Beyond Stratum: Land, Sea, Cosmos A broom hangs from the mast. The enemy has been swept from the seas. Clean sweep: a successful patrol mission in naval warfare; a decisive Imperial victory. Beyond those watery depths, we can think of landscape as a surface to be maintained; as a thin, malleable crust, to be scraped, scoured and refashioned over time, each new beginning expunging the one that went before. It is a place where the imprints of human habitation overlap untidily; a repository of knowledge, of communal histories, our violence enacted upon it. The spatial designations of Empire – territory, boundary, border – appear solid, immovable, yet they too are constantly shifting: things resurface and we begin again. Some habits are difficult to unlearn. What layers exit below this taut, fragile veneer? Consigned to history, to archaeological typography, those unseen elements only come to light in folktales. The rest – this outmoded detritus, these cast-off systems – settle like outcrops, their dense, compact geology less penetrable than ancient stone. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Can we imagine a post-military landscape? How should it be preserved? What would we choose to eradicate? Barely able to comprehend the revelations of ‘Project Cleansweep’ – a record of past atrocities and cover-ups – we think about modern geopolitics and recoil. What devastates me most is language. Old vocabularies – neatly attributed to an unenlightened past – have resurfaced. This time they are far unrulier. They seek to ravage us. It seems so anachronistic, this talk of political conspiracies, phone hacking, The Pentagon and The Kremlin; of secret prisons and assassinations; of Orwellian Newspeak and alternative facts. It’s the stuff of dystopian fiction; of paranoid nightmares and schizophrenic delusions. But now, reawakened, it is far less persuasive than before. There is no clear aim. No vision to dismantle Communism or to stop Capitalism in its tracks. No evolution towards the ideals of Socialism to counteract Fascist regimes. This time round, there are no beacons to strive towards, no utopian dreams to harness the public imagination. This distinct lack of ideology is critical. Even the Global War on Terror pitched believable lies, for a while. At the time of writing, Britain is the second biggest arms dealer in the world. It fuels conflict in unstable regions, where charity hospitals, schools, food factories and wedding parties are bombed daily. At this moment, Trident submarines – armed with thermonuclear warheads – are patrolling British waters, as Syrian children choke on the deadly fumes of chemical bombs dropped by ‘unidentified’ warplanes. There is no post-military; there is only perpetual conflict in a globalised and permanent war economy. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I remember it vividly. I felt it all, long before I understood it. Those evenings, my sweet-tempered father shouting at the news – shouting at who? Thatcher, that’s who. Industry decimated, unions fragmented, working men reduced to scabs. They never recovered.
After 12 generations, forsaking the mines took him away from those gloomy red-bricked terraces, to the granite planes of northern Scotland and a brand-new industry – Nuclear Power. This era ushered whole new subcultures of protest: Take back the commons. Reclaim the streets. London’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was the largest demonstration in British history. The country was in the grip of moral panic. New-age travellers became fully-fledged folk devils. The 1986 Public Order Act prohibited the massing of convoys. With adult eyes in Manchester I saw the rage – a molten furnace fuelled by the splintered sticks of industry – in the places where culture seeps through. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “It appeared,” wrote Jacques Merleau-Ponty in Cosmology of the 20th Century, “that cosmological thought was again feasible, that the universe was susceptible to thinking, not only to dreaming... Astronomy and the Theory of Relativity brought back the desire for intellectual possession of nature, and brought to life again the Greek passion for cosmic contemplation.” As mankind’s most fantastical and pioneering achievement, space exploration not only tested the boundaries of technology, but the limits of human imagination. The Space Race drew considerable momentum from popular culture, stirring the masses with images of rockets, lunar missions and alien life-forms in cinema and science-fiction. When NASA astronauts spiked an American flag into the moon’s dark, craggy terrain, it galvanised imperial dominance on earth – an act of cosmic supremacy. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ An interest in walking as a leisure pursuit emerged during Romanticism, and was revived in mid-nineteenth century France with Charles Baudelaire’s poetic theorisations of the flâneur. In Walter Benjamin’s portrayal, Baudelaire strolls through mercantile Paris as a ragpicker, turning urban detritus into poetry, vexed with the paradoxes of modern life. Until that point, walking was generally an activity for the poor, the criminal, the young, and above all, the ignorant. Following the example set by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge – who roamed the country by night, as well as by day – the upper classes took to walking as an end in itself, beyond the confines of the landscaped Victorian garden. Before that, they were carried around the countryside in fast-moving carriages, at a safe distance from the dirt and poverty of the roadside.
The major distinction between the wandering journey of a Romantic poet, and the garden stroll of an aristocrat, was the quest for discovery of one’s inner depths. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Uniformitarianism is a pivotal concept in geology that emerged in Scotland during the late eighteenth century. It proved that geologic processes have occurred at a constant rate since the beginning of time. By studying erosion and sedimentation in rock formations in the earth’s crust, it became possible to map the evolution of human life. This terrifying new index became known as ‘deep time’. As described by Scottish geologist James Hutton in his book Theory of the Earth, within these new geological time-scales “…we find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end.” What began with colliding continents, volcanoes and glaciers, was later expressed in Scotland’s Neolithic settlements and standing stones – known as fir bhrèige or ‘false men’. In this unforgiving Northern territory, geology and human experience formed a single cultural landscape. Against the longest of all time-signatures, people began to doubt their own traditions and narratives. It was an inability to conceive the relationship between human life, landscape and the abyss of time – An existential crisis brought on by rocks. The Scottish Enlightenment, while bringing new freedoms and possibilities, also left a void to fill. Century by century, human mythologies plummeted through time like falling stars. As described by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid: “We must reconcile ourselves to the stones, Not the stones to us.”
Joanne Laws is an arts writer and Features Editor of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet (IRL).