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? 

Nostalgia is being used to steal the future

The Financial Times published an article yesterday morning arguing that ‘nostalgia has stolen the future’:

“I remember when elections were won by leaders selling visions of the future: Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology, Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or Tony Blair’s New Britain. In the new democratic disorder nostalgia has replaced optimism as a ruling emotion. Populists recognise the power of adjusted memory. America’s Donald Trump, British Brexiters, Europe’s new nationalists – they all inhabit a rose-tinted past. Nostalgia’s force lies in a human instinct to screen out the bad while recalling the good…”

Though I agree largely with Stephens’ polemic, and the questioned use of nostalgia is something I have been thinking about for a while, I would argue a more active accusation of nostalgia’s theft of the future. That is: nostalgia has not simply ‘stolen the future’, but is actively being used to do so. 

Nostalgia has a complicated etymology beyond the popular understanding of rose-tinted glasses. Borrowed from Latin, its early usage from the mid-18th century was as a medical diagnosis for homesickness, a meaning that retains contemporary use as a longing for familiar surroundings. In the early 20th century the term is de-spatialised by an emphasis on its temporal properties; nostalgia thus comes to describe a sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period in the past, especially in one’s own lifetime, or a sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past. In the 1970s it transmogrifies once more: a collective term for things that evoke a former (remembered) era. Retaining its triad of forms, nostalgia today is generally understood as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. It’s the sighed remarks of older generations about Their Day and the comparative ignorance of The Youths Today; the #throwbackthursdays shared across social media platforms in weekly longings for beaches, parties and other off-days past; the renewed (characteristic?) contemporary fascination with period dramas of vintage styles, romances and heroes. 

What is time?

I don’t think we actually know. That’s not to say that we haven’t tried to define it, containing it within the parameters of what we (think) we know. I could answer with the numbers consigned to the movement of the sun and the gradient of its light that the hands of my clock now point to: 20:23. Or the number of planetary resolutions around the Sun since the death of Christ: 2018. I could answer with a cultural polemic describing the shape of contemporary society and its difference from earlier societies. Or I could quote Shakespeare and suggest that “we are time’s subject, and time bids be gone”. I could answer that time flies; that it is lost, irretrievable, wasted. That it is short and that it is endless. That is, we can describe time and we use time itself to describe all manner of things. We cannot, however, define it. And I think that’s because we don’t, really, understand it. None of those answers are wrong, but not one of them looks you in the eye and, unflinchingly, absolves that this is all and everything that time is. 

Time at Murray Edwards College. In the changing colour of the leaves; in the fact that I am stood here where so many previous female scholars stood and future female scholars will stand, and narrate it from this particular point within the lineage of continuity; in the movement from a lecture to a supervision, their schedule interrupted by the taking of this picture.

Noun: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. 

Verb: to plan, schedule or arrange when (something) should happen or be done.  

Does time even exist? As a noun or a verb, time confounds simple ontological description. Whilst the progression of existence and events and the act of scheduling both suggest an ontology (‘progression’ or a ‘schedule’), neither are really so tangible nor definite as to refute the question of time’s existence in a satisfactory, end-of-argument way. Yet time, or whatever it is that we have so called ‘time’, irrefutably exists. It’s in the wrinkles that gradually write themselves across foreheads and the grey that slowly tinges the colour from hair. It’s in the consciousness that delineates a present from a yesterday and a tomorrow. It’s in the knowledge that two people will show up at the same place simultaneously (or, depending on punctuality, thereabouts) when they agree upon a ‘time’ to do so. In all this evidence, however, it differs. They all describe ‘time’, but the concept of a simultaneous meeting is not the same as an agent of age, nor is the concept of changing from young to old the same as understanding the distinction between what one has experienced and still hopes to experience. The differences are not to be understood as dichotomous: they overlap, blur into multiplicity, trap each other in intertextuality. 

Visualising Space as Place: The Invention of Oxbridge

** ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED VIA COMPASS MAGAZINE BLOG BY SAME AUTHOR ** 

1209. A few students leave the stuffy spires of The Other Place and decamp to The Bridge, a land of denser castle-colleges sitting on the edge of the river Cam with similar traditions and a lighter blue sky. Or so the legend goes. The all-knowing, ever-present, fancy-punting-today-ladies tour guides will tell you something along those lines as they push you along the Cam, woven into soliloquies about Prince Charles failing his exams whilst his body-guard passed, cheeky Clare students scaring tourists into the water with a polystyrene ball, and John’s architecture snubbing Trinity with its eagle, et cetera ad infinitum.

Dusk in Clare College.

You know the tropes: New York, the city that never sleeps; Rome, the city of love; London, the city of fog. Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. Cambridge. The city of sleep-depriving, caffeine-fuelled essay-crises? Anonymous crushbridge stanzas? Generally mild weather with winter fog you can catch if you row or, more keenly, wake up before 8am? Turrets, bridges and a dome to boot?

Reading Geography

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POST ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON COMPASS MAGAZINE BLOG BY SAME AUTHOR 

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Jane Austen thought those who didn’t read were stupid. More precisely, that ‘the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’. My 13-year-old sister would beg to differ. She thinks reading is stupid – because, and I quote, it’s boring. I’ve always been a reader, and a pretentious one at that (think the precocious figure of Roald Dahl’s Matilda), so have never shared my sister’s sentiments. What I did think stupid once upon a time, however, is Geography. The hydrological cycle and demographics of one population or other were in fact ‘intolerably stupid’ in all their bore. If this was Geography, I’d have nothing to do with it, thank you very much. Not even Austen’s ‘what are men to rocks and mountains?’ could convince me otherwise. Yet, beyond the rigidity of a GCSE exam syllabus, geography is perhaps more than anything else about reading. (And I don’t think it intolerably stupid anymore, in case you wondered – even if it retains the trope of a doss degree).

Plato believed reading gave soul to the universe and wings to the mind. A pretentious reference, yes, but also an effective capture of geography’s relation to reading. The etymology of geography grounds the concept, with Greek roots, in writing: gē-graphie, earth-writing. If the verb is writing the earth, its noun is reading this writing and, by extension, the earth. So in reading, I am at core engaging with geography. Take Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s writing is geographical for through it Austen explores, translates and comments on the world, whether this be a construction of the rolling rocks and mountains of Derbyshire or a commentary on the patriarchal social conventions of the time. Its reading is equally geographical, for through the novel I engage with the world in particular ways and shape my understanding of it. The same can be said of most writing, almost all of which functions as an engagement with the earth and hence can be analysed for its geographical function.

Placing Art

"How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played - the night you saw her - she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art." 

-Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, Ch. IX, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I spent my first year of English A-level debating, amongst other less pretentious study, whether Oscar Wilde subscribed to the hedonism and aestheticism of Lord Henry and Dorian Gray and if, as was used to testify against him in his trial and subsequent conviction for gross indecency, the novel these two characters situate, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', was in some way a reflection of Wilde himself. Contrary to Wilde's dubious preface outline that 'it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors' and 'all art is quite useless', the fate of Dorian and his portrait almost perfectly mirrors that of Wilde and his novel; a perfect thematic and contextual parallel for a literature student to note in an exam, but also interesting from a semantic perspective.   

In 1907 Alfred Lichtwark, a German art historian, mused that 'in our age there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a photograph of oneself, one's closest relatives and friends, one's sweetheart'. Theorists like Walter Benjamin and John Berger alike have essayed around Lichtwark's muse by questioning the understanding of photography and art through inquiry of aesthetic distinctions and social functions (see: 'A Small History of Photography' (1931, Benjamin) and 'Understanding a Photograph' (2013, Berger)). The argument that photography might itself constitute a form of art has been enumerated by proponents for almost a century, at its heart lying the question of art and purpose posed rather fatefully by Wilde. But whilst the medium has been thus explored, its location is oft left implicitly static. Photography: art. Art: gallery (primarily). Gallery: exclusivity. We've recognised the self-expressionism of art, and eventually expanded its tool from brush and paint to camera (etc.), yet it remains a term of exclusive connotation. I don't want to debase the concept of art - its very core dependent upon an aspect of creativity, peculiarity, and representation rather than pure being such that it cannot, surely, be the everyday - but I do think that art can be found in the everyday, beyond the canvas and outside of the gallery.

Might not your social media page be a site, or at a greater stretch form, of art? Queue Lord Henry dropping his glass of gin and shuddering upright in the study of his West London apartment at the very thought.