Some scenery is like walking around inside a glossy photograph: it is beautiful, grand, and where it is supposed to be. But it doesn't bite into us, shape us.
Our experience of such splendid scenery is, for most of us I expect, when we are on holiday. Picturesque, scenic, panoramic if high, pretty even; all as the brochures predicted. Then we go home – to our undramatic streets, our as-expected houses. And there is the day to day scenery that does shape us.
For John Clare, and I suspect for most of us, it is what we grow up among that truly moulds us. For John Clare it was the flat lands around Helpstone village, the marshes and meadows all coming with their own history and local lore. And when the enclosures came and took away the common lands he came undone.
Like John Clare, and it has become a cliché this age of overpopulation, many of us sadly say of our childhood's natural playgrounds, “Knew this when it was all fields.”
Ted Hughes, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth fared better by their being shaped by Yorkshire rocks, their contours and solidity. As did Herman Melville and CS Forrester with their being bitten by the globe-encircling sea. Monet got bitten later in life, and twofold, by the garden that he himself made and then obsessively painted.
When a child steps outdoors the child becomes more than his/her mother's stories – that accident, that illness, that pet/obsession – the street, the lane, the locality has claimed them. The cornershop group, the scaled hill, a tree [gone now], an always frightening alley, the few wild acres of a park, a long neglected building plot beyond...
An intensity of feeling belongs to childhood, be it happiness or despair; can be only of a sunshine-splashed moment, but associated forever with the place where it happened. That was/is the one time we feel with such strength, such attachment to place.
As we grow older we use these once-felt moments to measure adult instances of happiness or despair.
And this will not have been the scenery of inescapable trauma – the equivalent say of Great War trenches, or of finding oneself like Mervyn Peake at the liberation of Belsen – unthinkable agonies that require revisiting. This will not be the trauma of abuse, the room, the furniture among which it occurred. No, this is simply the scenery of everyday life that while living there we stopped seeing, that as a child we even once took as fixed, as unchanging.
Grown the child will say that this is/was his/her town, their territory. When in fact they knew but a few streets of it, or if a village John Clare's few acres. Grown they will be both shocked and resentful of a recent newcomer's more extensive knowledge of the town, their 'own' streets and more. They, the newcomer, though has not yet been bitten by the topography. Their knowledge is of a different order, a superficial order, a researched second-hand history, the many bits threaded together to form an almost unrecognisable whole. Somewhere other.
Before we become engrossed in our own histories let us bear in mind Freud's definition of neurosis, 'an abnormal attachment to the past.'
© Sam Smith 7th June 2023
Our experience of such splendid scenery is, for most of us I expect, when we are on holiday. Picturesque, scenic, panoramic if high, pretty even; all as the brochures predicted. Then we go home – to our undramatic streets, our as-expected houses. And there is the day to day scenery that does shape us.
For John Clare, and I suspect for most of us, it is what we grow up among that truly moulds us. For John Clare it was the flat lands around Helpstone village, the marshes and meadows all coming with their own history and local lore. And when the enclosures came and took away the common lands he came undone.
Like John Clare, and it has become a cliché this age of overpopulation, many of us sadly say of our childhood's natural playgrounds, “Knew this when it was all fields.”
Ted Hughes, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth fared better by their being shaped by Yorkshire rocks, their contours and solidity. As did Herman Melville and CS Forrester with their being bitten by the globe-encircling sea. Monet got bitten later in life, and twofold, by the garden that he himself made and then obsessively painted.
When a child steps outdoors the child becomes more than his/her mother's stories – that accident, that illness, that pet/obsession – the street, the lane, the locality has claimed them. The cornershop group, the scaled hill, a tree [gone now], an always frightening alley, the few wild acres of a park, a long neglected building plot beyond...
An intensity of feeling belongs to childhood, be it happiness or despair; can be only of a sunshine-splashed moment, but associated forever with the place where it happened. That was/is the one time we feel with such strength, such attachment to place.
As we grow older we use these once-felt moments to measure adult instances of happiness or despair.
And this will not have been the scenery of inescapable trauma – the equivalent say of Great War trenches, or of finding oneself like Mervyn Peake at the liberation of Belsen – unthinkable agonies that require revisiting. This will not be the trauma of abuse, the room, the furniture among which it occurred. No, this is simply the scenery of everyday life that while living there we stopped seeing, that as a child we even once took as fixed, as unchanging.
Grown the child will say that this is/was his/her town, their territory. When in fact they knew but a few streets of it, or if a village John Clare's few acres. Grown they will be both shocked and resentful of a recent newcomer's more extensive knowledge of the town, their 'own' streets and more. They, the newcomer, though has not yet been bitten by the topography. Their knowledge is of a different order, a superficial order, a researched second-hand history, the many bits threaded together to form an almost unrecognisable whole. Somewhere other.
Before we become engrossed in our own histories let us bear in mind Freud's definition of neurosis, 'an abnormal attachment to the past.'
© Sam Smith 7th June 2023