that the 'front' and 'reverse' are tucked away. The front now is one of the segments or 'squares' containing French words (Sondage) and their English equivalents (Boring – as in cut).
The past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.
We know the map was made in 1916 with minor corrections to details on 15.8.16. This is just six weeks after the first offensive in the Battle of the Somme. Shortly after this period the map would have been replaced with another as the landscape changed with each offensive.
When I look at this map from the comfort of my own front room I see history – albeit one written in a less conventional way. It still has words and pictures.
For much of its life it was no doubt a curiosity. Maybe it was a reminder for those that were there who when looking at the lines would have seen something very different – not on the map but in their minds.
Those who used the map would have seen something else. By August 1916, the colossal tragedy of the first day of the Somme would have been etched on everyone's mind. The contour lines can hardly tell the reality of the ground's undulations, and yet it was these which meant the difference between life and death. The map serves to distance us from reality.
Considering its past, the action of being folded and then unfolded over and over, one can almost imagine a bellows lifting and then depressing, letting out air like a breath – a last gasp.
The map is like a palimpsest, albeit one which is just a single print. One can see the original landscape which over the years changed as landscape features assumed English monikers. It is a place that appears at once to be real and imagined – a non sort of place.
'The Poodles', 'The Dingle', 'Willow Patch', 'Round Wood', 'Birch Tree Wood', – they all have the sound of something made up – a children's story. 'Middle Wood', 'Villa Wood', 'Lonely Copse'. There is even marked 'a row of apple trees'. These names – these alien names – all appear on the right hand side of the map; on the left, large swathes of woodland go unnamed.
The same is true of road names.
Observation of certain parts of the map has changed the way it moves – these movements seem impressed into the map's fabric.
When I stand to look at the map, I stand as, no doubt, others stood around it. I can again imagine the creases as sharper, the colour of the paper whiter, the lines more vivid.
Looking at the map, unfolding it and folding it, smoothing down the paper, one gets the sense of an individual. 1/20,000. The map as an object tells me about the individual who looked at it. What is pictured tells me – when I think of the scale – about the thousands of men killed on that first day of the Somme.
One gets the sense of other maps printed before this one, upon which this one is based – each one covering over the horror of the most recent losses of life. They become like shrouds.
Each one would have been used to plan the next map, and the next, and so on, until there weren't any red lines left.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations, Trees Tagged With: Goethean Observation, Trench Maps, World War I, WWI
Goethean Observation: Mediaeval Pottery Shard
October 29, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges
This piece of pottery can fit in the palm of my hand. The shard measures just over three inches in length. The narrower side of the shard (the bottom) is around two and a half inches in width and the top (the rim) about three inches. It is delicate, quite thin – about four millimetres thick. It weighs very little and is rough to the touch. As I rub my thumb and forefinger over its surface I can feel the indentations, ridges on its surface. Looking at it, the surface on the outside appears smooth. Of course here I will have to distinguish between the outside and the inside of the shard. Looking at the shard sideways on, I can see how the shard bows to one side. This curve appears quite uneven but from the top of the shard, it appears quite uniform. Looking from the top I can see two ridges running down the surface (the outside) of the shard just below the rim. These ridges are either side of a groove and find their opposites on the inside. Where there are ridges on the outside so there are grooves on the inside and vice-versa. As I feel the surface of the pottery fragment, bits fall onto the page like small grains of sand. I can detect more ridges, though more shallow than those which run across just below the rim on the outside. Furthermore these ridges are on the inside of the shard. Closing my eyes I can feel about eight or nine.
The shard becomes thicker near the bottom – almost twice as thick as at the top. In the side of the shard I can see small holes – about a dozen – little more than pinpricks. The material is light grey in colour and moving my finger down the edge I can detect a shallow groove running from the bottom of the shard to approximately halfway up. The colour of the shard as a whole at first glance is very dark grey, almost like charcoal, perhaps a little lighter. On the outside there are patches where the shard is darker and indeed lighter than other parts. There are also very small patches of colour in the shard, tiny patches which are sandy in colour and even smaller patches which appear white. Although mainly grey, there is a hint of brown throughout the fragment, particularly on the inside of the shard where there is a greater build up of material particularly around the ridge near the top. The colour and patination on the inside of the shard is much less uniform than on the outside. Just as I can see more ridges and grooves in the surface, so I can see more variations in colour. In the centre there is a large patch of light grey within which I can see speckles of white and brown. I can see lines running through the middle of the patch. Towards the top of the shard on the inside right as I look at it, I can see distinct brown markings and around this are what look like crumbs of dirt – dark grey which if gently rubbed fall from the shard. There is some writing on the inside too, just beneath the top of the rim written in black – OX TMS 02 II with a 35 in a circle beneath.
On my fingers I can see patches of grey from the surface of the shard. I can see the dust on the piece of white kitchen towel on which the shard is resting on the table. I can see particles on the surface of the table too and my finger tips can feel the edges of the shard even though I am no longer touching it. If I hold the shard in my hands and without looking move it around I can feel both its smoothness and its edges which though not sharp are nonetheless rough. This object, without looking, becomes an object in its own right rather than a part of something else, but the rough edges tell you there was once more to this piece. Feeling the smooth side with its ridges and grooves one can feel suddenly the sharper rougher edge, which is quite at odds with the rest.
Looking at the shard from the inside, it's difficult to see this object as being anything other than a piece of something. Looking at it I can see of course see (even if I hadn't known already) that this piece of pottery is a broken piece of something bigger. However what that bigger something might have been is difficult to discern. It's only by observing the piece from certain angles that the bigger picture's revealed. The curve of the shard, looking at it from the top down, shows the bulge on the right hand side. One can also see a tapering of the two longer sides towards what is the bottom of the piece and even though these sides are jagged and obviously broken, they carry nonetheless the dynamics of the shard. One assumes that whatever pot this piece was a part of it narrowed towards the base. Looking at the curve again from the top and holding the shard in my right hand, I can see roughly how the curve would become a circle using my left hand as a guide. In order however to judge its height, I need to know the size of the base. If I hold the shard in my left hand and look at the shard from the bottom I can see the curve and with my right hand get a sense of its diameter. I then look at the sides of the shard and draw the lines down towards the base, thereby gaining a sense of the volume of the pot from which this fragment remains.
[drawing the line up and down mirrors the physical gesture of the potter's hands]
However I must leave the reconstruction to one side for a moment because to understand this shard fully I need to take it back in time. I need to see it first as part of the collection in the museum stores, stowed away in a box with hundreds and thousands of other pieces. I need to see it being assessed and given its reference number (visible beneath its rim). I need to take it back to the day it was pulled from out the ground in 1985 in the area of the Trill Mill Stream in St. Aldates where it had lain in the dark for perhaps as long as 500 years. Half a millennium in which time its original colour was changed by it being in the waterlogged ground. Was it broken in the ground, or thrown away because it was broken already? Either way this fragment has been an object in its own right for several hundred years.
[the rings are testament to this other complete object]
How it ended up in the ground I cannot say, but I can speculate that it was broken before it went in. There is evidence of burning on the surface of the shard (although one must be careful as the discolouration could be confused with burning). Perhaps this points to its main use – as a utilitarian piece of pottery used for heating food or drink? Whatever the answer, I can perhaps surmise that the fragment has had contact with fire. Perhaps that's why it broke?
Certainly it was broken and it broke at a specific moment in time. The edges of the shard therefore reflect and illustrate this very specific moment in time. There is a sound associated with those edges; a sound I can feel when running a finger over the surface.
There is then within this single shard, evidence of two distinct time spans: 1) the staining caused by it being buried in the ground for several hundred years and 2) the moment it broke – a second in time several hundred years ago. There is also therefore a sonic quality to the shard in relation to these two periods of time 1) the long sound of silence and 2) the short sound of a break (one can also imagine that this breakage came with other sounds – perhaps that of the person responsible for breaking it?).
[what other sounds were there at this moment in the city?]
Before the breakage, this fragment was part of a bigger object which we can speculate was used over a given period of time – how long exactly we can't be sure, but we can imagine it being used in a mediaeval house – perhaps as part of its everyday activity. But what did it hold? What was it used for? Whatever the answer to these questions we can say that it held something and was used by people in the mediaeval period.
I have described the ridges and the grooves on the inside of the shard which tell us that this piece of pottery was made on a wheel. It was thrown. The rings are evidence not only of the movement of the wheel but of the person who made the pot. The wheel would have been turned by hand by the potter and then using his hands he could have drawn the clay up to make the pot. Every groove shows the movement and the physical presence of the potter.
[I'm reminded of a record player, with the needle drawn over the surface of the record, replaying a sound that has already happened. In a sense this shard reveals to us something that has already happened – not through the fact of the pot (as a whole) but rather the physical gestures of the potter. Drawing my fingers over the ridges and the grooves and keeping my eyes closed, listening to the everyday things going on around me, I can begin to find a window into the mediaeval world – not by sight, but by tough].
Having described the two sounds associated with this fragment (silence and the break) as well as the two time-spans (the moment in time that it broke and the few hundred years it was buried beneath the ground) I can also add to that this sense of movement; the wheel being turned, the wheel turning, the clay being pulled up into shape and the physical presence and skill of the potter. Through touching the object we can make a physical connection with an anonymous individual who lived between the 13th and 15th centuries. We can make a physical connection with a time. Just what was happening when those rings were made? It's almost as if what was happening at the time has been recorded in these grooves – including the thoughts of the potter himself.
With this piece of pottery therefore we can go back even further, for the shard is evidence of the pot and the pot is evidence of the skill of the potter – skill which was no doubt learned over a long period of time, passed down from other potters. It is evidence of an exchange between people in the mediaeval period. It is evidence of dialogue.
In terms of the fragment's materiality we can also think about what it is made from. I think of the piece of clay sitting on the potters wheel, without shape, inert. Only through the intervention of the potter, through his eyes and his hands and through the skills he has learned over time could this piece of clay have become shaped into the pot of which this shard was a part. The question arises; what about the other parts of the pot? What happened to them? Perhaps they are hidden away somewhere in other boxes in the museum stores, or still buried somewhere in the ground. Perhaps like so much of the world from which this fragment originates they have been lost altogether?
It's strange to think that when this fragment was part of a much bigger pot and indeed when it was in the ground, it was more a part of the world than I was ever likely to be. Now as I look at the fragment, I could say that the fragment is now more a part of the world than the person who made it, although of course it might be that there are people alive today who wouldn't be here had it not been for this anonymous potter.
Any work made and inspired by this shard should not necessarily be considered as separate from the pot itself but rather as a continuation of the pot, and just as the fragment is a direct consequence of the thought, skill and physical gestures of a potter living some 5, 6 or 700 years ago, so this work might be considered the same. This shard has been living the same moment ever since it was made and so it continues in this work. The mind of the potter, my mind and that of all who see the work I make will somehow be connected.
I want to draw out from what I've written about the shard, points which I think will lead to further research as regards the production of works about the shard. The following is a list of those key points.
This piece of pottery can fit in the palm of my hand.
As I rub my thumb and forefinger over its surface I can feel the indentations, ridges on its surface.
This object, without looking, becomes an object in its own right rather than a part of something else, but the rough edges tell you there was once more to this piece.
Looking at the curve again from the top and holding the shard in my right hand, I can see roughly how the curve would become a circle using my left hand as a guide. In order however to judge its height, I need to know the size of the base. If I hold the shard in my left hand and look at the shard from the bottom I can see the curve and with my right hand get a sense of its diameter. I then look at the sides of the shard and draw the lines down towards the base, thereby gaining a sense of the volume of the pot from which this fragment remains.
Either way this fragment has been an object in its own right for several hundred years.
The rings are evidence not only of the movement of the wheel but of the person who made the pot. The wheel would have been turned by hand by the potter and then using his hands he could have drawn the clay up to make the pot. Every groove shows the movement and the physical presence of the potter.
Through touching the object we can make a physical connection with an anonymous individual who lived between the 13th and 15th centuries. We can make a physical connection with a time. Just what was happening when those rings were made? It's almost as if what was happening at the time has been recorded in these grooves – including the thoughts of the potter himself.
It is evidence of an exchange between people in the mediaeval period. It is evidence of dialogue.
Only through the intervention of the potter, through his eyes and his hands and through the skills he has learned over time could this piece of clay have become shaped into the pot of which this shard was a part.
Goethean Observation: Old London Road
Puddles, water, reflections.
Old road surface, scattered cobbles and stones.
Tyre tracks, undulating surface.
Birdsong, the sound of distant cars.
Shadows.
Hedgerows on either side, mainly brambles.
Old trees, young trees lining the way.
Fallen trees laying by the wayside – the rings on the exposed, cut branches.
The sky, the clouds, the position of the sun.
My shadow stretched across the road's surface.
The squelching of people's footsteps.
The rippling of the surface of a puddle in a pothole.
The almost indistinct wind.
Last year's leaves scattered at the edges of the road.
A blackbird flies low over the ground.
Conversations grow as a couple approach.
Fly-tipping off the road behind one of the hedges.
Old clothes, pots of used paint, broken glass, bottles, cushions, an old teddy bear lying face down on the ground, pipes and bits of wood.
More cuddly toys face down, pale and faded. Saturated and soggy.
Huge tracks gouged out of the surface. Within them the water gathers. Reflections move with the wind blowing down the road.
The rounded stones of the surface. Smooth yet irregularly placed. A plane flies above cutting through the sky.
Molehills. A ditch running beside the road on its left hand side (as I walk west).
Large stones separate the ditch from the edges of the road.
The ground on the left hand side is at a different level to the road itself which I can see is raised up.
A siren in the distance over towards the city.
The sound of the stones – silent today.
At this point I began to move into the second and later phases. I had thought for the purposes of clarity to keep things in strict stage order (i.e. 1, 2, 3 and 4) but I think it's important to record my results as they came. I shall write them as they were written (in italics).
There is a point walking away from the city where the road turns a corner and heads off to the left. Here the shadows are gathered together. The road also narrows or rather the countryside around it encroaches. The shadows and the trees. Towards the city the countryside backs away.
The passage of time in the tracks left by the wheels.
I started again to look at the road itself, as it was 'presented to me'. I measured its width and found that it was approximately four paces wide and then started looking more closely at the stones which made up the road's surface. There were I noticed some stones which were larger and flatter than the others. I also noticed that the road itself seemed to be on a slight angle, with the right side slightly higher than the left. I noticed, as I observed the surface, the sun catching the puddles and the moist mud around them. Yellow, ochre puddles.
Lichen on the boulders on the left hand side of the road, like fat unmade gravestones.
It was as I walked back up the road towards the city that I began to sense something about the road that wasn't to do with its material or physical quality (although it's precisely its physical and material quality which causes this sensation).
Walking back towards the city there is the sense of going somewhere for the first time even though I've walked this path many times before.
Silver, green lichen.
Blue stone.
The grass at the edges of the road [is] in patches encroaching on the roads itself.
In one section smaller stones have been used.
Many of the stones are either missing or covered with mud on which the grass then grows.
There was here a sense of the passing of time, the way of nature, as the mud and then the grass reclaimed the road. In the mud I saw the prints of horseshoes which made me think of its early years when horses and carriages, as well a pedestrians, would have used it. I thought back to the tracks left by wheels and found myself considering the road in terms of the changes in transport over the past few centuries.
Further towards the city, the stones disappeared all the more. They were covered in greater thicknesses of mud and consequently more grass.
As I have written, what is important to me in this kind of observation is noting everything that is going on around me, so as to give a more holistic view of the road, to not see the road as something which is separate from the landscape but a part of it (just as I was at that point not separate from the road but also a part of it). I became aware, through a gap in the hedgerow, of the blueness of the distance which I could see over the fields rolled out below.
Movements in the hedgerows (right).
The stones reappear like a spine running up the centre of the road.
It was on turning round and walking back up the road away from the city that I noticed very strongly a difference in the feel of the road. Almost straight away, I got the impression of leaving, of heading towards something familiar (even though for me the feeling should be reversed).
Walking away one can see the blue distant hills. To the left just the trees, parked cars and the radio mast.
A house through a gap in the hedgerow. Dark windows.
Walking away [East, away from Oxford] is almost like being in the past and walking towards the future, whereas vice-versa [West, towards Oxford] it's like being in the present and walking into the past.
I appreciate that this may sound a strange thing to write, but with this sort of observation it's very important to make a note of everything you see and indeed feel. This is all part of intuition, 'seeing into' the phenomenon being observed. As I said, I rather mix the stages together and in a sense some of the things I am recording here belong to the fourth stage (being one with the object [Intuition]).
The future is missing when walking towards the city. Curiously walking away from the city, one has the impression of leaving something behind, which I am doing by leaving behind something which is familiar.
The sense of leaving and going to a place which was evidently so much a part of this road is not something one finds so much on roads today. Roads today carry people through and around places, they are somewhat unattached to anywhere, whereas this stretch of old road is very much linked to places. It is very much a road which takes you away from somewhere and to somewhere else.
The undulating surface of the road… the divots and bumps… the stones, make it a slow road. It moves at the speed of thought and as such everything around it, the hills in the distance become a part. Again the difference between roads today (which one can hear constantly) and roads then, becomes very apparent. Because the hills, trees and surrounding countryside move at the same speed as you, you feel more attached to the world.
It's a road which generates thoughts and carries thoughts because it is slow.
Movement of the road. Even though it feels like a road which definitely connects two places or rather things, it seems to have a sense of going on and on and never really ending. It's as if walking on this road you will never get there. It connects you to two places you can never reach; the past before you were born and the future in which you won't exist. The road is always the present, but a present made of all the past (moments upon moments) which can be found as you walk it.
Through this first set of observations I began to understand the road not just as a thing in its own right, but as something which is very much a part of the landscape. I found that in participating in the road, rather than simply just observing it, I began to participate in the road's wider landscape, both physical and temporal. It's a road in time as well as in space.
The second stage of my observation of this road is to 'take the road' into my imagination and to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon; Exact Sensorial Fantasy as Goethe called it. To do this, I closed my eyes and recorded myself talking whilst drawing my thoughts, describing all the while what I could see in my mind's eye.
Below is a transcript of my recordings (NB. The digital recorder malfunctioned and so the following is taken from three recordings). I have also scanned some of the drawings made whilst describing that below.
Walking along that road, looking at everything around it, the distant horizon, the trees, one feels a connection not only with the landscape but with everyone who's walked or ridden along that path.
Along this road people are still carried. The thoughts they had as they walked or rode along arranged upon the ground in the stones just as the magnets arrange the tiny particles on tape. And even when the grass has completely covered it over, when people don't walk hear anymore, when the voices are covered over as their bodies are and have been for hundreds of years there will still be the marks in the ground. The road is then a kind of palimpsest. When we walk we are writing ourselves on the ground, changing the ground just a little, imperceptibly, but a little, adding to all those changes which have been made before. Voices which are made more distant but which are never fully erased. Like a never ending book that has no start the lines just go on and on. Words are written over the top of each other, it's not even a book, just a single line When the grass is grown over the road which it's sure to do when the trees are bigger and they themselves have walked to cover the ground so that the road is just part of the forest, like a trench. What else will be gone? Will all the sounds in the distance be covered or will they be replaced by other sounds, things we can't imagine now, just as those who walked the road a hundred, two hundred years ago could not imagine the sounds of an aeroplane or the distant drones of the traffic thundering down the bypass. Will the ground too have begun to cover those roads, to cover the buildings? I look at the grass, there's not much road to cover, it wouldn't take much to swallow it completely and yet one gets the sense that when that road has gone everything will have gone with it.
Standing back on the old road from Oxford to London running over the top of Shotover, this long muddy track which cuts through the grass into the distance. On one side is the hedgerow on other side the forest, much smaller than it used to be. Beyond the hedgerow are the fields and the distance. Looking at the road one can see the stones, all different types smoothed over with age, covered with mud and in the patches in between grass can be seen to grow as if slowly it's trying to reclaim this road. In amongst the stones are also puddles in which you can see the sky the trees and if you look yourself, you can see yourself and inevitably the weather will change the days will become warmer, drier the puddles will dry up and take their images with them down into the ground up into the air. One imagines this place before this road was ever built. It makes one wonder what it takes for a road to be built long before the stones are put there when people first started walking that way when the first few footsteps marked a rough track which people followed through the landscape. Footstep after footstep. In many ways the landscape determines the route we take and therefore it's almost as if the landscape is using us to draw upon itself. But what is it that makes this road a road? It's not simply a collection of footsteps going in the same direction or back the other way. Every footstep is made, at first at least, consciously in this place. There is a conscious act behind the steps planted in the ground. Someone a long time ago hundreds of years ago had reason to walk there to get from somewhere to somewhere else, were they leaving or going, or coming? The road itself therefore becomes a kind of palimpsest which footstep after footstep is written upon the ground like words across a page and though footsteps which come afterwards gradually remove all traces of the others they can never fully remove the traces. Every footstep we plant changes the landscape just a little but a little nonetheless. Many of the trees are not as old as this road and yet this road is much younger than everything around it. What were those first footsteps thinking as they were planted in the soil. What languages did they speak. What images did they hold in their minds? What did the world look like around them? The forest was much bigger the sounds in the distance would not have been there. It would be the sounds of the wood and the forest, the birds and the human body which planted the footsteps in the first place. When I first went to the road I had the impression that although it led from somewhere and went somewhere else that nonetheless one could never reach the end but that somehow it would always keep turning; moving as if it was a conveyor belt of some kind.
Thinking about it now one can take that analogy and think of it instead as piece of tape which runs and runs and runs and which every step upon it is like the recording head changing the ground, changing the particles on the tape just a little. And just as we record when we walk so we also play, play the ground which passes beneath our feet. We can hear very distantly the thoughts which came before us. I could hear the sound of people's footsteps planted in the mud, the same sound that's been made on there for hundreds of years. And looking ahead one can imagine the grass that is already beginning to reclaim the road growing over the road entirely covering it again so that it's hardly visible but should it do that, what would it mean? What else would have had to have gone for that to happen for no-one to walk there again? What else would have to be covered by the ground? What other roads, buildings, the town even. Perhaps then the woods would return to what they were? And though there's not much left for the grass to cover it wouldn't it seem take much for the grass to cover the road completely and yet one imagines what that would signify if it ever occurred. One would look at the radio receiver behind, the aerials, dishes and know that they would all be dumb and deaf. The mounting stones, one at the top and one at the bottom of the hill would be like gravestones.
What did the world look like for people to walk in this direction in this space? What drove people to walk here? What was on their minds as they did so? Were they excited, nervous, lovesick, jealous, happy? When the road was young and not a road but a small track one has the sense that people walked there consciously, that they were making the path through the landscape although the landscape was itself using them to write upon the world and that all those who came after were not so conscious of this path. This was simply the way you went.
There is the sense that when you walk along this road, you are adding to the thousands of fragments of thoughts left on the road. One can imagine these fragments as like the tesserae of a mosaic uncovered beneath the ground; one to which pieces are added just as they are taken away. What do the gaps tell us? Good litter, left on the road, not like that dumped in amongst the hedgerows.
There is a sense as I walk and see the distant hills and the horizon that the road is waking as I walk. When no-one walks upon it, it sleeps. It uses our eyes to see the world around it. What lays beyond the hills? There's a connection between our feet and our eyes. What lays beyond the horizon is hidden from everyone who walks this road, no matter what the century. The road is the people who walk it or ride it. The road is not so much a physical thing but a short trail of thoughts. The road is whatever people who travel it were/are thinking.
Absent Presence
September 25, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges
See also: Artefact.
At a recent meeting with the East Oxford Archaeology Project we were given a short talk about an upcoming dig at Bartlemas Chapel. A number of things interested me in light of the work I've already done there, one of which was the image of a resistance survey carried out in the grounds of the chapel. At once, a sort of chain reaction of images flicked through my mind, which I've tried to recreate below.
The first image is a Resistance Survey image from Iffley village. The dark patches indicate areas of low resistance while the lighter patches indicate areas of high resistance – such as the remains of buildings, roads, walls etc. I like the fact that images such as these can reveal a footprint of the past, not only in terms of where structures such as these once stood, but where people once walked, following specific paths. What might today be just a large field where one can walk in any direction is revealed through techniques such as these as being a place where people walked along certain lines. The ground is revealed as a palimpsest of movement, where, just as fragments of pottery etc might be found, fragments of movement can also be revealed.
Looking at a Resistance survey image (such as that above) during the meeting, I was reminded of an image from a previous work of mine which I exhibited last year. The image was part of an overall picture of the Belzec Death Camp in Poland, photographed from a plane in 1944. It was a place where in 1942, over half a million people were murdered, but walking there now, one cannot image that many people. Walking around the memorial, following a prescribed path, you find yourself looking in at the space enclosed, contemplating the half a million lines of movement that ended there. Where did these lines stretch back to? Where had they come from?
Thinking this way is one small way to establish empathy with those who died in places such as Belzec and the image below, when coupled with the image above resonates with this idea.
The next image is a detail from a photograph taken of someone in 1903. This person has of course long since disappeared from the world and yet they remain. They aren't of course visible in the places where they lived and worked (for example on Headington Hill where this image was taken) but through light (just as with electricity in the Reistance survey) their trace is revealed. The aesthetic link with the images above strengthens this connection.
During my observation at Bartlemas Chapel last week, I wrote the following:
"The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page.
I read the first few words on the saint. I turn the page – again the ice-cream van. The page creaks like the pew I sat on. I can hear the words as I read them in my head, although of course they make no sound. I imagine hundreds and thousands of internal voices of people who have stood inside the chapel."
Looking at the bible in the chapel, I saw the words as being like the fragmenetary image of past movement revealed through a Resistance survey, or the image of someone frozen in a photograph. These are words that in this small space have been heard over the course of hundreds of years; words that have mingled with the thoughts of those listening. Reading the bible within that space, I could hear the words in my mind – just as I could hear my thoughts – and yet everything was silent. (Silence here equates with (apparent) emptiness – the field where once there were buildings and people. Words read silently mirrors the electric current passing into the ground, revealing a pattern of movement beneath – lost movement, lost thoughts).
I tried to imagine the thoughts of those who've listened over countless generations. If they could be written down what would they tell us? After the meeting, I thought about the aesthetic of the Resistance survey and the photographs above, then pictured fragments of words in much the same way – just like the image below.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Archaeology, Bartlemas Chapel, Fragments, Geophysics, Goethean Observation, Silence
Bartlemas Chapel Observation
Taken from Artefact – a website concerning Contemporary Art and Archaeology.
I'm making this initial visit to the chapel a few days before archaeological excavations are due to begin within its grounds. I'm interested in how my initial observations might be tied in with both the archaeology discovered there and the chapel's history. How far is empathy an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge?
As usual, I began by observing the chapel using a Goethean methodology, which – as if often the case – ended up following its own course.
Pre-Observation
Leaving Cowley Road and walking up the track to the chapel was like leaving the modern world behind; not completely for the outside around the chapel and here inside once can still hear the traffic humming like an overhead cable carrying electricity.
The first thing I notice when entering the chapel is the smell; the smell of age, of the past – the smell of the rooms in the church I'd attended as a child. Old books, paper and damp.
The light is slowly beginning to fade being as it is 6pm and the weather grey and raining.
I shall endeavour to carry out the observation without electric light for as long as is possible.
The chapel is small comprising two parts divided by a screen. The main door on the chapel's western side is locked and one enters through a small door on the left hand (north) side. (I'm going to carry out my observation inside rather than out – not least because of the rain, but also because I can easily record outside at a later date).
The walls are all whitewashed; they are rough and bumpy beneath revealing the stone. There are five windows, each of which is arched and through which the last light of the day is creeping. Behind me to my left is a large door in front of which are stacked wooden chairs – no doubt for congregations when services are held here, which they still are. Along the left hand wall more chairs are lined up in a row – eight of them. At the end facing me and in front of the screen are two small pews. Running alongside the right hand wall is another row of chairs – nine of them. There is a radiator, an old wooden cupboard on the side of which are electric sockets and a light switch. I'm sitting on a small wooden bench. In the corner to my right is a large red candle holder replete with candle – no doubt for ceremonial purposes.
Ahead, either side of the doorway through the screen are two small stools. Beyond the screen, from my position, I can see a wooden altar with a crucifix and four candles. A stool stands before them on which rests a box. Above the altar is a window and on the left and right hand walls are also windows. In the wall in this half of the building, on the right hand side from where I am sitting is another window upon the sill of which – which is deep – sits a book, open on a small lectern. Another lectern stands next to me on my right with a book containing the names of visitors. I write my name in it now.
I get up and walk. The hum of the traffic is weak like the light. I can hear the wind rustling the trees outside. Outside the window above the book is an apple tree covered with fruit. My footsteps echo.
I measure the first part of the chapel which is approximately 8 paces. The floor in this part of the chapel is parquet. In the part ahead of me it's stone.
The pew creaks as I sit down. There are two small pews divided in two to accommodate two people. There are candle stands with low candles (burned down) on my left, a crucifix on a pole and a blue bottle of gas. On the right hand side is another blue bottle, two more well-used candles, four chairs and a picture of Christ. I see now that the altar is stone. Either side in the corners are two wood burners. The window in the left wall is narrower than the others and has a deep sill. This part of the chapel again measures approximately 8 paces.
On a window sill (right) is the curled body of a dead fly. Outside I see the apple trees and the leaves on the wet grass.
The altar is covered by a cloth – green and another white one beneath.
The bible on what I now see is a folding lectern is open at John. Tomorrow's reading, John 3:13-17.
The ceiling is wooden with numerous coloured shields placed between the beams. The light is fading and it's getting harder to see.
As I stand before the altar my face is drawn up to the window above it and to the sky. I turn to my left and see the old building that stands alongside. The wind stirs again. There is a white iron work chair in the garden outside. No-one is sitting in it of course.
The window above the large door in the western end of the chapel is smaller than all the others. Again I find my eyes drawn up towards it, to the pale grey light of the sky. There is a large hole in the wall on the right hand side (as I look at it) no doubt where a wooden bolt was once used to secure the church.
There are two circles, unwhitewashed either side of the door.
There are four 'arches' supporting the ceiling. The wood appears to be very old. The stone of the floor around the altar is patterned almost as if something has spilled upon it and not quite dried.
The width of the chapel is 7 paces.
I look again at the book full of names and dates – someone from as far away as Australia has visited here. In just a few pages we're back at the start of 2005. I think of what I've done in these few pages – I think of the people I know who have recently passed away.
As the light fades the windows become a stronger presence as they hold what remains of the light outside. I can hear the chimes of an ice-cream van – a sound from my childhood. But although the windows are dominant, I don't find myself looking beyond – just at them.
Echoes and footsteps. Car horns.
I allow the cars and the sounds of the modern world to fall away and instead I listen only to the wind blowing through the trees. I look outside at the trees. I imagine the fruit trees across hundreds of seasons, bearing fruit, dropping the fruit, surviving the winter, blooming again in the spring. I imagine how much more important apple trees would have been long ago; a vital source of food rather than something one might idly pick while strolling past. The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page.
The shadow cast by my hand is more prominent here before the window.
I pick a spot on the left hand side of the chapel looking towards the altar. I imagine all those who have stood here in my place over the centuries, looking to their right at whatever was outside; up ahead through the window; at the others standing there with them; and I begin to imagine those other people. I begin to try and imagine their presence.
The crows outside help dispel the modern world. I think of the floor – how it would have been. I imagine the city behind me, Oxford as it was a few hundred years ago.
I move around the chapel before the screen and glance behind me to the side and up ahead and where I see the walls and windows I imagine people. Each glance is accompanied with a thought – my thoughts.
I try and get a sense of my body in relation to the chapel.
The shadows grow across the floor, blurring to become the first signs of nightfall. Forms in the chapel, like the legs of the chairs against the walls begin to disappear. Everything becomes a shadow – perhaps even me.
I imagine the large locked door being opened and people filing into the light behind. I picture that light filling the chapel, chasing away the shadows.
I'm aware of my body – how my back is aching – how I'm hungry.
The green of the leaves outside is still very visible. Everything is brown, green and grey.
My shadow is faint on the wall.
I move to stand before the altar. I turn and face the large door. Lines of sight from people long since gone still linger. I turn and face the altar. My eyes are drawn to the window, following these eye lines behind me.
I imagine the candles flickering, casting shadows on the walls as the light continues to fade. These candles which are little more than stubs of wax with short blackened wicks and puddles of wax around them.
The sound of the traffic cannot be stopped. It's always present like interference. The only way to hear the past is with my body.
(Rather hard as I can hardly see to write.)
Fleeting, embodied shadows.
I try and think of myself as the chapel. There is, like everything, an outside (exterior) and an inside (interior). I can feel my body – my presence – not so much as me but as something within the chapel.
Contact with the floor, with the furniture means that the chapel and I are one.
NB I have to put on the light – and only then am I aware how dark it is outside. The shift from an external light and interior dark to interior light and external dark is striking. When I turn off the light it's reversed.
I'm aware of my heart as I sit with my eyes closed – of my breathing. My back against the wall – my breathing and heartbeat becomes that of the chapel.
Exterior / interior.
Beyond the chapel and inside.
Beyond my own body and inside.
A reversal of the two.
Interior voice reading / exterior voice listening.
With the lights on, the light beyond the window is blueish above the door. Up ahead, the window above the altar is dark.
Again there is almost a grain in the building – of sight. Looking towards the altar one is aware of the individual; then turning round, of a crowd.
Filed Under: A Line Drawn in Water, Goethean Observations, Trees Tagged With: Archaeology, Bartlemas Chapel, Goethean Observation
Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin 2
June 22, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges
Since carrying out the observation of the Roman Coin discovered during a dig on 11th June I've been thinking about the coin in greater detail. One of the things which interests me about it are the vivid colours formed during its time in the ground; in particular those on the reverse side of the head, as can be seen in the image below:
It's easy to think of the coin as having occupied two distinct periods (i.e. the 3rd century and today) and that it's almost two distinct entities; the 'new' coin of some 1700 years ago, and the clipped and rather decayed coin it is now. But of course this coin is a singular entity which has occupied a span of time covering a range of years difficult for us to imagine. To borrow from Bill Viola, this coin has 'lived' this same continuous moment ever since it was 'conceived' – or in this case minted – and for much of its existence, it's been laying out of sight, in silence, underground.
At some point 1700 years ago, the coin (we might assume) was lost and during the dig a week or so ago it was found. I find it easier however, to conceive of the coin's entire existence if I forget these two 'divisions' and think instead of the coin as always existing – not lost or found, just always there – somewhere. Stating that it was first lost and then found creates a kind of void in between, in which the coin just sits – not really existing at all. Of course the coin was in existence for hundreds of years; before the city of Oxford was even established, and throughout the time during which it was made ancient. And in that time, beneath the ground, things were acting upon it, slowly changing its shape and colour; to make the beautiful colours we see today. The colours therefore can be linked to the passing of time – to the coin's continuous existence. There's a correlation between the passing of time and the formation of the various colours.
There is also something rather poetic about this as regards the way we imagine the past. For me, the distant past is often a dark and silent place (in the sense that it's largely unknowable – not that it really was dark and silent) but one in which there was movement and colour – just as with the coin beneath the ground. Although out of sight to us today, we know that that things moved, that things were formed, that entities acted upon or influenced other entities. That there was of course colour.
Thinking about the coin a little more, I realised how else it's changed from the 3rd century AD. Back then it wouldn't have been valued as an object in its own right per se, but rather in regards to what it represented, i.e. a monetary unit. If I have a pound coin in my hand, I don't value the object (the coin) so much as what it represents (a pound sterling). Now of course, the Roman coin's original monetary value has been lost and it's the coin as an object which has become important.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Archaeology, Artefacts, Bill Viola, Colour, Goethean Observation, Silence
Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin
Further to my entry on the archaeological dig in Iffley, Oxford, I have carried out some extra work on the Roman coin we discovered whilst excavating the test-pit. The coin in question, dating from the reign of Emperor Postumus (260-269 AD) can be seen below.
Click here for the text of the observation.
See also: Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin 2.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Archaeology, Artefacts, Goethean Observation
Goethean Observation: Wolvercote Cemetery
Freshly dug earth, a small pile. A new name on a label planted in it. Twigs and pine cones scattered upon the grass. The wind blows through the trees. Something creaks. The traffic drones in the distance. Grave stones with their backs towards me. Slate-grey surfaces. Voices in the distance talking. Different shades of grey, marked with stains of age. An alarm sounds for a while then is quiet again. The birds chirping around me. The sun catches the top of a smooth marble gravestone. To my right beyond the neatly clipped hedges a burial is taking place – a wicker coffin, the same I saw in a hearse driving past as I walked here. An aeroplane flies overhead and marks its presence with its noise. A fly buzzes. To my right the gravestones show their names. Gold and black lettering in latin and hebrew alphabets. The coffin is lowered into the ground. A man walks past outside and a siren rips through the comparative calm.
Daffodils are growing. The mourners leave the graveside and hug each other.
In the ground, in the grass the plots of land are marked in different ways. Some are slabs of grey, flecked with stain of age and lichen. Green glass beads and bits of gravel, purple flowers or shallow depressions in the ground. Or of course the small mound of freshly dug earth. The mourners are shaking hands. Two men walk between the graves before me, looking for something. One of them yawns with his hands in his pocket. Looking at the back of the gravestones it is as if the graves have turned their backs to me. To find them I will have to walk between them.
The shapes and the heights of the graves are all quite different.
There's a feather on the ground. Grey and white like the graves themselves.
On the slabs of marble, stone etc. which mark the graves, a pot of broken plant. Holes for putting flowers in. Stones left in memory. Two on one grave. Five on another. Some have none. Others have many more.
Names begin to talk. Dates. Occupations. Places of birth and death. Daisies and last years' autumn leaves upon the ground. Flowers on one grave; a pot of lavender and white roses amongst them.
Flowers left on turned earth. A mug.
Physician.
Deported to Riga. December 1941.
Cellist. Artist.
Social Anthropologist.
Geographer.
Moss grows on the glass beads of a grave.
The edges have fallen.
Names. Places and dates slowly melting into the bluish stone. The grass creeps over the edges.
Tartakov. Poland.
Holocaust Survivor.
Reflections of the trees in the polished marble slabs of the graves.
She graced the world.
Lavender growing marks another grave.
Orange lichen creeps up the base of a gravestone.
The stone slab of a grave has almost been swallowed by the grass.
Car doors close as mourners leave the cemetery.
A rose bush, cut back, climbs through a hole.
To so good a man no evil thing can happen.
Wloclawek, Poland.
Nikolai.
Prague.
Perished in Dachau.
Tachow, Poland.
And her family who died in the second world war.
Komotau.
Goerhau.
A small head stone barely poking above the ground.
His work lives.
Komotau, Czechoslovakia.
Who were put to Death in Poland in 1942.
Members of her family massacred in Poland 1942.
Victims of the Holocaust.
He made a new life in England.
A single stone on a grave.
Komitau (formerly Bohemia)
Minsk.
Riga.
Uneven surface.
Painted stone on a grave.
An artists life.
Scratches on a grave.
My shadow upon the grass before me and as I stand and walk.
Como, Italy.
Swansea.
Cold wind begins to blow. Constant sound of traffic.
Faint names slowly disappearing into a grave.
Vienna.
Breslau.
Berlin. Vienna.
Pomorzany (Poland).
Skoczow (Poland).
Bratislava. Arch. and Eng.
Dried leaves crunch beneath my feet.
The ivy rattles on the tree trunk.
A train horn blows.
Graz (Austria).
Enkirch-Mosel.
A plant pot in its plastic.
A grave grown over with ivy etc.
A coloured windmill turns.
St. Petersburg.
Walking and looking back, the names become once again the plain surfaces of the stones.
A digger fills in a hole in the ground.
The diggers work is done.
Names all face the same way. Dates blur.
For many, the dates are carried everywhere by those who remember them.
The following is a transcription of stream-of-consciousness thoughts spoken about the cemetery, considering the cemetery in both the past and the future as well as in the present. The images were made during the process as aids to thinking.
Looking at the cemetery today, not necessarily those graves in the Jewish section but the stones of those buried 50, 60 years or more, one sees how the names slowly recede back into the stone, how the edges of the letters are smoothed, covered over with lichen. How the front of the gravestones become no different to the back. The boundaries of the grave if they are marked with stone begin to collapse. The graves themselves begin to sink. One day the stones will fall and the grass will cover them over and perhaps all that will be left in years and years to come will be a shallow depression in the ground, something like a footprint at the end of one life's journey.
Cemeteries are places where names go to die. When these names are lost from the stones, when the people that remember them are themselves gone, so we are lost to memory. All that is left to remember us is the ground itself, the world itself. We are that footprint on the ground and beneath the ground our remains live on. They decay, break down and every part of us carries on somehow. Looking at the trees in the cemetery one can see them as metaphors for those buried within. We are in a strange way like seeds in reverse – like an acorn. We begin at the top of the tree before the tree has even grown and we travel between villages and towns, in and around our home towns; every thought we have every connection we make grows its branches, the branches of the canopy until those branches become less and less, albeit thicker and thicker until we're left with just the trunk marking a small spot in the round and beneath the ground the roots echoing the canopy itself. Perhaps in a way when our bodies decay when we're broken down into atoms, that is what the roots somehow represent.
And when that tree grows its leaves, every year bears its fruit, we can imagine every place that person had been to, still bearing a trace – a living trace – of their existence. Looking around the cemetery, the Jewish part of the cemetery, one is struck by the places from which people have come, the journeys they have led often in tragic circumstances, which have led them to this small patch of ground.
As I was coming home on the train yesterday watching the landscape pass me by anonymously, one part blurring into the next as if rushing into the past, I saw a small pool of water surrounded by trees into which I threw my eyes imagining what it was like beneath the water's surface, and there they remained for some of the journey. Whilst I saw the world whizzing by, my eyes were still. All sounds were gone as my thoughts and my eyes drifted beneath the water. And a day later I can still imagine them there the world seems not to have changed and yet a lot of things have happened since then.
One can almost imagine the bodies buried within the cemetery as being like that and the lives they led as being like the man on the train, that though they are still now, in the quiet and the dark, somehow the lives they led are still moving; between Berlin and the cemetery, Vienna and the cemetery, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, all the places from which they've come.
One can go back before the cemetery was even there when it was just another field, another plot of ground, perhaps it was farmed? I don't know. Things grew in it of course, the grass grew, trees grew, every blade of grass was more a part of the world than any of these people. And yet within the ground now a wealth of experience has been poured into each of these little holes, experience that is full of happiness, tragedy. Thinking about the trees the branches separating off one should really think of them as one continuous branch that starts high above the ground and snakes its way downwards, every encounter is a knot making up the vast canopy of the tree until it reaches the soil.
When one's in the cemetery one can't help think of one's own death and where we will end up, which patch of ground we will occupy and looking at any patch now one can think whether it will be the place where a life not yet even begun will be remembered by the earth long after the name has died. And in any patch of ground one can also think whether someone is there beneath, unknown, unseen of course, unknowable, but a person who's left a mark somewhere in the world.
I can't help but think of the battlefields of Verdun, where from the barren wastes whole forests have now grown, each tree in some way reminding us of the people that died, each branch part of the journey they made through their lives. There's also the trees grown around sites of the Holocaust those planted to hide the places, those which have grown afterwards. Somehow they too serve to remind us of those lost on those small patches of ground.
There is a connection between this idea of small patches into which so much is poured so many thoughts, so many memories, love, anger, tragedy, laughter. One thinks of a town from which these people were from. Towns in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia. One thinks of Vienna and it's almost as if within that small grave, in that small hole in the ground the whole of that city has been poured. For every city, every place is defined by the people who lived there. So in many respects these are graves not only for people but for places.
Goethean Observation: 18th Century Glass Bottle
A vessel, translucent, whose surface is revealed by distortions, reflections and engravings. There is an opening at the top about 2cm in diameter and here the thickness of the vessel can be seen as being about 5mm.
The base of the vessel is not round but oval with flattened sides. The base is solid and about 1cm thick within which one can see tiny imperfections where the light is gathered.
Light from bulbs above, inside the display cabinet, grows around the neck and shoulders of the vessel revealing a dimple in the surface on the right. From the base of the neck (which is itself about 2.5cm in height) the pattern of the engraving on the front of the bottle begins, comprising feather-like curlicues, dots, dashes and small fine strokes. They form a kind of border, within which the words Thos Brown, Nenthead, 1769 have been engraved.
The lettering of the name is somewhat irregular and not central, as if the engraver was expecting an 'e' at the end of Brown. There is a space after the 'n' into which part of the pattern of the border has extended and part of which has since been scratched or worn away.
On the sides are engravings of birds. That on the right can only be seen properly whilst looking through the front of the vessel. On the back the engraved figure of a man can be seen with a rifle, standing on a patch of ground next to a tree. Looking at the figure whilst bending down slightly, one can again see small imperfections in the surface of the glass.
Within the glass are colours, reflected from the fabric of the display stand behind; blues and golds as well as the dark grey of the glass ledge on which the vessel is standing. There's also the reflected light of a dish on the shelf below.
Even without touching the bottle appears heavy.
Looking at the glass and its 'time-life' I see the bright glow of its beginning – a molten bulb of glass. I can hear the noise of the place in which it was made, the heat and other ambient sounds. Who made it? What were they thinking at the time?
There is a real sense of movement at the beginning; an urgency – a far cry from the static object sitting in the display case before me. One gets a sense of the physical process of its creation, the heat and the sweat. The molten glass needs to be shaped, partly through being blown – and while it's in this state, the glass blower blows, turning the glass and shaping it until the form is fixed. This object then becomes the preserved breath of its maker. Cold and fragile.
The glass cools and loses its glow and colour, taking its shape from the borrowed light and reflections of that which surrounds it. What has been seen over the centuries, reflected and distorted through its surface? The interior of the workshop? Thomas Brown's house? Back then, the light of an ordinary day in 1769 would have lent the vessel its shape. Today, mainly the glow of the electric lights reveal its form to visitors.
Next the bottle would be engraved. A conversation takes place between the engraver and whoever commissioned the engraving. Who was Thomas Brown? Is he the figure on the back of the glass? The engraver takes a note of the name. Did he make a mistake? Did he think it should be spelt Browne with an 'e'. When would he have realised? Perhaps it's not a mistake at all, just the way he did it.
The vessel would have been held in the engraver's hand, its shape felt by him as he worked to write the letters. I can only guess at how it feels, through the engraver and the person who commissioned it, and finally the man himself. One can almost see his smile as he receives it. What was it commemorating? He would have felt its shape in his hands – the glass blower's breath. He would have felt its temperature, its texture. What else did he feel at that moment? How did his clothes feel on his back? What did he see through the glass surface of the vessel? The floor? The faces of his friends? The walls and windows? The light of a day long since vanished like the glass blower, the engraver and Thomas Brown himself.
Part 3 & 4
The bottle is always borrowing from that by which it's surrounded; gathering light in order to make itself visible.
It bends, distorts and refracts the present – gravity bending the light from a distant star.
Hot, molten, fluid becomes cold, fragile, solid.
Flesh becomes brittle.
The influence on the present day of a breath exhaled 250 years ago.
Exhale. Inhale.
A bubble.
An imperfection in the air, where time rather than light is gathered and held.
The past in the present.
Goethean Observation: Headington Hill Park
This a transcript of my notes as they were written during the observation.
This is a large area of grass with a large number of different trees at various stages of maturity. The traffic can be heard coming from the left and behind me some voices in the grounds of a large house, separated from the park by iron railings. The sound of the wind blowing through the trees is always apparent even though there is little wind today. The sound of birds too can be heard particularly in the grounds behind me.
The entrance to the park was through railings on the park's NW side. The path runs down and around the perimeter of the park. Some of the trees have plaques planted beneath in memory of those who've died.
The path down which I'm walking cuts across a slope which runs down from the east (the house and grounds side) to the west. There are a number of seats alongside the path facing west into the centre of the park. There is the sense that there us kittle really to divide the grounds to the east and the park, save for the grass which on the slope to my left (east) has been allowed to grow. There are a number of weeds, daisies and shrubs.
The path turns to the south and runs alongside a busy road. The path runs between trees, the SW past another entrance to the park and an old stone building. The building has a kind of vestibule in the middle with a window at the SE end. There is some graffiti here such as 'Don't forget us' written in felt-tip on the frosted glass. A sign reading 'Ladies' in the shape of an arrow points SE in the direction I am walking.
A few yards on more buildings are revealed, built around a small courtyard. These buildings look much older. On the western facade of one of them is a wooden sign on which the words 'staff only' have been written. A sign next to them reveal that the former toilets and dairy are to be sold off.
The side of the building is in part covered by ivy and the whole building almost looks to be sliding into the ground. The green paint of the windows is the same shade of green as the ivy.
The path slopes down. A man jogging runs up beside me. The trees are constantly chattering while the traffic flows up and down to my left.
Towards the bottom of the slope is another building standing behind a tall hedge on my left.
Past the small building, there is a large set of blue painted iron gates leading out onto the busy road. Either side of the gate, on two ornate posts are old-fashioned lamps.
Straight ahead, heading slightly SW is a gravel path which snakes away in a kind of elongated 'S' shape. To my right, heading in an almost westerly direction, the concrete path continues. Along this path there are fewer trees, but looking to my left, I can see that the gravel path is bordered on either side by a number of mature trees. Heading north along the path, I can see another road to my left.
On my right hand side are two mature horse chestnut trees. The leaves on one are speckled with rust coloured patches.
It is just past this tree, beyond the reach of its shadow, that to my right, towards the east, I can see how the ground undulates. This sense of undulation as I approach the second of the mature trees which again I think is a horse chestnut with rust/yellow coloured patches on the leaves. I'm not aware visually of a slop but I can feel that I am climbing.
Again to my right, just past the mature trees, I am aware of the undulating ground, though not quite as before.
Two large purple trees grab my attention along with the mature tree see just behind through the gap. This view feels very much as though it belongs to a garden.
To my left is the minaret of the Islamic centre. On my right a group of four saplings.
The purple trees cascade to my right and turning back to the path, it seems almost incongruous in these surroundings. Behind me, about ten yards, a gravel path leads NW towards the Islamic Centre. To my right the undulations become more pronounced. Besides another collection of brick buildings , these undulations are especially pronounced, particularly on the left hand side of the path.
A little further on, on the right hand side of the path there is a concentration of foliage in the shadow of a large mature tree. On the other side the ground seems to slop up back towards the house.
To my left the slope is increasingly pronounced running down towards a long stretch of flatter ground. From this area, which borders a footpath behind a line of railings, there is another profusion of weeds such as stinging nettles and doc leaves.
Back in the park, through the same gate, there is the sense of everything 'sliding' towards the west (at this point) – or towards the 'city centre'. The same rumble of traffic – the same sound of the leaves blowing in the wind.
Where the path forks, I'm instinctively taken down the right-hand path, i.e. down the slope. A helicopter whirs overhead.
At the point in the path where I saw the 'view' of the two mature purple trees I leave and head towards them. In front of the left hand tree I can see three undulations – very shallow, but of equal size running east to west.
Walking between the two purple trees the feeling in the park at this spot is completely different. I notice too a 'pattern' of two more purple of copper trees ahead and a more mature tree – an oak – in the centre.
Walking between the trees, one of the undulations I saw before is clearly evident. It seems to peter out within about ten yards. There are a number of lumps and bumps at this point which are hard to pinpoint.
By the 'top-left' copper tree is a distinct depression.
Turning down it, one again finds the shallow humps which extend towards the house at the top of the area.
Returning to the gape between the purple trees, I feel a definite 'step down' into the hollow between two bumps. I decide to walk the route again.
Between the trees, I pick up a ridge on the right hand side and follow it towards the right-hand tree at the back. By the tree I find a ditch cutting across, leading towards a group of trees around which a large number of weeds, nettles etc. are growing. Standing beneath the tree and facing SW, I can see more of the ridge and furrows. Turning to face SE I see the 'ditch' running off which I decide to follow and notice that this 'ditch' seems to join up with another patch of dense undergrowth which I've already recorded.
Walking along it, between the patches of undergrowth, I'm made aware of how different the park feels – certainly compared with walking between the purple trees towards the house. There is it seems a correlation between this and the direction of the ridge and furrow, and the direction of the ditch and the path which I mentioned earlier.
As I walk from this undergrowth towards the path, I feel another dip running alongside the path on its SW side.
The 'natural' direction of this place follows the direction from the windows of the house behind me to the city in the near distance. The trees in the grounds of the house and those in the park suggest the area was once joined – the railings running across it follow the 'unnatural' direction already mentioned. One can easily imagine the house, the full extent of its grounds with the views over the city.
Rolling back the time life of this area, the nettles and weeds disappear – the saplings are removed and the trees begin to slowly reduce in size. The sound of voices and of laughter behind me might well have been heard in the years before and the sound of traffic would certainly be absent. For a time at least it would have been altogether much quieter.
The trees shrink, the house disappears and the view across the city is clear. Sitting on the bench as I am – facing the city – there is the sense that this a place of views- of looking out. Behind the windows of the great house, those who lived and worked within would have once looked out across the city. Without trees, one is left with a ground which undulates in ridges and furrows one way and a few lines which cut across. They are almost like scars, gouged out of the ground.
This 'natural direction' is persistent and one day, the concrete parth which cuts across the park, along with the railings will disappear. People walk along them today just as people once walked along the ridges which lie across the grass.
The ridges and furrows one can imagine being created over a great period of time. As people walked up and down, the view was still there – how did it change.
I look at the dedication plaque in front of me. I wind back time – the person to whom it is dedicated lives again and is then nothing. The tree beneath which it is planted disappears. Appearing. Disappearing.
The plaque is dedicated to a certain individual, but in the ground, one gets the sense of the lives of many individuals. The milky sun above would have shone on them just as it does on me.
Leaving the bench I return to the spot between the five trees.
Looking back between the trees towards the city centre, I can see clearly the spire of St. Mary's. Removing the trees, the whole city would have been visible.
Parts 3 and 4
Looking down towards the city, out from the city towards the house. The area is about looking out and being looked at. It is about looking and moving – up and down, over and over. It's a place of directions, 'natural' and 'unnatural'; peaceful and less-so. A place in thrall to the city below.
Notes written the day after initial observation of the park.
Like a piece of paper or fabric, the area we know today as Headington Hill Park has a grain. This became apparent in the first instance at a point along the concrete path where, looking to my left, between two large purple/copper trees I saw a view which seemed to 'belong' to the a time when the park was a garden. Looking back up the path, the path itself felt incongruous. Leaving it and walking towards the gap between the trees my body felt different – my movement felt 'freer'.
In front of the trees I could see the mediaeval ridge and furrow very clearly and beyond the trees I followed a furrow and noticed a long depression cutting across it, running in the same direction as the upper part of the path. Walking along it felt very different to walking up the ridge towards the house – just as tearing a piece of paper against the grain feels much different to tearing it with the grain.
Thinking about the ridge and furrow – one can imagine the area when it was ploughed with all the turned earth. It would have looked quite uniform in its appearance. Then as crops began to grow, a patchwork would have developed.
During the Civil War, this land would have been taken over my siegeworks. This movement up and down would have been cut off by the movement across it; which eventually would have carried on again after the war, eventually changing (as the area became a garden) from physical movement up and down, to lines of sight, up and down.
Goethean Observation: Apple Tree
Standing at the end of the garden, a gnarled trunk, deep grooves in the pale brown, in place almost grey, bark. The trunk is full of swellings near the ground. On the 'front' as I look at it, there is a hollow, a small hole a few inches across, with thick smoothed sides – above it on the left hand side, a branch sticks out at an angle of about 40 degrees. A few leaves remain on younger branches around it – this older branch ends after approximately two feet. From the newer branch hangs a wooden structure, small with wire sides (meshed). Above that and above the old, short branch is another wooden structure – a bird box on the side of which the grain is clearly visible.
The trunk bulges out towards the hollow and narrows again just above it, from where it rises up a few feet and then splits into two main branches. That which grows out to the left grows at an angle of about 40 degrees, almost parallel with the old branch below. There it turns up, as if it has been cut, moving at an angle of about 50 degrees. From here it splits into two further branches and from there too numerous to count. The other main branch (on the right) splits into five branches one of which has been cut short. On the trunk, growing from amidst the swellings are shoots of leaves. A yellow wire is wrapped around the trunk, running over the smooth edge of the hollow, hanging down to then disappear some four feet below, behind the tree.
There are many apples in the tree and looking around the base of the tree, a circumference approximately 50% bigger than the circumference of the canopy are a number of fallers; some whole, some smashed, some cut in half.
The leaves are green and shaped like stretched ovals, pointed at the tips. There are few leaves on the ground and only the tips of a few branches are bare. The canopy of the tree itself is quite spare, and is as much made from the colour of the sky as the colour of its leaves and branches. The branches move a little and the leaves are agitated, moving a little like rattles. There is a sound, as the leaves move, a rustling. The colour of the leaves differs depending on where they are in relation to the light, some are bright green, others are dark and almost the colour of the branches.
The apples hang above the ground, each with a dark patch in the middle. I can see more evidence of pruning in the branches.
It's difficult to say how old this tree is, but it's easy to see how it came to be here. Around its base are numerous apples, inside each of which is the potential for more trees. It is hard to imagine, that this tall, robust, warty tree was once a hidden seed inside a piece of fruit – an apple, but somehow, an apple seed came to rest in the soil at this place and began to grow. At that time, one imagines that many of the houses around here would not have been here at all. The sounds would be completely different – I am struck as I write this by the sound of an electric saw, a distant aeroplane and the rumble of traffic – sounds which when this tree was a germinating seed in the ground would never have existed. I can hear the sounds of other trees stirred by the wind and know that such a sound would have been evident at that time, whenever that time was. This old tree then is very unlikely. How did that seed from which it grew come to rest here? There are no apple trees in the immediate vicinity that I can see, although they they might have been cut down in the intervening time – evidence of cutting on the tree observed shows that that is not at all impossible. Perhaps the seed was deposited there by an animal? What animals eat fruit? How far did the seed come, what is the physical connection between this tree and one elsewhere – or a space elsewhere where once the tree grew? As the tree grew from out the ground the chances of it developing must have been small – was it grown intentionally? By someone who lived in the area? Was this a garden back then? Or part of the countryside? Did people walk by here and pick the apples? Those which had fallen? When did the first apples begin to grow? After how many years?
How does a tree grow? Water and sunlight. I can see the ground around it into which it has sunk its roots and know that the ground has supported it for generations. But its being here tells me of the constancy of the world – the sun and the rain. I can through the sun and the rain, through the tree, know of a time and of certainty of that time even though I myself was nothing, not even as likely as the fallers from the young tree. Did people sit under its canopy if then it was not part of a garden. When was it enclosed? How were the definitions of the garden's space defined? When?
What of the future? The branches will continue to grow, the apples will continue to grow and to fall. People will cut the branches who are not yet even as realised as the apple which has just this second fallen to the ground a few feet in front of me. The apple which has come to rest will be collected along with all the others – its flesh will be cooked once the skin is removed and the cores put in the compost – or into the rubbish, where the core itself will rot away and the seeds inside might have the chance to grow. Where will these seeds end up and should the seeds grow and the tree mature to become like the tree is today, then where will it stand, what will the world around it look like? Who will sit beneath its branches and who will even consider, as they sit beneath the branches in the shade that I saw the apple fall from which it would eventually spring? By that time, no doubt, I will be as hidden from the earth as I will be from their thoughts.
And what of this tree? Will it grow fatter and taller? Will the houses remain standing or will it outlive or outgrow the garden fence in which it has been kept/contained? One thing is for sure. The sun will rise and set, and the rain will still fall. The smaller trees in the neighboring gardens might have matured along with those in the grounds of the school behind. The vegetation of the garden might grow and in hundreds of years time, nothing might remain of the place in which I am sitting – place being the garden. Even the tree might one day wither and die. Its trunk become hollow. Perhaps it will be cut and its stump left exposed – and the rings counted by children who will point at a ring and wonder what year it was was – some time way back when. Some time, now.
A movement pushing down and flowing upward . A movement which is sinking into the ground, pushing, seeking. Something moves back up through the trunk out into the branches. It reaches up. It reaches down and reaches up, it is pulling and pushing at the same time, collapsing and expanding, breathing. It's a spring, a squeezebox, but one so slow we cannot see it move. The leaves are the feint sound of this movement. Up and down. Circular. The ground beneath; reaching towards where others have sprung.
All around the base are the tightly packed coils waiting to be sprung; each one a tiny clock, wound ready, a clock so small but its seconds are long, its minutes like hours and its hours stretched to cover the distance of a year.
I breathe. Slowly. In and out. And with each breath expelled I reach towards the sky, I reach further than the tips of the smallest leaves by which I am covered. I extend further down in the cold, wet ground. I am only half seen, I am mostly invisible. I am never still. You cannot tell, but I am in a constant state of flux, moving up towards the sky, down deeper into the soil and out. I am never the same size. I am growing all the time, pushing myself through the leaves and the fruit, pushing through the fruit until they fall. And once on the ground I wait. I can feel just where I am in all my pieces. I am a set of contrasts. I am old yet new, older than you yet younger than you, yet even my youngest parts know far more than you'll ever know, even my fruits will outlives you.
The ground is cold, yet I am warm. I can feel the heat from the sun towards which I stretch and unfurl even these parts I did not know I had and inside I am warm. The wind moves me, it gives me a voice. I do not creak and crack because I am forced to do so – I am talking. My leaves do not rattle or whisper because they are young, small and are easily moved by the breeze – it's because I am talking.
I am never in one place, although it might appear that I am fixed. I am in many places at one and the same time. I am many years passed and many years in the future in a coil which slowly unwinds and unravels itself – the most complex mechanism of any clock you've seen. Idle hours spent beneath me pass in an instant. My memories are beyond your comprehension, I blink only in winter and when I open my eyes again, the world is already new.
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.
Graves in Highgate Cemetery.
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Cemetery, Goethean Observation, Highgate Cemetery, Instruments, Music
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Herodotus and the Morning Paper
One has to remove the future from a past event to really understand its 'presentness'. One has to view historical ('Herodotus' – see Walter Benjamin and Objects) events as being on the periphery, whilst the mean and the commonplace ('morning paper') take centre stage. It is the distance which interests me, the distance from the heroic or 'main' event and the historical perspective this gives us.
"Thus the whole emerges simultaneously with the accumulation of the parts, not because it is the sum of the parts, but because it is immanent within them."
Bortoft's theory of authentic wholeness could be applied to history. A great event, such as a coronation (let's say, that of Elizabeth I), is not a whole in itself. Step outside the ceremony, outside the city and into the countryside; walk into a tavern… what is happening there, at the exact moment of the coronation? Let's say a man sits at a table eating his dinner, enjoying a drink. The moment of the coronation is not simply about the ceremony but the moment in time (some time on January 15, 1559); that moment, of which the Queen and the man in the house are equal parts, although history has forgotten one and kept alive the other. Within both these people (parts), the moment (the whole) is immanent.
The man in the tavern pours his wine from a jug; 450 years later and that jug is in a display case in a museum, freed as Benjamin would have it from the 'drudgery of its usefulness.' For us to see it properly as it stands behind the glass, we need to re-impose that drudgery, we need to see it as it was, when it was useful.
Returning to the idea of distance and perspective: the distant elements in my old holiday photographs on which I have been doing some work, as well as those in old photographs (windows and bicycles) coincide to some degree with what I have written above. When I look at a photograph, taken during a family holiday in the late 1970s, I see the people I recognise, whether that's myself, my brother, parents or grandparents. But there are often others, all of whom were a part of that moment (such as the girl below who was standing in the distance of one of our snaps).
Returning to objects: how do we re-impose the 'drudgery of an object's usefulness' back onto the object? Think of the old musical instruments in the museum. How did I give it back its usefulness? By using the Goethean method of observing, and, in particular, by placing it back – through use of the imagination – in its own time. Although I wasn't looking at the specific 'gesture' of things at that time, I believe I found the gesture of the lira di braccio nonetheless.
So, returning to the man in the tavern; what are the elements of that place which one would need to understand in order to re-construct it through the imagination? Objects (contemporary and old), environments (the room itself and elements thereof), conversations…
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Creatures, Goethean Observation, Henri Bortoft, Herodotus, Objects, Vintage Photographs, Walter Benjamin
The Goethean Method and Haiku
I have recently studied, as part of my MA in Social Sculpture, a couple of articles on the use of Goethe's Scientific method in observing both objects (Talking with History: Using Goethe's Scientific Approach with Human Artefacts by Jim Davis) and landscape (Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape by Iris Brook). Both these articles, whilst using different methodologies, share the same aim; to show how Goethe's approach to phenomena, can lead to an understanding of the subject (in these instances, an object and the landscape) which runs much deeper than a more 'traditional' objective view.
For his approach, Jim Davis uses "a series of questions that Floris Lowndes (2000) uses for organising one of Rudolf Steiner's meditation exercises." The questions in his methodology are (preceded by a defining keyword):
a) physical: What is it made of? What are its properties?
b) historical: How is it made? How is it used?
c) emotional: Why this design? What are my feelings about it?
d) creative: Who created it? Invented it?
e) desire/need: What need or desire led to its invention?
f) origins, background: What preceded it? What was its context?
g) archetype: What is the concept of the thing? Other forms?
These questions are, he explains, "are a set of 'canned riddles' that formalize and direct the conversation which leads from the physical objects to a form that can only be grasped imaginatively or intuitively. By working through the questions from a) to g), the process follows Goethe's 'genetic method' of proceeding from empirical observation to archetype."
I have written in detail about my application of this methodology in a 'conversation' I had with a Lira da Braccio in The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, but what I was particularly interested in, was how this method allowed me, through my imagination, to visit the past of this musical instrument more directly than I would have managed before.
The second article by Iris Brook, describes her use of "Goethean observation as a means of surveying and appraising landscape…". She describes her methodology as follows:
a) Exact sense perception: "…the observer attempt[s] to approach the object from a clearer, more objective standpoint.. This stage was called by Goethe, exact sense perception and is characterised by a detailed observation of all the 'bare facts' of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. It is an attempt to see what is present with as little personal judgement and evaluation as possible."
b) Exact sensorial fantasy: "The second stage of looking at the phenomenon is what Goethe called 'exact sensorial fantasy' (Exact sinnliche Phantasie). An aspect of this activity is to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, that is to see the phenomenon in time. This means no longer seeing the thing in an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with history. That history can be drawn from the phenomenon with the use of an imaginative faculty that cultivates temporal and physical relationships…"
c) Seeing in beholding: "In the third stage one attempts to still active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer. We attempt to step outside of what has gone before and make space for the thing to articulate in its own way."
d) Being one with the subject: "Being one with the object in this fourth stage allows the human ability to conceptualise to serve the thing: we lend it this human capacity. When the phenomenon being explored does not have the ability to think, it is the most participatory part of Goethean observation."
What interested me about Iris Brook's approach was how it allowed the landscape she was studying to reveal itself (its gesture), while Brook herself, through her 'perception, imagination, inspiration and intuition', becomes "one with nature", understanding the landscape's position within the wider landscape not only in a physical sense but also in a temporal one.
The phrase "one with nature" comes not from any book on Goethe (although there might be just such a phrase in one of the many available) but a book by Lucien Stryk on the Haiku of Massuo Kinsaku (1644-94) who later became known as Basho; it's in his collection of travel sketches, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, that he writes:
"… All who achieve greatness in art… possess one thing in common: they are one with nature."
This phrase shares much with Goethe's approach, in that following the methodology as described by Brook, one does indeed become "one with the subject" which in her case was a "60-acre parcel of land that lies at the foot of the north-facing slopes of the Lammermuir Hills, 20 miles east of Edinburgh."
Stryk states: "Basho's discussion of poetry was always tinged by Zen thought, and what in his maturity he advocated above all was the realization on muga [no-self, selflessness, non-ego or ecstasy] so close an identification with the things one writes of that self is forgotten. As Zen's Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng (637-712), put it, one should not look at, but as, the object."
The forgetting of self and becoming the object, are absolutely the same as what Brook describes in the fourth stage of the methodology
One of Basho's disciples, Doho, writes of a conversation he had with the poet: "The master said, 'Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.'
What he meant was that the poet should detach his mind from self… and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and feelings whereupon a poem forms itself. Description of the object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings which have come from the object, the object and the poet's self will be separate things."
The similarities between this advice and that offered by Goethe is striking. Regarding the advice recalled by Doho, Stryk writes: "To give an indication of the influence of such comments on subsequent practice of the art, a contemporary haiku school, Tenro, possesses a creed, Shasei (on-the-spot composition, with the subject 'traced to its origin'), virtually based on the theoretical statements and practice of Basho. Tenro has some two thousand members all over Japan, and it is customary for groups to meet at a designated spot, perhaps a Zen temple in a place famous for its pines or bamboo, and there write as many as one hundred haiku in a day, attempting to enter the object,' share its delicate life and feelings.'"
Filed Under: Goethean Observations Tagged With: Goethean Observation, Haiku