The past is a foreign country

We live not only in a place, but also a time. 

I never understood, truthfully, (and despite extensively quoting it in drafts and redrafts and final drafts of essays and my undergraduate dissertation; wherever memory was concerned), David Lowenthal’s line: ‘the past is a foreign country’. Until I put time and place together as adjuncts: suddenly both were inhabited and necessary to identity, fundamental to it. You cannot abstract the past from time: history without time is absurd, nonsensical, and memory without the backbone of temporality ceases to exist. Similarly, any notion of the future without reference to time simply isn’t ‘the future’. The shared temporal reference core to both concepts is the present: the origin of the axes of time (that is: coordinates (0,0)) from which we read the graphs of past and future. As such, time, like identity itself, is a matter of alterity: that which something is defined against and is itself defined against something else, never an abstract independent. I am in the present because I am not in the past; that is the past because it is different to now, lived in the tense that is occupied; this is the future because it is different to now, vacant of experience. I am who I am because of my past and that which is my future. We are who we are because this is our past and this is our future. 

We are a country that shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be, we shall fight on the beaches and we shall never surrender. We are a county whose heritage is mining. We are a city of learning and academic excellence, the names of scholars more numerous than the faces hanging in our great halls. I am a ‘90s kid, because I understand this set of niche cultural references those born in the 2000s could never ‘get’. The various claims made on time in these examples are fundamental to the identities they list at various spatial scales, from nation to individual body.  

Monuments to everyday lives

Beyond the trope of a haunted setting for gothic characters or mauve hangout for teenagers trapped in a budget horror film replete with green slime, the graveyard is frequently a place of reflection: both of individual experience and time itself. Common to all characterisations of the graveyard aforementioned is its stasis in time and space; its atmosphere is typically one of sombre mood, a quiet setting where noise is out of the ordinary (hence its easy lend to the gothic genres), and its location removed from the surrounding urbanity of mobility and fluidity, a place seemingly dislocated from its spatial setting. Yet this stasis is actively and always undermined by movements of organic growth (lichens, moss etc.), demography (as more graves expand its space), and time (as living connections to particular graves shift with demographic cycles and Mr Smith, Loving Husband and Devoted Father, 1889-1957 shifts from an active monument visited weekly and decorated with fresh flowers to a forgotten name, half corroded to a Mr Smi glanced over on the way to more contemporary plaques). It is this contradiction of stasis and fluidity in the marriage of memory and place that makes graveyards so interesting. 

I’m driving through Paris, thinking about the Vichy regime, national memory and the Vélodrome d’hiver, when we pass a massive graveyard awkwardly slanted and slotted between two dual carriageways and a medley of roundabouts. A sea of grey plaques of varying shapes and efforts, interspersed with dying plants and ribbons. A statue to an eighteenth century figure, apparently held in place by the surrounding vines’ embrace, juts out of a wall by the road a few minutes later. I don’t catch his name or purpose worth monumentalising, and I wonder if many (any?) drivers negotiating Paris would notice him. The Eiffel tower is of course the monument one thinks of when Paris is called to mind, a psychological relation normalised by the relentless capitalisation of the monument in the sale of the city and its ideal. Trying to spot it makes me think of the Statue of Liberty, that figure that curses through the full-American blood of their constitution, and the fact that it was a present from France. What are they monuments to?